Until Yesterday is Here
The pain was back. Splintering and white hot. His teeth clenched tight together and he hissed outwards.
The trees were upside down, their broken and bare branches gently probing a smoky red and black earth, their roots buried deep in the raw grey of a grassy sky. His right arm reached up towards an anchoring surface of rough stone as his feet hovered in open air, unable to find purchase, the stub of his left arm waving into the empty space around it, balancing him.
The pain blistered through him again and he set his jaw and sank upwards.
His elbow bent and he felt the pressure of his whole body upon that one joint, the sudden bulge of musculature along his arm and shoulder, splitting outwards around his chest and back. Two hundred and five… his arm shook and abruptly he flipped back onto his feet, the world rightening itself again.
It was the pain. The pain had stopped him again. Even now it persisted in a vicious ache that throbbed all the way down his left shoulder, pulsed through his muscles and pooled relentlessly in his fingertips.
Except that he had no fingertips, no hand. Nothing below the elbow at all.
But the pain was there.
Savage. He could feel it all down the length of his non-existent forearm, burning his wrist and his hand, tingling in each finger. So present, even after all this time.
He growled and swatted at the air below the stump, where the fixed metal brace protected the ugly, closed over and useless half-limb. Nothing. There was nothing there. No arm, no hand, no fingertips.
But still the pain persisted.
He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the hand he still had, feeling the twitch in the muscles there from the marathon set of one-armed handstand push-ups he'd just forced out of himself. With the disadvantage of a missing arm, it was vital his other arm be at absolute peak, that his whole body was more than able to compensate.
Vaguely, he remembered Splinter drilling into them as twelve year olds that being able to do all feats one handed was not only useful, it was crucial. The hours of agony in one-handed push-ups, trembling and collapsing onto the dusty cement of the lair, one-handed chin-ups, grip slipping and falling to the ground, hard on his tail. Balancing awkwardly on one hand only for his legs to go tipping back over his head. Hand-standing against the wall and lowering himself towards the ground on one hand, the fingertips of the other pressed so lightly against the brick wall, just enough to support him, and Splinter wrapping the knuckles of it sharply with his walking stick, scolding him that was cheating.
Splinter… he turned around to the stake that marked his Father's grave and bowed slowly, one hand pressed against his thigh, eyes lowered to the dead grass.
As he righted himself again another lash of pain whipped through him and he swallowed against the cry that burst from his throat, clutching his left shoulder tight in an effort to subdue it.
Turning, he moved through what was left of Central Park, towards the burrow he used to sleep in, a burned out shell of a below-ground apartment – the basement of what had once been April's building. She had offered him a place in the library her meagre rebellion army had converted to a base. But although he had acknowledged the pointlessness of staying in the lair anymore he had found that giving all of it up had proved impossible, even as she turned her back on it. So he had kitted out a space for himself there, steadily and patiently blocking off all forms of access apart from a hole broken into the ceiling – what had been the floor of her shop – and there he holed up. In some ways, it felt even safe. Safe to hiss and grunt at the pain in his arm, safe to let his body shake and his eyes grow hot and wet, safe to – sleep, to nod off. To nod out. To gently numb the bitter grip of what reality had become.
It was not something he could inflict upon her haven.
He dropped down into it now, the palm of his one hand pressed against the broken, uneven edge of the hole before letting go, his knees bending to absorb the shock of the landing. Here there was some colour, at least, not like the awful black and grey of the world outside. Colour he'd salvaged from the ruins left by the Shredder's methodical destruction of all he'd once known and loved. A brilliant yellow and orange rug, though much stained and grubby, hid the dirty cement beneath it. Vivid green plastic plants, unable to die, clustered up against the walls and a hundred different, chipped and broken ornaments in all colours and sizes and types were scattered amongst them. A big, bright pink My Little Pony stuffed toy, its seams bulging with the stuffing that kept its shape hulked in one corner. It was huge, that thing, the size of an actual pony and when he'd found it, in what had obviously once been the room of a little girl, he'd had to drape it over his shoulders in a fireman's hold to get it back. Colour like that, it didn't matter it was a girl's toy, though he wondered if the girl who'd owned it was still alive to miss it. The walls were papered in the torn out pages of the comic books he'd once so reverently kept wrapped in plastic, the bright and wild exploits of a hundred Super Heroes overlapping each other in a nonsensical pattern of stories. He paused to survey them now, his face still and without expression, and when he recalled his youthful enthusiasm over them it was like he was remembering another person. Something below his plastron felt hollow with his inability to connect with that former emotion, but it was replaced quickly by another roll of pain.
