Author's Notes: My first TMNT fanfic, so please be nice! Just a little one-shot I've been working on for a while with some slight Don/April shipping. I wasn't sure whether to continue or not so I'll see how it goes.... Not a happy ending so if that's not your type of fic, be warned! T rating for strong language.
Also, Happy New Year everyone!!
Disclaimer: I do not own the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or any related characters.
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Goodbye April by sai ninja.
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April slowly opened her eyes, trying to make sense of her surroundings, but instead winced at the stabbing pain in her leg. She didn't know how long she'd been lying on the cold concrete floor, but the strong smell of the nearby gutter quickly reminded her of the situation she was in. She had been wrong to challenge Bishop like that, she understood it now. Her fractured leg was proof enough that he did not appreciate her sense of humour, but then again - what choice did she have?
It was either lying or giving up the turtles, which was simply out of the question.
She suddenly thought she heard the sound of shouting and gunshots in the distance, put dismissed it as part of her feverish hallucinations. She'd had quite a few of those already and everytime she thought the heavy footsteps outside her door were her friends, she was always painfully disappointed.
She simply had to admit it to herself - her tracking device had failed. The turtles would never find her and she was sure to bleed to death soon. Besides, before his goons had brutally thrown her back in her cell, Bishop had made it perfectly clear ; she would never see the outside world again. She would never go home again. She would never see the guys, Casey nor Master Splinter.
Not even Donny.
The thought of never seeing him again gripped at her chest and pained her more than her leg.
She closed her eyes once more, breathing hard, and failed to notice the two figures approaching her cell. She had been strong throughout the past weeks Bishop had kept her like this, cloistered in his secret lab. She didn't know how many days it had been in total, but it felt like a lifetime. She had gritted her teeth and kept her head up through most of it, but thinking of Donny again shattered the last of her strength.
"April!"
Someone was calling out to her, she could hear them. Another hallucination, she figured. She'd already dreamt of her friends being by her side, rescuing her, taking her away from this hell. Everytime she had awoken disappointed and everytime a small piece of her had died along with the vision.
"Jesus, April!"
A man's voice again. It was strange - he sounded so real and so familiar.
"We're here babe, don't worry, we'll get ya outta here! Donny, do something!"
Donny? Was that what he had said? It couldn't be -
"I'm trying Casey! Help me open this door!"
His voice, she knew it. It was Donny, but she was too weak to think – too weak to understand whether this time it was real or another vision. All she wanted was to lay back her head on the floor, close her eyes and drift off - escape reality and the biting pain in her leg. She could feel the cold air drifting over her skin and causing her to shiver, but she clenched her teeth, swallowing her cry and almost biting her tongue in the process. Warm blood trickled down her calf, tickling her skin, but April was too weak to reach out and brush it away. All she could do was simply lie on her side, shivering against the cold floor and willing herself to sleep. At least she was never alone in her dreams.
She didn't want to think about her broken leg, she didn't want to think about the way the jagged white bone was jutting out of her ripped flesh, nor how the blood leaked from her wound and gradually formed a puddle around her thighs. She was going to sleep now and hopefully it'd be all over soon.
Hearing a crash above her, she willed herself to stay awake. Something was happening – she was sure of it now, but she didn't know what. Was Bishop back, taking advantage of her delirious fever to interrogate her once more? She managed to open her eyes, hoping to God that it wasn't his guards coming in to fetch her.
Her effort was rewarded by the sudden appearance of olive-green skin by her side.
"D - Don."
"It's okay, April, I'm here," she heard a soothing voice above her and then suddenly felt his hand on her cheek. "We're getting you out of here. Casey, come here, I'm going to need your help!"
The reassurance in his voice and the touch of his hand brought tears of joy to her eyes. She couldn't believe it, her plan had worked, the guys were here – they had found her.
Donny was finally here.
The cold hand moved away from her face and she felt it reach for her leg.
"Urgh!" she gasped, unable to stop herself from crying out. The throbbing pain was more than she could bare and she suddenly felt the darkness creeping up on her again.
"April!" a distant voice called out. "April, come on, stay with me – April!"
Closing her eyes, she silently prayed that her vision wouldn't disappoint her again.
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The stabbing ache returned, but this time it seemed to have dulled slightly. April opened her eyes groggily and wondered what her happened to her and whether she had been dreaming again about Donatello. However, the tight grip around her wrists told her something had changed. She was floating, moving along a dark tunnel, although something smooth, but hard poked her in the ribs. It took her a while to figure out that she was being carried on someone's shoulders and the uncomfortable hard surface was actually a shell.
The realisation hit her like a brick wall, but she was too weak to talk and smiled instead.
Home.
She was finally going home.
