So far, writing Mikey has been surprisingly challenging. He feels kind of out of my element, which would explain why I normally stray away from him. Weirdly enough, I'm not used to writing through such naturally happy characters, and I don't find myself the least bit funny. I'm trying though, so I'm sorry if at points he feels a little un-Mikeyish. If you've got any suggestions on how to funnel Mikey's character I am all ears :) But anyway ... Here's Chapter 3!
The boy grew. He grew and he grew and he grew. He grew until he was a teenager. He had strange friends and he wore strange clothes and he listened to strange music. Sometimes the mother felt like she was in a zoo!
But at night time, when that teenager was asleep, the mother opened the door to his room, crawled across the floor and looked up over the side of the bed. If he was really asleep she picked up that great big boy and rocked him back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. While she rocked him she sang:
I'll love you forever,
I'll like you for always,
As long as I'm living
my baby you'll be.
Michelangelo sang under his breath, his voice caught and carried off by the same wind that whipped the tails of his mask against the back of his head. He sat on the ledge of the building with one knee drawn up to his chest while his other leg dangled over the five-story drop below him.
It was mid-day, but cloudy, and most everyone was too busy trying to get wherever they were going to look up in his direction. And at this point, he wasn't the weirdest thing these people had seen anyway. So he sat comfortably, unconcerned but not unaware. He always kept his ninja senses turned on. His nunchucks were nestled readily in their holsters on either side of his waist, his belt full of shuriken, throwing stars, and smoke bombs. His T-phone was tucked next to the chuck on his right, and Donnie would use it to track him if he didn't show back up at the lair before they started to wonder where he was.
When he'd snuck away, Donnie and April had had their heads together, bent over homework. Raph he'd left to wrestle Casey, and Leo and Splinter had just begun their afternoon meditation. He figured he had a while. So he plucked a bag of Skittles from the left side of his belt, tore off the top and dumped its entire contents into his mouth, bobbing his head as he continued to hum and stare down at the playground just below him.
There were children everywhere from crawling age to freeze-tag age, screaming and squealing and chasing one another around much the same way he and his brothers occasionally did … Maybe a little more than occasionally.
He observed sympathetically as a little boy in a Batman shirt was tagged aggressively by another boy a little older than him who wore the same kind of roguish grin that Mikey was used to seeing on Raph. The tag was so aggressive, in fact, that it looked suspiciously more like a shove in the back, and the Batman kid got a face full of synthetic turf.
This hostility—however "accidental" it may have been—was answered with a scream that cut through the volume of the other twenty-or-so shrieking children, and Michelangelo found himself shaking his head as he watched the bigger kid grow wide-eyed and flush-faced and try to pull the Batman kid up off the ground. But the Batman kid's mom was there in an instant and the bigger kid panicked and dropped him, to which the Batman kid only shrilled louder.
The mom was a freckled woman with frizzy red hair and wide hips, and she exuded the same kind of maternity all mothers had when she scooped up her little boy and kissed the top of his head with a kindly pout that perfectly read, "I'm so sorry, honey." The bigger kid spoke to her frantically, tugging on the hem of her shirt with that I-didn't-mean-to face, and the mom nodded and patted his hair forgivingly.
Mikey's eyes traveled across the playground where another woman bounced a baby girl in a watermelon dress on her knee, holding the baby's minuscule hands in each of hers and rubbing her nose against the baby's face until the baby widened her mouth in a toothless smile. This woman had blonde hair, and it seemed as though the baby on her knee would soon become a big sister.
His eyes scanned the area again until they landed on a gaggle of moms standing under the shade of a tree. Some of them were too old, some too young, some had blonde hair and kind faces, some had brown hair and angular faces, a couple had babies on their hips, and a few had their arms crossed, and one looked like she really didn't want to be there.
He sighed. They all seemed nice. But none of them were the one he was looking for.
He waited only a moment longer before standing. Maybe he'd check another park before going home.
That was when his T-phone began buzzing against his hip. He groaned when the picture of Captain Ryan popped up on the screen. Had it been anyone else, he might've ignored the call.