He kept the gear in an old painted tin chest next to the dusty rainbow of ripped cushions and moth-eaten blankets he used as a bed. The first flicker of urgency began as he flipped the lid open and began to lift each piece of equipment out, not prompted by the pain but by the sheer need that now quickened his movements and blotted out the drone of the world above him.
As though in anticipation, the pain began to hum more vibrantly, spreading up through his arm and down across his chest, shattering outwards to engulf his back, his other arm, to blister through his pelvis and legs, so that any pressure he placed upon his feet seemed to bite back, sending more waves of pain ricocheting upwards, meeting the flickering jabs that shot from the phantom limb. He cried out now, the papered walls swallowing the sound, and felt himself convulse, a violent twitch running through him so that he could do nothing but wait until it subsided.
His cheeks were wet when it did and he sat back upright hastily, moving quick before another attack could overwhelm him. It always seemed that the one just passed was absolutely the last one he could endure, that anything more would finish him off.
He had done this so many times that even one handed his movements were as sure and smooth as if he were wielding his nunchuk. The measure was poured, the water added and the Bunsen burner was lit, the flame lapping steadily at the base of the soda can he used. He removed the brace and the belt was looped around his bicep, he drawing it tight with his teeth, neck straining backwards.
He poised the syringe just above the twisted mass of scar tissue that finished his arm off, the sweat in his eyes blinding him momentarily, the strange animal taste of the leather belt on his tongue, the prick of the needle that no longer even registered as pain. He shot upwards, above the tourniquet, towards the heart, something Donatello had always told him he must never, ever do but which he felt he had no choice but to, in case the dose got lost in the sawn off tips of the veins that no longer pumped blood into his forearm. Even as he depressed the plunger he felt another brutal kick of agony begin and his anticipation swelled his chest so that it ached.
The brilliant white flare of the heroin raced forward to meet the pain, overwhelming it in one bright kiss. Replacing it instead with the softness of pleasure, caressing as warm sea water, spreading through him in one rolling burst that had him making an altogether different sort of moan. A guttural sound that was positively obscene and he sunk back against the nest of his bed, suddenly feeling so light-headed he thought his spirit might float upwards, leaving the contrasting increased heaviness of his body to slowly submerge into the pool of blankets.
His missing arm tingled, then vanished. It was gone. Truly gone. All that was left was a delicious pins and needles like a million tiny orgasms erupting all over his flesh and deep within it. Relief, deep and satisfying, soon joined in and he sighed outwards and released the belt from between his teeth, his hand dropping the syringe carelessly to the grimy threads of the sunset coloured rug.
When he did not show up later, April would know immediately it was one of Those Nights. They had started months apart at first but steadily they were creeping closer and closer together, and with that advance, more and more her quietly frantic concern pooled into understanding resignation. She would drop silently through the hole in his ceiling, step her way carefully through the ornaments and plastic plants to where he lay curled in the blankets, and gently wrap her body around his, her thin torso curving against his shell, her arm reaching over the bulk of him so that her fingertips could gently caress the stub of his lost arm. The only time she would dare to touch it.
Each time his eyes blinked it was more of an effort to open them again. The bliss was replaced with a numbness that was in some ways even more pleasurable than the ecstasy itself, for its absolute lack of sensation. His mouth lolled open, spittle collecting in one corner as he stared blankly at the wall opposite, where Silver Sentry, Stainless Steve Steel, Superman, Spiderman and the Green Lantern saved the world from one more ruthless villain hellbent on destroying it in a dozen conflicting depictions. Their colours, still bright beneath the film of grime that had covered them, began to run together as his vision blurred. Somewhere, in the back of his consciousness, the Turtle Titan rose beside those heroes, his red cape flickering in the wind as he hurtled toward the only villain that had proved unconquerable, on the cusp of delivering them all.
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The idea for this one is entirely credited to the marvellous MT Angeli, in a discussion that happened on Stealthy Stories. Go to 'Author's Info' then click the 'Back to Canon' thread. Page 5, I believe. My deep thanks and appreciation to her for allowing me to use it and it serves as her Birthday Gift, this month on the 26th. Hope you enjoy this, sweet pea:)