He takes the packet of baby wipes she fetches from her backpack, and she submits and shivers as he starts to clean the many and varied scrapes and cuts she has endured through all the wretched evening. Almost immediately, she wishes she hadn't. It's undoing her, this painful tenderness, as he cups her face in one huge hand and, more gently than she thought he'd be capable of, carefully smudges away the blood. His green eyes are vivid and he smells of blood and sweat. A lump is constricting her throat as she gazes into him, and her heart just won't stop pounding. She blinks and swallows against the tide of emotion that threatens to erupt, then presses her eyes shut as damp cotton methodically, softly swabs the aching points of her. Sensations come alive beneath his touch and soon she is more aware of her body than she has been in years; it's a mess of stinging, cringing, throbbing fever and he's being so goddamn… it feels like he could… no one has ever taken care of her like this and abruptly she tastes bile in her throat and has to fight not to push his hands away.

Why did it have to be like this? She wants them to just be fucking already. For it to be easier.

She lifts her hair from her damp neck and winces. She wonders what will happen now with both of them so awkward and trapped in a hot, empty room with the sun beating mercilessly beyond, with all that they have shared palpable between them. When he is so scared of his own inexperience and she is terrified of any vulnerability. All she sees behind her eyelids is that moment after he came, when he pushed himself up and looked down at her. When she gazed into his eyes, so vivid and alive with feeling, and set in a face that is so absolutely not human. And she knew nothing could ever be the same again.

Even thinking of it as his calloused, scarred hands gently tend to all her battered parts causes her breath to rush from her in a great torrent that leaves her lungs flattened and dry.

And she opens her eyes again and looks at him, at this creature who is not human, and remembers that it was her who made him stay. When he would've turned away and left, no matter how furiously his desire raged, she had bid him stay. Because with that strange and awful night still echoing in the rattle of her bones and the throb of every torn muscle, she could not bear to face the savage dawn without him. The nearness of her own death urged the strange suicide of inviting him into her body and now she doesn't know how to stop him from going much deeper. Despite all the promises she made herself in a thousand powerless childhood moments, finally she has been unmade. Is being unmade still with every tender gesture as he cleans her wounds and examines them, gently arranging her limbs, and she can see the way his eyes flit over her nakedness as he works and she cannot think of a time she has ever been touched with such kindness. Something so immense wells in her that she thinks she might suffocate with it.

Her hand is pressing abruptly to his plastron then, leaping there of its own accord, and his hand stills on her arm, near her breast, as she looks at him, the domed green head and the broad, snubbed snout with its intent and heavy expression, the bony plating that covers his front and the shell that just barely rises over his shoulders. Her head reels, her gut lurches and she can't breathe, spots swim in front of her eyes.

Then he lifts his gaze to hers and their eyes lock.

She remembers his eyes after he killed Rex; glassy and remote, frighteningly cold, staring at her dispassionately.

Now they are soft and bottomless, the vulnerability in them so raw it hurts to see. He wants her so bad and he's so scared and it's more than desire there, and that tremendous realisation silences the morning so that for a moment it's as though they have stepped out of time and space. And her heart beat rises and thuds so that she feels her ribcage echo with it, with the terrifying awareness she wants him just as bad.

Her hand smooths across the hard, textured surface of his plastron and again her heart skitters to be reminded of all that this is. She's really not sure she's okay with this but she can't let him go either. The nearness of his bulk and strength, the hardness of his muscle and the intense, masculine scent of him seem to anchor her to the world; he's so absolutely alive and she is alive because of him and after all these years of sordid indifference she finds herself suddenly so badly wanting to revel in the perfect beauty that is being alive and in her body, and her body in the arms of a mutant turtle who is her fucking hero, her only ever hero.

But this callous warrior who had so brutally murdered men in front of her, in such a way she knew he had done it before and expects he'll do again, is quaking in fear at the thought of making love to her. And she realises that he probably never expected anything like this would ever happen to him.

He's not alone.

Everything she's feeling, the giddy rush of desire, her thudding heart and fluttering belly, the hum between her legs and the horrible, helpless impulse to cling to him and never let go, are sensations she thought long ago lost to her, and she wonders if he realises – if he can possibly know – she's terrified too.

There's nothing about it that isn't huge, isn't incomprehensibly enormous, so she dives forward and again their mouths meet in desperate yearning, fumbling and awkward, their tongues lapping and twisting, his mouth closing over hers and sucking it into his as they strive amidst the headiness of their passion to fit them together. They tumble back onto the mattress and she whimpers into his mouth as shooting stars of pain careen through her body and he's tugging his lips from hers, staring at her with wary, concerned eyes, a killer's eyes, a monster's eyes and she can see herself reflected in them, pale and ugly and wretched, and she looks for all the world like a monster herself.

But they are not monsters. They are just two terrified children carefully holding each other, naked and battered under the raw light of an indifferent morning.

Then she hears herself say, her voice raw from the abuse her throat sustained when she was being throttled to death:

"I have no fuckin' idea what I'm doing either."

He stares at her silently, his brow puckering slightly, a defensive little sheen glazing the green of his eyes.

And heat collects in her cheeks as she realises how ridiculous she must sound, twenty years old and a hooker since she was fourteen.

She snorts and tears her gaze away from his; even that little movement causing a racket of pain in her bruised neck.

"I haven't had real sex in years," she hears herself say, and her throat throbs under the effort. She thinks about what she's just said and realises she cannot ever remember a time she was a virgin and her heart painfully folds. "I don't think I ever have."

Then she remembers the freedom she felt that long ago summer's night beneath warm, sharp rain on the highway, accepting a crumpled and sticky twenty dollar bill and knowing she would never, ever have to go back, that she could smudge away the stain he'd left beneath a thousand indifferent strangers until it was utterly buried.

