62Nightmare Memories
Part 3
By Dierdre
Disclaimer: Um, I own a pair of shurikens, a wakizashi and a homemade kunai… but no mutated reptiles. …Drat.
AN: Violence and explicatives galore! You have been warned.
I was blown away, tickled pink and just plain flattered by y'alls reviews for the previous installment of this fic. I wanted to thank all you wonderful people individually, so:
Pacphys: Thanks so much for your kind review! And yes, I did get the belch thing from a truly awful B movie I saw on late-night TV once. Death by burrito-induced gases; what a way to go. :)
Shannon: Ask and ye shall receive, m'dear! Thanks for your review and I hope you like this next installment.
Chibi Rose Angel: Thank you so much for your kind comments! And yes, things will get worse before they get better. :)
Reinbeauchaser: (Blinks, then grins like an idiot) This is by far the longest review I've ever received… and probably the most flattering. The ante is upped? Wow, no pressure on me, eh? ;) I'm really glad you liked it and I hope this next installment doesn't disappoint. :)
Sassyblondexoxo: Thanks so much for your wonderful review! As a matter of fact, I do have an idea for another fic called 'Fade' (a Leo and Raph fic. Think dark and very, very twisted) that I'll start as soon as I get this one finished. :)
Kikiyophoenix19: Thanks so much for your kind words and for volunteering to be my beta reader! I'm working on the next installment of this fic now, so as soon as I finish with it I'll send it to you, okay? Thanks again. :)
And now, without further ado… on with the fic!
Leo's hand paused in the act of dropping the last shuriken into its pouch. That uneasy feeling of wrongness was spiking again, but for the life of him he couldn't figure out just where the danger was. All the gang members were still strewn about the alley in varying stages of unconsciousness, their weapons gathered up and piled out of reach, and Mikey had surely called the police and was on his way back by now. He had successfully removed all physical evidence of their involvement here and a quick glance confirmed Raphael's continued presence as lookout. His brothers were safe, his enemies defeated, so what was the problem?
Master Splinter had once told them that this ability to sense incoming danger, as unpredictable as it was, was both a product of their ninjitsu training and a gift from the gods. And while he'd had cause to be grateful for the cosmic assistance on more than one occasion, Leonardo sometimes wished the gods would be a little less subtle. Instead of vague hints and amorphous feelings without concrete substance, it would be nice to be occasionally presented with the psychic equivalent of a flashing neon sign. 'This way to impending doom,' would certainly save him a lot of needless worry and paranoia.
And perhaps paranoia was all it was. The only remaining unknown was the woman, who had crawled out of the dumpster's shadow and was now chatting amiably with Donatello. As he watched Don's hands spread out in an expansive gesture he only performed when excited, however, Leo decided there was little danger there. Despite his reclusive nature or perhaps because of it, Donatello had always been a good judge of character. If he trusted this girl enough to talk with her so animatedly then Leo had no reason to question his assessment.
…Still, he should probably get over there and talk to her himself. Maybe satisfying his own curiosity would put his mind at ease.
Donatello was outlining some of the basic philosophies of ninjitsu to a raptly listening Constance when he heard the sound of footsteps. He turned around to see Leonardo walking toward them, his expression cautious.
Eager to reassure him, he grinned and gestured graciously to the woman. "Constance, I'd like you to meet Leonardo. Leo… Connie."
She'd been talking to Don for only a few minutes, but it was nevertheless enough for her to offer her hand without any of the hesitation she'd shown previously. Despite their odd appearance and strange names ('Leonardo', eh? I'm sensing a trend here…), these were definitely the good guys. "Pleased to meet you, Leo," she said sincerely. "Thanks for the save."
The blue-masked turtle blinked and slowly shook her hand, not entirely successful in concealing his surprise. "You're welcome," he replied. His mouth curved into a small smile, which faded quickly when he got a closer look at his brother. His eyes widened. "You're hurt."
Donatello glanced down at his leg wound, which was still leaking blood at a sluggish rate. Shining almost black in the moonlight, blood had snaked down from the slash and followed the lines of his leg muscles, soaking into his kneepad. "It's not that bad. The knife didn't damage the musculature." He looked slightly bemused. "Truth to tell, I'd forgotten about it."
Despite these reassurances Leonardo sank to one knee and examined the injury critically. After a moment he nodded in agreement and said, "We still need to get the bleeding stopped. I'll make some bandages."
