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A New Lease on Life	By : Ghost-of-a-Chance Category: +S through Z > Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Views: 3157 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I don't own TMNT, any of its characters or devices, or any songs/books/movies referenced. No money is made from this story. I DO own any & all OCs included in the story...and a Woozle.

Chapter List
- 19
- 20
- 21
Suggested Listening: John Mellencamp "Small Town," Paramore "When It Rains"
19: Dreams and Disasters
Soft cool breezes filter through the leaves of a tall, gnarled Pin Oak. All around Amber, a familiar overgrown plot of land stretches as far as the eye can see. Tall tasseled grass ripples in the wind; powder-puff clouds race across the bluer-than-blue sky. Up in the tree's middle-most branches, Amber smiles fondly, watching distant bluebirds dart from trees down to the ground then back again. She knows this place—she knows this view.
Willsdale…somehow, she has made it back to Willsdale, and not the Willsdale she left behind. Nowhere is any sign of the horror and tragedy the storm left in its wake. Off to the south, the grove of black locust trees stands bedraggled, but tall and proud, not splintered and shattered the way the trees are in her dreams. As she scans the horizon for all the old familiar sights, she realizes belatedly that this Willsdale still shows signs of the disaster she relives nearly every night. Off to the north, a vacant lot has taken the place of a rickety wooden outbuilding, and the already worn trailer house and brick shed due East are a little worse for the wear. Even the pair of hedge apple trees nearby show signs of damage.
'How am I here again?' she wonders; 'I'm dead in this world—I can't be here.' Moss green eyes drift downward and notice over-abundant cleavage and the very end of one long brown braid, the grey streaks dyed bright blue and violet. Still in Kimber's body, then, she decides, but somehow in Willsdale…a dream, then? 'Well, might's well enjoy it while I' got it.'
"Amber?" The sudden voice startles her from her cloud-gazing and she turns to greet the visitor below her. At the foot of the massive tree, Donatello comes to a stop and stares up in amusement. "Now how'd you get up there?" Kimber's body, her world, and Donatello to boot—she's loving this dream!
"I climbed, silly," she teases with a playful grin, swinging her feet girlishly. It looks ridiculous, she's sure, but being home makes her feel young again…hence her absurd desire to climb a tree she's not been able to climb since college. "C'mon up, the view's great!"
In what seems like the blink of an eye, Donnie's ninjas his way up to the limb right across from hers and settles down along one wide limb, his carapace nestled comfortably in the crook of the trunk. Bandaged fingers hang loosely while their kin fidget, fighting the urge to reach for some random piece of equipment. His complete inability to get a single bar on his phone has driven him antsy.
"Aaron an' I must'a spent half our lives up in this tree," she confesses running her fingers along the underside of a branch right overhead; within seconds she locates what she sought and points it out to the turtle. 'Ambur O, Aaron W, & Mercy R,' the poorly executed carving reads. 'Best freinds furever;' even decades later, Aaron's intentional misspellings drive her inner grammar Nazi batty. Somewhere near the top of the tree, she once carved her initials with Aaron's surrounded by a wobbly heart; after years of waiting, hoping, praying, and finally giving up on him, she hopes he never found it.
"Willsdale seems like a great place to grow up," Donnie remarks quietly as he surveys the land around them. Aaron lives in a single-wide, but he has a lot of land around it—no one wants to live that far beyond town center and the land supposedly has no redeeming qualities, and that meant it was dirt cheap. "Very wholesome…very calm." Amber nods, turning back to the locust grove and picturing it the way she loved it most—covered with bunches of white and pink flowers that last all spring and into summer.
"It's not for everyone," she admits, "but it's home, be it ever so humble. Your family thrives in the city; this is where I thrived." Suddenly anxious, she turns away from the wide swath of greenery. "My home was on the other side of those trees…There's nothing left now, nothing but rubble." She startles somewhat at the hand supportively clasped on her shoulder; she and Donatello haven't been getting along lately, and it surprises her that he still wants to comfort her. Their eyes meet over a bunch of vibrant leaves, sending a pang through her heart. It hasn't been that long since she finally came clean with him—finally admitted the horrible truth about his family's role in her world—but he still finds it hard to trust her. Now the blatant affection in his ever-changing eyes makes her wonder if he's ready to let it go.
