lucetilogs | (no subject)

Who:

nexuschamp
What: A not-so-dire illness.
When: The wee hours of Sunday morning.
Where: The Hamato apartment, in C6.
Summary: Don feels a little sick. Raph and Leo freak the hell out. An honest discussion is had by all, and Many Theories are Expounded.
Rating: Raph is here. It probably won't be less than PG-13.

The problem with being a turtle, is that you cannot curl into a fetal position when your stomach hurts.

Don rolls over and presses his face into the pillow.

No. Bad idea.

He rolls over again, and breathes in the cool air of the quiet apartment.

Why does he feel so hot?

He's going to get up. He's going to get some water and turn the thermostat down, just a notch.

No, wait. No climate control in Luceti. He'll have to open a window.

Windows. What a novel concept.

Thank God there is indoor plumbing, at least.

Right. Getting up, getting a drink.

Very quietly, because Leo, the infamously light sleeper, is right there on the other side of the room.

He sits up. His stomach rolls. He swings his legs over the side of the bed, and stands. The entire apartment pitches to the left, and two-hundred pounds of turtle crashes to the floor.

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"That...creature beneath the mansion where we found Angel's brother, right?" Leo's question sounds distant to his own ears, but he's trying as hard as he can to process it. The eldest can remember the sickness in his stomach as the monster tried to coerce him into sparing it - digging into his mind like a tick, drinking down the desires that Leonardo himself never spared second thoughts to. His throat is dry and he whispers, "That was almost a year ago."

Silence. He swallows again, laces his mind back around the topic at hand, and steels his voice. "The infection stayed dormant for a while, but you needed to use your bo as a staff to get around, and after a few months, you got sick." he stops before 'like you are now'. "We had to go out to handle the rest of the outbreak, but you were in no condition to come, so we left you at with April and Casey. And..."

He inhales, and it shakes. "And then you - mutated. You..." he trails off, turns his head, and clenches his eyes. "We didn't even realize it."

"Then you... mutated."

Fascinating.

Morbid, but fascinating. Don has always wondered whether their mutation was quite stable, or whether the right combination of events (or maybe just time) would trigger a further metamorphosis.

(Sometimes, when he thinks of what they could become, he yearns. Other times, he fears. Always, it keeps him awake, staring at his ceiling until night turns into day.)

He shakes his head. "What do you mean, you didn't realize? What kind of change was it?"

Leo seems to need time to organize his answer. While he's thinking, Don jostles Mike's shoulder, rousing him from his drowsy state. "Mike, where are your art supplies? Paper, markers."

A non sequitur request, maybe, but his brothers are used to that from him. Certain things are starting to fall into place, and he needs to see them outside his head to know if they mean what he thinks they mean.

"Wha?" The dire tone in Leonardo's voice had pierced something, but despite all that Mike had still slowly been drifting off. He was always horrible when he didn't get enough sleep. One could only be a ball of energy for so long, after all.

Don's request at least gave him something to do, so he leaped to his feet to obey. Maybe he could get his blood moving and wake himself up as he dug around for his things in his messy room (how it was already so messy was a mystery).

Mike leaves the room and the three of them wait in wire-strung silence. Raph shifts from foot to foot, his eyes still glued nervously on Donatello. He knows this question's probably getting old fast, but it's way too damn quiet in here and he's worried.

"You sure you're all right, Donnie? I mean, I heard ya hurlin' all the way down the hall..."

And it reeks in here. It's making Raph feel a little sick himself. He gestures to the garbage can.

"Somebody should take care of that. Smells like shit in here."

Yes, all right. I'll increase my ninja training until I learn to hurl in silence.

He bites back the response, because there's no need to be that sarcastic when his brothers are still genuinely worried about him. Instead, all he says is: "Sorry I woke you. I'm really not that sick."

"Somebody should take care of that."

Don nods. "Please. I think I'm done with it."

He nods, happy for something to do that isn't talking. The task doesn't faze him much. He grew up in the sewers, after all. And it makes him feel useful to do the jobs no one wants to, because someone's got to do it. Might as well be him.

He ducks for the can and tries not to look inside it, but his beak is still wrinkled in disgust as he heads for the bathroom to go rinse it in the tub.

At this point, distractions of any kind are welcome ones. So he takes his time, lets the water run, because he can brood about the past on his own time. All this storytelling is doing is digging up old ghosts that are better left dead and buried.

It didn't take long for Mike to locate the aforementioned objects and he hurried back to deliver them to Donatello. He didn't have markers here -not yet- so instead he provided his brother with a pen, his colored pencils and a sheaf of blank paper. "So what's this for? Are you gonna put like chemical stuff all over it, cause I'm not gonna follow that at all."

"Nope," Don says. "Just an illustration of a minor temporal paradox."

He dumps the drawing supplies into a dip in the blankets, moves aside the glass and towel to make room on the nightstand, and leans over to draw his sketch. First the pen, to set up the axes. Then the pencils, a different color for each set of data points. And then the pen again, to scribble some rough labels.

"Someone gave me a guide to Luceti," he says, as he works. "I read it this afternoon. It says that people who are drawn here from the same world, might come from different times in that world." He drops the pen with a clatter and holds up his graph. "I don't think I've forgotten, Leo. It just hasn't happened to me yet."

Edited 2010-02-26 17:36 (UTC)

Leonardo had read that guide. He'd studied it inside out. The possibility of Don being from a time before his secondary mutation is one that he's recognized before, but only vaguely and never seriously. A part of him refuses to accept that he has the knowledge that it will happen - unlike last time - and realize that he won't be able to do anything with it.

But more than that, it creates so many complications.

These versions of his brothers are softer. Less able, both physically and emotionally. Maybe he hadn't seen the gentler youth in their faces before, but now that the possibility has been dragged to life, he can trace the scars on their skin and see fewer.

Scars. Leonardo gestures slowly to Don. "The scar on your thigh. Where you were infected. Is it there?"

This story is getting awfully hard to follow.

"The scar on your thigh. Where you were infected. Is it there?"

His first thought is of the old scar where Raph had accidentally stabbed him in practice, the time he had been convinced he was coming down with gangrene. (He'd been only twelve, and suffering from a bad case of paranoid delusional prepubescent med-student syndrome.)

His second thought is that Leo is referring to the mutant monsters who had allegedly injured him and infected him with some agent (a mutagen?) that hasn't been explained very well.

It's cold in the room (I was so hot a few minutes ago) and Don is reluctant to unwrap the blankets. But he does it anyway, and shivers as he traces his fingers along his bare legs.

Good thing I didn't get as far as opening a window. It's February; what was I thinking?

He catalogs each scar as he touches it. The sai mark. A thin line from a jagged edge of broken-off pipe. For each pale inscription, a date, a place, an image, a memory of pain.

But none that trigger repressed memories of being stung by a feral mutant. None that he can't account for.

"I don't... I don't think so..."

"So you're tellin' me - " He's nothing but a shadow in the dark c doorway, arms crossed, his shell leaned casually against the frame. He'd been listening silently since he'd reappeared from the bathroom, and he hopes his entrance slipped under the radar enough to catch them off guard. "That you and Mike got pulled from a completely different time than us, and you know nothin' about the Outbreak 'cause we're from the future?"

He snorts a laugh, half amused, half giddy with relief, before turning his glare to Mikey. "I was wonderin' why you picked up that Battle Nexus shit again."