Just a little nonsense

Whoever was in charge of putting together the weather forecast at Channel 6, they deserved to be fired.

Raphael hadn’t bothered to pay attention to the reporter’s name, had barely bothered to pay attention to the report itself considering it wasn’t April onscreen, but the guy had gone on and on with all the confidence in the world that the string of serious storms on the horizon was due to roll in tonight. Not today, mind you, tonight, which one would assume to mean you still had some time to be out and about, do your business, and then batten down the hatches once all was said and done.

Naturally Leonardo and Donatello, worriers and planners that they were, had been of the mind that they ought to stay underground the whole day and get all the battening done ahead of time. Big storms up top often meant increased flood risks in the sewers and it was best not to take any chances. Supposedly there was no reason for them to go topside today anyway, not unless it was a real emergency like a Shredder sighting. With the recently restocked freezer full of pizza and ice cream to tide everyone over, even Michelangelo was willing to settle in for the long haul, even though he typically hated the idea of being cooped up with cabin fever.

Unbeknownst to them, however, Raphael might have neglected to mention the little—so little, so not a big deal, so not a real emergency, so totally sweepable under the rug but not so easily ignored case of more literal fever that had slowly but surely been eating at him over the past few days.

Much as he enjoyed complaining sometimes, if he mentioned it now the others would either A) get exasperated about the timing for no good reason, as if he had any control over the bad weather or a bugged immune system or B) fuss and fret to the point of overbearing until he was just dying to get some breathing room and the storms offered him no avenues of escape.

He saw no reason to get them involved when he had been holding it at bay on his own just fine so far, sneaking some blister packs of medicine out of the bathroom cabinet here and there as needed. If he was a little tired and tetchier than usual, the others could put it down to the weather change; they knew how much he hated a total downer of a downpour.

When this round of fever reducers hit his stomach, so did the sinking realization that it was the last round in the cabinet and he was going to hate the downpour a heck of a lot more without them. The only thing worse than being holed up down here with the gloom, potential power outages and chilly excess moisture creeping in through all the leaks Donatello insisted he had patched already (which was funny because if they were all patched up, there wouldn’t be leaks to do the leaking, huh, Donatello?!) would be the sickness creeping further in with it.

So there was no real emergency that would have any of the others going topside today, which meant they would be none the wiser if Raphael, after dutifully double checking the sturdy seal on what used to be a grate against potential flooding, shrugged on his trench coat, slapped on his hat and darted aboveground for a quick little shopping trip.

Not quite as quick as he’d hoped when the pharmacy closest to their manhole was inconveniently closed for reasons unknown and none of the nearby taxi drivers spared him a second glance—or maybe they just didn’t hear him call out with the tickly, scratchy throat he had been staving off so long. He would have thought the fresher air up here would help but it only tickled further when weighed down with impending ozone.

The clouds were churning, billowing in much grayer hues than he would have expected when the storm front should still be several hours away, but he couldn’t be bothered to think on it for long. He had places to be.

The walk to the next pharmacy might have been a pleasant one any other day but the breeze that a happy and healthy Raphael would have considered merely brisk was rather biting to a decidedly uncomfortable and shivery Raphael trudging along, hunkered down into his coat. His hat nearly flew off more than once as said breeze whistled its way up into a proper wind, needling a deeper flush into his cheeks, grating his ears even worse than Michelangelo’s radio blaring on full blast.

Good thing the next pharmacy was open and stocked with pain reliever for the pressure headache rolling in. Cough syrup, lozenges and fever reducers were scored. To feel better about himself, to muster some miniscule spark of joy, he even grabbed some of the guys’ favorite candies at checkout to serve as a surprise pizza topping later; he could just tell them it had been tucked away in his secret stash all along.

The thought of piping hot pizza with a gooey candy coating melting over it was his only consolation when the pharmacy’s sliding doors reopened and the wind swept in to meet him, bringing a surprise spray of early rain with it.

…Oh, boy.

In hindsight maybe that should have been his sign to stay put. He could have tried to make himself comfortable in one of the pharmacy’s infamously uncomfortable chairs or start building a whole new stash from the bigger candy aisle until the rain let up a little. But it wasn’t estimated to let up anytime soon; this was only the beginning, the mildest it was going to be for at least a few days and somehow he couldn’t foresee himself camping in the candy aisle that long or somebody would start bumping up the tax on his chocolate for rent.

