Hanami – Chapter 12
Raphael finally felt warmed up. His coat was draped across a stump, and his breath made white puffs in the frigid air. He had begun his workout behind the barn, out of sight of the house and under a glass covered forest. Dawn was pinking the horizon and the light glittering through the ice-covered trees was dazzling. The cold woke him up, and the beautiful woodland distracted him from darker thoughts. The whole thing was a picture postcard; 'Damn! Aah! Nature!' It wasn't quite ancient Japan, but the ice storm smothered all the noises of the New York countryside. 'No highway sounds, no birds, no squirrels… no brothers.' He had the whole world to himself. His own perfect kingdom – at least it was until one of his high kicks knocked all the loose water droplets from a pine tree directly down the back of his neck. "Yeah! Shit! Shit! Goddamn trees! That's fuckin' cold!" He knew better than the attack the tree, but he'd broken the rhythm of his exercise, and that pissed him off more than the water down his neck. 'Well, almost more.' He moved out from under the pines and drew a deep breath searching for the calm had drained away under the impromptu cold shower.
'High kick left, use the momentum to bring the body around. Transfer the weight, still using energy from the first kick. High kick right, dropping the body, sweep-kick left, follow the right punch back up…' He didn't really need to focus on the words. They were only sensations: stretching his leg or bracing his body with the very ground he stood on. If asked, he could never have explained it. Words got in the way. The instant you put a name to something, you were thinking too much. He pushed himself further from words and more toward feeling towards that comfortable void. It wouldn't do to concentrate on it too hard, the calm would slip like water through his fingers.
'Ok. Do not panic. It's the outside. You know all about the outside, girl. You've seen movies, read books, and windows! Yes, windows! You've seen through a number of those in your day. The ground is the same as inside. Concentrate on what you know: the ground.' TwoSee had wandered off the porch and made it about 5 yards before the incredible amount of space around her made her drop to the ground. 'Damn, the sky was BIG.' She'd never set foot outside a building before in her life. 'Least not while conscious anyway.' Now there were no walls around her. There was no ceiling above her. Just empty purple-blue. She shut her eyes against the vertigo. She couldn't shake the feeling that if she stood up, she would fall away from the ground. She pressed her face against the icy grass and tried to pretend it was really weird carpet.
Raphael spun a combination kick toward the house. He stopped and stared.
One of the girls was outside. She was wearing one of his brother's trench coats, but it was huge on her. It almost touched the ground, and the sleeves covered her hands completely. Standing in the middle of the lawn, she kept hunching over and crouching back down again. She seemed to be looking in the sky for some thing. As he approached her, he could see that she was plainly distressed.
He watched her push herself off the ground, trying to figure out her balance. She still seemed freaked out, but he knew that she couldn't do herself harm in the middle of the yard. He just figured, 'This one's nuts. She's bitten me, growled at me, and now she's doing some weird-ass interpretive dance on the lawn. Hell, I'd be way crazier than that if I'd been in that fuckin' box. Wonder what else she'll do.' He squatted down on the lawn to watch.
Truth be told, the cold air was clearing TwoSee's mind rapidly. She was beginning to remember the events of the previous evening and her actions no longer seemed quite so well justified. 'God, I bit him. Way to go, girl. Talk about your first impressions…' She groaned inwardly at her own pun.
She looked up. She froze. He was four feet away, sitting on his heels and watching her. She felt her face blush dark green.
Raphael saw her blush, 'That's one of the first normal things I've seen this one do yet.' "My name's Raphael." He extended a hand. "You wanna go back inside?"
Relief bloomed on her face; she nodded vigorously.
'An' I thought Leo was a freak…' Raphael stood up, "Okay, don't worry now, I'm just gonna carry you to the porch." Before she could argue, he'd scooped her up and deposited her on the wooden floorboards of the house. He backed away quickly, still unsure of what would provoke her. He went to open the door for her, but she shook her head 'no' and moved to sit on the floor with her back to the house.
She rolled up the sleeves of her coat, and figured out how to adjust her belt. With the morning sun on her face, Raphael thought she almost looked peaceful. Her skin was a dark green, and like Shima, her stripes were a golden color. They followed the contours of her cheekbones. Unlike her sister, her stripes came forward and traced the line of her collarbones for a bit before dipping beneath her plastron. Her beak and chin were a little too sharp for Raph's tastes, but he figured, 'Heck, they all look half starved, I bet she's actually —' He cut himself off. 'Nope. Not going t' even think. She's a looney. Psycho girl.'
