A/N: Thank you for the feedback from the first chapter! I've made my decision on how much angst the story will include. Suffice to say that I picked a middle ground between options A and B. I hope you'll like what I have in mind!
Also, I'm currently looking for a beta reader, so if any of you are good at picking out plot holes, grammar issues, or places where the story just drags in general, please send me a PM!
Chapter 2
The first thing he knew was the ache in his head, the dry fuzziness that felt like three tons of cotton balls had been shoved into his skull.
Donnie opened his eyes a slit only to be met with a searing light.
"Keep your eyes open, hon, come on," a mellow voice hummed. It was a female voice, not familiar at all.
'Who... where...' he wondered, trying not to wince when the light managed to flicker through his squinted eyes once more.
"There we go, try to keep 'em open. It might take a bit, but your eyes should adjust," the voice repeated, and he tried to follow the orders, but his eyes kept clamping shut. After what seemed like an eternity, his eyes did adjust, but everything around him was blurry. Try as he might, he couldn't keep himself from going cross eyed.
"There we go! Everything will be just fine, I've got the doctor right here with me." Everything seemed to focus again in an instant, even though he still couldn't keep both eyes trained on the same thing at once, but it was enough. Enough to jump-start every fiber in his body with a surge of adrenaline he hadn't known since the first day he'd faced the Foot.
There was a nurse in front of him, or what he assumed to be a nurse, with a 'doctor' just behind her. Both were wearing lab coats, and the scent of antiseptic around him was overpowering. Donnie backpedaled even while laying down, nearly falling out of the hospital bed in his mad scramble to just get away. He pushed his shell up against the wall in an effort to get the best view of the room as well as any escape routes. The only one was the doorway behind both of his captors.
"Touch me and you won't get your hand back," he snarled, channeling Raph as well as he could. He blinked hard again, trying to get his eyes to stop sliding lazily downwards.
"We aren't going to hurt you, just calm down," the nurse said, moving slowly around the bed to get closer to him. "You're still disoriented from the surgery, just take it down a few notches, okay?"
Donnie didn't let his guard down, although his heart rate spiked at the word 'surgery'. "Aren't trying to hurt me? You kidnapped me! What the shell did you do to me?!"
The nurse looked, wide eyed, over at the doctor, who also looked fairly stunned. "He still remembers. How can he still remember?!" she demanded.
"This hasn't happened before," he said, punching one of the buttons in a remote Donatello hadn't noticed until now. "I don't understand. The treatment should have worked!"
Donnie gulped, realizing that reinforcements were probably on their way. He took another step back, his shell scraping along the wall and halting his progress. At the same time, whatever force had been holding him upright suddenly let go, and he felt his knees weaken and quit, dropping him unceremoniously on the tile floor.
'No, no! I have to get out of here!' he panicked, but his limbs wouldn't cooperate, and his pounding heartbeat only magnified his headache. Hands clenched, he tried to push himself up again, but it was as if the floor had been coated in butter.
Footsteps stormed through the halls outside the room, reminding him of the ominous thunder that always came before the kind of storm that could flood the sewers. Thirty seconds passed in the blink of an eye and, somehow, he was being held down again, hands and feet restrained with glowing blue bands.
Two guards lifted him back onto the hospital bed none too gently, and it wasn't long before the room was entirely deserted, save one guard standing by the door. He tried glaring at the guard, but his gaze slid cross eyed, and he looked away out of sudden embarrassment.
'This is so messed up,' he thought to himself. 'I just hope the guys will be able to find me if I can't get out of here on my own.' His brothers... Had they been taken too? For some reason, he felt like the answer was no, but he couldn't pinpoint a rational reason why.
Donnie closed his eyes to the ridiculously bright light filling the room and focused on listening. He wasn't all that surprised to find that he could faintly make out the conversation between the doctor and the nurse out in the hallway.
"Sampson doesn't make mistakes like this. If it didn't work the first time, it won't work at all."
"But the chemical process could still be successful, right?" the nurse asked.
"It doesn't matter. He's useless if his mind isn't wiped. We would be introducing too many variables."
There was silence for a few moments, and Don strained to hear, hoping they hadn't moved further down the corridor.
"Perhaps more variables are precisely what we need." another male voice said. "A week ago you were talking about a field test, Doctor Bennet. You couldn't find a legally safer field test than the one right in front of you." The voice hardened at the end of the sentence, leading Don to believe that he was listening to one of 'Doctor Bennet's' higher ups. More silence. It was the kind of silence that signaled the end of a conversation, and though he tried to keep listening, he could hear nothing more.
He sighed, staring down at his shackled wrists. So he was an experiment. He was actually somewhat surprised that they weren't trying to cut him open this time. Normally his and his brothers' physiology was what the scientists wanted to study, but this time was different. If the conversation he had overheard was enough to go in, they wanted to study his brain.