Walking over to the nearest unconscious thug, a wiry little man with a ridiculous green Mohawk, he grabbed the collar of his jacket and drew one of his swords. Lifting the material he prepared to cut it away from the man's body, only to be stopped by Constance clearing her throat. "Uh, Leo, if you don't mind…"
He looked up in time to see the woman take off her jacket and toss it on the dumpster's lid, revealing a long-sleeved cotton shirt. Gripping the hem, she pulled the garment over her head. Now clad in only a dark blue skirt and simple white tank top, sporting an embarrassed grin, she held out the shirt. "Use this."
"Uh, thanks," Leo said, taking the item of clothing. It was soft and white, and with the exception of a few smudges on the cuffs and collar, still quite clean. "This'll do nicely."
She has freckles across her shoulders, Donatello thought dazedly, suddenly very grateful for his reptile origins. It wasn't possible for turtles to blush.
"I'm glad," Connie said. She quickly grabbed her jacket, to Donatello's secret disappointment, and slipped her arms back in the sleeves. "There's just no telling where that guy's been."
Don snorted in amusement as the shirt was quickly reduced to strips under the onslaught of Leo's sword and powerful fingers. Constance silently watched as Leo once again dropped to one knee and, after wiping away the worst of the blood, began to bandage his brother's wound.
She suppressed a sudden shiver. Connie had never been squeamish around blood, but it was nevertheless a little disquieting to see how briskly and efficiently Leonardo worked. For although his touch was gentle and Donatello's relaxed posture displayed complete trust, there was a sort of dispassion in their eyes that told her this kind of post-battle ministration was not uncommon.
Constance suddenly wondered just how often they got hurt.
Unaware of the woman's thoughts, Leo gave the knots on the makeshift bandage a final experimental tug. Satisfied, he stood up and used the last scrap of sleeve to clean his hands. "How's that?"
Donatello flexed his leg experimentally, pleased but not surprised when the dressing held securely. "It's perfect. Thanks."
Leonardo nodded and seemed about to comment when he was interrupted by the tinny beep of his communicator. Reaching behind his shell, he plucked it from his belt and activated it. "Leo here."
A voice promptly answered, sounding rough as shark's skin and deeply sarcastic, "Thanks fer the info' there, bro. I woulda never've guessed."
He rolled his eyes heavenward as Don smirked and Connie smothered a grin behind her hand. Everyone's a comedian tonight. "What's up, Raph?"
"Mike's in sight now. He'll here inna minute."
"Good," Leo said. "Keep him with you. Don and I'll meet you there in-" he hesitated as Don gave him an entreating look and held out his hand, fingers splayed, "-three minutes."
"Better get yer asses up here quicker'n that," Raphael grumbled. "I don't wanna have ta deal wit' a bored Mikey." He cut the connection before Leo could respond.
As Leo muttered something uncomplimentary about hotheads and belted his communicator, Don turned his attention back to Connie. "My brother's on his way back, which means the police will be here in less than ten minutes. We'll have to leave as soon as we hear the sirens but you should be just fine until they arrive."
Constance nodded in agreement. Seemingly struck by a sudden thought, she frowned slightly. "I'm just wondering what the hell I'm gonna say to them. I can't very well tell the truth." She crossed her arms and gave him another lopsided smile. "They'll throw me in the loony bin for sure."
"There's no need to lie. Tell them what happened," Leo said, and then concluded with a wry smile, "just neglect to mention the 'ninja turtle' part."
Raising an eyebrow, the woman looked amused. "And that's not lying?"
"Selective omission, actually," Donatello replied innocently. "Which is something completely different."
Connie threw back her head and laughed. "Makes sense to me."
In a few minutes they would disappear from her life forever, and Donatello was mildly surprised to discover the thought saddened him. Despite their rocky start Constance had proven to be kind and remarkably easy to talk to. He had thoroughly enjoyed their conversation, however brief, and Don found himself wanting more of the same.
He took a steadying breath. Leo was probably going to have his shell for this, but he had to ask. "Connie, I-"
Don never got a chance to finish, for at that moment Leonardo felt a sudden premonition flash like a lightening strike across his consciousness. It arched and spat across every nerve ending his body possessed, jolting him into action with a speed that had little to do with grace and everything to do with desperation.
Raphael belted his communicator with a muttered curse and sank back into a sullen crouch. More waiting. If he hadn't been perceptive enough to realize the extra delay was primarily for Don's sake, he would've sworn Leo was doing this just to irritate him.
As a last-ditch effort to fend off boredom while acting as lookout, he'd been idly watching Don and the woman from the first disastrous beginnings of their conversation to its current relaxed and friendly state. And while it was obvious that Donatello was already half-smitten, he just couldn't see what the fuss was about. She was pretty enough, he supposed, but too damn doughy for his tastes. He preferred chicks with a little muscle tone. Like April, for example.
