Gonna break my own rule now. This is in response to Mutant Rebel's SS challenge for better romantic OCs. M.D. Owen named the story, by the way.
I'm rewriting this chapter.
"My psychiatrist says you aren't real," she said. Her eyes blinked a few times as if trying to keep him in focus.
Raph crossed his arms and decided to find this psychiatrist's car and slash his tires. Not real? He'd show him who was fucking real. "Well, how do you explain this then?" He reached out a few inches on the hospital bed and pinched her arm.
She looked at the small welt and her little nose wrinkled as she thought. Raph could see the wheels turning in her brain, thumbing past possibilities. "Maybe I imagined the pain. Ever think of that, Raphael? I really like your name. It's very pretty, like you." She giggled and covered her mouth with both hands as if she'd just said a dirty word.
He puffed up with pride for a second until he realized that he was sitting on a hospital bed with a girl committed to an asylum. "Yeah, I know you probably don't see lots of guys your own age in here, but that's a pretty sad statement for any girl to make."
And then it was quiet again. Well, it was never entirely quiet. Music played nonstop in her room, in an endless mishmash of opera and classical music that made his stomach twist with ignorant nausea. A lady on the radio sang like her lungs would explode. It was the kind of music rich people listened to and pretended they understood because they knew the mayor would be there, trying to understand it too.
He worked his hands into fists and released them and glanced along the walls, trying to find something to do besides sit next to her awkwardly. It was an interesting way to waste an hour on a rainy day when the police were out in full regalia because of a parade. Lousy police. They only did their jobs ten days out of the year and everybody considered them heroes. He and his brothers did their jobs every day of the year.
Pictures of abandoned houses covered the institutional green walls. He asked why on his second visit and she said, "They look out broken windows like me. That's a stupid question. Want to see my socks? They say I LOVE CHEESE."
But he still couldn't understand the china dolls. At least ten of them. They were all blindfolded with old ripped up socks.
"Now what's up with the blind dolls?" he asked. "Pretty creepy. And you don't look like a creepy Goth chick."
Her big deer eyes widened and she picked at her fairy wings. She always wore a Halloween costume. Today she looked like Glenda the Goodwitch, if she decided to do all her shopping at Goodwill with a pink fluffy skirt and ratty nylon wings that looked like they would blow away in a weak wind. The rainbow knee socks drew his eyes every few seconds and he hoped she didn't think he was a pervert, looking up her skirt.
"Why do you want to talk to me?" she asked. She touched his shell again and he batted her hand away. "People don't like talking to me."
"Maybe I don't like talking to you at all and just want to torment myself." He turned his head and looked at a fallen down farm house on the opposite wall, wondering if Leo could find him.
She swung her legs on her hospital bed and hummed along with a woman wailing out her misery in a foreign opera.
"Why do you listen to that shit?" he asked. The woman's voice was too perfect. It made him twitch and feel like running away. It made him ashamed of his ugliness.
"What's your favorite song?" Always with a docile little smile and a curious lilt, like he was the most fascinating creature on the planet. Clearly, she didn't talk to anyone else.
"I don't know. Don't like music. Well… I listen to some. But you wouldn't like it."
"Why not? All music is music if it's good. I don't think bad music is really music so if I don't like it, I'll just block it out. But I'll fall down, so you would have to catch me then."
He moved her hand off his plastron. Her fingers invaded his space without his notice and it grated on his last nerve. "Smells Like Teen Spirit. That's what I listened to on the way over here on my iPod."
She held out her thin fingers to him.
"What?" He knew what she wanted, but nobody listened to his iPod. April called it devil's music.
She turned down her little CD player, but didn't turn it off and then pulled his iPod out of his hand without his permission.
"Hey! Did I say you could…"
She stuffed the earbuds in her ears and fiddled for a second, instantly finding the song.
"…nobody touches my stuff without my permission and I'm thinking I won't come back again and you can sit here and rot!"
"Oh!" She pulled out the earbuds with a little smile of realization, like she had just remembered something delightful. She jumped off the bed and skipped across the room to her closet, shoving her clothes aside and pulled out the violin case. Oh, great. She was going to ask him to play the violin again.
But she pulled the thing out of the case and he wondered why he hadn't noticed the "Frodo lives" and My Little Pony stickers all over the case on his last visit. She pulled out her bow, tuned up it up in less than a second and put it to the strings and played.
She played "Smells Like Teen Spirit." It was certainly interesting. It gave him the creeps, but it was interesting. It sounded good.
"That was… interesting…" he mumbled as he rubbed the back of his head, searching for a better compliment.
She held the bow out to him again.
"How many times do I have to tell you? I don't want to!"
"Okay." She laid the violin back in the case. As soon as she snapped it shut, she turned around and said, "You're an angel."
Huh? "I'm not an angel. I'm a turtle. I said that the first time I was here. Got memory problems too?"
"No! You saved me. I was all lost and those big stinky guys were going to get me ice cream in that alley and you beat them all up. That was real nice of you. If you want, I'll beat people up for you sometime. I take classes at the YWCA for self-defense because boys try to touch me a lot and I just let them because I'm not that brave…"
He snarled and held back a demand for names and numbers.
"You must be an angel because nobody saves people." She spun around on the floor in her rainbow socks, watching the linoleum as she glided across like an ice skater.
