Chapter 45

It's been nearly a week since Thanksgiving… since I've seen Donnie. Excitement and nervousness make my hands sweat as I cross the turnstile threshold.

"Hey, Case, didn't think you were coming by so—April?" Raphael does a double take when he sees me stepping further into the lair.

"Hey, Raph."

"April, what're you doing here?"

"Good to see you too," I smirk, crossing my arms at his usual bluntness.

"I didn't mean it like that. It's just that the last time you were here wasn't exactly a Kodak moment."

"I know, but things are okay now."

"Your dad doesn't know you're here, does he?" Raph deadpans.

"It doesn't matter. I just needed to make sure Donnie was okay."

"Depends on what you mean by okay." Before I can question Raph, movement from one of the bedroom doors catches my eye.

"Donnie?" He turns and stares at me with wide doe-eyes, nearly losing his footing as he tumbles into Master Splinter's hold on his shell.

"April?" Master Splinter answers instead. It looks like it's taking everything within Donnie just to stay upright even with the support of his father. Splinter gives me a questioning look but says nothing. He nods for me to follow them to the lab.

Donnie's breathing is labored just from the short trip to his lab. Splinter helps him sit on the examination table. He still hasn't said a word to me, hasn't even looked at me.

"I assume your father does not know your whereabouts."

"No, Master Splinter, but I'm not going back. You can't—" Lifting his palm, he silences my defense.

"I have no intentions of forcing you to leave. Your invitation to our home has never been in question." I nod with a slight smile as I watch Donnie's unresponsiveness. It isn't until Splinter unties the white wrapping from around Donnie's waist that I realize he's hurt in some way. I flit around Master Splinter as he unwraps the white cloth to get a better look at his injury. That's when I see how much larger his shoulder, his entire arm is, compared to when I saw it just days ago. The area of his shell under his arm is chipped in several places and there's a crack that extends to his carapace. The cracks aren't the scary part; it's the dark, brittle color of his shell around his now exposed side.

Donnie's hands grip the edge of the exam table as Master Splinter takes an opaque ointment and rubs it along the underside of his arm and into the hole that exposes the soft flesh inside of his shell. I'm not sure if his tension is from pain or simple discomfort from having his 'insides' touched as Donnie trembles under his father's examination. Splinter removes his fingers from the gaping hole; his fingers brush against the corroding edges of the opening causing more of the brittle area to crumble apart. I glance at Donnie worried that he may be in pain, but he doesn't flinch from the sudden bodily loss. After rewrapping the decaying shell, Splinter pats Donnie on the shoulder and gives him a concerned look before turning to me.

"I will leave you both to talk." I give my sensei and second father an appreciative smile before he leaves the lab.

My heart feels just as broken as Donnie's shell when he still refuses to look at me. Stepping in front of him, I reach out to touch his cheek only for him to turn his head from me. Something happened after I left. This broken soul before me isn't my Donnie.

"Donnie. Talk to me, please." My patience is rewarded when he finally looks up and I see those sad, haunted eyes staring back at me.

"You shouldn't have come." His voice is so soft but clear all the same.

"Wha-what?" I lean away from his words.

"Didn't you get my letter?" His voice is a little stronger as his serious expression keeps me bound to where I'm standing. "It's dangerous for you to be here. I'm dangerous for you to be around."

"Donnie, I told you what happened in the sewers doesn't matter to me. You're still my Donnie. I still love you."

He shakes his head stubbornly, refusing to accept my words. "April, you're not thinking clearly. What happened in the sewers wasn't an accident."

I'm just as stubborn as he is as I reject his guilt. "You just felt threatened. It was self-defense."

He snaps his head in my direction, glaring at me. It's the most reaction he's shown since I came here. "No, it was not self-defense. I was hungry, he was a source of food, and I ate him. You can't rationalize this, April." His emotionless tone sends a shiver down my spine.

"Then… then it was just a side-effect from the radiation."

His pupils dilate larger than anyone's I've ever seen before shrinking again and revealing a more reddish tint to his irises. He jumps off the table in a swift serpentine fashion that I don't expect as I take a step stumbling step back. His entire body language is different now. As he circles me with purpose and strength that he didn't possess moments ago when Splinter all but carried him into the lab. Something is changing in him; he's like a totally different person. The hairs on my neck tickle my skin with static that I usually feel when I'm facing the Foot, but Donnie isn't my enemy.

"I was hungry, so I fed like any non-sentiment animal would. Had you been there, I would have gutted you like pig, too." His eyes glow red as he hisses and his jaw suddenly drops to reveal his canines. My heart painfully pounds against my chest in fear as I cover my mouth before a scream rips from my vocal cords.. "Now, that is the reaction you should be having."

His eyes dull back to a weary brown and the process of realigning his jaw sounds painful, when he winces as his teeth grind together. He gives me that look that I hate, the look that says he was right and I was wrong. "Do yourself a favor and leave." The sardonic sneer in his tone as he turns away makes me want to throw a beaker at the back of his head before I storm out, but instead I listen to his mind:

Show her what you are, it's the only way to protect her... scare her and she won't come back, she'll be safe.

It's a mantra in his thoughts but the bittersweet words are a cloak for a more sinister voice in his head:

Hunger... blood... kill her.

The two voices occupying his headspace sound so similar if it weren't for the content of the words, I wouldn't know the difference. Donnie is a protector, no matter what that second voice says.

"I know what you're doing. You're trying to scare me but it isn't going to work; I'm not going anywhere, Donatello."

"I don't know what you're talking—" He gasps as I lift my hand and his feet hover an inch above the ground. "April..." There's shock and worry laced around my name as it parts from his lips, and my hands begin to tremble from the levitation, but I place my other hand to my temple and ground my thoughts.

