I wanted to thank everyone who has left a comment, or added my story to a Favorites list. It means a lot to me.

The whole reason I started posting this story was to inspire me to write more, and now that we've passed the halfway point on this one, I need to get to work on the sequel! You guys are keeping me motivated, and I appreciate it.

Chapter 14

"…third escape attempt!"

"Why does he think he has to 'escape'?"

"It's getting ridiculous…"

…

The darkness wasn't as thick, this time, but it still smothered all thought and will. The voices came and went. He didn't understand anything else they said.

There was a voice in his head, most of the time. It whispered soothing things to him, sentiments without words, things that were meant to calm him and stop him from fearing the unknown things that happened to him when the darkness rolled over him.

He wanted to trust the voice – it was in his head, after all – but he couldn't.

The lights were too bright. His eyes watered even though he'd barely cracked his eyelids open. His hands were too heavy to bring up to shield him from the light.

There was someone beside him. "Shh, shh, it's okay. You're safe, you're alright…" A hand touched his head. He turned in the direction of the touch before he even realized it. He hurt too much to think who this person was, and he couldn't see to confirm his reflex. But the sense of comfort was familiar. How long had it been since anyone comforted him…?

And he had to rely on that when he felt the edge of a cup press into his lip. "Drink this – you need to drink this, it's good for your system, it's okay…"

He drank.

He fell into darkness again.

…

Later, he counted four or five of the odd, almost-waking intervals. It was hard to be sure, since he was still heavily drugged every time. But when he woke, the same calming voice was there. And so was the cup of what he finally identified as a very weak juice of some kind.

He was still thirsty after he'd downed the cup. It surprised him – he couldn't remember the last time he'd felt hunger or thirst. Now he felt both.

The light was still too bright. He squinted against it, trying to see where the cup had gone, and if he could get it back. He brought his hand up to shield his eyes.

"It's okay, shh, it's okay," the voice sounded more hoarse than he'd remembered it. He tightened his squint and looked in the direction of the voice and the hand that had captured his own.

He was too tired and too weak to pull away in fear when he realized that he didn't know this person after all.

"Do you think maybe you could try not escaping this time?" the man continued with a wry twist to his mouth. "It seems to panic everyone here, and it hurts you."

Donatello cast about in his memory, looking in vain for any recollection of escape attempts. All he remembered were escape intentions, and those weren't quite the same. And after each one…well, there was only the darkness, and the blinding pain.

After a long minute, the man asked, "Do you remember me?"

Don stared at him wordlessly. Why would he remember...? An image floated slowly to the surface of his tumbling memories: a sword-point, pressed into a dirty shirt…

"You," he began, then stopped, appalled at the graveled weakness of his own voice. You were the man in the Arena.

"Yeah, I was there," the man shifted uncomfortably. "You were going to kill me…I think."

Yes, I was.

The man hunched away. "Thought so…" he mumbled.

With a slow thrill of horror, Don realized that the man was hearing his thoughts.

It was too much.

This time, he deliberately sought out the darkness.

…

His brain started working before his eyes opened. I can't ever go home again…

"Why not?" someone asked from the other bed.

Don sighed and turned away even while his eyes opened of their own accord. He turned his thoughts resolutely from the family he'd failed. He wouldn't share any more of himself with this stranger; he was too tired to feel properly outraged that even his thoughts weren't his own anymore.

A rustle of sheets and movement, then. He felt a presence beside his gel-bed. "I'm Brian," the man offered uncomfortably after a long minute. "I don't know...we're in some place, I don't know it. These people, they call themselves Utroms…they say you'll remember them. Do you?"

Unbidden, Don's mind conjured up images of the first time he'd encountered Utroms.

"Huh. You do, I guess…" the man trailed off again. He seemed to be waiting for something.

Don slowly realized he was supposed to respond in some way.

He didn't want to. He couldn't imagine wanting to.

