Author's Note: Heads up everyone! It's been awhile since I last posted and all for a good reason. I've been going through all of my stories, including this one, and fixing grammar and other mistakes in every chapter. It's taken longer than I anticipated, but I'm happy with the outcome. Before reading this, I highly suggest rereading the story. It'll make a lot more sense and matches the current writing style. If you don't want to, it's all good. I won't keep you waiting any longer. Anywho, let's get on with the show. You guys are in for a treat!
Lights! Camera! ACTION!
We unlatch ourselves from Donnie's makeshift anchor and scramble into the side door of the plane, the wind nearly blowing us away and into the thousands of miles below. Leo yanks me inside after a gust of powerful gale almost steals me away from his arms. My feet meet solid ground with tumbling feet, my arms wrapped around Leo's lean abdomen as my backpack slaps against my back, and I've never been more grateful for something so stable. Whether I'm talking about the ground or Leo's stamina, I'm not sure.
Once inside, Donnie goes to close the door before we can be blown away only to find that we're surrounded. Half a dozen men dressed in tight black suits and masks rush toward us, only stopping to unsheathe their weapons. They raise their katanas high above their heads in defensive positions, silent and patiently waiting for our first move. It's another batch of Foot soldiers, like the ones from the police headquarters.
I do not like these guys. Not one bit.
"The good news is: you're wearing chutes." Raph says to them, sais in hand, more for show than fighting at the moment.
"Chutes." Mikey repeats playfully.
"The bad news is… " Raph ventures, taking a step forward.
One second the 6 men are armed and ready to fight and the next I'm watching them float away on their parachutes after the turtles flung them straight out of the plane.
Damn! I'd hate to be one of those guys.
Donnie finally closes the door, cutting off the wind from snapping at our backs and we make our way in. Blinding, round bulbs beam down on us in a harsh, white fluorescent light, casting shadows along the cargo. Boxes line the walls in high, neatly stacked columns, some covered with tarps and others strapped down with bungee cords. That is all, except for a single package. A wooden crate about two feet tall and a foot wide is perched atop another box, standing out amongst its counterparts. It's like every other package in the cargo hold, except that it's unlabeled. And being unlabeled means that it must be exactly what we're looking for.
Just so you know, I didn't think that up myself. I just so happened to be listening to Donnie as we made our way through the room in search of Shredder's oh-so desired missing piece.
May I remind you that I ain't smart like him? I mean seriously. I told you this: what? Two, three chapters ago?
Leo and Mikey grab the sides of the crate and tear it open easily, the nails and wood splintering to the floor to reveal a contraption I've never before seen in my life.
Imagine a trophy with a vase-like body slitted with yellow and grey metal and topped with some kind circular head like that of an old, tin cup. But then think of it as some kind of weird alien tech, so it's all shiny, curvy, and glowing, like they make it look like in sci-fi movies. Now picture it all in your head, all of that mumbo jumbo, encased in a glass box.
That's as best as I can describe it, so you better have a pretty good imagination to see it for yourselves.
"Okay. This must be what they came to Brazil for." Leo asserts.
The others gather around it in curiosity. I do as well, squeezing myself in between Leo and Donnie. I place my hands on the rough surface of the bottom crate, splinters brushing the palms of my hands. The device in front of me beams with artificial life, glinting against the clear glass. Up close, it looks more threatening than I had anticipated.
"It's an interdimensional portal thingamabob!" Mikey comments enthusiastically, the purple essence of the device radiating off of his boyish green features.
"Well, there's probably a more technical name for it, but…" Donnie corrects, inspecting it closely like a scientist at work.
"I don't know," I retort. "I kinda like what Mikey said. Sounds intelligent."
"Har har. You're a comedian." Mikey returns, grinning childishly at me through the prism of class, his smile warbled and purple. A grin of my own makes its way to my lips and-
God fucking dammit!!! Not again!
What did I say?! What did I just fucking say?!?! They are not my friends! They are not my friends! They are not my fucking friends!!!
How many times do I have to tell myself that before it sinks in through my thick ass skull?
"Hey! You're bleeding!" Mikey points at me, baby blue eyes wide with horror.
Oh shit!
I immediately swipe at my nose, streaks of red shining on knuckles. I wipe my hand on my pants hurriedly, hunching my shoulders like a cowering turtle hiding its head in its shell.
"I'm fine." I mutter, speedily trying to wipe away the trickling crimson like I haven't nearly broken my nose.
"No you're not." Leo states in my ear, almost rigorously as he hovers over me.
Putting aside that my cheeks flush with intense warmth when his breath beats against my ear and the fact that his face is a mere inch from my neck, I refuse to face Leo when my nose is a fucking faucet of blood. Yet I don't have to look at him to know that he's kneeled down to my eye level, his expression riddled with worry. He tries to turn me towards him, his giant hands firmly gripping my shoulders, but I plant my feet as heavily as I can, my own hands covering my mouth and nose.
Great. Now I've got the mighty and powerful Leonardo's shell in a bunch. What next?
"Uh, guys?" Raph says.
