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“Why is this happening to me?!”
April buried her face into a pillow and screamed. Life was just starting to turn around for her. Sure, she’d recently had a string of failed dates. But she had also just gotten the promotion that she’d been dreaming of.
And then suddenly this. The diagnosis.
Maybe it was fair. Karma. The universe’s way of punishing her for abandoning her sick boyfriend.
I can do better, she’d told herself. I need a real man, not a sewer rat.
And so, she went find a real man. A dozen real men, actually. But none of them made her feel as loved as he did.
As silly as it sounded, she almost wanted to go down to the sewers and beg Splinter to take her back. But what was the point? She’d been so awful to him. So selfish. One look at him covered in tubes and wires was too much. She had still been going through tests, and it was a painful reminder of what could happen to her. What would eventually happen to her now that she had been diagnosed. Without a word, she'd walked away.
April made it to a sewer entrance that was close to the lair, and then suddenly stopped.
Should I really go in? No. It’s too late to say anything. He’d never forgive me, anyways.
April turned and went back home.
I need to get some rest. After all, the treatments start tomorrow.
The doctors had told her that they needed to work fast and use the strongest medicine possible, if she were to have a chance of making it through. Soon, she was in so much pain that she found herself unable to work. She spent each day curled up in bed, shaking, crying, and begging for it to stop.
On one particular painful evening, she’d heard someone shuffling around in her apartment, but was too weak to investigate.
It’s probably just Irma dropping something off.
When she finally gathered the strength to get up, April wiped away her tears and slowly shuffled over to her living room. There, she found a gift basket on the coffee table, along with an envelope. She opened it, revealing a “get well soon” card. She had already received lots of those, but always appreciated them.
And then, she started crying all over again when she saw who had signed it.
Splinter.