Here it is! After a bit of a waiting period, here is another chapter to maybe spark some interest again. I'd love to hear what you guys think, so please leave me a review if you can!
Chapter Twelve
She didn't know how long she had been asleep when she stirred. There were no windows in the lair that might tell her if the sun had started to rise or not, but she knew that she had been out long enough for everyone to have left her to rest on the couch with only a blanket to cover her half naked body. It had taken her a moment of looking down and shivering against the cool temperature of the room to remember that she had told Don to cut it off of her so that he could better access her side and stop the bleeding there. She'd need to replace the bandage soon though. Already she could see touches of red leaking through the gauze that he had taped to her side. But that would also mean having to ask one of the others to help her since her left arm was still resting in a sling after her shoulder had been put back into place. And for the time being it looked like she was completely on her own.
Shrugging the blanket back over her shoulders as best as she could with her good arm, Destiny pinned it down against her chest and slowly removed herself from the couch until she was able to stand on her own two feet. She was a little wobbly at first and had to shift her weight a few times before she could find a balance, but once she started to try and move she found that things were still in working order. She couldn't move too quickly, nor could her steps be as wide as they normally would be either – she was still a little too unsteady to be supporting her weight on one foot for long. But as she slowly began to master the shuffling motion that seemed to work instead she was able to cross the distance of the room until she was standing somewhere near the middle of the room itself.
Dark eyes looked around her in amazement. To think that the brothers had managed to create an entire home for themselves down here was rather incredible. They had so much room compared to the cramped living conditions of the world above, and despite the fact that they had made their home in an older section of the sewer system, she had to wonder if it wasn't cleaner down here as well. It was just amazing to think that an entirely different civilization of sorts had been lurking beneath her feet the entire time and she had never known.
Now she had to decide where she was going to go. The center of the room offered her a few different options in that regard, but there was one place that really caught her eye and struck a chord of familiarity in the young woman as soon as she saw it. It was the very same hallway down which Leo had disappeared earlier that night when things had gotten a little tense in the living area. He had been rather mad at her for running off to the docks like that, but he had quickly vanished from sight when it came time for Donatello to reset the shoulder that had been dislocated during the scuffle with the Shredder and his men. It was funny though, he hadn't struck her as being the squeamish type when she had initially met him.
Either way though, she felt the need to find him and at least talk to him about the events that had unfolded that night. Something just wasn't sitting right with her – she needed to talk it through. And of the four brothers who were likely to be sleeping at this point, he was the only one that she knew well enough to talk to.
No way was she talking to the rat.
So down the hallway she started, letting her steps remain slow and small until she could reach out to the wall with her good hand and use that as a means of supporting her unsteady legs. There were only two rooms in this hallway, a curtain separating each for the sake of privacy. At the first one she paused against the outside edge of the wall and tilted her head, listening for any sounds that might betray who was currently on the other side. But when she heard nothing, a thought struck her and the girl instead turned her attention to the colour of the curtain and began to connect the dots in her mind. If the deep purple colour was a sign of anything, it was Donatello who slumbered inside that room, and she certainly didn't want to bother him after all that he had done for her that night.
But as she turned to look at the other room, she saw that the curtain was of the same shade of blue as the mask that Leonardo had been wearing each time they crossed paths. He had to be in there, she decided, though she would regret waking him if he had fallen asleep. He had been the first to leave the room that night, and she hadn't seen him in the hours that had followed. Clearly, there had been some discontent between the pair…and if she could, she wanted to try and remedy that. After all, he and his brothers had saved her life that night when it would have been easy enough for them to leave her for dead and save themselves the grief of potentially being exposed.
Breathing slowly to try and keep her pain under control, the brunette shuffled on down the hallway until she found herself just outside of his bedroom door, pausing again to listen. He was definitely still awake, she could hear him grumbling to himself in a tone that was inaudible to her from the other side of the curtain. But now that she was there, her courage was beginning to fail her. What if he was still too angry to speak to her? What if he blamed her for putting all of their lives in danger? Or worse yet, what if he hadn't wanted to save her?