I look up at Big Red the "Fearless" Turtle (I still can't get over how Mr. Macho here has a fear of heights. I'd rub it all in his face, if I could) only to see that he's looking somewhere else, to his right to be exact. Raph grabs at the top of Mikey's head and with poised fingers pressing into his brother's temples, gently directs the orange clad reptile to where the red-banded turtle's attention has turned. Mikey gives a short, humorless laugh upon seeing it.
"Oh boy!" Says Leo after he catches sight of whatever it is Raph has seen and the leader stands up. He pushes me behind him protectively, sheltering me from our unexpected visitors.
I just had to say something, didn't I?
Peeking from behind Leo's bungling, clothed forearms, I witness Mother Nature's most monstrous creations saunter toward us. Two creatures stand on their hind legs not six feet away in all their gritty, grueling, 8 ft. wonder. One is a rhinoceros don in cargo pants and a worn leather vest, his arms entwined with dark tattoos that pop against his rough, grey skin. He breathes heavily through flared nostrils, his icy blue eyes watching us from under a heavy layer of flesh furrowed on his brow, each one gleaming menacingly from the sides of his humongous horn.
The other is a very hairy, very husky warthog in similar clothing. Folds of his belly fat hang over his black pants as his thick, purple-flame-tattooed arms clench into fists. Beetle black eyes peer over his pig snout as an animal-like noise squeals from his thick lips, yellowing tusks protruding from the corners of his mouth.
Immediately, I know that these two monstrosities are none other than the mutated versions of the low life criminals known as Bebop and Rocksteady. And I doubt they came in here to give us a warm greeting.
"Dude! Bringing back the mohawk?" Mikey asks lightheartedly. "Good for you!"
Now is not the time for formalities, Michaelanjelo!
"Ha! Y'all got jokes, huh?" The warthog speaks as he straightens out the spiked locks of violet atop his head. "But let's see how funny you are after we bash your heads in!" He pounds his fist into his palm and charges, the floor shaking with his thunderous footfalls.
Leo instinctively lets me go and races toward his attacker. Just before he can strike, Bebop swings out his arm and slams it right into the blue clad turtle's chest, causing him to fall on his shell with a loud bang. On the other side of the crate, Raph is tackled by Rocksteady, a hard and fast attack that would've easily taken out a Lineman on the Jets' football team. And just like that, a full-fledged battle unfolds before me.
Pop Quiz! Question: Have I ever been in a fight before? Like a real fist-to-face fight with split lips and black eyes?
As far as my short-circuited brain can take me, the answer would be no. So you can imagine my uncertainty when said battle takes place.
Suddenly, I'm yanked by the arm and into the side of a familiar being. Donnie stands in the middle of the fight, ushering me into his secure embrace as he holds up the alien device high above his head for safety.
"Watch it!" The purple-banded brother cries out as Mikey swings his nunchucks back and forth at the battle hungry warthog mutant, nearly connecting with the back of Donnie's head. "Careful!"
From behind Donnie, I watch as Raph lifts up the boulder of a rhino and throws him all the way to the other side of the plane, the impact an explosion of shattered wood.
Seeing that we're practically in the kill zone of this little war, I grab Donnie by the inside of his elbow and pull him away, towards the front of the room. Crates and packages are stacked along the wall, perfect for cover.
Just as we get there, an ear splitting pelting sound rings out, almost tsking. I turn to see what it is only to be shoved onto the floor violently. I slam face first into the hard metal of the ground, another burst of red gushing from my nostrils as a heavy figure prowls over me.
OW! What the fuck was that?!
It takes me three seconds to register that the sound was that of a gun. A big one with fast, loud, and deadly bullets, and are being continuously aimed straight at us. And the one and only person that's here to protect me from the line of spitting bullets is none other than Donatello, who curls himself around me.
If it wasn't for him I'd have more bullet holes puncturing my body than there are holes in Swiss cheese.
Dammit! Now I'm really in debt with these guys.
A rain of wood fragments and blasting bullets pours down on us for a solid ten seconds before they cease. Carefully, Donnie stands from his crouched position and helps me up, the strange contraption still in his clutch. I graze past his side, cautiously overlooking the room with one hand cupping my bleeding nose and the other hooked to Donnie's clasped hand.
"Dude! Seriously?" Bebop calls out to his comrade flabbergastingly a stone throw's away from us.
The other turtles stand up from their hiding places, seeing that we aren't being drawn and quartered by a lethal machine gun. The room is trashed. Nearly everything on our side has been mowed down to scraps from the spray of lead.
"Yep, that's my bad. I got a little carried away." Rocksteady, who's perched himself in a conveniently present war tank and proves to be the one to nearly gun us down, says in a thick Irish accent as he raises his hands up in surrender and off the handlebars of the giant gun.
Suddenly, the plane lurches with a piercing whistle and I fall to my knees, wrenched from Donnie's grasp. Looking up, I see that not only did the tank take out the stacks of boxed cargo, but a good portion of the front of the cockpit.
Oh my- That's not good.
