Slash's Revenge

Chapter 10 - Not the Same

And so, they just sat there, waiting for the clock to hurry up.

In a cruel twist of fate, the three of them were currently sitting in almost the exact locations they had been the day of Donnie's kidnapping: Raph on the beanbag chair, Mikey on the floor in front of the TV, and Leo on the couch. Just like that day, Raph had a comic book in his hands and Leo had a magazine. However, both brothers were far too distracted to absorb anything from their reading material. Mikey had switched on the television set, but he wasn't actually watching TV. No one was. The machine had been turned on for the express purpose of creating background noise to drown out the silence none of them wanted to hear.

Once again, Raphael found himself staring at the closed lab doors, hoping against hope that his brainiac brother would interrupt them, just as he had four days ago. The irony of it all was that the red-masked turtle had been annoyed by the disruption back then. Now, he wanted nothing more than to have his younger brother barge in on them like before.

Tearing his eyes away from the lab, Raph turned his stare straight ahead. It was then that he noticed Mikey's big, blue eyes were also fixed on the doors.

As it turned out, the hotheaded turtle wasn't the only brother who kept glancing over at the laboratory. For the past half hour or so, Michelangelo had also been volleying his gaze back and forth between the doors and the floor beneath him. Every time the turtle in orange looked over at his big brother's lab, he felt his heavy heart drop a little lower, but he still couldn't stop himself from doing it. There was this naïve part of him still clinging to the belief that this was all just one bad dream. One that was taking forever to wake up from. Mikey had long lost count of how many times he had pinched himself, trying to get himself to snap out of his stupor. Truth be told, all that pinching was seriously starting to hurt.

To Michelangelo, four days had felt like an eternity. The youngest turtle missed his brainy brother so much it hurt to even breathe. He missed Donnie's big, goofy, gap-toothed smile. He missed the way Donnie used to yell at him for messing with his stuff. He missed Donnie trying to teach him facts and sciency things, even if it he didn't understand about ninety percent of what his smartest brother ever said. Mostly, Mikey missed his best friend. His best friend that had always been there for him.

Until now...

A melodramatic sigh deflated out Mikey, not just because he was super sad, but also, because he wanted to fill the room with some much-needed noise. The lair was once again getting too quiet for Mikey's sanity and he felt as though the walls were closing in on him.

When the sigh didn't satisfy his need for sound, the youngest brother decided that talking was the next best thing.

"So... has anyone heard anything from April today?" Spinning around so he was facing the couch, Mikey looked up at his two oldest brothers and immediately noticed something was off. Granted, the youngest turtle may not have been the sharpest brother in the sewers, but even he knew Raph and Leo were pretending to be reading. Their eyes weren't actually moving, and now that he was really thinking about it, he hadn't heard either one of them turn a page for like fifteen minutes now. Maybe more like twenty... That and they were both still staring blankly at the same exact comic book and magazine they had been holding in their hands for over two hours now. There was no way it could possibly take Raph that long to read one comic book. Even if it was a double issue.

"No." Leonardo's quiet response was halfhearted at best. He knew very well that his youngest brother was only throwing the question out there to strike up a conversationming...

"I'm so not afraid of silence!"

Of course, Donnie, being the witty and sarcastic turtle he was, had simply responded...