I was pressured into this by the kind folks at Stealthy Stories. They peer pressured… offered creative support and got me to do this answer to my own challenge. So I decided to be very awful in this story. If you don't like suffering, then don't read. Just saying. Thought I'd do it up right.

"So, you're a big talking turtle, huh?" asked a fuzzy and unfamiliar voice.

Raph's head vibrated with pain. His eyelids stuck together as he slowly forced them open, taking in the light as a bolt of pressure split his head. His sleepy mind processed the new information slowly. A garage or a dark room with a humanlike shape bent over him. Wearing a flannel shirt. Definitely not family. Raph's heavy arms and legs refused to move when he sent the message. Couldn't open his mouth to demand answers from the stranger.

"I guess you could talk if you weren't drugged," the stranger said. His hands were all over him. Traveled up and down his arms. Touched his head. Not a caress or stroking, thank God. More like curious exploration. He couldn't move. Couldn't roll over. "Don't be offended or anything, but I bought you from one of those ninja gangs. They sell imported animals and one of them caught you and said he'd let me have you for a great price. I think he did it on the side. I don't think his boss would have allowed it." The stranger's fingers worked into the groove between his carapace and his skin.

He bought him? Captured? When did that… Oh, wait. That. Standing in the rain in an alley, taunting a few talentless hacks and then a pinprick in his neck. Within seconds landing on his knees, the alley fading away. Falling flat on his face in a rain puddle while Purple Dragons pawed his still body as his eyes closed. Waking up now in this dark room. Raph's hands were tied in front of him and rope wound around his waist, tying him to a bench. His mouth was unbearably dry. But that didn't matter. As soon as his senses sharpened he would smash the bench over this guy's head. He watched him with narrowed eyes, studying his movements.

The stranger's overly excited eyes bulged. And his wicked smiled made Raph think of a demon smiling through a human face. He was pale, like he never left his garage if he could help it. Raph hated that type. Go out in the sun already if you can.

"We're going to start out slow," the guy said. "I really want to hear you talk, but I can't have the neighbors hearing you, as much as I'd like that."

The guys stuff his bandanna in his mouth. Never thought he would be gagged with his bandanna.

The stranger held a long metal rod and ran it across a work bench across the room. The sound grated and Raph struggled, his dull pulse beating faster. A fireplace poker. The dim halo faded suddenly and everything in the room came into focus too quickly. Pelts of animals and parts. Just random legs and heads and tails and animals split from stem to stern nailed to the walls. And metal tools. Small metal instruments for cutting and chopping and splitting skin. Brown with blood. Bits of fur stuck to them.

He was tortured for information. By evil government agents or ninjas with agendas. Always methodical with their torture. Designed for a specific result. This was torture at its lowest form. Just to see the pain in his eyes. To listen to him cry out in terror. Skin and bones heal. But some of his parts were irreplaceable. Like his eyes or reproductive organs. Even if they didn't get any use, they were still his.

"Now, don't squirm." The man pulled out a vial and a syringe. Raph pulled at his ropes and smiled as the fibers strained under his weight and nearly choked as his bandanna moved in his mouth. But a needle pierced his arm and body fell slack against the bench.

Now he was paralyzed. Totally paralyzed. Couldn't even call out in pain if he'd wanted too. And he didn't. He never did that. The guy would have to do worse than work a scalpel through his plastron and into the soft skin underneath if he wanted to hear anything from him.

Raph would personally cut off his hands for touching him. He would have closed his eyes and imagined it to block out the new pain as the stranger cut into his arm with a pair of scissors and gouged it open to take a look around. But his eyelids were stuck open. His eyes roamed the room, looking for a way out. Waiting for an idea to come. Irrationally believing Leo would fly through the door and lop off the jerk off's head with a katana. Or Don to break his skull with his bo. Or Mikey to break several bones at once with the propeller blades of nunchaku.

His blood dripped between the slats in the bench and onto the floor. His eyes could see the red puddle underneath him. The steady streams of trickling and dripping red. His brothers would never find him. Good. He needed to deliver himself from this evil. Couldn't stand the looks on their faces.

Seemed to go on for hours. It was boring. If only the guy would stop cutting into his skin, he could sleep. The guy pulled bags out of a freezer and shifted them around and then come back with a new instrument and made a new cut. Looked around inside his flesh and make excited comments. For a while he turned him flat on his face and examined his shell. At least that didn't feel bad. It felt almost comforting. His father used to do that for him when he was sick.

Another jab in the side that he could barely feel. His eyes closed, grateful for the relief as the incisions throbbed all over his body.

Just as suddenly as he'd shut his eyes, he opened them. No time had passed. But time had passed. He was somewhere else. Darkness all around except for light coming from above him. He twitched a hand, just to see what would happen. Secretly, to see if it was still there. Pain exploded up and down his arm. He growled. Cuts heal. Good, still there and working. Moved the other hand. Still present. So were both his feet and thus it followed that his legs were still attached. Eyesight told him that both eyes were still in their sockets and his privates were intact.

He ignored the slicing pain. Slicing pain wasn't so bad. Blinding pain was worse. Crippling and debilitating pain was something to worry about. It was when the pain went away that you need to worry. The gentleness of death. He was well mutilated and the pain told him that he was still alive. The cuts went all up and down his body and arms and legs. He could tell some were burns. Didn't remember being burned.