"Amber," he starts, but is cut off by a holler from the mobile home behind them. A glance at the patio reveals Aaron standing by his rickety grill waving a metal spatula over his head like a giant foam hand.
"Oi, O'Brien!" he shouts louder before shaking the spatula at them; somehow threatening to 'Aunt Jemima' someone with a grimy metal spatula just doesn't have the same effect as with a wooden spoon. "Quit neckin' an' git over here!" Not for the first time, Amber wants to carefully wrap her fingers around Aaron's neck and SHAKE HIM.
"I'm gonna kill'im," she grumbles at Donnie. "Better go keep'im from burnin'is house down, huh?" Donatello stares back at her with an indecipherable expression, seemingly searching for something behind her eyes. Why is he staring at her, she wonders? Amidst a sea of electric tension, he reaches one bandaged hand out toward her, his eyes fixing on her left cheek.
The surprising softness of his thumb brushing a smudge of dirt off her cheek makes her lungs forget their purpose. Amber never notices the wind pick up or the sky darken with storm clouds; her focus is entirely on Donatello, his callused fingertips and palm, and the unexpected softness in his eyes. Although the wind and clouds escaped her notice, a sudden crack of thunder makes her head whip around toward the horizon. Lightning splinters the greying sky. "C'mon," she warns the turtle in a rush, "we' gotta get to shelter!" Donatello dives from the tree and rolls with the landing, then turns to her with open arms.
"Jump!" he shouts; a moment later, she's safe in his arms again. The moment her feet hit the ground they bolt toward Aaron's brick-walled shed—the safest place on the property during a storm—and Amber fights her rising panic. Up by the mobile home, Aaron stands on the patio staring up at the sky, frozen in place as though hypnotized. Amber's warning shouts go unheard. In glancing over her shoulder she sees the sky split open in a maniacal grin, funnel clouds and hail oozing from the jagged wound like vomit. A funnel drops down right between Amber and Donatello and their destination, cutting off their retreat—more close in from the right and left. With their doom barreling toward them from all sides, Amber finds herself on the ground.
"Don't worry, Braids!" Donnie urges as he covers her with his own body clearly intending to shelter her from the storm. "Everything will be okay—I swore to protect you, and I will!" Before she can reply, the newly spawned tornadoes reach them.
This time, Amber dies with Donatello's agonized screams in her ears.
March 12th, 2016, 4 am, the Lair
It took a while, but finally Amber realized the screams she was hearing were her own. Shortly after that the clean tiled wall of the Lab—and the bizarre Nevada-shaped chip nearest her pillow—came into focus. Another nightmare, she realized as she focused on calming her heart-rate and smoothing out her breathing patterns. 'What a weird dream,' she thought as she settled back into the covers. 'It wasn't one'a my usual night terrors…Could it mean somethin'? What the heck could it mean? Nah,' she chastises herself. 'Put away the tarot cards an' use yer head, O'Brien—it's just a freaky dream.'
Not a moment later, she registered a large green blob hovering in the Lab's open doorway, and tugging her glasses on revealed it was Donatello. Before she could get out an apology for waking him, she realized the strange, guarded expression on his face. "You okay?" he asked, his voice low and calm without a hint of the affection it normally bore. Something changed, she realized—something was wrong. She nodded distractedly, noticing that he hesitated a moment as though not believing her, then left as abruptly as he'd come. Something changed between them…something was wrong…
Amber couldn't help but feel like she missed something; little did she know that something was going to blow up in her face.
2 pm, the Hardys' Loft
"From the bottom again, Annie," Beverly instructed her student simply, "slowly—something's not sounding right." The blonde flautist nodded weakly, her pale blue eyes downcast, and played the scale again. "Please pass it to me?" Annie handed her instrument over with a cowed expression, clearly mentally blaming herself for something she wasn't to blame for. Instruments get out of tune regardless of how well they're handled, but Annie struggled with low self-esteem; she took the slightest mistakes as catastrophic failures and habitually assumed guilt for incidents she wasn't responsible for. Beverly silently reminded herself she needed to be a little more gentle and encouraging with this student, and help build up her confidence.
