Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Breathe, Michelangelo.”

“Whatdoyoumeanimtotallybreathing,” Mikey gushes out, immediately gasping for more air. Draxum sighs and runs a paw over his face, posture dropping to a slouch.

“You need to take this seriously. As of right now you are a danger to your family with how much mysticism is coursing through your veins unchecked-“

“Yeah, yeah, I know! It’s just hard, okay?” Mikey interrupts, breaking out of his rigid posture and placing his elbows on his crossed knees. They had been at this for two hours now, and Mikey was tired of it.

These sessions with Draxum had started a month ago, and barely any progress had been made in controlling the excess power that rolled off of him at the most random of times. For a few weeks after the invasion he had managed to hide how his hands trembled on the Bad Hand Days™, or how things in the room would shatter when the lightning-like scars on his arms pulsed with bursts of warmth.

Most of the attention was focused on Leo and Raph physically healing, anyway, which was way more serious. It’s not like it was a big deal.

Of course, when it happened in Donnie’s lab on a night neither of them could sleep, there was little Mikey could do except come clean about the ongoing problem, much to the annoyance (and overdramatic worry) of his older brothers. Donnie went on a rant about nerve damage that Mikey sort of listened to, Raph and Dad chewed him out for ‘hiding something so serious’, and Leo tried to defend Mikey a little bit, but he could tell his immediate older brother was disappointed in him, too.

Mikey thought that he had been able to escape relatively unscathed from the whole mess with the K-words. Everyone else was busy physically healing from their injuries and that in turn meant Mikey picked up even more shifts as Dr. Feelings. Just to make sure his family's mental healing went off without a hitch, too. There was no need to focus on his arms, he was handling it fine.

Only, according to his family and Draxum, that wasn’t the case.

It was sweet that Draxum acted like a mother hen when he heard the news about what happened on the surface during the invasion. That is, until Mikey was explaining the portal situation. Draxum had completely flipped his lid, ranting about the dangers and how ‘of course there would be complications after a downright miracle, Michelangelo has never been trained to handle that kind of power!’.

So, that led to this arrangement. Weekly sessions in Draxums apartment about how to control and direct the mystic energy coursing through Mikey’s body so it couldn’t unintentionally hurt him or other people. Easy peasy (not).

“Let’s try again. Close your eyes, and remember to breathe deeply.” Draxum abruptly began, straightening to his full height while sitting cross legged in front of him. Mikey copies him, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly, matching Draxums speed. “Focus on your mind. Let your thoughts slow.”

That was always the part Mikey couldn’t understand during these lessons. How was he supposed to slow his mind? There had always been five drawing ideas, seven upcoming dinner menus he wanted to try, and at least 10 different snippets of songs floating around his head at all times. His brain had never known peace since the moment he gained consciousness.

“I can hear you thinking, Michelangelo,” Draxum states, briefly snapping Mikey out of it. “This will not work unless you have a clear, blank mind.”

“Okay, that makes sense, I guess, but you never really explained how I’m supposed to get there-”

“It is different for everyone. Start by thinking about whatever makes you relaxed, that should help get things going.”

Mikey huffs, sticking out his tongue and hoping Draxum would hear that, too. Regardless, he takes Draxum’s advice. He imagines his sixth birthday, when he and his brothers had run each other to the brink of collapse and flopped into one big turtle pile in front of where Dad had been watching telenovelas. And about that time Leo had snuck him out of the lair when he was eleven, stealing popsicles from a stand on the street before climbing onto a roof's edge to enjoy their bounty. And when Raph had forcefully snuggled him to sleep when he was five and his favorite stuffed animal, Mr. Croc, got lost in one of the sewer tunnels.

“Very good, keep doing…whatever it is you’re doing,” came Draxum’s voice, lowered to a soft, lilting tone. “Now, think about what it feels like to use your power. Remember the way it flows through you. That you control it and that it does not control you.”

This is where it always went off the rails, in Mikey’s opinion. He takes one more deep breath, mentally psyching himself up in a voice that sounded oddly like Leo, and started sorting through the memories he would prefer not to exist.

The hopelessness his family felt. The echoing boom of the Prison Dimension as it closed on the Technodrome, cutting Leo off while they could do nothing but stand and watch. The wetness of Mikey's cheeks as he sobbed, straining all his muscles with the small, small hope that maybe it wasn’t too late, maybe he could save him and really be the badass mystic warrior that Casey said he grew up to be, and then the burning, stabbing pain of molten lava flowing through his veins–but the portal was opening and he could see Leo, alive, so it didn’t matter that this was the worst pain Mikey had ever felt in his entire life and his skin was falling away—

The blank picture frame explodes to his right, jolting Mikey out of his spiraling thoughts with a yelp. His eyes fly open and he gasps for breath, wiping off the sweat from his forehead with a frown. Since when had he started sweating? Or stopped breathing?

“Well, it is safe to say we have made little progress in today's lesson,” Draxum states, face blank but ears flicked back.

Mikey rolls his eyes. “Thanks for the encouragement, Barry.”

“Of course, that is what I hear teachers are supposed to give their students to help them succeed,” Mikey sighs, looking up to Draxum to see he was entirely serious. Of course.

A thick silence stretched between them as Mikey caught his breath, Draxum silently handing him a plastic water bottle. He felt marginally better after drinking the luke-warm water, but there was still an exhaustion attached to what felt like every bone in his body.

“Michelangelo…” Draxum suddenly says, pursing his lips and looking anywhere else but at said turtle. “I know that these past few months have been hard for the family, especially during the brunt of the blue one’s recovery,” he pauses, glancing at Mikey’s now painfully forced smile and grimacing, “...but I believe my suggestion at our last session would help you–”

“Nope, nuh uh,” Mikey immediately denies, rolling to his feet and snickering when Draxum nearly trips on his robe in his haste to follow suit. “I’m all good, Barry, but thanks for the offer, I’ll be sure to pass it along to the bros, they probably need it more anyway–”

“Michelangelo.” Mikey freezes at the stern voice, glancing nervously at the sheep-man as he crosses his arms and a new steel flashes in his eyes. That look never spelled good things for anyone. “The therapists in the Hidden City are uniquely qualified to help–”

Mikey dryly swallows, slowly backing towards the door. “Y’know, I think I forgot to feed my…frying pans, yeah, they must be super hungry by now so I think I’m just going to go,” he rushes out, swiftly pulling open the door and dashing into the hallway. “Besides, I’m totally fine, I’ve got Dr. Feelings! He has a certifiable PhD in people's emotions! I got it covered! Thanks for trying again with the lesson, Barry, same time next week? Yeah? Okay bye!”

Mikey attempts to slam the door to seal his escape, but it’s blocked by Draxum’s hoofed leg. He huffs, and as Mikey tries to make a run for the window in the hallway he’s snatched back by his weapons strap across his back, holding his nunchaku as well as a spare kusari fundo. Mikey groans, turning to face the open doorway with the best pout he can muster.

Draxum’s face is unyielding. His fur is getting even redder, and Mikey braces himself to be yelled at in Draxum’s warrior alchemist voice before his expression softens and he’s let go with a deep sigh.

“Please think about it, Michelangelo. This is clearly impeding our progress, and your outbursts of mystic energy are only going to get more extreme until you get the hang of it. Just…be careful.” Mikey beams up at Draxum, rocking on his heels.

“Aw, you really do care! I knew I was your favorite son, c’mon, you can admit it–” Mikey is cut off by the door slamming in his face. He laughs at the muffled cursing from under the doorway and bounces his way to the window. Sliding it open he perches on the fire escape to slide it back shut with his foot.

Making Draxum feel things other than annoyance and exasperation was always a foolproof way to get out of his company. Mikey had practically mastered the tactic by now, using it to his advantage to get out of conversations he was not equipped to handle.

A shiver works through his body as he parkours to the roof of Draxum and April’s apartment building. Mikey has the errant thought to visit April since he’s already here. She would probably make that home-made hot chocolate he loves to drink when fall officially starts. Reluctantly, he decides against it. His brothers were expecting him back soon, and Mikey really doesn’t want Don to send a Donnie Pod crashing through April's wall. He didn’t know how she would explain a giant hole in their apartment to her parents.

Mikey breathes in the fresh air and absorbs the sounds of the city. He very much prefers the surface noises to the staleness of the sewers and the abandoned subway station. Sure, it was home and he would always love being there, but there was something about the ambient sounds of New York City that relaxed him in a way the muffled drips and distant rumblings of subway trains simply couldn’t. And now that the city was fully reconstructed from the failed invasion, everything was slowly sliding back to normal. Well, as normal as a city sitting atop a Yokai and mutant metropolis could get.

His phone blaring out Raph’s ringtone (Dancing Queen by ABBA) knocks him out of his thoughts. Mikey rolls his eyes, pulling out his phone to be greeted by Raph's smooshed face in his profile picture.

“Hey Raph, just got out of Draxum’s place, I’ll be home soon. Do you need anything? That’s the only reason you would call, not ‘cause you felt some paranoid big brother instinct, right?”

A nervous chuckle answers his question before Raph even starts talking. “Whhhaaaaaattt? Of course not, little–I mean big man! Nothin’ like that, I swear! Just, ah, wondering exactly when you’d be home so Raph could, um, start makin’ the popcorn! Yeah, for movie night, y’know? Don’t want any stale popcorn for my youngest bro!”

Mikey shakes his head, both annoyed and amused by Raph’s lies. You’d think that he’d have gotten better at it, especially with how much Leo’s been trying to teach him, but his biggest brother still can’t lie for shit.

“You still don’t trust me to be out on my own, huh? I’m fifteen now, Raph, not even close to being a baby! I can handle myself just as well as you guys can, you know that,” Mikey snips, wincing when it comes out harsher than he intends. That had been happening a bit too much lately, and his family chalked it up to a late forming teenage phase, but Mikey still tried to keep it in check, whatever it actually was. He was not a moody teen, thank you very much. “Sorry, bro. Didn’t mean to say it like that. No matter how true it is,” he finishes under his breath, but knows Raph still caught it.

“It’s alright, Mike,” Raph says, his voice softer now. “You’re right, I know I worry too much, but…it’s been too quiet lately, y’know? I can’t help but feel like somethin’ bad' is cooking. And when that happens I would really like to have all my little brothers accounted for so none of you bozos go and do somethin’ stupid again.”

Mikey sighs, swinging his legs gently against the bricks. “If I promise to never do anything stupid again will that make you feel better?”

“Absolutely not, ‘cause it would be a straight up lie.”

“How dare you slander me like this!” Mikey gasps, giggling when he hears Raph’s amused huff over the speaker. “Although I can’t really blame you, that sounds like something me and my razz-ma-tazz would do.”

“Yeah, I know,” Raph grumbles. Mikey hears something explode over the speaker, followed by the muffled shouts of Donnie. Raph sighs, and he can practically see the way his big bro is rubbing the bridge of his snout.

“What’d Leo break this time?” he asks, idly counting how many red cars pass by below him. He’s at seven before Raph answers him with a huff.

“No clue, but Don is not happy ‘bout it. Also, you never answered my question–you know when you’re going to be home? I could use some Dr. Delicate Touch to calm those two down.”

Mikey laughs at the muffled arguing growing louder and a clear hiss comes through the speaker. Yep, Leo definitely broke some big project of Don’s. “I should be home in about 15 minutes, think you can hold them off from maiming each other for that long?”

“I guess I’ll have to, see ‘ya then, Angelo. And you will be telling me how the lesson with Draxum went this time, no more distracting Raph to get out of it.” Another crash and Leo’s colorful swearing and Mikey is swiftly hung up on with a mumbled, “Maybe if I mash their heads together hard enough that’ll knock some sense into–”

The dial tone sounds and Mikey’s face scrunches in despair. He had been successful in redirecting Raph and Dad’s questions about the failing lessons so far, but Raph sounded serious this time. It was going to take all of the charm to get them off his back when he got to the lair.

Besides, there was nothing to talk about in the first place. His mysticism was doing slightly better (as long as he didn’t think about it) and, unsurprisingly, no new progress had been made.

Already formulating a plan of action for when he’s inevitably cornered at home, Mikey stands and stretches out his shell. Who knew sitting ram-rod straight for almost two hours just thinking would hurt his muscles as much as regular training? And whatever had happened during that last attempt had made him unfairly exhausted for having been sat on the floor for that long.

With one final shake of his limbs Mikey takes off across the rooftops with a loud whoop. Summoning his chains he wraps them around various anchors hanging off of the buildings, swinging his way through the streets. All of the Spider-Man movies made it look easy, but it had taken almost an entire year for Mikey to perfect this technique enough to avoid slamming into buildings and lamp posts. Donnie had an entire new folder full of blackmail material from that year of face planting into bricks on the regular.

Nothing could beat the feeling, though. Leo had his portals, Raph cleared most buildings in a single leap, and Donnie could use his battle shell to fly everywhere, but this was all Mikey. The wind whipping past, the ground rushing so fast beneath him it looked like a blur, and all of the flips and acrobatics he could ever want to perform.

Mikey was a bit surprised he had never seen an upload of ‘Giant Flying Turtle Real?’ on Youtube.

After almost a full ten minutes of swinging and flipping through the air, Mikey finally came into view of the abandoned fire station they used as a waypoint to get home. It took a while to get used to traveling mainly above ground to their lair instead of jumping into a random manhole and going from there, but by now it was second nature to look for the chipped red building.

Mikey swings around the corner, coming to a brief stop atop said abandoned fire station so he can walk the rest of the way. He dissipates his ninpō and struts across the roof, about to jump down when whispered, muffled voices filter up from the alley beside him.

He chews his bottom lip, looking between the voices and the direction of home. Raph could handle the twins for a bit longer, right? This would just be a quick pit stop to make sure nothing evil was happening, then he could continue on his way to restore peace within the lair. And, like he keeps telling Raph, he isn’t a baby. He’s fifteen, and he helped stop the end of the world! Twice! He can handle some thugs by himself no problem.

Decision made, he creeps closer to the roof's edge, crouching down to peer over the side into the shadily lit alley. From his angle, Mikey can only make out two figures who seem to be arguing about something, one small and one as big as Raph.

“You spent rent on 57 hot dogs!? Are you completely insane!?” the smaller figure shouts in a raspy voice, bringing up their hands as if to throttle the other. Mikey’s eyes go wide, recognizing the terrible voice of the Foot Lieutenant in an instant. That must mean the other figure was the Foot Brute.

Cass had assured everyone that both of them had been killed when the K-words had invaded, though. And, after reluctantly being shown pictures by an overenthusiastic Cass, Mikey had to agree. There was no walking away from that kind of damage.

He had seen the extent that the Foot Clan had been infected by the K-words. They should be very much in the ground, or at the very least be killing machines locked in a lab somewhere by the government. How were they here and looking relatively unharmed?

Whatever the case, Mikey knows they can’t be up to anything good. Maybe Raph was right when he said something bad has been cooking during these quiet months of recovery.

“How would I have known!? I was hungry, and they were right there!”

Or maybe their brains were affected even more by their infection than Mikey thought, if this was what they were arguing about.

“I can’t believe–ugh! Whatever, just move the crates inside. We should have enough to make rent after the Purple Dragons pay us for this…grunt work,” Foot Lieutenant sighs, looking around at the scattered wooden crates that Mikey only now noticed.

Well, that seals the deal in Mikey's mind. If the Foot Clan is working for or with the Purple Dragons, then something big must be going down. Or, the other half of his mind supplies, these two might simply be desperate to keep their apartment. Either way, Mikey isn’t going to miss an opportunity to kick Foot Clan ass.

Sending a mental plea to Raph that he keeps Donnie occupied enough to not deploy a Donnie Pod, Mikey summons his ninpō and conjures a chain that wraps around the Brute and Lieutenant. They crash together with grunts of pain.

“What the–”

“COWABUNGA!” Mikey shouts as he dives off the roof, swinging the two into the side of the building to make things a little more interesting. They gasp and regain their bearings enough to scowl at him as he gracefully rolls to a stop with a flourishing bow.

“Oh great, it’s the little one,” the Lieutenant says, struggling to break free from his temporary prison. Mikey glares and cocks his hip, swinging the end of the glowing chain through the air.

“Oi, I’m not that small! Why does everyone always say that,” he pouts, slamming the two into the opposite side of the alley, leaving a dent. Mikey smiles in satisfaction at their pained grunts as they try to catch their breath.

“You are tiny compared to the other turtles, especially the red one,” Foot Brute wheezes. Mikey’s frustration grows and he barely resists throwing them around again. He needs to focus and find out what they were doing working with the Purple Dragons, and maybe finally prove that he can handle himself.

He still doesn’t appreciate the comments about his height, though. Mikey had hope that he would reach at least Donnie’s height one day. When that day was would be anyone's guess.

“My totally appropriate height aside, I can’t help but be amazed that you two are still standing, let alone out and about, back to doing your evil thang.” Mikey says. “Wanna tell me what that’s all about? And what do the Purple Dragons have to do with it?”

“As if, Turtle,” the Lieutenant spits, increasing his struggles along with the Brute. Mikey knows it’s worthless. His chains are hard for even Shredder to break, but it was still amusing to watch the two struggle.

Maybe Donnie was on to something when he said Mikey had a sadistic streak as large as his own.

Mikey shrugs, absentmindedly tightening the chain around the two so every breath came out a wheeze. “Suit yourself, I’ll just have to take a lookie at what this stuff is and bring it back home, then. I’m sure Don will appreciate getting some new tech to play with, and I know the Purple Dragons will understand when you explain–”

“No! Our rent money!” Foot Brute cries, shaking his head. “Fine! It’s for some new machine meant to capture Othello von Ryan!”

“You idiot, why would you say that! Now we won’t be paid at all!” Foot Lieutenant shrieks, glaring daggers at his companion and attempting to hit him. The most he’s able to do is bite down on Brute's forearm with his sharp teeth, making Foot Brute yelp in pain.

Well, that wasn’t good. They had all assumed the Purple Dragons had gotten over their preoccupation with Don, but obviously their targeted hatred still very much existed. Mikey mentally patted himself on the back for interfering with the plans, and made a note to rub it in Donnie's face when he got back to the lair.

“Thank you for your cooperation, gentlemen,” Mikey announces, dropping the end of the chain and conjuring another that he promptly smashes through one of the crates, screeching metal echoing through the alley. “Now if you’ll kindly excuse me, I have some smashing to do!”

Mikey proceeds to smash all of the crates with his chains, sometimes switching it up and throwing them in the air only to jump up and kick them into the ground to watch the wood explode. The chained duo let out a wonderful collection of curses and threats as a backdrop to his gleeful destruction, some of which Mikey stowed away in his mental folder to use against his brothers in the future. When all of the crates had been appropriately destroyed and all that was left was wood chips and some sparking metal, Mikey turns triumphantly to meet two scowls.

“There, all done! Was that really so hard? And, I mean, there are plenty of job openings for pizza delivery if you guys still need rent money. There’s nothing wrong with having ordinary jobs and hanging up the apron of evil for good!” Mikey brushes off his hands and conjures a pair of nunchaku, flipping them around in little tricks as he saunters up to the fuming Foot Lieutenant.

“We had hoped that you all had died fighting the Kraang. I suppose you will continue interfering with our plans, instead,” the Lieutenant grumbles, glaring daggers at Mikey.

Mikey freezes, cocky smirk wavering and nun-chucks dissipating as an icy cold pit starts to form in his chest. He takes a deep breath, trying to relax his posture when the Foot Lieutenant speaks again, smug now seeing Mikey so obviously falter.

Stupid. They were just words, and he was the one who was completely fine after the invasion. He had to be fine, he was always fine, ask anyone in his family about him, they would always say he’s the happy-go-lucky one.

“Or maybe one of you did perish? I assume it was the large red one that the Kraang also infected, he seems the most likely to have sacrificed himself for you lot,” he continues, smirk growing as Mikey’s hands start to shake.

“Shut up,” Mikey grinds out between clenched teeth. His shoulders hunch and he can feel his breathing start to pick up, becoming shallow as his shaking hands ball into fists.

But that shouldn’t be happening, because he was fine. Not affected at all.

“Or maybe it was the purple one?” Foot Brute interjects, “He seems to be the most squishy, the easiest for the Kraang to kill.”

“Shut up.”

“Ah, it must have been the blue one, then. I wouldn’t have pegged him as the sacrificial type, but you all seem to be stuck on the idea of being heroes, even against beasts such as the Kraang.”

“I SAID SHUT UP!” Mikey screams, slamming his hands to his head and screwing his eyes shut to block out their words. He knows that they are trying to make him slip so they can escape, but he can’t help how his ninpō flickers at every mention of the K-words.

His breathing is too fast. He’s fully hyperventilating, now. All he wants to do is retreat inside his shell, block out all the noise and ignore all of the memories. But he can’t do that, because he came out of the invasion just fine.

Mikey feels his breath hitch as behind his eyes he sees Leo fall out of Raph’s Pod, no sign of Raph anywhere. He distantly acknowledges his own fingernails digging into his skull as the phantom weight of Donnie leaps on top of him, then the crack of his battle shell. His knees collapse underneath him as Raph’s infected arm wraps a tentacle around Leo’s neck, ready and prepared to strike the killing blow while Mikey is stuck in the thick black tendrils of slime. And his body is becoming uncomfortably warm, a piercing light filtering through his eyelids as he hears the sound of the Technodrome splitting in half. As he realizes his brother was going to die, and he can’t do anything to stop it.