It was truly ironic, though, that he of all turtles had been picked up for whatever experiment they had in mind. Donnie had spent most of his life as a scientist himself, or as close as he could get with only the internet and a few rotting textbooks to guide him. Almost laughable, really. Almost. But surely his brothers would come to get him, surely he wouldn't have to actually go through with this? Just like it always happened in Mikey's cartoons, the character who got captured by the bad guys would be safe and sound at home by the end of the day, the adventure fitting neatly into a 22 minute episode, 30 minutes if you counted commercials.
Unless, of course, this was one of those season finales that lasted two episodes.
He scoffed. This was real life. Real life was not a weekly cartoon, no matter how badly he wished it was, no matter how much their lives usually seemed like it.
Shaking his head, Donnie stared at the thin hospital sheets that he was laying on, analyzing the weave of the material and trying to make himself believe once and for all that this was real. He sighed, realizing that he was already going crazy without his brothers. Perhaps the "surgery" the scientists had been referring to really had done a number on his brain.
Donnie looked back at the restraints keeping him still, seeming to notice for the first time that these cuffs had most definitely not been created on Earth. These humans had Triceraton technology, and there was no telling what other devices these people had at their disposal.
Don shuddered, trying not to recall the moment that damned helmet had been forced onto his head. It didn't work, of course. The memories kept seeping in of their own accord through the cracks in his mental walls.
The bundle of nerves that spread through his brain had been lit on fire again and again, yanked at, extruded for the thousandth time, when he finally realized that the information he'd been trying to keep secret was about to become public knowledge. Well, that and he just couldn't breathe anymore, the pain burning up the oxygen in his lungs before his body could use it.
He had choked out his Master's name, begging for the release, and just like that, it was gone, but that didn't mean the aftershocks hadn't been just as damaging. That part had gone on for weeks after his brothers had rescued him, even resulting in a nosebleed once or twice, but he was okay now. He would never be able to get rid of the memory of those creatures sifting through his thoughts with their repulsive machine, leaving mental silt everywhere it went, but he had learned to get over it.
The door opened, and in walked another 'doctor' carrying some kind of technological headband. Donnie sucked in a breath of air, praying that he would be able to get over this experiment as well.
"He ain't here, Leo!" Raph called back to his brothers, scuffing his foot on a rock.
"This is where the last ping from his shell-cell came through; he has to be here somewhere!" Leo replied. He refused to give up on his brother. Don had been stolen from them once already, and although the damage had been comparatively minimal, there had still been damage. He didn't even want to think about what the consequences might be if their genius brother had been taken on his own again.
"We've looked, Leo, there's no sign of him!" Raph growled. If Don really was gone, they needed to move, as in right now, or they could kiss their brother goodbye. He twirled his sai in his hands, wishing he had some thug to beat up right about now. "I'll bet you a year of chores it was that lowlife Bishop."
"We need a plan first, Raph, and right now we have nothing to go on, so quit saying he isn't here and look again." he ground out.
By that point, Mikey was a nervous wreck, darting around Central Park like a mother who couldn't find her child. They had done a fairly thorough scan of just about everything but the Northern edge of the park where the woods were thick, only a small path trailing through it, but they were losing time. Another twenty minutes passed, and they were no closer to figuring out what had happened.
"It's almost 4:30, we need to head back soon if we don't want to be spotted." Leo's voice was resigned. If they hadn't found any trace of him by now, they probably weren't going to find anything at all. He only prayed that Don had just chosen to go to the junkyard for a piece of equipment and was now at home in bed right now, but somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew that wasn't the case.
"We can't just leave!" Their youngest brother hadn't said a word since they left the lair, and the sharpness of his tone was enough to startle anyone.
"Mikey, we're useless if we get caught, you know that."
Raph took a deep sigh, gripping his weapons tightly. "I hate to say it, but Leo's right. We ain't found anything, and I doubt we will." He turned to leave mumbling something that sounded like Bishop.
Mikey let his shoulders droop, his fear for his brother truly beginning to consume him. He took a step toward his older brother to beg for five more minutes and felt something give way under his foot.
"Hold up guys, I stepped on something." The object turned out to be some kind of syringe, broken, and with feathers on the end. "This doesn't look like a clue, does it?" he asked, the hope rising in his voice as Leo turned around to see it.
"Tranq dart. Who knows, it might just be a stray dart from some bear that they had to take back to the wild… But you never know. Look around, see if there's anything more under the leaves."
Another twenty minutes passed, and their shaky lead seemed to have been a dud after all. Leo was just about to open his mouth to call off the search when Raph suddenly let out a string of curses from his place on the ground in front of an oak tree. His red-masked brother tilted his head down and held something up. In the murky pre-dawn light, Mikey and Leo could just barely make out the remains of Don's shell-cell.
A/N: Once again, thank you so much for reading! I'm going to mention once more that this story is in need of a beta reader, someone to look for grammar issues as well as plot holes or places where the story drags. If you're interested, send me a PM!
Oh, and if you have thoughts on where you think the story is going, I always love to hear them! Keeps me from getting too predictable, ya know? :D
Love you guys!