Yeah, Master Splinter's training was really doing wonders for that dame's figure…
He banished that line of thought with a firm shake of his head. Motioning impatiently for Mikey (who was idly shadow-boxing a few rooftops away) to hurry up, he glanced back into the shadow-shrouded alleyway. Still nothing of interest; just his brothers and the woman chatting away about who the hell knew what-
Catching a slight motion out of the corner of his eye, Raphael barely had time to cry out a warning as one of the supposedly unconscious thugs suddenly raised his head and pulled a pistol from under his body. His breath froze in his lungs as the small gun fired with an incongruously loud bang and the white flash of spent gunpowder. He saw one of his brothers blown backwards from the single shot even as he launched himself off the roof with a howl, drawing his sais as he plunged.
When the remainder of your life is can be measured in seconds, there is neither the time nor the will for hesitation.
Leonardo unceremoniously rammed his shoulder into Donatello's side, sending him tumbling away with a startled cry, and made a desperate lunge for the woman just as Raphael's shout of warning split the night stillness. Leonardo's fingers had barely brushed the sleeve of Constance's jacket when the crack of gunfire assaulted his ears. A millisecond later an unassuming bit of metal slammed into his plastron with incredible velocity and sent him flying backwards in a shower of blood.
Stunned by an impact more devastating than any he had ever endured, he was completely unable to prevent his head from slamming against concrete with a crack that could be heard over Raphael's scream of abject rage. Pain as incandescent as a supernova flared behind his eyes and sent him spinning into blackness before he could do more than send out a fuzzy prayer for the continued safety of his brothers.
Whoever invented the pistol was a fucking genius, David thought gleefully. With a simple pull of the trigger the happy little trio before him had disintegrated; the woman eating pavement while the blue-masked monster sailed backwards with a bullet lodged in its torso. Such power to be found in only a few ounces of metal and plastic.
Caught in a sudden heady feeling of invincibility, he swung his gun around and set his sights on the purple-masked one. Still sprawled against the wall where it'd been pushed and seemingly oblivious to the danger, its eyes were locked on the fallen form of its kin. If he'd been inclined to accredit it with any sort of human emotion, he would have believed it'd been rendered temporarily immobile in a fit of horrified grief.
His index finger was once again tightening on the trigger when a scream rent the air, causing him to flinch and snap his head up. Another creature, its mouth fixed in a snarl of wrath personified, leapt off the warehouse roof almost directly above him and drew its three-pronged blades, clutching them in its hands like claws. The tails of its red mask streamed behind it as it plunged towards him like a god of vengeance, and David had no choice but to once again believe in demons.
Priorities shifting abruptly, he forgot all about the purple-masked one and whipped his gun around with practiced speed. He squeezed the trigger… only to realize with a sudden jolt of dismay that, in a devastating stroke of bad luck, his gun had jammed.
Oh shit…
His dismay never had a chance to morph into true horror, however, for the demon chose that moment to land on his back. The sudden crushing weight snapped his spine in two with a dry, brittle sound. David didn't even have time to feel pain as six needle-sharp spikes pinned his neck to the pavement and sent him to eternity.
Donatello's breath left his body in a pained 'whoosh' as a heavily muscled shoulder slammed into his unprotected side, sending him reeling away like a drunkard after his fifth shot of whiskey. His shell smacked against the wall with a strangely hollow sound, driving him to his knees, and his head snapped up just in time to see the weapon discharge.
The rest of the world narrowed and faded into unimportance as he watched Leonardo take a bullet to the chest. The eternally analytical part of Donatello's psyche was screaming for him to move, to get away before he was gunned down too, but his body would not respond. He was frozen, entangled in a moment of visceral horror, as he watched his strong, seemingly invincible brother topple backwards with a blood-spattered plastron, astonishment in his brown eyes.
No! Oh, no, no, no…
The crack of Leonardo's head hitting pavement seemed impossibly loud, overwhelming even Raphael's howl of rage. An instant later the sick crackle of snapping vertebrae announced the end of the threat and broke through Donatello's paralysis, propelling him forward with a gracelessness he hadn't displayed in over a decade. Tripping over a suddenly malevolent obstacle course of fallen bodies and broken concrete, he fought his way over to his brother's side. His legs folded up beneath him and he dropped to his knees like a marionette whose strings had just been cut.
There was blood everywhere. It seeped in a spreading pool from a deep gash on the back of Leo's head and splashed across his chest, shoulders and even his face like macabre body paint. Limp and seemingly lifeless, Don couldn't even tell if he was breathing.