Raphael is gazing at her solemnly and with enormous tenderness, cradling her head against the unyielding muscle of one arm, the hand of his other resting with conspicuous lightness at her hip. She remembers again how he easily killed for her, this inexperienced boy of eighteen who is now too scared to touch her.

And even though there likely aren't any mysteries about her body to him, at least as far as the basics go, she doesn't really know the first fucking thing about what he's got going on, except for the brief glimpses of something dark and glistening and staggeringly inhuman, and how absolutely he'd filled her. She's still the one with all the experience and he will wait for her to act, oblivious in his apprehension and naivety that nothing of the thousands of times she has fucked has prepared her for this.

And she realises, as much as her gut churns and her knees are jelly against the mattress, she has to take charge, and it makes her terribly wistful, and yearning for a time when she was more innocent, a time she can't even remember and isn't sure ever existed.

It would be easier for both of them just to fuck again, to get caught up in the brutal and breathless rush of pure carnal need, have it out in sweaty, frenzied moments. Easier for him, when he doesn't know what the fuck he is doing otherwise. Easier for her, when she won't have time to think too much about what he is. Easier, altogether, so that neither of them risk too much the danger that making love means.

Except she knows she wouldn't be satisfied by that. She thinks he won't be either.

"Show me what to do," she whispers, and smooths a hand back over his cheek, making herself feel the leathery green skin, making herself stare into those fearful, fierce, green eyes. "Show me how you work."

Those eyes widen as he comprehends and she feels him recoil slightly. Though she had hoped her words would build confidence in him, they've had the opposite effect – he probably didn't need reminding of this critical difference between them. And now she's reminded him she's all too aware of it too. He starts pulling back and, in terror that she might be about to lose him when she's got nothing else to lose, nothing else to buffer her fearful heart against if he goes, she grasps at one of his huge hands and puts it between her thighs.

She hears the sharp catch of his breath in the moist heaviness of the humid morning, and his hand stiffens beneath hers as the calloused fingertips come into contact with her softest flesh. His eyes bore into hers and she meets them unflinchingly, grips his hand for all she's worth and holds it there, though she knows it would be nothing to him to break her grasp. After an endless moment she feels him relax, and though his hand is enormous, powerfully muscled, could easily, effortlessly crush her own slight one, he doesn't resist as she guides it so that his fingers can explore her, gliding through slick folds soft as velvet for all that the rest of her is so bony and dry. She is raw and tender from the rape despite the precautions she had taken, and sensitive from the ever prickling desire that has been steadily growing, piquing anticipation, only teased by their first frenzied tumble, and his touch heightens it further still, prompting a moistness at the centre of her that is exciting and strange. Jesus, it's been so long.

A moment later she feels something hard and wet nudging against her thigh and a sudden bolt of adrenalin sets her heart racketing as she realises what it is.

She can barely breathe, there on that musty old mattress in the bare and muggy room with its graffitied walls and exposed floorboards. With the painful intimacy of his hand between her thighs and his erection against her leg, she naked and bruised and in the arms of a mutant turtle who is a killer, and only eighteen, and looking at her like she means something, like she possibly could.

And he's her hero, and they're alive and somehow, in all the world, they've found each other, a freak and a loser who are unmaking what it means to be young and falling in love.

It's the nauseating terror of that realisation and all its enormity that compels her just to fucking deal with this, in the only way she knows how. With wretched determination, she sits up and lowers her head to his lap. Without pausing to look at him properly or fully comprehend, with a lump in her throat and her heart a painful flutter, she takes him into her mouth.

The noise he makes as her lips glide over the head of his cock is choked and desperate, and she can hear how he strives to stifle it, so much like herself her heart hitches. He's huge, so wide she feels the corners of her mouth strain against their limits and the flared head of his cock ends in a tapered point that nudges against the back of her throat. She knows the trick though, and forcibly relaxes before she can gag, snorts in air through her nostrils and concentrates only on slowly, gently, carefully sucking him as he forcefully smothers moan and suddenly grips her thin shoulder with his powerful hand.

He abruptly lets go when she mews in pain, his hand fisting helplessly into the mattress instead as she tenderly sucks him, ignoring the variety of aches and pains this movement flares in all the places she was bashed that night that brought them to this moment. That night that is ever retreating rapidly into the past. Raphael lets out a shaky breath and beneath her palm she can feel the cabled tension in his thigh as she sucks him off, can feel how intensely he is holding back – from thrusting, from making a sound, from betraying what this feels like for him. But his cock swells in her mouth as she continues to work him, gentle and passionately, and his breathing is heavy.

His taste is distinct, but not unpleasant. She braces her hands on either side of his hips, increases the pressure of her mouth around the head of it cos she can barely get anymore in, feels her eyes prick with tears she refuses to shed for how sweet and terrifying this moment is. She's not sure she's okay with this, but she wants him to know she wants it anyway and sucks him fervently now, faster and harder. Raphael lets out a short, helpless groan and she feels him throb powerfully inside her. She's suffused with a sudden quiet joy to be giving him pleasure like this, and it's something she's never known before. Something she didn't know she could.

Suddenly, he's pushing her back, extricating himself with a sharp inhalation sucked in through his teeth, turning away from her with a grimace contorting his features and she remembers again he is only eighteen, and practically a virgin. Her lips are wet and her jaw aches and she kneels on the mattress and watches him as he silently strains to get control of himself and there's something kinda sweet and nice about it, to think he got that excited over her, when he's her hero and she's nothing but an ugly, miserable bitch.

Then he's looking at her with eyes seeming like green fire in the sweltering shadows of the dingy room, and she's holding her arms out to him, passion making her voice tremble: "C'mere, baby."