~*.*~
Here is where you'll always find me,
always walking up and down.
But I left my soul behind me
in an old cathedral town.
The joy you find here, you borrow,
You cannot keep it long, it seems.
But gigolo and gigolette
still sing a song and dance along
the boulevard of broken dreams.
-"Boulevard of Broken Dreams," Nat King Cole
~*.*~
It's just another one of those nights. Sleep's not coming any time soon, and thoughts racing round and round my head just won't stop. I kinda regretted not sneaking out the front door when I'd passed it, but how was I supposed to know that in less than five minutes the thought of clean sheets and sweet dreams would make me itch worse than that batch of poison oak. It's not like I did anything. Really. Just took one little innocent peak into the room and walked away. I mean, he told us everything was fine and he was just going to go make a few notes and hit the sack, so looking in his room on my way past was just a normal reflex. I didn't even say anything.
But maybe…
Maybe I should've. Maybe.
Gah, why was I even thinking about it? I just leaned on the doorframe for like half a minute and watched him lean into his hand like he always does when he's thinking really hard. It's not like it was that big a deal. I just watched his posture change as he gave into fatigue and continued on my merry little way. Didn't even hang around long enough for him to know I was there.
But maybe…
Maybe I should've. Maybe.
'Cause maybe I was trying just a little too hard to convince myself that he was shaking from fatigue and those dark spots eating away at the paper in his hand were shadows...or bugs...or something. And I mean, I could see a ton of books laying around. He just hadn't gotten around to organizing them the way he wanted, I was sure. I mean, I totally understood being so wore out that sleeping in a mess was a better alternative than cleaning it up. I kinda wished his lamp hadn't been on. His lamp is like never on, not even when it got to the point that the notebook was less than an inch in front of his face. Just wasn't something he did unless…
I stopped short and vaguely wondered if I would turn around and see a groove in the floor I'd been pacing.
...unless something or someone was broken beyond repair.
And very suddenly, I couldn't get down the hall and into the adjacent room fast enough.
In the wake of the newfound sense of panic, I completely forsook the training that disguised my steps. He had to have heard me coming, 'cause he was leaning on the doorway like I had been not ten minutes earlier. Regarding me in a way that was all kinds of uncomfortable, he let his shoulders sag in a sigh and motioned me in. I'd only just managed to get my breathing below hyperventilation when he curled up at the end of his bed and kept on studying me.
I looked to my left and traced the cracks in the wall, pursing my lips and blowing out two puffs of air.
"What gave it away?"
Two more puffs. The roar in my ears died down a little as my pulse evened out. I was going to have to let him know that the whole mind-reading trick was just plain creepy. "Lamplight." ...someday. Right now, I was just glad to have a place to start.
"Ah."
He slipped off his mask and let it hang around his neck, calling attention to the dark bags gathered under his eyes. Pale and trembling and way too thin for my liking, he just sat and stared through me so long that I thought maybe he'd gone to sleep with his eyes open. I didn't like that look. It was just...haunted. Like he'd seen way too much and his brain had short-circuited. I wanted to turn on my heel and run far, far away from that listless gaze.
Maybe...
Maybe I should've.
'Cause it was right then he chose to speak, and I had a feeling that what I was about to hear was going to keep me up for a long, long while.
"I was there for days. Weeks, maybe. I lost count after the first week because my pencil broke." He froze, a mirthless choke of laughter on his mouth. It started out slow, laboriously building until every muscle in my body told me to run. It was a low, moaning keen, pulsating just enough to pass for a bitter laughter. "My pencil broke! How stupid is that?"
He giggled and then cut off and assumed the same lifeless stare.
Oh-kay. Watching someone devolve into deep-rooted psychosis is now off the bucket list.
He was silent for five straight minutes, and I didn't think this was one of those times where I was allowed to speak. And if it was, I didn't want to. I could tell he needed to talk, and I was afraid that if I opened my mouth too soon, none of us would ever get anything out of him. So I just got comfortable on the thick rug in the corner and let him know that he had my undivided attention for as long as he needed it.
"I'm not a stranger to wounds. I've bandaged my share of them and outgrew any squeamishness by the time I was eight. So when they took me to the camp, the first thing I had to pass through was the infirmary." He swallowed. "They...they told me it would be bad, and he -" I watched his fists curl up "- told me not to be stupid and think I could help."