The sky spirals with the jungle in swirls of blue and green and brown through the gaping holes of metal as the plane spins out of control. My stomach does backflips as the room turns and turns sickeningly. I grab onto the first thing I can find as the ground becomes the ceiling and the ceiling the ground, clutching the rope to a tied down, mangled box for dear life, now dangling from the roof of the aircraft.
Oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my fucking god!!!!!
All of the contents, from the leftover crates to the battling mutants, tumble with the motion of the aircraft in a cyclone of blurred color and noise.
What the hell is happening?!
Mikey appears from the tornado of scrambling contents and frantically bounces around the spinning cabin to grab ahold of the lost alien tech.
"I got it!" He yells when it's in his grasp.
"I'll take that!" Bebop proclaims as he snatches it straight out of the ninja turtle's hands and zooms away through the air.
"I don't got it!"
A box nearly chucks itself at my face before I swing myself to the right so it doesn't smack me upside the head. With a sickening turn, the plane swivels back to its upright position and I slam into the ground, my hip bone nearly cracking. I only have a second to wince at the pain before the turning starts again and I fumble for the rope, this time only one hand is able to grab on as I'm suspended in mid air.
Holy shit! Holy shit!!!
"Don't worry guys, I'll level out the plane!" Donnie cries out as he climbs his way back to the front, dodging a flying crate the size of his shell and probably three times the weight of it.
"Donnie!" I scream. My fingers burn as the rope digs into the flesh of my hand and I'm sure that if I let go I'll get sucked into the storm of cargo and mutants and crash into someone or something. Maybe fatally.
He turns to me and in the blink of an eye, leaps into the air, snatching me up and grabbing the back of the pilot's seat, hanging off of it with our feet flying behind us. I snake my arms around his neck tightly, squinted eyes watching the purple don mutant grunts with effort as he pulls himself to his feet with one arm and into the cockpit while the other he cradles me to his chest.
Said cockpit's roof has been completely torn to shreds by the tank's gun's previous blast, hunks of metal flying off, charred and smoking. Wherever the pilots went, they certainly aren't in their seats.
Maybe it's a good thing, for them at least. But for us, it just proves to be yet another obstacle before we can get ourselves out of this mess.
"And there's no cockpit." Says Donnie.
Well, he ain't wrong.
He plops me in the copilot's seat as he sits himself down and fervently grabs a hold of the abandoned wheel, pulling on it furiously.
The roar of the plane's engines whine in my ears deafeningly along with the rattling of the brittle, fragmented walls. My eyes are half blinded by the streaks of black smoke emitting from the bullet-gauged cabin, my clothes snapping at my skin, my hair billowing out of its ponytail and flying free as the wind strengthens, our downward descent steepening. The ceiling's gone, the twin windshields are empty frames with nothing but shattered glass wedged in their corners, and the view of the incoming jungle grows bigger with every second.
In a panic, I mash every button and pull every lever on the control panel as much as my little grubby hands can touch.
"Nothing's working!" I yell at the top of my lungs, banging my fist on a row of yellow squares that refuse to respond.
Oh my god! We're gonna die!!!
Donnie's still pulling on the wheel when it suddenly pops straight off of its holster in a burst of yellow sparks, the snapped end spewing wires and chunks of metal. A maniac alarm goes off at this, as if the plane had just realized that we were in deep shit. Donnie's jaw drops into a big 'o' as he stares at what's left of the wheel. I'm sure my facial expression matches his.
Oh shit! That's not good! Definitely not good!
"How we doing up there, Donnie?" Leo hollers up at us.
Fan-fucking-tastic! We just broke the fucking wheel to the plane and are about to nosedive straight into the fucking Amazon Rainforest. We are fucking fantastic, Leonardo!
"Uh, everything's great." Donnie calls back, clearly not great. "We're doing awesome." He says as he tosses the wheel out.
"Okay. Now what, genius?!" I scream at him.
"I don't know!" He hollers back. He looks around frantically, his gaze locking onto the stub of jagged steel where the wheel once was. With an assertive furrow of his brow, he raises an arm above his head, pulls out his electronically upgraded bo staff and shoves it straight into the broken wheel's stand. It stays, and he pulls on it with all his strength.
The jungle gets closer and closer and closer and closer. I can't take my eyes off of the blurring green of the rainforest and the shiny brown of the river below me.
Is this it?! Is this how I'm going to die?!
What once was seconds turns to long, drawn out hours as my thoughts race through my head at the speed of light, my focus on my oncoming deathbed never shifting.
If… if I'm going to die, I gotta ask: was everything I did, from surviving the treacherous woods of the unknown to ganging up with these secret mutant creatures of science fiction, worth doing? Was this journey of mine complete?
Wait! If I die, I'll never find out who I am! I'll never figure out where I came from, who my family is, what my real life was like. I'll die in this plane crash; nameless, lost, alone, and forgotten.
If that isn't scary enough, the next thought to register sends sweat prickling my spine.
Did my short life have any meaning? Did I serve my purpose? Did I fulfill some great prophecy and am about to fall to the same fate of those numerous tragic heroes in Greek Mythology who were sent on similar quests to mine?