He’d come this far. Committing to this commute inherently meant committing to the return trip. Swiping his sleeve over his face, he sniffled, took a steeling breath, stifled a cough and marched out to meet the street.

Big surprise, the street was not a fun place to be. In fact it was becoming more and more inhospitable by the second.

Halfway back down the block—maybe less than half, considering the wind was whipping against him, trying to buffet him four steps back for every two steps forward—and the raindrops had already opted to skip the buildup of gentle pitter-patter to become a relentless drumroll. Raphael wasn’t seeing a punchline anywhere on the horizon but the thunder packed enough punch on its own. He jumped much more violently than he should have at the boom but he didn’t have time to be embarrassed; the startle threw his footing out on the wet sidewalk and left him scrambling to catch himself. Clinging to a nondescript wall, he had to waste valuable seconds waiting for the sudden reeling dizziness to subside and then he re-quickened his pace.

Challengingly, relentlessly, so did the rain.

It was crazy how fast those gray, gloomy clouds had darkened to look like puffy purple-black bruises. His vision had darkened too, what with all the water drizzling off the brim of his hat to sting his eyes. Any other figures unfortunate enough to be out here with him were hunched, hurried, blurry smears. He and Shredder probably could have bumped past each other without any hint of recognition. The only time he could make out the people any more clearly, huddling in doorways and under awnings, was when lightning lashed across the sky, like the stark, scathing slice of Leonardo’s sword across the dark canvas of a Foot soldier’s uniform.

Raphael was probably in for something scathing too once he got home and the others realized where he’d been against their advice. Or maybe, hopefully, they would accept his peace offering of candy—if the boxes weren’t dissolving into mush right now within the puddles that were forming in his pockets. For all he knew the boxes could have been jostled out and lost somewhere along the way already with his coat’s frantic flapping in the wind. He clutched at it and his flyaway hat for dear life with clammy, shaking hands.

Maybe the guys would feel sorry for him with his sodden, shivering, drowned rat look (no offense, Master Splinter, if you heard that all the way from your sabbatical), let him off easy with a minor finger wagging and then a clean, cozy blanket. That sounded so good! Bundled up in a blanket, nestled in his usual spot on the couch, a hot meal, a hotter cup of tea with which to take his medicine—He’d even take some of their patented fussing on the side. He’d welcome it. It couldn’t be anywhere near as overbearing as this storm!

Every puddle he staggered through seemed colder, deeper and slipperier than the last. But how to tell one puddle from another? They were all merging together into a current. It was even harder to keep his feet underneath him when they were going numb. Why hadn’t he worn his boots?

Because he thought he had about six more hours before the street turned into a stream! Thanks a million, Mr. Weatherman! Soon-to-be-Former-Weatherman, once Raphael convinced Donatello to help him draft a formal letter of complaint.

But for that he would need to be with Donatello. Home.

His skull rattled with the force that his teeth were chattering; he could barely think over the sound of it and the constant, shrieking squall blasting rain—drops? No, at this rate they were more like rain-needles in his face. The forecast hadn’t called for hail, had it? Would Soon-to-be-Former Weatherman have even known to give everyone a head’s up if it had?

Raphael’s exhales were freezing but his every inhale burned, laced with water. And he’d thought his throat was sore before! His sporadic, spluttering coughs were lost to the cacophony around him, until one particularly rough, lingering round nearly cost him his balance again.

Okay, Plan B. He let it happen and dropped, prying stiff, soaked, tingly fingers free of his coat’s lapels to scrub clumsily at his eyes and then sift through the rivulets racing past, feeling around for a manhole cover. He may not know the sewers as well in this area (What street was he on anyway? He could barely see four feet ahead of him, much less make out the street signs!) But at least he’d be underground, out of the deluge! He may just have to hope he wouldn’t descend the ladder straight into a flood risk; it’s not like the whole length of the sewer system had been shored up as well as it was around their lair.

By the time he skimmed over familiar bumpy, ridged metal, he almost didn’t feel it; his searching hands were going about as numb as his feet. He was shivering so violently, he couldn’t get a solid grasp on the cover’s edges. Spitting near inaudible curses, regretting it when it left him out of breath, he banged his fist against it with more of a splash than a thud.

Thunder reverberated as if he had triggered it with the blow, seemingly right over his head, and again he jumped, coughing exhaustedly, defeatedly. The longer he knelt there, the deeper he could feel the rain soaking straight through his collar to slither into his shell with him, a nauseating chill.

