Book One In The Ahh-Ness Of Things Series: April & Donnie were once inseparable, but now almost six years have passed since she left NYC. What if April O'Neil could set the record straight, once & for all! The only girl down enough to chill with the...
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I want to be very clear when I say that I would not end my life for lost love. I would give my life for love, though. I went to Alaska to end my life. It was not for reasons that anyone on this earth could possibly comprehend, & so I had no one of this earth to turn to. I was completely lost & I honestly felt that nothing could happen that would make me want to stay here & see things through. They say before someone completes their premeditated death; they have a sense of peace, & I did. I was truly enjoying myself; hiking through the wilderness there in the cliffside woods by the sea. I took dozens of pictures; I honestly wanted them to be left behind as a way for whoever found them, to see the beauty of the world through my eyes. I hoped that the guys might see them someday. I hoped they might make their way back to Donatello & he would never think for a minute that I was anything but happy, right before I died. Perhaps the only one who might know what led up to that decision, was Renet.
The truth, since I made it a reality, was that I did have an affair of sorts with Casey Jones. He found me when I was at my most vulnerable. I don't think he himself ever realized that he took advantage of that. It was a fling that needed marriage attached to it, because we were both Catholic. This was not why I left. This was not even when I left. Infact, despite the rumors I let run wild in my absence; I never betrayed Donnie. I might not have taken our relationship seriously, but I had respect for him to not be with anyone else while we were together. I married Casey, because he would wouldn't take me seriously. No matter what he ever found out about me, he wouldn't really care either way, because he was incapable of loving or really caring for anyone but himself. So why would I be with him? Because it was what everyone expected: boy, girl, human, human; sleeping with each other so get married. Walking down that aisle was the first time I'd stepped foot in a church since I was a kid & the preacher might as well have been holding the Bible upside down; I wouldn't have known.
No one knew about Alaska. Only Renet knew what I had seen before I left, because she had shown it to me. Those two nightmarish visions, that are forever playing on a loop in my mind, ever since. The explosions of airstrikes I had witnessed in Afghanistan, the lifeless bodies of women & children I had photographed of Syrian refugees washed ashore in Greece, the screams of children being ripped from their mothers' arms at the US border; could not compare to the surreal personal horror of what Renet had shown me. I could detach myself & do my job on those assignments, but I couldn't detach myself from these visions, because they were of me.
When I had realized I would likely never be able to have children of my own; I questioned if it was because I was designed that way. The Krang had wanted me to observe, remember, & consume. They had never intended for me to have an actualized life here on Earth. When I was working as an undergrad for Stockman's labs, he had injected me with nano bytes to try to track the Turtles & be a sort of sleeper cell; once he figured out who I was to them. Donatello & I had assumed that this had sterilized me, as the process Professor Honeycutt had used to try to deactivate them & extract them from my body had subjected me to inhumanly tolerable amounts of radiation.
I accepted all of this; I had become desensitized to the self realizations I was forced to comprehend in the few years that I had known all of them. So what more was that fact. I was an alien hybrid, created as an experiment to see if Krang could assimilate humans for the use of their physical bodies as avatars, but still share a hive mind. My best friend before, I knew the guys, turned out to be a spy; searching for me after I was lost from the Krang. I realized that my psychic capabilities reached far beyond clairvoyance & that I not only had the ability to host a god like entity, called Za Naron; who was bent on destroying the human existence, but I tried to kill to the one person who accepted my whole self & was tied to my very soul. It probably wasn't a good idea for me to be able to reproduce, so what did it matter to me.
Then I saw myself. I saw the love of my father had in desperation, become an insane obsession. I saw the way the love for a child, or the desire for that love, can fill a human heart with the kind of joy & sorrow that the Utrom knew only as the source energy. It is pure & without end. This was power that the Utrom could never understand & the Krang could never utilize for their agenda. They cannot have children; they self replicate. The Utrom stove for peace & understanding & they fully give into the shared collective. They cannot imagine not accepting one another. The Krang, on the other hand give into the dominance of each upon the other. They have no place for love or understanding; it's counter productive to efficiency. No one could have known that the human in me would be fully aware of this love, that it existed. That it was obtainable & stronger than anything else in this world. That you could completely, selflessly give all of yourself for something you are responsible for, & never hesitate to do so. Yet when I saw myself as an infant, bouncing on my father's knee, & the sheer joy he felt to have me in his life; I was also made aware that this was something I was observing & compiling as a Krang created Utrom. Not a human. Yet the human part of me; my soul, understood it.
Renet had broached to me that she needed to show me exactly what I was. That after seeing my possession by ZaNaron & the power I could wield over the current world & the future itself; the Future Elder Lord Simultaneous had feared that I might be too much of a risk to allow my continued existence. If it weren't for my connection to the Turtles & his fear that my execution might disrupt their part in the fate of the world; he would have exterminated me before I had met them. If you think this is hard to comprehend, try to imagine I was finding all of this out in a very short amount of time.
On the night that Renet decided to break her precious Future Timestress "protocol", just after I had taken off to my aunt's, telling Donatello I was stricken with a horrible stomach flu & he needed to stay away; she had no idea what was going on in my personal life, & that it might push me too far. She had met me outside of my of my brownstone townhouse on Bleeker, & we drove in my car to a secluded overpass by the docks. She seemed to obliviously buy my story about feeling ill & having some kind of flu, apparently not knowing; I never get sick. She seemed so matter of fact when she explained that Lord Simultaneous had reviewed every possible further outcome, if I was allowed to keep living. That he had seen that if I was simply banished, even inter dimensionally; beings like Krang & Za Naron would still find me. In each possibility; I was left vulnerable & helpless to their sway over me. Even old world, demonic demi gods like Kavaxas, sought my power; the power that I had no idea how to use, let alone control. The Krang had truly created a monster, a destroyer of worlds, when they created me. When I asked her why he didn't just kill me, she answered it was the same reason he didn't do away with me as a child; I was the tide that turned the guys & I had always done so, in every life I was connected to them. It was something I was not yet ready to hear; they were my friends, my brothers, Donatello had suddenly become more than I could have ever imagined. Yet to think of us as eternally bound to each other's lives? I wasn't mature enough to think about the depth of such ideas. Though, I had had dreams for years about them. I could connect to them, especially Donnie, in a way I couldn't with anyone else.
It was then that Renet confirmed things I had only entertained myself with the thought of & convinced myself I had only dreamed; mostly because they were too unbelievably sad: I had once been one of a dozen men, sent to kill them in a past life. In another; I had lived in their home as a wife & mother. But that was not what she showed me, that night.
She explained that I would have to see it; to travel back with her, for there was no way to explain it to me, & this was the only way that I would accept it. She hoped that if I could see how it all began; I might have the forethought to choose to remove myself from the possibilities, in a way that would be least harmfull to myself & everyone else. I might save myself, & the future in the process.
