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The Halfway Point chapter 13
Practically speaking, there was nothing left to do. If Don were in a practical mood, he would leave things alone and take a break. Watch television with Mike. Practice his katas. Take a shower to get the crick out of his neck. Somehow, though, he knew that such leisure would drive him insane. He needed to fix things. He needed to be useful. He needed to make up for something he could never make up for—something he could not fix.
Now he had run out of things to do. He hadn’t run out of ideas—that was impossible, to him. But now he lay on the couch and stared at the ceiling of the lair simply because it was a change of scenery from lying on his bed staring at the ceiling of his bedroom. There was nothing he could do now that would make him feel any different once the project was finished. Donatello couldn’t make his brothers whole until Donatello was whole. He lay on the couch and pondered how to fix himself.
Lying on the floor was a deflated soccer ball Mike hadn’t bothered to throw away. Don’s eyes rested on it like idle dragonflies, staring from under the edges of his top eyelids, through the half-moon shape of his vision. After a moment, he propped himself up on one elbow and squinted at it. He could fix that. Re-inflate it. Patch it up. Lazily, he rolled off the couch, feeling rather light, and picked up the damaged toy.
It took less than half an hour to place a clear seal on the hole that had popped the ball and fill it with air. It was more than Mike would have done. Mike would have patched it with duct tape. The toy already showed his brother’s marks—doodles with colorful markers of superhero logos and stickers for various bands randomly placed. Duct tape would have covered some of the personalization. Maybe this was why Mike hadn’t thrown it away. His room was full of random little artistic things, like models of starships and a chess set he had carved himself, its figures modeled after people he knew (Don was the white rook, opposite Baxter Stockman on the black side). Those chess pieces, on further thought, spoke well of how Mike thought of those around him. Raph was the white knight.
Don was rarely artistic himself, and when he was, Mike said he was too deep. Art soothed him nonetheless, and helped him express things his inventions lacked the vocabulary for. Perhaps a sort of personal creative outlet was a coping method for Mike just like Don’s inventions were for him. Considering how poorly his current method was working for him, Don wondered if it might not be a bad idea to try Mike’s tactic.
He blinked at the soccer ball, and the added colors vanished, showing him the geometric patterns on the sphere, an ocean of white with islands of black, and inspiration struck.
Raph wasn’t sure how he had come to be alive at the moment. His plans had stopped already, as he was supposed to have been dead last night. A moment of hesitation had come, of all times, when Casey had mentioned April bringing beer—which she had, thank God. But instead of drinking himself to death, Raph sat on the roof with a bottle and nursed it slowly, just as his eyes drank up the view of earth and sky surrounding him. He hadn’t managed to get alone except to sleep. Even now, Casey was sitting on the same rooftop, some feet away, taking in the view with a beer of his own. Neither had spoken since coming up here, Casey uninvited, and Raphael was able to sift through his own thoughts without intruding conversation.
He had needed to think for so long.
Everything that could have gone wrong since the night a few Purple Dragons had taken him hostage had gone wrong. Raph would rather have been killed than ravaged. He would rather his family never known. Revenge hadn’t even been his—it had been Leo’s. He was a child of Murphy’s Law. It was nuts.
He turned his head a little and studied Casey out of his peripheral vision. The man didn’t need to see him standing up. He wouldn’t reach him in time if Raph decided to take a tumble from the rooftop. An image of dying with someone gaping at him flashed before his eyes, and a fire was kindled in the pit of his stomach as his lips drew back in disgust. The idea was so bitter he could taste it in his mouth, swallow it and feel it burn. Casey would not be there for his final moments. If there was a thing about his life that he could still choose, he would choose death in solitude.
The back of his mind played, in black and white and muffled sound, his family’s reaction to his death. It was different from before. Casey was bringing him home, and since the man had called to report the news, there was no sickening shock. There were tears and grief amidst the black-and-white clips and flashes of the colors of his brothers’ masks, but every one of them, especially Leo, was more devastated by his own failure than by the death of their wayward brother. They needed to move on from this. Raph could never do the same; therefore, he was holding them back. They needed him to die.
But he couldn’t do it now. Not with Casey. The beer was pleasantly bitter and reminiscent of past contentment, and combined with the weather would have made for a perfect day to die in peace. But Raphael could not die in front of Casey.
If need required it, Raphael would live another day.
