Author's Note: This is more of an interlude than a full chapter, but another update should be pretty quick. Thanks SO much for your comments last time around! It was very good to get feedback on how things went.

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Chapter Eleven: The Art of Denial


Donnie sat staring at the metal canister that had just been placed on the table in front of him.

The color of the liquid, visible through a small section made of glass, was wrong. It wasn't April's blood.

His brothers had faked the Foot out.

Fishface stood nearby, eyes watchful. "How long until it is finished now?"

Donatello looked up at him. "Half a week to a week. Maybe a little longer."

Fishface tilted his head in a half nod, just a hint of anticipation showing through. "Fine." He turned for the double doors, disappearing through them a few moments later.

Donnie's gaze went back to the canister. He reached forward to pick it up, then unscrewed it. He took a careful sniff of the contents, which were a muddy brown color, with an oily sheen, and coughed a little, the movement pulling at the cuts in his plastron.

As if coughing had set off a chain reaction, he started to quietly laugh.

Fishface had taken his word just now.

At some point over the last few days, Donatello had learned to lie. Or, perhaps he'd simply made peace with lying to the kind of scum these people were.

Or maybe the part of Donnie that cared about lying, and that it was wrong, had finally shut down. Guilt was so close to other emotions...

For Donatello, yesterday had been like a French Impressionist painting; all blurred lines, muted colors. There had been no point to working, because everyone had known it was an exercise in fakery. So Donnie had slept most of the day away, and they had let him. He hadn't been good for anything else anyway, because every thought, every feeling, had been saturated with the experience he'd endured at the hands of Jan and the others. So he had simply given up, and tried to rest, to forget...to not think at all.

Today, Donnie's body was stronger and his mind was clear again, but there was a danger lurking inside him- an emotional wound, deep and wide open. He was stepping carefully, because he'd couldn't put a salve, or stitch it or sooth it with a cold compress. He couldn't fix it at all. The best he could do was to ignore it.

When a trigger tried to make things surface – any reminder of their laughter, of his pain - Donnie instinctively shunted it away. Something about how extreme his emotions had been, how fundamentally different that experience was from anything else he'd gone through in his life, made pushing the bad thoughts away a surprisingly easy thing to do.

It was as if it had been a bad dream, something not quite real.

All in all, if he didn't count the pain from his leg and plastron, Donnie hardly felt bad at all, really, because he'd taken punches all his life, as a ninja. He was used to being bruised.

A tiny voice in the back of Donnie's mind, a voice that remembered a medical journal he'd read about trauma and how to deal with it, quietly warned that he was in shock, that the ability to shunt things aside was only temporary.

Donnie didn't pay attention.

His eyes narrowed thoughtfully, as he studied the contents of the canister, tilting it slightly to make the liquid move. Donnie chuckled again, and shook his head.

His brothers had sent him diesel fuel.

Thanks, guys.

In full sight of the guards, and not caring at all, since he already knew they didn't understand one whit of what he was doing, Donnie started working.

One way or another, he'd be out of here in a week.


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AN: :( This chapter makes me sad. I felt I needed to get this in before taking another step with the plot. What do you guys think?