He doesn’t want to think about it. He doesn’t want to be here anymore, he needs to be somewhere else, somewhere away from the Foot Lieutenant and the Foot Brute, somewhere these memories can’t hurt him, where the memories aren’t actually real–

Mikey’s thoughts abruptly cut off with a sharp, lightning-like snap. For a moment he’s weightless, enveloped in warm, pure light before crashing hard onto gritty pavement.

==========

The Foot Lieutenant and Foot Brute blink the bright spots from their eyes as their chain prison abruptly vanishes. They glance around, trying to locate the small, previously glowing turtle, but there is no trace of him.

“Is he…dead?” Foot Brute asks, scratching his head.

“I am not sure,” the Lieutenant replies, taking one last look around before bolting the opposite way down the alley, “If he is, I’m getting the hell out of dodge before those other turtles find out we were involved.”

Foot Brute pales and takes off after the Lieutenant.

“Hey, wait for me!”

Chapter Text

Mikey groans, curling into himself. The urge to retreat inside his shell is overwhelming. He doesn’t know exactly what happened, but all of his limbs feel like lead bars and his brain pulses with sharp, needle-like jabs. Any thought that tries to form is reduced to nothing but mush. Mikey lets out an involuntary whine, trying to piece together what was going on.

He was outside, right?. Because if he was in the lair then one of his brothers would have surely found him by now. But what was he doing outside in the first place? And why did his body feel so tingly?

With another groan Mikey flicks his eyes open. He sends a small prayer to pizza supreme that it was night wherever he was, otherwise he might have started bawling right then and there. Everything is blurry, but he can see faint glowing dots in the distance. Another stab of throbbing pain has Mikey’s eyes snapping shut. He winces and drags his hands to his head to try and massage away some of the hurt.

What Mikey wouldn’t do for a pair of Don’s sensory deprivation goggles right now.

The small glimpse of the world he managed to get doesn't bring up any more clues to how he got here. Mikey takes multiple deep breaths, preparing himself to open his eyes again when an uncomfortably familiar burning is shoved to the front of his mind.

Gasping, his eyes fling open, other pains momentarily forgotten as he cradles his arms closer to his chest. Mikey’s breathing stutters as the scars start glowing, slowly creeping their way further up his forearms until they abruptly end their journey just above his elbows. He stares, unwilling tears pooling in the corner of his eyes. The glow pulses once, twice, and then the scars fade back to pale green.

As if triggered by the impromptu light show, his memories of the night flood back. The lesson with Draxum, escaping the apartment, the call with Raph, and finally the Foot Clan. Mikey’s thoughts stutter briefly at the reminder of the Foot Lieutenant and the Foot Brute, but he hurriedly shakes it off.

Did the Foot Clan get the drop on him while he was dealing with his brain junk? Was he currently a hostage, or in the process of being taken to some sort of secondary location? Because if Mikey knew anything about kidnapping from April’s true crime podcasts, being taken to a secondary location was really bad.

Pushing past the lead in his limbs and the pulsing in his head, Mikey rolls onto his plastron and dizzily pushes himself to his knees. Mentally, Mikey prepares himself for a possible fight if he really is getting kidnapped. But, as he looks around through a wince, Mikey can see that he’s clearly alone. And, oddly enough, on a random rooftop.

Hadn’t he just been with the Foot Clan? Unless he managed to somehow swing himself up during his blackout, Mikey can’t think of how he ended up here. Maybe his brothers came to find him after he wasn’t home in the promised 15 minutes, and they were playing a very poorly timed practical joke on him.

Mikey knows that doesn’t really make sense either, though. None of them would have left him alone when he was obviously not feeling the razz-ma-tazz.

Steadying himself Mikey slowly pushes to his feet, immediately almost face planting when his knees tremble. He pants and brings his hands to his head again, trying to push away the pain and focus. Looking around once more, Mikey feels a small stab of panic when he doesn't immediately recognize the buildings around him.

If he’s still in New York it isn’t any part that he had been to before. All of the buildings look gray and lifeless, with barely any graffiti or people in sight. A heavy smog settles over this ‘Not New York’ (quickly dubbed NNY in his head, he was not saying ‘Not New York’ every time he thought about this place), and while it smells similar to the dirty air of home, there’s something off about it. Everything also feels inexplicably heavier, like gravity had decided to start working overtime.

Panic growing he stumbles to the edge of the roof, leaning to support his weight. Between the throbbing in his eyes Mikey glances down and doesn’t see any cars parked on the side of the road, either. And in what looked to be a residential area? Something was definitely wrong in NNY.

Finally the pain in his head starts to go from ‘oh ancestors this migraine is going to be the death of me, prepare my casket’ to ‘I think I had too much pizza and juice boxes yesterday’. Sighing in relief Mikey takes a moment to orient himself.

With his mind at least somewhat his again, Mikey remembers the phone in his shell.

“Oh boy, glad Leo wasn’t here to point that out,” he mumbles, hastily fishing around in the top of his shell. With a triumphant grin he whips it out, thanks his past self for charging it before leaving for Draxum’s, and immediately clicks on Donnie’s contact. His genius brother always picked up when Mikey called, no matter how angry or distracted he might be by a project.

Clicking on the call button Mikey brings the phone to his ear only to be met with ‘the number you dialed does not exist’. He pulls it away, frowning at the screen in confusion. Double checking that he’s on the right contact, he dials again, and then three more times, only to get the same result. Mikey tries calling Raph, Leo, Dad, April, Draxum, and both Casey’s, multiple times each, and gets the same response from the robot lady every time.

With his phone obviously broken, Mikey shoves it back into his shell and presses the appropriately named panic button strapped onto his plastron, but all it does is blink once before fizzling out. All seventeen times he presses it, too.

With a growing sense of unease Mikey breathes deeply to try to reach for his brothers through his ninpō. All of them are able to connect through their mysticism if they try hard enough, but Mikey has always had a certain knack for it, even before the invasion. He was told not to do it much anymore as they all claim it feels uncomfortable (like he’s scratching their organs), but sometimes it’s comforting to feel their energies near him when he’s getting lost in his thoughts.

When he reaches this time, though, they are nowhere close to him.

They are still there, which is the only reason Mikey doesn’t completely freak out. All of them are frighteningly faint. It’s as if he’s looking through a long, winding tunnel and their lights are soft pinpricks on the other side. Even his own seems oddly dim, like NNY has molded his ninpō into a wet rice ball inside his chest.

The feeling is a little too similar to what the K-words had done during the invasion. Mikey knows it’s not the same, since he can still distinctly feel everyone, but the uneasiness continues to grow.

This was getting a little too much for him. Waking up in a strange place is just more of the norm at this point, but being completely cut off from his family with his mystic powers on the fritz?

Mikey feels himself about to go down a deeper spiral when the static laugh track from a TV below snags his attention. Head cocked to the side, Mikey crawls over the roof's edge to find a fire escape that he silently jumps onto, stalking closer to the open window.

Surely he can get some information from the TV about where he’s ended up. And then he can make his way back home to his relieved brothers and tell them what he found out about the Purple Dragons and they’ll all celebrate Mikey’s genius tactics.

He would be picking the movie the next three times on family nights, that’s for sure.

He quickly finds the open window and settles down on the platform directly above it. Mikey hears another laugh track play, as well as quiet chuckles from a lady the apartment must belong to, before whatever boring sitcom that had been playing ends. The woman sighs and the sudden clattering of pots and pans nearly drowns out the sounds of the TV just as it starts to play a stereotypical news introduction.

Mikey plasters himself to the grated metal below him, pressing his tympanum flush against it. Sure enough, two newscasters introduce themselves before jumping into NNY news.

“In news that took the internet by storm, the famed Mayan calendar, which was said to predict the end of the world this year, has been confirmed to be a fraud. The so-called prophesied date has now passed without a single world-ending disaster in sight. Hopefully internet conspiracy theorists can now rest easy knowing that the end of the world was indeed not on May 18, 2012,” the news anchor reported. He had to admit, she was nailing the news voice to a T.

Mikey remembered that whole fiasco, mostly because Leo insisted that all of them had to write a will. He had been seven at the time and didn’t fully understand what Leo had been talking about or why Raph had gathered them up that night to silently cry himself to sleep in a big turtle pile. He did know Dad had thought it was hilarious the next morning.

The Mayan calendar had definitely ended in the winter, though, not in May. Wherever this newscaster was getting their information from was completely out of the loop. And why did they say it was predicted to end the world this year? 2012 was eight years ago–

The thought crosses Mikey's mind in a flash, and he nearly chokes on his own spit when he connects the dots.

Somehow, Mikey had sent himself back through time. That would explain why everything in NNY felt off.

The only problem is that Mikey is still very obviously alive. Casey had to spill the beans eventually that Master Michelangelo had killed himself to open that first time portal. After that bombshell, all of them realized that had it not been for Raph and Donnie sharing Mikey’s power during the invasion, he would be nothing but specks of dust.

So how had he sent himself back in time with only a new smattering of scars to show for it? Based on past experience, Mikey should definitely be dead.

But no, now he’s stuck in the past, and he has no clue on what to do next.

Having got the information he needed, Mikey jumps back up to the roof and starts pacing, picking at the sticker on his plastron. He bites his lip, gently knocking his head with his other hand to get the brain juice flowing.

What he wouldn’t give to have one of his brothers with him right now.

Mikey stops his pacing, eyes wide. Technically, he could go get his brothers. And, in tandem, also get his Dad. His brothers might be kids right now, but Donnie’s always been a genius. Dad’s back problems were significantly better when they were kids, too. He would be perfectly able to help once Mikey explained that he was his son from the future and he didn’t know how to get home.

As he thinks through the hypotheticals, though, he realizes that idea might not work as well as he hopes. Mikey and his brothers were still kids. They didn’t have to worry about Yokai, villains, the Foot Clan, Big Mama, or any kind of mysticism. Mikey really doesn’t want to be the one to burst their bubble on how dangerous their lives can be sometimes. And while he knew that Dad had tried his best to raise them through his struggles and trauma, this was also the age he had started to become distant. Dad might not even have the energy to help Mikey alongside making sure his sons didn’t starve.

Plus, there’s a tiny Donnie voice in his head warning him about bifocal timelines (at least, that's what he thinks Donnie called them). Mikey really wishes he had been able to pay more attention to Donnie’s many rants about it while his brothers were still recovering.

So, enlisting the past versions of his family was out of the question. Or, at the very least, left as a last resort, which left only one other option. Sneak into Draxum’s lab in the Hidden City and see what kind of information he had on time portals.

It wasn’t the best plan, but it was the only one Mikey knows he can manage. And if he can get to the Hidden City, he can blend in with the crowd and lay low while he figures out how to get home.

Plan set, Mikey holds out his hand to summon his chains and swing to Run of the Mill, the only Hidden City entrance he knows exists in 2012. When the chains appear, though, they flicker in and out of sight, and feel heavier than normal. Frowning, he lifts it off the ground and whips it through the air. It’s like the air has turned to sludge. His scars faintly start to glow alongside the regular light of his ninpō, but the molten warmth that usually flows through the scars feels more like hand warmers against his skin.

Opening that time portal must have really messed with his ninpō.

Sighing, Mikey dissipates the chain, immediately feeling a bone deep exhaustion. He hasn’t felt like this since the first Shredder incident. His eyelids start closing on their own, his body sagging under an invisible weight.

As if more things needed to go wrong. Mikey groans, trudging his way to the edge of the roof to look for road signs to guide his way to Señor Huesos. He spots one right at the corner, and a smile lights up his face at the familiar name. Shaking off as much exhaustion as he can Mikey starts a light jog and jumps, landing with a roll on the other roof.

Mikey might have to ask Hueso if he can take a nap in one of his booths, because he doesn’t know how much energy he’ll have left when he gets there.

He makes a steady pace, turning here and there to cross to a different street without leaving the safety of the rooftops. Mikey wants to make better time, but he knows his body can’t handle going much faster. It annoys him to no end how his stamina is failing him at a time like this, but right now he just has to roll with the punches and hope his plan works.

Finally, after what seemed to have been hours of running under the light of the oddly large moon, Mikey arrives at the right place. After leaning on his ninpō for two years, getting around the city only by rooftops is more tiring than he remembers it being.

Mikey smiles and drops down into the alley with a sigh of relief, briefly stretching out his legs. It would be just his luck to get a cramp. But he supposes now that he can get into the Hidden City and relax for a little bit, things will be looking up. Mikey pivots on his heel, reaching out towards the graffiti wall that hides the entrance to Run of the Mill–

His hand rests against a blank wall, completely devoid of graffiti. For a moment his brain shuts off, fingers poking against the wall as if it'll change if he tries hard enough. Mikey lets out a rough shout and kicks the bricks, yelping at his stubbed toe and glaring daggers at the blank wall. He rubs his foot and fights back frustrated tears.

Why wasn’t it here? Of all the things that he knows to be different in 2012, Run of the Mill isn't one of them. Mikey knowsHueso hasn’t changed spots, so where in the pizza supreme was the gateway?! He groans, rubbing away the lingering wetness of his eyes and flopping cross legged on the ground.

What was going on? Something about this smelled fishy, and it had nothing to do with the Japanese restaurant that sat across the street. Maybe he heard the newscaster wrong and it wasn’t actually 2012. That’s the only thing that made sense, because all logic pointed to Run of the Mill being owned and operated right out of this wall. The same wall that was blank and had no more mystic energy than the trash behind him.

Mikey doesn’t know how long he sits, stewing in his own confusion and twisting thoughts, when he hears voices coming from across the street. He perks up slightly, rolling into a crouch and moving towards the mouth of the alley to hide behind a trash can. He has yet to get a look at anyone who lives in NNY, but if there’s one thing Mikey knows it’s fashion. Hopefully he can at least tell which decade he’s in by the clothes these people are wearing.

The voices grow louder. They must be roughly his age, too, based on the small cracks in their tone. Mikey cautiously pokes his head around the corner of the alley to try and sneak a peek at them, frowning when he doesn’t see anyone coming down the street. Pulling back, he nearly misses four dark figures dropping down from a roof into the alley across from him. His eyes latch onto the shadows, trying to pick out any distinct patterns on their clothes.

And then they step onto the street and his brain short-circuits.

Mikey has to shove his hand into his mouth to keep from making a noise as his wide eyes frantically scan the coincidently color-coded mutant turtles with even more coincidental weapons strapped to their backs. He watches, transfixed, as they enter the Japanese restaurant. They don’t even get the chance to order before the blue banded one is handed five bags stuffed to the brim with take-out containers. They all enthusiastically wave and give their thanks to the man wearing sunglasses behind the counter (who the heck wears sunglasses indoors?). With a burst of laughter the group saunters out of the shop to start making their way back to the darkness of the alley.

“Murakami-san is definitely my favorite human of. All. Time,” the orange banded turtle exclaims, only to get a small wack to the head from the tall, purple banded turtle.

“Why isn’t April your favorite? We’ve known her for longer, and she’s basically perfect. Even if she hates us now for what we’ve done,” the purple one growls. Mikey’s eyes widen even further and his breath gets stuck in his throat.

“Yeah, and? Doesn’t change my opinion, Donnie.” This time he’s whacked and dragged into a headlock by the red one, in which he squeals in protest.

“Do you have any common sense in that empty head of yours, pizza brain?”

“Raph, it’s Mikey. Of course he doesn’t,” the blue banded one responds before the orange one can even protest the insult. Mikey lets out a slow exhale of awe.

“C’mon, Leo, you can’t say it isn’t true. Murakami-san rocks!” The red-banded one finally lets the smaller one go with a small shove, sending him into the shell of the blue one leading them further into the shadows.

“I could say it, but I try not to lie to people’s faces,” the blue one responds. Before anything more is said they disappear from Mikey’s sight across the street.

So, Mikey now knows two negative things and a positive thing. On the positive note, he seems to be strong enough to not only open portals through time and space in his own world, but to open portals to dimensions he didn’t even know existed. Negatively, he owes Donnie his entire allowance for a year. And even worse, Mikey isn’t stranded in the past, but rather in a completely different dimension.

Why does his life have to be so chaotic? He’s only 15 and is already thinking about hanging up the nunchaku to live on a farm when he gets out of this mess.

This new revelation makes things significantly harder. If Mikey had been in the past, at least he had some options on trying to figure out how to get home. Now he’s back at square one.

It crosses his mind to try to catch up with the alternate versions of himself and his brothers, but the Mind Donnie warns against it. Who knows what he could screw up if he asks for their help. And, if Mikey’s memory serves, there is the slight chance that getting too close to his other self might make this entire universe implode.

He, once again, hadn’t been listening too closely when Donnie was raving maniacally about Pizzasaurus and alternate dimensions. But better to be safe than sorry, in Mikey’s opinion.

But that, unfortunately, leaves little to work with. Mikey sighs, sliding down the alley wall and tucking his knees into his chest. Hugging himself, his mind races with the new information.

Mikey's best option is to try to send himself back through his mystic powers. But without Draxum or his family to stabilize him there’s a very good chance he wouldn’t make it to the other side of that attempt. He still isn’t completely sure how he managed to get here, either, other than it was his fault and it depleted his mystic stores to almost nothing.

Mikey’s second best option, which could take who knows how long, is to wait for his brothers to find him and bring him home. The only drawback is they don’t know what direction to start looking, and would assume he had been kidnapped. Getting thrown into a new dimension would be near the end of their list of possible reasons for Mikey’s disappearance.

And the option he’ll try to avoid for Mind Donnie’s sake is going to the other turtles for help. Mikey’s sure they’re nice, and they seem like fun, but the less people he drags into his mess the better. Besides, he doesn’t want to unintentionally bring about the end of the world.

At least Mikey knows it wasn’t some kind of machine that landed him here. If it was then he might have had to kidnap the other Donnie and force him to help him rebuild it. And, while that would be a fun way to pass the time, Mikey doesn’t think the other brothers would appreciate the turtle-napping, no matter how good of a cause.

Portalling himself back home was the most proactive option, then. On a whim Mikey tries to center himself like Draxum taught him. Deep breaths, calm thoughts, and push away the trauma (that he definitely had handled) from the Shredder and the K-words–

His arms spasm, and Mikey’s eyes fly open with a gasp. Hands and fingers shaking, warm golden light flickers through the scars on his hands but fails to appear further up his arms. Biting his lip Mikey shoves his hands underneath his arms to put as much pressure on them as possible. He could really use those compression bands Donnie made right about now, but no, Mikey had stupidly thought that since it was a Good Hands Day™ when he woke up his regular black wrapping would be fine.

To be fair to past Mikey, he didn’t think his day would end with being flung into another dimension, but the current Mikey’s point still stands that it was stupid to leave the lair without them.

When the spasms had passed and there was only a small tremor left in his fingers, Mikey releases his hands and drapes them over his knees. That little experiment had decidedly not worked. He’s not sure if it was because he’s incapable of making another portal period, if it was this dimension dampening his mystic and ninpō, or if his powers were simply too weak after bringing him here to try and make a portal home so soon.

Whatever the case was, Mikey was going to be stuck here for a while. Exhaustion tugs at him, and he makes the executive decision to try to find some shelter that was more than a dingy trash can. He can think about all of this later, preferably after a nap.

Shaking out his stiff limbs Mikey rises from the ground and steps towards a nearby ladder to get to the roof again, but stops as heavy footsteps enter the alley.

Crouching down once more, he slinks into the shadows and moves forward to investigate. Because while being in a completely new dimension all alone sucked, there was also a curiosity burning through his body to find out what was different here. Raph always said it was best to get as much information as you could about your environment if you ever got lost. Mikey only counted two pairs of footsteps, too, so there was a good chance that he could wiggle himself out of the situation if it turned ugly.

As he got closer he could see a faint pink and blue glow. The footsteps get louder, and Mikey only has a brief moment to think about the metallic sound they made against the pavement before two robots turn the corner.

Mikey freezes, hands automatically reaching to brandish a nunchaku in one hand and his kusari-fundo in the other. His eyes flit back and forth between the blank humanoid faces and the pink, squishy, disturbingly familiar aliens shoved into the robot's stomachs. Mikey’s grip tightens on his weapons, his body unconsciously shifting to be ready to pounce.

When the bots in front of him start talking about some kind of failed shipment, Mikey's vision turns red.

He was suddenly leaping out of his hiding place and towards the, now confirmed, K-words. He was on top of the first bot and bashing its metal head into the concrete before he fully realized he had moved. The other one lets out a startled beep and raises some sort of gun that Mikey latches onto with his kusari-fundo, effortlessly slamming it into the wall where it shatters on impact.

The rest of the fight is a blur of twisted metal, high pitched screeches, and blood rushing through his ears.

Mikey slowly comes back to himself, panting heavily, when the squishy alien underneath his hands stops twitching. Grimacing, he looks around with wide eyes at the two robots that were now no more than scrap metal. The first K-word is a thick pile of mush streaked against the wall, and the one underneath him looked more like wet play-dough than a previously living being.

Mikey jumps up with a gag, shaking his hands in the air and flinging bits of K-word all around the alley. He has a small freak-out as he scans the sky for any sign of a Technodrome, but when the sky was still as dark and polluted as when he first woke up, Mikey lets out a small sigh of relief and forces himself to take a deep breath.

