We Have Nothing Underfoot

Author: Serendipity

____

Warnings: Death, creepiness, violence…etcetera. In other news, I’ve gone nucking futs.

“It offered us a chance to join us. I took its offer.”

His brother rips the flesh from his bones with a thousand gruesome whips. It’s nothing like death should be- cold and stinging and slow, but nothing painful. He should be feeling pain. Instead he feels nothing but tightness, he’s burning and his brother is hurting him, his brother.

“Oh, Mikey,” Leonardo says lovingly. “Wake up.”

A dot of gore splashes his brother’s face, and he shudders.

___

And then he crashes to the floor and jars himself into reality, concrete vividly real beneath his hands and the sting and shock of the fall running through his body. It’s weird, because the floor beneath his hands has the smooth coldness of stone caves, but the body check comes up positive for skin and bones.

It should be daylight now, and Leonardo’s voice calls out from the doorway with the faintness of sound passing by. “Wake up, little bro. Rise and shine.”

(wake up mikey can’t you wait I can’t)

Michelangelo wakes up tangled in a mass of blankets that wind around his arms, legs, twine tightly around his throat. He struggles to get out because, hell, practice takes priority and Master Splinter will totally whack him with the cane if he’s late because of a little blanket difficulty, right? Right.

The one around his neck catches and clings to him, tight and scratchy-wool. It’s cold, strangely, he doesn’t know why. And wet- the pipes above his bed haven’t leaked in ages. Donatello fixed them just weeks ago. He needs to fix them again. Can’t be getting the blankets wet. Could you tell him to come and fix them, Leo? They’re trapped around my neck.

“I’ll think about it.” He sounds amused. Bastard doesn’t understand the pain of wet blankets. He is a wet blanket.

“Don’t worry, Mikey. We have all the time in the world.”

And then his brother takes his neck in his hands and snaps it and he feels his own bones crunch like toothpicks.

“I can be merciful.”

___

He wakes up tangled and wrapped in a thousand snakelike tentacles, pushing at his body and coiling around his neck, sending bruise-hard flashes of pain through him as they tighten.

Red light flickers before his eyes, like twin candle flames. “You know that wasn’t a dream, don’t you? You know that I’m gone. How many years does a body last rotting?”

“I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe, Leo!”

His neck is broken. He shouldn’t be speaking. Leonardo laughs and twists harder.

___

(this isn’t really real.)

His night light glows neon green near his bed.

Night in the sewers is pitch-black and oppressive, and the tunnels and rooms have no light when everything has been switched off. The darkness is so absolute that it feels almost alive. Like it can suffocate you with its weight. As a child, he felt like he was in the belly of a monster.

Michelangelo has never stopped being afraid of total dark. He squeezes his eyes shut as if he can find light behind his eyelids. It’s almost counterintuitive, but he curls himself into the tightest ball possible because he knows that-

Something?

But it’s already happened, hasn’t it?

His throat closes in on itself, choking back something metallic and cold.

(is it?)

___

Someone lights a match. He smells the sulfur and feels the motion of another body here, but he keeps his eyes squeezed tightly shut.

“I was searching,” he says. “And I was caught.”

He’s really just talking to hear his own voice. There’s nothing here but him, and he always talks when he’s nervous, even when he has the creeping feeling between his shoulders and he refuses to open his eyes. Everyone knows the rules from when they were children: opening your eyes makes the monsters real. Keeping them closed might fend them off, it’s no guarantee, but once your eyes opened to face the monster it was real, and it had teeth, and it would-

“Tell me how.”

He shivers.

It’s Leonardo’s voice.

“You always get caught, Mikey,” his brother says. He sounds casual, "Your problem is your lack of focus. It makes it so easy for someone to distract you and catch you unawares.”

Water drips somewhere just beyond his hearing.

He’s lived among water in pipes, water in pools, water in rushing streams through concrete pipes, and this is something different. It sounds like endless raindrops in deep cavern pools, and something just above him moves quickly enough to send a brief sensation of cool air on his skin. It feels like the flutter of bats in attics, and his skin crawls at the sensation.

When he really thinks about it, it doesn’t even feel like he’s dreaming.

___

Ninja hide and seek is different from regular hide and seek. But this time, they have weapons.

“I’m going to count to ten.”

(listen to me, mikey. it’s not real. it’s all in your mind.)

“Ten. Nine. Eight.”

When he dreams, he’s always felt lighter- like he’s nothing but air stuffed into a body lighter than any fabric ever made. Lighter, but slower, trudging through the molasses-slow dreamscape. He’s thinking clearly, and the weight of his body anchors him to the stony ground beneath his feet. Michelangelo knows this is not real, and still more real than any dream he’s every experiences, and that everything dangerous here could very well wound him or kill him.

Michelangelo groans and it sounds like it’s been forced out under pressure, as if a fist hit him in the stomach. “Oh man, I’m afraid.” He’s not afraid to admit it.