"Leo?"
The word was free from her lips before she had a chance to turn around and change her mind, but the sounds from behind the curtain instantly stopped. In less than three seconds the blue fabric was pushed aside and the turtle was in the doorway. But instead of the anger that she had half expected to see she was instead confronted by a look that already spoke volumes of the concern that he felt in seeing her standing outside of his bedroom.
"Are you crazy?" he demanded, his hands shooting out gently pull her body toward him so that he could support her weight with his own. "What the shell are you doing on your feet? You should be resting!"
The palm of her good hand pressed against his chest as she tried to regain her balance. "I needed to talk to you," she insisted quietly. "About night-"
The turtle cut her off by gently moving his arms, slipping one beneath the back of her knees and the other around the middle of her back so that he could lift her from the ground and remove the pressure that she had placed upon her feet. A soft gasp fluttered from her lips as she felt the air appear beneath her and her body curled inward to rest against Leonardo's chest, but she winched almost immediately as she felt the tug on her side and the ripping of the skin. Teeth bit down tightly on her lower lip and eyes closed against the painful reminder of her folly from the night before, and deep breaths were taken to try and ease her body down from the agony that she could feel coursing through her side. Damn, did it hurt though. And without the strength to even at least partly heal herself of the injury she could do nothing more than take a deep breath and hope for the best.
Before she could tell him no, however, Leo had taken her back beyond and curtain and into the small space that he called his own and set her gently down on the stack of mattresses that sat in the corner of the room. Every movement that he made with her body was slow and deliberate, a clear indication that he was doing his best not to hurt her any further as he moved to place her inside the room. As soon as she was secured in a sitting position on the edge she could feel the soft touch of his hand pulling the blanket away from her shoulders, his eyes looking her over until they came to rest on the bloody gauze that was still attached to the side of her body. Wordlessly he moved himself away and crossed the room to the neatly kept table on the other side, picking up a small box in his hand before he came back and knelt down before her.
It didn't take long for her to realize that it was a smaller and simpler version of the kit that Donatello had produced earlier. He was already beginning to pull out the same items; a piece of gauze, more medical tape and a few alcohol wipes that were definitely going to sting like hell when he touched them to her skin. She couldn't help but grimace at the thought, something that Leo took immediate note of.
"Are you alright?"
"Yeah," she hesitated, reaching across her body with her good hand to slowly draw her other arm out of his way. "I just know that this is going to hurt."
The turtle nodded. "Sorry about that."
"Why?" asked the brunette, raising an eyebrow in his direction. "It's not like you did it."
She hissed when he pulled the tape away from her skin and peeled the gauze from her wound, feeling the resistance that had built up as the blood stuck everything together. Even when she closed her eyes she could sense his regret at being the one who had spotted the bloody bandage, something he was clearly hoping to have avoided. But his sense of guilt was what had prompted him to look and prevented him from turning away once he had seen it. Even in her beaten condition she could read that much of his mind, gently prodding at the thoughts that had taken control of his consciousness.
It should have been a simple task, really. Remove and dispose of the soiled bandage, remove the dried blood from the outside edges with an alcohol wipe and recover it with a new piece of gauze. But it seemed to Destiny that Leo was spending a little more time tending to it than even Donatello had done earlier in the night with all of the other broken parts of her body that he had tried his best to fix. And that struck her as being a little odd.
Lightly, she touched her teeth to her lower lip in hesitation. "I'm sorry that I snapped at you earlier," she started. "You were only trying to help."
But he seemed almost to shrug off her apology as he continued to busy himself with the open wound on her left side. "You're hardly the first person to snap at me. Raph does it almost every day."
"That doesn't make it right," Destiny insisted. At the first touch of the cold wipe to her skin she groaned and her body tensed a little. "And I'm not going to use this," she nodded to his hands. "As an excuse."