He sat up and hit his head after a few inches in his progress with a metallic thump. Raph instinctively threw his arms and legs out to see how far they would reach. Only a few inches in each direction. He was in a small space. Maybe a car trunk. But it didn't feel right. He was too stretched out for that.

"You're awake. I thought I'd killed you. What a waste of money that would be."

Raph looked around for the voice. He squinted out of the shaft of light ahead of him. It was a narrow length of PVC pipe several feet long. There was blue sky and a tree branch blowing in the breeze overhead.

"I paid good money for you, so I put in an air pipe. Thought that burying you without an air source would, like, kill you too quick."

"Let me the fuck out of here!" Raph demanded. He meant to sound threatening, but his throat was so hoarse that it came out as barely more than an angry whisper.

"You do talk! Oh, score! I knew it. You have a filthy mouth, turtle."

"Yeah, I talk. I do other stuff too. I could drive a sai through your fucking skull. How about that for talent?"

"Are those the funny fork things you had?" Metal clanked in the background as the guy fiddled with Raph's sais. "I looked them up on Wikipedia. Aren't they used mainly for defense?"

"Not the way I use them," he growled. His voice sounded unusually harsh and he liked the sound. "How are you talking to me?"

"I have a two-way radio set up. Actually, it's a walkie-talkie. I hope the battery holds out. You could last a long time. I hope. Ever wondered how long you can go without food?"

Raph kicked the lid of the box as his frustration broke way. The thud of his foot echoed around him and he shuddered, the first flick of fear touching him. "Where am I? What did you do? It ain't important, really. I just want to know what I'm killing you for when I'm breaking all your fingers first."

"I wonder if you'll starve to death before the bacteria kills you. You'll probably be killed by your own waste first. It'll be interesting to find out."

He turned his head for the walkie talkie with half a mind to smash it against the wall.

"Turn it off, if you like. I can watch you too. There's a camera outside your coffin. I can watch you 24 hours a day. It's all giant freak turtle, all day for me."

Raph switched it off.

Why did he drink so much juice before he left home? Leo forced him. "Drink something without caffeine or alcohol, for a change," Leo said. Raph laughed at him and chugged half a bottle of apple juice while Leo pretended to be horrified.

That damn juice. He worked his legs to hold it in, bringing his knees up and down methodically. Raph would not piss on himself. He never had and he never would. Even if his bladder broke. Had anybody died of a ruptured bladder? He was sure Don knew that answer.

He never knew that urination could cause pain and pounded his fist against the side of the box in a rhythm that matched how he worked his body back and forth in his limited space, trying to hold it back.

But then it all leaked out anyway. It was no more use and he closed his eyes, giving in. I did not just piss all over myself, the thought as his hot urine covered his legs. Little flickers of humiliation lapped in his mind.

He laid back in relief as his bladder hollowed, blocking out the new stink. At least he was alone and nobody else would have to smell it.

They would definitely notice when they rescued him. Leo would give him that sad, cow-eyed look he saved for times when he didn't have the heart to lecture. Don would totally ignore it. Mikey would probably make a loud deal about how cruel it was to leave him in that space without at least a bottle to use.

He fought at least fifteen foot ninjas single handedly that night. The last one standing had tried to stick him in the stomach with his katana. Raph drove his sai through his ribcage, feeling his ribs crack until the tip of the sai hit the brick behind the man's back. And blood sprayed out onto fist and up his arm.

That was a good day. That guy had knocked Don unconscious. Maybe killed him. Unconscious at least. He watched his brother, hoping for movement, lying on his face a few feet away.

Raph's hand flew out in front of him in his sleep and his knuckle slapped unexpectedly into metal. He expected to hear Leo breathing in the other bed. He almost could hear it, even now as he looked up into the dark early morning sky as the stars flickering away in the dawn between patches of heavy clouds. The tree was still.

Water splashed in his face as the rain washed down the breathing pipe. He rolled over onto his side to avoid it, rather uncomfortably because he couldn't curl up. He winced as his cuts came into contact with the urine filled water. It had been at least a day and a half and he'd had to piss in that box two more times. Raph held his mouth at the end of the spout and caught some rain drops and closed his eyes to savor the one comfort he'd had so far. His mouth was so dry and his lips cracked and sore.

Later in the morning, the clouds drifted away and the sky lit up blue. Cars rumbled past and dogs barked. Children talked and laughed as they ran to the bus stop. He wasn't buried in a cemetery. Was he near the man's house?

Before he had given it much thought, he grabbed the walkie-talkie and flipped it back on. He held down the contact button and said, "Hello? Hello, asshole."

"Hello, turtle." He sounded pleased. Like he was talking to an old college buddy.

"I'm going to scream," Raph said. "I'll scream and somebody will hear me."

The guy laughed. "Go ahead. Like anybody will care."

His let the walkie-talkie drop from his mouth. Nobody would care. He knew people. They didn't care about others in danger or in pain. Even when it was right in front of their faces.

"You look sad. Do you miss your family? Hey, are there more of you? Or are you the last of your kind?"

"Last of my kind," Raph slurred into the walkie-talkie.

"That makes it even cooler. I imagine it must smell pretty interesting in there."

"It does. Want to come and smell it?" Raph asked.

"No thanks. I'd rather watch." The walkie-talkie clicked as it turned off at the other end.

What did this guy want? But he knew what he wanted. He wanted to watch something else suffer at the least inconvenience to himself. That was the worst kind of monster. The one who was too lazy to do his own dirty work.