( you have to wake up!)

“Seven. Six. Five.”

Leonardo‘s voice chuckles from somewhere to his right. “Still afraid of the dark, Mikey?”

It’s cold enough now that he’s sure that if he opened his eyes, he’d see his breath as frozen white clouds. No, he wouldn’t. He knows it’s still too dark to see. His breath doesn’t carry its own light.

“Four. Three. Two. ONE.”

And he knows he could run, should run, that this is like a game of hide-and-seek or keep-away and maybe if he’s fast enough or quick enough he can get away. Leonardo always beat him at keep-away. “You’re not my brother,” he says quietly. His voice shakes too much to get the words out correctly. “You’re not.”

More laughter. “What’s the matter? Aren’t you sure enough to trust your own eyes?”

___

“Wake up, little bro. Rise and shine.”

His eyes open to the sound of skin scraping against stone, and his brother’s face in front of him, bloated and caked with blood. Leonardo’s mouth curves into a smile, tugging at the loose flesh of his face.

He looks dead.

Dead for years.

(wake up!)

He realizes his brother’s eyes are milky white as a corpse as he pushes closer and opens his mouth. It looks impossibly wide: a yawning void of teeth- (sharp, like shark’s teeth, he’s spent a week watching horror movies like Jaws,) and Leonardo swallows him whole. Swallows him like a pit of quicksand, like the ground opening to take him.

Michelangelo smells the rot of flesh, bitter water, the echoing taste of metal and blood.

___

“I have to wake up,” he says, and chokes out a gush of sewer water.

This cave is not like the one he’s just traveled through. It’s harder, sharper, and made of jagged edges that are just a little too clearly-defined to be real. But only a little, and he thinks that he’s telling himself this because he wants this all not to be real. Not this. It’s like the world ending in one fell swoop, and his brother has him pinned-

(no, his mind whispers in a mad rush, no no no and he doesn’t want to think-)

-pinned to the rock with an arm made of a thousand pulsing, rubbery tentacles that dig into his skin and leave sharp trails of pain down his arms and any skin they touch. His eyes are red, glowing, otherwere eyes with a shine to them like any evil thing you might see in a movie come to life- penetrative and slitted. Their eyes have always been reptilian, but his brother’s now make him think of the dinosaurs: of crushing jaws and ancient things that shake the earth.

“Oh, Mikey,” Leonardo says- it’s quiet, and he’s never heard his voice like this before, “We’re going to have so much fun.” ‘Fun’ slithers out between his brother’s teeth, twisted and ugly in his mouth, and he’s never heard anything like that from him, because it sounds like he’s not even talking anymore.

Like he’s making sounds that lump together to make words, but the sounds don’t come from his voice…but from a series of distorted hisses, sounds jangling together to form words. Not like a voice at all.

He’s never heard his brother speak like this before. It’s harsh like he’s breathing too much- like he’s breathing too much when he’s talking, does that make sense? And he feels wrong, part turtle like his brother has always been, hard muscles and strength and curved bones, part other, cold and gripping and squirming along his skin and he can’t-

He can’t tell if he’s screaming.

“So. Much. Fun,” his brother hisses all around him, and it feels like even the words coming out of his mouth have come to coil around him, tight and grasping and-

___

And this time he has a flashlight: bright and colorful, one of those toy ones you get from Halloween. The beam is dim, and he swings it in a wide arc.

“The trick is not to say anything,” he tells Leonardo. Cold water spills from his mouth in a gush, coppery and rank. “Don’t say anything and don’t look at anything. Because, once you see the monster, it becomes real. And then, once the monster comes alive, you spend your whole dream trying to run from it. But they get you there, because you can’t run from a monster.”

“Why not?” Leonardo sounds sort of tolerant and long-suffering, which must be hard for him with his arm nearly falling from his shoulder. It swings from shreds of flesh, and he thinks he should be advising him to get stitches on that thing, for the love of god.

“I don’t know, dude. Ya just can’t. Your legs get caught in the air, like it gets thicker, and you crawl until it catches you. It always catches you from behind.”

The flashlight drips its painted colors onto the floor, bleeding in with the puddles.

“Are you really dead?”

“Do you want me to be?”

___

Leonardo’s corpse-white eyes are sympathetic. “Do you remember when we got here? Do you think we ever think things through before we actually go through with them? Do you think that‘s a flaw in my leadership abilities, Mikey? Do you think…do you ever think we should have paid more attention?”

Michelangelo opens his mouth and drowns as his brother pushes him in the sewer and holds his head down. Littered across the bottom of the water-flooded tunnel are hundreds of golden coins engraved with Leonardo’s face.

___

This isn’t supposed to happen.