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As soon as April awoke again, she was surprised to find herself lying on a hospital bed. It was dark all around and she was seemingly alone. Her room was perfectly silent except for the faint noise of the machinery by her side. Her fractured leg was lifted in a sling and covered by a cast from ankle to mid-thigh. She wondered how long she'd been asleep and why everything was still so dark and quiet.
Hadn't she been rescued? Where was everyone? She tried to make sense of it all, but she felt incredibly drowsy and figured she'd been given an awful lot of drugs.
She tried lifting her hand to brush random strands of hair out of her face, but felt too weak and then noticed the needles poking out of her hand and connecting to various drips around her. It seemed one of the intraveinous drips was probably supplying her with morphine as she no longer felt any pain at all. Careful to use her other hand, she used all her strength to lift it and rub her eyes.
"You're awake."
April flinched in fear and suddenly noticed the dark figure standing in the shadows by the open window. She didn't dare say anything until she saw a green two-toed foot step out of the shadows.
"April," whispered a familiar voice.
Moving into the faint blue dome of light around her bed, her eyes opened wide as she recognised the purple-clad turtle before her.
"D – Don?" Her voice was raw and she coughed as soon as she spoke. He quickly poured her a glass of water and brought it to her lips, helping her drink in small sips.
"Take it easy," he told her, putting the glass back down. "It's okay, I'm here."
She tried to reach her hand out to him, but felt too weak to lift it so far.
"Don? Is it really you?" She looked up at his face and her face broke into a smile. "I'm so glad to see you."
He smiled in return and hugged her gently, placing a hand on hers. "Me too, April. I'm glad you're finally awake."
She breathed in his scent as he hugged her, suddenly feeling safer than she'd ever been in the arms of her best friend.
"How are you feeling?" he asked breaking away.
"Tired, but good. Am I – am I at the city hospital?"
He nodded. "We brought you here after we rescued you. Your leg had a compound fracture and needed to be treated immediately. My surgical knowledge is too limited to repair something so severe, so Casey brought you here. He told us they'd taken you straight to surgery and managed to realign the femur and tibia bones. He said they'd used metal pins to hold everything in place and with proper rest and re-education you should make a full recovery in no time."
She listened to him intently, noting his voice sounded unusually sad. She was grateful to hear they'd taken her to the hospital and that her leg wouldn't be permanently crippled. However, she also noticed that Donny was rambling slightly, almost as if he was nervous, but quickly dismissed the thought and smiled at him.
"I'm okay Don, really," she reassured him, gripping her hand with his. She knew how much he constantly worried about her and felt a warm twinge inside her as his eyes looked at her with concern. "I'm so glad you're here – I'm so glad you found me."
He smiled again, his brown eyes still glancing anxiously at her. "Do you want to tell me what happened?"
She fell mute, trying to decide whether it was worth making him worry all over again and also giving herself time to collect her thoughts properly, deciding where to start. Finally, she laid her head back on her pillows and glanced up at the ceiling instead.
"It's my fault," she began hesitantly and as he opened his mouth to protest, she shook her head. "No use denying it Donny, I should have stayed at the Lair with you guys."
He remained silent and she turned her head to face him, her lips curving sadly at the memory. "I shouldn't have gone back to the store like that, but it's the only thing I've got left really – it's the only thing that kept me busy in my life since I broke up with Casey -"
He squeezed her hand lightly. "It's okay, April, I understand."
"I'm just such an idiot," she continued softly. "I knew I'd be an easy target for Bishop, but I never really thought he'd come after me like that. He only ever seemed interested in you and your brothers and since we hadn't heard anything in a while, I thought maybe it was safe."
She closed her eyes briefly, her breath suddenly becoming unsteady. "I was wrong."
"It wasn't only your fault you know, we should have been more prepared," Don offered, caressing the back of her hand. "Leo's still blaming himself for all of it."
"Don't," she told him shortly. "Don't blame yourselves for this. It wasn't your fault, it was mine. Bishop might have kidnapped me to get to you guys, Donny – but he also found out about my past. He found out that I'd once been Stockman's assistant."
He flinched at her words and his dark eyes gleamed in the darkness.
"The last thing I remember was sipping my tea in the kitchen and then waking up in that cage," her voice started becoming hoarse and Donatello quickly filled up the empty glass on her bedside table with water again and helped her take a sip.
"Thanks," she told him, keeping the glass in her hand.
"They questioned me for about a week. I didn't tell them anything and they didn't seem too pissed off about it. Then they told me they needed my help and that if I did what they asked, they'd release me," she continued, pausing to drink every so often. "I didn't really believe that, but thought maybe if I helped them, I could buy myself some time and figure out a way for you guys to find me."
