Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Don't Let Me Push You Away
I can't believe I got this done so quickly! I don't know whether to be thrilled or terrified, since the Leo chick writing Raphael is possibly not the greatest idea to begin with. Nonetheless, it's done, I'm posting and I'm actually kinda proud of it. So, let me know what y'all think?
Title: Don't Let Me Push You Away
Series: TMNT 50-sentence sets
Word Count: 1,645 (including the prompt words)
Rating: PG-13 for mostly-offscreen violence and Raphael's language
Disclaimer Post
Summary: Raphael doesn't know if he's on the journey of a lifetime or just forever circling the drain, but there's one thing he knows for certain: no one is going to dictate his life or his death but him.
Notes: This is a companion piece to It Always Comes Back To You. I don't currently have any plans to do Don or Mikey sets, but I haven't ruled it out, either. Raphael is...not my usual point of view turtle (that'd be Leo), so I'm not sure I hit the right note. I know it felt right with what I know of Raphael, and the voice of the character in my head, but feedback would still be welcome. I found it absolutely fascinating as the set developed to see the contrasts between the two--both Leo's and Raph's lives pretty much revolve around their family first and the other people close to them or under their protection second, but they view it in very different ways. (Which I don't dare go into here or the notes will be longer than the fic.) What else? Oh, yeah. I used theme set gamma from the 1character comm, just like before. Try reading them one after the other and see what you think.
1.Snow
“You’re shitting me with the polka-dotted scarf, right?”
2.Child
Raph teases Mikey mercilessly, and he always will; of all of them, only Mikey hasn’t locked away his inner child, and Raph is determined to see that he never does.
3.Brick
“You got a brick, I got these little beauties-which I can put right in yer fuckin’ eye without even movin’-tell me again, who looks like an idiot, here?”
4.Judgment
Raphael tries not to believe in justice too strongly, so that he’ll never be too driven to uphold it; someone like him could never be judge or jury, and he’s not sure he likes the look of the last option.
5.Powder
Splinter never told them about drugs and what people would do for them while they were young, so the first time Raph saw one person kill another for a simple bag of white powder, he was half-afraid he might be hallucinating and completely terrified that he wasn’t.
6.Grim
Raph isn’t worried much about ol’ tall and boney-way he figures, it only matters if he dies last.
7.Trap
Raphael will walk headlong into any and every trick, trap and setup in existence, and fuck them all anyway, because it’ll take more than anyone’s got to make him kneel.
8.Star
Raph doesn’t hate his brothers, he just hates himself compared to them.
9.Possession
Splinter constantly tries to teach them not to need anything as much as they need each other, but Raphael must have a mental block when it comes to that lesson, because he needs like crazy and he’s absolutely shitty at letting go.
10.Bandage
Raphael learned how to tie a bandage one-handed long before any of his brothers.
11.Pearl
“The world is my oyster,” that’s what they say; yeah, you get the oyster, but someone’s already snatched the pearls.
12.Glass
He feels like glass sometimes next to his brothers’ steel, like he’s one step away from breaking into a thousand brittle, razor-sharp pieces that no one could ever hope to reassemble.
13.Classified
“I don’t tell you because it’s not any a’ yer fuckin’ business!”
14.Buttons
Raph would never question Donny’s intelligence, but sometimes he does wonder why the shell the guy keeps making inventions with big red buttons when he knows Mikey’s just gonna push them.
15. Closet
There’s no closet in Raphael’s room-or any other built-in places to hide things-but a ninja doesn’t really need one to make things disappear.
16.Ash
Raph had always heard people talking about being in such despair that food tasted like ash in their mouth, but he never believed it was possible until the first time Mikey got really bad cold that laid him up for nearly a week; three days in, Leo dragged Raph and Don away from Mikey’s sickroom and forced them to eat, but between the sweat (not tears) in his eyes and the ashes in his mouth, Raphael couldn’t tell what he ate at all.