He decided, at that moment, that he wanted nothing more than to lay there and look at the lights, and to definitely not think.

The hum of white noise filled his mind. He let it – the non-sound was soothing. It didn't want anything from him.

"You were…I saw some of your dreams. Pieces of them, anyway," Brian shifted again in his chair, restless and unhappy – it leaked from him into Donatello's mind, and neither one of them seemed to be able to stop it. At least, Don couldn't stop it – he didn't know if the man was even aware of it. "You keep having nightmares about a little girl in the Arena. A little human girl, too – who is she?"

Don didn't answer. He didn't let himself think about the child he'd once called his niece. He didn't let himself think about the family that surrounded her. It was the only safety he could give them – to keep them as safe as possible from someone who could apparently see into his thoughts.

It was a violation that even the Triceratons couldn't have inflicted on him.

The man sighed. "I guess it doesn't matter, but…I thought you should know, 'cause maybe you'll have fewer nightmares if you do: girls never go in the Arena. Well, females of any age. Triceratons don't – what? What is it?"

Without meaning to, Don found himself looking at the man in horror. They… don't? It all made a horrible, maddening kind of sense, all of a sudden. A whisper of a remembered voice told him: Your females are safe…

He shuddered as the enormity of it all crashed on him.

It was all a waste, anyway…

He started to laugh, weakly, at the irony and tragedy of it all. At least, it started out as laughter. Before too long, though, it turned into howls of grief, for his needless pain, his pointless endurance, and most of all: for his lost sense of honor.

The darkness wasn't thick enough to cover it, anymore.

…

Try as hard as he might, he couldn't quite manage to stay asleep after that.

His mind wouldn't stop racing. In the drugged half-sleep that was all he could manage for long stretches of time, he thought about what he'd been told. How females never, ever went into the Arena – how had he missed that crucial detail? How did he never notice that there were no females in the population under the tunnels?

Or had he been lied to, again?

That was the question he really couldn't answer. And it was the question that couldn't be silenced, in the long grey times between what he finally recognized as medical attentions.

It was hard to recognize the passage of time. Yet time must have been going by, because he found that he could think around the pain in his knee and his feet. He couldn't move yet, of course – though he'd tried again, more than once, only to stop when it all hurt so badly that he couldn't breathe – but he was starting to think again.

He cursed himself for ever having stopped, because it was so hard to start again.

It was after one of these failed attempts to escape his bed, again, that he made the conscious decision to try to trust the man he found at his bedside most of the time. It finally occurred to him that, in spite of his repeated attempts, he'd never woken up in restraints. Surely they, whoever they were, had to know that he'd keep trying? And yet, they didn't think to tie him to the bed. In fact, there seemed to be some sort of unspoken agreement that he should be building his strength. This person – Brian? – pressed juice on him, and talked to him, and kept him from panicking when the dreams were so bad that it seemed like he would die if he couldn't get up and fight something, anything, right that moment. So he decided to bide his time, and trust Brian's care, and wait for further events to tell him if he'd been right or wrong to do so.

Besides, he told himself fatalistically, it wasn't like it was the first time he'd blindly trusted someone who didn't have his best interests in mind.

He couldn't imagine that anyone else would ever have his interests, best or otherwise, in mind again. And that was the curse of starting to think again: he started to remember more and more of what he'd done.

Utroms came and went during his waking times. Utroms conferred near his bed, in whispers that his translator couldn't pick up. Utroms asked him, repeatedly, if he wanted to go home.

He only stared at them, stony and silent, and after a while, they stopped asking.

…

It took a long time for him to understand why Brian never seemed to leave his side.

"I can hear your thoughts. Not everyone else's thoughts," Brian explained one night, after the nightmares were particularly bad.

Don shivered and wished that he could stop hearing his own thoughts, for just a while. The waking knowledge that Shadow wasn't in danger, had never been in danger at all, didn't have the slightest impact on his nightmares. If anything, the horrors he saw in the dream-Arena only grew more intense as time went on.

