Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Has he come around at all since I've been gone?”

“No,” Raph whimpered. 

Michelangelo lay still in a small, frameless bed on the cold floor of a ruined medical bay. The facility still hadn’t been torn down, and given its history, it was the last place that the Hidden City’s guard would look. They thought many things of Draxum, but they didn’t think he was stupid enough to return to his old laboratory. It was a calculated, necessary risk. He needed a place for his family to recover after emerging from the pits of hell. But they could not stay long. 

Raphael had not left Michelangelo’s side since they had arrived. The latter was held together with bandages up both arms that needed to be changed frequently, and a brace around his wrist and that monitored his vitals. It had been two days. Raphael had not eaten, slept, or moved an inch out of eyeshot from his brother. Their second sunset since their return was quickly drawing to a close. 

"Venus, what's your read?" Draxum asked.

A voice crackled out from the brace on Mikey's wrist. "His vitals are stable, he's no longer in danger of bleeding out. I'm switching my priority to monitoring brain activity, and uh..." she hesitated. "It's still not looking great."

Draxum put his hand gently on his creation’s shoulder. “You should sleep, Raphael. If you do not allow your body to rest you will become weak and disrupt your circadian rhythm.”

Raph turned to him in a panic. “Dad, I want to sleep in here tonight. With Mikey.”

“Both of you will not fit in his bed.”

“Can we bring mine in here?” 

“Very well,” Draxum said reluctantly. He had learned that the genetic ties that Raphael shared with Michelangelo made it difficult to separate them, especially during times of high stress. He had stopped trying. “But you must promise that you will go to bed immediately afterward if I honor your request.” Draxum could tell that Raphael was about to protest, and cut him off. “I’ll come back to check on you once your friend the alligator is back from his rounds. Try to get to sleep by then, and I’ll take over.”

“Ok.” Raphael still had an unshakable determination in his eyes.  

---

If Raph were to forget all that Mikey had been through to put him in his current state, he would have thought that his brother looked peaceful. His breath was slow, and he didn’t fidget in his sleep. But he knew Mikey was fighting. His father had told him that there was a chance that Mikey wouldn’t wake up. 

"Dad's right. You should sleep, Raph," Venus' voice said from Mikey's arm brace. "I can look after Mikey while he's resting."

"What about you, Vee?"

"I'm running low on power too," Vee said solemnly. "Listen, I need to switch to essential functions soon. But I'll still be awake. I'll come back online and wake you up if there are any changes. Goodnight, Raph."

" 'Night."

The screen on the bracer turned from bright blue to dark.

In the darkness, Raph reached across the chasm between the cots on which they lay and held Mikey’s hand. He squeezed it twice. For as long as he could remember, Raph had been afflicted with a restless mind. But not in the way that Mikey’s mind was restless. Raph was not creative or imaginative in his thinking in an artistic way. What he was good at imagining was all the things that were waiting for him in the dark, around corners, and behind the faces of strangers. All the things in the world that could hurt him played like an endless motion picture in his mind during quiet moments. There were nights when it made sleep nigh on impossible.

A long time ago, Raph and Mikey had come up with a secret code to help Raph fall asleep. Raph would grasp Mikey’s hand and squeeze it when he was having trouble sleeping. Two squeezes meant Are you awake? One squeeze meant Yes . Three squeezes meant I love you. They would send these words across to each other until sleep found them both. 

Mikey’s hand lay still. Raph had to remember to be gentle. Underneath the bandages that wrapped him to his shoulders, deep scars snaked up his arms. Some were old. Many were fresh. Even more were still bleeding. Draxum had told them both that mystic energy was just like any other kind of energy; it couldn’t be created or destroyed. For it to work, it needed to draw power from a living outlet. Draxum had also said that while he was impressed by Mikey’s unusual affinity for mystic abilities, it wasn’t good that he had unlocked them at such a young age when using them could take a greater toll on his body. 

“Mikey,” Raph whispered. There was no response. “Mikey.” Nothing. 

Raph’s face twisted into a grimace as he felt a sob rising in his throat. “Please don’t be gone,” he said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t come get you. I got too scared, but… I’m not scared anymore.” Raph wiped a hand across his eyes. “When you wake up, I promise I’m gonna be a better big brother. I’m gonna protect you no matter what and I won’t let anybody mess with you ever again. Ok?”

Mikey didn’t stir. 

Raph lowered his head back onto his pillow and sniffled quietly. He had to be patient. The best thing he could do for his little brother was wait. Wait and feel helpless. Try to keep the endless barrage of deadly possibilities at bay. 

He kept squeezing Mikey’s hand through the night. He closed his eyes and tried to feel even the faintest twitch in response. For what felt like forever, Raph lay in the dark and waited. 

He was on the edge of sleep when he felt a squeeze in response. 

He bolted upright. Mikey’s eyes were open, just barely. 

“Mikey!”

Raph lunged to embrace him, but stopped short. He had to be careful. When Mikey had last been conscious, he had lashed out. 

“Do you…” Raph’s voice warbled. “Do you remember me?”

Mikey blinked slowly, and mumbled something incomprehensible. Raph gulped. He leaned forward cautiously. “What?” 

“I wanna hug, Raph.”

Raph couldn’t hold it in. He laced his arms around his brother and wept.

Chapter Text

The way to tell if you’re taking care of yourself properly is if falling asleep and waking up feels like blinking; so tired from the day that you fall asleep as soon as your head hits the pillow, and then rested enough in the morning that you’re ready to go as soon as you open your eyes, to wear yourself out all over again. This is what his father told him. Leo had gotten very good at falling asleep, because he trained and played all day. 

He wasn’t restless at night like his brother, who spent his time reading and tinkering with pulleys, levers, and bits of wire. It wasn’t his fault. Sensei didn’t let him train with Leo. He had been born with a soft shell, and it was too easy for him to hurt himself. So while Leo learned to fight, Donnie learned to fade into shadow. He was good at this. He was already quiet.  

Leo wanted every night's sleep to feel like blinking. Time spent not awake was not time he was interested in. Toward the end of his days in his home in the sewers, he began to know the limits of his body and energy, how much to push himself each day so that it was easy to sleep. Sensei trained him to know, since he and Donnie always put up a fuss about going to bed. He began to get good at falling asleep.