17.Definition
Savage (as a noun, at least, Raph doesn’t like to get into some of the other definitions) can be defined as “a fierce, brutal, or cruel person,” and Raph’s never sure if he’s living up to that definition or living it down.
18.Staircase
Raph slipped out of the hospital room that housed his best friend, snuck into the stairwell, and deliberately, methodically put his fist through the wall until he couldn’t feel his fingers, until Splinter’s hand on his wrist forced him to stop.
19.Nail
“Careful,” Raph says to the chain-smoking Purple Dragon as he presses the business end of his sais into the man’s back, “those things’ll kill you.”
20.Prey
Raphael is a fucking ninja-everything is his prey.
21.Backwards
Raph prefers to be the first in battle and the last to retreat-anything to avoid having to look behind him.
22.Trouble
“With a capital ‘T,’” Raphael confirms with a smirk, then he opens his hand and lets the gang member in his grasp plummet twenty feet to the warehouse floor; it sets the rest off like dynamite, just as he intended.
23.Little
Once upon a time, Raph’s hands were barely big enough to fit around the weapon he’s got buried in a Hand ninja’s gut; once upon a time, he would have been completely unable to recognize the person he’s become.
24.Collar
Raphael loves his family like the world will end if he stops, but he’s not blind to the unbreakable hold they have on him, like an iron collar around his neck that he’ll never try to take off.
25.Circle
Sometimes Raph feels like he’s just running in circles, like he’s never going to get far enough away to actually want to come back.
26.Hands
Raphael is half-afraid some days that he’s lost the ability to grasp things with gentleness, rather than ferocity.
27.Freedom
Let the others dream of freedom and sunlight all they want-Raphael’s not that stupid, not anymore.
28.Last
Every now and again (just occasionally, and not after a bad injury or a rough battle or anything like that), Raph secretly stays up until his brothers are asleep so he can creep into their rooms and whisper to them the truths he can never admit to in the light of day.
29.Scab
The old lair is less and less a home each time Raph visits it, inexorably falling away to dust and debris; he goes anyway, because what will he do when he has nowhere to go back to?
30.Crown
Hidden away in Raphael’s room, where he keeps his most secret and important treasures, is a paper birthday crown, a gift from a young girl he once saved-the very first human who ever looked at him and smiled.
31.Time
Time has never been kind to them and Raph doesn’t look for that trend to change anytime soon.
32.Rice
Raphael does not get the whole rice thing, he really doesn’t-if you’re not bringing red beans or chili to the party, then what’s the point?
33.Worn
Raph can feel himself becoming both more and less angry as the years go by; he just can’t bring himself to let go of all the sharp edges he carries with him, but his family and friends seem to slowly wear them down anyway.
34.Paint
If anyone asks, Raphael did not directly cause Leo’s utter disgust in getting paint on his shell, and a hypothetical practical joke that may or may not have involved a pail of paint and a door and that wonderful force known as gravity most certainly had nothing to do with it.
35.Ache
It used to hurt like a knife in his gut whenever he watched his brothers shine in ways he knew he’d never completely match; these days it’s just an old, familiar ache.
36.Cherry
Raphael does not like the taste of cherries-he doesn’t remember why anymore, he just knows that anyone who tries to feed them to him better be prepared to suffer for it.
37.Library
Raph’s never seem much use for a library-not like they don’t have a freakin’ bookstore in the lair, if you add up everyone’s individual book hoards-but that doesn’t mean he’s gonna let his younger siblings go anywhere above ground without him around to watch their backs.
38.Win
One day, Bishop and Shredder and all those other bastards are going to win, because there’s no more turtles after them, and they’re not going to live forever.
39.Loss
The first time Leo tried to leave because he decided he’d “failed” them, Raph hit him hard enough to leave bruises for weeks; the second time they both broke bones and the third and final time, they stared silently at each other from across the lair and never moved at all.
40.Fold
Hamato Raphael does not, has not and will not give up-ever.
41.Music
Contrary to popular belief, Raphael doesn’t like rock music because it sounds angry-he likes it because it sounds like him, whatever he happens to be at the time.
