THE SOMA SAGA VII: VENGEANCE
Withdrawal is no cakewalk. It took until two days after first waking up for my mind to process what my brothers told me had happened. The three of them devoted themselves to my recovery, from Don staying up with me through sleepless nights, to Mike cooking gargantuan portions of my favorite foods in an attempt to reawaken my appetite, to Raph building my strength back up through all the muscle tremors and cramps. It was a team effort; to show solidarity, Raph and Mike gave up smoking and drinking, and Don even quit his coffee habit. They knew their own resulting headaches or irritability were molehills compared to the mountain of my recovery.
The withdrawal made my panic attacks and anxiety return tenfold. They'd strike me randomly, with no provocation, and lasted for what felt like eternities. Now, instead of handing me a pill, Don had a more 'hands-on' approach to treating me in my state. He'd lay me down on a couch or bed, snuggle himself alongside me in a chaste way, and lock his fingers with mine, telling me everything was going to be okay and reminding me to breathe. Between that and leading me through meditation three or four times a day, Donnie had really become my anchor. I wasn't in any state to go further with our intimacy than that, but clearly that wasn't an issue for him; he was just looking out for me, trying to ground me there in the real world.
Other than my brothers and my own will, nothing stopped me from getting lost in the nightmares and the hallucinations that I couldn't often distinguish from one another. I wished I could crawl out of my own shell, to rid myself of the constrictive, confused haze I felt buried in both night and day. Despite all that, I didn't think to harm myself or try to end it all. Having three guardian angels orbit me around the clock, and submitting to their care and responsibility, was the best medicine I could ask for. No matter how much I thought Tylenol would ease my migraines or chills, or Nyquil would help me find some kind of restful sleep, Don was strict about my detox being completely drug-free. Pharmaceuticals were what made the problem worse, he told me, so there was no sense in using them to try to improve it.
One effect of coming off the pills was feeling every pain increase drastically, but I pushed through the burn of exercise out of principle and a need to release anxiety, even if it meant I was too sore to move my arms afterward. Once, after a light weightlifting set with Raph, Donnie hit the showers with me and had to wash my whole body for me. Before the overdose, I'd have enjoyed it, but in the racing mentality that haunted me since I'd woken up, my eyes started to tear up as his arms wrapped around my waist to scrub around the base of my tail. I let out a muffled sob into his shoulders, and he dropped the soap in shock, not quite sure how to comfort me. So much of me wanted what we had before, to give in and make love, but all my negative thoughts about the implications flooded back every time I humored the idea. The constant conflict between the two was the hardest part of getting better.
After two weeks, I was finally sleeping restfully and seeing with enough clarity to start something resembling regular training with my brothers. We moved at a beginner's pace, but simply going through the motions at all reminded me what it felt like to have some purpose in life. Raph had stepped up to lead our practices until I'd improved more, and even still looking slightly pale and hollow, I was still eager to take the reins back from him. It was the first time I'd ever seen our ninjitsu training from their perspective, following one of our brothers as leader. I accepted my limitations with as much grace as I could manage, but Raph was more a strategist than a sensei. Practices under him meant close-quarters hand combat, hitting targets with blowguns and throwing knives, and improve weapons training with metal pipes or lengths of rope. Though at first, my body was unsure of its movements, I forced my mind to take control and concentrate on doing the best I could to prove I was still the leader. No matter how much discomfort it caused, I breezed through every lesson after getting the basic gist of Raph's style.
"Hey, I been waiting a long time to take a crack at this 'fearless leader' gig." He told me one morning after training. He popped a toothpick in and chewed it between his teeth, as he'd taken up in the process of kicking cigarettes. "But I'll make a deal with you. Mike and I have had our eye on a warehouse in South Queens that's moving a lot of Purple Dragon product onto the street. That's what all my training's been about. Originally, I was gonna take him in as my partner, and let you run tech support in the Battle Shell with Don. But if you're up to it, you come in with me and prove you can run the show again. Mike'll be lookout."
"Hey, that's not fair!" Mike huffed. "You know how many gangbangers I had to knock around to find out about the warehouse?"
"I said, Mike'll be lookout."
"Are you out of your mind, Raphael?" Don interjected. "Leo hasn't been topside once yet, let alone in combat with potentially dozens of Purple Dragons!"
"Which is why I'll have his back if he needs me." Raph put his foot down. "Leo's healing made all of us stronger. Between training like we've been doing, and kicking smoking, drinking, and...everything else that's been going on, the team's more prepared than ever to handle this." He turned back to me. "So, what do you say?" It took me a moment to process it all.
"I'm in." I finally declared. "Enjoy your last night as leader." That elicited a smile from him.
Seeing as all three of my brothers had been going topside in disguise only now, I dug around in the closet before we left for the rumpled hoodie and oversized jeans that made up my street wear. Sliding on the beanie and pocketing my sunglasses until we hit the surface, I shut my eyes and drew in a deep breath as I shut the door behind me. My feet were starting to tingle from the worries I had about the night's mission. When my eyes opened, Don was hanging in the doorway, looking straight at me.
"You good to go?" he asked. I put my worry aside to smile.
"Hell yeah."
