In his dream, he had made it to the pizza place. He was hunched inside his sweatshirt, watching the half-dozen or so other patrons eat their greasy food at the cheap Formica tables. His order was taking a while, because he had asked for an extra-extra-extra large. Large enough for a mutant turtle to lie down on. Mikey wanted it, so he could fold himself inside a Mikey calzone.

I'll sleep in it, and then in the morning it will be breakfast! he had said.

The pizza guy was showing him the extra-extra-extra large pizza paddle he'd constructed to handle the order. I got one of those billboards from Times Square, he explained. He turned it over. It was a poster for Phantom of the Opera. Oh, pizza's done. He turned to scoop the pie out of the oven.

He was looking for the extra-extra-extra large box the pizza guy had said he had - I bought a really big mirror a while ago, I saved the box it came in - when he saw, out of the corner of his eye, that the other patrons were all standing up. They were coming towards him, shaking clubs and chains out of their sleeves.

He reached for his sai but all he could find were two loaves of garlic bread. In the giant mirror on the far wall, he saw himself, saw that his clothes had vanished. He turned to the pizza guy to ask for help, but the oversized pizza paddle had morphed into a battle axe, which the pizza guy was swinging at his head...

He woke in a dim room. He was lying down. Someone was standing near him - a figure of light. They were leaning something tall and thin against the wall.

"You!" He tried to scramble upright but a hot flare of pain sizzled through his arms and they slipped out from under him.

It was the young man from the alley, clothed in whiter-than-white, intent on propping up his fishing pole. He did not acknowledge the outburst.

"How did you get in here?" he demanded. At the same time, he wondered if he was still dreaming.

The man finished arranging the pole, and turned to face the bed. "I am manifest," he said.

"What the hell does that mean?" His eyes darted around the room, coming to rest on the book he'd been reading. It was exactly as he had left it. Not dreaming. "Leo!" he shouted. "Master Splinter!"

"Help is not coming," the young man said, without feeling.

"Shows what you know," he hissed, straining to catch the first sounds of his family coming to his side.

"I know you, Raphael."

His attention jumped instantly back to the person in white. "How do you know who I am?" he whispered. "How did you find me?"

The young man was watching him, his face curiously blank. "I remember when you were blind," he said. "I was with you then."

"That's a lie," he bit out, but his visitor's expression didn't change. He searched his own memories. "You're lying," he said again, but without much conviction.

"This is truth," the man said, and he said it with the disinterested blandness that would not sustain a lie.

He realized then that no one was coming.

"What do you want from me?" he asked.

The young man held out a bottle. It was glass, thick-bottomed, corked. "You must drink this."

"No."

"You must drink it," and he found the bottle pressed into his strangely unresisting hand. He jerked, forced control of his arm despite the pain washing up and down his limbs. He stared hard at the bottle, trying to guess what might be in it.

His eyes refocused and he saw that it was empty.

He said as much.

"You must drink it," was the only reply.

"How do I know it isn't poison gas?" he asked.

"I would not betray you," the young man said, with the same unshakable certainty that attached to all his statements.

"You're not human, are you."

"No."

In one motion, he thumbed off the cork and upended the bottle over his open mouth.

His body was filled with a sense of rushing cold. His arm fell limply over the side of the bed. His hand opened, and the little bottle crashed to the floor.

He woke in a dim room. He was lying down. Someone was standing near him - a figure of darkness. They were leaning something tall and thin against the wall.

He remembered the terrible coldness and, while he didn't feel it now, he was afraid. "What did you do?" he tried to ask. It came out in a gasping voice not like his own.

The figure was already fleeing.

"Hey!" he shouted. It came out as a bark, followed by a string of hacking coughs. He closed his eyes against it, turning his head to the side and feeling sharp drops of something wet flying out of his mouth.

When he opened his eyes again, working to pull air into his flooded lungs, the light was on. Master Splinter had come.

"Did you get him?" The words scraped against his throat. He forced them out anyway.

Master Splinter was watching him, but Raphael could tell, from long familiarity, that he was also listening, sniffing, sensing for anything that was not as it should be. "Get whom?"

"That guy." Rest. He only wanted to rest.