42.Bell
No one has ever suggested putting a bell around Raphael’s neck-or anything else that stupid-at least not more than once.
43.Sleep
Raphael sleeps because he has to, not because he wants to or because he enjoys it-it’s just one more way for life to take away something he can’t ever get back.
44.Contact
Some days Raph thinks the only people on the whole damn planet that he’ll ever be able to touch in any way that matters are his brothers; the rest of the time, he just thinks he’s kidding himself.
45.Electricity
There’s a charge Raph gets from a good fight-not just a beating or a tussle, but a real, ugly, brutal throwdown-that he’s never felt from anything else.
46.Milk
The rumors that Raphael was the first to expose Leo’s hatred of milk (and thus begin a life of familial torture featuring the beverage) are completely and utterly false-there’s just no way he’d do that to one of his brothers…probably.
47.Wild
Raph doesn’t remember the first time someone called him the wild child, and he’s not going to hear the last, ‘cause they’ll be saying it long after he’s gone.
48.Expectation
What Raph hates the most about Leo are all his damn expectations-all the ones he carries for himself and all those he never even thinks to carry for Raphael.
49.Mechanism
“This way, we won’t lose track of each other,” Don said when he handed Raph the shell cell version 1.0 (otherwise known as That Mechanical Bastard That Had More Bugs Than A Swamp); Raph tried his best to look surprised an hour later when they did just that.
50.Finale
Raphael doesn’t know if he’s on the journey of a lifetime or just forever circling the drain, but there’s one thing he knows for certain: no one is going to dictate his life or his death but him.
Alternates:
2. Child
Once upon a time, a simple game of follow the leader with Leo turned into a fight and nearly into a disaster; it’s like some kind of sick metaphor for their entire lives, because even now, Raph’s never sure if he’s following Leo to get into trouble or to get out of it.
38. Win
Raph doesn’t really believe he’ll ever come out a winner, but he’s for damn sure never going to be a quitter.
39. Loss
Raph ran away from home once, when he was little; he only got as far as the first sewer junction before the crippling sense of loss knocked him to his knees.
Title: Don't Let Me Push You Away
Series: TMNT 50-sentence sets
Word Count: 1,645 (including the prompt words)
Rating: PG-13 for mostly-offscreen violence and Raphael's language
Disclaimer Post
Summary: Raphael doesn't know if he's on the journey of a lifetime or just forever circling the drain, but there's one thing he knows for certain: no one is going to dictate his life or his death but him.
Notes: This is a companion piece to It Always Comes Back To You. I don't currently have any plans to do Don or Mikey sets, but I haven't ruled it out, either. Raphael is...not my usual point of view turtle (that'd be Leo), so I'm not sure I hit the right note. I know it felt right with what I know of Raphael, and the voice of the character in my head, but feedback would still be welcome. I found it absolutely fascinating as the set developed to see the contrasts between the two--both Leo's and Raph's lives pretty much revolve around their family first and the other people close to them or under their protection second, but they view it in very different ways. (Which I don't dare go into here or the notes will be longer than the fic.) What else? Oh, yeah. I used theme set gamma from the 1character comm, just like before. Try reading them one after the other and see what you think.
1.Snow
“You’re shitting me with the polka-dotted scarf, right?”
2.Child
Raph teases Mikey mercilessly, and he always will; of all of them, only Mikey hasn’t locked away his inner child, and Raph is determined to see that he never does.
3.Brick
“You got a brick, I got these little beauties-which I can put right in yer fuckin’ eye without even movin’-tell me again, who looks like an idiot, here?”
4.Judgment
Raphael tries not to believe in justice too strongly, so that he’ll never be too driven to uphold it; someone like him could never be judge or jury, and he’s not sure he likes the look of the last option.
5.Powder
Splinter never told them about drugs and what people would do for them while they were young, so the first time Raph saw one person kill another for a simple bag of white powder, he was half-afraid he might be hallucinating and completely terrified that he wasn’t.
