Disclaimer: I do not own TMNT 2012.
As he sat there, on the living room floor with five pairs of eyes staring at him so intently that he could've melted like an ice cube under the heat of not one but FIVE suns, Donatello couldn't help but tremble a bit.
April, Splinter and Michelangelo, who had his left arm in a proper cast and sling, had taken their places on the couch, with the old rat in between the two teenagers, while Raphael opted to stand behind said furniture with arms folded across his plastron. Leonardo had settled on the steps with one knee pulled up, his chin resting on top of it. All five were gazing at the disfigured turtle on the center of the living room floor, waiting for him to start his little "story-telling", as Mikey called it.
Still, Donatello felt utterly uneasy and vulnerable. Especially with his purple bandanna mask suspended around his neck like a neckerchief and his scarred face exposed for everyone to see.
"We haven't got all day, genius," it was Raphael who broke the awkward silence, tapping the floor rhythmically with his foot. "Ya gonna spit it out or not?"
"Just…wait, will you?" The alt-dimension brainiac barked, glaring at the hothead. "It ain't actually that easy to let it all out. It's a rough trip down memory lane and unfortunately, I ain't really got a lot of good memories to recall."
He breathed in deeply and heaved the air out as a heavy sigh. Running his right hand through an invisible mass of hair, he began with a question.
"I take it that you aren't familiar with the concepts of alternate dimensions?"
His audience shook their heads.
"Thought so. You see, when you ask yourself a certain question, say 'What am I going to do for today?', you are presented with an infinite amount of answers, choices, decisions. It is said that each decision has a corresponding outcome, whether positive or negative, that may have an impact on life as we know it. Now, you pick one of these decisions and everything goes along with it. But have you ever asked yourself about what would happen if you had picked another decision instead of this one?
"I had once pondered about this. My theory is that with every decision, with every choice a sentient being could ever think of, there is a matching occurrence to it wherein everything is affected by it. In other words, every choice would lead to a different road down a life or in a familiar term, to a different DIMENSION. And since only ONE being alone can be presented with an INFINITE value of choices to at least ONE question in his-slash-her entire life, the dimensions present in all of space-time continuum are of an INFINITE number."
Again, he inhaled and exhaled, giving his listeners time to process what he had just said.
"So…" Michelangelo drawled out, a thoughtful expression on his face, much to the brainiac's surprise. "Is there a dimension where I'm the leader of the team and not Leo?"
The looks on his brothers', his friend's and his adoptive father's faces were ones of absolute shock and horror.
"Yes, there is, sadly," Donatello's reply tensed the lair's current ambience even more, "I pity everybody in that nightmarish dimension. Including Shredder."
"That horrible, huh?" Leonardo questioned and the more mature counterpart of his late brother just nodded.
Mikey resorted to pout at their reactions.
"And what does your little science lecture have to do with everything that's going on?" Raphael pointed out, shaking off the image of Shellheaded-Mikey-the-leader-of-four-fifteen-year-old-ninja-mutants.
"Remember THAT incident with your Donatello?" The alt-dimension brainiac received solemn nods. "Well, my dimension branched out from that event and instead of me, it was Leo who got hit."
He expected the gasps then proceeded to briefly describe how his eldest brother rushed in and protected him from the Foot's shuriken, getting badly injured in the process.
"The blow on us was severe and everything went down hill pretty fast," he continued, "Raph was losing his grip on his temper and even Mikey rarely smiled. Sensei prohibited us from going topside until Leo was fully recovered and he told April to stay away from us for a while since he thought of her as a distraction from our training.
"I knew I had to do something to get it all back on the right track. So I decided to use the Time-and-Space Jumper to change what had happened that night, to fix everything. But the TSJ was yet to be completed so it malfunctioned and sent me on a rollercoaster ride through different time periods, dimensions and even null-rifts, gaps where time and space have not or have yet to collide."
"But you said that you fixed your TSJ," April mentioned.
"Yeah, I did manage to get it up and running," Donatello confirmed as he sighed and hung his head, "however, when I got back to my home dimension, all hell broke loose."
…
Floating in the slate gray void that was the null-rift, I punched in the coordinates of my dimension, as eager to get home as a little boy waiting for his gift on Christmas Day. The TSJ in my hands hummed softly and it shot out that familiar lime green beam, the portal to my dimension opening right in front of me shortly afterwards. I should've checked the date the TSJ depicted, the exact time of my return to that dimension, but my thoughts lingered to the family I have left behind. I found myself rubbing the scar on my left arm. I'll surely forgive Raph for wounding me, knowing that his temper got the best of him that time. Gathering courage, I stepped out of the null-rift, through the portal…
…and into pitch black.