When he was ripped from his bed in the middle of the night with a large hand clapped over his mouth, that too felt like he had only blinked after crawling into bed. 

"Hold still-" the hand had commanded.

Leo kicked and struggled silently, trying desperately to find his breath. Finally he was able to wriggle free just enough to bite down hard on his assailant's fingers, making them cry out.

"Let me go! Help me!" Leo had cried. "Daddy!"

"You damn brat!" His attacker struck him hard across the face with their fist. Leo tasted blood in his mouth. He had been too disoriented to get a beat on the man's face straight away, but he spoke strangely, like the villains in his Jupiter Jim cartoons with funny accents. He was big and strong, and the texture of his skin was rough, dry and leathery. When Leo looked up, he saw a face that was obscured head on by a huge, ivory horn. 

Leo didn’t let up. “No! Let go of me-!”

He was cut off by the strange rhinoceros man’s hand finding a purchase around Leo’s throat and clamping down hard. 

“Steranko, what the hell are you doing?” A sourceless voice hissed. “We’re gonna get flayed alive if the kid dies!”

“It will not die,” the creature grunted. “Is only for knockout.”

Leo could only struggle for so long before the lack of oxygen blackened his vision. When he came to, seemingly seconds later, he was being hurled against a wall, his ears ringing and his body aching from the force of a searing, deafening blast. 

“ – no way – rat – follow us –” 

He had landed on a wet surface, and a quick look up told him that he wasn’t in the lair anymore. He had been taken to a brick antechamber that connected a labyrinthian network of sewer tunnels to one point. It must have branched off to at least seven corridors. One of the entrances had been caved in and destroyed, in the direction from which Leo was thrown. 

Leo was hoisted back upright by his captor, who was swearing loudly. He could only understand pieces of frantic exchange. His vision was still failing him, and he could not right himself quickly enough to fight back, or even call for help. 

The monstrous creature slung Leo over his shoulder. “Zeck! Do it now!”

Another nightmare apparated from seemingly nowhere, in the form of a man with the face and tusks of a monstrous pig. “Yeah yeah, you don’t gotta tell me twice.” He reached into a pouch at his side and produced a small object shaped like a hockey puck. It was placed on the ground and twisted with an audible click . The two men fell back with Leo as a circle of blue light fanned out from the device’s origin point. “I’ve had enough of this place, let’s get out of here.”

Leo flailed helplessly. The rhinoceros didn’t budge as Leo slammed his feet against their chest and pounded their back with his fists. Tears burned his eyes as he was moved ever closer to the circle of bright light. 

“Stop! Let me go! I don’t want to!” he screamed. “Daddy! Donnie! Help me!” Desperate to find a means of escape, his eyes darted to every corner of the dank antechamber.

And he saw a small shock of purple fabric peeking out from behind the distant entrance to a northward passageway. The men’s backs were turned, but Leo could see it from where he was clear as day. A small, meek figure watched as the invaders dragged Leo away, with eyes wide with terror behind a pair of cracked glasses that were too big for him. 

“Donnie! Donnie!” Leo reached his arms out to his brother as far as they would go. “Help! Donnie!”

They had a fight. Donnie hadn’t come home. Leo hadn’t realized that he hadn’t been in the lair. He just assumed that he would return. 

His brother lingered. His stance wavered, his fists clenched at his sides. For a moment he looked as though he would run after Leo, throwing all caution to the wind. 

But instead, he swept once more behind the corridor’s pillars, disappearing completely. As the light swallowed him, Leo shrieked. 

Torn away from the only life he had known, forever. And it had just felt like blinking.

Chapter Text

Donnie hated his birthday. 

Every year he tried his best to ignore it. April used to get him gifts and make him cards anyway until she figured out that it was upsetting him. She understood in the end, though. April wasn't particularly keen on her own birthday either. They still gave each other gifts and took each other out all the time, and they had ultimately decided that they didn’t need to assign a date to those kinds of things to make them special. 

He never had to worry about his dad, in that respect at least. He probably hated Donnie’s birthday just as much, if not more. The tail end of July was a quiet, tense time when the lair was permeated by oppressive silence and the hot, pungent, relentless miasma of New York City summer. Donnie spent as much time as he possibly could holed up in his lab with the fan on, losing himself in different projects and destroying his hearing with noise music. 

This year was different. This time he was going to be spending it laying on his back next to an alleyway dumpster blue and bruised, staring up at a dark, starless sky. He was nursing a hip that he wasn't sure was sprained or broken, and a cut across his plastron; the only things he would be bringing home from a retrieval mission that was supposed to be easy. 

Luck had decided to spit in his face that night when she decided that the Foot would be raiding the same vault of the same highly reclusive New York City curator for the same morally questionable exhibition on relics from feudal east Asia on the same night he had set his sights on it. There was one of him, and dozens of them. The wounds he took that would take a long time to fade into cool looking scars were consolation prizes in a race that he was losing. 

He slowly sat up, grunting in pain as he steadied himself against the dumpster he had hid in. He felt his phone vibrate in his pocket, and pulled it out to check the notification. It was an automated email from work. Midnight had just struck.

Subject: Happy Birthday from your friends at StockGen Industries!

Without a moment of hesitation, Donnie hurled his phone at the brick wall across the alley as if it had burned his hand, breathing hard after it clattered to the ground. He put his head in his hands in frustration, but reluctantly eased himself back against the dumpster, exhausted. He sighed. He looked back up at the empty sky.

"Well, happy birthday to us, Leo," he groaned. "Phenomenal job I'm doing, huh?"

–

“Thank you for calling StockGen Technologies 24 hour support line, this is Ryan speaking.”

“Hi, yes, I’m having some trouble checking my email on my computer?”

“I understand, are you connected to the internet?” Donnie asked blandly. 

“I don’t know.”

“Ok, well, you either are or you aren’t, so which is it?”

“Do I need to be on the internet to check my email?”

Donnie had conceded long ago that if he wasn’t able to multitask and work on his tech projects while he took calls, this job would have made him jump off a bridge a good while back. But his options were limited in terms of remote work jobs where he didn’t have to show his face. Fortunately, almost all of the calls were trivial enough that they only required a fraction of his attention. It didn't make them any less aggravating. “Yes.”

“Well I guess not, then.” 