"What did they ask you to do?" Donatello asked, his eyes narrowing slightly, his free hand gripping the metal bars at the side of her bed.
"They wanted help taking apart alien machinery, things that they'd collected from Stockman's lab. Nothing too complicated really, but I was so helpful to them that they stopped harassing me about you and gave me more work instead. It was like a silent agreement – as long as I kept doing good work, they would leave me alone and it suited me fine. I guess my work took precendence over finding you guys, although I never really knew why Stockman's collection was so important."
"What happened next?"
She passed him back the empty glass and smiled. "I started working on a little side project – a small transmitting device, which I programmed to transmit my coordinates to your Shell Cells. I'm guessing that's how you guys found me."
Don smiled in return. "Yeah, took me a week to understand why the connections had suddenly become so scrambled. You did well, April."
She blushed slightly at his compliment and smiled as she realised her plan hadn't failed after all. She hadn't been wrong and the realisation was enough to release part of the tension that had lingered inside her chest since her capture.
"It took me more than a week to actually put the darn thing together and make sure the guards didn't find out about it. But they did and then things got worse," she informed him, pointing to her leg. "Apparently I broke my side of the agreement, so they broke theirs – and well in this case, my leg."
She noticed the knuckles of his fist, still gripping the metal bar, turn a shade paler at her words. "That's when they began questioning me about you again, wanting to know everything I knew, where you lived, where you came from, how we met – everything."
She tried to smile, not wanting to alarm her friend more than necessary, but the vivid memories of Bishop questioning her made her cringe instead. "They used different methods, they tried threatening me and my family, they prevented me from sleeping for days and then they finally resorted to physical torture."
She refused to look him in the eye as she spoke. There were just certain things she couldn't tell him about yet; it was too painful to remember.
"I refused to give them anything. It was difficult though and in the end, I started making up all sorts of crazy stories about you. I once told them you were descendants of a native tribe from Vanuatu and dressing up in sea turtle shells and painting your skin green was a local custom to protect yourselves from the cold."
Don shook his head at her words. "Oh April, you didn't."
"Yeah, I even told them I was actually an amateur anthropologist studying such a strange tribe in New York City," she said with a hint of pride. "It turned out the guards had a severe lack of humour and decided to teach me a lesson."
She fell silent and Don looked back at her gravely.
"They pushed me down some stairs. They roughed me up. They broke my leg," she told him bluntly. "I didn't really care what they did to me Don. I thought my device had worked and that you'd find me sooner or later."
His dark eyes went wide for a moment, before he finally shook his head again. "You shouldn't have protected us like this, Leo was right; you shouldn't be putting your life on the line like this for us. It isn't right!"
A sudden chill passed over her. "What do you mean 'Leo was right'?"
"Nothing, it doesn't matter," he said quickly.
"No, I want to know!" she exclaimed loudly. "I want to know what he thinks I should have done instead to protect my family. It's my own damn fault that I was caught in the first place. Master Splinter's been teaching me ninjitsu for over a year, I should have better defended myself after all. I'm the one who put you all in danger and I would have died before giving you guys away!"
"But you shouldn't have to!" he shouted in return and April couldn't help but flinch, briefly taken aback by his sudden outburst. "I mean look what they did to you April."
His voice cracked and a wave of guilt overtook her as she looked at herself as if for the first time. She didn't only have a fractured leg. Her skin was covered in cuts and bruises all over and she realised blood had managed to seep through several of her bandages.
"Don, I'll be fine," she told him weakly, grasping the blanket thrown over her free leg in her free hand and twisting it around her fingers. She couldn't seem to look him in the eye anymore, the guilt suddenly becoming unbearable. They must have been so scared for her – so scared to lose her and it was all her damn fault. "I'm here now, aren't I? This isn't anything I wasn't prepared to put myself through when I became your friends."
"But what if it'd been worse," he told her, frowning hard. "What if we'd found you too late and I'd opened your cage only to find you dead. Is that something you're willing to risk for us? Is that really how you want to spend the rest of your life? Knowing that at any moment some maniac could snatch you up like Bishop did and possibly kill you, just because you happen to know us!"
His voice became frantic and April stopped fidgeting with the blanket, glancing back up at him without saying anything. Her eyes met pale skin and sunken eyes, his face betraying exhaustion and fear.
"I'm not willing to risk that April," he finally spoke up. "I'll never forgive myself for what those scumbags did to you back there, but I'll never be able to live with myself if you were killed because of us. You mean too much to us, April – you mean too much to me."
April's eyes went wide at his words, ignoring the sudden bad feeling clenching her gut.
"Donny, I'm really sorry," she whispered, taking his hand again. "I promise I'll be more careful from now on – I'll do everything you guys tell me to. I won't put myself in danger anymore, I swear."