“Oh boy, this better not be the start of Savage Mike,” he groans, desperately trying to clean his hands off on the wall. He is left with the faint pink discoloration of his fingernails and fingertips, and despite how much it disturbs him he knows it has to stay until he finds some soap and water.

Looking back at the carnage, Mikey grabs his weapons from where he dropped them in favor of his using his hands and sheathes them back on his strap. Mikey is horrified by the massacre he created, but the feeling is quickly pushed to the side in favor of the exhaustion he can no longer ignore. His body is sagging, mind sluggish, and his ninpō and mystic energy has been wrung out like a wet towel.

Mikey really needs to find somewhere safe to take a nap. Maybe when he wakes up everything would reveal itself to simply be some really bad nightmare, and he can go and laugh it off with Leo and get to lounge on the couch all day.

Mikey doubts it, but he’s the optimistic one in the family, and he can’t afford to lose that attitude now.

Chapter Text

2012

Yesterday was easily one of the worst days of Donatello’s life. First, they find out that the Kraang are still crawling around, no doubt rebuilding their armies for another invasion. Secondly, in their attack on the Kraang ship not a single one of his dumb brothers had managed to snag a mutagen canister before they were being scattered across New York. And then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, Mr. O’Neil had been mutated into a bat. Now April hates his guts all because Michelangelo had to run his mouth.

If Donatello had the means to get away with it, Michelangelo would be nothing but an empty shell.

But, alas, fratricide is frowned upon and Michelangelo does prove to be useful every once in a while. Such as when they need something to use as bait for whichever monster or villain they are fighting that week. It’s the one job his brother always succeeds in.

Donatello cries out in frustration, banging the tracking device in his hand against his palm. It was clearly not his best work, but it was certainly a start in their search for the missing mutagen canisters. And the faster they found the missing mutagen the faster he could begin working on an antidote for Mr. O’Neil. Which, in turn, would be his one way ticket to April’s love and forgiveness. Donatello supposed stopping innocent humans and animals from mutating was also a priority, but it definitely wasn’t on the top of his personal list.

“Are we really just waiting around to see if Donnie’s stupid machine works? We could have found at least three of those things by now if we just started looking!” Raphael exclaims in frustration from where he is pacing across the roof's edge. He glares at the device in Donatello’s hand for a moment before resuming the spinning of his sais.

“Have a little faith, Raph. Donnie’s machines always end up working eventually,” Leonardo states. Donatello appreciates the vote of confidence. He only wishes he was as confident in his own creations.

When the radar screen flickers once again Donatello bangs it harder against his palm until the static is fizzled out and a clear image appears. He waits a moment, watching the blank screen of four green dots with rapt attention to see if any blips show up. When none do, he walks around the perimeter of the roof, stepping on Michelangelo’s shell where he’s lying on the roof, messing with his T-phone. The take-out containers from Murakami’s are scattered around him in small piles. Michelangelo mutters a small protest but Donatello keeps walking, studiously ignoring his brother.

“Ugh! The stupid calibration must be off, I can’t get a good read on any kind of mutagen anywhere in the vicinity. Other than the stuff in our own bodies, of course,” Donatello states, stopping his walk near where Leo is ‘heroically’ gazing out over the city.

“See? Donnie’s machine is busted. Now let’s go with my plan and start searching the old fashioned way,” Raphael argues, hopping off the roof ledge to wrench Michelangelo to his feet, stealing his T-phone in the process.

“Hey, not cool dude! I was just about to beat the level,” Michelangelo whines. He makes a grab for his phone but is easily pushed aside. Raphael pockets the phone in his own pouch, and Michelangelo pouts but smartly doesn’t make any more phone rescue attempts.

“It’s not busted,” Donatello hisses, fiddling with the antenna and bringing out a small screwdriver from his pack. “I just need to make the variables it’s searching for more fine tuned so it specifically finds pure mutagen and not what’s in us.”

“How long will that take?” Leonardo asks, turning to face him with an arched brow.

Donatello swallows, fiddling with the now sparking device. “Well, it could take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours–”

“A few hours?! We’ve already been up here doing nothing for forever!” Michelangelo exclaims, waving his arms.

“The sun is going to be up soon,” Raphael grouses. “And we haven’t made any progress in finding those canisters. Let’s ditch the machine idea already.”

“Yeah, let’s go! I think I’ve already died of boredom,” Michelangelo whines. Donatello opens his mouth to snap at them (they have no idea what it takes to make something like this from scratch in just one night), but Leonardo speaks before he gets the chance.

“Sorry, Donnie, I think you’re out voted on this one. We need to start looking before someone else gets mutated. You can fix the tracker when we get home and we’ll try to use it tomorrow night, okay?”

Donatello huffs, glaring down at the device. He knows that it wasn’t a suggestion, but it still stings to be brushed off. Didn’t any of them know how hard he works to give them all their cool gadgets? Of course not all of them worked right away, that’s what testing was for.

“Fine, lead the way then,” Donatello says through gritted teeth. Leonardo looks as though he wants to say something else, but turns away and beckons his brothers closer.

“Alright, I think this is as good a place to start as any. We’ll make our way back to Murakami’s before sun-up and then start from there tomorrow night,” Leonardo states. He goes on to assign different areas each of them are going to specifically look through. Donatello smirks at Michelangelo’s pained groan when he’s assigned to the back alleys and dumpsters.

It serves him right for ruining his chances with April.

With Leonardo’s new orders Donatello pockets the tracking device and follows his brothers as they leap off the roof and begin their search. Donatello had been assigned the rooftops and fire escapes, and he tries not to be too bitter about being assigned the easiest locations. He appreciates his brother looking out for him, but now he feels even more useless than before.

Despite not having his tracking device, they somehow manage to gravitate towards the canisters anyway. Raphael finds the first one on top of a billboard, a smug smile on his face as he carefully straps the intact container to his back. Donatello spots the next one cracked against a fire escape, slowly dripping mutagen into a puddle below. Unfortunately they hadn’t brought the Shellraiser (something that would be remedied tomorrow night) so they couldn’t do much other than mark the location. Michelangelo tried hiding the puddle and broken canister with newspaper, but it quickly dissolved after touching the mutagen.

They had almost reached Murakami’s restaurant when Michelangelo found the third. It was hidden inside of a trash can, buried under two bags filled to the brim with various animal bones. While this one was still mostly intact, a hairline crack that dripped a single line of mutagen ran down the side of the glass.

“Uh, Mikey, why don’t I hold onto that?” Leonardo asks, slowly pulling the canister out of Michelangelo’s hands. He doesn’t protest, too mesmerized by the slow movement of the mutagen sloshing around inside the glass.

Donatello sighs. Walking across the roof of Murakami’s restaurant he scans the area one more time before jumping down and regrouping with his brothers.

Raphael crosses his arms and raises a brow in his direction. “You alright, Donnie? You seem even more down than usual.”

Donatello glares at the ground. “I’ll be fine as soon as I can fix my machine and find all of those mutagen canisters. I’ll be even better once I figure out how to make an antidote for Mr. O’Neil.”

A hand lands on his shoulder and Donatello looks into the kind eyes of his older brother. He gives Donatello a small smile and pat on the shell, his other arm hooked around the cracked canister.

“We’ve all got faith that you’ll figure it out, Donnie. You always do.”

And that was just it. What if this was the one time where Donatello isn’t able to find the solution to the problem? The Kraang were such an advanced race and figuring out the cellular make-up of mutagen was as complicated as mapping a DNA strand. But he was the one his family always went to when something was broken and needed to be fixed. He was the one who came up with all the gadgets his brothers used. If he wasn’t able to fix this problem, then how could his family trust him to fix their technical and scientific problems in the future?

But his brothers always seemed to have faith in him, no matter how much he messed up. Even Raphael, even if he showed it in a particularly violent way. So instead of spilling his guts about the doubts, Donatello shoots Leonardo a small, grateful smile.

“Uh, dudes? I think we might have a problem,” Michelangelo announces. All of them straighten and gather around the youngest, looking across the street. Donatello squints, but he doesn’t see anything that could have set Michelangelo off.

“An empty street?” Raphael grumbles from beside him, sneering down at Michelangelo. He vigorously shakes his head. His little brother's eyes never move away from the alley across the street, face pulled into a serious frown.

The uncharacteristic seriousness from Michelangelo has Donatello pulling his bō from its sheath. Leonardo quickly follows suit with his katanas, and Raphael rolls his eyes but unsheathes his sai as well. They all stay silent, scanning the other side of the street. Donatello still doesn’t see what might have spooked Michelangelo, but he has enough trust in him when he starts acting serious.

“Don’t you guys see that glow down the alley? It looks like Kraang bots,” he announces. Pulling out his nunchaku he sprints across the street and into the alley before Donatello can grab him.

“Mikey, wait!” Leonardo calls after him in a whispered shout. When Michelangelo fails to stop Leonardo darts after the youngest. Donatello shares a concerned look with Raphael before falling into line behind them, preparing for a fight.

Across the street and now darting into the alley, Donatello can indeed see the faint pink glow that always indicates Kraang activity. Tightening his grip on his bō he nearly slams into Michelangelo and Leonardo as they both skid to a stop around a corner. Raphael runs straight into Michelangelo's shell, sending both of them to the ground and revealing the scene that stopped his brothers in their tracks.

He nearly drops his weapon in the face of the massacre.

Two destroyed Kraang bots lie sparking on the ground. Their metal arms have been ripped clean off, and the robotic joints of their legs are broken in multiple places. The base of the bodies have chunks ripped clean out with wire sticking straight though the gelatinous outer layer that made up the robots false skin. One of the robot’s metal heads has been ripped off and is sticking halfway out of a crumpled piece of the brick wall. The other head is concave in the front and completely flat in the back, an obvious sign of deadly blunt force trauma.

“Oh, god, I think I’m going to hurl,” Raphael mumbles as he and Michelangelo scramble to their feet, backing towards their brothers. Donatello follows his line of sight and immediately regrets it.

The mutilated body of a Kraang lies motionless next to one of the robot bodies. Swollen purple bruises cover its entire surface, and one of its tentacles has been torn off and thrown to the ground some feet away. Pink ooze leaks out of its body to stain the ground. One of its gray, glazed eyes peaks out of the blob of muted pink and purple to rest on its destroyed robotic body.

“It gets even worse…” Michelangelo whispers from where he is now clinging to Raphael. For once, Raphael doesn’t seem to mind the clinging and even has one arm folded over his brother's shell to pull him closer. Donatello hears Leonardo’s sharp inhale and looks towards the other wall.

He feels himself get lightheaded at the remains of a Kraang smeared across the wall. It’s barely recognizable at this point. A trail of pink ooze marks the path where the Kraang had been smashed into the wall and then forcibly dragged across it. Its tentacles lay scattered across the ground in front of it while the oozing body sticks to the wall like a wad of bubblegum. The eyes are also a lifeless gray, and Donatello swears he can see the petrified fear the alien must have felt before it was killed.

“This wasn’t us, right?” Michelangelo quietly asks as Leonardo takes a cautious step towards the sparking remains of the robots. He says nothing, but Donatello can see the minute clench of his hands around the hilts of his katanas.

“No way this was us, this is way too brutal, even for me,” Raphael answers instead. He lets go of Michelangelo and unsteadily crouches next to the Kraang on the ground, slowly poking it with his sai as if it could wake up at any moment.

“Who could do this? We don’t know anyone that’s this…murderous, do we?”

“Leatherhead has the ability,” Leonardo answers Donatello softly, still staring down at the remains of the robots. “But unless he somehow escaped Dimension X it can’t be him. I don’t think his episodes would ever go this far, anyway.”

“No way Leatherhead would do this!” Michelangelo exclaims, but the mention of the mutant sprouts another idea in Donatello's mind. His eyes catch on the mutagen strapped to Raphael’s back.

“It’s likely this was caused by a new mutant created by one of the canisters. Whoever or whatever was mutated was likely terrified of what was happening. These Kraang must have run into them and…it didn’t end well, as we can see,” Donatello explains. The implications of that run through his mind a second later, and he sees Leonardo’s eye widen as he comes to the same conclusion.

“We have to find the mutant that did this,” their leader states, turning to face them all with a stoic expression that would not be remiss on the cover of a comic book. “If this is what they can do against advanced alien tech, then just think of what could happen if a human runs into them.”

“Murderous mutant mayhem,” Michelangelo dramatically exclaims, and Donatello can’t help but agree. If this new mutant can take out Kraang bots so completely, then the damage they could deal to an innocent human would be catastrophic. And to make matters worse, it would be their fault for making such a dangerous mutant in the first place.

“I guess that’s our new side mission, then,” Raphael mutters, abandoning the body on the ground to start inspecting the robotic husks. “Find the mutagen, look out for Kraang, and make sure no one else is killed by a vicious mutant on the loose. Sounds easy enough to me.”

Donatello rolls his eyes at the sarcasm. He steps closer to the remains of the Kraang on the wall, the analytic side of his mind taking over now that the shock has worn off. Despite their many battles, he’s never been able to properly study their alien biology. While these Kraang aren’t the best subjects considering they’ve been beaten to death, it is interesting to see that their blood is so watery. He had hypothesized that because of their general gelatinous nature their blood and whatever organs they may have possessed would be much more viscous than any blood found on Earth–

“–and pound them into the ground!” was all he managed to catch of Michelangelo’s exclamation as a nunchaku flung itself into Donatello’s shell.

“Hey, watch it!” he snaps, glaring at the sheepish expression on his little brother's face.

“Sorry, I was showing how we’re going to fight off the new mutant. With a little bit of wakow–” Michelangelo punches the air. “–and a whole lotta wabam–” he flips his nunchaku around while performing a midair kick, aiming a smug smile at Donatello. “–they’ll be completely toast.”

Donatello hums, making sure to make it as unimpressed as possible. While he does agree with his brothers that this new mutant is dangerous, he has something more productive in mind for when (not if) they cross paths with them.

“Don’t you guys think it would be more productive if we approached them peacefully first?” At the incredulous stares, Donatello rushes to explain. “I mean, they obviously don’t like the Kraang. And if it is similar to a Leatherhead situation and they’re being triggered into this kind of rage, we can help them overcome it and have them keep looking for canisters when we’re otherwise occupied. We could always use more ally’s.”

His brothers all stare at him blankly, jaws dropped. Donatello rolls his eyes. “Oh come on! I’m not anywhere close to figuring out an antidote to the mutagen yet, so wouldn’t it be easier to keep tabs on a friendly mutant rather than a hostile one?”

“I appreciate your optimism, big guy, but look at this mess!” Leonardo says, gesturing wildly around the scene with his katanas. “Doesn’t exactly scream ‘friendly’ and ‘sane’ to me.”

“Yeah, I thought Mike was the one who was obsessed with becoming friends with murderous psychopaths, not you,” Raphael interjects, jabbing a thumb at Michelangelo.

“Those were honest mistakes, alright?” Michelangelo groans before turning to Donatello with a long face. “But I don’t think there’s any chance this guy would be willing to talk, dude. Although I do appreciate a good try.”

Donatello sighs. He takes one last look at the massacre surrounding them before giving a slight nod. “Yeah, maybe hoping for another friendly mutant would be asking too much.”

“That’s the spirit, Donnie,” Raphael says, roughly shaking him by the shoulders. “Now, how’s about we head back home? Sun’s going to be coming up soon.”

“Raph’s right, we should get going. We’ve done as much as we can tonight, we’ll come back out tomorrow with the Shellraiser and Donnie’s new machine to find more mutagen,” Leonardo announces before striding to the manhole cover in the street. The brothers follow close, Donatello twisting it back into place behind them like they were never there.

==========

“A new mutant? Are you certain?” Sensei questions after they report the findings of their patrol. He had allowed them to place the recovered mutagen canisters safely in Donatello's lab, but had immediately summoned them to the dojo to find out what they had discovered.

“We’re pretty sure, Sensei. I don’t think an ordinary human would have the strength to do that to the Kraang,” Leonardo confirms from the end of their line in front of Master Splinter. Sensei hums and strokes his beard, deep in thought.

“Yeah, and then Donnie suggested that we have a tea party with the thing. Y’know, right in front of the murder scene.”

“Hey!” Donatello protests Raphael’s interruption, sending him a glare. “It was a perfectly fine idea! We could use more allies now that April doesn’t even want to think about us anymore!”

“Yame,” Sensei orders. They all straighten their posture, and Donatello smacks Raphael with the end of his staff only to receive an unimpressed eyebrow raise from Sensei. “It is honorable that you wish to make this new mutant your ally, Donatello. But until more is known, I must advise you all to proceed with caution. We do not know their true intentions, or whether or not they are even sentient.”

“I completely agree, Sensei,” Donatello replies. Sensei’s ears flatten for a moment before he sighs and puts a comforting hand on his shoulder.

“Do not lose faith in April, Donatello. She will come around. I fear that her life will never truly be normal again, and she will come back to us for help eventually.”

Donatello swallows thickly and nods, averting his gaze. Sensei gently squeezes his shoulder before retreating, folding his hands behind his back.

Sensei releases them after that, stating that he has much to meditate on. Donatello and his brothers give a respectful bow and wander out of the dojo. Michelangelo immediately bolts to his room and Donatello raises a skeptical eyebrow until Raphael growls something about him stealing both their phones and stomps after the youngest.

Leonardo huffs in amusement beside him. Donatello shuffles away, hoping to make a bee-line for his lab so he can get started on fixing the mutagen tracking device and possibly try out some new retro-mutagen sequences now that he has plenty of test samples to work with. Maybe he’ll even be able to give Timothy some self agency back instead of just floating around in a vat with his organs.

Just as he is about to cross the threshold into his lab Donatello is stopped by Leonardo’s hand on his shell. He turns, eyebrow raised and about to snap at the leader, but pops his mouth shut at Leonardo's hard expression.

“Do you really think this new mutant could be reasoned with?” he asks. Donatello's eyebrows raise in surprise and he crosses his arms, dropping his gaze to the floor.

“Honestly? I have no idea,” he replies truthfully. Leonardo gives a small nod, but Donatello can’t help but feel his brother is disappointed in the answer. “Until we see them in person or try to have some sort of conversation, everything’s up in the air. There’s not enough data to come to a solid conclusion.”

“And based on the data you do have?” Leonardo retorts, removing his hand from Donatello's shell and idly playing with the strap across his chest. Donatello sighs, knowing the leader won’t like his answer. He doesn’t like the answer himself.

“Based on the little data we have, if we ever cross paths with them we should take them out with extreme prejudice.”

Leonardo purses his lips. He gives Donatello a curt nod, his serious expression dissolving into something softer.

“Sounds like a plan, then. Make sure to get some sleep before tomorrow night, okay? I’ll see you later.” And with that Leonardo turns and makes his way towards the kitchen. Donatello swiftly enters his lab, the tension in his body melting with the familiar sounds and smells of machines surrounding him.

Stopping at his work table he picks up the intact canister of mutagen and holds it up to the overhead lamp. The green and black ooze flows around the glass like a lava lamp. Donatello thinks that it’s quite ironic that something so beautifully mesmerizing can create beings of such destruction. And, he thinks as he glances over to Timothy’s pod, that it can also bring about so much pain.

But, no matter. Donatello picks up his goggles and marches his way towards the protective gear he keeps in his lab just in case. Tonight he’ll fix the tracker and study the genetic and chemical compounds in the mutagen in the hopes he can make an antidote for those whose lives are being changed because of their stupid mistake.

As he pops open the lid to the canister, Donatello can’t help but wonder if the new, murderous mutant running around would blame them for their pain just as much as he blames himself.

Chapter Text

Mikey doesn't know how Dad had been able to find such a good place for them to grow up. Now that he’s had to go scouring for some kind of shelter in the sewers himself, he realizes just how much muck and ooze is lurking in every single tunnel.

He had finally managed to find a mostly abandoned part of the system that ended in a dead end. The triangular space was small, pure concrete making up the entire room and one large sewer tunnel that acted as an entrance and exit. A ladder led to a small ledge that rimmed the room, the railings slowly rusted away from time. Mikey had seen the lack of sewage water and sludge and promptly collapsed on the platform that sat atop the entrance.

Originally Mikey thought it would be a bad idea to step foot into the sewers period. He knew that since this was a different dimension things wouldn’t be the same, but the one thing that had to be universal was the other turtle's lair being in the sewers.

Yet after an hour of searching on the surface for somewhere safe and covered where he could get some sleep, nothing caught his eye. Sure, there were plenty of abandoned buildings with nooks and crannies to hide in, but most of them would be easy to spot in the daylight. Mikey had even peered inside the windows of said abandoned buildings, hoping there was somewhere inside that he could rest. All that had done was scare the daylights out of the resident homeless population.

So Mikey’s only choice after that had been the sewers. It was more risky, but he couldn’t help a sense of relief washing over him when he found his new little nook to sleep.

Now, as he rubs the gunk from his eyes and stretches his limbs, Mikey knows he made the right choice in shelter. The familiar smell and concrete walls bring a sense of home. Sure, he runs the risk of this universe being torn apart by the seams if the other turtles stumble on him, but in his mind it’s a risk worth taking simply for the familiarity the space brings.

After a couple hours of sleep to clear his head, Mikey has a plan to get back home now, too. Well, most would call it a suggestion of a plan, but it’s more than he had when he fell asleep. And he was finally able to put all of Todd’s wilderness lessons to good use in this new concrete jungle.