He shut his eyes as he spoke, willing himself back to that nightmare to make sure all of it was purged from his system.
There were a lot of cots off to the right, most of them unoccupied but all of them stained red and yellow and brown. Five, maybe six people stretched out on the remaining ones. They were covered in some kind of gauze, and that was only on tight enough to stop the bleeding for the night. I think he knew I was itching to re-dress them properly, but he just tugged me along and said not to worry about them.
'It won't matter by morning.'
The whole place stank of death and decay, and I lost count of the number of shovels and makeshift body bags after the first few feet of them. The infirmary was a sheltered hovel a quarter mile behind the main structure of the base, and the open ground on which we trod was moist with rain. Several of the grave diggers looked up from their work as we past, looking at us...looking at me with some mix of awe and apprehension.
'Quit staring!' He snapped. 'It's not like you've never seen one of us!'
Shocked, they turned their heads back to the bloated corpses that needed to get in the ground before the morning. They were too young to have seen so much death, and in some cases, to even pick up the shovel. A row of what I assumed were barracks lined the back wall, and as we approached them, I could see that a load of brush had been pulled away from the door to allow us passage. Skirting past a guard that looked no older than twelve, he ran his hand along the inner wall until he came to a closed door, three down from the entrance.
'Rebel Leader won't be back 'til dawn. You're bunking here.' He roughly shoved me into a room with half a straw mattress and a bowl of water and stormed off.
I rubbed my hand absently over the bruise that was forming and paced around my quarters for the better part of an hour. I had left the door cracked so I could listen to the sounds of life around me. The only life around me. I shivered as I thought of the eerie quiet of the city, silence punctuated too infrequently by the soft whirr of machines. The base was even less hospitable than whatever shelter the steel towers offered, and my chances of surviving the next few days looked just as bleak with my new 'allies.'
At least he hadn't ordered me offed outright.
Although, maybe he wants to do it himself.
Well, wasn't that a comforting thought.
Dropping onto the flatten mattress, I pulled the bowl of what I hoped was drinkable water to my mouth and drank.
'Ungh,' I coughed. Grit and pieces of straw left a fuzzy sensation in my mouth, but the water seemed clean enough, so I kept swallowing.
I peered out the door as the sounds of living softened. Doors were shut gently, good-byes were whispered softly, and snores began to drift into the air. I hadn't been told to stay put, and I didn't intend to anyway. The hallway grew darker and darker as night settled on the land, and I crept out, merging with the shadows.
The foliage hiding the doorway from prying eyes also served as a decent alarm, and I wasn't sure I could twist my way past all the branches without telling him that I was going for a stroll. Moonlight taunted me from afar, illuminating the very path I wished to take. I frowned and stepped back.
I shouldn't have been able to see the moon through the downed tree, at least not if the bottom part was as dense as the top, which meant…
The cold mud stuck to my chest and neck as I slid nimbly under the dead leaves but I made it out of the barracks with no one the wiser. Faint starlight kept my desired path too light for my liking, and I muttered angrily when I felt the sharp prick of burrs in the undergrowth clinging to my legs. I settled into a light jog (and hoped there was only one thorny bush) and let my feet take me where they would.
The slipshod construction of the small infirmary meant that it creaked and croaked if the wind blew past, never mind when anything of substantial weight set foot on the ground boards. So as I slipped behind the door, I found several curiously terrified pairs of eyes looking me up and down. I took quick stock of the room, finding no medical supplies in plain view and several more empty cots than I remembered seeing on my way in.
'The diggers came for them if that's what you're wondering.'
Startled, I spun on my heel to face the lone guard, a young woman of Asian descent and too much bitterness in her eyes. Her abdomen was large in late pregnancy, and long dark hair cascaded over her shoulders as she regarded me. She was using a stack of ruined books as a chair and playing with a bright purple strand. She didn't seem to want to stop my ministrations, so I turned to the closest cot.
The girl was trembling in the throes of a fever. She was pale. Blue discolorations on her skin brought a simmering rage to the surface, one I didn't know I possessed. She didn't seem to notice I was near, but she flinched away from my cool touch.
I swallowed thickly. 'What happened?'