His hand shook slightly as it rose of its own accord and stopped, just millimeters away from his brother's carotid artery. He didn't want to check. Ah, god… if he pressed his fingers to Leo's throat and felt nothing-
His thoughts were interrupted as a streak of green and orange suddenly appeared at the alley's entrance, moving so swiftly that sheer momentum sent the turtle skidding several feet before finally coming to a halt in a tangled cloud of dust. "Guys, I heard gunshots and-"
Michelangelo felt the blood drain from his face in an almost dizzying rush, leaving his skin the pale, sickly green of long-dead pine needles. "Oh, shit! Leo!" He rushed over and collapsed to his knees, tears forming in his eyes even as he clasped one of Leonardo's hands with both his own.
Raphael ghosted silently over to them; fists clenched and blood still dripping from his belted sais. In a voice utterly devoid of emotion he asked the question that was on all their minds, "Is he dead?"
Mikey's look of mute pleading forced Don to take a deep breath and steel himself. Sending out a fervent prayer to every god he'd ever heard of, he pressed his fingers to the fallen turtle's throat. For a moment all was silent as none of them dared breathe, then Don's shoulders slumped. In a voice made shaky with emotional overload, he said, "He's got a pulse."
He barely noticed as Raphael bowed his head, blowing out a low breath, while Michelangelo smiled in relief and gripped his brother's hand tighter. Hope, as potent as any drug, was surging through Don's veins, and as such his muscles barely felt the strain when he tore the tough cotton bandage from his leg and threw it at a startled Raphael. "Use this to staunch the blood from his head wound. Press gently, now; he might have a skull fracture."
As the red-masked turtle complied wordlessly Don turned to Mikey, who was looking at him with wide eyes. "Find me some light."
He blinked, and then asked hesitantly, "Where-"
"Check the weapons pile for a flashlight; set one of these goons on fire… I don't care! Just get me some light so I can see."
Mikey leapt away like he'd been shot from a cannon.
Turning away long enough to forcibly remove a thin brown jacket from the body of a fallen man, he began to wipe away the blood as best he could. He suspected the bullet wound was in one of the bony scutes on Leo's upper plastron, but he steered clear of that area, not trusting himself to check until he had better lighting.
As he gently swabbed the red fluid from Leo's abdomen, shoulders and neck, a disquieting sense of wrongness began to niggle at the back of Don's mind. There was an oddity about the spatters of blood across his leader's chest. Some bit of long-unused knowledge about the patterns liquid made when…
The nagging thought faded as Raphael, who was monitoring Leo's heart rate with his free hand, frowned suddenly and said, "His pulse is weak an' his skin's gettin' cold." He gave Don a swift, urgent look. "I think he's goin' inta shock. We gotta get 'im back ta the lair."
"I know, Raph," Donatello replied softly, his hands never pausing in their work, "but we can't move him until we know how bad the damage is."
There was a cry of triumph from somewhere near the alley entrance and Michelangelo returned a moment later with a small penlight clutched in one hand. Dropping once more to his knees he activated the light and held it above his head, spilling yellow luminescence across his fallen brother's body. Thanking Mike absently, Don carefully dabbed away the blood from Leo's upper scutes, revealing a neatly drilled hole about the size of a dime. His eyes widened. "What the..?"
"What? What is it?" Mikey asked urgently.
"This isn't possible."
"Just tell us, dammit!" Raph snapped.
Don dropped the blood-soaked garment and ran a wondering hand across the hole, his sensitive fingertips barely brushing against the bit of metal lodged there. "He was shot from twenty feet away with an army-issue pistol, but the bullet didn't enter his body. It's lodged in his upper right scute."
The artificial illumination wavered as a shocked Mikey nearly dropped the penlight. "Not that I'm not glad... but how the hell'd that happen? Our plastrons are tough but they ain't Kevlar!"
"The bullet must have somehow lost velocity," Donatello murmured doubtfully. His logical side was clamoring for attention again, insistently pointing out oddities he'd overlooked in the past few emotionally-charged moments: the mysteriously decelerated bullet, the strange spatters of blood where no blood should be… and the now-conspicuous absence of someone whose existence they'd all temporarily forgotten.
Gripped by a sudden horrible suspicion, he snatched the penlight from Michelangelo's grasp and trained it deeper into the alley. The beam it emitted turned weak and watery after only a few feet, but it was nevertheless enough to outline a familiar form lying facedown in an awkward heap. Donatello's throat seized for a wide-eyed moment before he whispered softly, sadly:
"Ah, no..."
AN: I'm afraid I left y'all with another cliffhanger. An evil person, am I. :)
This chapter was rather hard to write, so… let me know if it was okay. Please? (Attempts to look endearing)