6.Grim
Raph isn’t worried much about ol’ tall and boney-way he figures, it only matters if he dies last.
7.Trap
Raphael will walk headlong into any and every trick, trap and setup in existence, and fuck them all anyway, because it’ll take more than anyone’s got to make him kneel.
8.Star
Raph doesn’t hate his brothers, he just hates himself compared to them.
9.Possession
Splinter constantly tries to teach them not to need anything as much as they need each other, but Raphael must have a mental block when it comes to that lesson, because he needs like crazy and he’s absolutely shitty at letting go.
10.Bandage
Raphael learned how to tie a bandage one-handed long before any of his brothers.
11.Pearl
“The world is my oyster,” that’s what they say; yeah, you get the oyster, but someone’s already snatched the pearls.
12.Glass
He feels like glass sometimes next to his brothers’ steel, like he’s one step away from breaking into a thousand brittle, razor-sharp pieces that no one could ever hope to reassemble.
13.Classified
“I don’t tell you because it’s not any a’ yer fuckin’ business!”
14.Buttons
Raph would never question Donny’s intelligence, but sometimes he does wonder why the shell the guy keeps making inventions with big red buttons when he knows Mikey’s just gonna push them.
15. Closet
There’s no closet in Raphael’s room-or any other built-in places to hide things-but a ninja doesn’t really need one to make things disappear.
16.Ash
Raph had always heard people talking about being in such despair that food tasted like ash in their mouth, but he never believed it was possible until the first time Mikey got really bad cold that laid him up for nearly a week; three days in, Leo dragged Raph and Don away from Mikey’s sickroom and forced them to eat, but between the sweat (not tears) in his eyes and the ashes in his mouth, Raphael couldn’t tell what he ate at all.
17.Definition
Savage (as a noun, at least, Raph doesn’t like to get into some of the other definitions) can be defined as “a fierce, brutal, or cruel person,” and Raph’s never sure if he’s living up to that definition or living it down.
18.Staircase
Raph slipped out of the hospital room that housed his best friend, snuck into the stairwell, and deliberately, methodically put his fist through the wall until he couldn’t feel his fingers, until Splinter’s hand on his wrist forced him to stop.
19.Nail
“Careful,” Raph says to the chain-smoking Purple Dragon as he presses the business end of his sais into the man’s back, “those things’ll kill you.”
20.Prey
Raphael is a fucking ninja-everything is his prey.
21.Backwards
Raph prefers to be the first in battle and the last to retreat-anything to avoid having to look behind him.
22.Trouble
“With a capital ‘T,’” Raphael confirms with a smirk, then he opens his hand and lets the gang member in his grasp plummet twenty feet to the warehouse floor; it sets the rest off like dynamite, just as he intended.
23.Little
Once upon a time, Raph’s hands were barely big enough to fit around the weapon he’s got buried in a Hand ninja’s gut; once upon a time, he would have been completely unable to recognize the person he’s become.
24.Collar
Raphael loves his family like the world will end if he stops, but he’s not blind to the unbreakable hold they have on him, like an iron collar around his neck that he’ll never try to take off.
25.Circle
Sometimes Raph feels like he’s just running in circles, like he’s never going to get far enough away to actually want to come back.
26.Hands
Raphael is half-afraid some days that he’s lost the ability to grasp things with gentleness, rather than ferocity.
27.Freedom
Let the others dream of freedom and sunlight all they want-Raphael’s not that stupid, not anymore.
28.Last
Every now and again (just occasionally, and not after a bad injury or a rough battle or anything like that), Raph secretly stays up until his brothers are asleep so he can creep into their rooms and whisper to them the truths he can never admit to in the light of day.
29.Scab
The old lair is less and less a home each time Raph visits it, inexorably falling away to dust and debris; he goes anyway, because what will he do when he has nowhere to go back to?
30.Crown
Hidden away in Raphael’s room, where he keeps his most secret and important treasures, is a paper birthday crown, a gift from a young girl he once saved-the very first human who ever looked at him and smiled.