Donnie groaned internally, not looking up from the tiny machine he was attempting to repair. “What about your internet router? Are the lights on?”

“My what?”

“Your internet router. The device that connects your computer to the internet. It should look like a little black box with two antennae.”

“Oh. Yes, it’s on.” 

Donnie heard a loud rapping on metal behind him. He saw his father standing in the doorway to his lab.

Donnie lowered his headphones and covered the speaker. “Dad, I’m working right now.” 

Splinter nodded, but his expression said that Donnie had better find a stopping point, and soon. 

Donnie turned his attention back. “Ma’am, can you describe what your computer screen looks like right now?”

“It’s black.”

“Does anything happen when you move the mouse or press the spacebar?” 

“No.”

“Have you tried pressing the power button?”

“Which button is that?”

“With the model number of your device, it should be on the back of the monitor next to the USB port.”

“Alright, hold on… sorry about all this, my son helped me set this up the first time…Ok, there it is, the screen changed... Hey! There’s my email! Thanks so much for your help.”

“Of course ma’am, have a wonderful rest of your day,” Donnie said joylessly. He hung up, logged the call and signed off for his break. “Warmest greetings, Master Splinter.”

“I wasn’t sure that you came home last night. If I didn’t know any better I would think that you were trying to give your poor father a heart attack.” Splinter said. He smiled. “It looks like you took quite the tumble. How did everything go?”  

“Well, there were a few setbacks, I won’t lie,” Donnie mumbled. He fiddled with the bandages wrapping his arm. “And some things didn’t quite go as I had initially formulated. The Foot may or may not have beaten me there. However!” He snatched a small, wriggling, chitinous apparatus from his workbench and displayed it in the palm of his hand. “I of course didn’t dare leave the scene before planting some of these bad boys onto a dozen or so Foot soldiers.”

Splinter blinked. “What exactly am I looking at?”

“My newly patented Spy Roach!” Donnie let the artificial insect crawl through his fingers and up his arm. “It’s something that’s been in the works for a little while now. I’ve embedded them with synthetic microcells containing tiny audio and video capture systems that are even capable of sending me a live feed through a VPN. Plus I can track their whereabouts for as long as I have a signal. And if they’re seen, they’re designed to just look like regular cockroaches to avoid any kind of suspicion.”

“Did you secure the piece of armor that you found?” Splinter asked hopefully.

Donnie’s heart sank, but he tried not to let it show. “Well no, I wasn’t able to secure this specific piece, but! It’s highly likely that the Foot already has a significant amount of the set, right? With a man on the inside – or in this case an insect, and also in this case, several – we can finally figure out where their base of operations is, and I can start developing a plan of action for infiltrating their hideout and getting those pieces back.” Donnie sat back in his office chair and folded his hands behind his head. “Boo to the Yeah. See? Nowhere near a total wash.”

Donnie tentatively chanced a look at Splinter, not doing well keeping his hopes in check. Surely this time, he would see an expression of stoic commendation, perhaps even one of respect. No such luck. It was one of concerned disapproval. 

“My son, you will be doing nothing of the sort. You are one. The Foot has multitudes. You are not yet ready to undertake a solo mission walking into the house of the enemy.”

“Ok maybe not, but I almost am. The machines I’m working on that’ll help me do it just need a little bit more fine-tuning, and then–”

“Donatello,” Splinter interrupted. “If you want to prepare for such an undertaking, you need more formal training.” Splinter gestured to Donnie’s computer. “You have spent too long away from it.” 

Donnie scoffed. “This job is helping me pay for my tech projects.”

“It is paying for your distractions.”

Donnie clenched his fists at his sides. “With all due respect, Master Splinter, I am not having this conversation with you again. The weapons and machines that I’ve designed have saved me dozens of times and have been indispensable in my recon endeavors. They’re what make my missions possible.”  

“And that is precisely what worries me,” Splinter said. “While tools certainly have their place in shinobi practice, for you I worry that you rely on them far too often. They are becoming a crutch, Donatello. If you were to find yourself in the lair of the Foot backed into a corner and one of those crucial tools should cease functioning, what then?”

Donnie opened his mouth to protest, but found that he didn’t have an answer. His mind went back to the previous night. He had almost escaped with the piece of dark armor that he had spent weeks tracking, but that heist had failed when an enemy kunai dagger found its way into the propeller turbines of the aerial apparatus in Donnie's battle shell. The rest, anybody could fill in. He fell, they kicked the shit out of him, he had barely escaped. 

“I want to see you in the dojo tomorrow morning,” Splinter ordered as he began turning to leave. “Come early. Tonight, you will see if you can find any information regarding the remaining fragments.”   

Donnie hung his head. “Yes, sensei,” he said. “Dad, I…” 

“What is it?”

He was so bad at this. He didn’t even know why he wanted to say it. 

“My birthday is today.”

Splinter’s expression softened. 

“I wasn’t sure if you remembered,” he added sheepishly. 

His father and master cracked a smile filled with sorrow. “So it is, my son. If there is anything you would like to do to celebrate, let me know.”

“Understood.” 

So Donnie played nice. He took time off of work. He trained in the lair’s dojo, and performed sufficiently to his father’s standards. He meditated. He didn’t build anything new. It was a tiring ruse, but it was worth having his father off of his back at night. That was when he could truly be productive. 

A few of the spy roaches that he had planted on the foot soldiers he had encountered four nights ago were still active. Their AI wasn’t as advanced as it could be, and the machines themselves were too small for a robust intelligence system to be contained in them. The computer that contained their AI system was kept on his workbench, controlling the roaches through remote radio frequencies according to Donnie’s orders. It had taken weeks of finagling and several headaches to get it to work, but it was performing beyond his expectations. Most of him expected all of the links to be long gone after almost 48 hours had passed, and he was pleasantly surprised how well some of them were maintained. 

“Hey Donnie!” A crackly drawl called from behind him. “If you find the Foot’s lair this time, can I come with you when you bust the dark armor?”

“For the millionth time, Shelldon, no.” 

The little purple drone hovered next to him and pouted. Or at least Donnie imagined that he did. “So when are you gonna let me come on missions with you?” 

“Never. You’re not coming on any missions with me.”

“Why not?”

“Because that isn’t what I built you for,” Donnie said sternly. “Go recharge.” 