'She was found yesterday by a scout. Her parents were taken to one of the camps, and when she tried to follow…' She knelt next to the cot and pull the sheet down to the girl's waist, and I only just had enough to turn my head to retch. Two long scratches serrated the skin along her chest cavity, exposing muscle and bone. Yellow-green pus was crusted onto the edges of the gashes. The immature tissues shuddered as she tried to breathe against the sudden chill. 'The children are not shown mercy.'
Quickly scanning the woman's impassive face, I demanded, 'Do you have anything? Iodine, peroxide, a sewing kit?'
My despair grew with each shake of her head. I growled and launched myself at an unused chamber pot. I had seen a ground well on my way out. I cared not for the amount of noise I made as I gathered water and wood and tossed both into the fire pit at the center of the room. Patting my belt for the loose rolls of gauze I kept on my person for quick patch jobs, I threw them into the water once it came to a boil.
She said little as I waited, beyond asking me my name. 'Your brother said you wouldn't listen.'
'I have to do something. It's...it's not right to consign someone to death and be done with it.'
'No,' she sighed. 'But what else can we do?'
The rhetorical question struck me hard and I had to bite down on my palm to keep from lashing out. I understood the cruelty forced upon these people, and I understood the choices they faced every day the woke to find themselves in this hell. But I just couldn't make myself see how far they had abandoned hope.
'You can fight.'
She snorted. 'Look where that's got us.'
I tenderly removed the cloth and let it cool some before I touched the girl. I used the first strip to wipe away what I could see of the infection, the second to clean the rest of the wound somewhat, and the third to re-dress it. She moaned in agony every time I grazed her skin. Using the sullied water to douse the fire, I cracked the door to let some of the smoke out and some of the fresher night air in.
I kept a close eye on the child through the rest of the night, speaking occasionally to the woman, who finally told me her name was Shuka. At some point during my vigil, the exhaustion sunk into my bones, and I fell into a light sleep.
An adamant stomp at the entrance shook me awake, and I found myself staring into hard cobalt eyes. The glare leveled at me caused me to shift back a few steps. He glanced at Shuka, who shrugged and nodded to the child. The new bindings on her wounds were clearly visible. He sighed, then brushed past me and lifted the thin frame up.
When I started to protest, he roughly dropped her into my arms, and I got my first good look at her in the sunlight. Her lips and skin were a light grey, and her pupils were dilated more than normal. She wasn't breathing, and she likely hadn't been for hours. I flinched as he drug the shovel along the ground and led me out to a fresh plot.
'I told you so.'
When he finished his story, he looked more tired than I'd ever seen him. Slowly, he tilted his midline until he just fell over on his mattress, and I was pretty sure that though he shut his eyes, he wasn't going to be sleeping any time soon. I know I sure wasn't. I backed out of the room slowly, not wanting to hear or even think of anything else he might say but not quite wanting to be alone. I stumbled back to my room and gave one last look over my shoulder. His lamp was still on.
A/N: Okay, so I had a few issues with the SAINW episode, all of them tied back to the fact that one episode was not enough to cover all the possible things that probably happened to poor Donnie. I don't think that the events in the episode ran their course in only one night. Think about it: Mikey was with the SuperTurtles for about two days, Raph was part of a THREE-day planet race, and Leo easily spent at least two nights with Usagi and Gen before going to the Battle Nexus. So, I'm under the persuasion that Donnie was in that dimension for at least three days, maybe longer. Also, it would have taken a while for them to get to the camp, meet everyone, call up Raph and Leo, meet Raph and Leo, form a plan, gather the troops, and head out.
Anyway, I know everyone's got their own story about how Don reacted once everything was back to normal. Mine is that he told everyone the basics (what we saw in the episode) but maybe not EVERYTHING that he saw, and it starts wearing on his sanity.
This is a one-shot for now, but I wanted to ask you guys if maybe I should have a few more 'story times with Don' with some of the others? What do you think? In this one, he is talking to Mikey about SAINW Mikey. Maybe he shares a story with Raph about SAINW Raph or something like that?
Btw, is the format easy enough to follow? And what do you guys think of Shuka (aka my first overt attempt at a minor OC)?
As always, please feel free to point out any grammar/spelling mistakes. I proofread as best I can, but I am merely human.
Please lemme hear your thoughts!