Explanations
Chapter 2 of "Blurred Edges"
The first part of Raphael’s narrative

"I could always kill you. Right here, right now. And no one would ever know…"

"Please…Raphael…"

"Don’t say another word. You hear me? Not one. Because I have something I need to tell you. This is something I only can tell you once."

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. This was supposed to be The Moment, the one where Absaraka would leave his world behind and come over to mine. I mean, after he wrote "Face to Face", I kinda figured that when we got to this point, he’d be open to hearing about this. Instead, here I was, scaring him to death again, and wondering what the hell I could ever say to him that wouldn’t leave him shaking.

One thing about "the Rock" (which is simply Raka without the A) that always worries me is the way he thinks about himself after our talks. (OK, sure, sometimes it’s a hell of a lot more than just "talks", but you get the idea.) True story: he once joined a support group for abuse survivors. He ended up kicking that in the head when he heard some of the real horror stories—guys getting stuffed in trash bags and getting gang-raped, ten-year-olds getting molested by their teachers, one teenager getting raped in reverse, if you will, by his mother…again, you get the idea. He was out of his depth there, and he knew it. Trouble is, he still had a lot of issues because of what was happening with me. He thought he was, and I quote, "a hideous monster" because of what was going on between us. Still does. (What he thinks about me half the time could probably shock Marilyn Manson, but I digress.) And that bothers me. I honestly don’t give a rip about what he thinks of me; what bothers me is when he starts hating himself for something he shouldn’t even be worried about.

Which is one of the reasons why, over the years, I’ve usually been forced into doing my "tough guy" routine around him. It’s not that I’m as bad as he thinks I am, far from it. It’s just that he’s confused enough about himself with me trying to scare him. The way things are now, he has a bit of an out in his own mind—"Raphael’s a monster, he’s a violent, uncontrollable rapist who wants to kill me"—that sort of thing. (He’s used almost those exact words to my face on a couple of occasions.) As long as he thinks that the balance of the time, he can live with himself. After all, he’s not in control of the whole thing, I am, so therefore, why should he torture himself? But you know something crazy? Even when I am at my worst—when I try to hurt him in his dreams just so he won’t hurt himself the next morning—he still blames himself. And I have no idea what to do about that.

So why don’t I "play nice" with the guy? If you read the last paragraph, you’d already know the answer. He hates himself enough as it is. If I were as gentle to him as he can be to me—in other words, if he can’t blame me for what’s going on between us—then he’d just blame himself that much more. Follow that? It’s gonna be important later on, something tells me. But don’t read too much into that.

Which is why him writing "Face to Face" puzzled me. I honestly have no idea sometimes what Rock thinks of me deep down. Sometimes he hates my guts so much, it surprises me—it’s really hard to get Rock to hate anyone. He’ll give you all kinds of chances before he gives up on you. But there are times when hating me seems to be all he’s capable of doing. As long as he doesn’t hate himself that much, I don’t mind. If he can hate me instead of himself, it’s no skin off my beak. After all, I’ve got a whole stinking clan of ninjas who’d love nothing more than to see me dead. I can handle a bit of Rock rage, thank you very much.

But then there are times—more than Rock will ever admit—when he feels so attracted to me it’s scary. And this is where it gets dicey, because Rock doesn’t like admitting to anyone that he worships me at times. And I do mean worship. Sometimes, when there’s no one else in the apartment, he’ll go into his room and just look at me. And I can feel him reaching out to me in his mind…which is either gratifying or frightening, depending on how you look at it. Gratifying, because I like knowing I have someone who still thinks I’m worth hanging on to. Frightening, because he’s hanging on way too hard. I mean, sure, I’d be absolutely thrilled to be able to see him "live-and-in-person", instead of having to travel to the dimension of dreams and meet him halfway, and even then only for short periods. And I’m pretty sure the feeling’s mutual. After all, Rock hasn’t changed that much since he wrote "Face to Face." And he did write it for me, despite his standard "I wrote this for my guardian angel" routine.

Guardian angel? Yup. Rock’s really into angels, and a while back found out that his guardian angel is also named Raphael. Not, for you angel-ologists, the famous archangel of the same name. The other Raphael (and I’m going strictly on what Rock tells me about him) is a healer of some kind, and the name Raphael means either "God heals" or "God has healed" depending on who you talk to. Ironic that I ended up with that name, because I’m not into all this feel-good healing mumbo jumbo. That’s more Donny’s turf, not mine. But what’s almost laughably ironic, as Rock would say, is the fact that I was indirectly named after an archangel. See, Splinter named me after the painter Raphael, who was, of course, Italian. Judging by the amount of work my namesake did for the Pope, he probably came from a pretty strong Catholic family. And Raphael is one of only 3 angels that are named in the Catholic Bible. So I was named for a painter, and the painter was named—as far as Rock knows and as far as I even give a damn—after the archangel. QED, I’m indirectly named after an archangel, who happens to share his name with Rock’s main guardian angel. Confused yet? Oh, it’ll get worse before it gets better, trust me.