Fingers dug into his biceps, and pain rocketed up and down his arms. Suddenly, he was reeling from being shoved against a car, his hands slapping against the metal before it could make contact with his face. Someone pressed against him from behind, forcing him harder against the vehicle, smashing his face against the dull red paint. Loud laughter crackled behind him, and when he glanced back, House’s face filled his field of vision.
This is another dream.
But the shame was real when House took his turn, and his lip split against the cold metal of the car. The stick of sweaty flesh against sweaty flesh and harsh storm of breath against his ear felt real enough. Panic lit his face and chest afire, and he shoved backward to buck House off him. House laughed and slammed him even harder against the car, continuing with renewed fervor. A scream, distant and quiet and nowhere near as relieving as it should have been, sounded somewhere in his ears—his own scream, which his own breath could not quite expel. He tried again, bellowing with all his might, with the same result in addition to a strange sensation, more physical than anything he had felt up till now.
When Leonardo woke up in bed, he was choking on nothing.
He gasped, and cool air flooded his lungs. He blinked hard, clearing his eyes of the sight of the hood of the car, and clenched his teeth to hold back the scream he knew would satisfy the residual desires from the dream. Tense as a bound spring, he flipped the covers away and climbed out of his low bed, the touch of the cold floor on his feet cooling his overheated body as he padded to his door.
Light leaked out from under Donatello’s door, and acting off the surface of his emotions, Leo approached it and knocked. He wondered what time it was. Don was usually up fairly late compared to Leonardo.
“Come in,” called a quiet voice.
Leo pushed the door open to find Don hovering over, of all things, a papier-mâché globe, about eighteen inches wide, with black continents and white oceans. Leo hadn’t seen such a project since they had been children. “Ah—that’s…”
Don didn’t even glance at him, but dipped another white strip into a jar of flour paste and pressed it against the globe. “It’s just an idea I had. No mockery necessary.”
“I wasn’t going to mock,” Leo protested, the horror of the dream still lingering in the air around him. He approached his brother, and as he came closer, he could see that there were words on the slips of paper Don was using for his project—black words on the white paper, white words on the black, some large, some tiny, some bold and some slender. Each land mass was a mixed conglomeration of thoughts, and each body of water was a sea of the vocabulary of the past weeks.
Control Anger resentment TIME strange weird Thankless Care dark DISASTER Power resigned Fall helpless…
Leo tore his eyes from the dizzying hive of words and stared at his brother. “Art?”
Don nodded, planting another strip—a black strip with the word “can’t” in white—against a slowly forming
Leo sank down to sit on Don’s bed, still watching his brother, interest piqued. “Different from…?”
“From all the mechanical things I’ve been doing. I thought if I tried something a little more expressive, I could get my own thoughts organized.” Don shuffled through a few scraps of paper on the desk, as if looking for just the right one. “I can’t help anyone until I do, really. I…have dreams, Leo.”
Leo’s fingertips went cold. “Dreams?”
Don nodded, fingers idly sorting through the papers. “About Raph dying, usually. Sometimes I’m back in the bathroom with him just after he was rescued, and he gets toxic shock. Sometimes Raph’s committing suicide, and I can only watch. I…actually woke up from one about two hours ago. Decided to work on this until I could sleep again.”
Leo was not even tempted to reveal his own recurring nightmares.
Donatello finally looked up at him. “You might try something like this, Leo. It really helps.”
Feeling suddenly uncomfortable, Leo pushed himself to his feet. “I’m fine,” he muttered as he walked briskly out the door.
He’d lost track of how many days he had been here.
April came and went sometimes, to bring groceries. Otherwise, his only companion was a quiet, unobtrusive Casey. Unobtrusive, at least, in the sense that he rarely spoke except about topics low in intimacy such as what they would eat for dinner. Otherwise, Casey seemed to be everywhere. When Raphael found himself staring too intently into the snow-peaked rapids of the river, Casey suddenly appeared, mentioning some excuse or another to divert him. Even when Raph thought he was alone with his thoughts, Casey would give himself away with a breath taken too loudly, a misstep, a trickle of wind blowing in the wrong direction.
I get the idea, Casey. You’re not gonna let me kill myself. I’m not stupid.
The knowledge was infuriating, but in some distant way, it quelled the same fire it kindled. Casey wasn’t going to let him die. All this time, when they had never talked about that night, or Raph’s behavior, or his mental state, and when Casey had given him minimal strange looks, Casey had been careful not to let his friend end his life. It was less like having a babysitter and more like having a spotter, who kept him from falling no matter how much he wanted to.
It was better than what he’d gotten from his brothers, at least.