  Shelldon lingered for a moment, but skulked off. “Whatever,” he grumbled. "I didn’t wanna go anyway.” 

Donnie had set a timer for one hour, after which the roaches would initiate the Stealth command, find a place to hide, and shut themselves off. Donnie had planted roughly twelve devices onto the Foot soldiers who beat him to the previous fragment. Out of the twelve, he was able to establish a connection with three. 

Donnie snickered darkly as his typed commands came up on his computer’s monitor. “Yes, yes my pets… When man is gone, the roaches shall inherit the Earth.”

ANIMATE R9_

CAMERA ON_

MIC ON_

SET SYSTEM PRIORITY 1: STEALTH_

SET SYSTEM PRIORITY 2: SEEK TERRESTRIAL ENTITY_

The grainy view of a stone floor illuminated Donnie’s face in the darkness of his lab. The microphone captured the skittering sounds the roach made as it crept along the shadowed hallways. The scaffolding along the ceiling looked like the interior of an abandoned  barrel-chambered church, refurbished with crude, utilitarian barriers and passageways, consisting of material like drywall and metal sheeting. Slapdash as it was, he couldn’t deny that there was an elegance to it, no matter where in the building the roach explored. Donnie panned the camera to look around. The roach had sniffed out a small group of what looked to be unmasked foot soldiers congregating in a doorway. 

Donnie’s eyes widened. He inhaled sharply. “Donatello you brilliant, handsome devil, you’ve done it again.” 

The roach wandered into the church’s main antechamber. The pews had been taken out, and a large group of soldiers were gathered where Donnie imagined they once had stood. They were staring at the sanctuary raptly, some still trickling in. Standing atop the sanctuary was a young woman dressed in black, with long dark hair that was bleached at the tips. The roach weaved its way through the feet of Foot soldiers and odd followers, until the screen went black with a loud crunching sound.

“Damn it–” 

Donnie frantically tried to establish another connection with an intact roach. At last, he was able to find a signal. 

ANIMATE R2_

CAMERA ON_

MIC ON_

SET SYSTEM PRIORITY 1: SEEK TERRESTRIAL ENTITY_

“Come on, come on…”

The screen lit up again. This roach had been able to get into the antechamber itself, and Donnie saw the same view from a different angle. 

INPUT POSITION COORDINATES_

“Hurry up…”

Slowly, the digits began to produce themselves on a separate monitor programmed to receive any text output that the roaches could manage. The coordinates probably wouldn’t be 100% accurate, but they would give him a good ballpark estimate of the location. It was an important measure that he couldn’t afford to forget. 

42°45'16.88889"N 79°00'19.2477"W_ 

“Ok, ok, ok…” He saved the coordinates to his notes app and copied them down on paper for good measure. When he looked back up at the video feed, he was able to get a better view of the woman addressing the Foot. She was speaking, but the roach wasn’t close enough to pick up everything that she was saying. She was holding the piece of fragmented armor that Donnie had failed to reclaim the night before. 

“ – nearly complete – longer – unforeseen barriers – “

Donnie squinted. “What the…?”

Standing next to her were two Foot warriors, one large and brutish and the other scrawny and gaunt, both with the clan emblem tattooed on their face. Nothing too out of the ordinary about that. What surprised him was the behemoth that stood by the woman off to her right. It appeared to be a humanoid tiger with an artillery’s worth of firearms holstered to his sides, his face donning an eyepatch and deep scars. Donnie had suspected that mutants outside of his family might exist in New York, but he hadn’t expected to find any in the Foot Clan. 

The roach scampered toward the church’s sanctuary where an altar might have been and placed a hand on the area of the wall where a cross may have hung once. He watched the woman place a hand on the wall, and it depressed into a pressure plate. There was a low rumbling of stone grinding on stone, and the wall lifted vertically to reveal a chamber behind it. Suddenly, the roach’s feed went pitch black static.

“No!”

Donnie scrambled to establish a connection with a new unit. His last one. His final shot to get as much information on the hideout as he possibly could. He finally found it sequestered in the rafters of the church, and heaved a sigh of relief. He would have to figure out where the roach was and lead it back to the main chamber.  

ANIMATE R11_

CAMERA ON_

MIC ON_

SET SYSTEM PRIORITY 1: REMOTE MANUAL CONTROLS_

At last it made its way back into the main chamber of the building. And not a moment too soon. The door to the hidden chamber had nearly closed. The roach scurried under it, narrowly avoiding being crushed by its impact. The room was dark, but Donnie could hear voices while he waited for the roach’s vision to adjust to a darker environment.

“It won’t be long now,” a woman’s voice said. “Only a few pieces remain.”

“That victory will mean nothing without someone to awaken it,” a raspy male voice said. “Without Oroku Haruhi’s abilities, I fear that our efforts would be for nothing.”

“They won’t be. I’ll find him.” 

“And if you don’t? We’ve a timeline that you’ve promised to maintain.”

“I said I will find him!” the woman snapped. “I will turn over every stone from New York to the Hidden City if it means getting him back."

“And what makes you think you’re equipped to search the Hidden City?”

The chamber came into focus slowly. It was a square shaped room that reminded Donnie of a traditional tea room, the floor paneled with tatami and decorated with illustrative wooden panels. That was where the similarities ended. The walls were marred with grime and what looked like scorch marks and cosmetic wear from steel weapons. Candles lined the perimeter of the large room, which the brutish Foot warrior lit with a wave of his hand. They cast an ominous light on the unnatural iron figure poised behind the woman with black hair, held up in a wooden frame. 

Donnie’s hands shook. He felt lightheaded. It was a dark, vaguely humanoid shape that towered behind her like a nebulous monolith. Donnie's heart fell at ease when he saw that it wasn't moving, but the response returned as soon as he realized what it was. Splinter had told Donnie stories of the Shredder since before he and Leo could walk. He had always pictured it as frightening, but seeing its shape in a truly real space for the first time made his mouth go dry. It was bigger than he had imagined, and just as ghastly. Splinter always treated the character of Oroku Saki in his stories with vitriol, but occasionally with compassion as well; a man who lost his way and never found it again, turning his soul to stone and himself into a merciless killer.

This didn't look like a man, or even something that could have been one once. It looked like a monster. His thoughts were interrupted by the woman shrieking as her gaze met Donnie’s through the monitor, nearly giving him a heart attack.  