First up on Mikey’s plan was finding a semi-permanent shelter. As much as he didn’t like it, he had no idea how long he would be here, and that meant finding a stable place to live in the meantime. Looking around the room he’s found, he mentally checks off that part of the plan. It could use a little TLC, but Mikey's not too worried about it. Hopefully he’ll be able to get home before it becomes too much of an annoyance.

The next part of the plan is finding food and water. The building blocks of life, according to Todd. At just the thought of food his stomach starts rumbling, upset that his last meal was yesterday's lunch. This step was the next priority, Mikey just needed to wait for night to fall again to go scavenging. Pulling his phone from his shell (he’s surprised his phone still works at all, let alone that it’s able to find any signal in the sewers) he checks the time. 5:30 PM. Which means only a couple more hours until he can go back to the surface to start stockpiling.

The final part of his plan involves recharging his ninpō and mystic powers. This step is still a little hazy on details since Mikey has no clue on how to go about doing that. Does he just have to wait until it grows stronger over time, or does he have to charge it like a battery? What would he even charge it with, a telephone wire? He’s hoping they’ll spontaneously come back in the middle of some kind of fight like what always seems to happen when they lose their powers. That would make things so much easier.

Yet as he tugs at that thread attached to his ninpō and mystic powers, he knows that would be a miracle. The theory he’s crafting is that mystic abilities and ninpō aren't something that happen naturally in this dimension. Because of the lack of mysticism, his powers are being messed with and pushed down to try and better integrate Mikey into this new dimension.

Mikey blinks at the idea, then feels a sly smile creeping onto his face. He must have picked up on more of Donnie’s alternate dimension talk than he had first realized if that’s something he was able to come up with without any help.

Instinctually he turns, about to brag about his genius thoughts to one of his brothers, before being abruptly jerked back to reality finding himself alone in the small room. His heart gives a sharp pang. Tears he’s been holding back rise to the surface and Mikey finally lets them fall. His hiccups quickly turn into sobs, his body curling into himself. Looking around the damp, drab, and empty room through blurry vision only spurs on his tears.

What he wouldn't do for one of Raph’s hugs right now. His hugs had always been Mikey’s favorite, right above those that his Dad gave out on the rare occasion. Raph’s large frame brought Mikey into a cocoon of warmth every time, and if he had been feeling particularly bad then Raph would nuzzle the top of his head with his snout. Sometimes, he would even make an involuntary churring noise that always made Mikey go boneless in his hold.

While getting a hug from Raph had always been easy, wrangling one from Leo was slightly harder. He was always open to receiving the physical affection Mikey doled out but had more trouble trying to reciprocate. Most of the hugs Leo gave were after a big adrenaline rush or something particularly exciting (or scary) had happened. There were multiple times on missions where Leo would give him a quick squeeze or, after the mission was over, would hang off of Mikey like a koala.

April was the most touchy-feely of their little family other than Mikey himself. April’s hugs had always felt different, and Mikey had practically glued himself to her side when they first became friends simply because of how she felt. His Dad and brothers were warm, but they didn’t even come close to the all-encompassing heat that April gave off with her hugs. Mikey wasn’t sure if it was a human thing or a big sister thing, but April’s hugs were always the warmest.

Donnie was in a completely different ballpark. Mikey and April had mostly free reign when it came to physical contact, and Donnie always seemed more welcome to his attempts compared to the others (especially Leo). And while Mikey felt all warm and fuzzy because of it, he tried to limit initiating physical contact with him as much as possible. While he knew Donnie didn’t necessarily mind when he went to him for some kind of comfort, that didn’t mean he was completely comfortable with the physical affections. That made the times when Donnie had come to him for that kind of comfort all the more precious.

They’re not here now, though. His family was in a completely different dimension and had no idea where he was. They had probably realized that Mikey was late getting back to the lair and deployed a Donnie Pod. He wasn’t sure where it would go, but when it returned without him they must have freaked out. Donnie would be contacting anyone and everyone they knew, good and bad, and when he heard nothing back he’d activate the tracker he had put in all of them (still not cool). After that showed Mikey nowhere to be found, his family would dissolve into a complete panic. He had no doubt his brothers and sister were currently raising hell somewhere in New York or the Hidden City trying to find him.

Mikey really wishes he could speak to them. He would be able to tell them that he was fine, that they didn’t need to worry. He wasn’t in any current danger and he even found a good shelter all by himself. The plan he had come up with wasn’t half bad, either. They just needed to sit tight while Mikey figured out how to solve this newest case of the mysterious mystic malfunction.

Mikey’s sobs slowed. Wiping his face of tears and snot, he heaves a sigh.

“It’s like a…vacation, yeah,” Mikey whispers to himself in a hoarse voice. “Get away from the familiar and welcome the unfamiliar.” He sniffles one more time, checking his phone with a wince to see that it was now 8:12 PM. He had spent nearly three hours feeling sorry for himself while his brothers had to be worrying themselves sick about him back home.

They didn’t need to, though. All of them already had so much on their plate to worry about, and Mikey didn’t need to be one of those things. He was meant to help lift their burdens with Dr. Feelings, not add to them with his own stupid thoughts and actions. So he was fine.

“It’s. A. Vacation,” he grinds out, slipping off the ledge and stalking into the tunnels towards the manhole cover a few hundred feet away from the entrance to his shelter. “They shouldn’t have to worry. I’m totally capable of handling myself.”

Taking a breath he pauses beneath the ladder to the manhole cover, soft shafts of moonlight filtering through the holes.

“My brothers wouldn’t want me to be sad. They’d want me to have fun. I can try to have fun, no problemo.”

==========

The population of NNY must be a lot smaller than Mikey’s New York. He had been scouring the many shops along the streets bordering his shelter and there were barely any people to be found. Back home, you were lucky not to bump into anyone with the constant crowds that formed at all hours.

It did work in his favor, though. With the streets relatively empty it made moving in the shadows and exploring unseen much easier. It was quite a nice change of pace.

All of the stores near his shelter, however, had nothing of what he needed. Mikey must have chosen some kind of mechanical or tech district in the city, as all of the shops carried nothing except for car parts and the occasional pack of gum. His stomach rumbles unhappily from his perch on the edge of a roof.

Mikey frowns and starts off again, sticking to the shadows as he scans the signs on the neighboring buildings. He’s traveling farther from his shelter than he likes, but in the name of food he would do anything. And he is really hoping he won’t have to go dumpster diving. He had thought those days were finally behind them after they had met April and been introduced to the wonders of take-out and grocery stores.

Finally Mikey spots a department store that looks promising. It’s closed for the night and is in a slightly more populated area, but the windows boast that it is a ‘one stop shop’ for groceries, clothes, and home supplies. It also looks to be corporately owned and not a family business. All in all, a perfect place to steal from.

Mikey prepares himself to jump down and canvas the store when he realizes how many more people are here. Granted, it’s still worlds away from his New York, but now there are small clusters of people milling up and down the street. While it would be simple to avoid them while breaking into the store, it’ll become a problem when he tries to get out with his supplies.

Leaning on the edge of the roof Mikey bites his lip. He isn’t sure what he can get away with saying in this dimension about his appearance. The humans in his New York barely bat an eye at all the mutant and mystic events of the city. Not even the cops try to interfere anymore after the invasion. They simply accept what’s happening and go on with their day.

Mikey has a feeling that this darker NNY wouldn’t have that same attitude. He sighs as he observes the people of the area, trying to think of a solution. Said solution ends up being three wanna-be gangsters strolling around a corner with a gait of false confidence and brightly colored, baggy clothes, bandanas pulled over their mouths. No one else on the street spares them a second glance, and they continue on their way without a hassle.

A smile lights up Mikey’s face. It seems that his fashion expertise won’t be put to waste, after all. What he needs now is a human disguise.

New side quest made, Mikey doubles back and hops his way to a dimly lit alley he passed with two charity clothes bins hiding in the shadows. Making sure the coast is clear he jumps down and with too much enthusiasm rips open the lid. The same lid that is meant to prevent people from stealing the clothes. Mikey frowns a bit knowing that he is technically stealing from charity, but quickly shoves it away. He’s a person in need right now, too.

It’s not like the clothes wouldn’t be going to a good cause.

Eagerly Mikey dives into the bin headfirst, rummaging around for some pants. The majority of what he finds are jeans with multiple rips and holes in them (and one stained with a suspicious white patch, ew), but then he stumbles upon a pair of big, baggy cargo pants that are pitch black. Pulling out of the bin he sets them on the cleanest part of a nearby dumpster before diving in again to see what will match.

It takes a bit more time but Mikey finds a large, frayed wool turtleneck the same color as the cargo pants. He sets those to the side as well, looking at his bounty with a contemplative hum.

While wearing all black will contribute to his stealth, it doesn’t exactly scream ‘Hamato Michelangelo’. He definitely needs some color other than his bandana.

Unfortunately, most of the clothes left in the bin are dark and neutral colors or just plain ugly. Mikey’s about to give up and move to the next bin when a flash of blue and purple catches his eye. Digging down to the very bottom of the bin, his mouth drops in disbelief. Slowly he pulls out the colorful jacket, a smile lighting up his face as he flips it over and finds it in perfect condition.

It’s almost an exact replica of the paint splatter jacket from Hypno’s 80’s montage trap. Mikey slips it on and is immediately enveloped with warmth. He pulls the hood briefly over his head, giggling in delight.

Mikey had always wished he was able to keep it. All he had to do was hop into another dimension for that wish to come true, apparently. Plus, it added the much needed color to his disguise, even if this jacket had a much more low-key color palate with only blues and purples.

He leaves the jacket on as he leaps into the other bin. This one was smaller, filled mostly with shoes, socks, and hats. Mikey briefly entertains the idea of trying to wear shoes but figures it wouldn't be worth it. Who really paid attention to the shoes people wore anyway? His hands, however, might become a problem if he ran into any humans while in disguise. For that Mikey digs out a large pair of red fingerless mittens from the pile and after a quick test to make sure they didn’t obstruct his movement they’re added to the pile.

Mikey knows he can make due with the stylish disguise he’s found, but he still feels like he’s missing a special touch. Taking one more dive into the bin he pushes aside shoe after shoe until he finds a piece of soft, white cloth, a printed cartoon cat face in the middle. Stars in his eyes Mikey leans out of the bin with a grin, triumphantly holding up what he now sees to be a neck gaiter.

“Aw, it's so cute!” he whispers to himself, pulling the fabric over his head until it rests comfortably around his neck beneath the jacket. “Who would ever want to get rid of this?”

Finally completing his disguise, Mikey snatches up the rest of the clothes and pulls them on over his armor and gear, flipping the hood over his head. Grinning, he pulls the gaiter over his snout and confidently strolls out into the open street. And, just like he predicted, no one bats an eye.

He can’t help but check himself out in the windows of the buildings. What can he say, he’s outdone himself this time. The cat face mask was definitely the finishing touch he needed to complete the look.

Mikey gives himself a mental cheer for completing the side quest and darts across the street to get back to his main mission–food. His stomach gives him another very unhappy rumble for being ignored for so long. He pats at it, telling it to be patient, and rounds the corner into the side alley of the department store.

At first glance, Mikey can’t see a reliable way to get in and out of the building. He checks behind boxes, dumpsters, and even the locked side door. He knows he could easily break the lock to get inside, but he’s hoping for his presence to be as undetectable as possible. Leaving a broken lock along with the things he’s about to steal would be a red flag to whoever owned this place that they needed to update their security.

Then, after being startled by a stray cat taking a swipe at him, Mikey spots a vent near the top of the building that looks just big enough to fit his shell.

“Bingo.”

Unfortunately, there is no conveniently placed fire escape to reach the vent. Mikey has to resort to haphazardly stacking boxes in order to get to it, but he hasn’t been watching those cup stacking videos for nothing.

Once stable enough he easily climbs to the top and rips out the vent cover to shimmy his way inside. The tunnel is just big enough for him to army crawl and he quickly arrives at a grate that leads to the main store. Using his elbow he swings it open, dropping silently onto the tile floor in a crouch.

Taking a cursory glance around the place, Mikey can already tell he chose the right place to rob blind. Thanks to Donnie’s lessons that he made them all sit through he can easily see that the cameras in the corners are all fakes, only meant to deter prospective criminals like him. The shelves of the store are crowded, barely leaving space between aisles and absolutely jam-packed with food.

Stomach rumbling with new vengeance Mikey darts towards the first snack he sees, rips open the package of Oreos, and stuffs five into his face. Moaning in delight, Mikey shoves more into his mouth until the package is completely gone and crumbs litter the ground. He haphazardly sweeps them under the aisle rack to get rid of evidence (no one ever sweeps under there, anyway) and crumples up the package to throw into the first dumpster he sees.

He may be a criminal, but he’s not a litterer. He loves the Earth, even if this one isn’t his.

Stomach satisfied for now Mikey rushes to the front of the store to grab as many paper bags as he can carry. Moving through the aisles and seeing all the ingredients has complex dishes coming to mind, but he sorrowfully pushes them to the side in order to think practically. Instead of grabbing the fresh ingredients he throws cans of fruits and vegetables in the bags right alongside the junk food.

When he’s done three bags are full of cans, chips, three gallons of water, and multiple packages of candy that Mikey couldn’t resist. He doesn’t know any of the brands, but they look similar to what he would get back home, so that’s good enough for him.

Mikey makes a quick pitstop to drop the bags of food by the side door before venturing into the home supplies section. He grabs four packs of batteries and two different brands of flashlights. He has no idea what the difference between them is as they both boast being named ‘the best on the market’, and since he wasn’t going to be wasting money, he figured it couldn’t hurt to get them both.

The camping aisle is severely lacking in supplies, being that the store is located in the middle of the city, but Mikey still manages to find a plush, orange sleeping bag along with plenty of blankets. It wouldn’t do to sleep on the cold concrete when there’s perfectly suitable blankets around, after all. He wishes he could find some way to make a hammock out of them, but none of the blankets are big enough to stretch across his shelter.

It’s as he’s deciding which first aid kit he should take that the spray paint catches his eye. Mikey hesitates for a moment, throwing the kit he has in his hand into the bag before wandering towards the large display of colors.

His mind races at the options. Mikey’s hands are itching to reach out and take some with him. He bites his lip, looking between what are obviously the essentials and what is obviously not. But every time he looks back to the wall of colorful caps, the longing in his chest grows. His shelter could use a bit of color, Mikey reasons, reaching out to pluck a red can from the display.

It had been a long time since he had done any kind of art, let alone spray paint. Because of his (occasional) shaking hands his brothers had insisted that he put the art on hold so they could figure out if it was making things worse. Mikey had never gotten an answer about it, but regardless they had a constant watch on him to make sure he didn’t pick up so much as a pencil, let alone a spray can.

His brothers couldn’t say anything now, though. And Mikey said that his hands were perfectly fine to make some art.

“Plus, this is my vacation. I can do what I want,” Mikey resolves, opening up the last paper bag he would be able to carry and throwing as many colors in as he can. He makes sure to get all of the primary colors, then grabs anything that catches his eye. The bag is absolutely bursting with cans when he’s done.

It would be nice to add some decorations to his temporary home while he waits for his powers to recharge. Staring at concrete walls has already started to get boring, and he can’t quite figure out how to connect his phone to any of the Wi-Fi networks here.

And, if he gets really bored, the buildings in NNY were looking a little sparse in terms of murals. Mikey had been heavily discouraged when he was younger about going to the surface and making graffiti, but that had rarely stopped him. Where else was he supposed to make his art when wall space in the lair ran out?

Mikey tries to squash his hopes of his artwork being put up in this world for the sake of practicality. He was supposed to be laying low. Going out to make murals would be the opposite of laying low.

But as Mikey picks up the bag stuffed to the brim with the cans of spray paint, he already knows his resolve will break. If restoring his ninpō is going to take as long as he’s fearing it will, then he’ll get bored enough to go out into the city. It’s practically ingrained in his being to go create things when the thoughts in his head get too quiet or too loud.

“I suppose it wouldn't be all bad,” Mikey says, “No one’s here to scold me this time, heh.” He grabs all of his bags and opens the side door, making sure it’s locked again when it closes. “This is just a new adventure. I’ve never let that stop me before. I’ll be fine, just like always.”

Mikey runs back across the street with his bags and jumps back onto the rooftops. He gets a few odd looks from passersby at the clanking of the paint cans but thankfully nobody says a word. He pulls the cat mask down around his neck again and takes a deep breath, taking off across the rooftops as fast as he can manage with his new bounty.

In no time at all he’s lifting up the manhole cover and is back in the shelter. As soon as he enters, his mind starts racing with the endless artistic opportunities of the blank concrete walls. He sets the bag of paint off to the side before plopping down to organize his supplies into neat piles for future use.

And if he eats three packs of candy before getting to any sort of fruit, no one is there to tell him off for it.

Chapter Text

In the end, Mikey’s right about not being able to resist the allure of art. It takes less than a day after stealing the spray paint for his artistic brain to over-power his practical brain. Before he knew it he was bouncing with restless energy and bored out of his mind, especially since no matter how much he tried his phone refused to connect to any kind of WiFi network. Plus, he wanted to save as much battery as he could since he couldn't exactly find an easy place to charge it in his shelter.

Good thing Donnie gave all their phones a ridiculously large battery upgrade.

When he first went out he wanted to start with something small, maybe a graphic design of their Mad Dogz logo, so he went up to the surface after dark and scouted for a suitable spot. But, as he had made note of before, the walls of the buildings were ridiculously empty. The more blank canvases he passed, the more big, bright, and colorful murals popped into his head.

Eventually Mikey found a perfect spot, completely free of any sort of marks or gum, and the canvas spanned practically the entire building. He immediately scrapped the Mad Dogz idea in the face of the massive blank wall. Ideas flitted through his mind at top speed when a karate dojo across the street caught his eye. With a grin, Mikey popped the top of a blue can and got to work on his masterpiece.

Holding a spray can after so long was a bit of a challenge, but after hours of hard work he finally stepped back and admired the now colorful space. Lou Jitsu stood proudly front and center, spin kicking a writhing squid-like yokai twice his size with a smug smile. Hard, geometric shapes surrounded them, creating a jagged outline of the scene. Mikey didn’t have quite enough colors with him to make it accurate to life, but that was just fine with him. He loved messing with color theory, anyway.

He had to take several breaks that first time, both to catch his breath from the paint fumes and to stretch his aching fingers. Turns out, his cat mask was not very good at keeping out the smell of the paint. All of his clothes now had speckles of dried paint stuck to them, but Mikey thought they added to his style and made no effort to wash them out.

That first venture had been a much needed catharsis to Mikey’s stress. Enough so that he found himself heading to the surface every night since, painting a different scene or a different person every time.

Now, though, three days after having completed the first Lou Jitsu mural, his supply of paint is getting dangerously low. And his work was starting to garner attention from the media, too. He’s not sure what reaction his art is eliciting, but he hopes it’s positive. This drab, dark NNY was in desperate need of color.

Overall he isn’t too worried about his new media presence, especially when it comes to the humans. The buzz would die down eventually, and Mikey’s art would become a common occurrence around the city. He had seen it happen countless times at home. Mikey would become irrelevant to the media soon enough, he just had to be a bit more careful about his surroundings until that happened.

Along with running out of spray paint, Mikey is now running out of food, too. He had gotten used to having fresh, full meals again after the invasion, and he forgot just how much junk food he needed to eat in order to feel full. There is only one gallon of water left, as well.

So, Mikey waits for nightfall and goes back to the department store, which he learns is actually called Kowalski’s. Just like the first time he grabs food and water first, then eagerly bounces over to the home supplies to get a new cache of spray paint. Now that he’s comfortable making graffiti again, he picks out the specific colors that flash in his mind for the different murals he has planned.

He’s excited to get back out again, planning on creating a mural for S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N tonight, but there's another thought that’s been plaguing his mind every time he goes out onto the surface. Mikey is painfully aware that painting is a coping mechanism for him. And he is really hoping that it keeps working and he doesn’t actually have to stop and think about what he’s coping with.

Shaking his head, Mikey shoves another paper bag full of his spray cans. That sounds like a problem future Mikey will have to deal with when he gets back to his own dimension.

With bounty in hand he makes his way to the side door, once again making sure it locks behind him. He hasn’t seen anything that hints to anyone knowing he’s been stealing, and he wants to keep it that way. It would be very annoying to have to find somewhere else to burgle.

Mikey races his way back to his shelter, clicking on one of his flashlights and lighting up the many test lines of paint now coloring the walls. He quickly separates the food into piles before digging into the bag of cans, pulling out multiple shades of purple, a can of gray and black, and a single can of bright, neon pink. They barely fit in his jacket and he has to shove some uncomfortably in the top of his shell, but S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N deserves nothing but the best for his service in defeating Shredder.

He hops back up to the surface and immediately makes his way to the rooftops. He excitedly starts heading in the direction of a sleek, newly finished building that popped up a couple of blocks away from a small Chinatown. It’s also closer to a warehousing district that Mikey plans to check out for new canvases, which will be his next stop once he finishes S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N’s mural.

Mikey is almost there when the sound of clicking robot parts has him skidding to a stop. Eyes wide, he cautiously makes his way to the edge of the roof, hesitating on actually peering over the side. He worries his lip beneath his mask, eyeing the edge.