Brian draped a blanket over him, carefully avoiding the last of the tubes and wires that adorned Don's knee. The Turtle clutched the soft fabric around his shoulders and wondered at the sense of comfort he drew from it. "Yeah, I wish you could stop, too. But anyway… apparently my people, all the people on HomeStation, are part of some kind of super-long genetic experiment." He sighed. "Gods, this is all so complicated! I just wanted to get off-planet, and maybe see a few things in the universe! Y'know? I didn't know about any of this genetic stuff. I didn't know about Utroms…"

Don snugged the blanket up around his shoulders and tuned the man out. Brian had been saying something like this for days now – apparently he needed to work his thoughts out by saying them out loud, and it was getting on Don's already raw nerves. He craved silence. He craved the white noise of his own resolute attempt to feel nothing. He craved…blankets? It suddenly occurred to him that he'd been so cold, for so long, that the blanket was literally the best thing he'd touched in months.

He brought a fold of the blanket up around his ears, and curled up as tightly as the gel-bed would allow. The Utroms had explained the gel to him – it was a combination of physical healing, in that the gel kept his broken feet immobilized, and chemical healing, since it was laced with antibiotics, anti-inflammatory drugs, and local anesthetics that were absorbed through his skin. Don had a feeling that he would have been lot more interested in the whole concept, once upon a time, but for now it was just more noise that he had to filter out.

He was so tired of noise…

Brian was still talking when Don fell asleep.

He was still talking when Don woke up, too. This wasn't unusual. Brian talked all the time – to the Utrom physicians who came in, to the older humans he'd casually identified as his parents, to Don himself. But this time, the recipient of his restless stream of conversation was someone Don recognized. "Professor Honeycutt?" he rasped.

The robotic body swiveled immediately in his direction. "Ah, Donatello! Good, good – you're awake!"

"He's a lot more coherent in his waking moments than he was a few – "

"I wonder if you could give us a few minutes to talk privately?" the Professor suggested. He put one hand under Brian's elbow and steered him toward the door. "I'll come out once I've had a chance to talk with Donatello, that's right…"

"But it's not like there's any privacy that way," Brian looked doubtful. "I can hear his thoughts – "

"Perhaps you could try those mental exercises that Dr. K'zal taught you? Yes, I think you should work very hard at those…" He chivvied Brian out the door. The robotic hand shot for the controls beside the aperture, and closed it as soon as the man was clear. "Honestly," he muttered, in tones of exasperation that carried clearly to Don's ears.

Donatello struggled upright. "Professor…" he said again, his voice a harsh croak in his own ears.

The robotic face couldn't convey expression, of course, but the Professor's manner was kind and solicitous. "Dear boy, don't strain yourself! Here, drink this juice…there. I'm so sorry that it took me so long to get here, but I was on the Outer Rim when I got the most extraordinary vid! Someone asked me if I knew you – apparently you've caused quite a stir here, in the Medical wing. They didn't look in the right place for you – the Classifications team thought that they'd accidentally found an entirely new species! People were gearing up to go look for a planet full of people like you."

"But…they know me. They've called me by name…" Don cast his mind back for a memory, and once again came up blank. "Or…did they?"

"Oh, probably they have, in the last few days. Bear in mind, Donatello, that the Utrom collective is a huge place. And some of the projects, like the one that took that pod of Utroms to your home planet, aren't as well-known or well-connected to the research facilities as they should be. But I set them straight as soon as I heard you were here."

"So those Utroms who wanted to know," he had to pause for a drink, to clear his aching throat, "if I wanted to go home...?"

"They were trying to determine where your planet was – they were mistakenly searching for a planet of reptilian life forms, like yourself!" The blank metal face didn't change, but the tone of voice was amused.

Don wrapped a fold of the blanket around his hands and fidgeted nervously. "So…no one's told my family?"