He sat down a few feet from her and closed his eyes to enjoy the warm sunlight on his skin. He was so lost in the warm glow, that he jumped slightly when he felt her touch his hand. She was tracing the line where her teeth had punctured his skin. He looked up at her questioningly.
TwoSee looked him in the eye, opened her mouth, and rolled out an uncanny impersonation of Raphael. "She bit me! She FUCKIN' bit me!" She dropped her eyes and pulled a sheepishly embarrassed face.
Raphael had no idea what to do, so he just let his mouth start talking. "Why the hell'd you do that anyways? We hadn't hurt you had we?"
She looked away and shook her head 'no.'
"So why then?"
She drew a deep breath and began to speak. Raphael had never heard anything like it. Her voice sounded like 2 or 3 different people talking in unison. It was so unexpected that he missed everything she said.
"Uh, sorry but, your voices – I mean voice – I mean…"
She looked a bit uncomfortable, then raised her head so her could see her neck. Where her voice box should have been there was a raised mass. It looked like a particularly wide adams' apple. It wasn't terribly prominent, but it wasn't quite normal. There was a scar running across it +"Birth defect.,"+ she mumbled. +"Double voice box. No one noticed until after I'd been mutated, then the humans couldn't leave well enough alone. They opened it up to see how it worked. I guess when they closed it back up it didn't heal quite right. So now I've even more voices then I should."+ She smirked. +"My sisters are used to it, but it does take new people by surprise."+ Looking up with a smile, she sang in harmony with herself, +"Would you like to swing on a star? / Carry moonbeams home in a jar/ And be better off than you are/ Or would you rather be a turtle?"+ She chuckled, +"Yup, OneSee teases me about it all the time. She says that I'm my own choir. I'm good with sounds, mimicking I mean."+
Raphael tilted his head, "OneSee?"
She nodded, +"Yeah, she's the one with that horrible wound on her side. She'll have to get that tended to before the sedative wears off. Something tells me you guys don't have much in the way of anesthetics here."+ She gestured at the old house and peeled a paint chip off the wall.
"Oh! She's Cabbage! Well that explains that."
+"That explains nothing."+ Her stare prompted him to explain further.
"Well there's four of us guys, right? Leo, Don, Mike, and me. Master Splinter is the mutant rat who raised us." She nodded. "Well, we each took a crate and tended the turtle inside it. Mike got Cabb- OneSee. He's a goofball, and he decided that until she could speak for herself, he was gonna call her 'Cabbage." Raphael shrugged, "He's a little dip-shit really."
+"That does explain things. Last night I faded in and out of sleep but I could have sworn I heard somebody talking."+ Out of her mouth poured some quintessential Michelangelo, "Sweet Dreams, Cabbage… You are a totally bodacious babe!"
Raphael laughed so hard he felt his eyes watering. "Yeah, that's him alright!"
+"So have any of my other sisters been renamed? How about me?"+
Raphael grinned, "He named C-3 or ThreeSee, I guess --" She nodded "Frogger' because she had long legs. And my dull-as-brick brother Leonardo called the other girl with the yellow stripes 'Shima.' Apparently that's Japanese for 'stripe.' But no, no one had any nicknames for you."
TwoSee chuckled, and extended her hand. +"We got off to a bad start. My name is TwoSee. I'm sorry about yesterday. I know it'll just sound lame, but I really wasn't myself."+
+"I must have seemed insane to you. Heh. Yesterday I probably qualified. You see both Cabbage and I experience rather inconvenient side effects whenever the humans use that drug on us. In my case, the sedative knocks me out, but it also does a number on the balance of the chemicals in my brain. For Cabbage; it feels really weird to call her that; anyways, as for Cabbage, it actually causes temporary muscle paralysis. For Frogger – Does she know you've been calling her that? She hates frogs. Well, It just makes her abominally sleepy for a week or so, even after it's supposed to have worn off. With Shima, well for her it just works. No side effects what so ever."+
As they headed into the kitchen for breakfast, Raphael thought of the one particular side effect that Shima had already suffered.