He has a feeling he knows what he’s going to see when he looks down. The clicking sound is eerily familiar, and now that he is closer he sees the blue and pink glow.

Mikey knows the K-words of this world have to be bad news. Regardless of the fact they seem pretty harmless compared to the ones he’s dealt with, he suspects that these guys don’t exactly have good intentions for this Earth, either. Which means it should be his duty to try and stop them, but he finds himself at an impasse.

While Mikey is normally a proud criminal as well as decorated Earth hero, he does draw the line at murder of sentient beings. Whatever had come over him that first night was not who he was and he really didn’t want to start developing some kind of Savage personality like Raph (not that there’s anything wrong with Savage Raph, but there’s only one spot in the family for that kind of eccentric flare).

Yet, in all of his hesitations, Mikey knows deep down that interfering would be the right thing to do. He may not have any plans to interact with the turtles of this dimension, but that doesn’t mean he can’t help them out in a subtle way, right?

But he really wants to vandalize some buildings and ignore whatever is happening below him. Ignorance is bliss, and all of that other razz-ma-tazz.

Mikey swallows, shaking his head and taking a deep breath. That first time he lost his cool was simply because he was confused and didn’t assess the threat level. This time would be different, he would keep his mind stable and only give the K-words a semi-lethal beat-down.

With one last full body shake to get rid of any more nerves, he peeks over the edge.

Sure enough, two K-words stand directly below, looking to be guarding a door to the building he’s standing on. Mikey licks his lips, eyeing the two nervously. And then, just like last time, they start to speak in a broken version of English to each other.

At first Mikey thinks he’s fine. Sure, his breathing gets a little funny and his heart beats a little faster, but his mind is still clear of any murderous thoughts. But as the K-word talk continues, his arms start to give off a simmering heat below his jacket. The scars on the tips of his fingers begin to pulse, his breathing stalls, and after one more comment from the K-words about some kind of unusual energy readings, the tenuous cord stretched thin in Mikey’s mind snaps in two.

Mikey is aware of leaping straight into the head of the closest K-word, but what happens after is blurry. He knows he’s fighting, knows that he’s using lethal force against the K-words that are practically defenseless outside of their crushed robot bodies, but he can’t tell his body to stop, to slow down. All he hears is the squelching of their pink bodies as they are battered and the screeches that, if he didn’t know any better, sound terrified. Blood pounds in his ears, and then Mikey’s mind separates from his body. He watches what happens next through static vision, as though through a wonky TV screen.

When the screeches die and the mutilated bodies stop twitching, Mikey heaves for breath and stumbles to the wall. Slowly, he takes in the scene with tears gathering in his eyes. His mouth wobbles with frustrated sobs.

He thought he could handle it. That first time was supposed to be a fluke, just a result of his mind being scrambled after being thrown into another dimension.

Was he really becoming a serial murderer? They may be K-words, but they still have thoughts and feelings, no matter how malicious.

His hands are shaking, still pulsing with a warm golden glow. Mikey scrunches his face and bites his hand in retaliation, only to yelp as he ends up hurting it even more. The action leaves a metallic taste on his tongue, and his heart drops as he registers the wet blood of the K-words staining his hands and gloves. And now his mouth.

Shaking out his arms he takes one more look at the scene before darting away into the street, stumbling briefly to a stop as a white van slams on its brakes with a long honk.

Mikey hears a dog’s low growling through the shouted Japanese curses a woman throws his way, but he’s in another alley and scaling the fire escape before he can even think to apologize.

Then he’s running. He doesn’t know how long he runs, or where his feet are taking him, just that he has to get away from the crime scene. His mind races, not willing to settle on one emotion and instead overloading him with so many not even Dr. Feelings can see through the fog.

Finally, after his muscles are screaming in exhaustion and his mind is starting to quiet, he collapses to his knees on a roof beside a large wooden bird bath. Mikey lunges for it, flinging his gloves to the side and furiously scrubbing his hands and mouth of pink blood as he sobs.

His scales are practically rubbed raw by the time it’s finally gone. The pink tint to the water will confuse whosoever bird bath this is, but Mikey can’t bring himself to care.

His thoughts still racing by at breakneck speed, he clenches his fists together, over and over, trying to get the shaking to stop. The glow had faded away sometime during his great escape, but the tremors continued. Scrunching his eyes shut Mikey concentrates on his breathing, and for once he feels appreciative for the focus Draxum had put on breath control during their training sessions.

An indefinite amount of time passes. His mind is finally starting to feel like his own again as he wipes away dried tears.

Okay, so maybe the K-words had done a bit more mental damage than he wanted to acknowledge. That was fine, he just needed an internal discussion with Dr. Feelings, and everything should go back to normal.

When that session would happen, he couldn’t say. As much as Dr. Feelings likes to help with the emotional troubles of those around him, Mikey really doesn’t want that advice to apply to his own mind. Ignoring the problem is a much easier and simpler way to go about addressing his current issues. Besides, it’s not like his support system would be able to help from a different dimension, anyway. Right now, he’s on his own, and neither Mikey nor Dr. Feelings has a good solution for that.

Mikey rubs his eyes, slumping to the floor of the roof with a sigh. A purple paint can tumbles out of his jacket pocket at the movement, and he slowly picks it up, toying with the cap.

Despite the emotional roller-coaster, he still feels the pull to go and release his stress. While the scene with the K-words was a major mood crusher, tonight was supposed to be fun. His mind flashes an image at him and, with new purpose, Mikey stands with the can of purple paint gripped tight in his shaking fist.

Through all the emotional turmoil, he gleefully latches onto the emotion that’s the most straightforward—anger. Anger towards his situation, towards the K-words, and even a tinge of anger for his brothers who can’t seem to figure out where he went. He knows it’s unfair. He’s always trying to prove how capable he is when alone. But no matter how much he is trying to tamp it down (because he’s not a baby, guys), he finds himself longing for Raph’s overbearing presence, Donnie’s constant questions about the rating of his rescue, and Leo’s bragging about how he totally saved Mikey’s life.

Mikey is angry because his brothers. Aren’t. Here. They couldn't help him even if he wanted their help. Which he totally doesn’t. He’s got everything under control.

The birdbath beside him explodes, but he pays it little mind. Mikey stalks to the edge of the roof, popping off the lid of the spray can as he drops to the ground of the alley. The wall here has multiple cracks running along the surface, but he can’t find it in himself to care about the state of the canvas for this particular picture.

S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N’s mural can wait, for now. His image doesn’t deserve to be influenced by the rage flowing through his veins.

Mikey knows exactly who deserves the anger, instead.

==========
2012

“Hey, dudes, check out this new version of Banksy that’s going around!” Michelangelo announces, shouting over the rerun of Space Heroes Leonardo has blaring on the TV.

Donatello had tried to ask the leader what was wrong, as he had looked very rattled after his private talk with Sensei, but Leonardo had briskly brushed him off. He had sat down inches from the TV as he turned on Space Heroes, and hasn’t said a word to any of them since.

“Oh sure, Mikey, I don’t care,” Raphael mutters distractedly from his place on the couch, face shoved into one of his comics. Michelangelo pouts, and Donatello rolls his eyes. Honestly, he’s surprised Michelangelo even still tries with him.

“A new Banksy? They must really be impressing the humans if they’ve earned that title,” Donatello replies. Michelangelo beams at him and rushes over, shoving his T-Phone into his face. Donatello huffs and snatches the phone from his little brother, raising an eyebrow at the detailed graffiti.

Now, he should be in his lab working on the retro-mutagen instead of lounging on the couch with his brothers. But after their fight with Karai and the new Foot robots earlier in the night, Donatello figured he could use a little break to rest and recharge. Plus, during their trek home after escaping the battle, they had stumbled upon a graphic scene of more murdered Kraang. It gave them all a stark reminder that there was still a dangerous, unknown mutant of the loose. And after the Squirrelanoids fiasco, they knew exactly the kind of threat these new mutants could pose.

“Yeah, their stuff is so cool! I wish I knew how to paint like that. They’re even better than Raph,” Michelangelo sighs dreamily. He wraps himself over Donatello’s shoulder as he scrolls through the many pictures included in the clickbait article.

Donatello has to admit, the work is pretty impressive. While he may not be too artistically minded (other than his mechanical blueprints), he knows great art when he sees it. The first image is some kind of cartoon-y, colorful glam-rock action hero defeating a squid-like enemy, and is credited as this ‘New Banksy's’ first official work.

After follows a darker, more sinister image. A large, goat-faced humanoid in battle armor is surrounded by branching purple vines that look to be bursting through the face of the wall. The only thing that is in perfect focus is the goat’s bright yellow eyes and sinister smirk as a pair of small, laughing demons dance in its outstretched palm.

Donatello swipes to the next photo. He raises an amused eyebrow at the image of a cartoon pig walking on two legs standing in front of a fire and spit-roast. The pig is wearing an apron and wields a large meat tenderizer as it laughs maniacally at the spit-roast which contains an obviously dead turtle.

“That’s probably my favorite one,” Michelangelo announces, snatching back his phone with a wide smile. “I mean, the other ones are good too, but this one has a turtle!” He pauses for a second, laughing sheepishly. “The turtle's dead, but it’s still a turtle. Gotta stick to the brand.”

“What’s this about a dead turtle?” Raphael asks, pulling down his comic and looking critically at Michelangelo before his face twists into a snarl. “If you’ve done something to Spike I swear–”

“Spike’s fine! I haven’t touched him, scout's honor!” Michelangelo shrieks, trying to hide behind Donatello. He snorts and pushes Michelangelo to the floor.

“You were never any kind of scout. I don’t think they would take you even if you were allowed to join,” Donatello snarks. He gets a blown raspberry in return, to which he shakes his head.

Michelangelo opens his mouth to retort when his T-Phone pings. He grins and starts tapping away on the device immediately. “Woah, they made another piece just last night! And it was pretty close to where we were fighting, too. Do you think they would use me as a muse if I ever met them? I’m sure they would be blown away by my awesome–”

He cuts himself off, frowning down at his phone. Donatello furrows his brow at the sudden change in attitude from his little brother. Even Raphael notices the shift, putting down his comic and shooting Michelangelo confused look.

“What’s up, Mikey? You were practically just drooling over this guy—”

Raphael is interrupted by Michelangelo rushing up to him, shoving his phone into his face with wide eyes. “Does the armor look familiar to you, too?”

“Mikey, get your phone out of my face,” Raphael complains, roughly swatting his hand away. Michelangelo is persistent, though, and with an eye roll that is way too dramatic in Donatello’s humble opinion, finally looks down at the phone. His eyes go wide, and he snatches the phone out of Michelangelo’s hand. “Holy shit…”

“Language,” Leonardo mutters, finally breaking out of whatever trace he had been in to glare at his brother. Seeing his wide eyed stare, he frowns in confusion. “Everything okay, Raph?”

Donatello wants to know the same thing. He stretches across the couch to catch the picture on Michelangelo’s phone. When the image finally registers, Donatello snatches the phone himself to get a closer look.

It is, indeed, another one of New Banksy's works. This one, however, is much more in the harsh style of the goat-man than the cartoon-ish other two. It is made up of almost entirely purple hues, accenting the large frame of what appears to be a massive, snarling metal monster. The large beast is lunging towards the camera, mouth open wide with razor-sharp teeth posing to tear into the first thing it sees. Three metal claws extend from the back of the wrist that’s closest to the camera. Its metal armor connects in small, intricate ways, seemingly impenetrable. The only part of the painting that’s not purple is the glowing pink eyes, the black remains of broken chains surrounding the creature, and the cowering silhouette of a man hidden below the snarl.

The lines of this one are sharp. Each one is thick with harsh, jagged edges and more shaky areas than any previous painting.

After another shock for how drastically different this painting is from the previous, Donatello finally spots what Michelangelo and Raphael had been talking about. The crown of its head, where three metal spikes protrude, is practically an exact match to Shredder's helmet. That, combined with the metal claws and battle armor, can’t be a coincidence.

“Guys? What’s gotten into you–” Leonardo starts, wandering to Donatello and peering over his shoulder at the phone. Donatello feels him stiffen beside him. “Is that…Shredder?”

“The resemblance is definitely there,” Donatello replies faintly, looking nervously at his brother's worried faces.

“When was this made?” Leonardo asks, still studying the picture. Michelangelo clears his throat.

“Last night, probably around the same time we were kicking Foot butt,” Michelangelo frowns, hopping over to snatch his phone out of Leonardo’s hands. “Do you think New Banksy knows Shred-head?”

“With how accurate that helmet and those claws are? Absolutely. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if this guy is somehow part of the Foot Clan, too,” Raphael announces, scowling at the phone.

“And where was this painting found?” Leonardo asks, eyes distant. Donatello perks up, knowing that his brother is slowly putting some kind of puzzle together in his mind.

“According to the article it was found about eight blocks away from our battle. We might have even run into it if we kept going that way after we found those Kraang…bots,” The pieces finally fall into place in his mind. Evidently, it starts to click for Leonardo, too. The leader scrolls to the first record of New Banksy’s artwork. “Do you think these paintings and the destroyed Kraang are connected?”

“It’s definitely possible,” Leonardo replies after a moment of pause, “The first painting was found a night or two after we found the first murder scene. I’ll bet my shell there are probably more destroyed bots out there for the nights these other paintings showed up.”

“Wait, New Bansky’s the one killing Kraang? Oh,” Michelangelo groans, slumping into the couch with his head half in his shell. “Why does everyone I like turn out to be a bad guy?”

“I don’t know, but that is a weird pattern, Mike,” Donatello mutters, distracted by all the new details swirling through his head. “The good news is we finally have a new lead for that rogue mutant, and if they’re able to create these paintings it means they’re sentient and sane. Sometimes, at least. Bad news, it looks like Shredder could somehow be involved in all of this, too.”

“All that means is that this new mutant is going to get twice the ass-beating than he was going to get anyway,” Raphael growls, cracking his knuckles.

“Language, Raph, Master Splinter is still in the dojo,” Leonardo scolds, but doesn’t contradict his statement. “What this really means is that this guy is moving up on our priorities list.” Donatello listens intently, nodding along to the new orders. “From now on, whenever we’re on the surface we keep an eye out for any new graffiti. If we find any, we split up and thoroughly search the area for clues. We need to catch this guy before he escalates from Kraang to innocent people, and find out how Shredder’s involved, too.”

“When we do catch them, can I be the one to ask the questions?” Raphael asks with a malicious smile, “I have a few words—and gestures— I want them to feel.”

“It doesn’t matter who interrogates them as long as we get the answers we’re looking for,” Donatello replies, only to get a smack to the head as Raphael stands with a scoff and stalks toward his room. “That was not necessary, Raph!”

Now that the commotion is over and they have a new plan of attack, everyone else disperses to their rooms as well with an order from Leonardo to get some rest. Donatello crashes onto his bed with a sigh, rolling to watch the movement of his purple lava lamp.

Foolishly, he had still held onto a small bit of hope that the new mutant might not be as bad as they all think they are. The best case scenario had been a Leatherhead situation, but with them having knowledge about Shredder, the likelihood of them seeing sense and becoming allies plummets even further than when they thought they were a feral mutant.

Donatello gazes at the picture of April sitting on his nightstand, a pang racing through his heart. Why couldn’t they be allowed just one friend? Was that too much to ask?

With a grunt Donatello flips to face the wall, pulling up his specially made weighted blanket to his chin, and falls into a fitful, dreamless sleep.

Chapter Text

He makes a point after the second K-word encounter to stay away from anything glowing pink. If his brain isn’t going to listen to him when Mikey tells it that he’s fine then the next best thing is to stay away from the problem in the first place. Better than unconsciously going apeshit the moment he goes near them.

He constantly has to push down the guilt about leaving them to whatever evil plans they’re doing, but he really doesn’t want yet another repeat of Savage Mike.

Mikey even managed to keep himself in check with his murals. After having completed the last one driven by only his anger, his mind was exhausted. He trudged back to his shelter and collapsed onto his makeshift bed. And if he cried himself to sleep, then no one would have to know. Because no one was with him.

He had never been alone for this long before. There was always his brothers, Dad, or April somewhere close by that he could go and distract himself with whenever everything became too much. And more recently there was Draxum and the two Casey’s. The longest he had ever been this isolated was during his first solo mission, but even then he knew his brothers were just a quick phone call away. If anything actually bad had happened, they would’ve been there for him in a heartbeat.

From Mikey’s count, it had been almost two weeks since arriving in this dimension. His food supplies were at their bare minimum, and he knew he would have to go back to Kowalski’s later tonight. Since he had been resisting going out to paint, though, he still had most of the cans he collected from the previous trip.

Mikey sighs, pulling on his disguise. The previously white cat face mask was more of a kaleidoscope of colors at this point, bringing a small smile to his face. Everything else was similarly speckled with paint, giving even more color to his ensemble.

Adjusting everything as much as he could, Mikey hops off his makeshift bed and goes to leave, hesitating before crossing the threshold. He turns back towards the paint corner, where multiple cans have rolled to the floor after not fitting back into the paper bag. Biting his lip he fidgets, looking towards the exit then to the cans and back again.

He really does want to make a mural for S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N. Mikey misses the little guy, and he was going to bug Donnie about finally rebuilding him as soon as he got home. But staying up on the surface for a long time also meant a greater chance of running into the K-words again, and while Mikey could tell himself he was fine all he wanted, his subconscious obviously didn’t get the memo.

He had managed to get some more control over the bad thoughts, though. Biting the bullet after forcing himself to stay in his shelter for the better part of a week, he had messed around on his phone as much as he could without service and a charger. Mikey forced himself to stop when he was at twenty percent power, but watching the various home videos and browsing all the unhinged photos he had taken throughout the years had raised his spirits.

If he lingered a little too long on the family photo taken after the invasion, eyes wet, then so what? Sue him.

His brothers would want him to keep being the turtle in those videos–happy, carefree, and always optimistic.

So, that’s who Mikey told himself to be as he over-enthusiastically grabs the purple paint cans he had left after the last mural. He strolls out of the shelter with a forced pep to his step, determined to find the perfect place to make the mural for S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N after he gathers his rations for the next week.

This time, nothing was going to stop him from honoring the little guy. And Mikey would make sure there were only positive thoughts happening while doing it, too. He didn’t need any kind of negative emotions getting in the way of what was going to be a joyful piece of art.

==========

Breaking into Kowalski’s is still a piece of cake. Mikey’s slightly concerned that none of the employees or even the owners realize how much spray paint has gone missing, but he supposed that’s just the general attitude of retail workers. He knows that’s how April ended up being when she got her first job that lasted more than a month.

Now brimming with genuine excitement, Mikey slides the manhole cover shut and takes to the rooftops. He grins, giving a small whoop as he jumps over the alleys and heads over to a canvas he had spotted before his self-punishing isolation in his shelter.

The wall was located a couple of blocks away from a small lot filled with gravel and a singular swing set. All of the buildings in the area were residential except for one corner store that looked to have been repaired recently. There wasn’t any other graffiti on the building and the smooth gray concrete would be the perfect home for S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N’s mural.

Mikey flips through the air, giggling at the head-rush as he lands atop his target. While it was a lot more tiring to run around the rooftops on foot, the ache in his limbs was something he appreciated.

Despite not having a concrete schedule for it, Leo had eventually established a training regiment of a sort after the first year of him being leader. Most of it was a more intense game of tag, with all of them trying to catch Leo first, and whoever caught him would be the next one to run and so on. Other times it would be similar to Raph’s idea of training in the dojo, but even then Leo was much more lax about it and wouldn’t chew anyone out if they didn’t show up.

Regardless of how the training happened, Mikey was used to a lot of physical activity and sparring. So, with no one here to spar or train with, he may have fallen a little behind on the fitness regiment (and he was not going to mention how much candy he had been stealing). He missed the burning in his legs, the heaving in his chest, and the feeling of accomplishment when he finally managed to pin one of his older brothers.

Unless they flopped just to let him win. In that case they got a session with Dr. Delicate touch, and as of right now Raph held the record.

Mikey stretches out his legs and leaps into the alley. Landing with a barely audible thud, he turns to the expanse of wall with a contemplative hand on his chin. Different angles and art styles shuffle through his mind until finally he lands on the perfect design.

With a grin and the pop of a cap, Mikey gets to work.

He starts with the background, laying out multiple lines that mimic the marks on Donnie’s arms, legs, and face that he had built into the metal turtle's final design. The lines are a little shaky, but Mikey is used to pushing away the frustration of that by this point. People were calling the uneven lines a signature of his, so the public obviously liked it even if Mikey thought differently.

After finishing the geometric background, Mikey tosses the now empty can of light purple to the ground to be thrown out later. He reaches into his jacket and uncaps a darker shade to get started on S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N’s metal shell. His shell is going to be the centerpiece to the mural, facing outward as if protecting himself or a person in front of him. Mikey has to make sure it's perfect.

Enough time passes that he loses himself in his work. All of the lines blur together, slowly forming the grand design pictured in his mind’s eye. S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N’s eyes glare fiercely out of the wall when he’s done, and as a finishing touch Mikey brings out the light green can he had snagged from Kowalski’s earlier. Making sure the marks are light and don’t overpower the purple, he surrounds the metal turtle with wisps and orbs of soft, green light.

“Not bad for a week out of practice,” Mikey announces, stepping back to admire the drying paint. S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N certainly looks just as fierce in his battle armor in picture as he did in real life.