I squinted through the darkness as the portal closed behind me. Where the shell was I? Slightly disturbed and coughing due to the dusty atmosphere, I fumbled the inside of my duffel bag, brought out the much-needed flashlight once I had my hold on it and turned it on, letting it illuminate on what was in front of me.
Junk. Piles of scrap metal and other trash littered the floor of the room I was in, as if a hurricane had paid a visit. To my right was a piece of furniture and I turned to it, seeing it to be an unmade bed that was split into two down the middle. Hang on. I recognize those light bulb-designed bedsheets. Fear settled in the pit in of my stomach and I shined the light on the walls. Sure enough, they were decorated with posters of scientists and inventors, some still in one piece, others in shreds.
This was my bedroom. Or what was left of it.
I sucked in air sharply, the dust in it throwing me into a coughing fit. Gasping, I made my way through the junk, opened the door and exited my bedroom, only to be greeted with an unwelcoming sight.
The lair, the entire lair, was in shambles. The couch was overturned…the TV had been thrown across the room and left as an irreparable heap of wires and parts…the tire swing missing from its suspension…a training dummy sticking out of the dojo's sliding door and its cotton innards scattered everywhere…moonlight emanating through a considerable hole in the ceiling…a horrid stench originating from the kitchen…
It was as if Katrina itself took the liberty to stop by and raid the whole establishment.
Footsteps snapped me out of my daze so I hid in the shadows above the lair entrance. Arming myself with a kunai, I waited until the intruder was right under me then landed behind him-slash-her, pressing my blade against his-slash-her throat with a growl.
"Who the shell are you and what have you done to my home?"
I heard a quick intake of breath. The intruder seemed to relax under my tight grip on his-slash-her shoulder before speaking in a voice I knew all too well.
"D-Donnie? Is that you?"
Throwing the kunai the kunai to the side, I turned the intruder to face me. I felt my heart skip a beat. Standing before me was the girl I had fallen for, except that under moonlight, I could see the wrinkles on her face and a few gray streaks in her mow pale orange hair.
It was April!
"April!" I half-squealed in both surprise and joy, hugging her. "Boy, am I glad to see you! You won't believe what I've seen and been through. What's with the wrinkles and stuff? You got a role as an old lady in your school's play or something?"
I wanted her to laugh and joke at my question. I really did because I felt that there was something wrong. And the lost look in her sky blue eyes confirmed my suspicion. Gently, she pushed herself out of my embrace and faced me again, giving me a rather sad smile.
"God, Donnie…it really is you!" She said, tears in her eyes. "Where have you been all this time? We've been searching for you far and – "
"What…are you talking about, April? What happened?" I heard my voice crack under the overwrought pressure in the atmosphere that felt oh so wrong.
Her answer would've knocked me dead if I never knew how to handle emotional stress in the first place.
"You've been gone, Donnie. For nearly thirty years."
…
"Dude, you haven't been home for thirty years?" Mikey asked, leaning forward. "How's that even possible?"
"It's quite simple, really," Donatello replied, a slightly bitter tone in his voice. "If ever an inhabitant of a certain dimension would find himself in a different dimension or trapped in a null-rift and then somehow figure out a way back to his home dimension, he'll be in one hell of a dilemma. His home dimension would consider him as an alien, a foreigner and wouldn't let him in because he has particles from another dimension on him. Kinda like foreign contaminants and such. These tiny suckers alone can distort the collision of time and space in his home dimension and then terminate it and everything in it from existence."
"But you've been from an interdimensional run," Leo stated, eye ridges furrowed, "and that doesn't make sense. How is it that you were able to return to your home dimension?"
"Good question, Leonardo," the disfigured turtle praised with a quick clap of his hands. "I have discovered that the portals my TSJ opens are like…uh…carwashes. When one passes through my TSJ's portal, he is instantly cleansed by the time he makes it to the other side since the energy that cuts through temporal and spacial qualities somehow eradicates 99.99% of the foreign contaminants and this extra factor allowed me to return to my home dimension.
"However, my TSJ can only permit ONE route back per specific dimension, meaning that once you've left a dimension you've previously returned to, you can never go back to it again. Plus, the 0.01% of foreign contaminants left on you is enough to disrupt the flow of time, either slowing it down or speeding it up. I have yet to determine why this is so. Besides, what the TSJ does, cutting deliberately through temporal-spacial attributes, practically bends the laws of how one should perceive time and space continuum."