Once, the sudden intrusion caused Raph to snap, and when his vision cleared, Casey was lying flat on the ground, reeling from a blow Raphael could not remember dealing. Ashamed, Raph helped him to his feet and muttered an apology and added the incident to the number of reasons he needed to die.
But as the days went on and so did he, he found himself slipping into a pattern each day. Mornings would be spent attacking the punching bag in the barn for hours before eating a thing. A bowl of cereal for lunch, then an afternoon of wandering the area. At first, this wandering ritual had come about as a way to seek solitude. Now, Raph simply took in the sights and sounds that were the antithesis of New York—the sunlight dappling the trees in various shades of green, the tinkle and glint of water, the high, hollow sounds of birdsong, the flash of bright feathers against green and brown, and the crunch of dead leaves on the forest floor. Not a single section of the forest looked the same as any other, but the smells were the same, the clean air and damp bark, free of any trace of the car exhaust that was so thick in
He would return in the evenings to find dinner ready, usually a frozen crock pot meal Casey had put on that morning, and after eating, he would watch movies and drink beer until he fell asleep on the couch. Every time he woke, he would find himself covered in a blanket he hadn’t touched himself. After a few nights of this, he started covering himself with the blanket as soon as he lay on the couch, pre-empting Casey’s sentimentality.
Raph lived these days untouched by his surroundings. The woods that had once mystified him now served as soulless diversion, idly viewed through fogged glass. Stars became dots, and birdsong became sounds, not unpleasant, but more or less unremarkable.
The loss of passion didn’t make him want to die more. It made him want it back.
It was a creeping realization. The more time went on and the longer he lived, the more his suicide fantasies mingled with fantasies of what things would have been like if that night had never occurred, or fantasies of returning home to find that things had gone back to normal. He would accept that--Leo nagging about little things, Don drifting in the long cotton clouds of daydreams, Mikey abandoning care and tact in favor of good times and laughter. He even dreamed about playing video games with Casey again, although his mind still could not venture with his friend out into the dark streets. That would take time.
Time.
Since when had he started thinking of time? Of a time when everything in the past months had no bearing on his daily life, and he could be content? When this trial had turned into strength of character for himself and his family? The only time he’d thought of such a time existing, it had seemed like wishful thinking. Now, he dreamed of it. He dreamed of living.
There was a knock at the door, and Mike hurled a pillow at it. He did not want to talk to anyone, especially not Leo, and there was a ninety-five percent chance that the knocker was Leo.
“Michelangelo, you’ve been in there since this morning. Are you planning on eating?”
Yep, it was Leo, and Mike knew for a fact that Leo had seen him emerge from his room to collect and hoard various food and drink items. He might have been setting up camp in his room, with his stash of food on one side of the bed and himself sitting on the other end with his laptop on his knees, playing an online role-playing game like a fiend. He wasn’t going to starve, and he wouldn’t have to talk to anyone.
“Michelangelo, get out of there NOW!”
He sounded impatient. Mike ignored him. His zombie warlock was just a few kills from level fifty-eight, and these little beasties didn’t even give that much experience. Thing was, there were gazillions of the little things swamping him, and while each individual did very little damage, the fact that there were gazillions of them meant he was losing hit points fast—
There was a crash, and Mike’s vision involuntarily focused on the door skidding across his bedroom floor. It stopped after a good six inches, and his eyes swerved to the side, where Leo stood in the doorway with steam coming out of his ears.
“Michelangelo,” Leo said precisely, his voice quiet with restrained fury. “You. Will. Come. To dinner.”
Mike glanced back at his computer and continued attacking the little critters swarming over his character. Leo stormed in front of him and slammed the laptop shut, nearly closing Mike’s fingers in before the indignant gamer jerked his hands back. “Leo!”
Leo shoved the computer to the side and grabbed Mike’s arm, fingers digging into his bicep. “You are going to eat dinner with your family,” he snarled, then forced Michelangelo upward.
In automatic reaction to being so handled, Mike jerked back, the force of Leo’s pull not quite letting him sit down no matter how hard he fought. He raised a foot to hook behind his brother’s knees and topple him, but Leo’s hand caught the foot, then his arm hooked to capture both ankles. With both feet together, Mike kicked fiercely at Leo’s plastron and succeeded in making him stumble backwards, but his older brother still had his arm in a viselike grip. Mike snapped his arm towards Leo’s thumb to break his grip, but succeeded only in bruising his own arm. “Let—me—go!” he shouted.
