Raph's Nightmares

Blue

I wake up with a start again. 

Again.

I am sweating and I pull the covers back, kicking them. My first thought is to get up and go fetch some water, but the minute my feet touch the floor I know I'm not going to be able to stand up. I'm shaking and feeling dizzy, so I take deep breaths and try to calm down, to think straight. I rub my eyes and stand up slowly, carefully. One foot in front of the other, come on, Raph, you can do it. I wipe sweat off my forehead and focus on the door, it's not that far away. 

Glass. I step on glass and my heart skips a beat. I crouch down, maybe too quickly, and I'm forced to close my eyes and steady myself in my new position. I've cracked a small jar that I don't recognize. I pick up the pieces and look at them, frowning slightly. It's odd, but my mind is in no condition to solve any jigsaw puzzles, so I put them aside on my nightstand and walk to the kitchen. It's been probably Mikey, messing around as always. No matter how many times I've told him not to come near my room, he never listens. Well, this time he's earned some good pounding. I could have hurt myself. He's paying. The thought makes a smile play on my lips as I open the fridge and reach for some cold water. That will either help me or give me a brain - freeze, a win win. I sit down at the table, a glass of water in front of me, and I try to recall the dream.

They are changing, somehow. They used to be vivid, real, in such a scary way. Voices, noises, scents, everything got attached to my memory and I could replay the scenario and the events on my mind as many times as I wanted, even during waking hours. I could have wrriten a book about them. Oh, well, maybe it's not too late yet. 

At the beginning, I wasn't scared. It was kinda fun to run around in the dream realm and being able to change things, events, sometimes even tamper with other characters' wills. I used to think I was inside a video game, and it was thrilling. But at some point, the dreams started to get 'inside' me. I don't even know what that means, maybe they were like some kind of drug: the more I tampered with them, the more addictive I became and there was a point from which I couldn't come back. The dreams decided where I was going and what I was doing. And I couldn't track the story back down once I was awake. That was when I freaked out and decided I needed help. 

But now that will have to wait, because obviously, Leo's problem comes first. And now is when I have to be quiet and keep the changes to myself. Maybe the only solution is not to sleep anymore. Or try and fight the dreams back? Too bad I can't stab them with my sais.

Too bad.

I don't feel like sleeping anymore, so I trudge out of the kitchen and into the living room. My eyes notice a small trail of some kind of liquid. Blue. Bright blue. I kneel down and look at it. There are only some drops, but they mark a perfect path from the entrance to... I turn my head back. To my room. 'Huh?' I follow the drops, almost on tiptoe, as if a blue monster would be waiting for me behind my door. I peek inside the room, and everything is exactly the same as I have left it. No trace of the blue drops. Not until my eyes rest on my nightstand. 'The jar. What the - ' I walk over to my nightstand and take the pieces. I turn them in my hand trying to find a meaning, trying to make them talk to me. As if they could. Now that I'm taking a closer look I realize there are some scratches on them. I sit on the floor, not quite believing I'm really going to make the jigsaw puzzle after all. But I need to find out. I need to make my heart beat at a normal pace. It's not that hard to bring them together. Thank goodness the glass is quite thick and it hasn't shattered into small pieces. I hold the jar together with one hand, I get up and turn on the light; the scratches are too thin to make them out only with my nightlamp. 

I frown.

Why on earth is there a jar in my room with the TCRI sign on it?

I haven't taken it from Donnie's lab. 

The liquid had been dripping all the way from the entrance. 

So there are only two possible answers. Either someone has snuck into my room from the outside while I was sleeping... Or I am a sleepwalker and I have brought it myself, all the way from a kraang facility.