Or did I fail it?! If I did, then would dying this way be a sort of punishment? Crashing into the Amazon with products of genetically and chemically synthesized creatures known as mutants fighting around me, only being caught in the midst of this whole fiasco and having nothing to do with it, a form of punishment? Knowing that I'm helpless and useless to these vigilantes and my failures only dragged them down with me to our demises?
Depressing, ain't it?
I know! I know! This is not the time or place to reflect past decisions or question the quality and quantity of my existence. But with Death greeting me and this plummeting plane with open arms for the ready, it's hard not to.
As my mind reels at the intensity of my thoughts, I glance over at Donnie who's still yanking on the electronic bo staff with a vice grip, lean muscles bulging on his forearms, veins dilating on his neck, eyes screwed shut.
He hasn't given up. He hasn't stopped fighting. He's not willing to die. No. He's not ready to die.
And neither am I.
I jump out of my seat and grab at a space of the staff above Donnie's clenched hands. I grind one booted foot on the floor and the other on the dismantled controls, close my eyes, and jerk the ninja weapon upwards.
I'm not going to die! Not today! And nobody on this fucking airplane is dying either!
All I see is darkness behind my clamped eyelids, but I can hear. Giant engines screech, fire crackles, smoke guffaws, wind howls, fabric flaps, Donnie screams.
If I'm going to die, I'll die doing something worthwhile.
Seconds go by. 3, 5, 10, 15, 20. I open my eyes slowly.
Are we dead?
We're not… We're not falling anymore! We're not falling anymore!!!
Instead, we race just above the Amazon River, gliding over the surface of the dirt tinted waters.
Holy fucking shit!
The plane inclines up and up and up until we're completely upside down. My legs are suddenly taken out from underneath me and I'm half thrown into the air. I hang from Donnie's bo staff, screaming as my body suspends a hundred feet over the Amazon. The plane loops nauseatingly like the world's most dangerous roller coaster until it's flying straight again and I'm sent back onto the floor of the pilot's cabin, gut knotting and feet stinging.
The aircraft bolts forward, creaking and rattling and jerking and wobbling. Donnie and I steer our makeshift wheel with all of our might, but it's like trying to wrangle a giant bull. We lose altitude, fast, and we crash straight into the river. Water surges from all sides and I'm thrown back from the cockpit, torn out of the bo staff's hold. A sudden shriek rips out of my throat as I shoot back so far and so fast I slam into the floor of the cargo hold.
OWW!
Water floods the interior of the plane before I can respond. One second I'm lying on my back praying my spine didn't shatter to bits and the next I'm submerged into the murky water of the river.
I'm thrashed and thrown through the warm currents. My body spins in the turbid brownness, my limbs being pulling into each and every direction as the water swells. Through slitted eyes, I see that said water has pushed me out of the sinking plane and into the open shallows where hunks of debris and cargo and mutant turtles float in the water, rays of sunshine beaming through the green and brown tide.
Mikey's nearby, spiraling not ten feet away from me. He catches sight of me as he stills, his cheeks puffed out with stored air, and points upwards before shooting up off of the river floor, streaking for the surface like a bullet.
It takes me a millisecond to realize that my lungs are burning in my chest, craving oxygen they've been deprived of for too long. I flap my arms furiously, pedaling my feet and arms through the rippling water until I burst out in a wave of droplets, inhaling mouthfuls of sweet, sweet air.
Note to self: Never take breathing for granted.
Wading around for a moment to get my bearings with the sun shining down on me in hot rays, I paddle my way to a bobbing, mangled box half scorched from Rocksteady's previous shooting, holding on for dear life as I take in lungful after lungful of air, soaking in the warmth of the sun and river. My dampened clothes drag at my body, weighing me down to exhaustion.
Goddamn! That was fucking intense.
The brothers come up in similar ways, spraying out of the freshwater depths and clumsily grabbing a hold of something buoyant. Their vibrant, moistened green skin gleams beautifully as if jaded with emeralds, twinkling with every heave and cough that spews from their mouths and slitted nostrils.
"Is everyone okay?" Leonardo asks aloud a few yards in front of me, his top half resting heavily on a hunk of the airplane's outer wall.
"I'm good." Mikey calls at my left, bandaged arms wrapped around a giant tire.
"I'm good." I wheeze out, hastily wiping away thick strands of freakishly long, sopping wet hair out of my face.
Another note to self: Cut hair to a reasonable length.
"I'm good." Donnie yells from atop a storage trunk. "Wait, where's Raph?"
"You guys lost him?!" I ask, flabbergasted, twisting to face the bo staff wielding brother, my spine corkscrewing painfully. "How can you lose someone as big as him? Seriously, that's like impossible." I wave my arm in emphasis, letting it splash into the water before once again hooking my fingers onto the nailed down lip of the box.
Leo turns to me. Even from where he is, his Carribean blue eyes glow against the wet, darkened cloth of his mask.
This is ridiculous! Did the mutagen change more than just their physique? Did it enhance his eyes so that they look like that? I wonder if they glow in the dark.
"Let's just say that the flight wasn't a smooth one." He says, wiping excess water from his mouth. "But I'm sure he's fine." He swivels his gaze over the jungle encircling the shore as if his brute of a brother will pop out of the greenery. As certain as he sounds, he sure doesn't look like it.
