It's Not Just In Your Head - Tumblr Posts

Chapter three is up.

Peter Parker is initially targeted as a means to ensure cooperation by Tony Stark. This eventually spurs into something different, and the spider is caught by someone much worse than his original kidnapper. Peter’s a very popular target when it comes to kidnapping, and somehow, Tony Stark must find a way to get his kid back after multiple subsequent kidnappings.

Disclaimer: I own nothing (except for my plot)!

@whumptober2021

in my head, link and zelda are at their house and they r kissing

Whumptober: Rise and Shine... Turtle? I Think? (3/3)

After the crash and his kidnapping (could he even call it that? He was already a captive), Leonardo was passed from hand to hand. He went halfway across the country, and then further. They ended up bouncing him across countries, sending him to almost every corner of the world so that multiple people could use him as an attraction, an exotic animal.

He refused to say pet. He was not a pet. The word felt like a toxin on his tongue and in his mind, bitter and sour and bad.

His appearance in private collections called scientists, reports, journalists, the press, everyone who wanted to see what he was. Of course, his existence was not something that people wanted to share. He didn't know a lot about his situation, but he did know that there was a lot of money paid to keep people quiet.

Still, that might have been a dream, or some hallucination. To keep him quiet while moving around, Leonardo was drugged in mass quantities. At that point, he was numb or asleep half the time. Sometimes, though, he'd remember the people he left, suddenly dragged out of the fog. He remembered falling, knowing that he wasn't going to come back. He remembered a violent fight with some sedative, trying to stay awake because people needed him.

It made him sick. He preferred not to remember, and fell back under the influence of the drugs.

Leonardo spent a lot of time getting moved around, unaware of most of it. One day, though, he couldn't sleep at all. He was sick and trembling, unable to move but barely able to do anything else. It clicked that he was addicted. He wanted to throw up.

He could only lay still in the newest enclosure stopping point when somebody came in. There was silence for several minutes, then-

The sound of someone loading a gun was familiar to him after years of fighting Purple Dragons. He froze, did not try to move out of the way, senses and reflexes horrifically dulled.

For a second, he mourned the person he used to be. The one who would fight back, who would run out of the line of fire and immediately disarm whoever was wielding the weapon. Instead, he laid there quietly, sighed softly...

%%%

...And opened his eyes to a sterile, cold, white room.

It was all a dream, he told himself, you never left here. They've been messing with your head.

It was so real, though. The dream was so vivid, he had thought it was real. To say the least, he was unnerved.

Leonardo sat up and leaned against the wall, then felt himself over to see if he was injured at all. Feeling nothing out of sorts, he let out a short sigh of relief. Good, it really WAS just a dream.

The voice over intercoms wasn't, though.

“Good. You’re finally awake.”

Leonardo's heart thrummed loudly, so loud he couldn't hear anything else between that and the blood rushing in his ears. Distantly, he recognized that voice. It was the same person who was making ransoms for him and said that he would make a great subject.

“Don’t worry,” They soothed, as if that was what he was worried about, “That was all in your head, an unfortunate effect of the sedatives.”

That sent him reeling. Now that, that, was something to be worried about. However, he wasn’t really that surprised. He’d had various experiences with tranquilizers throughout the time that he had been stuck with humans.

Still, his heart rate picked up, hammering against his plastron like it was trying to free itself, trying to get a lifetime of beats in before it was, suddenly and untimely, stopped.

He couldn’t breathe. There was silence, the person on comms wasn’t speaking anymore, but it felt too loud even so. Something was in his lungs, and he couldn’t breathe- He couldn’t breathe-

Across the room, a door opened.

%%%

By the stars.

He was finally free.

Over the past (he assumed) few months, he had eyed every possible exit, risky or not, and constantly sized up their security, just in case. His plan had worked, too. Maybe he was a little busted up, and sure, the shock collar they put on him was on the fritz, but he was in one piece and at that point, the area of the burn was numb.

(It probably wasn’t supposed to be numb. He was fairly certain he heard Donatello talking about how once burns got bad enough, they caused permanent nerve damage, which caused a lack of pain or complete numbness.)

(...Yeah, that burn was probably really bad.)

It didn’t help the mood at all that it was raining pretty hard, complete with thunder and lightning. When the collar beeped a few times, it suddenly occurred to him that they might be tracking him. The thought passed quickly and urgently, getting its message across with ease. He needed to hide.

Leonardo trusted his instinct, as that usually went well, and started running. Sure, he needed to find his family, but he also needed to not accidentally get them killed in the process. His captors would most likely find him soon, anyway. There were quite a few options he had for hiding places, but settled for an oceanside warehouse where they kept a lot of fishing equipment. That way, he might be able to escape into the water if anything went wrong. Swimming in the rain was nice, as long as he didn't get struck by lightning in the process.