"Don't worry about it."
His nonchalance at the matter was almost unsettling to the young woman, who found that even as she continued to look down at him he seemed rather intent on avoiding any form of eye contact all-together. Had she really put such a rift between them by going after the Purple Dragons that night? Sure, things hadn't exactly gone according to plan…or was he angry that she had known about Michelangelo and not said anything about it? It seemed that she had somehow become connected to each of the four brothers without knowing it and thus exposed their secret to the eyes of a human. She couldn't really blame him for worrying about that. The world that they lived in made sure that there was no shortage of people who might expose the four turtles and their sensei to the human population in the hopes of making money off of their existence. And that was the sad truth of the society that she had become a part of. If there was a way of using another human being or creature for monetary gain, the opportunity was usually taken.
"Leo…"
Silently he pressed the gauze to her skin and started to rip at the tape with his teeth until it came apart in the pieces that he desired, laying each one along an edge of the porous white fabric to hold it in place. But still he did not look at her. And when he removed his hands from her side and turned his head away to begin packing the medical kit up again, Destiny reacted to an impulse that had been screaming in her head for the last several minutes. The reach was a little more awkward than she had intended as she reached across her body with her right hand, but the pads of her fingertips still managed to find his cheek and caused the turtle to freeze for a moment before he slowly turned his head back to look at her for the first time since bringing her into the room.
What she saw immediately caught her off guard though. It wasn't an expression of anger that stared back at her, something that she might have handled better because of her expectation at seeing it there. Nor was it fear at being so close to someone who, in theory, could cause him and his family a great deal of harm. Instead the brunette found that her chest seemed to tighten with guilt as she read the hurt behind the dark orbs of his eyes, a sadness that almost overwhelmed her at a single glance. The shock of seeing him so upset was almost enough to make her recoil, but she knew that he might read that as something else entirely and so forced her hand to stay locked where it was against the soft flesh of his cheek.
"Talk to me."
She took great care in keeping her voice soft. His walls of defense were slowly beginning to come down the longer he knelt by the edge of the bed with her fingers against his cheek, and she knew that the slightest of things would put them right back into place again if she wasn't careful. It was something between curiosity and concern that kept her pushing forward like this, moving at a glacial pace with the constant risk of going back to square one always looming over her head.
A heavy sigh left the turtle's lips, his head dropping just enough that he no longer held her gaze. But his hand slowly moved up, pressing lightly against her own until he held the palm of her hand completely against the side of his face. "I almost lost you," he murmured. "And there was nothing I could do about it."
Destiny gave her head a little bit of a shake. "Oh, Leo…you're not still worried about that night, are you?" she asked him, feeling her face fall a little. "We've been over this already. You don't owe me anything. I'm not your responsibility."
"But you are!" Leonardo insisted, his head shooting upward to look at her with an intensity that almost made her feel uncomfortable beneath his gaze. "Despite everything you say to try and persuade me otherwise, I can't help but feel this obligation to try and keep you safe. You knew the truth about me, but you kept that secret to yourself. You found Mikey but you never betrayed his existence to anyone else, including me."
The tension in his fingers grew around her hand for a moment, pinning her flesh to his own. "I've never come to trust another person so quickly in my life," he continued slowly. "Maybe that's because of where I was raised…I don't know. And I've never…"
He trailed off, and again he dropped his gaze as if he had given up on the idea entirely. He slowly released her hand from his grasp and pulled back until there was a distance that she could not reach across her body. For a moment Destiny waited, hoping he might perhaps finish his sentence…until a thought struck her. Could the answer really be so simple though? Without room to debate the girl knew that time was running precariously short for her to find the answer before Leo withdrew into himself again and forever left the lingering question between them. With her good arm and the strength in her legs she managed to slowly turn herself until she could slide her body off of the bed completely and come to a standing position beside him, reaching down to nudge his chin upward with her fingers. Only when she succeeded in recapturing his gaze once more did she speak.