31.Time
Time has never been kind to them and Raph doesn’t look for that trend to change anytime soon.
32.Rice
Raphael does not get the whole rice thing, he really doesn’t-if you’re not bringing red beans or chili to the party, then what’s the point?
33.Worn
Raph can feel himself becoming both more and less angry as the years go by; he just can’t bring himself to let go of all the sharp edges he carries with him, but his family and friends seem to slowly wear them down anyway.
34.Paint
If anyone asks, Raphael did not directly cause Leo’s utter disgust in getting paint on his shell, and a hypothetical practical joke that may or may not have involved a pail of paint and a door and that wonderful force known as gravity most certainly had nothing to do with it.
35.Ache
It used to hurt like a knife in his gut whenever he watched his brothers shine in ways he knew he’d never completely match; these days it’s just an old, familiar ache.
36.Cherry
Raphael does not like the taste of cherries-he doesn’t remember why anymore, he just knows that anyone who tries to feed them to him better be prepared to suffer for it.
37.Library
Raph’s never seem much use for a library-not like they don’t have a freakin’ bookstore in the lair, if you add up everyone’s individual book hoards-but that doesn’t mean he’s gonna let his younger siblings go anywhere above ground without him around to watch their backs.
38.Win
One day, Bishop and Shredder and all those other bastards are going to win, because there’s no more turtles after them, and they’re not going to live forever.
39.Loss
The first time Leo tried to leave because he decided he’d “failed” them, Raph hit him hard enough to leave bruises for weeks; the second time they both broke bones and the third and final time, they stared silently at each other from across the lair and never moved at all.
40.Fold
Hamato Raphael does not, has not and will not give up-ever.
41.Music
Contrary to popular belief, Raphael doesn’t like rock music because it sounds angry-he likes it because it sounds like him, whatever he happens to be at the time.
42.Bell
No one has ever suggested putting a bell around Raphael’s neck-or anything else that stupid-at least not more than once.
43.Sleep
Raphael sleeps because he has to, not because he wants to or because he enjoys it-it’s just one more way for life to take away something he can’t ever get back.
44.Contact
Some days Raph thinks the only people on the whole damn planet that he’ll ever be able to touch in any way that matters are his brothers; the rest of the time, he just thinks he’s kidding himself.
45.Electricity
There’s a charge Raph gets from a good fight-not just a beating or a tussle, but a real, ugly, brutal throwdown-that he’s never felt from anything else.
46.Milk
The rumors that Raphael was the first to expose Leo’s hatred of milk (and thus begin a life of familial torture featuring the beverage) are completely and utterly false-there’s just no way he’d do that to one of his brothers…probably.
47.Wild
Raph doesn’t remember the first time someone called him the wild child, and he’s not going to hear the last, ‘cause they’ll be saying it long after he’s gone.
48.Expectation
What Raph hates the most about Leo are all his damn expectations-all the ones he carries for himself and all those he never even thinks to carry for Raphael.
49.Mechanism
“This way, we won’t lose track of each other,” Don said when he handed Raph the shell cell version 1.0 (otherwise known as That Mechanical Bastard That Had More Bugs Than A Swamp); Raph tried his best to look surprised an hour later when they did just that.
50.Finale
Raphael doesn’t know if he’s on the journey of a lifetime or just forever circling the drain, but there’s one thing he knows for certain: no one is going to dictate his life or his death but him.
Alternates:
2. Child
Once upon a time, a simple game of follow the leader with Leo turned into a fight and nearly into a disaster; it’s like some kind of sick metaphor for their entire lives, because even now, Raph’s never sure if he’s following Leo to get into trouble or to get out of it.
38. Win
Raph doesn’t really believe he’ll ever come out a winner, but he’s for damn sure never going to be a quitter.
39. Loss
Raph ran away from home once, when he was little; he only got as far as the first sewer junction before the crippling sense of loss knocked him to his knees.