“Dude, I’ll say! That thing is wicked cool.”

Mikey yelps and instinctively chucks the can in his hand at the source of the voice at the mouth of the alley. There’s a harsh thump of the projectile hitting its target, followed by a whiny groan.

“Ow, man, what the hell was that for? I just gave you a compliment!” Mikey whips his head toward what he now sees is a tall teenager with wide eyes as he rubs the red mark on his forehead. His black bike matches his clothes and his scraggly raven hair, with a wooden hockey stick stuck to his back.

“Ohmigosh, sorry,” Mikey says, taking a step towards the teen to apologize more when he remembers that he should probably flee the scene, like, right now. “Um, you haven’t seen anything, I’m just a part of your imagination. You’ll forget this ever happened after a good, long rest.”

Mikey accompanies his words with wavy hands, slowly backing deeper into the shadows of the alley. The teen glares at him and raises a single eyebrow.

“Pretty sure I’m going to remember this mark in the morning. Jeez, you play baseball or something? Cause, ow,” he rubs once again at the mark on his forehead. Mikey winces, but before he can say anything more the teen's eyes widen and an excited finger is pointed in his direction with a wide, gap-toothed smile. “Hey, you must be that new artist guy going around New York! I’ve seen your stuff online, I wish my stuff looked half as good as yours.”

“Eh, I think you have the wrong guy,” Mikey says nervously, rubbing his neck. “I’m sure there are plenty of artists that make really big murals of things that don’t exist in New York. You’re thinking of one of those people.”

“Nuh uh, no shot. I’d know your stuff from a mile away,” the teen states, taking a few steps further into the alley while leaving his bike on the sidewalk. Mikey takes a few steps back in response. “Hey, I’m not going to rat you out to the police. I just want to talk to a crazy cool dude. Name’s Casey Jones, by the way.”

“Casey?” Mikey exclaims, jaw dropping. The teen–Casey Jones, apparently–nods, walking closer and sticking out his hand.

“The one and only! We don’t know each other, do we? You seem a bit weirded out right now. No offense.”

Mikey squeaks, slamming his hands to his mouth to prevent any word vomit. He scans the teen in front of him, and now that he’s closer, he sees the resemblance. The greasy hair held back by a black bandanna is reminiscent of the new style Casey Jr. has been trying out.

Casey frowns, lowering his hand. “Um, actually, how old are you? Cause you’re way too short for an adult.”

“I am a perfect size for fifteen!” is what escapes Mikey’s mouth before he can stop it. He winces at Casey’s widening eyes and his sudden excitement.

“You’re fifteen?! Dude, you’re a year younger than me! How are you so good at doing all this stuff?” Casey starts encroaching on his space as he excitedly talks, making Mikey stumble back. His mind is still racing, trying to figure out the best way to deal with the conversation he’s been roped into.

Does he just run away? That could work, but if this Casey is anything like the other’s then he would probably try to track Mikey down if he has any unanswered questions. Not necessarily with malicious intent, but the one thing that all Jones’ seem to have in common is their stubbornness.

But would talking to him mess things up in this dimension? He’s not trying to make too many ripples, so would he be roping Casey into something even Mikey doesn’t know how to handle? Hell, he’s not sure if this Casey even knows about the other turtles or not.

“Are you okay, man? Do you want me to call someone? You’re kinda freakin’ me out with all the staring that’s happening,” Casey has stopped his advance, raising a slightly concerned eyebrow in Mikey’s direction.

“No! Don’t call anyone! You just, ah, surprised me. Yeah, no one is really out this late,” Mikey responds. He swallows, throat dry, and an awkward silence rises in the space between them. Casey tilts his head, brows furrowed in confusion. Mikey fidgets with a small thread coming off of his jacket sleeve, rocking on his heels and doing his best to avoid eye contact.

“So…you have a name, then? All street artists have to have a cool name, and everyone keeps calling you ‘New Banksy’ which is totally lame,” the teen says with an eye roll, taking one more small step forwards.

Mikey’s mind blanks, and before he can stop it he blurts the first thing that comes to mind.

“Orange.”

There’s a beat of silence that follows his abrupt statement. Mikey cringes at the voice crack, mentally cursing his stupids brain's inability to shut up. Finally, after a solid ten seconds of simply staring at each other, the lanky teen’s face lights up.

“That’s a sweet name, man! Very original, totally Casey Jones approved.” He sticks his hand out once again, just a few steps away from Mikey now. “Nice to officially meet you, Orange.”

Mikey stares at the hand for a moment before his eyes flicker back up to Casey’s wide grin. He looks back down at the offered hand, twisting his hands nervously.

Casey doesn’t seem to have any bad intentions. He really does look like he wants to be friends with him, and is trying in his own way to do just that. But can Mikey really afford to take the risk in case he brings the other turtles down on his head? And who knows, maybe this Casey Jones is a part of the Foot Clan just like Cassandra was.

He is lonely, though. It would be nice to have someone other than his own brain to bounce thoughts and ideas off of again. Even though this is going to be a one time thing, maybe Mikey can make the most of Casey’s company before he leaves and never sees him again.

Hesitantly, Mikey reaches out and grasps Casey's hand, giving it a firm shake. “It’s nice to meet you, Casey Jones.”

“Likewise,” Casey responds with a smug smile, then frowns down at their interlocked hands. “Hey, I think your skin is looking a little green–”

“Oh, hah, just some…spilled paint, yeah, nothing to worry about, I’m just your average human teen who is definitely not a ninja or any kind of reptile,” Mikey says, yanking his hand back to fold behind his back. He shoots Casey a beaming smile that he’s sure translates through the cat mask, and Casey shakes his head.

“You’re a weird kid, y’know that?” Casey pauses. “I totally dig it.”

“Thanks, I guess,” Mikey mumbles, swooping past Casey to pick up one of the many cans of paint laying on the ground. A silence stretches on as he picks up the empty cans, and without prompting Casey begins to eagerly help him. Mikey smiles, purely genuine this time, and lifts the lid to a nearby recycle bin where they throw the cans inside.

“So, when are you going to be out next?” Casey suddenly asks. Mikey frowns and tilts his head in confusion. “It looks like you could use some company out here at night, and I know just the guy to help with that.”

Mikey raises his brow, shaking his head. “Sorry, Casey, this meeting was a…one time thing. I’m a lone wolf out here, y’know? It was nice talking a little bit, but I...don’t need any friends, right now. ”

“Well, you may not need any friends, but I could use some,” Casey quickly responds, throwing an arm over his shoulder. It’s a little awkward with their height difference, but Mikey is trapped against his side all the same. “Think about it–Orange and Casey Jones, dynamic duo, setting out each week to make sure New York doesn’t forget the beauty that is street graffiti.”

Mikey does think about it. Briefly, of course. He thinks about how he could have someone to talk to, joke around with, and watch his back for any stray police patrols or the other turtles. And that Casey can act as another deterrent to keep him out of any more trouble with the K-words, as getting the other teen involved in that whole mess would be a nightmare. And, slightly down the road, he imagines how they could hang out together in Mikey’s shelter, and how cool Casey would think it is that he lives by himself in a sewer. Or that Casey could show him the sights of this Not New York, and they can have a fun night out on the town where Mikey can almost forget that he doesn’t belong here.

Mikey thinks about all of these things, and knows, for better or for worse, he shouldn’t go through with it. No matter how much his loneliness is telling him to accept the offer.

His heart sinks as he lurches out of Casey's hold, jumping onto the fire escape before the other teen can react. “As cool as that sounds, I mean it, Casey. This was just a one time thing. I’ve gotta get going, but make sure to take some good pics of my painting, yeah? If you don't, I'll think very angry things about you in the future.”

“Hey, wait–” is the last thing Mikey hears from Casey before he leaps up the fire escape and takes off in the direction of his shelter.

Overall, Mikey would rate that interaction an 8 out of 10. He hasn’t spoken with another person for an entire two weeks, so he can excuse himself for some of the slip ups. At least he didn’t tell Casey his real name.

And with that little interlude over, Mikey can go back to his lonely, regularly scheduled program of surviving.

==========

Casey Jones is making it very hard for Mikey to live out his lonely existence in peace.

Ever since that first encounter a week ago, it seems like every time he ventures onto the surface for food or painting supplies he runs into Casey. Mikey half believes the other teen planted some kind of tracker on him with how frequently it keeps happening. When he is leaping across rooftops–Casey Jones just happens to be sitting on a patio table. When he is leaving Kowalskis–Casey Jones is riding his bike past the alley and figures he needs some help. When he’s scouting places for more murals–Casey Jones just got out of a tutoring lesson and thought he would go have some fun in the alleys of NNY.

He knows that he shouldn’t be talking with him, that it’s likely he’ll eventually reveal something too important or give away his mutant status, but every time Mikey sees the hockey sticks or hears the squeaking of his bike he can feel himself start to smile in anticipation. After two weeks of almost complete solitude, he readily admits how nice it is to finally be seen by someone again.

Mikey can also say with certainty that Casey Jones takes after Cassandra. While this Casey is slightly more soft spoken, they both have that same chaotic fire and stubborn spirit that he has come to adore about the two.

“I’m just saying, in a fight between a giant mutant spider and a magic sheep-man, the spider obviously wins! There’s, like, barely any competition there. Have you seen those hairy legs? Gross,” Casey says from his place on the roof, voice muffled by the white hockey mask over his face.

“Ah, I think you’re looking over the magic part of the equation, Jones. He’s magic, how do you beat magic, huh? Easy answer–you don’t. She’s as good as gone. Perish, you fool,” Mikey giggles over the spray of the can, making nonsensical doodles on the concrete of the roof.

Casey had basically begged Mikey to teach him some artist tricks the last time they had run into each other, and despite his mind telling him it was a bad idea getting this close to Casey his heart had eagerly agreed to Casey’s request. How was he supposed to turn down such a genuine offer to teach his craft?

“You’re on the wrong side of this debate, Orange. As soon as a sheep and spider mutant make the news I’ll be double sure to rub it in your face when the spider is so much scarier than the sheep,” Casey exclaims, stopping his own spray and flipping up his mask with a smug grin. Mikey rolls his eyes and, seeing his guard down, darts up to Casey and sprays a bright pink slash diagonally across the entire front of his black hoodie.

Casey squawks, stumbling away from Mikey who is laughing hysterically at his scandalized face.

“Oh c’mon, you couldn’t have picked a cooler color than pink!?” Casey whines, trying in vain to wipe it off with his sleeves and scowling when it only makes his sleeves pink, too. Mikey has tears in his eyes from laughing, now, and collapses to the roof while pointing a shaking finger at Casey.

It had become a tradition in their previous game of chase for Mikey to spray Casey with a can of paint. At first it was in an attempt to drive the other teen away, but it soon turned into a game of how often he can ruin the other teens clothes. He gives himself extra points if it’s in a ridiculous, neon color.

“Get good, Casey, you can’t be letting your guard down like that,” Mikey says through gasps of air. His cheeks hurt from smiling, and he beams up at Casey from his cross-legged position on the ground. The other teen scoffs, playfully shoving Mikey’s head to the side.

“Oh just you wait, I’ll get you one of these days, and I’ll get you good,” Casey states, pointing a finger into Mikey’s face. If his mouth wasn’t covered he would make an attempt to bite it, but the best he can manage underneath his disguise is a loud raspberry blown in Casey’s direction.

Mikey’s a bit surprised Casey hasn’t caught onto the fact he isn’t human yet. Sure, he always wears his mask and makes sure his hood stays up during their interactions, but there’s only so much he can hide about his turtle-ness. The other teen had clearly seen him (there were even a couple of times they talked directly under the light of a street lamp), but other than that first time Casey hadn’t mentioned anything odd about him. He was already prepared with the ‘skin condition’ excuse if he asked about it, as well as an entire story about how he lost two of his fingers and toes in a freak cooking accident.

As it turns out, this Casey Jones can be pretty oblivious when he wants to be.

“You couldn’t catch me if you tried. I’m just too cool. Honestly, I don’t even know why I humor you,” Mikey jokes. Casey crosses his arms, leaning over him with a challenging smirk.

“Oh please, I could beat up a runt like you in my sleep,” Casey goads, slinging one of his hockey sticks from his back to jab Mikey in the gut. “And I’m the one who’s too cool to be hanging out with someone as young as you. You’d totally ruin my reputation at school if anyone knew we hung out.”

“You think you can beat me in a fight, huh? Let’s see it then,” Mikey rolls backwards, springing to his feet to put a fair bit of distance between them before falling into a loose ready stance. “Come beat up the ‘runt’ , tough guy. Let’s test these non-existent skills.”

“Wait, really?” Casey asks, surprised for a moment before a feral grin spreads on his face. “Get ready for a Casey Jones special, Orange. You’re not going to know what hit you.”

Mikey grins, positively lit up with excitement. The fight might not last more than a few seconds, but this is the most action he’ll have seen his entire time in this dimension. Other than the K-words, of course, but he doesn’t count those as fights. More like complete beat-downs that unconsciously turn lethal.

He snaps back to focus as Casey lunges at him. He’s sloppy, no footwork at all, and Mikey can easily telegraph the moves he is going to make. When the swung hockey stick is just about to hit his head, Mikey ducks. Casey startles and tries to stop his forward movement but stumbles, providing him the perfect opportunity to sweep the other teens long legs out from under him and send Casey to the ground with a grunt.

Smug smirk in place, Mikey leans one foot on Casey’s chest, who’s staring back up at him with wide eyes.

“Cowabunga, baby! That’s what this guy’s talking about!” Mikey exclaims, stepping off of Casey and offering a hand up. Casey grabs it stiffly, still staring at him with wide eyes and a slack jaw when he effortlessly drags him to his feet. He regains his balance, stares at Mikey’s grin for a second longer before he starts to vibrate with excitement.

“Dude, that was so cool! You’ve been holding out on me. Since when did you know how to fight? You’ve gotta teach me some moves! And, again, how the hell are you so strong?! You’re so tiny, but you lifted me up like it was nothing!”

Mikey giggles, pumping his hands up and down as he eagerly matches Casey’s energy. “I know, right!? I could totally show you some stuff!” He forces his voice to go solemn as he spoke next, “But you must promise to only use your skills in the defense of yourself and of others, for that is the way of the ninja.”

Casey nods eagerly, none the wiser he had quoted one of Lou Jitsu’s most famous lines. Whatever Casey didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. And if the other teens' eyes sparkled in what looked like awe at the words, then that was extra cool points in Mikey’s favor.

“Hell yeah! I can actually become Batman now!” Casey exclaims to himself. Mikey has no idea what that means, but he can appreciate the enthusiasm. “Teach me your awesome ways, wise orange one.”

While Mikey had expected this night to end with some tips and tricks traded from his many art pieces, he has to say this is a much more interesting turn. He had never truly taught anyone his ninjutsu skills before, so the beginning is a bit of a learning curve for the both of them. Dr. Delicate touch almost comes out to play when Casey has trouble getting the simplest footwork down.

But, as he finds out, once Casey has gotten the hang of it, there’s almost no stopping him from perfecting the move. After doing a crash course on the basic forms he had been taught as a tot, Mikey moves onto simple katas. Mikey can already tell Casey gravitates towards utilizing brute force the most, so he makes an effort to try and drill more Raph-centric katas into the older teens head.

By the time the sky is beginning to change, Casey can hold his own against Mikey in a spar for a total of thirty seconds. He was still going easy on his new student, of course, but managing that in the span of a few hours? Mikey is incredibly impressed with both his teaching skills and how fast a learner Casey was when it comes to fighting. No wonder he was one of the stars of the hockey team if these things came so easily to him.

“Whoa, was not expecting that much of a workout tonight,” Casey gasps from his position on the ground where Mikey had last laid him flat. He barks out a laugh at his new student and crouches above his head, giving Casey a lazy smile.

“You call that a work out?” Mikey goads, getting a groan and a hand forcefully pushing his face away. Casey sits up and stretches his back with a grunt.

“Uh, yeah. I just got my ass handed to me at least 20 times by a freakishly strong kid. I’d call that a workout.”

Mikey shakes his head, grabbing Casey by the bicep to haul him to his feet. He looks to the sky, and feels a small stab of alarm race through him when he sees the lightening blue of dawn. Quickly he grabs the two discarded cans of paint and shoves them into his jacket. Casey looks on in confusion before also glancing at the sky and groaning.

“Oh man, Dad’s going to kill me for staying out all night. And for ruining another hoodie,” he says with a sigh.

“I’m sure he will, and I really have to get going now,” Mikey rushes out, taking one last look around the roof for any more cans he could have missed. He might have gone a little overboard when packing for what was supposed to be an art lesson and couldn’t quite remember how many cans he had brought with him.

“Thanks for the comforting words, Orange,” Casey grumbles. He sidles over to Mikey as he stuffs the last can of paint into his pocket. “So, wanna show me some more ninja moves the next time we meet up?”

“Yeah, that’s fine, I’m going to go now okay see you later bye–” Mikey shouts as he darts across the roof and leaps to the other building, ignoring Casey whispered ‘whoa, how the fu–’ as he tries to beat the rising sun to his shelter.

Just as the sun peaks over the horizon and he can hear NNY start to truly wake up, Mikey arrives at his designated manhole cover. With a sigh of relief he slips inside to be greeted by the familiar smell of sewage. Home sweet home-away-from-home. He trudges to his sleeping cocoon that now has more blankets than Mikey needs (but they’re so soft he couldn’t just leave them in the store) and collapses into it face first. He squirms, throwing off his disguise, and settles into the nest of blankets.

Maybe these meetings with Casey weren’t so bad. He definitely doesn’t feel as alone anymore, even if the place containing his family is still a gaping hole in his chest. But that was fine, because Mikey was going to get home, and soon. It had almost been a month since arriving in this dimension, after all. Surely his ninpō and mystic powers had recharged by now.

Four days. Four days, and Mikey was going to try to use his mystic powers. That would be plenty of time to warn Casey that he might not be around anymore. And if his powers still didn’t want to work, then he would force them to, damn the consequences. This dimension might not be too bad, especially now that he had Casey, but it still wasn’t home.

All he wants right now is home. To see his family and continue helping them. For once, Mikey hopes that the universe will finally be on his side.

Chapter Text

2012

Despite being the very bane to his quest for April’s heart, Donatello can admit that Casey Jones isn’t half bad. Having a less angry version of Raphael around was slightly terrifying, but his help had come in handy when defending the lair against the Foot.

He would definitely be happier without his presence now that the commotion is over, though.

While Donatello can say for a fact that Space Heroes was nowhere near his favorite show, Casey’s constant scathing remarks about it is making his eyes twitch. Leonardo looks as though he is about to blow a gasket while Raphael laughs along to Casey’s commentary. Michelangelo is off in his own world (like usual) at the end of the couch, wide eyes glued to the flashing lights on his phone screen.

“Jeez, how many times is the captain going to slap that guy?” Casey complains, heaving a sigh at the ceiling. Leonardo whips around from his place in front of the TV with a glare.

“Why are you even still here? Don’t you have school or something tomorrow?” Leonardo growls.

“Nope. It’s Friday, my guy. I’m free to come visit you all weekend~,” he says, stretching his arms above his head.

Donatello sighs, already dreading the coming days. Hopefully he can sequester himself in his lab to work on the retro-mutagen, or Raphael will take Casey up to the surface so they can patrol together the whole time. Really, anything that will get him out of the lair will work for him, as long as he doesn’t have to look at his stupid, smug, gap tooth smile for too long.

Donatello has a gap tooth, too. It wasn’t all that special, and his teeth look better than Casey’s anyway.

A running argument starts between the two, with Raphael occasionally chiming in on either side to stoke the flames. Donatello tunes it out, turning his attention to his phone when it buzzes with a notification labeled ‘Urgent’. He clicks on it, and sits up straighter at the headline from the newly posted article.

“Hey guys,” he starts, but is quickly drowned out by the ongoing argument. Michelangelo spares him a glance, but goes back to whatever is on his phone just as fast. “There’s been a new–” his raised voice similarly fades to the background. Donatello growls, standing up and drawing his bō. He raises it high above his head before slamming the end to the ground with a resounding crack.

Casey, Leonardo, and Raphael all jump, turning to face his pinched expression with wide eyes. Michelangelo yelps and falls off the back of the couch, peeking only the top half of his face above the edge to stare at Donatello.

“We have an update on the paintings, another one was found. And it's older than I would have liked,” he grumbles. The painting depicts a purple metal turtle (that looks suspiciously like Metalhead), with green wisps surrounding the body and a background detailing a pixelated pattern made with lighter shades of purple. He flips the phone around for the others to take a look.

While his brothers study the new painting with grim expressions, Casey looks elated. Donatello takes a moment to frown at the immature response, but quickly realizes that the human teen has no idea why this is important in the first place. In his eyes they’re simply admiring a piece of New York art.

“I suppose I should explain why this painting is important–”

“Oh, sweet! They used my picture in the news! Does this mean I’m famous now?” Casey exclaims. Donatello blinks, pulling the phone back.

A beat of silence echoes around the room. Donatello and his brothers stare at Casey with bewildered expressions and he shifts uncomfortably against the sudden attention.

“What? Is there something on my face?” Casey pokes at his cheek, brow furrowed. Donatello is the first one to break out of the stalemate, invading Casey’s space to shove the phone right back into his sight. He has a lot of new questions and needs answers, and he needs them right now, thank you very much.

