SWOLLEN
"Kicking ass and catching babes." Casey answered, punctuated by a sip from his can of beer. "That's the only reason I lift, bro."
"You're telling me the strength itself don't mean shit to you? Or the stress release?" Raph rebutted.
"I train mad light now, so it don't feel the same. Two years of power lifting, plus Ape's good cooking, bulked me up to a good place. From here on out, it's high-rep sets and cardio. No point in being mega strong if you ain't light on your feet, too."
"Yeah, I did something similar for a little while." Raph slurped from his iced tea. "When I was twelve."
"Don't front like you ain't seen the results, bro." Casey stuck his forearms out straight and flexed his wrists, showing off every bulging vein and twitching ligament crawling under his skin. "I'm looking mad vascular." It was true; in the couple months that had passed since I'd last seen him, he'd gone from having a slight 'dad body' to being completely shredded.
"All you're looking like is like you need some more beef in your diet, dude." Raph huffed. "No body fat means no padding for bruises or cuts."
"Oh, so that's your excuse?" I teased. "You wouldn't be talking so big if your shell didn't hide that beer belly underneath."
"Don't drink anymore, shell-for-brains, remember?" He shot back. "Besides, I'd rather be a little overstuffed than a scrawny wimp like you."
Casey cursed at the TV as the Blue Jays scored another run on the Mets just as the game ended, sealing the game at 6-1. Hitting the bathroom as the commercials started to roll, my eye caught on the reflection in the mirror as I washed my hands. There were no pulsing veins or taut cables of ligament, just wrists, looking so much more frail than any of the others in Casey's apartment (at least while April was visiting her family). Even with Leo's condition, I was vying for second-to-last in the muscle contest among the four brothers, just barely more built than Donnie. Since we were little, Raph had always had the jump on us as far as size went, but over that span of time, there was no excuse for me not to have bulked up too.
As Raph took my place in the bathroom before we left, Casey pulled a mid-sized bottle out of his supplement cabinet in the kitchen.
"Yo Mikey!" he called out. "I know Raph and you have been on this whole 'no test boosters, no pre-workout' thing recently, but if you really wanna pack on some more muscle, give this a try." He tossed the bottle to me, and I read the bold-faced 'CREATINE' on the label. "It ain't steroids or nothing crazy, but enough to get you a major pump on. I dunno how many babes are looking to hook up with a mutant turtle, but on the off-chance you guys find one, you'll thank me later." He turned his head and flexed his arms up like a Greek statue. "Ladies go crazy for a shredded bod." I withheld a chuckle.
"Thanks, dude." I popped it into my backpack just before Raph rounded the corner. We exchanged fist-bumps with Casey, and dipped back through the sewers to the lair in relative silence. We posted up on the couch in the living room while Don and Leo meditated in the training room, and as I flipped through the channels, out of the corner of my eye I noticed Raph flicking through a workout magazine. Beneath the title 'PUMP', a freakishly built, tattooed shirtless hunk grinned devilishly on the cover underneath the subtitles 'Lift harder' and 'Look like a real man.'
For whatever reason, it threw me into a funk. I'm just as much a man as Casey (well, maybe not in a biological sense, but at least as much a man as Raph.) Raph calling me a 'scrawny wimp' was just his usual poking fun, but there he lay next to me, taking up almost two-thirds of the couch with his commanding heft, looking at pictures of other fit, hunky bodies, after we'd just hung out with his best friend, another well-muscled Adonis. Raph's body was one of my favorite things in the world (Lord knows it makes up for his personality) but I didn't dig the vibe of being his 'chick' that went crazy for his 'real man' bod. Sure, he had his little stint as leader of the pack, but that never meant the two of us weren't equal. Finding myself underneath him in bed, and the showers, and the couch, et cetera, didn't mean I was actually below him, did it?
Before crashing for the night, I filled a glass of orange juice halfway and took it into my room. For once, I didn't feel like sleeping in Raph's pad. Pulling Casey's bottle out of my backpack, I read the fine print on the back for instructions. It said to use one or two scoops before a workout for increased results. Interpreting that a little creatively, I screwed the cap open and heaped five or six scoops into the glass, swirling it around and gulping down the gritty mixture. I figured it'd show me some visible results by training tomorrow, and hopefully Raph would notice.