He pressed the phone to his ear and gave his cheeriest, "Hey Leo!"
"Mikey," Leo nearly shouted. "Where the heck are you?"
"Me?"
"Yes you, doofus," said Raph's voice. "You're the only one who's not here."
So they had him on speaker. He hated when they did that.
Leo's sigh was very clear. "Where are you, Mikey?"
"Oh, I'm on my way home, Leo. No worries."
"That doesn't answer the question, Mikey," Donnie spoke up.
"Mikey, I swear, if you're hiding somewhere in my bedroom again …"
"Psh, I'm nowhere near your room, Raph."
He glanced over the edge of the building as sirens went off, interlaced with bellowing honks as a fire truck squeezed its way through traffic.
"Are you up top!" Leo said.
He pursed his lips. "Well … Define 'up top.'"
"Mikey!" chorused his brothers.
"You little weasel," Raph shouted. "You went topside without telling us?"
"Mikey, it's the middle of the day," Donnie said.
"Chillax, bros. No one saw me."
"No one? Really?" Leo said.
He scratched the back of his head and was glad his eldest brother wasn't present to interpret the motion. "Well, except for this one guy who was sitting in a lawn chair on the roof and thought I was a gargoyle. But no worries," he added quickly. "I took care of it. Got a free pack of Skittles out of it and everything."
Donnie and Raph's comments were buried under Leo's command. "Mikey, you come home right now."
Michelangelo tossed his head back. "Hai, Sensei," he scoffed sarcastically.
He could hear Raph cough a snicker just before it was buried again by Leo's voice saying, "You'd better be here within the next ten minutes."
And then the line went dead.
He sighed, tucked his T-phone into his belt, crushed the Skittles bag he was still holding in his fist, and tossed it over the edge of the building before taking off into a sprint and diving into the closest alleyway.
Mumbling something about older brothers, he kicked at a soda can and then heaved the manhole cover off the ground. He checked quickly over his shoulder—a cautionary measure Leo had gotten all of them to practice. One never knew when he was being followed by Feet. But there was no one around, besides the pedestrians not bothering to glance into the alley.
He jumped down into the hole, stopping his momentum by catching a rung on the ladder below just long enough to replace the manhole cover. Then he let himself fall into the shadows. He was engulfed immediately by the familiar mustiness of the sewers and comfortably walked on before his eyes could fully adjust to the darkness. He was so used to these tunnels by now. He could easily navigate through them with his eyes closed if he wanted to. In fact …
He closed his eyes, then decided he didn't trust himself not to cheat and turned his mask to the side. He stomped down the tunnel confidently for about five steps before his nose hit a wall.
"Ouch!" He rubbed his beak then turned his mask back around to glare at the wall as though it was the slime-coated bricks' fault for getting in his way. But he got over it quickly and moved on.
He kicked at trash and puddles of sewage as he walked, occasionally passing under dappled afternoon light spilling through the grates and drains. He began humming again, the same lullaby that had been stuck in his head since before he could even speak in coherent sentences.
He opened his mouth wide to catch a stream of water coming down from one of the grates then immediately squealed and spit it out when he realized it wasn't water.
As he brushed off his tongue a chorus of squeaks came up from his feet. He looked down and smiled at the congregation of rats that had formed around him, rubbing against his ankles like dogs begging for food.
"Good afternoon, fellow sewer-living creatures," he said, kneeling to pat each individual one on the head.
"Hello, Splinter 2, Jerry, Speedy G …" He pursed his lips and picked up the third rat, scratching it beneath its chin. "You know what, Speedy G? I changed my mind. From now on your name is Leo 2 ... Why's that you ask? Well, Speedy—I mean Leo 2, you're exactly like Splinter 2. See?"
He set the rat down next to its kin and nodded satisfactorily. "Now try not to get a big head about it. Just because you're a Leo doesn't mean you should boss everybody around."
He stood. "Play nice, you guys."