“This is your photo?” Donatello asks, pointing at the screen inches from Casey’s face. If it’s true, that would make finding this mutant a much easier process. They would be able to feasibly talk with them knowing that they don't hurt humans, at least.

“Yeah, Orange made me swear to take some good pictures of his mural. I think it was also supposed to be a threat, but since when does Casey Jones listen to threats?” Casey answers with a shrug and smug smile. Raphael turns to the teen by his side with wide eyes, gripping his shoulders.

“You’ve met this guy?” Raphael gives him a small shake, knocking off the hockey mask on the top of his head, sending it clattering to the floor. Casey huffs and pushes him off while simultaneously leaning away from Donatello.

“Yeah, we’ve hung out a bunch of times. Orange is a pretty cool guy, I think you turtles would like him,” Casey pauses, giving Leonardo a critical look from the leader's place frozen on the floor, “Unless you’re only asking me so you can get him arrested. If that’s what this is, then no, I don’t know who Orange is!”

Donatello feels his heart speed up in excitement. Finally they might be able to make some progress on catching the rogue mutant killing Kraang, and all it took was meeting Casey Jones.

He doesn’t know if that’s an equal exchange or not, yet. He’ll have to think it over once they finally catch them.

Donatello shares a quick look with his brothers, all silently sending a mental message to Michelangelo to work his otherworldly charm. His little brother has always been good at getting information out of people with a simple conversation, and it’s a much easier way than Raphael’s typical method.

Michelangelo smirks and cracks his knuckles before sidling up to Casey’s other side, throwing an arm over his shoulder to trap him on the couch.

“We don’t wanna arrest him, man, I just really want to talk to him! As a young, aspiring artist myself–”

“Yeah, you keep believing that Mikey,” Raphael interjects, only to be ignored.

“–it would be really cool if he could show me some tips to make my art as awesome as his own!” Michelangelo waits a beat, then before Casey can respond, “So when can you set us up for a little meeting?”

“Ha, good luck with that,” Casey snorts, raising an amused eyebrow. “Most of the time we just run into each other on the street. And I had to basically beg the kid to teach me anything about what he makes,” he stops, a contemplating expression on his face, before gleefully continuing. “Orange was pretty eager to teach me some of his fighting moves, though. Little guy is really strong for his size!”

“Kid?” Donatello asks quietly at the same time Leonardo perks up even more and mouths ‘fighting moves?’ to himself.

“Yeah, Orange is fifteen. Looks like it, too. I think he has some kinda skin condition or something, though, ‘cause he never takes off his mask or his bandana thing, which is weird. But I figure that if it was important he would have said something about it already.”

Donatello feels slightly faint with that revelation that the mutant they’re hunting is a kid. It was already bad enough that they were responsible for their mutation, but for them to be even younger than they were? While he doesn’t remember what mutating felt like, he knows from witnessing their many enemies that it is excruciatingly painful. And because of their mistake they had subjected a kid to that kind of torture?

No wonder he was lashing out. He was probably hurt, scared, and thought that he had been turned into a monster.

“Wait, this guy can fight? And he’s been teaching you!?” Raphael exclaims, blinking at Casey as if he had betrayed him. Beyond the dawning horror of the new information, Donatello secretly snickers at the thought of Raphael being jealous of someone he’s never even met.

“How’d you think I did so well in our first fight, dude? Orange taught me a bunch of moves! He makes it look easy, too. I haven’t managed to land a hit against him yet. But now that I have you guys training me too, I’ll kick his butt the next time we meet!”

“And when will that be?” Leonardo asks a little too eagerly, only to get a suspicious look from Casey. “I mean, I think we all want to see what…Orange is really capable of, right? For…recruitment purposes?” He gestures for them all to agree, and Donatello and his brothers quickly nod their heads.

Casey hums, looking around at all of them with suspicion. Donatello keeps on his plastic smile, eyes practically sparkling with this new opportunity that’s been dropped into their lap.

“Sorry, like I said, we don’t plan any meet-ups. It just sorta happens sometimes. Like fate, I guess,” Casey finally says with a shrug. “I can ask if I can invite you guys to hang the next time I see him, though. Not sure how he’d react to the whole giant turtle thing, but he’s pretty chill, so I don’t think it’d be a big deal.”

“We can keep an eye out for him when on patrol, too!” Michelangelo announces, barging into Casey’s personal space. The teen cringes but doesn’t move away from his little brother's wide grin. “What’s he look like, so we know what to look for when we’re up there!”

“He wears the same thing every time I see him–black pants, gray gloves, black jacket with these paint splat patterns all over it, and a really dirty cat mask with this weird orange bandanna thing, like you guys wear. I’m starting to think he doesn’t own any other clothes, actually.”

Donatello immediately opens a notes app and jots down everything Casey is saying. He adds the little details of the mutant's height, supposed fighting experience, his ‘skin condition’, as well as his artistic qualities. Every little bit counts, and after such a long time of no new information, Casey is practically gift wrapping a care package for them on everything they need to know.

“Well, that makes it easier for us, at least,” Raphael grumbles, brow furrowed in thought.

“Hey, you guys gotta promise me something, okay?” Casey suddenly asks, tone serious. Donatello and his brothers share a look before giving him a solemn nod. “If you do run into Orange, don’t try to fight him or turn him in to the police. I know you guys are heroes and all, and he is technically breaking the law with his graffiti. But so am I when I go out to bust some heads every night! He’s not doing anything wrong, okay? He doesn’t deserve to be treated like one of your enemies.”

Donatello’s eyes go wide at the little speech, his internal view of Casey shifting just slightly to veer towards impressed. He’s serious about his request. There would definitely be retribution if Casey found out they had broken those conditions. He can respect the loyalty the other teen shows to his ‘friend’, and in the recess of his mind Donatello wonders if Casey would defend and protect them in the same way he is the rogue mutant.

Donatello supposes he should start calling him Orange, now. Better than using ‘mutant’ as a placeholder name every time he comes up in conversation. There’s a new, slimy feeling he can sense growing when thinking about it now, knowing they’ve been talking about a kid this whole time.

“We promise, Case,” Raphael responds. His expression is completely genuine, too. Donatello finds himself surprised he was the one to promise first, considering he was the most bloodthirsty when talking about Orange previously.

“As long as he doesn’t attack first, I don’t think there will be any kind of problem,” Leonardo reassures. Casey looks relieved, slumping down further into the couch cushions with a deep sigh.

“I appreciate it guys, really. Kid seems like he’s been through a lot already, don’t want to be the one adding to that kind of shit-list,” Casey admits, sending them all a soft smile. A chime rings from his phone, and when he reads the notification his face abruptly goes pale. “Oh, Dad’s going to kill me for not putting my sis to bed on time. I gotta get home, remember your promise!”

With that Casey is scrambling out of the lair with his equipment clutched in his arms. Donatello and his brothers wait in silence for a time, making sure Casey is far enough away, before it becomes pure pandemonium.

“Since when is he training with someone else–”

“Why would he keep this to himself–”

“Casey was probably used as a muse, when will it be my turn–”

“Don’t you guys know what this means?!” Donatello announces over his brother's voices, gaining all of their attention. His face hurts from how wide his smile is, and his arms shake with excitement. “We can actually talk to Orange without having to fight him first! We could be on the same side after all!”

“Hold up there, Donnie,” Leonardo placates. A thoughtful expression crosses his face only to be replaced with something much more stoic. “Orange may not be as dangerous as we first thought, but there are still those Kraang murder scenes he needs to explain, as well as how he knows Shredder.”

“But this means he’s friendly!” Michelangelo has just as wide of a grin on his face as Donatello. “I might be able to get my artistic career started for realz!”

“Not the point, Mike,” Raphael snaps, making Michelangelo duck his head halfway into his shell. “Whether he’s friendly to humans or not, he might not be friendly to mutants. Who knows what is going through this kid's head. He’ll be completely unpredictable, and if that means we have to bring him down, then that’s what will happen.”

“Didn’t we just promise Casey that we wouldn’t fight him? You seemed pretty eager to agree to his conditions,” Donatello asks with a furrowed brow.

Raphael rolls his eyes, arms crossed. “I just said that to make sure Casey wouldn’t go and warn the guy we were after him. I don’t care about the stupid promise, if this kid is really as dangerous as we think then we’re going to make sure he’s stopped.”

“I think I’m with Raph on this one,” Leonardo says, prompting Raphael to gesture towards the leader with a smug smile. “We know what Orange is capable of, so we need to be prepared to fight him if he turns aggressive.”

“But we can’t break a promise to Casey! He won’t ever trust us again if he finds out! Aren’t friends supposed to keep their word, no matter what?” Michelangelo exclaims with a pout, pleading eyes wide. While Donatello can’t get behind the theatrics his little brother is pulling, he fully sympathizes with the sentiment of it.

Not that he considers Casey a friend, of course. Just that he can be a helpful pair of extra hands in a fight. Or canon fodder, depending on the circumstance.

“If getting a dangerous mutant off the streets means we have to fight him, then Casey’s trust is what we’re going to sacrifice to do it,” Leonardo states, and Donatello knows by the tone of voice that it’s final.

The slimy feeling in his gut grows with the thought of being ordered to fight Orange. Even though he knows essentially nothing about him, from what Casey has said he can gather that he’s had a rough time ever since he was mutated. Hell, maybe those Kraang murder sites were simply Orange defending himself and not knowing how to control the strength of his new body.

Despite all of this new information, Donatello has a bad feeling that they’re still missing essential pieces of this puzzle. Everything they know fits loosely together, but it’s not perfect. If Orange was killing Kraang every night a mural showed up, then realistically they should have stumbled upon more sites with how much they’ve been patrolling lately. And if he was mutated because of one of the mutagen canisters, and that in turn affected his emotional regulation, then there should be many more headlines of strange occurrences and destruction around the city.

Even with the new information and new orders to try and solve this peacefully to avoid a fight, Donatello feels that they are still blind to what is truly happening.

He knows his worries won’t be listened to, though. His brothers will just shrug it off, saying he’s overthinking again. So Donatello doesn’t say anything, snapping back to reality as Leonardo is laying out the plan.

“Next patrol, we’re going to tail Casey on his route. We’ll be able to see exactly where he frequents, and if we’re lucky, Orange might show up. If he does, we can try to speak to him, but it’s likely he’ll attempt to run at the sight of us.”

“And then we chase him down and…ask him some questions. Piece of cake,” Raphael finishes, rubbing his hands together with a frankly disturbing grin.

“Orange is fifteen, Raph, no one is going to be hurting him. Too much,” Leonardo compromises when Raphael grumbles.

“We shouldn’t be trying to hurt him at all,” Donatello mumbles. He feels himself shrinking at his brother's stares, the slimy feeling returning tenfold at the leader's words. Raphael rolls his eyes at him and mumbles an insult about going ‘soft’, to which Michelangelo harshly punches his arm with a glare.

“Not everyone gets off on the idea of fighting a kid, dude. You’re just very disturbed,” Michelangelo states, taking the brunt of Raphael's smack to the head. Donatello feels a soft smile forming on his face knowing that at least Michelangelo agrees with him.

“It doesn’t matter if Orange is younger than us or not,” Leonardo starts with an air of finality. “He’s proven that he can be extremely dangerous, so if he refuses to talk and decides to get aggressive we will be putting a stop to it. Those are my orders, and everyone is going to follow them. Am I clear?”

For once Raphael eagerly agrees. Michelangelo mumbles his agreement, but he doesn’t seem nearly as cheery about it. Donatello sighs, giving a small nod and rubbing his arm nervously.

The bad feeling in his gut is growing, and Donatello knows with a looming sense of certainty that something is going to go wrong. To be fair, most of the time their plans do, but something about this situation feels distinctly off.

He doesn’t know if any of them are going to be fully prepared when everything finally comes to a head.

Chapter Text

Tonight was the night. Mikey’s been in this dimension for nearly an entire month now, and it’s finally time to end his ‘vacation’ and get back home. That’s what he hopes is going to happen, at least.

Of course, even in this dimension, nothing can go according to plan. Waking up is its own struggle. The first thing that tips Mikey off that tonight was going to be a rough one is the pain. He felt his hands trembling even before he pries his eyes open, and lets out a hiss at the shooting, burning pain running through his hands and creeping up his arms.

Tonight was going to be a Bad Hands Day™, then. It would make concentrating on his abilities a bit harder, but not completely impossible. He still has a chance to make it home tonight.

Mikey takes deep breaths, gently massaging his hands in the nest of blankets. Even through the layers he can feel the cool concrete against the inflamed skin, and the temperature difference makes him wince. It’s definitely not the worst flare up he’s experienced, but it’s still not comfortable.

With a groan Mikey rolls off of his ledge and to his feet, landing on the concrete in a crouch. He squints at his still shaking hands and takes a small breath of relief that at least the scars aren’t glowing again.

Mikey’s thanks his past self for leaving some of the cans of fruit open before he went to sleep yesterday. Then he curses that same past self for eating all of the candy, too. Some comfort food would be just the thing to bolster him through this little obstacle, but no, now he’s stuck with a dried out can of pear slices for his breakfast.

He tries to grip the can, but to his frustration, his hands aren’t listening to him. They curl around the can just fine, but as soon as he tries to grab it off the floor his hand spasms and refuses to put any strength behind the action. Mikey tries again, and again, and again, only to give up with a huff. Biting back the frustration, he plops down in front of the can and painstakingly tries to grab a slice straight from the can. It’s just as hard to maneuver his fingers to grab a slice, but it works eventually.

Finishing the small breakfast is a slow and painfully frustrating process. All of Mikey’s focus is on picking up a single, stupid piece of fruit, and even then plenty of slices slip through his fingers and onto the floor.

The longer it goes on, the more the frustration builds, and the more wetness gathers in Mikey’s eyes. Finally, when the can is empty and the floor is littered with stray pear, the trembling starts to slow, and the shooting pain dulls to a deep ache.

“Good timing, hands,” he mumbles to himself, glaring at his fingers, “Just had to wait until I actually finished eating, didn’t ya?”

It doesn’t matter too much now, though. He’s fed himself, it’s officially night time, and if everything goes the way Mikey hopes it does he’ll be home in his hammock within a few hours.

Standing he goes over to his human disguise, bringing the pants to his face to sniff with a scrunched nose. He better be home soon, because these clothes were really starting to stink. After a thought he leaves the turtleneck and pants off and only zips up his jacket, pulling his cat mask over his head but hesitates to grab the new gloves.

The red ones had been completely unsalvageable after his second K-word outburst. He had kept the blood soaked cloth though, and now they sat abandoned in the corner of his shelter. So he had been forced to go digging through another bin to find new ones. These gloves were made of a scratchy gray wool, and while normally that wouldn't be too much of an annoyance, Mikey knows that right now having them against his skin, even with most of it covered by his black wrapping, would be unbearable. Even the cool air makes him want to shove his hands into an oven to get them to warm up.

Well, he won’t be needing this disguise anymore, anyway. Who cares if he leaves most of it behind?

Mikey longingly looks to his stash of paint cans in the corner. He had hoped to create one last ‘farewell’ mural before he got back home, but with one glance at his hands he dismissed the idea. It would be stupid to strain his hands before his attempt to escape this dimension.

He does need to go and give Casey a proper goodbye, though. It would be rude to leave him in the dark and wondering where he went, and Casey had been a good friend while it lasted. Mikey can confidently say that he’s going to miss this version of Casey, but he’s still ready to get back to the two Jones’ he knows and loves.

With one last look around the place he had called home for a month, Mikey gives it a shaky salute. “It’s been fun, shelter. Hopefully someone else can find this place and give it a use again. Thanks for being my safe space!”

Mikey trots out of the tunnel, leaving behind all that he had gathered. It feels a bit like leaving behind his most treasured possessions. Half of him wants to turn around and at least bring a food label or a blanket with him as proof to his family of where he’s been, but it’s too late now. He’s already gone.

Reaching the sewer grate he tries to push it up with his hands, but just like with the can of pears they aren’t strong enough to lift it. Mikey sighs and pushes with his elbow, instead, and the cover pops off the ground like a bottle cap, flying straight into the air and landing in a nearby garbage can. He blinks, and he can feel his cheeks flushing at how much he overcompensated his strength.

When he pulls himself into the alley, Mikey sees that there’s even a dent in the metal cover. Well, that’s just embarrassing. He knows he’s strong (he’s right behind Raph in terms of brute strength), but he had thought he had gotten a handle on it years ago.

“Hope no one was around to hear that,” Mikey says, using his forearms to grab the cover out of the trash and place it back where it belongs. It’s lopsided, and clearly doesn’t fit the hole anymore, but it’s better than nothing. Wouldn’t want some innocent bystander to fall into a random open manhole. Especially with the thin coat of rain covering everything from the recent storm.

Mikey starts towards the ladder to the fire escape, ready to climb the ladder to get to the roof, but is once again greeted by the sight of his trembling hands before he grabs the first rung. He nearly snarls, ripping his hand away and taking a step away from the ladder. Even more frustrated tears gather in his eyes, but he shakes it off before any can fall.

It’s fine. He should be able to jump to the first landing on the fire escape. Who needs hands that consistently work all the time, anyway? Plenty of people live their lives perfectly fine without their hands at all, so Mikey has no room to complain about it right now.

The execution is a little bit sketchy, but Mikey leaps to the first landing and barely catches himself on the wet metal. From there it’s a piece of cake to get to the roof, where he quickly takes off in the direction of one of his and Casey’s most frequent meeting spots.

Mikey wouldn’t quite call them meeting spots, actually. Really, they’re just the places both of them seem to run into each other the most often, but they also happened to stay in those spots to mess around, too. There was a mutual understanding that Mikey wasn’t going to share any information about himself, which included avoiding any kind of specific meeting place. Even when he had shown Casey a meme on his phone for the first time, he still didn’t ask for his number to keep in contact.

He appreciated it more than Casey could ever know. Not having to worry about the other teen wanting to get all up in his business took a huge weight off of his shoulders when they hung out.

Making quick time by rooftop, Mikey swings by all of their usual meeting places. Granted, it’s still early in the night, but each time he sees an empty roof or alleyway his heart gets heavier. He really hoped he would be able to say goodbye to the one friend he had made here, but he doesn’t want to waste anymore time. He finally reaches the place of their last meeting, and knows he has to throw in the towel.

“See ya, Casey Jones. I hope you get to have a semi-normal life here. You deserve only the best, my man,” Mikey says to the wind, a chill breeze absorbing his words. He stays there for a moment, enjoying the cool, after-rain air on his face.

There’s no excuse to delay the inevitable now. With a deep breath Mikey heads towards a more abandoned area of the city he had scouted before with possible mural ideas. The walls in the district had been too run down for any paintings, but it would be a perfect place to attempt to make the portal home. Just in case something went wrong, he wouldn’t accidentally hurt anyone.

Aside from himself, of course. Mikey was well aware of the fact he could make his problem worse and was choosing to ignore it in exchange for blind confidence.

He arrives at the abandoned district and comes to a stop atop a deserted apartment building that’s only two stories tall. The roof is wide, with a plain concrete roof instead of loose gravel that is so common on these types of older buildings. Overall, Mikey decides it’s a perfectly suitable place to possibly rip his body to pieces if this goes horribly wrong.

Finding a dry place under a small awning by the roof access door, Mikey sits down, quickly adjusting his position to what Draxum taught him. His legs are tucked tight underneath him, back straight, and head facing forward.

Mikey takes one more glance around this dimension before closing his eyes. Hopefully, when he opens them again, he’ll be greeted by the skyline of his New York and not NNY. While this has certainly been an adventure, Mikey won’t be missing this drab, darker version of his home. The only thing that he’ll feel bad about leaving behind is Casey, but he’s sure the other teen will get over it to continue on with his life, one way or another.

Mikey shakes his head, dispelling any kind of regrets from his mind. Thinking back to all of Draxum’s failed lessons, he slows his breathing and tries to concentrate on the air filling up his lungs. He thinks about the cool breeze on his face, the hard concrete on his knees, and the distant sounds of cars and horns. Draxum had said that focusing on his physical senses would help ground him, and while he had always dismissed it before while in the apartment, he sees the usefulness of the skill now that he’s in the midst of a bustling city.

One deep breath in through the mouth, and slowly let it out through the nose. Mikey repeats this process until he feels suitably relaxed in the environment, then begins the hardest part of all the lessons he had sat through.

With one more breath to completely center himself, he begins sorting through the memories. First, the happy ones, filled with joy, laughter, and his family all around him. A smile forces its way onto his face as his ninpō burns brighter, fighting against whatever this dimension is doing to it. It’s still weak, and Mikey doesn’t think he would be able to do much, but it’s more than he’s had before.

Then the less fun memories start to filter into his mind. Nights of crying, particularly hard sessions with his brothers and Dr. Feelings, and flashes of grief in the moments where everything seemed hopeless. Mikey’s eyes start to water, and his ninpō dims in reaction. He would very much prefer not to think too hard about these moments since they don’t matter anymore, they’ve gotten through to the other side of them better off for it, but he knows it’s a necessary step in the process Draxum had tried to teach him.

Mikey lets out a shaky breath. Now comes the part he really doesn’t want to repeat. Draxum had drilled into his head that it was Mikey who controlled his mystic powers, that they didn’t control him, but most of the time it felt like the exact opposite. Because of his powers, he pushes away the bad memories even more than usual, since thinking about them causes them to go haywire. Because of his powers, he has days where he’s limited because of his hands. Because of his powers, Mikey will be lucky if he ever sees his family again.

