Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Fan Fiction ❯ 3 Weeks ❯ 6 ( Chapter 6 )

Argh, this one was so freakin' hard to write. Started over from scratch with it like 3 times. Frustrating to no end. I only wanted the best for this particular sequence. Hope it works.

 

Disclaimer: The copyrights aren't mine. I can only weep and try to grow accustomed to the pain in my soul.

 

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“You're a fascinating creature. Simply amazing. You were so well trained, weren't you, boy?” The whisper came out of the darkness that pressed in on him from all sides, just as it always had, accompanied by the sharp pain of a needle, just as it always was. Amber eyes traveled slowly towards the sound, straining fruitlessly to adjust. He was so tired...Were his eyes even open anymore? Lids flickered open, then closed again quickly. Had there been lights? Slowly, carefully, he adjusted himself and looked around the room.

 

It was dark, but not as dark as it had been. A small candle cast a dim orange glow around the man's sillhouette. He had always been able to look around the room, hadn't he? This was not new, and he tried to remember. Remembering...It was hard to remember anymore. Where was he? He swallowed, feeling coarse fabric shift against his throat with the motion. A collar, thick and heavy and degrading, chained to something too heavy to move, just like his hands. Chained by his sides, like they always had been. Fire spread from the needle, moved through his veins...It hurt...Couldn't the man see it hurt him?

 

Words formed in his mouth, garbled and tangled over a tongue that felt too thick. Perhaps the least human-sounding noise he'd ever made, the turtle considered abstractly. A hand...There was a hand pressing on his arm, patting, rubbing in small circles. A distant alarm went off: something...something was wrong. He shouldn't be here. There was...somewhere...

 

Water was pressed against his face, trickled down his throat, over cracked lips, and he coughed. A jolt of pain passed through his side, and he wondered why. He couldn't recall leaving, let alone being hurt. The man never let him leave. Never had.

 

“That's right...That's a good boy...Go on, drink your water...So well-behaved,” the whisper praised, hand moving up to his shoulder. Something distant latched on, and he flinched away from the touch with a slight growl. “Shh...It's alright...I'm not going to hurt you, not like your last owner did. You've been neglected, but it's over now. I know just how to take care of you, don't I, fella?” Something about the question made him shudder.

 

Images flickered to life behind closed eyes, blurred and jumping, the edges faded away into nothingness. He could almost see their faces, green and blue and orange and purple, spinning before him in a jumbled mess, and he struggled to remember what it was like, a time when he had had a family, had laughed and shouted and fought. It was all so distant now...Like a dream...Had they ever really been there?

 

The hand stroked his head once, coming around to cup his face. A feeling rose in him, fast and hot and a voice was screaming at him to do something, damn it, because this wasn't right, this was degrading and wrong and he could feel it in his bones, a hollow nausea that he fought to contain. He latched onto the voice desperately, following his instinct because it had been so long since he'd been able to feel and something about this seemed to fit him perfectly.

 

Cold hand shifted against his cheek again, granting him an opportunity he would never before have noticed or dared to act upon. A feral growl rose in his throat, causing the man to hesitate. He could feel analytical eyes on him, but ignored them in favor of opening his mouth and bringing it down upon the offending limb. The voice in his mind screamed approval as the man howled in pain and jerked back, feeling grim satisfaction at the taste of blood in his mouth, metallic and warm and informing him that he'd bitten down exactly as hard as he wanted.

 

The blow came with much more force than he had expected, causing lights to explode before his eyes even as the chain pulled taut and he choked on the collar. His head was ringing, everything was spinning, and the blow was followed by another, and another. Somewhere, distantly but gaining clarity, the images sprang up again, and the creature's mouth twitched in a small smirk.

 

He had a family. He had a name. The realization brought Raphael from the brink of insanity, temporarily overriding the drugs he now knew ran through his system. He remembered fighting, chasing some kind of thugs down, a deep slash across his plastron, before everything had faded away. When he'd woken up, things were as they had always been here. He could see their faces, even as the man removed a small black box from his pocket and pressed a button-

 

-and Raphael remembered exactly why he hated shock collars. Pain exploded through his system, burning all over, never lessening, never becoming easier to deal with, and he vaguely wondered how many volts were in this particular accessory. At the same time, he wondered how long it would take to kill him. Not long at this rate, he decided, feeling the screams tear themselves from his throat without his bidding, small bits of foam exiting the corners of his mouth-

 

And just as suddenly, it was over, leaving him shaking and twitching and limp on the ground. Weak, his mind shouted, furious with him for being brought down so easily. Bloodshot eyes looked up at the man in hatred, glaring as well as he could in such a state. The man cradled his injured hand to his chest and glared back in full, eyes bright and fevered as he pushed the box back into his pocket. After a moment, his face softened slightly and he knelt down again.

 

“That was bad. That was very, very bad and you'll never learn if you aren't punished. Maybe you aren't as well-trained as I thought. Were you bad before? Is that why your former owner left you to run in the streets?” A sigh. “You just don't understand.” He reached out for Raphael's face again, and the turtle fought back the urge to just bite him again, cursing himself for flinching, for shaking like a child. After a moment, nodding and frowning, the man blew out the candle, leaving the turtle alone in the dark once more. His words brought fire into Raph's soul, but it was extinguished just as quickly. The man's tone had slow and firm: Raphael held in a bubble of hysterical laughter as he realized he had just been lectured.

 

He was incapacitated, weak as a kitten, slowly but surely losing his mind, but the ninja could still put two and two together to make four. Today's solution was that the man holding him would put two and two together and probably hand you a dead squirrel - in other words, the guy was a fuckin' psycho- and Raphael was completely at his mercy. Not to mention that even imprisoned, he'd still found a way to get himself in more trouble. It made him think of Leo, and Donnie, who were always going on about him learning his lesson. He missed those lectures, the ones he knew came out of sincere concern but pushed away simply because he enjoyed seeing the older turtles get frustrated. Mikey got on his nerves all the time, which he didn't exactly mind and he figured it was just karma at work. Too bad there was no one to annoy Mikey. He missed Splinter's unbearably ninja-esque sayings that he wouldn't undertand until he was in his forties.

 

Raph coughed harshly, the sound reverbating around the room before fading sharply into silence. He couldn't see. There was nothing to hear. He was cold and starved and thirsty and his entire body hurt and it was maddening. God, how long had he even been here? Was his family coming? Were they even looking?

 

Had they been captured, too? Was the man making his way to their holding places, even now? The images came up, unwanted: Leo, lying chained up somewhere, stripped of his dignity, Donnie, staring into nothingness, slowly losing his mind, Mikey, beaten and scared, crying, left all alone. All of his brothers...left in the dark...

 

Staring into the darkness, fighting the screams that were slowly building in his throat, Hamato Raphael concluded that he hated being alone.

 

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So what did you think? Cause I'm not entirely sure I got this right. Well, I gotta get to work on the next one.