Master Splinter shook his head without moving his eyes. "You are confused, Raphael. It was only your brother." He glanced quickly at the floor, at the desk. "I will bring you water. Then we will talk." He touched Raphael's arm, then left.

Raphael focused his energies and dragged himself upright. He was overwhelmed with exhaustion, and it was taking far too long to get his breath back, but he noticed faintly that his arms didn't hurt anymore. When he had settled against the wall, he turned his gaze to where Splinter had looked.

There was nothing on the floor. On the desk - his book. Exactly as he had left it.

Splinter returned with the glass of water, helped him hold it. His body resisted the input of more liquid, and he swallowed slowly, carefully. It soothed the crawling feeling in his throat.

Splinter set the glass on the desk, then brought the stool closer and settled himself on it. It was a little too high for him to sit on easily, but he managed it with a grace that disguised the difficulty.

"Michelangelo has been very worried about you," he said. "He has been making a gift for you." He gestured to the wall behind Raphael's shoulder.

Raphael remembered the tall, thin object. He turned, half-expecting to see an old fishing pole.

The object was, crudely, unmistakably, a crutch.

"He hasn't come to talk to me," was all he could think to say.

"He is afraid," Master Splinter said. "He is not speaking much to anyone. He believed he had lost you." His tail curled around the leg of the stool. "He will not come until he is sure he will not lose you again."

"Then he should never come," his mouth blurted, while his mind thought about how much he missed his brother's constant noise and motion.

Splinter looked at him sharply. "Why do you say this?"

He hadn't intended to say it at all, but the reasoning unraveled inside his head. "Because," he said. "Because he's gonna have to lose me someday. Because I'm not gonna let him go first."

"These are promises beyond your power to keep," Master Splinter said, "and eventualities beyond Michelangelo's will to consider. He wants only for you to come safely through your present troubles."

"I know." Michelangelo felt things deeply, but not lastingly. His emotions focused on the is rather than the was or the will be. Sometimes Raphael wished he could let go so easily. "Tell him to stop being an idiot and come visit me."

Master Splinter smiled, his tail uncoiling and flicking through the air. "I will tell him. Although maybe in different words." He slid down from the stool, giving every sign that the serious conversation was over. "Donatello asked me to change your bandages when you awoke." He began systematically opening the room's various drawers and cabinets, searching for a clean roll.

"Fourth drawer on the left," Raphael advised.

"Thank you, my son." Splinter found the bandages and, coming to the bed, placed them in a fold of the blanket. He began to unknot and unwind the dirty cloth on Raphael's right arm.

"Where is Donnie?" Raphael asked.

"He is resting," Splinter replied. "He watched the monitors last night. Leonardo is watching now."

Raphael could feel his internal clock ticking now, keeping track of the hours since he came back to his senses. He didn't know which hours they were, though. "What time is it?" he asked.

"It is nine o'clock on Friday morning."

Friday morning. He had talked to Leo the previous evening, and Leo had said two days since the attack, which would have been Tuesday. Yes. It had been Tuesday when they sent him out to get dinner.

Tuesday when everything went wrong.

Splinter's fingers had stopped moving on his arm. "Raphael," he said. "What were these bandages for?"

It seemed like a strange question. Obviously, they were to prevent him from bleeding all over the infirmary. "Sword wounds?" he guessed, trying to provide a more substantive answer. "Don didn't say, specifically."

"I must speak to Donatello," Splinter said, already moving away.

"What's wrong?" he asked in alarm. He didn't hurt anymore; he didn't feel an infection coming on. He couldn't imagine what had disturbed his father so much. "Master Splinter?"

But he was leaving, the clean bandages still tucked into the pocket of the sheets.

Raphael looked at his arm, afraid of what he might see.

It looked like his arm, the way it always looked. It didn't look like an arm that had been attacked by twenty men with swords. Donatello didn't say...

He felt his grip on reality slipping away like a thin fish.

Despite the exhaustion circulating leadenly through his veins, fear kept him awake for the twenty minutes it took Donatello to arrive.

"What's happening to me?" Raphael asked at once.

"I don't know," Donatello said tiredly. "I haven't looked yet." He plunked a mug of coffee next to Raphael's glass of water, and rubbed his eyes. He hadn't bothered to put his mask on.

"What took you so long to get here?" he demanded.