Leo threw his weight forward and pinned Mike to the bed, knees on his plastron. Mike struggled to bring his knees up and shove his brother off, but then Leo had him in a headlock and was groping underneath his arm. A sharp intake of breath hissed through Mike’s teeth as he recognized a trick Leo used to use when they were kids, and he slammed his elbow against his plastron, closing his arm to Leo. Leonardo, however, had just managed to find a fold of soft, sensitive flesh, and pinched it hard between the tips of his large, strong fingers. Mike struggled wildly, this time to slip free of the painful grip on his underarm, but his struggling only twisted the skin further, and he cried out.
The calm in Leonardo’s voice surpassed all reason. “Michelangelo.”
“Okay!” Mike choked spitefully, refusing to let his brother finish. “Just let me go!”
But Leo was high on power now, and was too sharp not to notice that Mike hadn’t actually made a promise. “You will come to dinner. Understand?”
That was too much to ask. “Go fuck yourself.”
Leo pressed him further, leaning in and twisting the flesh between his fingers. Mike struggled wildly, this time to slip free of the painful grip on his underarm, but his struggling only twisted the skin further, and he cried out. “You will come to dinner. Understand?”
The helplessness was unbearable. It was humiliating, being pinned under his brother, his most basic gifts of control over his own body being seized from him. Tears of anger stung and stabbed at his eyes, heat swelling up in his face in shame at this takeover, this blatant and casual usurping of power. Did Leo think he had a right to do this? Was that why he resorted to it as easily as he had when they were kids? It was a horrible thing to say, but at the moment, Mike wanted to hurt Leo as much as Leo was hurting him, and ready to do anything to end the pain and helplessness, he took out his last weapon. “This is why Raph left!”
It had the desired effect. Leo’s hand suddenly left Mike’s underarm, and both hands were now pressing Mike’s shoulders into the mattress. “What?” he asked dangerously.
“Let me go,” snarled Mike. This had already been more conversation than he’d wanted.
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN?” Leo shouted in his face, the black pit in the center of his dark eyes no larger than a pinprick.
“I mean let me up.” Michelangelo knew this cheek wouldn’t help him, but it felt good.
“TELL ME, MICHELANGELO.”
Suddenly, Mike was glad to obey. “You fucking smothered him, he couldn’t breathe, and you just HAD to interfere with House, you just HAD to do everything for him—“
“YOU HAVE NO DEFENSE, Mikey.” Leo pressed him further into the mattress. “You are JUST AS RESPONSIBLE.”
“Why, Leo? ‘Cause I treated him like he was still my brother and not my hospital ward patient?”
“You just had a different treatment plan, Mikey. You don’t get off blaming just me.”
“Oh!” Mike could feel his own eyes light up. “Oh, I don’t, Leo. I blame those motherfuckers for doing this to him, and yes, Casey for leaving him, and House for messing him up more. I just blame you most.” As soon as he said it, he knew he had gone so far beyond the line that there was no making up for it.
The iron grip on his shoulders suddenly tightened, and before Mike could tell what was happening, he was reeling from being lifted and slammed hard into the mattress. Twice. Three times, and Leo struck him across the face with a cry of rage. Twice. The second time with a closed fist. Mike’s eyes watered from the sting, then from the crash of explosive pain. “You little BRAT!” shouted Leo. “You petty, useless, spineless little LIAR! You--”
Suddenly the grip vanished, and Mike could see the ceiling again. The oppressive weight of his brother on top of him vanished, and he sat up quickly to see Leo storming toward the door. Leonardo stopped just before exiting and whipped around to snarl, “STAY here, then. I don’t fucking WANT you at dinner, and neither does anyone else if you’re like this!”
Then Leo was gone, and a breathless Mike went back to his game to find that he had been killed by a hundred little creatures with a tenth of his power. The computer was shoved recklessly to the floor, and for the lack of a pillow, he wadded up a corner of blanket and buried his aching, stinging face in it. Maybe it would help the stinging in his eyes, as well.
“What happened, Leonardo?”
“Nothing.”
Then things got quiet. He hated it when things got quiet. It was in those times that he knew just what he had done to make Raph leave.
If he stood out on the edge of the front porch, Casey got a bar of reception on his cell phone. It was a balancing act, but at least he could prove that the outside world still existed. It had been a little over two weeks since he and Raph had come here, and Casey had to let his boss know that yes, he was coming back and no, he did not have an attitude problem and no, he was not trying to get fired. By the end of the conversation, Casey was dead certain his job would not be there when he got back to
He stared out toward the dark woods, trying to get his mind off his inevitable unemployment. It was worth it if he could help Raph. That was not in question. It was just another consequence of his stupid actions that night. He missed April. He wondered if she had picked out a dog like they’d been talking about. His phone was ringing. His mother was probably ten feet out the door on her way to see him.