Far as how Rock and I met…OK, this is gonna sound weird. Too weird. But hey, this is fan fiction, so maybe it didn’t happen this way. Hope you don’t mind a little, what do they call that…hyper-textual reflexivity? I swear, the amount of stuff Rock’s learned at college that he tries to force-feed me is unreal. I mean, he’s actually explained—get this—the second law of thermodynamics to me, and how it relates to his ever-messy room. (Don’t ask. You really don’t want to know.) So while my trueself may not be able to explain how to edit a proper audio mix-down, I probably could. Not well enough to fool a professional broadcaster/recording engineer/record producer/what-the-hell-ever, but probably well enough to impress a civilian.

So what am I, exactly? I could go into some of the psychiatric bullshit that Rock’s picked up from talking to his shrinks and start using the phrase "mental construct" like it’s going out of style, but that’s begging the question. Unless you are a shrink, in which case, what the hell are you doing reading this? Trying to diagnose the Rock long-distance? I’ll do that for ya…he’s fine. A little confused, sure. In need of a good talking-to every so often, I agree. Missing a few chemical compounds, eh…maybe. But don’t start thinking Rock’s dangerous.

If I haven’t said it before, I’ll say it here. Rock doesn’t like seeing anyone suffer. He’s about as dangerous as the parakeets he kept as pets in high school. He’s so tenderhearted, in fact, that he still remembers the exact spot where he buried those birds after they died. He even wrote a poem to say good-bye to ‘em. I actually had to show up in his dreams that night and console him, he was that shook up. Imagine it—two common little parakeets. They’d screech and holler all day, fly away from him when he tried to play with ‘em, bite him, treat their water dish as a toilet, and in general make keeping them around a pain in the ass. Yet when they died, Rock was so shook up that I was afraid he’d end up with a case of clinical depression. And he’s had more than one of those, let me tell ya.

But back to Reality Night…

"Now, then. What was that you wrote in that poem ‘Face to Face’? You remember it. You obsessed over every word as you wrote it. You could probably recite it without looking it up. Your words. I quote. ‘If there’s a way to meet you, in your realm, then let me rest no more until it’s found.’ You remember writing that." Rock nodded. That is, as far as he could nod with his head down. He was hurting inside, and I knew it. If ever there was a time when niceness was required…well, this sure as hell wasn’t it. The rest of this conversation was going to go down like Robitussin, I could tell. But at this point, my options were gone. Time was running out, and the blur wasn’t going to be in the right place much longer. I had to get through to him quickly, and the only way to do that was to make sure he didn’t run his yapper overtime and give me no time to explain anything. I had to do whatever was necessary…even if it meant scaring him, literally, to death. This was no time to be gentle.

"Well, then, get ready to rest. Because something’s happening. Soon you won’t be dreaming about me anymore. One of us will get to cross over to be with the other."

"What do you mean…?" His face turned absolutely white. Not pale, not ashen, white. Solid white. If he had been wearing his Navy whites at that point, he would have flunked the inspection, because his face was the most pure shade of white you could ever imagine. He was terrified. Rock, I’m sorry…I shouldn’t be hurting you like this…but all I could do was keep talking.

I explained the whole blurred edge thing to him as best I could, because the actual reasons behind how this works are way too complicated for even Don to understand. All I knew—all I needed to know—was that there was a way for Rock to join me in my world. Or, Plan B: I could give up my immortality to be with him. If it came down to that, then that’s what I was going to do.

I can just hear you wondering what’s so special about Rock that I’d be willing to face death for him. There’s a lot more to that than I’ll ever be able to put into words, even if I grilled Roget for every last word in his thesaurus. Put simply, Rock is everything I wish I could be. He’s always gentle. He actually has problems being sarcastic—it’s almost not in him. He has no guile whatsoever. He’s just so—pure—that sometimes it’s almost intimidating to be around him. Picture it. Me. A ninja. On a bad day, I can kill. My body is a lethal weapon, and never mind the sai I carry. And yet, whenever I see him, he’s just so innocent that it almost overpowers me. But then I get ahold of myself, and remember what I’m seeing him for. I can’t let on to Rock that I really, really love him. It’s too much to explain, but I’ll try. First things first, though. I need to tell you about how I came to be.