"You've never had a friend, have you?"
It seemed like such a simple thing, but she supposed that it was difficult to make friends when you were a six-foot turtle who lived in the sewers of New York City. He was constantly surrounded by his sensei and his three brothers, all of whom had been permanent fixtures in his life since the events that had brought them into their currently situation. It wasn't like they often entertained visitors, least of all humans from the surface above. And it was the flicker in his eye that told the truth when words seemed to fail him, bringing a small smile to the lips of girl who shifted her hand until she could brush trace one of her smaller fingers along his jawline.
"Well, you have one now," came her soft assurance from behind the smile. "And I don't plan on going anywhere for a while, okay? I will be here, day or night, if ever you need to talk."
It didn't take a genius to see that Leonardo was trying to mask the various emotions that were swimming madly in his head, though the small sink in his shoulders did betray a small level of relief. For reasons she didn't understand he acted as if the weight of the entire world rested squarely on his shoulders, a burden that he alone would have to carry in order to prove himself as being a worthy leader. Or perhaps it was a desire to find purpose in life that drove him. She did not yet know him well enough to judge…but she hoped to. Something within him reminded her so much of herself that it was almost frightening, and if she were able to help him to accept the things in this world that he could not change then perhaps she might find her own self-worth as well.
Maybe this was her chance to do something good.
"You're not as alone as you think you are. I promise."
He wrapped his arms around her hips so quickly that Destiny barely had time to blink before she felt the pull that momentarily made her unsteady on her feet. Though many of the bruises on her body certainly felt this new pressure, she noticed that he wasn't holding her tightly enough to cause any pain to the other injures she had sustained. But he was still clinging to her in a way, holding her close enough to feel the warmth of her skin against his own as he buried his face against her stomach. It was the only warm contact that she had on her upper body now, the blanket that she had brought with her having been long ago discarded so that he could replace the bandage on her side. Neither of them was concerned with her semi-naked state though. There were other, more pressing issues that they needed to confront before the night was over.
But perhaps not. Leo had not yet offered any form of verbal response to her earlier statement, but continued to keep a hold on her body and let the situation sink slowly into his consciousness. And for her part, Destiny was not interested in pushing the issue. Instead the girl touched her free hand to the back of his shoulder and lightly moved it up and down in a soothing gesture. The reaction was almost instant. Much of the tension that he was carrying in his shoulders began to fade as the seconds passed and his arms began to loosen from around her hips as well.
Then at last, a soft sigh sounded from him and the turtle began to lift his head. "People come and go so often from this world," came the first few words, spoken so softly that she could have easily missed them. "Very few would understand ours if they were to enter into it. I guess…I guess that with everything that has happened over the last little while, I thought maybe I was starting to find a piece of myself in a different kind of world, you know? A world that I've had to watch from a distance my whole life."
Resting back on his heels, Leonardo began to rub at his tired eyes. "Being around you gives me that freedom…to just be me. No major responsibilities, no expectations…and you don't look at me like I'm some kind of dangerous monster that might go on a rampage at any moment. To you, I'm just…just…me."
She couldn't help but blink at him. "Leo, there is more humanity in you than in most of the people that I have come across in my lifetime. Just because you don't look like me doesn't mean anything."
Silence filtered in between the two of them for a moment as they continued to stare at one another, hardly daring to believe the turn that their conversation had taken. Here he had confessed to just wanting something that made him feel normal, and she was willing to grant him exactly that without asking for anything in return. Was anything in life really that simple without a risk of something going wrong? Though the thought made his stomach a little sick, Leo had to believe in the best. It was all he really had these days. If he couldn't hold onto some tiny sliver of hope that things might one day change for his family then he feared he might go mad under the strain of wanting to prove himself a worthy leader for his brothers.