“What’s wrong?” Someone asked. 

“There’s a cockroach in here!” she yowled. “Kill it, kill it!” 

Donnie didn’t see who stomped the roach out. All he heard was a loud crunch, and the video and audio died after a short, staticy death rattle. It startled him enough to make him jump out of his chair and away from the computer, tearing off his headphones. Losing his focus, he suddenly became aware of how much his body was panicking. He tried to breathe evenly as he brushed his arms with his hands until he was calm enough to think clearly.

He had gotten too close.

He switched to his laptop and entered the coordinates that the second roach had generated into the computer's GPS. After several excruciating minutes, he had it.

Manhattan.

West side.

Chelsea. 

Donnie put his hands over his mouth and freaked out as quietly as he possibly could. The shape of a plan was already forming in his mind. 48 to 72 hours from now, it would be destroyed. The Shredder was never going to return. Donnie was going to make sure of it.

“Oh dearest father of mine…” Donnie snickered, his face starkly illuminated in his dark lab by the screen of his computer. “Let’s see if you’ll have the stomach to eateth thy words.” 

Chapter Text

Donnie left at 1 am, and took the L train part of the way. It wasn't the most classically ninja approach, but there were a couple of reasons he chose to do this. First, he needed to conserve both his energy and the energy of his tools in case a crisis emerged. Second, Donnie just liked riding the train. He was always able to get away with it late at night. Few crowds, no spoken word poets, and only the occasional mariachi band. The few people who were out this late gave him enough space to indulge in the one thing in New York that everyone did that he could do too, space for him to feel just a little bit normal. 

He got off in Chelsea and took to the air as soon as possible. It only took him about fifteen minutes to find the church. He perched atop the ledge of a nearby building and slid his goggles over his eyes to scout the area. The building itself was pretty unremarkable. It somehow looked simultaneously neglected and well maintained. It was close to Chelsea’s more industrial area, so there weren’t many apartment buildings or houses, let alone much foot traffic. 

Foot traffic . He was gonna have to save that one. 

Not many guards were posted. Donnie couldn’t tell if that was a good sign or a bad sign. If it was heavily guarded that would be inconvenient, and it also might have made him think that something tipped the Foot off and made them suspicious that they had been infiltrated. A light guard rotation also made him nervous. It could mean that most of the Foot was waiting inside. It could be a trap. 

Donnie shrugged off the thought. Now wasn’t the time to be doubting himself or the integrity of his inventions. He had to believe in them if he was going to succeed. They didn't know he was here.

He kept to the rooftops nearby and waited for the movement of the Foot soldiers on the roof to give them a blind spot. He found it, and jumped from the closest rooftop to the church. He intentionally fell a little bit short, so that he was hanging by one arm from the rim of the back facade. He heard the footsteps of the guards stop. They didn't see him, but they had heard his movement. It was now or never. 

He pulled himself up and fired the tranq darts he had loaded into his gauntlets. He only had a split second to aim, but managed to get both of them just below the jugular, ensuring that they would go down quickly and quietly without mortally wounding them. Donnie smiled as they did just that, choking in alarm a moment and then falling unconscious. He did a quiet little fist pump in the darkness.

The roof of the church had a glass skylight. Donnie had seen it during his scan of the interior of the hideout through the spy roach. So, naturally, he had come prepared. The glass cutter extension in his bo made quick work of it. He fastened the hook of his grappling rope from the reel in his battle shell and lowered himself down through the new, perfectly circular turtle sized hole. He went slowly. He was hovering approximately fifty feet over the church's main antechamber facing the sanctuary. There wasn't a single soul in sight, which was strange. Donnie had expected that there would be at least some security inside if the dark armor was just sitting out in the open. Unless, of course, they were waiting in a place where he couldn't see them. 

He lowered his goggles over his eyes and activated night vision. There were, indeed, about six or seven Foot soldiers skulking in the shadows behind the chamber’s outer pillars, facing inward. They seemed lax and noncommittal, weapons held but not quite at the ready. Donnie huffed, frustrated. He was going to have to improvise, something he hated doing. 

He pulled a round caltrop from a pouch at his side and poised it with his thumb and index finger, aiming for the antechamber’s entrance leading to the church’s main doors. He flicked it with such force that it landed right where he wanted it to, on the seam of the chamber’s entrance where it proceeded to ricochet down the hall, hollow metal echoes emanating after it. To Donnie’s relief, it had the desired effect. Three Foot soldiers left the scene to investigate the noise, and the rest remained. A much more manageable number of recruits to put out of commission. He activated his jets for a moment for a little momentum, and swung and held fast to the pillar where the recruits were concentrated. 

He let go and brought the brunt of his staff down on one of their heads. With one down, two others easily fell with strong, repeated blows to their external pressure points. One tried to run, but not before Donnie trapped their throat against the pillar with the length of his staff, choking them out until they fell unconscious. He caught his breath and looked back at the church’s sanctuary.

Now then.

Donnie eased his hand onto the pressure plate behind the sanctuary. He could swear that he felt the air pressure change as he crossed the threshold of the secret door. The echo of the church’s stone floor gave way to the quiet of tatami padding and wooden walls set with canvas. The silence combined with the pitch blackness of the room’s interior made Donnie’s nerves flare. There was part of him that didn’t want to turn on his flashlight. Then the dark armor would become real. He would know for sure that he was in the same room as something he had spent so long fearing. He turned it on anyway.  

The dark armor did not appear on its raised pedestal when the light came on. Curiously, it was nowhere in sight. Instead, Donnie stared into the face of a human man. 

He kept the light trained on the strange man, who didn’t seem fazed by Donnie’s presence. The man looked like he had stepped out of one of the tapestries that adorned the walls of the chamber. He had long black hair with small shocks of gray that was pulled back, and he wore a black hakama and an intricate indigo haori with a crest over his heart. Donnie had to squint to see it. It was the Hamato crest. 

“Hiroto?” The man asked. 

Donnie remained frozen, for all but his hand reaching for his staff. “Who are you?”

The man reached out a hand in the darkness. “Hiroto,” the man said. He was smiling. “Come here.” 

Donnie approached cautiously. He reached his own hand out. They were almost touching when the man's expression fell into a harsh scowl. His shape distorted and bent, and suddenly vanished. Where his hand was once extended, a sharp, clawed hand made of dark iron reached for Donnie instead. 