I scoff, remembering the whirlwind of cargo and mutants twirling violently through the innards of the plane, the exact opposite of "smooth". "That's for damn sure." I go to lick my lips only to taste something very weird and very distinct. The strong tang of iron makes my stomach churn and I wipe away the trickle of blood from my nose.
Goddammit! Not again!
Splashing sounds go off in front of me and I chance a glimpse to see Leo treading towards me, expertly swimming through the water like a trained diver.
Shit! He's seen it!
Knowing that I can't escape him, I duck my head so low my forehead grazes the sodden surface of the crate, my eyelashes kissing the grain of the wood pallets. His shadow casts over me before his weight dips down on the floating box, his hands on either side of my hunched form.
Oh my fucking god! I am not dealing with this! Not again!
Fed up with this bullshit, I face him head on. He rests his torso across from me, head bent down to mine. I can feel his legs sway underwater, his knees bumping into my feet every second or so.
"Are you-"
"I'm fine!" I bark out, interrupting him.
He jumps slightly, his head leaning back at my harsh words. But he remains where he is, his expression placid; calculating.
Come on! Take a hint, dude!
I groan. "Seriously, I'm fine. It's just a little blood." I swipe at my nose again, hoping the flow of crimson has at least thinned out. I turn away from him, focusing on some point off in the distance of the river and rainforest, praying that he'll go away.
Instead, he takes a deep breath, exhaling through his nostrils, the release of soft air ruffling the drying baby hairs on my forehead. "I wasn't asking about that." Says him.
I snap my attention back to him in surprise.
Is he… is he asking about how I'm doing? Like, how I'm handling this whole adventure of an operation?
Oh, I'm great! Fucking fantastic, in fact. 'I'm fine and dandy as a daisy' my ass!
What the fuck is going on?! First Mikey, then Donnie, and now Leo! All of them, one way or another, have shown that they care for me and my well being. From inviting me to bake cookies, saving me when the plane was nosediving, and now this! What's their deal? Whatever happened to them thinking that I'm some spy of their arch nemesis? Whatever happened to not trusting me? Not trusting the nut job from off the street claiming to have survived the wilderness outskirting civilization and having fucking amnesia? Like I'm worth their time and effort? Like I'm a real person they won't take advantage of and who has emotions and feelings and is actually lost and alone, caught in this mess with this bumbling band of vigilantes while on their mission to save their city and maybe the world?
It doesn't make any sense.
Before I can tell him off for giving a flying fuck about me, we're approached by a particular figure I'd rather go on living the rest of my life without ever seeing again. Bebop approaches us aloft his own mode of floating transportation, eyeing us and something ahead of us. Something square and purple, bobbing along the river carelessly.
The interdimensional portal thingamabob!
"Leo!" I yell, pointing to it. He sees it and tenses.
"Let's rumble, baby!" The warthog mutant calls from in front of us before belly flopping straight into the water, no doubt in pursuit of the contraption.
Leo turns his attention back to me, his once warm and caring persona vanquished and replaced with a cold, serious one. Like that of a man becoming a soldier in the blink of an eye. "Stay here and whatever you do, do not let go!" He unhitches himself from the crate and dives into the water.
Above me, the river turns into rapids, bubbling and foaming as water beats against rock in an epic battle. I approach it quickly, shaking violently as I fall down the mini ravine. Brown water sloshes at my sides and face, gurgling and raging as my body is bashed against boulders.
My shoulder slams into a rock.
Ouch.
My ribs slap into a fallen tree.
OW!
My chest bangs against the crate, hard.
OOOOWWWW!!!!!
Up ahead, through the spray of the choppy water, I witness the others struggle to stay afloat in the churning currents. Bebop and Leo race to retrieve the alien device, swimming through the rough fluvial and towered rocks. Donnie, still roosting on his trunk, reaches for the encased tech buoying at his feet.
"I got you! I got you!" He cries to himself. But just before his fingers can grab it, Leo's head pops out of the water, skyrocketing the device straight out of Donnie's grasp and farther upstream. "Leo! No!"
"Eyes up, Donnie!" The leader hollers back. He takes off after the glass case.
"Coming through!" Bebop screams, flapping and flailing through the thick of a miniature waterfall. He then plucks the contraption straight out of the frothing water and places it on a nearby piece of floating plane debris, hefting his broad self up onto it. "I got ya!" He cheers.
No sooner is he on his feet does Leo rupture from the raging river; a halo of droplets encompassing his form and shimmering like a glazened, mystic creature of lore; and expertly lands next to the warthog. In a flash, the leader in blue whirls in place and kicks the glowing device straight out of the criminal's hands and up into the air. He jumps, legs high, and swipes the glass case away with his foot where it sails into Mikey's arms, who sits in the center of his tire on the other side of the storming water. Or would have if he hadn't dropped it.