(god help me he’s caught me the monster’s caught-)

Michelangelo is pretty sure he’s saying something, but his own words don’t even make it to his ears. He’s pleading, he thinks. Screaming. Is he screaming? Because there’s a noise somewhere behind him, maybe even beyond him, and it’s high-pitched and vibrating and almost enveloping.

When his brother pushes a tentacle, dripping and squirming like the death throes of a snake, into his mouth, he bites down hard and tastes bitter, tastes blood, and then catches up in a spasm of pain like getting hit by lightning.

“No,” he’s screaming, and that’s the only thing he can say because his brother has caught him and pinned him and now he’s inside him- inside him and moving like- (like what, like what? nothing and this is hurting and it's wrong and he’s-)

It’s not a dream. It’s not a dream.

He closes his eyes.

___

And he’s not lost in a dark place at all. He is sitting in the middle of the kitchen with half a bowlful of cereal in his lap. The lights aren’t on here, but he can see that the TV sets are flickering in and out with a disjointed pattern that reminds him of shivering. The cereal bowl is cold against his thighs, wet like he’s spilled some milk during the nightmare. It was a nightmare, he thinks, of course it was. Like when he was five and dreamt of the dark things that lived in the pipes, when he ran from room to room until he got here.

That sense of clarity seeps in slowly,

Then he realizes this is the kitchen of a home that has been destroyed by mousers.

“Drink your tea,” Leonardo says. He’s walking stiffly, and there’s something wrong about the way he’s moving that makes it impossible to look away. “You need to stop with this, you know. It’s just your mind getting to you. There’s really nothing under your bed. None of them would go there, anyway. Not the little crawling things or the oldest of the darkest. I can‘t call out their names because the land you stand on is sacred. Drink your tea, Mikey.”

“What are you, the level boss of Silent Hill?” he asks. Behind him, the television set light goes dimmer as each set is filled with snow. No connection. The cereal bowl is filled with green tea and Cheerios, the tiny cereal bits soggy and disintegrating. “Is any of this real, Leo?”

Leonardo walks like a marionette- like the strings that control him are tangled. He collapses into a chair in a tangle of limbs, and his head lolls sickly to the side. “Why do you have to ask so many questions? I fear, therefore it is: not quite Descartes, is it? You should ask Donny these questions. You should eat your flesh- swallow yourself and never die. Is that real? Flesh of my flesh, real enough. Reality is the poison.”

The creature that is his brother lifts his head to look at him and he realizes every joint on his body is connected backwards- elbows swinging the wrong way, knees horribly buckling back and jerking crookedly out.

“You’re not-”

“Can’t you say anything else? It’s starting to get dull.”

___

(listen to me, mikey. it’s all in your head.)

“Can’t you say anything, Mikey?” Leonardo rips through him and he screams and claws as he lies choking underneath his body, he can‘t breathe- it’s too much, it’s not real, no, no, and his body collapses as his brother laughs, “Anything original? You‘re always so good with those one-liners. It’s disappointing when you can’t even-”

(it’s not real.)

The tentacles pour through his throat and entwine in his body, curling in his stomach and tearing through his chest.

“Too late.”

___

Kitchen again. The sink runs clear over his hands, the light is bright and fluorescent. When he checks the clock above the oven, he sees it is nearly three in the morning. About average time for a nightmare to send him running for safety in the usual place. He pours hot water into a superhero mug and searches for the damn hot cocoa, his hands shaking. Nightmares come too often.

Halfway before he’s finished trying to find the missing box of Nestle, he hears the heavy tread of footsteps entering the room, the soft slide of something being dragged. Leonardo has come home again. His swords clatter against each other as he slides them clumsily from their hilts. “Could you wash these for me?”

They drip blood into the drain.

“Is Master Splinter a truth, or a myth?” Leonardo asks. His voice sounds like it’s been washed with gravel, and his arm is sliced across his shoulder and bleeding. “I’ve murdered him again. He only seems realest when he dies. Then there is hot blood and cries- his air wheezes from his lungs and I can feel his weight. What is only real in death?”

“He’ll come for you the fifteenth time, and it won‘t be a dream,” Michelangelo says.

He takes a katana in his hand, feeling its weight, and plunges it through Leonardo’s chest and watches the blood bubble up from his lips. “But you’ll kill him, anyway.”

Then he leans over the sink and vomits streams of gold coins, wet and slimy. It comes out in fountains of coins that fill the sink and trickle down to the floor, landing on the body of his brother. His mouth tastes like rotting flesh.

“I want to go home,” he says.

Leonardo’s eyes have rotted out, so he can’t tell if he’s watching him, but his head slumps in a nod. He's slowly covered up with gold and swirling, filthy water.

___

He wakes up in the cave, collapsed on the floor. The rock is solid beneath his fingers, but he isn’t trusting his senses any more.

“The creature was merciful,” Leonardo says in his ear, hissing. He can't feel his breath.

Michelangelo doesn’t try to open his eyes. That would mean his brother was real.