With the flick of my wrist, Donnie's body turns rigidly in the air to face me. "You're not the only one who can scare people." A metallic scent fills my nose but I keep him afloat pulling my fist towards me which causes Donnie to draw near to me. "I'm not leaving. You don't get to push me away again. That's not how relationships work! You can't just steal my heart and… and throw it away like a bad experiment!"

I can feel the air around me changing as static sparks around me. Beakers shake on a nearby table as I struggle to hold Donnie in the air with my telekinesis. My emotions are getting away from me, but before they go too far, I project them into Donnie's psyche. My worry, my fears for his well-being—my heart's affections for him that warms my toes and makes me light-headed—I empathetically show them all to him until both of our faces are wet with tears. "I love you, Donatello Hamato, and there's nothing you can say or do to change that." It's not until I'm eye-to-eye with Donnie that I become conscious of my own body's levitation. "We're in this together, no matter what." I whisper right before my arms wrap around his neck and his arms hold me close. I barely notice my powers give out on me as my toes touch the floor again. Donnie's embrace prevents my feet from completely connecting with the ground.

"I'm sorry," he breathes as he nuzzles the top of my head. His tears splatter against the side of my face before sliding down my neck, making me shiver from our closeness. "I just want to keep you safe and I'm afraid I can't." His bitter resolves melts away into something more sincere but less confident as he lowers me gently to the floor. His larger hand never leaves the small of my back as he reaches for a tissue on the supply cart. His normal hand wipes the tissue across my upper lip before showing me the specks of blood on it. "But you may not need my protection at all. Since when have you been able to levitate?"

"Um… since now?" I shrug with a sheepish smile. I did a bit of research at home on telekinesis but practicing on chemistry textbook is nothing compared to levitating a mutant humanoid turtle. "Did I hurt you?" He chuckles as he tosses the stained tissue in the waste basket.

"No, but being squeezed into submission by an invisible giant hand isn't an activity I'm eager to repeat."

"Sorry." I am sorry, but only a little. If he tries to push me away again, I'll levitate him upside down. I try to keep one foot in front of the other before I flop down on the medbay. Levitating both Donnie and myself took more out of me than I realized. Donnie looks even paler than he did when I first arrived as he sinks down beside me. "Scaring each other is a lot of work, huh?" My weak joke is rewarded with another chuckle as his mutated arm pulls me gently but snugly to his side. He quickly recoils from the action as he uses his other hand to rub the bandaged area under his arm. I wiggle out of his embrace, touching the tender area. "Does it hurt?"

"…It's just a little sore. Sometimes it feels…" He pauses considering his words. "It feels sore sometimes." He's lying but I let it slide, not wanting to push the issue too much right now. I'm just relieved he's okay…well as okay as he can be considering the circumstances.

My fingers ghost over his bulky arm. "Your arm… it…"

"Mutated….again. It happened last night. My shell can't accommodate the sudden growth, so.."

"It's breaking." I whisper as my eyes trace over the brittle bridge of his shell.

"It's not just breaking. It's…. decaying." I was hoping it wasn't true, but I've worked after school at a local veterinarian office long enough to know the blackened, brittle areas are telltale signs of shell rot. "I'm not sure if my body's trying to mutate or kill me," he jokes.

"That's not funny." He smiles sadly, stroking the side of my face apologetically. "So have you guys had any luck finding a cure?" My heart sinks when he shakes his head side to side. "My dad said the treatments won't help anymore."

"I know. I figured that out a couple of days before Thanksgiving. I don't know what else to do. Retromutagen will turn me into a regular turtle and my body's immune to the inhibitor treatments. I've exhausted every chemical variable involving my DNA and mutagen and I keep coming up short—the equation isn't balancing out; something's missing. My immune system has plummeted over the span of a few days and my mind is just…." He sighs as he massages his temple. "I just don't think I can figure this out in time."

"Maybe the cure isn't in a chemical formula?"

"What do you mean? It has to be a chemical formula in order to create a cure."

"Just listen." I hold up my finger for his silence and when he obliges, I continue. "What if the cure is here?" I point to his temple.

"Sensei tried already and the wall is barely holding up as it is."

"Wall? ...What wall?" After taking a deep breath, Donatello gives me a summarized recap of the growing voice in his head that led to the incident in the sewers and how Master Splinter used a healing mantra to build a wall in his mind to trap the dark voice, but it was only a temporary fix.

"April, this… this thing in my head is dangerous and the only thing keeping it from completely consuming my thoughts is the wall and it's already starting to wear down."

"I saw it…. the monster behind the wall." I whisper, getting chills just thinking about it.

"That's impossible, how could you have—"

"Remember that time you had a nightmare after one of your treatment sessions?" He nods. "Well, I went inside your mind to try and calm you down and that's when I saw it." My voice lowers and I feel silly because that thing is in Donnie's head, it can't hurt me in the physical world. That thought is of little comfort to me as I brace myself for what I'm about to propose. "You said so yourself that the wall won't hold it much longer, it's just a matter time. So, what if the key isn't trapping the darkness, but destroying it? What if it could be removed from your mind completely? Then maybe your body would start healing itself. It's like Master Splinter says, what affects the mind also affects the body and spirit."

"Okay, let's say we go with your hypothesis, how exactly do you expect to destroy an ethereal representation of pure evil?"

"I have a plan, of course." I plant a kiss on his beak. "Let's get the others and I'll explain everything." We're both drained, supporting each other as we stand. "And Donnie, you're not a monster." He entertains my affirmation with a forced grin and the look that I hate, only more subdued.

"It's getting harder and harder to believe that."

TBC

A/N: Hope everyone enjoyed the new chapter. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review. I love hearing from all of you! Just what does our fiery red-head have up her sleeve? Stay tuned to find out!

See you next chapter!

Poetique