And now that she had unexpectedly entered his life, he had a feeling that things would never be the same for any of them again.
Finally Leonardo gave his head a little bit of a shake, pushing his exhausted frame to his feet to busy himself with the task of putting the first aid kit away in its proper place once more. And when he turned back to see Destiny leaning against the side of the bed for support, he could have kicked himself right then and there for having been so foolish. He crossed the room in two large strides and retrieved the blanket that had previously covered her body, draping it around her shoulders once more to push away the chill that was beginning to creep over her flesh. Then, as gently as he could manage, Leo once again lifted her into his arms so that her legs would be spared of having to keep her upright.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"You'll be a lot more comfortable on the couch," he explained as he started for the curtained door.
"You mean it won't raise an alarm if the others wake up and I'm suddenly not there, right?"
He chuckled a little. "Yeah, that too. Donnie would be furious if he thought you'd gone off on your own again."
Destiny let out a dramatic sigh. "Then I suppose I'll just have to stay here and out of trouble."
"Well, I don't know about that," Leo confessed as he turned at the end of the hallway and aimed for the couch in the living room. "If Mikey has his way, I'm sure he'll find something for you to get caught up in again."
"And what about Raphael?"
Pausing in front of the couch, Leo seemed to deeply consider the otherwise playful question for a moment before he came to realize that he was standing still and slowly lowered her body onto the cushions of the couch. "I don't know. I feel like there's something going on with him that he's not telling us about."
"Maybe he just needs a little time."
She did not yet know anything about Raphael compared to his brothers, aside from the obvious fact that he had been the one to bring her away from the park that night and that it was his face she had first seen after waking up. Even at the docks, something about the way he came so quickly to her side gave the girl reason to believe that Leo was right in his assumption, but she didn't dare to tell him so. There had been enough drama and adventure over the past fourty-eight hours for them to deal with, she didn't want to add anything further to the pot. If in fact there was something Raphael was keeping hidden, perhaps she would be able to talk to him the same way she had spoken to his brother. But she had a stronger connection with Leo, she thought to herself. Maybe she wouldn't get that lucky with Raphael.
"Try not to worry too much about it," Destiny suggested to him, shifting herself into a slightly more comfortable position on the couch. "You can't do anything about it until he's ready to talk. And maybe he won't be ready in the near future, we don't know. All we can do is be there for him when he is."
God this felt strange. Where did all of this feeling suddenly come from? She had spent so much time surviving on her own, shutting out emotional connections to people…and yet here she was, sitting in an underground lair while she had a conversation with a giant turtle whom she called a friend. It was like the last ten years of her life had been undone in a single night. The night that she and Leo had crossed paths as stranger for the very last time…
Leo nodded. "You should get some rest. You've had a rough couple of days."
"Physically, maybe," she said, narrowing her eyes just a little. "But I don't think I'm the one who has suffered the worst…at least mentally."
Damn, was he really that readable? "Perhaps," he acknowledged. He paused. "Get some rest."
Turning on his heel, Leo started back toward the hallway and toward the safety of his room. But just as he reached the beginning of the corridor, he felt a gentle tingle in his hand, and a voice register in his ear.
'Be not afraid of greatness.'
He turned sharply back to look at her, but saw nothing aside from the back of the couch. She must have made herself comfortable enough, he thought. But where had the sudden quotation come from? He knew it was familiar, and yet his mind could not register where he might have previously heard those words strung together. He'd find it though. The words would torment him until he did. And though he couldn't explain how, he knew it was Destiny's voice that rang in his ear, though it was impossible for her soft whisper to have reached him from that distance with such clarity. Still…it felt like she was standing right next to him.
Leo looked down at his hand, flexing his fingers a little as the tingling sensation slowly melted away. If he hadn't been paying any attention, he could have sworn that someone had taken hold of his hand for a moment there. But again, that was impossible when you were standing in the middle of the room without another person around you.
Wasn't it?