Beverly was normally a cool, collected person and little could get her riled up. It wasn't that she felt nothing—she just didn't relay what she felt at top volume. She spoke with little inflection, she used good grammar and enunciation, she had no discernable accent, and her manner was halfway between aloof and serious. Sometimes people thought it meant she was angry or sour-tempered—even Michelangelo was nervous around her when they first met, all because she seemed entirely unaffected. She wasn't unaffected at all, though—the deepest parts of the ocean are still on the surface.
Beverly accepted the shining metal flute and sprayed down the mouthpiece with sanitizer. Cringing at the cloying taste of alcoholic spearmint, she brought it to her lips and played, starting at the bottom of the scale and working her way up. Every time a sour note sounded, she brought it back down to inspect the footjoints, their applicable keys, and the pads underneath the keys. After a time of adjusting, tightening, loosening, and a replaced cork pad under the joining bar of the C roller, she brought it back up for a final test. A few minor adjustments of the headjoint and crown end later, the instrument was completely in tune. In hopes of cheering Annie up, she played a bar from "Little Brown Jug;" sure enough, the teenager giggled and accepted her tuned and sanitized instrument.
That's when the world exploded.
Next thing Beverly knew, Annie was leaning over her shaking her and shouting her name and Bosco was pacing and whimpering. It took a moment to register things one would think obvious—she lay on the floor, her IV stand leaned haphazardly against the piano, her glasses were missing—and her head was absolutely throbbing. "Wha—" she began hoarsely, cleared her throat, then tried again. "What…happened?" Annie handed Beverly her glasses and putting them on revealed that the girl was crying and shaken; to her dismay, the ever-present black void in the left field of each eye's sight seemed to have spread a little further inland.
"You—You fell off your chair!" Annie whimpered. "You started tipping over and grabbing your head, then you just—you just fell! You—" The girl was hysterical; Bev settled a calming hand on her shoulder.
"It's alright, Sweetheart," she soothed as she worked herself up to a sitting position with Annie's help. "It's just a migraine—I'll be fine." By the time Annie was calmed down, Beverly sat at the small table writing out a note. "Give this to your mother," she instructed calmly. "I'm cutting today's session short, so the next one's free—have her call to schedule whenever she wants. In the meantime, practice your scales an extra half hour every day, alright?" Finally, the still frightened teenager was picked up and the loft hung heavy with silence.
Alone again, Bev yanked the curtains closed and sank into the sofa cringing at the spikes of pain still lancing through her skull. She couldn't recall the last time she felt so dizzy—it was like the world was an out of control merry-go-round and she couldn't get off! No…she could recall the last time…it was the day she lost all sight, lost all sense, lost her way, and nearly lost her very life—the day she unknowingly met Leonardo.
Leo…she sighed despite herself. Even with a jackhammer pounding away at her skull and Bosco nipping at her fingers in concern, she couldn't get her Hogosha off her mind. He was so convinced that humans were all closed-minded—not that he'd been given much reason to believe otherwise—and he couldn't believe that all humans didn't see his family as beasts, as monsters. She knew differently; monsters don't save the lives of helpless women, nor do they continue to drop by at every chance to check on them. A monster would have left her there to die or worse, taken advantage of her inability to fight back. Leonardo was not a monster.
Beverly was intrigued by what she'd heard of Leo's brothers and even more so by the possibility of another human being who could love without labels. Other than herself and Bree, she'd never heard of such a person though she knew they must exist. She smiled weakly even as another barrage of sparks splintered through her skull. Bree and Mikey thought they were so sneaky but she'd seen their budding romance a mile away.
In the dark parlor, Beverly lay curled up on the sofa clutching her head and reminiscing on better times to come, never imagining the rocky road was only growing more treacherous.