"I got it I got it I got it!" Mikey yelps frantically, desperately trying to steal away the device out of the spewing tide. He's just about to latch onto the thin metal frame when a wave the size of a two story house sends him flying. The tank from earlier and it's proud mutant rider, Rocksteady, blows out of the surging Amazon River like a rising monster charging for war, a tsunami erupting on all sides. Mikey is thrown out of his makeshift lazy river tube and flops into the stream while Donnie's struggling to find his balance at the sudden upsurge, arms waving around as he jumps to his feet, wobbling on a crate.
Oh my god! He's right in line with the tank's gun!!!
I go to scream for him to move only to see a blur of green and red pummel into Donnie's side, barely missing the missile that shoots out of the tank's barrel with a burst of smoke and sparks.
Thank you, Raphael. Ever the punctual turtle.
Said missile zooms overhead and into a giant tree out skirting the river and crashes into the trunk in an earth shaking explosion. The tree starts to fall, the center cracking deafeningly with resonating splintering of wood and roaring fire.
And, as luck would have it, I'm positioned right where the tree is about to land.
Oh my god! OH MY GOD!!!
"Leo!" I scream at the top of my lungs. Just as I unlatch from my crate to swim away, I'm slammed in the head and shoved under water. There's a commotion of bubbles and rushing water mixed with whipping tree branches and groves of leaves.
OW! God! My head hurts. Really bad. So bad I feel like I'm gonna pass out. Which in my case, wouldn't be the greatest thing to do right about now.
I gotta… I gotta get out of here.
I have to get out of here. Now!
But I can't. I can't get out of here. I have no strength. I have no control over my body. And I certainly have no way of moving this tree up and off of me and to the surface. All I know is that my head hurts, that there's a sinking tree laying on top of me, that my chest is burning from lack of oxygen, and… and… that it's so… peaceful.
The weightlessness of the river is almost relaxing; comfortable even, as if I'm resting on a sea of clouds instead of the bottom of the Amazon. The rushing currents are so fast and so loud, they sound almost silent and… I like it. I like the quietness of the racing water, like it's some kind of classical music. And the pain in my cranium only lessens when I close my eyes. The longer I keep them closed, the more the pain subsides. And I want to keep them closed for as long as I want, maybe never open them again…
I know that this is wrong. I know full, goddamn well that this isn't right. Not in the least.
Through heavy lidded eyes, I can see the long appendages of the fallen tree drape over my limp figure. I can see the smoke and fire from the blasted missile curl in the air through the rippling surface of the water. I can see bubbles escaping my mouth bounce over my head in spheres of silver, like lanterns floating in the midst of a tornado.
I shouldn't be doing this. I should be fighting. I should be hectically thrashing and punching and kicking the branches. I should be swimming to the surface and to the brothers and finding a way to beat Bebop and Rocksteady, retrieve the portal device, and save the world. I'm drowning for fuck's sake!!!
But… I'm so tired and… and…
Okay. So now I'm about to die. Nameless, lost, alone, and forgott… forgotte…
My eyes close slowly, the last thing I see before I slip into darkness is the vibrant blue hue of the sky shining through the rough brown of the river. It's the same color of Leonardo's eyes.
Leonardo's POV
I can't believe it. I just can't believe it! Honestly, this has to be one of the worst days I've ever experienced. Like if there was a competition to find the most horribly mismatched, floundering crime fighting teams, we'd win gold on the spot.
As if it wasn't bad enough we exposed ourselves to the New York Police Department (courtesy of Raphael), we travelled all the way to South America, battled two of Shredder's new mutant soldiers that are easily the size of monster trucks, crashed an entire cargo plane into the Amazon River, and fell down a humongous waterfall, only to have our mission blow up in our faces. And the way those two brutes just waved at us before we went over the falls; goofy grins on their gnarled, animal faces, holding up the portal device oh so gleefully as if it were some kind of trophy; really got me going.
As much as I hate to say it, Master Splinter's advice has had very little impact on our performance today. At every opportunity, one of us just had to find a way to screw things up, inevitably resulting in our tumultuous defeat.
Some team we are.
What was it that Master Splinter said? The thing about different points of view making the team stronger? Well, at this point it's doing the exact opposite. And our failure today goes to show just how much our different points of views are not contributing, but are clashing instead.
I burst out of the water, practically engulfing as much air as my lungs can take. The others come up too, treading in the shallow calm, gasping. Small waves lap at my shoulders, warm and smooth, foaming in clusters of white. It reminds me of a bubble bath, yet it does little to relax me like most signature bubble baths are known to do.
"Great work guys," I remark sarcastically. "Real team effort." I stand up, sending splashes up from the tide that now only reaches my knees. I turn away from them, downtrodden, and head up to land, my feet sloshing loudly as water cascades from my sodden shorts and flesh.
If any of the others hold anything against me for being so sour at this time, none of them say anything about it. Perhaps it's because they feel the exact same way about our supposed grand teamwork. Although I am surprised Raph doesn't take a bite and try to, oh I don't know, make it seem like it was my fault. A frequent habit of his.
Speaking of Raphael…
"Uh, guys!" Mikey pipes up all of a sudden. "Where's Raph?"
I snap my attention back to my younger brother and see for myself that our supposed muscle of the group is nowhere in sight.
Goddammit! Not again!
