You're Needed Here Now, Donnie

Chapter 17 - You're Needed Here Now, Donnie

But he digressed.

All right, based off of my findings, I think I can now safely assume that water is not a factor here . . .

Donnie then came to the undeniable conclusion that he was way overthinking things yet again. It was no wonder his brothers were always rolling their eyes at him when he started thinking out loud. If he could open his eyes right now, he'd be doing the same thing.

Clearing his head as best he could, Donatello tried to focus on the actual sounds still floating above him rather than letting his mind wander off every which way. Sometimes, it was hard to concentrate when his hyperactive brain was constantly firing off countless hypotheses as to why things worked the way that they did.

With great knowledge comes endless possibilities . . . or something like that . . .

The voices around him were slowly starting to increase in volume and clarity, but he still found himself straining to fine tune them into something even remotely articulate. As near as he could tell from the detectable inflections and timbres resonating in at different intervals, there were at least three or four diverse vocal patterns sounding off.

An unknown period of time passed as he waited for the voices to become more comprehensible. A part of him had been filled with dread over the thought that one of the voices that he was hearing could be that of Chris Bradford – or even the Shredder himself – but the closer he listened to the voices, the more at ease he felt. Even though he could not understand what was being said to him, there was something warm and comforting about the sounds that made him feel secure.

After a while, the jumbled and unintelligible syllables gradually converted into occasional words here and there. Eventually, those words transformed into structured sentences, but Donatello's brain was still having a hard time deciphering them.

Another indefinite stretch of time elapsed before his mind finally regained the ability to translate English once again.

What he heard made him want to jump for joy.

"Donatello, it is time for you to return to us, my son."

That voice! That wonderful, wonderful voice!

His father was with him and he immediately knew that meant that he was safe and sound.

Oh, how he had missed that voice!

As much as he wanted to open his eyes so that he could set them upon his father, he could not . . . and that was not for lack of trying. Something was not right. He had this strange feeling, as though he was drifting and there was nothing to anchor him down to reality. He could hear his father's pleas for him to wake up, but he could not move. Not one little muscle.

The uplifting sense of security that hearing his father's voice had brought was now gone, quickly replaced by an overwhelming sense of fear.

Why couldn't he move?

Was this sleep paralysis or was it something far worse?

The last truly lucid thing that Donnie remembered before this point was leaping off of a balcony to take out Chris Bradford in order to save Raph. Then, all had gone black, save for a small period of semi-consciousness, but he wasn't even sure if that had actually happened. It could have just as soon been a dream or a hallucination brought on by his head injury, because the whole thing had seemed a little too muddled and hazy to be real.

Donnie thought about the balcony once again.

Had the fall caused damage to his spinal cord? Had he lost all voluntary muscle function or even autonomic function as a result of the fall? Well, at least he was breathing of his own volition, which meant that his lungs were able to perform without the aid of a respirator. Of course, he should have figured that out right away, because if his lungs hadn't been working, his family wouldn't have been able to do anything about it and he'd be dead.