Date: 3.12.2016
Time: 16:00:00.
Subject awoke at 04:00:00, screaming from night terrors as usual. Upon approach she showed signs of embarrassment and shame; she has since been reminded that such symptoms are not cause for reproach. By 05:00:00 subject was fully awake, bathed and groomed, and had already consumed her morning nutrition supplement shake.
Note: Introduction of said shakes has improved her appetite by 23.7% and slowed but not halted her unhealthy rate of weight loss; she is currently averaging a loss of .5 lbs/week. Use of the shakes has yet to trigger weight gain or the trauma-related gastric distress that prompted their incorporation. She has expressed concern that she'll "get fat again." Must remind her that some men appreciate curves and pat self on back for finding a successful—if temporary—solution to the meal problem.
Donatello glanced away from the steno pad and its scribblings surveying the view just beyond the Lab's open doorway. For the first time since he discovered the glimmering shoe prints on the bathroom floor, the empty Freaky Space Glitter vial lay abandoned. Last night, Mercy admitted to him that Amber had a history of deceit—well-meaning deceit, but deceit just the same—and ever since, he'd kept a log of evidence for or against that conclusion. So far things weren't looking good. From his desk chair, he could see Amber hard at work as usual; she sat on the lumpy old sofa, folding the mountain of clean laundry she'd just washed...yet another task she'd assumed without ever being asked. He turned back to the notepad to record again.
Behaviors reported in previous entries continue. Subject is also displaying contradictory reactions to stimulus. At 15:00:00, I observed the subject working her way through a week's worth of dirty laundry, little of which belonged to her; when approached about a favor, she claimed to be "not that busy" and offered to help on the spot without requesting details. Even after finding out the specifics of the favor—a 'misplaced' item which was found almost instantly—she never showed any sign of being inconvenienced. Upon being asked if she needed a break, subject replied in the negative.
Subject is evidently capable of hiding her reactions when she chooses—this might indicate she could hide anything she needs to. Along with her previous confession that she has hidden things from her loved ones, there is definitely reason for suspicion.
Donnie paused in his writing a moment and studied Amber again. Her shoulders were pulled tight and shaking, her eyes were scrunched tightly closed, and her hands seemed ready to tear a half-folded towel in half—an intrusive memory had her firmly in its grip. As though feeling his eyes on her, she turned to meet his stare, forced a smile, and gave him a shaky wave. She wasn't doing well, but she smiled anyway…because she didn't want him worrying about her.
For a moment, his resolve faltered; this was Amber, after all—she was his friend, his crush, and, it felt like, the only one in the Lair who still bothered trying to understand him. From the very start, he was inquisitive and curious, and that curiosity drove him to soak up every bit of knowledge he could find. Years later his family had all tired of trying to follow his reasoning and thought process—not that he could really blame them—and quit trying altogether. Your point, Donnie? they'd demand. What're you saying? Simplify it a little, will ya? Never once had Amber demanded he simplify anything for her benefit. She wasn't quite on his level, but as she'd told him before, she was no idiot; despite the wide gap between them, though, she always put forth every effort to keep up with him, a consideration his brothers never bothered with anymore.
He shook his head, staring through his notes, tongue darting out to wet parched lips, then shot a glance at his empty coffee cup. Proof that she was watching him, Amber shuffled past the doorway of the lab to set up another pot of coffee. Faced with yet more evidence of her compassionate, nurturing nature, Donatello couldn't fathom any reason for suspicion other than years of conditioning. Amber had nothing to gain from turning on his family—the very idea made his stomach turn, but his inner Leo reminded him of what he was protecting. He couldn't bear the idea of leaving his family open to betrayal…from any source. Amber was, after all, branded as a Purple Dragon, if only in body; better to cover all their bases just in case.
Subject cannot be trusted to relay her true feelings, he noted in neat print, his brows drawn tight in worry. Whether or not she can be trusted in other matters remains to be seen. Further study is needed.
UP NEXT: an ill wind comes a-rising in Trouble in Paradise
- 19
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- 21
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A New Lease on Life