Didn't he come down the falls with us? If he hadn't, how'd he manage to stay up there while battling the strong current of the river? It was a struggle for all of us to even swim through all of that. Is he trying to fight Bebop and Rocksteady all by himself? Wouldn't surprise me. Where could he be?
And if Mikey's statement hadn't already got me on edge, his next one automatically stops my heart from beating in my chest.
"And the girl!" Mikey yelps, his voice iced with fear. "She's not here either!"
Oh my god!
"She's still up there?!" I retort. I can hear the panic in my tone, but I don't care. Not when she's out of my sight and in the vicinity of such danger. Especially without us! Without me!
Is she still up there? Is she with Raph? Did Shredder's henchmen snatch her out of the river and take her prisoner?
Wait! What if something's happened to her? Something bad?! Something fatal?!
I take a couple steps forward to stand shoulder to shoulder with Donnie and Mikey, the pooling lake crashing into my shins. We inspect the waterfall closely; frantic eyes shifting, nervous thoughts racing, crushing anxiety growing, the harsh sun shining, the pouring rain of hundreds of tons of brown water streaking down the mountain, thundering into the bed of boulders below.
Where could they be where could they be where could they be!
"There!" Donnie shrieks, pointing.
I follow his line of sight to a dot of brown and green plummeting down with the waterfall. I only catch a glimpse of it before it vanishes into the plumes of white spray.
That's Raph! It has to be him! It must be him!
We stand and wait, enveloped in an atmosphere of tension; anxious for our brother's arrival.
"Look!" It's Mikey's turn to point. This time, his finger aims at a swimming Raphael, a dozen or so yards away. His masked head bobs in and out of the water as he emerges from the depths of turbid brown. Something's in his arms; it's heavy, it's limp, it's motionless.
A horrid realization strikes me like a blast of lightning.
It's not a "something". It's a "someone".
Fear slams my innards and it takes every fiber in my being not to rush forward like a crazed maniac. The others join me in going after him, all of us hoping yet knowing who's in Raphael's arms while plashing feverishly. He approaches us quickly, swashing through the tidal in a hectic sprint.
"What happened?!" I shout, unable to contain my own hysteria.
"It's the kid! Damn tree fell on top of her!" He hollers back. "She's not breathing!"
Oh my god! Oh my god!
He's now in front of us, cupping the girl's body in his arms as he trudges up, his hold on her almost vice like as if he were to let go, she'd disappear in a cloud of vapor.
I crowd into Raph's side as we continue our frenzied march to the shore. I can't take my eyes off of her, even if I can't fully see her with Raph's bulbous arms barricading her figure. Her arm sways back and forth from Raphael's embrace, cold and stiff.
Raph sets her down gently as we gather around him. I get down on one knee, my clothed kneecap and toes digging into the sodden sand painfully, hovering over her. When Raph pulls away, my stomach twists into knots at the sight.
Oh my god!!!
She's completely and totally pale, her lips blue, eyes closed. Her long hair is fanned out around her head in wet locks of black. Unmoving, still as a log. Or as still as a dead body.
Oh my god! Oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god!!!
"What do we do what do we do what do we do?!" Mikey screeches in front of me.
I don't look up from the lifeless girl, too enraptured in my hysteria, but I already know that Mikey's having a full blown panic attack. His baby blue eyes must be giant saucers on the brink of tears, hands clenching and unclenching at the sides of his head, shifting his weight onto the other foot every five seconds.
Gotta do something! I have to do something! Now!
Think think think think think thiiiinnnkkk!!!
"D-Donnie!" I half stutter, half scream. "What do we do?"
"Uh…" He pauses, gaze flicking as he rattles his brain.
"Come on, Donnie!" I bark. "Give me something!"
"CPR!" He blurts out.
"How do I do that?"
"30 chest compressions, close the nostrils and breath in her mouth three times. Repeat!"
I quickly position myself before the girl, kneeling down by her side completely, legs half buried in the gritty sand. My hands shake as I interlock my fingers and use the heels to press down on her sternum.
"1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9…" I whisper under my breath as I compress. My large hands take up a good portion of her upper torso, dwarfing her body as she rocks to my movements.
I don't know if I'm pressing too hard or too lightly. I need to push out the water lodged in her throat, but I can't crush her ribs.
Dammit mutagen induced super strength!
After 30, I lean my head over hers, pinch her small nose shut, and press my lips onto her open mouth. I breathe out until I see her chest rise ever so slightly before resting my head over where her heart should be, listening.
Nothing.
I breath into her mouth again and go to listen to a heartbeat, if there is any.
Nothing!
I do it again.
Still nothing!
Come on. Come on! Stay with me!
I repeat the 30 compressions, my blood pounding in my ears as the heels of my hands cram into her chest over and over.
I never look away from her face. The face I've gotten to see every minute of every hour for the past three days. The face of the little girl with amnesia. The face of the little girl who always has a snarky comment ready for the say, lopsided smirk proudly crinkled on her lips, the jagged scar on her left cheek stretching. The face of the little girl who knows of my bearings and worries, who sees past my facade of order and leadership to see the anxious little boy I am inside. The face of the little girl who has no name.
