Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Fan Fiction ❯ 3 Weeks ❯ 15 ( Chapter 15 )

Thank you guys for reviewing and reading and whatnot! Most appreciated! I'm coming in with Chapter 15. Can you believe it? I've never had this much follow-through on a story before!

 

Disclaimer: I have made peace with the fact that they don't belong to me…Mostly…Well, at least I KNOW they aren't mine, right?

 

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Recent events had led him to discover exactly how much he hated waiting. 3 weeks of waiting for leads, finally getting one only to end up waiting for Don and April to pin down the right guy, then waiting two-and-a-half hours just to get to him: only to find out exactly how close they'd cut it. Having to wait to get back to the others while his best friend nearly bled to death right behind him. Waiting, frozen and nearly having a heart attack, when Raph had stopped breathing for a few moments just before their arrival. Another example of things being too close for comfort. It was an experience Casey never wanted to have again.

 

He could still hear it, in the back of his head. The way Raph's shallow breaths had suddenly fallen silent, the way everything else had frozen. Even through the phone call and traffic sounds and their own half-intelligible conversations, everyone had somehow picked up on it the moment it happened. There had been a sudden silence, broken only by the muted voice of April over the line, filled with tensed muscles and wide-eyed disbelief. All eyes had turned to the mutilated chest, which had stopped rising and falling rhythmically. Mikey had jerked the wheel to the side, prepared to pull over, Donnie had dropped whatever object it was that he'd been holding, Casey had felt his face pale beneath his mask. Leo's entire frame had started shaking, his jaw clamped shut, eyes squeezing closed and just when it looked like he might go completely berserk, Raph had suddenly coughed and taken in a thin, rasping bit of air.

 

Casey resolved that he owed the hotheaded turtle one good punch for scaring them like that.

 

So you could understand why, by the time they made it to April and Master Splinter, the vigilante was convinced he'd had enough of waiting to last a lifetime. Fate, it seemed, had other ideas, and had swiftly kicked him in a sensitive area before taking off running before he could get after it. That was what led to where he was now: waiting in silence, yet again, while somebody else handled everything. The human shifted against the old, worn-out sofa that his friends owned, eyes trained on the door to Don's lab in an ice-cold glare. Donnie was back there, with April and Splinter, doing whatever they could for Raph. He'd never been one for patience, for sitting idly by, unable to do anything to help when a friend was in danger. It had to do, he supposed, with the fact that when it came to waiting, there was no action in the act.

 

If nothing else, Casey Jones had always been a man of action. Which was probably why this was so infuriating. Movement caught the corner of his eye, and he glanced away from the door to take in their current situation. Mikey could be found on the arm of the couch, knees pulled up to his chest uncomfortably with a sketchpad resting on top of them. His eyes were glued, unseeing, to the too-loud television as he repeatedly tapped the end of his pencil on the pad. Once in a while, he would turn it around, put the point to paper as though struck by an idea, only to pull back and start tapping once again.

 

Leo paced, for the most part: moving from about 3 feet in front of Don's door, across the living area, in front of the television and back again. He stared at his feet the entire way, glancing up only once in a blue moon to see if the door had opened yet. When he felt he had been pacing too long, the eldest turtle took a seat in the nearest available chair, gripping the armrests with white knuckles and looking completely lost. From there, he would stand suddenly, walk over to the dojo doors and reach out to open them, before he seemed to lose his nerve and drew back. Once he'd stood up again, though, he couldn't sit down immediately, which led to more pacing.

 

If this had been a different situation, Casey wouldn't be sitting silently on the couch. In fact, he probably would have tossed said couch around the room by now. He had a rather formidable knack for destroying furniture. And if Raph were only a little banged up, maybe if he just had a mild concussion or something, the vigilante would most certainly have destroyed all of the furniture around the lair before heading out to destroy his own furniture. From there, he probably would have hit the streets to find whatever punk thought he could get away with hurting one of his friends and dished out some much-needed revenge.

 

But there was no longer any vengeance to be had here, he reminded himself with a slight wave of disappointed rage. Leo had seen to that quickly enough, and though he regretted not being the one to end that miserable bastard Richards's existence, Casey was still satisfied enough to let it slide. The blue-banded turtle sat down once again, and the human briefly considered suggesting a shower to get rid of those bloodstains. He would probably suggest it to Mikey, too, but he was also aware that there was no way the two would go anywhere before knowing if Raph was okay. Otherwise, Leo would have been training and Mikey would have been in the kitchen. Casey could respect the notion.

 

Breaking his eyes away from the sight of flaking dark red on green skin, he also came to realize just how much he hated blood. He hated the sight of it, pooling on the floor, far too much and flowing too heavily. It had a way of covering everything without meaning too, could spread like fire and get into everything like it was sand. The smell of it was still stuck in his nose, sickly sweet and warm, making him want to gag. Briefly, he wondered what it would take to get it out of there. He also wondered if Raph had smelled it so clearly.