His eyes flicked back and forth, scanning her face and she noticed he had begun to gnaw on his lower lip, which was never a good sign. There was something else and April knew it, but she dreaded hearing what he had to say.
"We can't let you risk that," he told her softly, removing his hand. "After we brought you to the hospital, we went back to the Lair waiting to hear news from Casey. Master Splinter and Leo – well, they decided things had gone too far and had become too dangerous for you now."
April felt her heart suddenly leap to her throat and averted her eyes, not wanting to hear anymore of what her friend had to say.
"What with the Foot and the Shredder back, waiting to take us out any chance they get and Bishop now on our case, hoping to study and dissect us – it's just too dangerous for us now and certainly for you and Casey."
April whipped her head around. "Donny, wait you -"
But he cut her off by pressing his hand to her mouth.
"Please don't speak or I'll never be able to say what I have to."
She stared at him, feeling something in her blood run very, very cold.
"We've moved the Lair," she heard him say. "We're moving away from the main city for a while. We've found a secure place, which should be safe enough until things die down a little. We've moved most of our things away and we're moving the rest of it tonight. After that, you probably won't see us... for a while."
When he finally moved his hand away from her mouth, she felt as if the air had been sucked out of her lungs. They were moving away, leaving her alone and even though Don wasn't saying it, April knew that they had no intention of ever coming back.
All of a sudden, she missed lying alone in her cell again, simply dreaming of having her best friend by her side.
At that moment, anything was better than this.
"You're – you're leaving?" she asked and closed her eyes, fighting down the urge to cry.
"We're sorry," he said, his voice barely above a whisper. "The others asked me to tell you goodbye. They were here earlier, but you weren't awake yet."
His words stung her even more and she averted her eyes, feeling betrayed all of a sudden by her adoptive family and also by her own body – not strong enough to wake up in time.
"I don't – I can't believe it," she whispered to him, her eyes filling up with tears. "I know I messed up and I know you're scared for me, but Donny, please! We're family – we're stronger together. We should at least discuss this - please! Oh God, please don't leave me."
He leaned forward and kissed her on the head. "I'm so sorry April," he whispered in her ear, "but it's for the best. You can lead a normal life now, you and Casey deserve it."
He turned to face her and she kept her eyes locked with his as tears rolled down her cheeks. She struggled to lift her hand up to his cheek, pulling him softly closer as she did.
"That's not what I want. Donny, I -"
But suddenly they heard footsteps down the corridor, quickly reaching her room and the door abruptly opened wide. The lights switched on revealing a nurse, who promptly walked in.
"Miss O'Neil, you're awake!" she exclaimed, stepping up to her bed. April stared at her, her eyes adjusting to the sudden light, before she turned her head round to where Donatello had stood seconds before. He had vanished. Her hand previously cupping his cheek was still held up in the air and suddenly felt cold.
"How are you feeling, dear?" the nurse asked her, checking her drip for any problems.
"I'm –I feel fine," April lied, quickly wiping away the tears in her eyes and looking around for any sign of her friend.
"That's good to hear. The morphine was working then," the nurse told her, picking up a bottle and syringe from the bedside cabinet.
" What's that?" April asked, hoping the nurse would hurry and leave so she could talk to Donny again before it was too late.
"More morphine for the night, dear," the nurse explained, injecting the liquid into the drip. "It should help you get some more sleep before the doctor makes his rounds in the morning."
April tried to object, she needed to keep a clear head if she was going to convince the turtles not to leave, however, as she opened her mouth to speak she felt the morphine already taking effect and her head beginning to feel heavy.
"Sleep well, dear," the nurse told April, patting her pillows before leaving the room and switching off the lights.
She remained silent for a moment.
"Don?" she whispered, unable to keep her head from lying back down on the pillows. "Don, you... you still there?"
Her words began to slur and she tried to scan the dark room with her eyes, but felt her eyelids close heavily.
"I'm still here, April." His voice sounded even more tired and miserable than before.
Hearing his voice, she smiled with relief, reaching out slowly for him in the dark with her fingers.
"Don, I need you," she mumbled sleepily, drifting away as she felt his hand curl around hers. "Please Don, don't leave me, I – I -"
But her body betrayed her once more and she felt the darkness take over again. She let it invade her mind before she could finish, before she could tell him everything she wanted to before he left.
Everything she had always wanted to say, but had never had the courage to.
She was fast asleep before his hand finally slipped away from hers. She never heard him hover above her for a moment, watching her sleep, before turning away towards the window.
She never heard his final words to her.
"Goodbye, April."
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Thanks for reading! Reviews are appreciated :-)