He began to walk away, taking a breath to resume his humming, but stopped when the voice that drifted through the tunnel was not his own.
It was a soft voice, tender and melodic—feminine. And it was singing a lullaby—not the same lullaby, but one that was unmistakably such and had nearly the same melody as his own. He glanced up toward the grate he was standing under and saw the silhouette of a woman hovering just next to it, rocking on her toes as she waited for something. His nose took in the heavy presence of food. There must have been a cart on the street just off the curb.
For a moment, he didn't know what to do. He simply stood there and listened as she sang, squinting up at her though he could not see her face.
"Rock-a-bye baby, in the treetop
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock
When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall
And down will come baby, cradle and all."
He smiled as the tune floated gracefully through the tunnel, adding a touch of elegance that the shadows in the sewers had probably never enveloped before. He waited for her to keep going but she went silent, standing still with her arms wrapped around her torso, probably waiting as patiently as she could. She hummed for a second, nothing very coherent, which was faint in the gust of wind that brushed past. And then she began to sing again, this time a little more quietly. It was the same song, but with a tweaked melody and different lyrics, and it made his heart stop.
"I'll love you forever
I'll like you for always
As long as I'm living,
my baby you'll be."
"That's my song!" He gasped, immediately slapping his hands over his mouth and backing into the shadows when he realized he'd just shouted. He watched her look over both shoulders but never down.
He pulled in a breath through his nose, and suddenly he was running, scattering the rats and turning corners until he found the nearest manhole and climbed up, throwing the cover to the side and not bothering to put it back on.
He ran to the mouth of the alley, keeping close to the wall and peeked around the corner. There was a food cart about a block away with a line of four people standing around it, one of which was a woman, waiting alone in the middle of the line with her back turned to him.
Heart beating a funny cadence behind his plastron, he doubled back, jumped up on the fire escape and climbed to the roof. He darted across it, jumping the next alley over, and crawled up to the ledge on his knees to peek over the side. The cart was just below now, but he was no closer to seeing her face than he'd been a block away.
She stepped up in the line as the man in front of her glanced at his watch and walked away without ordering anything. She turned her head to watch him leave but her face was obscured by a sheet of soft brown hair that rippled away from her shoulders with the wind. She faced the cart before it stopped and Mikey let out a frustrated breath. There was no way he could get any closer. So he waited while she waited and leaned farther forward when she finally ordered her food, paid, and walked away with a gyro wrapped in aluminum foil. He followed along the edge of the building as she strolled down the sidewalk, eating as she went.
She was wearing a modest, blue, summer dress and flat shoes. Her hair reached down to about the middle of her back, and she carried a small purse that looped around her neck with a long strap and moved with her hip as she walked. She wore no jewelry that he could see, and from the way she moved and presented herself he guessed she was in her early thirties. All this … and he could not see her face.
He followed her for about five blocks to a decent neighborhood, the street lined with sandwiched apartment buildings and a little convenience store on the corner. She walked to the very center of the row of apartments, across the street from where he now watched her, and skipped up the steps then stopped to dig around in her purse.
A whistle sounded from the sidewalk beneath him. She looked up, and when she turned around a gust of wind blew her hair back behind her and he finally got a full frontal view of her.
It brought him to his knees, and he stared in bewilderment at her fair face, kind brown eyes, and warm, white smile.
She waved to whoever had gotten her attention and he just barely heard another woman's voice shouting, "See you at the cookout, Jen!"
"Yeah, see you!" the woman shouted back. She pulled her hair over her shoulder and proceeded to dig through her purse for her keys and then let herself in the building.
He knelt there for a long time, staring at the door she'd just disappeared through, sinking further down on his knees until he was fully sitting on the rooftop. He listened to the whistle of the wind and the tempo of his heart as it fluttered with a child-like rhythm in his chest, full and confused and delighted all at once.
He didn't know what to do, how to move, what to think. What was he supposed to do when, after fifteen years of knowing she was out there somewhere, and a full year of searching, he finally found the mother he'd been looking for?