 

The vigilante's eyes narrowed and he shuddered again. If they'd arrived any later, if he hadn't taken that route on patrol, if that criminal hadn't had a name for him, Raph would have died in that miserable cell of a room, bleeding and in pain and alone. Maybe he should have been the one to kill Richards. Casey knew Leo well enough to know that it had probably been a quick and painless death. A merciful one, some could call it. He fought back a snort at the thought: the man had sliced Raph up like a Christmas ham, and he still somehow warranted a merciful end. Then again, that was just his personal opinion. He'd always known himself to be of the `eye-for-an-eye' version of retribution, and figured that probably said something about his personality, just like showing mercy where none was deserved said something about Leo's. What it said exactly was beyond him. It probably didn't matter much anyway, he figured idly.

 

Another thing he couldn't seem to get out of his head was Isaac Richards himself. The undisputable hatred he felt for the once-veterinarian couldn't seem to put a block on his thoughts, no matter how hard he tried thinking of other things. He'd very obviously been insane, more than just `a little off-balance,' and Casey wondered what exactly his problem had been. The other man had been almost calm when they found him, had sounded so sure, as though everything he said was a solid, proven fact. Even seeing 3 other giant talking turtles hadn't fazed him as much as the potential loss of his `patient.' And he'd once been respected, with a good future and a love for what he did. Any kind of death would probably have been a merciful one for him. Sometimes it was better to die than to live sick, the vigilante figured indifferently. But, if Richards were to look, he would find no sympathy here.

 

The sound of a door opening wrenched him from his thoughts abruptly. Mikey dropped his pencil; Leo's head snapped up, the leader standing so fast Casey was amazed that he hadn't broken his spine in the process. Donnie and April wearily stumbled out of the makeshift infirmary, looking utterly exhausted and more than just a little bloodied. Two more showers to suggest, Casey thought distantly.

 

And somehow it had come back down to waiting, waiting for somebody to speak up and tell them how Raph was doing, if he had survived. All eyes turned to April first, who was shifting on her feet, no one willing to ask the question they most feared hearing answered. The redheaded woman was shaking all over, looking a little nauseous and extremely disturbed, but somehow she still managed a reassuring smile. Casey didn't think he'd ever been so happy to see that smile of hers. Eyes traveled again as Donnie sank onto the couch, head in his hands; when he spoke, his voice sounded muffled.

 

“If it was anyone but Raph,” he began slowly, shaking nearly as badly as April, “I swear, if it was anyone but Raphael, there's no way they'd be stubborn enough to survive that kind of blood loss, but he did.” At this he looked up again, eyes bloodshot and over bright. He caught the eyes of his two other brothers and their human friend, a small smirk creeping over his features. Leo sighed in relief, shoulders drooping as he all but collapsed back into the chair. Mikey glanced at April for confirmation, and her smile grew in warmth. The youngest turned back to Donatello, who elaborated.

 

“He'll be fine, Mike. Master Splinter's watching him for now. He's going to have to take it easy for a while, and he'll be really weak when he comes to, but apart from that he should make a full recovery.” Mikey immediately turned on his mega-watt smile, happier than he'd been in weeks, before leaping up and pulling April into a bone-crushing hug, spinning her around and incoherently shouting for joy. Once he'd finished with that (and the task had been taken up by an ecstatic Casey), he tackled Donnie around the waist, resulting in a two-turtle tangle of limbs on the floor. Leo and April had watched the display, wearing the same tired sort of smiles and catching each other's eyes. The `thank you' Leo sent her was clearly readable. Casey, in the meantime, had set the woman down and turned to face the resident purple-banded genius. Unable to resist temptation, the vigilante followed after Michelangelo's example with an impressive thump.

 

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It had probably been well over 36 hours since he'd last slept, and Casey was feeling the deprivation all too clearly by the time he got to his apartment. The tense anxiety, the rage and frustration that had kept him running for the past 3 weeks, had dissolved the moment Don and April stepped out of the lab door. He hadn't known it was possible to be so tired. Casey could only imagine how tired the others must have been feeling right then, too. He collapsed onto his bed with an exhausted groan, tossing his phone onto the bedside table just in case the guys needed him for something, and closed his eyes, ready for a good long rest. They snapped open again within seconds.

 

For a moment, it had been so clear, as though it were happening all over again. Dry, rasping breaths suddenly coming to a stop, Raph's blood pooling on the ground, the smell of it permeating the air thoroughly, the numerous wounds inflicted on his torso. The vigilante swallowed against the bile in the back of his throat. He stared into the darkness of his bedroom, at the ceiling, wondering what else Richards might have found time to do to his best friend. Wondering how long it would be before Raphael was really okay again. For the next hour or so, the thoughts kept him awake, teasing him, berating him for not managing to find that lead sooner and saving the turtle that much pain.

 

It seemed he wouldn't be getting any peaceful nights for a while to come.

 

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There we are, Chapter 15, done! How was it? So, yeah, questions, comments, criticism, any noticed errors or OOC-ness, let me know. Just a button-click away.

 

Right, we're almost finished with the entirety of the story now! Only a couple of chapters left to go! Chapter 16 is on the way, as soon as I write it. Ta-ta until then.