Fine. Fine! Plan C…He’d come this far, he wanted nothing more than to magically muster up reserves of strength he may not have in this condition, dig deep and keep pushing on until he was home already, but he should probably just take a hint from the passersby, duck inside a nice, cushy lobby somewhere en route and wait this out awhile. Hopefully said nice, cushy lobby wouldn’t mind him dripping all over their presumably just-as-nice floors. Now if only he had a little more visibility with which to actually spot a refuge!

The wind reached a shrill pitch he hadn’t even known was within his hearing range, wailing what might have been a warning, before the next disorienting, blinding flash of light signaled not a thunderclap but a distant creaking, crashing—

Crack.

Visibility dropped to zero. Lights out.

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In the dark someone was screaming, so close to his ear it felt like the sound was drilling straight through his brain, like it wanted to shatter his skull. How desperately he wanted to tell them to shut up already but when he strained for a breath to do so, the air turned to water and then to fire in his lungs.

Fire? Orange light flickered and reflected in his periphery, dizzying. No, water. He hacked and gurgled weakly against it, he thought, but he couldn’t be sure when the intermittent screams continued to drown it out.

Drown. Water. Current. Had he belly flopped into one of the overflowing sewer streams? That would explain the radiating, roiling pain and pressure behind his plastron. He may be a turtle, a sound swimmer, but the water was so cold and he was so heavy, so tired. He didn’t know if he had the strength to swim. Why couldn’t he move?

His head was swimming in a way he really didn’t like. Like he was…going back under. He had a gut feeling (throbbing, swelling, burning) that he shouldn’t let that happen…but…at least the glaring lights and noise were drifting further away now…

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Someone or something was shaking him. The rocking sensation made him want to hurl but all that came up was a mouthful of water that tasted too much like phlegm.

“…el? Ra…el!”

He coughed. Something soft and leathery brushed his face, damp yet radiating such gentle, blissful, nonsensical warmth. A part of him wanted to lean into it, chase the sensation. The better part of him didn’t want to move. Couldn’t.

Something chirped. Was it him? But his throat was so tight and sore, he didn’t know how the sound could have squeaked free.

“…uys, I foun…!”

Then that soft something shifted from his face to the back of his head, where it was suddenly a lot less soft and gentle and a lot more like an explosion of pain that dropped him like an anvil back into the dark.

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It felt like someone was peeling off layers of his sodden skin. His attempt to struggle was little more than a shudder. Once the tremors started, they wouldn’t stop, not even when something dryer was draped over him, hurriedly tucked in here and there. “Here and there” were already so bruised, even the tentative tucking throbbed. His head throbbed in time.

He wanted to curl all the way into his shell. The tucking was tangling him up, getting in the way.

He wanted to bite whoever or whatever was touching him. His teeth were chattering too hard.

He wanted to cry. Maybe he was already, what with all the rivulets streaking down his cheeks, but the exhaustion was heavier than the embarrassment.

Cry yourself to sleep then, you big baby.

Back under.

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He was moving again—or being moved. He couldn’t tell if he was floating or swinging but his head and stomach were still swimming. When another cough wrung its way out, the movement stopped short. Someone braced the back of his neck and his shell, trying to be kind, and it ached. Everything ached. The outside was freezing and the inside was on fire and he couldn’t do anything to stop it and he wanted to scream like the people who had drilled into his ear but all he could do was cough and cough and cough and—

And shouldn’t he have medicine for that? He’d gone to get medicine for that specifically, he realized, so abrupt and acute that for a moment it felt like he’d actually managed to poke his head above the water and the pressure. For just that moment he registered a muddled smear of blue and purple, not gloomy gray, and his heart jumped.

Then his tender ribs jumped with it. Fire. Orange reentering the periphery, bright, too bright for his bloodshot eyes to track. Blurring.

Coughing and coughing and water and ringing and—

Black.

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He was dry at long, long last but his body just went on shivering for its own kicks. His skin was still like ice. Dry ice.

Dry ice burned. The haze of blue hovering told him so, tutting worriedly, “You’re burning up…”

From where Raphael sat (or slumped, rather) there wasn’t much he could do about that, so thoroughly bundled and bruised. He couldn’t even find the strength to follow the traditional three-step plan, drop and roll to put out the fire.

What was the third…or first(?)…step of that plan again?

Stop.

More than anything he wished he could stop shivering.