Raph laid out his instructions for the mission as we made our way through the tunnels to our garage topside, and drilled them again as we cruised through the Midtown Tunnel in the back of the Battle Shell. I repeated them in my head even as Donnie parked the van about a block away from our target, in an alley opposite the murky waters of Newtown Creek, glittering with the reflection of the city lights. Mike hopped out of the back door, and we heard the sounds of him scampering up the fire escape from inside.
"This is Triton, camp is set up and there's no ducks on the water." His voice buzzed in my earpiece.
"This is Einstein, roger that." Don got out of the driver seat and flicked on the monitors along the side of the interior. "You guys ready?"
"This is Kamikaze." Raph slid his helmet over his face. "Operation Nightshade is a go."
"This is Brahma. Moving to the dock." Out the back we burst, hugging the shadows along the wall and rolling like pill bugs across the empty street until we could duck back into invisibility along the edge of the warehouse.
"Team Brahma-kaze, hold position." Mike buzzed in our ears, and we became statues. A hooded figure emerged from the office door, lighter clicking in his hands as he put a cigarette to his lips. Suddenly, he froze in place. A hand rose precariously to his neck, and I could make out the silhouette of a blow dart just below his jaw as he slumped to the ground.
"Thanks, Triton." I sighed. We gingerly stepped around the body, and rounded the corner to the loading area, where a stack of shipping containers gave us a path to the roof. We scampered up to the top, Raph jumping the gap to the warehouse roof first and I following close behind. A row of glass panes on each side of the slanted roof gave us a view inside. Seven or eight workers were unpacking crates in front of the loading bay and stacking the boxed contents among the countless others. From their vibrant tattoos and ridiculous clothes, I could tell they were Purple Dragons even from this height.
"You go in by the doors, and I'll rout them from behind." I offered.
"I'm still the leader, ain't I?" He scoffed. "They don't look armed. We go in right in the middle, back-to-back, and I'll focus on taking out that guy…" he pointed a gloved finger toward the hulking, shaved-headed figure closest to the door. "…First. Then we move clockwise, watch each other's shells." I was taken aback by Raph's level of strategy. It reminded me that, twice now, he regularly went to the streets to pull stunts like this when the rest of us had taken different paths. His whole 'lone wolf' shtick actually made him a far stronger leader than I'd given him credit for.
"This is Einstein. Pulling the curtain in three…two…one." Don announced, right as the whole building went dark. The smashing of windows echoed through the warehouse as we kicked through and dropped down. As voices shouted to one another in the blackness, I remembered where each had been standing before the lights were cut, and bulleted from one to the next clockwise with my swords in full swing. Despite tripping up a bit as I adjusted to the constraints of street clothes, I felt safe cloaked in the darkness, each incapacitated body hitting the floor as I moved about with precision. With a few opponents, I clutched the handles of my katana lengthwise and danced with the shifty street-fighter stance Raph trained us to move with.
"Kamikaze here, curtains back." Raph barked into his helmet, and the lights flickered on just as Raph kicked the burly skinhead, now unconscious, back into a stack of boxes. He picked one up and peeled back the tape from the brown cardboard. Inside was a grid of small cardboard dividers, separating white-capped bottles from clinking into one another. Picking one up between his fingers, I could hear a gasp through his helmet as he rolled it around to read the label. Without a word, he tossed it to me. It caught me off guard, and it fumbled through my hands, orange glass tinkling across the cement floor behind me. I turned to see the mess, sixty tiny white pills littered among the shards. The powdery discs bore a familiar imprint, and the scent of saccharine berries lingered in the air. I lost myself in it for a moment.
"I was lookin' forward to showing you why I needed you to cover my back when we came in." Raph nudged me, shaking me out of my state. He straightened out his arm in front of my eyes, revealing a fine black hose running from the pack-like hump in his back armor, through the arm plate and to an opening just behind his knuckles. His hand landed in mine, and I felt a round button in the palm of his glove. "But seeing what's in here, I figure you should do the honors. If you're cool with it."
"Yeah..." I muttered. "Dramatic irony, or something like that."
"Plus, I heard the way you were fighting back there. Sounded like light work. Since it looks like it's a couple minutes past midnight, and you proved you're still pretty fearless...I guess you won the bet, Fearless." His free fist met mine between us with a thud, Raph's elegant way of passing me back the torch. "This is Kamikaze. Time to start the oven." I grasped his hand, squeezing the button and sending a jet of flame out of his knuckles.
"Woah."
"Fooled around with a Camelback to make this. It was Mike's idea." I stepped behind him to grip his flamethrower from a safe distance, and let it rip across the stack of boxes before us. Up in smoke they went, catching ablaze like dry tinder. My soul felt liberated, like the weight it'd been carrying was spiraling up through the windows on the roof among the noxiously sweet fumes.
Thus ends 'The Soma Saga'! Mad love for reading it all.
For the curious, etizolam is a real thing (also still legal in the US) and the all overdose antidotes and withdrawal symptoms are based on similar experiences some people I'm close to have gone through. In the words of Chance the Rapper, "Xanax the new heroin." Hence, the moral of this plot arc (and thus also TNEP Part 1) is to not mess around with medication when what you need is meditation :)
Please please please review, and enjoy some of my lighter-hearted drabbles while I work out the sixes and sevens of the next serious arc.
