Raphael was pretty sure he was awake again, but the world still wasn't making any sense. Everything was blurry, and sound was muted, as though he had a film of dirty water over his eyes, and bubbles trapped in his ears. He was having trouble locating his own body.

There was a figure standing near him, outlined in light.

"Who are you?" he rasped. His throat felt lumpy, abused. Someone was talking but he couldn't understand their words.

The world drifted away.

There were shapes now, and sharp little noises, and still the bright figure.

"I'm going home," he said, because it seemed to make sense.

Someone was leaning over him. "You are home, Raph. You're safe." A familiar face, overlaid with concern. "Do you know who I am?"

He blinked hard. "Donnie," he said, with a great effort, and deflated into himself.

"You were awake earlier," Don said. "Do you remember?"

His eyes roamed around. Books. Bottles. Bed. "Don't know."

"Do you remember being attacked?"

He found his eyes resting heavily on nothing, made them move again. Brother. Blink.

"Raph? Do you -"

Blackness.

And back.

"Hi Donnie," he said.

"Hi Raph." Donatello was sitting on a stool, waiting for him. "You look better."

"Better than what?"

"Do you remember earlier?"

He thought, lost track of time, focused again. "Sort of."

"Stay with me, Raph. Do you remember who attacked you?"

Instantly: "Foot."

"How many?"

"Ten. Twenty. Don't know."

"Okay. It doesn't matter. You can sleep again."

"No." He tried to find his hands, couldn't, forgot about them again. "Tell me what happened."

"Well, there's... " Don trailed off, moving his lips silently. "There's two pieces of good news and four pieces of bad news."

"Bad news in the middle."

Don shifted in his seat. "The first good news is that whoever attacked you was enthusiastic but incompetent. They didn't manage to hit a single vital point."

"So I'm not dead."

"Exactly. The first bad news is that you had a lot of fluid in your lungs, and if it doesn't clear soon you're looking at another round with pneumonia."

He grimaced.

"Yeah, you didn't like it much two years ago, and you probably won't like it any better now." He paused, briefly. "The second bad news is that someone made a spirited attempt to cut off your foot. They didn't get through, but the ligaments are a mess. You won't be running again for a long time. I'm sorry, Raph."

"Not your fault."

Don was silent for a moment. Then he said, "The third bad news is that you'll have a long list of new scars waiting to make your acquaintance, and the fourth bad news is that your clothes are ruined. The good news is that we found you right away."

He rested, feeling the sheets around him. Something crept through the margins of his mind. Someone...

Don was still there.

"What about the other guy?"

"What other guy?"

His mind wandered, rallied, returned. "The guy with the fishing pole."

"I didn't see anyone like that, Raph. What did he do?"

He looked back across the sleeping and waking times. "Talked to me. Said... he said..." He wrestled with the image, tried to hold onto it with numb fingers. "Don't know."

"It's okay, Raph. We can talk about it later. You should rest now."

"Stay?"

"I won't leave you."

He meant to say more words, but he was asleep.

Donatello had lied to him.

"You're Leo," he said, accusingly.

"Yes. That's right, Raph."

"Don't patronize me."

"Sorry." Leo stood up, came closer, reached out, changed his mind. He crossed his arms - a nervous habit he manifested when he didn't know what to do with himself. "Don said you were pretty out of it earlier."

"Yeah, I know." His arms seemed to be working better now. He asked one hand to rub his head and it did, though he paid for the service with a number of sharp and discrete pains. He noticed that his wrist and elbow were bare, though parts of his arm were wrapped in bandages; his mask was missing. He put the thought aside. "Where is he?"

Leonardo tilted his head, and Raphael easily tracked the implied angle with his eyes. Don, or at least a Don-shaped lump, was buried in a nest of blankets under the desk. "He wouldn't leave," Leonardo said, and Raphael wondered in what sense he meant it.

He thought about sitting up but it didn't seem worthwhile. "Mikey?" he asked instead. "Splinter?"

"Master Splinter is guarding the lair, and Mike is..." Leo turned his head and looked out the door of the infirmary. "Being Mike."

"In what way?"

"In the way that..." Leo retreated to the stool, perched on the barest edge of it. "He was first to find you, and," he fidgeted uncomfortably, "and he thought you were dead."

He scoffed. "Not nearly."

"Yes nearly! That was two days ago, Raph!"

"No way!" He had an almost infallible sense of time, and his brothers knew it. "An hour!"

"No."

He lay there, dumbfounded. He may not have been the smartest of the brothers, but there were certain things in his head that just worked, reliably, without effort. He wondered if Donatello had lied to him by omission, leaving out a fifth piece of bad news.

Leo was speaking again. "You didn't wake up at all until this afternoon. When we found you - god, Raph, you looked like you'd been stabbed through a dozen times. I don't know how the hell your shirt had that many holes in it and you were still..." He cut himself off, unable to say more. He sat, looking away, and Raphael lay watching him.