Donnie jumped back. Where the man had once stood, the incomplete Dark Armor towered over him, beckoning him to take its hand. 

Lightheaded, Donnie rushed to remove the explosives he had prepared out of his bag. He went into autopilot almost right away, his heart pounding out of his chest making it a struggle to give the setup his full attention.   

“Ok, ok…” 

He latched four explosives about the size and shape of pencil boxes to the interior of the armor through its chest cavity and typed a sequence into his wrist bracer. The timer displays on the explosives started counting down from one hundred. The dark armor would be history after they reached zero, as would most of the Foot Clan’s hideout. But he needed to get out fast. It was less important if he was seen on the way out. 

As he turned, he nearly smashed his face into a woman standing directly behind him. She was decked out in lightweight armor and a mask, the red eye makeup and the bleach in her hair popping even in the scant light of Donnie’s flashlight.

“Boo!”

Her fist cracked across Donnie’s face and sent him tumbling to the side, not giving him time to brace himself before the blow that made his nose and jaw explode in white hot pain, and he tasted blood in his mouth. His flashlight tumbled out of his hands. Muscle memory kicked in where his reflexes had failed. He flipped on his heel and swept the girl off her feet and onto her back with a low spin of his staff, activated the staff’s hammer extension, and went for her head once he had the higher ground. She deflected the hammer’s head with the steel gauntlet adorning her wrist, sparks flying and illuminating the darkness when they clanged together. 

Donnie was fast, but she was faster. And she had the cover of the dark on her side. 

The girl was back on her feet in an instant, unsheathing a short sword that went flying at Donnie in a series of swipes. He parried most and dodged the ones that he couldn’t. The girl left no openings, at least none that Donnie was skilled enough to take advantage of. She was good.  

A little too late, Donnie realized he was backing up closer and closer to the explosive-riddled dark armor, the hidden door to the chamber becoming further and further away. He had already lost about fifteen seconds, with no opportunity to pause the timer on the time bombs. Getting out was more important than winning. 

He took a wide swing at the girl, which she ducked, lunging forward and digging her wakizashi into Donnie’s wrist, his bracer stopping the blow somewhat, but not quite enough. He cried out, and his bo clattered to the ground. She scissor kicked him to the gut, sending him flying against the dark armor that he had been trying to get away from. He slumped to the ground, the wind knocked clean out of his lungs. 

He heard a sound like stone scraping on stone and pulled himself to look up, trying to get his breath back. The girl had retreated past him and was standing in the chamber’s doorway, smiling. The door to the chamber was closing, the sliver of the cold light of the witching hour growing thinner and thinner. Donnie pulled himself up and threw himself at the closing door, agitating his injured wrist as he did. In a last, desperate plea for saving himself, he wedged his staff between the door and the wall. The door stopped, but it didn’t take long for him to hear the groan of metal bending and bowing. He put all of his weight on the staff to counteract the stress that the stone door was putting on it, but it was no use. 

The bo cracked in half with a loud, sickening snap of dense metal. Sparks flew as several mechanisms within its multitool feature were instantly decommissioned. Donnie fell to the floor, catching himself on his good arm and panting. His eyes rested again on the dark armor, aglow with the LED timers of the explosives planted on it slowly counting down. 

47 seconds. 

45.

44.

43 seconds on the deadly explosives he was suddenly trapped in a very small room with. 

Donnie frantically tapped his tech gauntlet, smearing it with blood, but it was unresponsive. The girl’s short sword had cracked it nearly in half when she pierced his wrist. The screen flickered once, and then quietly died. 

“No!” 

Donnie scrambled over to the bomb-riddled armor and stripped away the sheer metal casing on the one implanted inside the chestplate. With his bracer broken, he was going to have to disarm all of them manually. His mind raced as he looked at the maze of wires and electrical nerves that he could usually take in so easily. He couldn’t think. And even if he could, he knew that he wasn’t going to have time to disable them all. Why had he made all of these mechanisms so damn complicated?

Because they were meant to be disabled remotely.

Idiot. 

34 seconds.

He raced to the other side of the chamber and banged on the hidden door. “Let me out!” He screamed. There was no response. He kept going. “Open the door!”

“In your dreams, freak,” the girl taunted from the other side. “You’ve been a pest we’ve let get away for way too long. I’m really gonna enjoy seeing you finally get fumigated.” 

“Name your price, what do you want?” He pleaded. “We can work something out.”

“Nah,” the girl dismissed. “You’ve caused us enough trouble. This is what’s going to make it worth it.” 

Donnie looked behind him. The soft beeping had picked up pace, a sign that there were fifteen seconds remaining until detonation. He stumbled to the center of the room, mind in a daze. He fell to his knees, clutching his still bleeding forearm. 

There was nothing he could do. He had already gone through every option imaginable that he had at his disposal and every outcome was death. He doubled over and his breath became uneven. He was starting to hyperventilate. He had imagined sometimes, by some miracle, being able to see Leo again someday. He hadn’t guessed that he might be seeing him even sooner than he realized. 

He really should have thought of building a retractable reinforced shield into his battle shell. It probably wouldn’t be robust enough to completely withstand such a large explosion at close range, but it would make his survival exponentially more likely. Donnie immediately knew how he would have built it, what materials he would have used, its exoskeleton and infrastructure– 

The thundering explosion that blew out Donnie’s ears an eighth of a second after his broken battle shell inexplicably opened, with a flash of bright purple light that made Donnie gasp, his whole being tingling upon its release. Donnie’s head cracked hard against concrete, and then there was nothing at all.

Chapter Text

Donnie came to consciousness with blurry vision. He felt sicker than he ever had. His ears still rang from the explosion, and the rest of his senses were overtaken by shooting pain in his head. It wouldn’t take a doctor to know that he was concussed. As his vision came into focus, the smiling face of a girl appeared before him from the ether of nausea. A girl with a wavy black bob and bleached tips. 

“Morning, sunshine.” The girl backhanded Donnie across the face, snapping his head to the side. He lunged to retaliate, but found himself restrained. He was tied to a chair that was affixed to the floor with his hands behind his back. 

