Hanami – Chapter 33
+"Leonardo and the guys are back! It looks like they've got her with them!"+ Pipes, Shima, and Cabbage threw open the back door and all but tackled their sister. Pulling her into the kitchen, they bombarded her with questions.
"Where have you been?"
"Do you have any idea how worried we were?"
+"You're filthy! What happened to you?"+
"Are you ok?"
Sterling kept her head down and hugged her sisters back. Raphael cleared his throat, "Well, where was she?"
Donnie answered. "We found her in the barn, playing with the welding equipment."
On the word 'playing' Sterling's head snapped up. She shot him a glare that would have stunned a full-grown yak at 50 yards. "Oh. My. God." Sterling turned to her sister. Cabbage was reaching toward her face. "What did you do to yourself?" Sterling gently pushed her sister's hands away, only to find that her cheek was now the focus of eight pair of eyes.
Splinter sighed heavily, and gestured for her to sit. "Michelangelo, please, some tea." He gathered his thoughts and almost smiled. There was a time when he would have thought daughters would be easier to raise. Setting tea in front of Master Splinter and Sterling, Mike settled back against the counter.
Cabbage studied her sister quietly. Most of Sterling was no longer green. Her feet and legs were muddy. Her shell was caked with dirt. Soot coated her arms and face, except for the outline of clean around her eyes where she'd been wearing goggles. The only evident bruising ran down the side of her face. It was a beauty though: deep purple-black and puffy. It showed less on her dark green skin, but on her light yellow striping it stood out like a lone cloud across the sun. 'It's hard to tell without getting closer, but that kind of swelling and discoloration takes time. That must've happened earlier today, by a few hours at least.'
Splinter looked to his daughter. "My child, please drink some tea and relax." He sipped his to encourage her. "We will let you have your say, but you have worried us all greatly." Sterling stared at the table.
'I don't think I can get the tea in my mouth, let alone "have my say." She knew it looked like she was being stubborn, but she wasn't sure how to explain things without upsetting everyone even more. Cabbage came to her rescue.
A straw landed on the table between Sterling and Splinter. "You can't open it, can you?" Sterling grabbed the straw. She hadn't realized how thirsty she was until the tea sat in front of her. Cabbage continued the one-sided conversation. "I don't know what you did to your jaw, but swelling like that takes time to form. And since you can't even open it wide enough to sip tea, or make ugly faces at me, I'm gonna assume that the ligatures in your jaw joint have tightened up quite nicely. Ordinarily, if you had come to me say in the first HOUR or so after it happened, I could have given you some hot and cold pack treatment. It wouldn't have stopped the stiffening if the joint was fractured or broken, but for anything less than that you would have been fine. Tender, but fine. You would at least have been able to take some Tylenol or something." Cabbage sighed, "NOW, hours too late, I get to poke at your puffy head and try to guess how long you'll be eating through a straw." Cabbage grabbed the empty teacup from her sister, refilled it with water and handed it back. "You are so PIG-HEADED!"
"Raphael?" Raph nearly jumped out of his skin.
"Yeah Leo?"
"I don't suppose you know what happened do you?"
"What's that supposed to mean?"
Splinter knew his son far better than he knew his daughter. "Something is troubling you, my son. Come sit with us."
'Oh man. I'm gonna catch it now.' Raph dragged out a chair from the table and sat, staring up at the ceiling. Splinter placed his hand on Raphael's, "Please. She cannot speak for herself."
At that, Sterling waved a frantic hand in the air and mimed writing, one hand as paper, her other hand as pen. From the panic in her eyes, Raphael was certain she was gonna try and cover for him. "It's ok. I'll tell 'em." She shook her head sadly.
Raphael focused on her eyes across the table. "I hit her. I lost my temper and I hit her." She'd shut her eyes and cringed at the words. Raphael looked up in the complete silence and felt the shocked stares of his family. His brothers, looking like they didn't know him anymore, had yet to break the horrified tableau. His sisters, however, were not shy.
"YOU DID WHAT?!" Cabbage had completely lost it. Her eyes burned into his mind. "YOU BROKE MY SISTER'S JAW?!" She was shaking, "YOU HIT HER BECAUSE YOU LOST YOUR TEMPER?! WHAT DID SHE DO TO DESERVE THAT?"
Imediately, Raphael shot back, "IT WAS AN ACCIDENT! She said she was fine! That she'd been hit plenty before, that her teeth weren't even loose! I didn't know how badly she was hurt!"
Pipes squinted at him. +"Yeah. She's always been mouthy, disobedient, and stubborn. There's been plenty of times that a human's broken a few bones on her just to 'put her in her place.' Was she 'out of line' Raphael? Because no matter what the humans did to her, they always brought her back to her family! YOU LEFT HER OUTSIDE AND DIDN'T SAY ANYTHING TO ANY OF US!"+
Shima put a restraining hand on Pipes. Very quietly, Shima addressed her new brother. "What else did you do to her, Raphael?" Coming from Shima, that question carried far too many unpleasant associations.
The color drained from Raphael's face, "You think I raped—"
+"She is covered in mud. You broke her jaw. You didn't bring her back to the house. Didn't bother to tell any one that anything was wrong. You admitted you tackled her when we were out looking for her earlier. She was too ashamed to come back inside. All in all, it's a reasonable question."+
"No! I most certainly did not!" Raphael looked across the table at Sterling. She was shaking her head 'NO' emphatically.
"WHY SHOULD WE TRUST YOU?!" Cabbage pointed to Sterling, "She's clearly upset! How do we know she isn't agreeing with you just to keep from getting hit AGAIN?"
Sterling stood up. She walked around the table. She put her hands on Raphael's shoulders. She made eye contact with each member of her family. Then with a horrible popping noise, she parted her jaws, "…Accident…" and her world went black.