Life imitates art, sort of. My last post was about 9 months ago. A writing coma. Thanks for sticking with. Hope this doesn't disappoint. Reviews!? gasp! Yes, please!

Chapter 21 – Resuscitations

"Donatello is the fellow, has a way with machines"
TMNT Theme song
.

Nothing is the same.

For one thing. I'm really good at opening new jars of pickles. OK, sometimes I still overdo it, and break the jar…

...but I never liked pickles. I think.

April does.

And I like April. At least, that's what my brothers and Father tell me. Often.

It's been about a week since I woke up. I took the longest, deepest nap of my life, this side of The Big Sleep. I'm lucky to be awake.

I'm lucky to be alive.

That's also what my brothers and Father tell me, as well as some really, really big crocodile mutant who's been adopted by our family. Apparently. (WTH, Family?)

I'm also lucky to still have two arms. And a shell. Apparently that's all down to April. Even if I don't remember her, I'm beginning to see why I liked her before. Before I had: The Accident.

More like an attack, though. Wasn't it? That's also what my family says. But then, they don't say too much. And that Monster Croc is usually out of the room when they do start opening up about what happened to me.

Anyhoo.

This arm takes getting used to. Mikey and Raph helped April build it. It's a cybernetic fiend adapted from Metalhead's parts and Kraang tech, mixed with spare robotics pieces. It's pretty crude, but also pretty amazing. With the Kraang tech that Mikey scavenged, April actually successfully laced the arm's electrical wiring into my brachial plexus and central nervous system. Like, Whoa.

It makes sense. Nerves are all about electrical impulses. Too bad the arm still runs on a battery. It's lithium ion. But maybe April and I can invent a better solution so I don't feel so much like a jacked-up flashlight. And it would suck if the arm's juice ran out while I was, like, wiping myself in the restroom.

Nonetheless, the robot arm pretty much behaves like my normal arm would. I think of a motion and the arm just…does it. I'm a walking marvel of regenerative medicine. Now the government has another reason to want to capture and study someone "special" like me.

I also have to hand it her, April didn't skimp on imagination or ambition. You know how a shoulder joint pretty much rotates 360 degrees? Well, now my metal finger-, wrist- and elbow joints all rotate a full, fluid 360. My finger joints. It's wild. My bo technique is off the chain.

Perhaps the greatest injustice of all of my bad fortune is that I remember Mikey-isms, but not my life.

Oh, I'm also a boss with chopsticks.

It's fascinating how muscle-memory is its own thing. I can do all the physical and martial arts moves I used to, almost without thinking about it. I'm just weak. Physical rehabilitation therapy is my life right now.

Still, I should be grateful. Not just for the arm. As I alluded to earlier, my shell injury was cataclysmic. My carapace ruptured when I impacted against that brick wall. Apparently.

But, like with my cyborg lower arm, I don't need to remember the shell injury. I can see the evidence for myself. My scutes are F &ked. Up. No regular rings. The keratin looks like a Mandelbrot Set, zoomed in, hard. After someone took a hatchet to it. If April still likes me – and she seems to –she'd better dig guys with scars. Raph says all women do. I'm dubious about Raph's qualifications for dispensing this sort of advice. Besides, I'm not human so we're in a whole new realm of cross-species kink here. I'm getting my head around that, too. Sometimes the room spins a little.

Anyway, I have April, Leo and Splinter to thank for my shell fix. From my open shell wound, they had to pick out all the fragments of my broken carapace bones. Then, they had to patch the wound with gauze, plaster, epoxy… To make my shell whole again Raph even got in there with some fiberglass. Sweet Darwin, I'm like a cybernetic Camaro.

It's very clear that, for my own sanity, I've got to own my look as the family Frankenturtle.

It's a good thing I was comatose for months. If I'd been conscious, I probably would have become addicted to morphine, I'd have needed so much of it to manage the pain. And April probably would have been incarcerated for larceny for taking opioids from babies or whoever. It's bad enough she had to steal the very, very many antibiotics that kept shell rot from setting in while my open wounds healed. In a sewer.

On top of everything, April also fixed my phone. Something tells me that's important. But I haven't worked out why.

Anyway, I'm really glad I stumbled across this blank Daily Blessings Journal to record my thoughts and feelings. It's really helping me to cope with everything that I'm going through since waking up. I think that Raph could really use one of these, too. He seems very angry.

Alright: more later. Recovering from my concussion means that I still need to sleep a lot, and I can't think for too long. Which is torturous.

Memories,

Donatello.

Again, Sweet Reader, thanks SO much for reading: "Because words are just dead, until they've been read. And a writer without a reader is nothing.", Caitlin Moran. Also, shout-out to Gordon Korman for the inspo that occurred whilst reading his book, "Restart".