They weren’t alone in this small room, a humid stone chamber about the size of a walk-in freezer. It might have been a storage room of some kind. Crates piled to the ceiling in the corners and freshly polished weapons of all makes mounted on sad looking plaster walls. The only source of light hung above him in a naked bulb with a single corded switch. It felt as bright as the sun. 

He looked to his left. The burly, tattooed Foot brute that he remembered from the spy roach’s video feed was holding his tech bō and grinning, slapping it into his palm like a baseball bat. Beside him was his more scrawny counterpart, with the same dressings and tattoos. He looked to his right. Posted up by the wall with his arms crossed was the tiger mutant he had seen from the same feed, knives and pistols holstered at his side. His green, feline eyes glinted from the shadows at the smug, dye job girl glowering at Donnie. They all looked at him expectantly, waiting for him to speak. To surrender or fight back.

Concede or entertain. 

“How did you know I was coming?” Donnie groaned, defeated.

The girl held something out in front of him in the palm of her hand. “This belong to you?” It was Donnie’s spy roach. The carapace was busted, and the inner mechanical apparatus spilled out the sides like so many squashed guts. "We took a look at this and figured you would show up eventually." The girl pocketed the roach. “It's kind of poetic, you know? No matter how much time passes, Hamato always finds a way to drag itself back out of the woodworks eventually. I’ll give you this, the robot bugs are a new one. But the more things change, the more they stay the same, right? Different style, same annoying roaches,” she purred. 

Everything she said sounded a bit like she was underwater. Donnie wasn’t well. His head swam, and he felt like he was fighting for consciousness. But losing it meant that they would just shake him back awake, most likely.

“Now, under the usual circumstances, I would just kill you. No brainer, right? It would save me a headache.” She began to pace the room, as if showing off to her captive who couldn’t. “Unfortunately, nothing in life is ever that simple, is it? I have some questions I want to ask you, Donatello. You’re going to answer them, and depending on how you do, maybe we’ll let you off the hook just this once.” 

Donnie bristled at the woman calling him by the name that she shouldn’t know. “Oh, what, so you’re a ninja and you have psychic powers?”

“Yeah. It’s an archaic technique that’s been in my family for generations. It’s called ‘I Went Through Your Wallet.’” She held up a nearly complete loyalty punch card with his name handwritten on it between two of her fingers. “Jamba Juice? Really?” 

Donnie growled at her. 

“To be honest, I was expecting one of the other ones,” she said. “Hoping, more like. I didn’t know that Draxum had even made any more freaks. I thought it was just the three."

Donnie perked up. "The three what?”

“His other mutants,” The girl said.

“Whose other mutants? What are you talking about?”

“You know, I don’t find it very cute when people try to play dumb with me,” the girl warned. The girl’s cocky smirk was starting to give way to a frustrated grimace.  

Donnie sneered. “On the contrary, I find it quite insulting that you would assume I’d stoop to feigning low intelligence just to deflect your weak punches,” he said. 

The girl produced a wakizashi from her belt and held the point half a centimeter from Donnie’s throat, too fast for him to track the movement. Her expression turned to fury. “Alright, first question. How many pieces of the Dark Armor have you claimed?” 

“Uh…” Donnie stammered. “It’s a number that’s, ah… that number is zero.”

The woman smiled, leering. She pushed the blade so that it gingerly touched Donnie’s throat. “I think you’re lying to me.”

“Pfft, what? Noooo, I wouldn’t–”

“Next question. Where is Oroku Hiroto? Where are you and your little freak family hiding him?” she demanded. 

“Sister, refer to the previous attachment,” Donnie protested, craning his head back from the blade. “I. Don’t. Know. What you’re talking about.”

“Liar!”

“Steady, Karai.” The tiger-shaped behemoth of a man said from the shadows. “It’s possible that he’s telling the truth.”

“How can you say that?” the woman named Karai shouted back. “Look at him. He even has the crest of Hamato. There has to be a connection of some kind!” 

Donnie laughed nervously. “Well said, my large feline friend! Clearly this was all a colossal misunderstanding on both of our parts, it’s apparent that I know nothing, so now that that’s all cleared up I’ll be out of your hair as soon as you let me out of these itchy restraints–”

The tip of the wakizashi dug into the surface of Donnie’s neck, just breaking his skin. “Shut up!” 

Donnie lurched backward. The volume of Karai’s voice did not agree with his aching head, much less his stomach. 

“Do not put words in my mouth, girl,” the tiger growled. “Of course there’s a connection. But you are speaking in terms that may very well mean nothing to this one. Dig deeper.”

Karai considered this, then turned back to Donnie, eyes narrow. Her tone was calmer, more calculated. “Fine,” she said. “Where is Hamato Michelangelo?” 

Donnie froze. “What?”

“Are you going to make me repeat myself?”

“I… I don’t…”  

“The other heir to Hamato! Tell me where he is!” 

Donnie’s nausea had only been steadily building throughout the entire interrogation. Karai yelling in his ear was only making it worse, and he could slowly feel his body reaching its breaking point. He weakly mumbled something to Karai. She leaned in closer to his face. 

“What did you say?” she asked. 

“I said you might want to back up.”

In what certainly would not go down as Donnie's proudest moment, up came a mixture of stomach acid and the pizza he had eaten earlier in an attempt to carbo-load for the night's mission all over Karai's determined visage. In a fleeting moment of clarity, seeing her double take in visceral horror at suddenly being covered in barf almost made it feel worth it. She howled in anger and kicked him so hard that Donnie's chair flew off of its bolts and sent him crashing to the floor. 

“Tiger Claw, take his weapons and belongings. Put him in the stocks and have the recruits break his spirit in the morning,” Karai spat viciously, shoulders still heaving as she calmed herself. “I have a feeling that he can still be of use to us.”   

Donnie felt a large, soft paw roughly grab the back of his chair. As he was dragged out of the room and the hanging light became smaller and smaller, he realized he didn’t have any strength left to fight back. 

–

It didn’t make any sense. Nothing did.

Donnie barely felt anything as he was being frisked of all of his projectiles and remaining tech, and beaten a few times in between. He hardly even felt anything when they stripped off his battle shell without triggering the release properly. The only way his brain could survive that kind of violation of space was to dissociate from it completely. When he came back, he was hunched with his arms bound behind his back with a thick corded rope. Dried blood was stuck under his nostrils and one of his eyes had been swollen almost shut. He drifted in and out of his thoughts as the pain and sickness came in waves.