Raph knew what she was talking about and that was only because he'd been there during the event she described. He'd met her while standing in a giant cage, blood and sweat and grime covered. While the money at amateur MMA fight was pretty good, the action wasn't. Just when he gave up the night as a lame waste of his time, then a daffy girl in wings walked up to the cage, knocked, and asked for directions to her house. A group of thugs decided to give her an escort home and he'd intervened, realizing she was too stupid to know that strange men with more piercings than teeth and ask to take her alone into alleys were probably up to no good.
She could have been raped and never known it.
That night he went home and complained loudly to all his brothers about ungrateful bitches who wouldn't properly thank him for saving their lives. Don asked if this was a regular problem or a sudden problem prompted by a recent event.
And so the search began. In secret, of course. His brothers would have teased him into the dust if they knew he was checking up on a girl following a save. Well not so much of a search as a background check. Mikey and Leo did it a few times when they were struck with a girl's eyes or cleavage. But Raph never allowed himself the luxury. But this girl seemed… It must be dangerous for her to even exist.
Raph had escorted her home since she seemed to stupid to find her way back on her own without getting gang raped and decided to lecture the nurse for letting her wander around town alone when she needed her address pinned to her shirt like a Kindergartner. That bitch. It was her fault. She must not watch any of them closely. Maybe they got hurt all the time on her shift.
And then he saw it on the front page of the foster care facility website. Shannon Darling was famous. She was a classical music prodigy. Seemed she had some kind of mental problem and her brain only functioned when music played. So they kept her stimulated only part of the time. She had concerts at big music halls and conducted orchestras with no preparation and wrote whole symphonies and played the harp, violin, viola, cello and piano and was a prodigy on all five instruments.
That was another thing. That bitch nurse. Keeping her penned up without music so she was nothing but a vegetable and then bringing her out like a show dog three nights a week. Tickets at her concerts sold for hundreds of dollars. Big newspapers published articles with her starry eyed face in glittery fairy like dresses on the cover.
The first visit he spent most of the time not-really-trying to avoid getting little girl kisses and protesting that he would kick her ass if she tried it again, while coming closer.
This was the third visit. He forgot to threaten the nurse every time because Shannon left him with so many more questions at the end of the visit.
"So next time you come, we should go out. I want you to take me to a concert," she said.
"Disturbed is in town next week. But I can't be seen in public, remember?"
"I want to see a classical concert," she said, pouting out her lips. Not at him. She wasn't trying to get anything. She just did the pouty lip thing when she was frustrated.
"I only go to concerts with pyrotechnics." H snatched the iPod out of her hands and shoved it back in his belt.
"I'll pick the concert then and I'll tell you when it is. I'll pick one at night so we can sneak in. I don't know why you don't want anyone to see you, Pretty Raph."
"I'm a fucking ninja! How are you going to tell me when it is?" He threw up his hands in exasperation and realized with absolute horror that he had just imitated a Leo gesture and crossed his arms instead.
She grabbed his cell phone off his belt and he sighed. Miss GrabbyHands. "Quit taking my stuff before…"
"I'll call you." She punched her phone number into his belt. "I'll have to call from the front desk because I lost my phone when I buried a Coke bottle last week as buried treasure when I was playing pirates with Emyrs. And my parents call on Sundays at 6pm, so don't call then and I have to go to practice at the concert hall all day on Tuesday. Wednesday they leave me asleep so don't call then. I'll just call you."
She put the phone back in his belt and he chewed on his tongue, hoping it wouldn't bleed.
The CD stopped. Silence.
Her eyes went dead and she stopped moving, falling back on the bed like a limp marionette.
This was the first time he'd seen her go blank like this. It was about time for a nurse's check anyway. He should leave. He watched awkwardly, wondering what to do with her. It seemed so wrong to leave her lying vacantly on the bed. So he awkwardly maneuvered her into a position more reminiscent of sleep. If he crossed her hands over her chest, she would really look dead. Stupid morbid mind.
It still looked… wrong.
His heart skipped a few beats. Totally vulnerable and helpless. If he were anybody else…
Hopefully, the nurse's were all gay. If they were male.
He shook his head and the ideas. She wasn't anybody to him. Let her parents worry about it.
He pushed up the window and let himself out and dropped into the bushes under her window, then pulled it shut from the outside. The parking lot was mostly empty, lit up by just a few street lights. A park with a few rusty swing sets lay on the other side of the road, all abandoned.
It couldn't hurt to wait and watch the nurse doing her rounds. Just to see what she did. Out of curiosity. He wasn't worried or anything. The nurse's must be okay or they wouldn't have jobs.
Shannon wasn't very big. Smaller than April. Shorter too. April was pretty tall for a girl. But this girl wasn't too old. Maybe eighteen. A little older than him. He couldn't remember by how much, but a few years. She wasn't twenty anyway. He remembered having a slightly hopeful feeling at that and then berating himself for it. He wasn't going there to score. Just to waste time with a slightly interesting person who didn't run away in terror at the sight of him. He needed to remind her more diligently that she couldn't tell anybody about him.
The door opened and a fat nurse stuck her head in and took a two second scan of the room. She turned off the light and then shut the door again.
That was it? That's what her parents paid for? What if he was a murderer or rapist! The window was still unlocked! He would just stay there all night and sleep in the chair then. He pushed the window back up.
What was he doing? He shut the window again, now red in the face and took off running home, hoping to find a fight on the way.
He wouldn't go back. He wouldn't answer when she called.
What kind of concert would she pick?