As he came closer to the warehouse, he slowed down, waiting for the last worker there to lock up and leave. Maybe it would complicate things a bit, but he wasn't known as "The King of Lock Picking" for nothing. He'd just need two needles, or something like that. The windows were also always available.

The windows were also probably the better option.

Leonardo circled the building a few times before climbing up a small boat and breaking the window with a fishing hook he had found lying around. He rolled inside of it, and almost immediately got to trying to rip the collar off. They had to be tracking him, they wouldn’t just not track a human-sized turtle that suddenly landed in their lap. The fishing hook wouldn’t work. With how tight the collar was on him, he would probably accidentally hook it into his skin. Not only that, but he couldn’t feel any kind of buckle or clip that might help him out. He really was stuck. That numbness in the burn was suddenly a very good thing.

Something pounded on the door and his heart leaped into his throat. He was right, he was right he was right they were tracking him they found him-

No. No, there was no time for panicking. He had to act fast or get taken back there, and that wasn’t something he wanted. His gaze flitted around the room, wild and panicked, before he settled for climbing up into the rafters and huddling up there.

The pounding on the door got louder before it suddenly broke open, and people all in black and holding guns flooded in. They fanned out across the warehouse, looking for him in every nook and cranny, and talking in a language he didn’t understand.

He started to slink back over to the window, crouch-walking over the rafters and trying to make as little noise as possible to avoid getting noticed, but somebody finally looked up and pointed him out, yelling something to the others.

One of them raised a gun, and he bolted.

%%%

So, as it turned out, like many Americans, he forgot that there was a South America.

And apparently, that was where he ended up. He didn’t know where on the continent he was, but at least getting back home wouldn’t be such a big problem. Besides the walking. The walking would suck. Directions, at least, weren’t actually too hard to find. He had to steal a map here and there, and was constantly looking for road signs or any kind of signal about where he was in a language he could actually read, but slowly, he had found his way past the border and back into the United States.

So yay for him.

He had to keep wandering for a while, even if it wasn’t the best course of action, while trying to find a good enough map of the whole country and not just the state he was in- Which, happened to be Mississippi. At least it was more rural than it could be.

On his way, he found some kind of farmhouse that reminded him of the summer home April had. For a moment, he longed to be back home instead of across the country again, but it wasn’t like wishes were going to do anything for his journey. If he really wanted it, he reminded himself, then he should keep moving. The sun was going down, though, and from the lack of cars and lights, he considered that the people who owned it had left. It would make good shelter for the night, and he could recalibrate there.

Leonardo, as he had for the hundredth time, broke into the building and went to the highest floor he could to hide. Some people probably wouldn’t think that the top floor was the best place to go to, but with enhanced durability that pretty much no normal person has, it was great for a fast escape when he could just jump from a third story.

He settled down in the attic, between two cardboard boxes after clearing away the cobwebs between them and praying that there were no spiders left over. Almost as soon as he was tucked away, the door downstairs opened. Instinctively he wrinkled his beak. Of course somebody was coming home to a house broken into, of course he was going to get trapped there while waiting for them to leave-

That wasn’t somebody coming home. Somebody seeing marks from a break in would have screamed and called the police, or completely left and then called 911. Instead, he heard them pause downstairs, before they started coming up.

They were coming to the attic.

It had to be one of his captors. They’d been tracking him the entire time, but he always managed to dodge them, how had they managed to catch up? Maybe he had paused for too long, or got distracted, or maybe they were just getting faster in order to keep up with the pace he was setting. Either way, they might have found him. He moved further back and pressed himself against the slanted ceiling, making himself as small as he could to fit at the very back of his hiding as the door opened. He could hear beeping, and all of a sudden, the collar he had beeped too.

Crap.

He could only watch as the white light of a flashlight appeared and scanned the floor, getting closer and closer by the second. His breathing hitched when it settled by the entry to his hiding spot, then settled on him. Leonardo had to squint when the blinding light hit his eyes. He didn’t want to have to look away, not when he was in danger. Somebody leaned down and looked him over. From the looks of it, they were no normal homeowner. In fact, he was probably right. They were probably somebody tracking him. A small smile graced their face as they drew a gun. A small pistol, most likely not enough to kill him if they were to shoot at him, but probably more for putting him in enough pain to immobilize him.

They pulled the trigger.

The gun only clicked.

Almost immediately, they froze, realizing that they had messed up.

Leonardo let himself smirk, then rolled onto all fours and lunged at them, knocking them out of the way and running off. If he could help it, he would get out before they figured out what was up with their weapon. 

And, as long as he was smart about it, he would be out of Mississippi before they could give chase and catch up.

God, he hated this road trip.