Come on!
Please please please! Please! Come back! Breath! Just breath! Please!
After another round of blowing air into her mouth and listening to a mute heart, the back of my eyes are starting to burn.
Please come back please come back please come back!
I only realize that I'm saying this aloud when Donnie speaks up.
"Leo…" he ventures quietly.
"Come on come on come on…" I hiss, my vision blurring.
"Leo. She's-"
"No." I breath into her mouth, my lips lingering before my sensitive ears desperately try to catch the smallest thump of her heart.
Still nothing!!!
"She's gone." Donnie's voice says.
"No no no no no no no…" I mumble, once again pounding my hands over her still chest.
"Leo!" Raph speaks up this time. But he sounds distant, as if he were calling to me from the end of a long tunnel.
"I'm not done!" I yell over my shoulder, blurry gaze steadfast on the girl.
Breath, dammit!
"Leo!" Raph screams, yanking me away and forcing me to face him, strong hands gripping my arms as he pulls me away from the girl. His green eyes shimmer in their sockets, his scarred mouth contorted into a grimace. "She's gone!" He stresses, shaking me vigorously as if trying to wake me up from this hellish nightmare.
But this isn't a nightmare. This is real. All of it is. The girl is real. The girl who lies colorless and in breathing is real. And she's… she's…
I release a shaky breath.
No… No! She-She can't be gone! She can't be! She can't!!!
I turn back to her. She's still not moving. Her skin and clothes shine with dampness, her head lolling to the side. She's quiet, motionless, pale…
It's not her. This isn't the girl I've come to know. This isn't the girl who rode a motorcycle into the middle of Shredder's escape. This isn't the girl that's a mystery not only to me, but to herself. This isn't the badass girl who was willing to jump out of the airplane with me and did, whooping and hollering and laughing at my side. That girl is gone. And all that's left is her body.
All I can do is hear. I can hear Mikey sob above me loudly, I can hear Donnie whimper into his hand, I can hear Raph breath choppily, I can hear the small waves crash against the shore of the Amazon River, I can hear the waterfall's violent waters sail down to earth and smash into the eroding boulders stories below it. But I can't see through the sheen of unshed tears brimming at my eyelids. I can't feel the pounding of my heart beat against my shell, but I know that hands hover over the body of the girl, quivering.
She's just a kid! She's just a kid and-and now she's… she's…
Am I crying because there's a dead body in front of me? Is it because someone I've come to know and care for lies lifeless at my knees? Or is it because I had lost the soul of a spirited young woman who's now dead? Maybe it's one of those or all of those, but only one thing is for certain: it's all my fault.
And then… oh my god! What's happening?! Did I just see her finger twitch? Did she just move?
Before I can voice my thoughts aloud, the girl; once proclaimed stone-cold dead; shoots up and spews mouthfuls of tinted water from her mouth.
Oh my-Oh my god! She's alive! She's alive!!!
She's breathing! She's coughing and blinking and moving and breathing and spluttering and vomiting and alive! She's alive!!!
On instinct, I scoot forward and place a hand on her back, the other holding her drenched hair out of her face. She stops, taking in copious amounts of oxygen, a hand pressed over her heart, a beating heart, as she looks up at us with large chocolate brown eyes.
No. Not chocolate. Russet. Dark and murky, but they glow bronze when she looks up where the sun shines on them.
Her body heaves as she inhales and exhales compulsively. She looks at each and every one of us, scanning our faces with a wide, horrified expression. She looks scared and confused.
Who could blame her?! She practically just came back from the dead!
"Are you okay?" I ask hurriedly. I let go of her tangled mesh of wet hair, hands floating around her as if waiting for her next move. Waiting for her to either stand up or fall back down again.
She turns to me slowly and although pale, her cheeks arise with a pink blush. She drags out a long huff of air through her nose.
"What-What the hell do you mean by if I'm okay?" She asks.
I blink in surprise. Although I know it's meant to be a sarcastic comment, her voice is weak and lacks the air of snarkiness she wields almost joyfully. So her statement seems hollow, out of place.
"I… I drowned and-and now I'm here so-so…" She pauses for a second, as if the news of her revival is just sinking in. But no sooner is she lost does she look back up at us, grinning feebly. "I'm f-fucking fantastic!" A small giggle escapes her dry lips and I can't help but release a short chuckle of my own.
I'm not sure if it's the actual sarcasm in her words that make me laugh or the fact that she just said that after nearly dying, but I laugh either way and I can feel the brothers smile back at her.
She goes to stand, her legs and hands trying to find a hard surface to place her weight on only for her knees to buckle. I catch her before she collapses back onto the shore. Without explanation, I scoop her up into my arms and mount to my feet. My hands encircle her small form, grains of sands impaling my palms and the water trapped in her clothes squeezes out onto my wrists. She doesn't protest against my actions.
She's alive. The girl with the scar, the amnesia, the guts, the russet brown eyes, and the mouth of a cursing sailor, is alive and well in my arms. Her large eyes beam up at me, her small hands clasping onto my shoulder.
"Let's go home." I say before walking off the short strip of beach. The others follow after me in silence.