If You Think I'm Gonna Come Up With A Title For This, You're Dead Wrong

Chapter 19

This is when he realizes something is wrong.
From his lab, watching his phone with the door closed in some half-hearted attempt to keep the others from panicking as if he was the calm one, his first thought is to try tracking your location. While he does not have any sort of application installed on your phone that would facilitate this, he figures that tracking your IP address cannot be incredibly difficult, all things considered. He decides against it, hesitant to jump to his immediate inclination, that you were hurt. He does not want to believe something has happened to you.

He waits another hour before calling, pacing around his laboratory, picking random pieces of nothing from the table, sanitizing equipment to keep his hands busy. He figures that is the simplest way to confirm or deny your safety. He calls three times, waiting five minutes— his eyes are screwed to the numbers on top of the screen, watching the seconds— between each attempt as to allow you a window of opportunity to respond.

He rips at absent hair, rubs at his face at the last ring, silently willing you to just pick up the phone, to give him some confirmation that you are not lost or gone or—

"Pick up," he murmurs under his breath, heart beating in his throat as if that will get you to answer faster. It does not, of course; your number is read to him in an automated, bored woman's voice, prompting him to leave a message, and this is when he starts panicking.

He wants to go to your apartment, first, to check if you are there, just sleeping. He tries to, runs out of the laboratory and into his bedroom— your things are still there, laying in bags on the floor— for keys and his staff before running back out.

His brother sit around the television, watching the news impersonally, making jokes about what was being said, about the mannerisms of the reporter, a blonde woman— a childhood crush for them all at one point— named April Showers— an internet search provided her name as April O'Neil— currently talking about some international conflict. The air in the room is light, cheery, as he rushes to the door.

"Donnie!" Mikey cries out. "Where're you—"

He does not have the time nor patience to explain the situation in detail. "She's not answering her phone."

"So?"

"So?"

Mikey supplies unhelpfully, "She's probably asleep."

"She wouldn't go back to her apartment." He links his hands behind his neck, every muscle in his body tense. "All her stuff is here. It's not even eight and she's asleep?"

"Maybe her phone died?"

"It rang," he snaps. "It wouldn't have rang if it was dead."

Raph looks up from the television. "And your plan to find her is?"

"Go to her apartment."

"Why?"

"Because that's what the text said to do."

"And you're listening to a text you don't think she sent you because?"

He stops. "It's a trap."

"No shit."

"Should I go grab Leo?" Mikey folds his legs, shutting the television off.

"He's in no position to do anything physical." The antidote was not amazing at doing its job; it had left him vomiting up the excess foreign material making its way through his body, and though he had stopped about twenty minutes ago, he is still bound to the bed in his room until they can make sure it all left his body. "If he hears, he's going to want to help."

"Then what can we do?"

"I don't know." Donnie crosses his arms across his stomach, vomit rising in his throat. "I-I could track her phone, but who knows if it's bugged or even in the same place as she is, or if that's a trap." 'I should have given her the gloves.' "But if we wait, who knows what will happen to her, what they might do."