Into the silence came the soft shifting of blankets. "What's going on?" Don mumbled.

Leo bolted from his seat. "I'm going - going to make some food. Are you hungry?" It wasn't clear who he was asking, and anyway he left without waiting for an answer.

"Are you?" Don asked, extricating himself from the makeshift bed.

He shrugged. He didn't know; it didn't matter; the question was only conversational. His arms rubbed against the bed and hurt more. "What gives, Don? Am I dying?"

"You're not dying," Don assured him, calmly bending down to pick up the blankets. He separated them and shook them out. "Would I fall asleep if you were dying?"

If he had nothing else in the world, Raphael had faith in his brothers. "No."

"There you go." He lined up the blankets, corner to corner, and folded them together.

"Then what's with Leo?"

"Once again, distracted by worst-case scenarios."

"And Mike? What's his deal?"

Don finished folding the blankets and dropped them in a neat pile on the desk, giving them a final pat. "Trying to fix everything while completely avoiding the actual problem. He'll come around." He finally turned to face his brother. "Come on. Sit up and let me listen to your lungs before Leo comes back."

He rallied his limbs, ignoring the all-over ache that promised more specific pain later, and thought upward thoughts. Hazily, he remembered what Don had told him earlier. "Which leg did they try to remove?"

"Your right leg."

"Damn. I liked that one."

"Very funny." Don slid his arm around Raphael's shoulders and helped pull him upright, deftly inserting a pillow behind his head as he rested against the wall. His injured leg was making itself obvious, now, diverse unpleasant sensations rushing to converge around his ankle. He distracted himself with watching Don pull open a drawer and take out a stethoscope of questionable provenance.

He cringed as his brother came toward him, shifting his mask and inserting the bulbs into his ears. Don hadn't warmed it, it was going to be cold, but he wasn't going to jump, he wasn't going to -

The metal disk touched the skin under his carapace and he jumped. It didn't help his leg.

"I hate it when you do that," he said.

"I hate it when you come home like this," Don said mildly. "Breathe in."

He breathed in and thought about a reply. When Don "hmm"ed, he said, "I didn't even do it on purpose this time."

"Oh, sometimes you get yourself slashed up on purpose? Cough."

He coughed, and found he couldn't stop. After an oxygen-deprived, saliva-flecked minute, Donatello pounded him on the back. "Avoid that," he advised, turning away and putting the hated stethoscope back in the drawer.

"Thanks," Raphael said, once he had air again. He was going to say something else, but he was sidetracked by the sudden appearance of a disembodied arm protruding from the doorway. It was holding a tray of food. "Donnie, you have an arm."

"What? Oh." He crossed the room and took the tray. "Thanks, Mike." The arm vanished at speed. Donatello, unperturbed, returned to his stool and divvied up the food.

"What are you going to do to me now?" Raphael asked, accepting a plate of toast.

"For your lungs?" Donatello gracelessly attacked a sandwich. "Intubate. Clean you out with a garden hose and a shop-vac."

Caught mid-toast, he focused on not choking. "That had better be a joke."

Don shrugged and drank some water.

He swallowed hugely, clearing his mouth. "When you said you wouldn't leave, were you just waiting to torture me?"

"I figured it was a waste of time to be angry at you while you were delirious."

"I want a different doctor."

"I'm sorry, Doctor Nice Don has transferred to another hospital."

Raphael finished his toast and spent a few minutes silently nursing his juice. Then: "Feel better?"

"Yes, thanks." Don rubbed his fingers together to dislodge any remaining crumbs, and set his plate aside. "Still disappointed that Leo got first chance. What did he say to you?"

"Nothing you would have wanted to say first." Something else in his mind: a swirl of misplaced colors. "Meant to ask him - what happened to my gear?"

"It's all in your room." Donatello took the cup and plate Raphael held out to him, piled everything back on the tray. "Nothing was stolen."

"Good." He would have hated to have to go after the Foot naked. He kept the thought to himself.

Don hefted the ugly tray, with its load of mismatched dishes and permanently water-stained glasses. "I'm going to take this to the kitchen. Do you want me to come back and stay with you?"

The pain in his leg had flared up again, with no apparent immediate cause. It didn't incline him to be gracious, to accept sympathy. It made him grouchy. Sarcasm was suddenly, unapologetically, inevitable. "You got someplace else to be?"

Donatello looked at him seriously, over his anger but still not willing to make light of the situation. "No one's been out, Raph. I'll stay if you want. Otherwise I should take a turn at the monitors. Master Splinter has been watching them all day."

With an effort, he shunted aside the ill humors taking over his body, and formulated a civil reply. "I'm fine. Go."

Don shifted the tray in his arms. "Can I bring you anything?"

He thought. "Left a book in my bed..."

"I'll find it."

Don went out. A while later he came back with the book, and Raphael read until he fell asleep.