After an uneventful night sleeping alone, the first thing I noticed upon waking was how dry my mouth felt and how full my bladder was. Holding my knees together and gingerly darting down the hall to the bathroom, I sighed with ecstasy as the pressure relieved after a lengthy piss. Bending down to the faucet to tame my cottonmouth, what I saw in the mirror made me shriek like the female lead in a horror flick.
I looked like the unholy spawn of Godzilla and a sumo wrestler. My face was puffed up like I'd won a lifetime free pass to a buffet, and my limbs had swelled so much that it looked like I'd been overinflated. Inside my shell, I could feel my gut pressed tight against the chest plate, like I was trying to hide a beach ball. All in all, the oversized toddler looking back at me in the mirror proved my little experiment had fucked up big time.
"Mike? What's wrong?" Don pounded on the door.
"Uh…it's all good, dude!" I hollered back. "Just fell in the bowl is all. Got my tail wet."
"You sure?" the door clicked open, and I cursed under my breath for forgetting to lock it. His jaw dropped when he laid eyes on me, and his hand rose to cover his mouth as he held back laughter. Leo appeared behind him, and his eyes shot open to the size of dinner plates.
"Oh god. What did you do?"
"Nothing, bro. Casey gave me this workout supplement, and I tried some last night, and woke up like this!" I exclaimed.
"Ugh…it was creatine, wasn't it?" Don uttered. "You do know we aren't humans, right Michelangelo? Our bodies don't process things the same way that people's do. Mutant or not, we're still reptiles, and any creatine supplementation will radically shift your water metabolism."
"How was I supposed to know?" I cried. "He said it would help me get a pump on, not look like a hot air balloon!"
"Proof you shouldn't take medical advice from Casey Jones." Leo shook his head. "Why'd you try the stuff anyway?"
"I dunno…" I scratched at the back of my neck. "Case took it, and now he's all huge and muscley and stuff. I just wanted to get as jacked as him. Getting tired of Raph walking around looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger, making me feel like Sigourney Weaver."
"She wasn't in Terminator, dipshit, it was Linda Hamilton." A gruff voice sounded around the corner. Raph burst out laughing as soon as he saw what'd happened. "Jesus, Mike, someone forget to lock the snack cupboard up last night?"
"Not fair…" I grumbled. "All your fault anyways." I stomped off to my room in a huff, dramatically slamming the door behind me before stomping back out between them and commandeering the bathroom for the second time in five minutes.
Don said the only way to get my body back the way it was would be to sweat all the water out, so while the rest of them ate breakfast and trained, I holed myself up in the weight room, doing pushups and jumping jacks until the floor was covered in puddles. After what felt like a thousand sets, and two thousand bathroom breaks, the swelling had gone down enough that the openings of my shell weren't cutting off circulation to my arms and legs anymore. Feeling completely spent, while still pretty bloated, I hit the showers, letting the tepid water splash straight on my face in an attempt to cool down.
"Thought you could use some help." A voice came from the door, clicking it shut behind him. "Figured you'd barely be able to see your toes, let alone wash 'em."
"Ha ha, Raph." I uttered flatly as he walked up behind me. "Very funny."
"Listen bro, why'd you go and try some stupid shit like this?" He cupped a palm around the curve of my butt. "You know you don't gotta impress me."
"Doesn't stop me from wanting to." I batted his hand aside. "I was trying to prove I'm just as tough and manly as you, dude. Not a wimp."
"I figured it was something like that. You don't gotta be insecure about what you look like, or how people think of you. Cause all that matters is, you're my little bro, and I love everything about you. Even when you look like the white dude from Big Hero Six."
"But I don't want to be always be the little bro, you know?" He raised an eyebrow at me as he gradually caught on. "Sometimes, I wanna take a crack at…being the big bro, know what I mean? Feel what it's like to be the top dog."
"Well, uh…" he flicked open the oily cap of the familiar plastic bottle he was hiding in his hand. "…If that's what'll make you feel better, I'm game to take another crack at it."
Just some fluff with social commentary on 'bottom shaming' and male body image issues. Moral: be at peace with who you are, what you look like, and what you're into.
Hope you liked it!