Now, a lot of you reading this think I was created back in 1984 by Eastman and Laird. Right? Here’s the thing, though. I was around a long time before that. A very, very long time. When Kevin and Peter "created" us in ’84, they were actually coming into subconscious contact with The Real Us in a different reality. They got a subconscious glimpse of our being, and got it down on paper. Same thing happens to everyone who’s ever written fiction, drawn a comic strip, designed a video game, or scripted a movie. Some of you reading this actually write your own stories about us, and the same thing happens to you whether you’re aware of it or not. When you "create a world", all you’re doing is finding a world that already exists and reporting back on what you see. There are characters that just came into existence at the moment you read this that might end up being "created" in your world tomorrow. On the flip side, some characters that were around long before your world was created will never come to be known in your world, ever.

What does this have to do with Rock, you’re asking? I’ll get to that. Keep reading.

Now. How do characters from different dimensions end up in dimensions other than their own? Usually, they’re characters in stories in the new dimension. The blurred edge that I was discussing with Rock is an extreme case of dimension shifting. There are smaller blurs all the hell over the universe. (If you’re thinking I’m too scientific to be the real Raph, hey…I had to learn this stuff real quick in order to even get introduced to Rock, much less find The One Big Blur that would bring us together.) These little blurs allow characters to be seen and heard in other dimensions. Usually, only one person gets to see across the dimensional lines, subconsciously, and only for a few seconds. Which is how Kevin and Peter created us—they both saw us at about the same time, and they had the talents to take down what they saw. So when 1984 rolled around, and the black-and-whites started circulating, all that was, was Eastman and Laird looking subconsciously into our world and telling our story to the world.

See, once you’ve seen a different dimension for the first time, the hard part is over—you can come back to that dimension time and time again. And—here’s the kicker—when you help someone see into that dimension, they can see it again as well. This is an obvious point, right? I don’t need to elaborate on this, I hope.

But getting back to how this relates to Rock. I can’t seem to tell this story straight, despite having listened to Rock tell all his stories to me. And he’s a damn good storyteller, if you ask me. Not that I’m saying that just to feed his ego or anything…

When I was introduced to your world in 1984, I could suddenly see it all—every person, every place, every story. I knew I wasn’t going to have a lot of time to make enough friends to stay around long. So I had to find friends who would stay with me…even when it wouldn’t be "chi-chi" to still be hanging on.

I found Rock by accident. Actually, that’s probably not accurate—it’s probably better to say he’s the one who found me. He caught the miniseries and was taping it. I was kind of looking around at your world, when I felt someone reaching out to me. I looked, and there was Rock, going back over that bit about "You’d better, or else I’m gonna get sarcastic." He was going over, and over, and over that scene. When I saw that, I knew I’d found someone who would help me live on in your world. I made arrangements at that point to see Rock in his dreams. I hoped then that I could find out what he saw in me.

I remember our first meeting as if it were yesterday. When Rock appeared in front of me, he had his back to me—apparently, I’d caught him off-guard in his dreams. He was looking around at what was in front of him, and from the way he was moving his head, he was scared. Not wanting to scare him away, I said (as gently as I could), "Hey, it’s me."

He froze. He didn’t want to turn around. I’ve seen him scared many times, but rarely as scared as he was when he first heard my voice.

He hung his head—he still had his back to me—and asked, in a very low voice, "Who are you?"

"Hey, turn around—I’m not gonna hurt you or anything."

When he first recognized me, he gave me a look that I have never seen on his face since. It was ecstasy, almost rapture. But mixed with it was a fear so cold, I almost wanted to take a step back. I held my ground, however.

"You’re—you’re…" His jaw just moved, making no sound after that. The only sound he made was just rapid, terrified breathing. It wasn’t pretty.

"Hey. Relax. I just want to talk, is all."

"About what?" His voice squeaked.

"Hey. Sit down, let’s just talk. I’m not gonna hurt ya, kapeesh? I just wanted to see what makes ya tick. I think we could both use a friend or two."

He gave me a once-over with his eyes—which looked like a deer in headlights—and then we both sat down, Indian style, about a foot from each other.

"You’re wondering why I’m here, right, kid?" (I didn’t know his name at this point. And he wasn’t going to use the name Absaraka for another eight years.)