The world drifted in agonizing slow motion to another dazed, dim halt.

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Well…he was half right before.

The only thing worse than being down here with the gloom, potential power outages and chilly excess moisture creeping in through all the leaks was putting up with the sickness to boot.

However, it didn’t creep in slowly as he’d originally imagined or if it had, he was only semiconscious to register that stage. By the time he was more unfortunately lucid and aware, it felt like it had crashed in to sit on his chest with all the force of a semi-truck.

Or—more apt, apparently—a tree.

“Burne may have indirectly done us a favor being so unfair to April, badgering her to buckle down despite the weather and get out there to report about the damages,” Donatello muttered as he eased a cold pack between the pillow and the gnarly lump on the back of Raphael’s head, earning a groggy wince. “If he hadn’t who knows who would have found you?”

“Who knows if…?” Leonardo trailed off, his poorly stifled shudder nothing to do with the damp from the torrents of rain still raging above.

“Hey, m’ like a bad penny. I would’ve turned up sooner or—ow,” Raphael croaked more pitifully than he intended when he received a reproachful flick to his feverish forehead. He couldn’t say it was undeserved; Donatello might have opted for a harder swat if it weren’t for the concussion but that didn’t mean Raphael had to like it. Talk about insult to injury to illness. Triple whammy.

“You scared us half to death, Raphael! I imagine you looked half dead too when April saw you, pinned under that tree branch; you could have been if your shell hadn’t taken the brunt of it!”

“I couldn’t see it coming. It’s not like I was asking for it to—”

“You didn’t ask at all,” Leonardo snapped, crunching one of the blister packs of tablets before tossing it onto the nightstand, rounding on him in the precarious balancing act between stern and pleading. “You didn’t say anything to anyone, you just went out to inspect the seal on the grate and then disappeared without a trace! You could have been anywhere or nowhere and we would have had no idea where to start! If Donatello hadn’t boosted the signal on the Turtle Comms. to try and track you—”

“Which didn’t even work, considering your comm. was getting drenched!”

“—April’s call might not have gotten through and you could have caught your death of cold out there.” Raphael wasn’t the only one breathing unsteadily now.

“Yeah, I know…M’sorry. Really. I thought I had more time…Honestly I didn’t think I’d be gone long enough for you to miss me. S’just trying to take care of it before it became a big deal,” he mumbled tiredly. And of course he’d only made it an even bigger deal in the process; it was probably well on its way to becoming pneumonia with all that water he’d inhaled. When it rains it pours. His sigh hitched into a wet cough, then a garbled gasp as his busted ribs spasmed.

Michelangelo was quick to nudge Donatello aside, coax Raphael to sit up and press another pillow to his plastron ahead of the incoming fit. His hand bracing Raphael’s shell was becoming a familiar sensation and he wasn’t so stubborn or self-conscious that he failed to lean back on the support.

“No duh we’d miss you,” Michelangelo pointed out simply, his hand alternating between patting and circling. “You’re kind of a big deal to us, dude.”

Raphael could blame the blurring of his vision on the wrenching, raucous fit and/or the pounding headache, of course. They were certainly contributors. But when the coughing eventually waned, Michelangelo offered such a sweet, sympathetic smile as he nudged him to resettle back into his pillows. It matched the smiley-face bandages he’d woken up to find plastered all over the various scrapes and gashes from the tree branches; Michelangelo took an extra moment to smooth down any colorful adhesive edges that had started peeling away from his skin before skirting back out of the way.

Donatello picked up the dislodged cold pack, patting it first across his flushed neck and then cupping it back over his head with unexpected gentleness, and Leonardo was coming back in a meticulously measured dose of that cough syrup he had fought so hard for and a mug alongside it, when Raphael hadn’t even noticed him leaving the room to get them. He knew before he could smell it that it would be peppermint tea with way too much milk and honey, just the way he liked it. Sickly sweet.

Okay, so the fever and the cough and the collision weren’t entirely to blame for the aching warmth between his ribs and behind his eyes.

But it was more tolerable than the cold by a long shot. As was the deserved scolding and perhaps undeserved spoiling. Bundled up in a clean, cozy blanket? Check. Nestled in a comfy spot? Check. His medicine, followed by a few sips of soothing tea with which to wash it down? Check. He and the city were both under the weather but he had a feeling he was going to be saccharine-d and spoiled and smothered to death down here long before the clouds cleared out up top.