Bold is chapter titles, Italics are thoughts, and the rest as they say is history. Please read and review, its essential to my confidence as this is my first fan fic.
In this Instant
She stood beneath the shower, leaning negligently against the wall. How long she had been there like that she couldn't tell you. But one thing was certain, she wasn't happy.
You could tell without looking at her body language or the dark, almost murderous, expression. Hell you could tell just by standing at the end of the dingy hallway and listening to the music that churned through the heavy air.
"The window has closed. I'm sorry Blake, there's no going back"
She closed her eyes as his words floated about on the steam. She made the scolding water hotter, trying to distract herself from the memories that were swimming in her head.
"I'd rather be stuck in the 20th century with memories of you then go forever without your existence at all!"
"Well you got your wish you stupid girl. Now there is no going back. You are stuck here…alone. *sigh* "
Slowly she allowed her body to slip down the wall towards the floor of the shower. And kneeling beneath the onslaught of burning water she cried every damn tear she had been collecting the past few years.
The greenish light from his computer screen flooded his face. Numbers and letters scrolling past as he continued to tap at the keyboard. Running the equations again and again.
"How could I have been so damn wrong?"
The dark rings under his eyes were matched only by his tense posture. His entire body ached from days spent before the consoles. No sleep, little food and absolutely no natural light had taken its toll both physically and mentally.
"It should…I could of…DAMN IT!"
The splintering crash of a thrown keyboard brought Celia into the room, along with a blinding slash of sunlight.
"Fuck Celia!"
"Sorry, but I heard a crash. What the hell happened?"
"Nothing"
Celia followed his gaze to the mangled keyboard.
"Oh, nothing. Look you either need to get some sleep or eat something but either way you need to leave this room before you start throwing the monitors around."
"I can't. I need…it's my fault Celia. I have to find another window."
"*sigh* It's not your fault, they told us that we had a limited window. We just gotta move on is all."
"That's easy for you to say. You have nothing to go back to. Me, I'm never gonna see my little girl again if I can't find another window. I have to get back, I promised her."
"Daddy if you go you got to come back, you promise you'll come back? I won't say good bye if you don't promise!"
"I'm coming baby. Daddy's coming."
Blake tried to focus on the map before her. But the little lines kept moving making it damn near impossible to work anything out. Not that it mattered any more. She was stuck in the 20th century, in a dingy apartment in lower Manhattan, with no way of ever getting home. So what was the point in doing what they had come all this way to do.
"You find it yet?"
"No"
It had been 2 weeks since the window had closed. Celia was little changed by the fact. She had spent years alone and just didn't care if she never went back. Ryan had barely left his beloved computers. Leaving the apartment just once to get a new keyboard. Blake spent her days sleeping and her nights looking for a fight and when she couldn't leave she attempted to burst her ear drums.
"Jesus Blake."
"Okay even if we do, by some miracle, find them, what then? Do we tell them that we are time travelers that have come back to save them from a sociopath that is determined to turn them into humans…or worse? Or do we just tail them in the hopes that eventually Jacob will show his hideous face so that we can pound his ugly mug into tiny little bits? And if all that happens and we save the future and the turtles and all that bullshit are we just meant to continue living in the 20th century and forget everything we left behind?"
Celia shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Ryan just sunk a little bit further into his depression and glanced eagerly and hopelessly towards the closed door to the computers. It had been two weeks and no one had wanted to ask these questions.
"You volunteered for this Blake. You came as willingly as the rest of us." She held up her hand stemming the tide of abuse Blake looked ready to let spill. "You knew the risks. And yes we have been here longer then expected and yes we have yet to locate either the turtles or Jacob. But you know that we have a job to do. Now we can sit in front of computers and spend the rest of forever trying to do the impossible or get into fights in the meager hope that we'll find someone who can actually hurt us or we can do what we came back here to do. I don't know about you two but I take my job very seriously and right now at this moment in my life Jacob is my job. And I will spend the rest of my life hunting him if I have too and I will live out the rest of my days in old New York if I must. We all knew the risks of jumping."
A hellish silence descended on the small group. They knew she was right but it all felt so wrong. Each one caught up in their memories of that last good bye…