What in the world was going on?

He thought back to Karai smiling as she sealed him into the Dark Armor’s chamber with the explosives he had planted. She had sealed him in with the explosives, and the Dark Armor. Why? 

As much as he hated to admit it, even in his head, Karai didn't seem like an idiot. What he couldn’t figure out was why she would seal Donnie into that chamber if she knew that the bombs inside would detonate with the Dark Armor still inside it. She wanted him gone, sure, but it couldn't have been worth the destruction of the Dark Armor as well.

Unless, somehow, Karai didn’t think that those explosives were enough to destroy the Dark Armor. The idea felt unreal. 

And then there was the matter of his own survival. The explosives that he had planted were easily enough to completely level a quarter of the church’s ground floor, and they probably had. He had been in close proximity with the bombs when they had detonated. He shouldn’t be alive, and yet here he was, with the only thing to show for it was a concussion due to being thrown against the wall from the force of the blast… 

There was a clang of a thick hanbō on the bars of his cell, not doing any favors for said head wound, that made him jump. “Eyes forward, inmate!” A female Foot recruit with a close, dark buzz cut had been assigned to keep watch over him.

“You know, I’m not going to be able to escape if I fall asleep,” Donnie groaned. 

The recruit snorted, pointing the hanbō at him with a blustering authority. “I’m here to make sure that you don’t. Next time I see you so much as nod your head I’m coming in there to make sure you’re awake.” She sighed dramatically and slid down the wall beside the cell into a squat. Despite her intense personality, she probably didn’t want to be there either. She was the only other soul in sight and it was nearly dawn. “The Chunin says that she’s more likely to get you to talk this way.”

“Right. About things I know nothing about. The only useful thing that I’m able to impart at all is that all of you are wasting your time.”

“This is not a waste of time!” the girl yelled. “You know something about Oroku Hiroto. You have to. I mean… look at you.”

“I’m sorry, did I miss something?” Donnie asked. “Is this Oroku Hiroto another giant talking turtle well-versed in ninjutsu? How many of those do you people statistically think there are?”

The girl was silent. When she finally replied, she spoke in an uncharacteristically gentle tone. “Do you… really not know anything?”

Donnie sighed. “Sweet baby Galileo. Finally. Someone in the Foot Clan with an ounce of sense.”

“Do you or do you not?” She hissed. 

“I don’t!” 

The girl withdrew with her arms folded over her knees. “Right. As if you would tell the truth now.” 

Donnie started feeling braver with the girl. While he was stuck here, he might as well get as much information out as he could. “Care to impart that truth to me? Who is this Oroku Hiroto? Is he at all related to your precious Oroku Saki?”

“When he came to us, the lieutenant told us that he was a direct descendant of Oroku Saki, like Karai.” The girl hesitated. “He was an incredibly powerful person. Few people in the Foot are able to harness any kind of mystic energy, but he wasn’t like us. He was going to be the one to wear the Dark Armor, once we gathered all the pieces.” 

“Right...” Donnie sighed. He never understood the Foot’s wooey-woo occult obsessions and didn’t care for them. He believed in the power of the Dark Armor, but not much else. He had never encountered anything else in the realm of the occult that couldn’t be explained away with science. He saw the Dark Armor as a relic of a science that he didn’t yet understand, and that was unacceptable. 

“I’m serious!” The girl barked. “He could make fire in his hands and open windows to other places! I saw him do it!” 

“You watched an illusory approximation that gave off the visual appearance of something happening. You know who else can do that? Magicians at Times Square.”

The girl grumbled. “Maybe you really don’t know anything.” 

Donnie lit up. “Oh great! So you’re gonna let me go?”

The woman banged on the bars again. “Don’t be absurd! And the next time I hear another word out of you, I’ll crack you in the head on your good side!” 

Donnie decided to cut his losses and shut up. From that moment on, the two of them sat in silence. 

-

Donnie was on the edge of sleep again when he felt something fall on his head. It was something small, he guessed a pebble. It was quiet enough that the recruit keeping watch couldn't hear it. Convinced he was imagining it, he ignored it. It happened again, this time a small rock making a soft clack as it fell to the ground. He looked up. 

There was a small window high up in the cell where the basement ended and the church's foundation began. There was someone peeking in through it. Donnie had to crane his neck to see them. 

It was a human boy about his own age. He had brown skin and wore a red durag, its tails spilling over his shoulder. As soon as Donnie met his eye, the boy held a finger over his lips. Donnie felt a flutter of panic in his chest upon knowing he had been seen by a human he didn't know, a feeling deeply engraved in his psyche.

A small cat (dog? Donnie genuinely couldn't tell) crawled down from the boy's shoulder and landed softly on its paws. As it drew closer, the animal displayed strange coloring of orange and blue, and two overbite teeth jutted out of its mouth. It padded over to Donnie and briefly sniffed him. Donnie looked back at the boy in the window, baffled. The boy just grinned, nodded, and gave a thumbs up. When Donnie saw his snaggled teeth, he thought about a study that he had read once that had talked about how a lot of people look like their pets. 

He looked back at the creature in time to be blinded by a seemingly sourceless bright light. In another second he felt the shock of cold night air, and big hands held fast around his shoulders, manhandling him to the side. Donnie cried out and kicked instinctively. Curiously, his foot met the face of the boy in the window.

"Hey, relax!" He guarded in a deep voice, one hand nursing his cheek. "I'm here to help you!" 

"Why? Who are you?" Donnie demanded. 

The boy produced a serrated combat knife from his side. “I’m a friend. I don’t have time to explain. Let me see your back.”

“That’s not an acceptable answer,” Donnie seethed.

“My name is Raphael,” said the boy. “That’s the end of what I can tell you right now.”

Donnie balked at the coincidence. “Donatello.”

“I know.”

Raphael sawed through Donnie’s restraints carefully and quickly, and he helped Donnie get to his feet. “Can you walk?”

“I think so.”

“Good, because Raph’s gettin’ a funny feeling that pretty soon we might have to–” 

At that moment, a soft crunching of dry dirt made both of them look up. They made eye contact with three Foot soldiers rounding the corner of the church from the back.

“Run!” Raphael cried.