"I'm running on empty, Raph," Donatello said, washing his hands in the battered metal sink. "We all are. Give us a break, okay? We're doing the best we can, and wounds that heal overnight hardly sounded like an emergency." He wiped his hands on a fresh towel, taken from a stack inside a cabinet, and came over to the bed. "Now what's going on here?"

"You tell me," Raphael said, presenting his newly unbandaged arm.

Donatello took the arm in his hands and looked closely at it. He traced the grain of the skin with his finger. "There's nothing here," he said faintly.

"How can that be?" Raphael asked. The question had been circling in his mind for twenty minutes, prompting another one to rise into his consciousness. "Did you lie to me, Donnie?"

"Did I lie to you about your being stabbed?" Don stared at him in astonishment, in disbelief and disappointment. "What possible reason could I have for doing that?"

"I don't know." Lines of cause and effect flashed through his mind. "How is it possible that I got hacked up with swords and not even three days later the cuts are completely gone?"

"It isn't."

"So what am I supposed to believe?" he asked desperately. Please Donnie, anything. Any reason. Just give me something to hold onto.

Don picked up his coffee cup, drank some while watching Raphael over the rim. He lowered the mug, holding the rich beverage in his mouth a moment before swallowing. "A chemical," he said. "Something that accelerates healing."

Yes. No. "Why would anyone put a chemical like that on a weapon? I don't think the Foot were trying to gently incapacitate me."

"No." Don's fingers twitched in the air, palm out, his elbow braced on the back of his other hand, the one still holding the mug. It was a thing he did when he was trying to chase down a train of thought. "A chemical with two functions. A healing agent that hides the evidence of something else."

He was suddenly, acutely aware of his own insides. Something else could be anything. "How do we find out?"

Donatello was pacing now, his fingers still describing phantom figures. "I can't. I don't have anything." He cursed under his breath. "Need a blood lab, need diagnostic equipment..." He turned suddenly and brought his fists, his mug, crashing down on the desk. The mug and the glass jumped, their contents swinging wildly. "What am I supposed to do with a crummy microscope and a blood pressure cuff!"

Fear jumped into Raphael's throat, stung him with burning tentacles. He pitched forward, coughing wetly, uncontrollably.

A shallow bowl appeared in front of him. "Let it out," Don was telling him. "Don't try to breathe yet."

He hacked, deep in his throat. A thick ball of mucus ejected into the bowl.

"Good." Don's hand on his back. "Now breathe."

He breathed like there was only one lungful of air left in the universe, drew all of it into himself. It bubbled down, upsetting the liquid filling the space it wanted to occupy. He coughed again, forcing the foreign wetness up and out. He was dribbling. He didn't care.

The bowl came up, scooping the dangling threads from the edge of his mouth. "You're okay," Don was saying. "Breathe again."

The consuming need to cough left him and he fell back, panting. Don's hand slipped around to his shoulder. "You're okay," he said again. The hand squeezed reassuringly.

He couldn't speak yet, so he nodded convulsively. Don left, taking the bowl away. Then he was back, warming the stethoscope in his hands. "Just breathe," he said.

There was nothing Raphael wanted to do more. His entire being was intensely occupied with breathing. He barely noticed the metal disk sliding under his shell.

"Okay," Don said. "Breathe, Raph."

He inhaled as if it was the most important thing he would ever do.

"Okay," Don said again. The metal disk slid away.

"What?" he said. It was all he could manage.

"It's not good," Don said, folding the stethoscope in his hands. "But at least we know what it is. We can fight this."

"Going to fight," he said.

"I know you will." Don hung the stethoscope around his neck and moved away. He emptied the bowl and rinsed it out, then dragged the stool closer and set the bowl on it. "Use this. Cough up as much as you can." He reached out and pulled the blankets up, tucking them close around Raphael's sides. As he drew his hands away, he scooped up the roll of bandages, catching it as it tumbled from the sudden hill of the bedding. "There's not much else I can do for you."

Raphael blinked heavily. Whatever was inside him - natural or introduced - was dragging him down. He was losing the battle to stay awake.

"It's okay, Raph," he heard, dimly. "You can sleep."

He touched the words, gratefully, held them close and brought them down with him.

He did not dream.