His phone was ringing.
Snapping back to reality, he opened the phone and held it to his ear with a deep intake of breath. “Hey.”
“Casey?” It was Splinter.
Oh geez, I’m dead. He is going to chew me out, then he’s gonna hunt me down and rip me to shreds. I am so dead. “S—Master Splinter. Uh…”
There came a sigh from the other end of the line. “I am glad to have finally got hold of you. I will not keep you long, but I have been meaning to ask this of you.”
The situation felt a little unreal, and without thinking, Casey nodded. It didn’t occur to him that Splinter couldn’t see him nod until after the rat was already speaking again. “Raphael…you know that he is not himself, and it has been…difficult for me to be apart from him during this time. He needs his father.”
“He—“ Casey glanced back into the house, running a hand through his hair self-consciously, afraid Raph may be listening. The turtle was fastened to the television, vacant-eyed as he had been for the past two weeks. “He’d flip out if I told you, y’know—“
“I am not asking to come to him. Casey, I need you…to be what I cannot be any longer. My eyes. My hands and feet. Care for him as I would. I cannot…”
The old sensei trailed off, and Casey felt his throat tying itself into hard, awkward knots. Swallowing did not alleviate the pain, and he found himself pressing his fingertips into his eyes to stop the threatening onslaught. “Yeah, I can do that.”
“Please…protect him, Casey. Do not let him…”
“Way ahead of ya, Splinter.” Casey took a deep breath and raised his head, dropping his hand away from his face. “I got ‘im. He’s fine with me.”
“Thank you, Casey.” Splinter did not sound completely relieved, and now that things were complete, a note of awkwardness entered his voice. “Keep him safe.”
“Sure. I’ll…talk to ya later.”
“I hope so.”
Casey’s eyes slid shut as he closed the phone. A weight had been taken off him now that Splinter was at least willing to talk to him. But Splinter’s trust was the same as Raph’s—only there because he had no choice. Awkwardly shoving the phone into his pocket, Casey shuffled back into the house.
The evening passed like any other, only this time, Raphael’s body language did not actively cut out Casey’s existence on the couch as they watched video tapes of old movies. The house was too far from civilization to receive cable, but there were still videotapes from some years ago of old Westerns and Alfred Hitchcock films. Raph had been watching them every night until he fell asleep. Casey didn’t mind. At least Raph was coping instead of trying to kill himself.
Raph surprised Casey by speaking, his voice quiet from lack of use. “Case?”
Casey nearly jumped out of his skin. He blinked at his friend, briefly wondering if he had hallucinated his name. “Yyyyeah?”
Raph never took his wide eyes off the television. He looked very tense, leaning forward against his knees, his fingers twitching as though he were trying not to clench his hands into fists. Silence hung in the air for every tick of a minute, broken only by sudden deep breaths and soft, explosive throat-clearing. “I…”
When the silence started again, Casey decided a small prompt was in order. “S’okay, Raph. Go ahead.”
Raph clicked his teeth together, then muttered, “’S gonna be hard tonight.”
For a second, Casey didn’t have any idea what Raph was talking about. Then, his eyes widened.
Raph cleared his throat nervously and continued. “I don’t…think I needa be alone. It’s just…”
He’s giving me a clue. He’s helping me keep him from doing something.
Nothing could measure the height to which Casey’s heart leapt. A small smile cracked his lips apart. “Yeah. Sure thing, Raph. We can…we can bunk up upstairs. There’s a couple beds up there, an’ we can lock the windows.”
Raph bobbed his head and looked a little relieved, but still very tense. He let out a long stream of air. “’Kay. Thanks.”
“No problem.” Casey’s smile spread into a full-fledged grin, and he gave Raph a light punch on the arm. “You’re doin’ good, man. Keep it up.”
It was so small that it might have been a trick played by shadows, but for the rest of his life, Casey would testify that Raphael smiled.
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I'm working on the fic I promised you. I hope it's not disappointing!
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And I can already say that your fic won't be disappointing ! Nothing from you will be. Until now, I loved all of your stories, I was re-reading Eighteen Minutes last day, and I was so in the story that I totally forgot time and was late at school XD
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