"Wow…you figured all this out by yourself?" April mumbled in disbelief. "Donnie, you could get a Nobel Prize for this!"
"I don't think that scientists are willing to give such a prestigious award to a being they themselves wish to experiment on," Donatello sighed, yet flashed the girl a small smile, "but thanks for thinking like that, anyway. I really appreciate it. Now…on with the story, shall we?"
…
"Huh…what?" The words were stuck to my throat like bubblegum on the underside of a sidewalk bench. "Three d-decades…? You…you gotta be kidding me, Ape. It really…ain't that long…is it?"
Panic had me in its twisted grasp as I pulled out my trusty TSJ from my duffel bag. Turning it on, I tapped in a few strings of commands and the date of my return came on screen. What I read made my blood run cold.
August 8, 2042. Almost thirty years since my departure from my home dimension.
Trembling wildly, I fell to my knees, as if the weight of thirty years was suddenly dropped on my shoulders. I looked at the rubbish-strewn floor blankly for a while before lifting my gaze back to April. I forced my mouth to spit out the question I knew I'd regret to receive an answer for.
"My family…how have they been…?"
The girl – no – the woman before me crouched down to my level, her tired, sky blue eyes never breaking their sight away from my watery, burgundy ones.
"They're…fine," she replied, her soothing voice barely above a whisper. "Leo and Raph had a terrible fight several years back. After that, they've went their separate ways, travelling far from here and living their own lives alone. Nonetheless, both tend to visit every once in a while, though when they'd see each other's faces, they'd try to rip one another's throats. Mikey's…doing well. He stays with me now and actually helps a lot with my…work. But he never smiles nor laughs again, ever since you disappeared."
"A-And what about Master Splinter?"
I saw her cringe a bit and I really wasn't sure if I wanted to hear her out. She bit her bottom lip and stood up straight, holding out her hand to me.
"Come on. I have…something to show you," she said.
Reluctantly, I took the outstretched offer and soon found myself being led through the sewers. Looks like April knew every nook and cranny in the underground system. That cheered me up a bit. After some time, she stopped abruptly in her tracks, though, and I bumped lightly into her.
"Sorry about that," I murmured, my cheeks on fire.
"No biggie," she waved off, then pointed to something above us. "Would you mind raising that up for me? It's actually a whole lot easier for me to pull it out from the outside rather than to push it out from the inside."
Puzzled, I turned to the object of question, only to see it was just the sewer lid. With my face heating up, I climbed up the handle bars and effortlessly moved it from its place and set it aside. Then, I ascended from the manhole, turning back to it to hoist April out.
"Thanks," she stated, dusting herself.
"Your welcome," I answered as I looked around me. "April, where are we?"
There was garbage everywhere. In three-stories-tall heaps, piles barely a foot in height and shell, even in colorful layers carpeting the ground. Not to mention that it absolutely stinks here! I'm guessing we're in some kind of dump…
"We're in a garbage dump a few kilometers from New York," came the unmistakable answer.
Knew it. I just had to ask the obvious.
"Why are we here, Ape? I don't see anything else but mounds of trash. Does Sensei live here now?"
She didn't reply. Instead, she was looking at something somewhere. I followed her gaze and gasped at what I saw. At a distance from us was a full-sized mature weeping willow, slightly bent at the trunk and its curtain of leaves touching what I believed was bare ground. Its leafy curtain was thick since I couldn't even make out a silhouette of what was behind it.
"He's in there, Donnie," April mumbled, a strange, sad tone in her voice. "Go see him."
Nodding, I hesitantly slipped my hand out of hers and began walking towards the willow.
"Master Splinter? Master Splinter!" I called out, my lips tugging into a small smile. "It's me, Sensei! Donatello! I've come back!"
There was no answer, no movement from behind the leaves. The uneasy feeling that was nipping at the back of my mind turned into full-blown fear now and before I knew it, I was dashing across the dump, my voice echoing back at me as I shouted.
"Sensei! I'm here now! Sorry for making you wait so long! SENSEI!"
I reached the willow, breathless, but I didn't stop for a quick rest. I pushed my way through the thick leafy curtain.
"Otousan! Tadaima, Otousan! Tadai – "
My father's image flashed in my mind before I realized I was staring at a tombstone.
A/N
Not much of an Author's Note now. Don't wanna pull you away from taking in the flashback! :D
Japanese Vocab Corner
Otousan – Father.
"Tadaima!" – "I'm home!", but can also mean "I have come back!".
Really loved adding that little cliffy there. LOL. XP XDDDD