"Not yet – once I gave them some information, they decided to wait until I could talk to you. Apparently I'm the closest thing you have to an advocate, or family member, here." He glanced back over his shoulder at the sealed door. "Except for Brian and his family, of course."

"About that…" Don didn't know what to ask. The whole thing made him feel dirty and off-balance, and he didn't know how to change that. "I don't – he can read my mind!" he burst out, distaste clear even in the hoarse scratching of his voice.

"Yes, well…dear boy, you have stumbled into the very heart of something so very complex and important to the Utroms that I can barely wrap my mind around it. Brian and his people – all of his people, the entirety of HomeStation – are the descendants of a large group of refugees from your planet, from Earth itself.

"The Utroms are a very long-lived species, of course. And they've advanced far beyond the capabilities of almost every other sentient species out there. But they are just as curious, and just as driven by the occasional bad idea, as we are. Well, I mean, as humans are." The Professor couldn't blush, but managed to convey his embarrassment just the same.

"Apparently, the Council of about 3500 Earth-years ago decided to begin an experiment that would take several millennia to complete. They began looking around for species that might, with the right sort of guidance and direction, evolve into a people more like the Utroms themselves. One of those species was located on Earth.

"They discovered an island community, one that had a great deal of established culture, and determined that there was an active volcano at the heart of it. They were able to disguise themselves and persuade most of the population to leave with them, due to some immediate dangers posed by the volcano."

Don laid down again and watched the Professor with sleepy eyes, the blanket wrapped tightly around his torso. The story seemed so familiar – he yawned while he tried to remember…

"So for the last 3500 years, the Utroms have been supervising the lives of those refugees, and their descendants. They do it very remotely – the vast majority of the members of HomeStation have never heard of the Utroms – but they are carefully shaping these people. They are desperately trying to evoke certain mental abilities in these humans – the biological history of the Utroms indicates that they developed great mental capabilities, and these were the traits that allowed them to begin making great strides forward, scientifically and culturally.

"Brian, and a bare dozen other people from HomeStation, have the faint traces of something that might be those mental abilities. He's a very valuable person to them. And about ninety days ago, he simply vanished."

Don took a second to be wistful over this idea.

"Apparently he snuck onto a freighter from off-planet, with some intention of living a vagabond life. The Utroms, and Brian's own Family Council, were frantic to get him back, but he was nowhere to be found. And then his bio-sign finally turned up – in the worst possible place. The Triceraton Arena."

The Professor sighed. "It was a tricky thing, to get there in time. The Utroms and the Triceratons try to ignore each other as much as possible – there are too many eons of entrenched cultural differences for them to have any common ground right now. So diplomatic channels were not possible. Brian would simply have to be extracted, and quickly. But as soon as the Utrom ships were in range, another complication appeared – according to the scans they were able to make of him, Brian's latent telepathic and empathic abilities had been activated."

"Oh. This is where I came in," Don realized.

"Yes. Apparently the physical trauma and stress of facing his own incipient death caused Brian's abilities to manifest. And he seized on the most likely person around – you." The Professor's voice went solemn. "Donatello, I have to ask you – were you truly planning to kill him?"

"Kes had to kill, to keep his family safe," Don said, smothering another yawn.

The Professor brought his face closer to Don's heavy eyes. "Kes? Who is Kes?" he asked gently.

"Kes was me," Don explained. "They took everything away – my bo, my family, my honor, even my name – and they told me to do what they said, or my family's females would die." He shuddered, and let his eyes drift closed. "Professor…are they okay? Please tell me they're okay. It's only worth it if they are…"

"So there were extenuating circumstances…" the robotic voice went remote and thoughtful.

Yeah…extenuating…Don thought. He couldn't summon the energy to stay awake.

His last thought, before falling asleep, was the bitter realization that the Utroms hadn't known or cared that he was in the Arena at all, and that he'd only been saved because of his unwanted bond with Brian.