He nodded, still avoiding my gaze. I felt him start to relax, even though I wasn’t touching him. He wasn’t shaking at this point, where earlier, he had been shaking like San Francisco in an eight-pointer.

"Here’s the thing," I said. "I need someone to be friends with in your world. And my guess is, you need a friend, period. Am I right?"

For the first time, he looked me willingly in the eye, and nodded. And I felt his fear dropping away like red leaves in a hurricane. What was replacing it, was hope…friendship…devotion. Even though we’d only met, I could tell he would stay with me for a long time. At the time, it was exciting. Looking back, I probably should have been worried. No one’s supposed to be this loyal, this quickly. Meaning Rock either needed a friend in the worst way at that point, or he’s too gullible.

I’m getting way the hell away from why I said I’d give up forever to be with Rock. Let me just put it this way. Spending forever as an outsider—even in my own family—isn’t something I look forward to. I would rather spend a drop in the ocean of time with someone I love—Rock—than swim in the ocean of time without a single good friend. In a nutshell, that’s it.

I’ll get back to our first encounter later, I guess. Right now I need to get back to Reality Night.

I explained the choices to Rock: he could join me in New York, in my world, and stay with me forever. Or, I could come to his/your world and find him in Baltimore. I tried to make it sound like there really wasn’t an option. I wanted him to come over to my side. And that’s how I phrased it—I tried to make it sound like spending forever with me would be the best thing for both of us.

"But I don’t want to…you know…just die…"

At which point, I played my ace of trumps and told Rock the sad truth, which he knows damn well in the first place. He’s got no life, no friends, a job he hates, and about three grand in student loan debts. Two full years at one of Maryland’s state colleges and all he needed to borrow was 3K. Lots of scholarships and lots of grants will do that for ya. But despite having a degree, he’s working full-time as a telemarketer—probably the worst job he could have gotten, considering. The amount of abuse he hears on the phone is enough to have him calling out to me every night as he goes to bed. He hears everything—every last cuss word in the book, people screaming at him all the time, fax machines screaming in his headset…hell, he’s almost been sued in federal court twice, all in the course of doing his job.

Sued? (I’m getting away from my point, but you’re probably curious, so I’ll tell ya.) Rock once called some idiot in New York who’d been out of business for a year and a half. See, Rock’s in the small business side of his company, which means he’s hocking business plans. Anyway, some yutz in New York once gave Rock an earful, took down Rock’s name and phone number, and said he was naming Rock as a co-defendant with the company in a harassment lawsuit. The shysters never called, because they knew they had absolutely no case. Here’s Rock, never spoken to this idiot before in his life, and all of a sudden this putz wants to drag him across a couple of state lines and make him testify in federal court? In all honesty, I ask you, who’s harassing who here? The other one was a law firm in, what, Ohio? (Mighta been—God knows Ohio’s probably got the rudest people in the US, judging by how much they heap on Rock.) Anyway, this law firm tells Rock that he’s "got nerve to call a law office when we’ve already told you to quit calling us." Rock handled it well, explaining that it takes a few days to get the number all the way out of the system, and that he’d make sure he put it down as a don’t-call again. But I think his Old Spice probably gave out right there.

Back to my story, though. (I am rambling a bit too much, aren’t I?) Rock’s next excuse…

"Raph…look. I wasn’t meant to be in your world, don’t you understand? I was meant to be here—"

"Where your best friends are people you haven’t met, your job is going nowhere, your degree was a waste of your time, and hardly anyone knows you even exist? The hell kind of an existence is that? Sounds like a recipe for misery to me. Come on…you’d love it where I am. Forever young…anything can happen…adventures around every corner…and you’re telling me you want to stay where you are, working overtime in a cube farm, where nobody even cares about you?"

It was a risk. I didn’t want Rock hating life so much that he—how do I put this politely—decided to do some dimension-crossing, on his own, the old-fashioned way. If he really did kill himself, he’d be in a different dimension again, and I’d have to wait to get a blur in a different dimension entirely. That might take another couple of centuries, and I didn’t want to wait that long. God, it was close. I could smell it. And I didn’t want to lose him now. I had to lay it out, without making things look so bleak that Rock would kill himself. This was life-and-death stuff here. Maybe even life-death-and-afterlife, but then, what the heck, I wasn’t going to lose the Rock right now.

"Look…it’s not the best life. I’ll grant you that. But it’s the only life I’ve ever known, don’t you understand?"

I knew this wasn’t going to go the way I wanted it to. And time was running out. I asked him one last time—God knows the blur would move any second if I didn’t act quickly—and he said his decision to stay was final.

"Then I’ll see you in your world. It won’t happen right away, but you will have enough warning so you’ll know when to be on the lookout for me. I’m going to find you. And when I do, we have a date with destiny."

He might have said something then. I don’t know, I didn’t catch it. I had to get to the blur right then. I woke up in my world, and told my family the bad news—we were leaving for Rock’s dimension right then and there. We’d discussed this before, so it wasn’t as if it were news to them. God knows we’d argued about it for months before we decided to go. And we all had a lot to leave behind: April was leaving Casey, and Mike probably never would see Kala again. Leo wasn’t exactly thrilled when I initially broached the subject of going to Baltimore, but then, he’s never exactly thrilled at anything I do to begin with. Meanwhile, Don was going to have to forsake all his toys that don’t exist in your world. Man, was that ever a tough sell! And Splinter—at his age, the dimension-crossing was probably going to be somewhat dangerous.

But after I showed them everything I saw in Rock—some of which even he’s not aware of—they all were curious enough to tag along. Besides, Baltimore’s got a lot going for it. Crab cakes, the Chesapeake, Ocean City, quiet country on the Eastern Shore, and lots and lots of historical markers for Don to dig up. And then there’s Camden Yards—probably the two best sports venues in the entire US. Oriole Park is still the crown jewel of baseball. Much as this Yankees fan despised the Orioles, I gotta admit Oriole Park is one kick-ass stadium. And then there’s PSINet Stadium, home of the Ravens. That place is amazing, even though nosebleed country really could give you a nosebleed, it’s so far up. And the way Baltimore’s public works crowd checked the water system in there before it opened was a stitch. What happened was, they got volunteers from all over Baltimore to come into the stadium a couple of weeks before it opened, and had everyone go into the restrooms and flush the toilets on cue. You laugh, but it’s a true story. If you know someone besides Rock who’s been in Baltimore for a couple of years, ask them if they remember that one. They might even have given the volunteers free T-shirts, or something. I don’t know. But that’s the way stuff gets done in Baltimore. Which got everyone’s curiosity going, which made it easier to sell ‘em on it.

The downside? It was going to be hard as hell getting around town, at least compared to New York. In New York, the subway goes everywhere. Meanwhile, Baltimore’s only subway line has a total length of about 16 miles. The Central Light Rail system can be a major headache if something crazy happens along Howard Street. (And, true story. Once, one of the Light Rail drivers managed to crash a train full of passengers down at the airport. Turns out he was driving the thing while he was on drugs.) Meanwhile, the bus system—the bulk of Baltimore’s public transit system, the MTA—is so bad, regular riders joke that MTA really stands for Making Transportation Annoying. (A joke Rock claims credit for inventing, by the way.)

I knew I was going to have some competition for Rock’s attention once we all got to Baltimore. He’s married to his job, for one thing, and despite the fact that it’s killing him, he isn’t looking in the want ads. So we weren’t going to have time to see him that much, meaning we’d have to find some way of amusing ourselves in a city that goes to bed around midnight. Compared to the city that never sleeps, that’s unthinkable. Other item was, since April was going to be slaving away at WJZ all day, we five mutants were going to have to keep a low profile. Which I helped April set up—we got a place near the 8 bus, a short hike from Rock’s apartment. Only April and I know the reason for that right now—my brothers and Splinter think April just picked a quiet house in the semi-urbs that was close to a bus line. Heh—just wait until they find out who’s right up the road.

Meanwhile, I got this crazy snatch of song going around in my head lately. It’s so apropos (a word Rock taught me) that I think I’ll quote it here. Rock knows I think this song fits the two of us, at least in my book—even if it’s way too mellow for my tastes. Anyway, without further ado…

Maybe it’s intuition
But some things you just don’t question
Like in your eyes
I see my future in an instant
And there it goes
I think I’ve found my best friend
I know that it might sound more than a little crazy

But I believe

I knew I loved you before I met you
I think I dreamed you into life
I knew I loved you before I met you
I have been waiting all my life

There’s just no rhyme or reason
Only this sense of completion
And in your eyes I see the missing pieces
I’m searching for
I think I’ve found my way home
I know that it might sound more than a little crazy

But I believe

I knew I loved you before I met you
I think I dreamed you into life
I knew I loved you before I met you
I have been waiting all my life
A thousand angels dance around you

I am complete now that I’ve found you
I knew I loved you before I met you
I think I dreamed you into life
I knew I loved you before I met you
I have been waiting all my life