Unbidden, the image of Leo floating in the prison dimension, the K-word reaching for him with glinting metal claws, flashes in his mind. Mikey twitches, and the scars on his arms start to warm from the inside out.

He really wants to start over with the happy memories now, but he knows he can’t. This kind of thinking is what led him to this dimension in the first place, so replicating it has to bring him back, right?

Despite his wants Mikey pushes forward, feeling the burning in his arms grow as more memories bury themselves deeper into the forefront of his mind. All of the events of the invasion, all of the hopelessness and grief and suffering and uncertainty. A golden glow filters through his eyelids, and more magma heat pours into his arms.

Mikey’s mouth goes dry, heart beating faster and faster as the memories keep replaying themselves, over and over in his mind. He vaguely acknowledges that it’s not just his hands shaking now, but rather his entire body is shivering like he had just jumped into a freezing river.

The heat is nearly unbearable now. It’s spread from his arms and is slowly traveling across his shoulders and creeps into his shell.

He wants to stop. The memories keep coming and the glow from behind his eyes keep getting brighter. Mikey knows that he can do this, he just has to keep going, has to push through the terrible memories so he can get to the happier ones. So he can get home and start creating even happier memories to replace the horrors he is currently seeing.

The wildfire in his veins keeps growing. But he can’t stop, he has to get home, back to his family and friends, they need him to help them with their problems, they’ll completely fall apart without him and the fights between his brothers will only get worse, Mikey knows that if he just keeps pushing through he’ll get back eventually and the pain will stop–

He gasps, falling out of his rigid stance as his ninpō blinks out of existence. Mikey’s muscles lock up and he collapses to the side, trying in vain to breathe, but it’s like his lungs have stopped listening to his brain.

Almost as fast as it happened it’s over, and he’s left heaving for breath against the cold concrete, entire body shaking. The burning fire is gone from his veins, replaced with tendrils of cold and ice. He brings up a shaking, wet hand and rips the cat mask off his face, dropping it to the ground.

For once, Mikey's mind is blank. All he can focus on is the dim spark of his ninpō. It’s smaller than he’s ever felt it, and fear consumes his entire being. Some unknown instinct, however, tells him that he’ll recover from this in time. He doesn’t quite believe it because what the shell was that, but he supposes that since his ninpō is still there things are already better than they were and what they could have been.

Slowly warmth leeches back into his veins, returning it to normal. His breathing evens out, and while his heart is still pounding he can feel it slowly starting to relax.

Mikey’s mind swims with a newfound grogginess that he has never felt before, not even when he had spent 72 hours straight trying to perfect the best Japanese-style Yokai dishes he could find. His eyes peel themselves open, and his vision is blurry and hazy beyond belief, but he can see that he is still on the same rooftop he started on in NNY.

The scars on his hands are glowing dimly in front of his face, his fingers twitching uncontrollably. Tiny trails of blood leak from a multitude of new cuts running along the edges of the scars. He groans, scrunching his eyes shut and letting out a single tear for his failure.

Why couldn’t he just get through all the pain already? Why did it have to linger? Mikey’s not an idiot, he knows he has P-TSD, his entire family does, but it’s not supposed to affect him like this. He’s the one who helps others with their P-TSD, so why can’t his brain just accept that he has it and move on with his life helping others overcome their own hurdles?

Well, there’s no use thinking about it while stranded on a rooftop. Mikey’s attempt at getting home had been a complete bust, and now he’s back at square one. Might as well head back to his shelter to recuperate and maybe figure out what happened with his ninpō.

At least he would get a chance to say a proper goodbye to Casey, this time.

Decision made Mikey goes to move but finds his body barely responding to his demands. His limbs are slow and weak, legs aching like never before when he finally pushes himself back into a kneeling position. Nausea pools in his stomach and when he pries his eyes open a wave of dizziness so strong hits him and nearly pulls him back to the ground.

He pauses on his knees, closing his eyes and trying to orientate himself. When the spinning behind his eyes stops and he doesn’t feel like he’s going to vomit up his intestines, Mikey staggers to his feet. He presses his palms to his eyes until he sees stars, then blinks them open to adjust back to the street lamps lining the street.

Mikey doesn’t know how it’s possible, but he feels decidedly worse now than he did after he hopped dimensions. That’s not how that’s supposed to work, is it?

Whatever the case, he tiredly passes over the thought, already dreaming of his nest of blankets back at his shelter. Getting there is going to be a challenge with how bone-tired he is, and it’s times like these Mikey wishes he could just hail a cab or call an Uber. It would be so much easier than having to walk all the way back.

Alas, his turtle-ness makes it so he has to make the journey on his own two feet. Sometimes being a mutant teenage turtle really sucked.

“Well, this was not how I’d hoped tonight would go,” Mikey grumbles, blinking at the hoarseness of his own voice. He wasn’t unknowingly screaming during that whole thing, was he? Because that would be both alarming and embarrassing.

Mikey sighs, dragging his feet towards the edge of the roof towards the fire escape. Just as he manages to lift his leg over the edge a white van pulls into the alley below. He freezes for a single moment before he hits the floor, ducking behind the ledge and cursing his luck.

Whatever, he didn’t want to get back to his shelter as soon as possible to pass out, anyway. He can wait this out, no problem. If he doesn’t fall asleep first, that is.

Mikey hears the doors to the van open, but the only footsteps he hears are large and heavy as they walk across the length of the alley. And, oddly enough, it seems like the person below is scenting the air, a bit like what Guss had done when he was chasing Mikey and the others through Big Mama’s Hotel.

“Well, Bradford? Are you done? Our…friends should be here any minute, and we need to make sure they don’t get destroyed this time,” a silky woman's voice asks. There’s only a grunt in response, ‘Bradford’ getting closer to the fire escape below. Mikey hears one more long inhale before things go silent again.

He waits, trying to figure out what was going on and how soon he could make his escape. There is always the option of trying to hop to the other roof in the opposite direction, but with how strained and tired his muscles are Mikey doubts he would be able to make the jump, especially with the slick surfaces. It doesn’t matter too much, though, he supposes. They have no idea he’s even here, and soon enough they’ll meet up with whoever they need to and be on their way–

“I smell turtle,” a very deep voice growls, way too close to where Mikey is for his comfort. All he hears is the creak of the fire escape on the other side of the ledge before he’s grabbed by his shell and smashed into the roof face-first.

Mikey struggles, the rough grit of the roof digging into his skin. His body screams at the rough treatment after his little experiment gone wrong, and a massive hand keeps him pinned to his plastron as whoever (or whatever) is above him lets out a low growl. He tries to get his feet under him to push the hold off but is crushed further into the roof for his attempts, shell giving a twinge at the pressure.

“You thought you were sneaky, little turtle?” the one pinning him growls. “I could smell you as soon as you arrived. And that disguise does little to help you.”

Mikey ceases his struggles, lying limp in the tight hold and swallowing with a dry throat. Physically struggling is getting him nowhere, only further sapping his strength. Time to pull out the charm, it seems.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, man. There’s absolutely no turtles here, no sir-ee! You must be delusional, have you seen a doctor lately?” Mikey says in the most chipper voice he can manage. His captor snarls and in a single movement he is flipped onto his shell and his hood is being ripped clean off by long, black claws. He yelps, staring at the shredded remains of his hood as it’s tossed to the side. “C’mon, dude! That’s the only one I got–”

Mikey cuts himself off, eyes wide as he stares into the jaws of a very large, very menacing skeleton dog. His lips are pulled into a snarl, but his head tilts in confusion as Mikey’s face is revealed in all of its turtle-y glory.

“Bradford, I order you to tell me what’s going on! Have we been compromised by the Hama–” a Japanese woman begins, walking off of the fire escape towards where Mikey is held prisoner by the beast's claws. Her sleek black hair is as stiff as the metal armor she wears over the black skin tight suit, and Mikey finds himself slightly underwhelmed by her make-up skills.

She’s obviously trying to look intimidating, but it’s failing miserably.

Her eyes widen as she catches sight of Mikey under the dog's paw, a sly smirk lighting up her face before it, too, crumples in confusion as she registers the situation.

“What? I know I’m awesome, but you guys seem a little speechless,” Mikey quips, subtly trying to squirm away again when he realizes the dog's claws have released some of their pressure. Evidently, that’s the wrong approach, as the beast snaps out of whatever trace he was in to growl in his face. And man, does this guy’s breath smell like death.

“Who are you? Where are the other turtles?” the woman asks, kneeling above Mikey's head with a raised brow.

Mikey has a choice to make, now. These two obviously know the other turtles in this dimension, and based on their looks and general vibe they have to be bad guys. He can either play dumb and pretend he has no idea what they’re talking about in the hopes he’ll be let go in peace, or he can pretend he knows the other turtles and give out whatever fake information these people are after.

Either way, Mikey is screwed. He may be good at playing innocent and diverting attention, but lying to peoples faces is not one of his strong suits. That skill is all Leo’s.

Better not start off this interaction by completely lying, then, right?

“I don’t know any other turtles in this New York, but I suppose it’s possible I missed more giant turtles running around. Maybe they’re even long lost siblings of mine? Do you have their numbers, we could network ‘cause, imma be honest, I don’t have a ton of friends here–”

“Stop talking,” the dog growls, flexing his fingers around Mikey's chest. He tries to hold back the wince at the feeling of his ribs getting squeezed, but it filters through anyway.

“Lessen up, Bradford. We don’t want to kill him. Not yet, anyway,” the woman says, and Bradford loosens his grip with snarl. “Once again, who are you? What are you doing here?”

“Uh, my friends call me Orange. You’re definitely not my friend, though, just so you know. Friends don’t really threaten to kill each other. But I’m sure when you let me go we can have a nice talk over some pizza—”

“Are you in any way related to Hamato Yoshi?” the woman interrupts, a suddenly intense look on her face as she draws a small dagger from her belt to dangle in front of Mikey's face. He follows the movements of the knife, unimpressed with the intimidation tactic.

“Nope. Never heard of him. Sounds like a cool guy, though, he’d probably treat me a lot better than you guys are–”

“Bradford, bring him back to the van. I believe Father will want the final say in what happens to this new freak,” she orders, turning on her heel after sheathing her knife to stride back down the fire escape.

“What about the shipment of robots?” Bradford asks, using the hand not pinning Mikey’s shell to the ground to grab both of his arms in his claws. Mikey winces at the hard pressure on his scars, feeling the small wounds from before open once again. The blood from the previous bleeding is dry on his arms, now, creating a very unpleasant crusting on his arms.

“It can wait. Father will want to know of this development more than he cares about adding more robotic slaves to his army,” she replies, walking down the stairs to the alley. Bradford grunts, lifting Mikey into the air with ease. He kicks out his legs in an attempt to reach his captors arm but Bradford quickly adjusts so Mikey is out of range.

Mikey continues to strain against the hold as they make their way to the edge of the roof. Instead of using the fire escape Bradford simply jumps down, jostling Mikey’s arms enough to make him yelp in pain at the rough treatment.

“Hey! I’m not going anywhere with you creeps! This is kidnapping, and that’s a crime! Illegal! I can get a lawyer! Do you even know who my father is!?” Mikey protests as the woman approaches him with a long spool of chain from the back of the white van.

How cliche do you have to be to kidnap someone in a white van?

“You’re lucky I am loyal to my Master, otherwise you’d be dead meat, turtle,” Bradford growls in his face. He releases his grip on his arms, but before Mikey can even attempt to break free they’re wrenched uncomfortably around his shell by the woman behind him and wrapped at least four times in the thick chain. He wrenches his head around to glance at the woman’s stern face with a frown.

“Don’t you think that’s a bit overkill? I’m just a small, weak turtle! You can be assured that I absolutely will not be able to escape with just one layer of chains, trust me.”

“Grab a gag while you’re at it too, will ya? If I have to listen to it babble the entire way I may do more than lightly maim ‘em.”

“You’re not going to touch him, Bradford. He must be in good condition when I present him to Father,” the woman orders, receiving grumbles from Bradford. She notices the continued tremor running through his arms as well as the blood and scars on his hands and raises a brow. “Well, slightly damaged, I suppose.”

“I resent that, I am in mint condition, thank you very much,” Mikey snips back as his legs are grabbed next and wrapped in even more chain than his arms. He wasn’t exactly exaggerating when he said it was overkill. His muscles are so weak that he doubts he’d even be able to take on the worm guy and win.

As all of his possible escape routes get cut off, Mikey finds himself becoming more nervous. A pit in his gut starts to grow as the consequences of what was happening finally start catching up to him. Getting kidnapped in general was bad enough, but these two know the other turtles and are obviously enemies. Whoever this lady’s father is and wherever he’s being taken will not be a fun time, Mikey can already tell that much.

Speaking of, does he even know what this ladies name is?

“Y’know, since you’re kidnapping me and all, I think it would be respectful if you at least told me your na–mph!” Mikey is muffled by a rag being shoved into his beak and tied tight around his head. It’s rough against his tongue and tastes faintly of motor oil, making him gag.

Couldn’t kidnappers be bothered to wash their shit?

“Much better,” Bradford rumbles before tossing Mikey the six feet into the back of the van. He lands on his shell and arms with a yelp, glaring back at the dog who gives a raspy chuckle. His arms pulse beneath him, now, needle-like jabs of pain shooting through them at the rough treatment.

“Get a move on, Bradford. Make sure he doesn’t try anything on the way back,” she says, brushing past Bradford and out of Mikey’s line of sight. He hears a door open and close before the ignition of the van turns on. Taking a look around the van from the floor, he sees multiple weapons hanging on the walls along with rope and more chain. The van rocks as Bradford squeezes inside, kicking Mikey to the side of the van to make more room.

Mikey winces as his arms bang against the metal and glares daggers at him. The large mutant merely rolls his eyes and reaches to close the doors. As soon as they slam shut they’re enveloped in darkness and the van slowly starts moving out of the alley.

Swallowing, Mikey closes his eyes to reconcile just how wrong tonight had gone. His attempt to get home was a complete failure, something very bad happened with his ninpō, he feels about as strong as a pigeon, and now he’s being kidnapped by people he’s confident are the other turtle's enemies.

There’s not too many ways this night can get worse than it already has, right?

Chapter Text

2012

As they soon find out, Casey sticks to his own neighborhood on solo patrols. He occasionally pivots to visit a random alley or rooftop, but doesn’t stay long before moving on to the next block with a frown.

Probably looking for Orange, Raphael thinks, not taking his eyes off his friend for a second. They’ve been tailing him for the majority of the night, now, but other than a couple of muggings and an attempted assault, there’s been no sign of their resident rogue mutant.

Raphael sighs, catching sight of Michelangelo out of the corner of his eye. He shoots his little brother a glare from across the street when it becomes clear that, once again, Michelangelo isn’t taking the mission seriously. He’s doing pull-ups on the billboard on top of his roof, and if Raphael had a clear way to get over there he’d smack him across the head and make him focus.

They needed to catch Orange, and soon. The kid may be sticking to only killing Kraang for now, but it was only a matter of time before he switched it up and started hurting real people. And with how close Casey seemed to be becoming with him, his friend was the easiest target when that switch inevitably got flipped.

Murder sprees in general were bad enough (although he felt it justified with their enemies and his brothers, sometimes), and there was no way Raphael was going to leave Casey's safety up in the air like that.

No one gets to hurt his friends and family other than him.

Casey’s on the move again. He picks up his bike and hops on, cycling down the dark sidewalk without a care in the world. Raphael slinks through the shadows from the fire escape he had been perched on and makes his way to the roof. At the top he spots Leonardo already hopping from their roof to the next, glancing back and signaling Raphael to hurry it up.

Raphael glares and throws up his middle digit, cursing the fact they only have three fingers to use. The message gets across, though, and Leonardo rolls his eyes as he continues in the same direction Casey is heading.

He picks up the pace behind the leader, easily catching up within a few minutes and throwing him a smug smile that Leonardo resolutely ignores. Michelangelo and Donatello follow them from across the street on the other roofs, making sure Casey doesn’t make any erratic turns and they lose him. The other teen can get some pretty good speed on his bike, and while they’re faster than the normal human, their stamina will run out eventually.

Raphael’s getting close to calling this night a complete bust. With how many pit stops his friend has made without any luck, the chances of catching Orange tonight are becoming more slim by the minute. Which also means that Raphael won’t be able to kick any mutant ass tonight for putting Casey in danger, and that will always put a damper on his mood.

Casey skids to a stop at a corner store after a few minutes' ride, parking his bike and removing his mask to go inside. Raphael perches beside Leonardo on the edge of the roof, crouching to keep an eye on Casey through the store's small windows. His brother huffs, a frown on his face that shows he’s thinking about something that he obviously isn’t happy about. Probably the same thing Raphael has already accepted—that this patrol was a complete bust.

“You ready to call it a night? If this Orange kid hasn’t shown up by now, I doubt he will any time soon,” Raphael says to the leader, raising a brow in his direction.

Leonardo sighs, glancing at Raphael for a moment before stealing his gaze back on Casey who emerges from the store with an arm full of snacks that he shoves gleefully into his backpack. Raphael isn’t sure if he stole them or he found money somewhere to buy them, but either way he is making Casey share the packets of fruit snacks he sees shoved to the bottom of the backpack when he sees him next.

He’ll fight Casey for them if he has to, fruit snacks are worth any battle.

“Just a little while longer. I have a good feeling about tonight, trust me,” Leonardo replies, watching as Casey gets back on his bike and starts pedaling away, now back towards his apartment. Raphael rolls his eyes, playfully shoving Leoanrdos arm.

“Whatever you say, fearless. Not like your ‘feelings’ have ever led us wrong before,” Raphael gets a glare in return for the snark, but he knows Leonardo can’t prove him wrong. A shiver works its way through his body from the chill, after-rain air, but he knows he’ll warm back up as soon as they get moving again.

Raphael goes to stand but is quickly pulled back down by his weapons strap. He opens his mouth to ask what the hell Leonardo’s doing, because they’re losing Casey fast, when the leader points down the street. When he turns to see what’s caught his brother's attention, a white van rolls down the road. Raphael is about to ask if Leonardo’s gone mad in old age when the van passes under a streetlamp and the occupant becomes plainly visible.

His shoulders tense as he glares at Karai from their perch, the girl none-the-wiser to the fact that she’s now being watched as she continues driving down the street below them.

“What the heck is the Foot up to now?” Raphael groans, not taking his eyes off of the van as it starts to pass them.

“I don’t know, but it can’t be anything good,” Leonardo responds in a grim tone. He pulls out his T-Phone and shoots a message to Donatello and Michelangelo, who had stopped pursuing Casey when they saw Raphael and Leonardo stop across the street. Raphael sees the glow of Donatello’s T-Phone as he pulls it out to look at the message, Michelangelo basically climbing over him to see it, too. The genius straightens and sends them a nod, already moving and dragging Michelangelo along to follow the van.

“Looks like we have a change of plans tonight,” Leonardo says before taking off in the same direction as Karai. “Let’s go find out what the Foot Clan is up to and put a stop to it.”

“Smashing some evil robots? Maybe this night won’t be a complete bust after all,” Raphael eagerly responds, following on the heels of the leader with a crack of his knuckles.

It becomes clear the longer they follow that she is beelining towards the Foot Clans home base. Raphael shoots Leonardo a questioning look, getting a nod back and picking up the pace to keep track of Karai. Looks like they’ll be trying, once again, to sway Karai to their side once they make it to their final destination.

Raphael still doesn’t approve of the delusional idea of trying to get Karai to ‘see the light’, as Michelangelo calls it. She has made it clear, time and time again, that she wants to stay with Shred-head and doesn’t believe for a second that Splinter is her real father. Which is completely fine with Raphael, he wasn’t looking to get more siblings any time soon.

His three brothers are annoying enough by themselves, they didn’t need anyone else to add to the mix.

They finally reach the tall, cathedral-like building of the Foot Clans base. The van stops out front and Karai steps out as soon as the ignition falls silent, being greeted by four Foot-bots emerging from the building's shadows.

Raphael and his brother seamlessly blend into the darkness of the building directly across the street, watching in rapt attention as Karai heads to the back doors of the van. He briefly spots Michelangelo and Donatello hopping onto the cathedral itself, spreading apart so they won’t be seen from below. It seems like Michelangelo is finally taking the mission seriously now, too, which is always a pleasant surprise.

His attention flicks back to Karai as she yanks the doors open with the four Foot-bots flanking her from behind. From this angle Raphael can’t see what’s inside, but he draws his sai’s out of his belt anyway. When it comes to the Foot Clan, he’s always ready and eager for the inevitable fight.

“Bring the freak inside, but don’t remove any of the restraints. I will send a message to Father requesting an audience,” Karai announces to the back of the van before turning on her heel and marching up the steps, two of the robots following her.

Raphael watches raptly as Rahzar emerges from the van, grumbling about being ordered around by a child. Karai grinds to a halt at the top of the steps to glare at the mutant, snarl on her face. Rahzar simply rolls his eyes with a grunt, reaching back inside the van to hoist a wriggling, very not human figure over his shoulder.

Leonardo inhales sharply beside him and is drawing his katana’s in the very next moment. Raphael raises an eyebrow at the drastic response to Rahzar’s entrance and then squints down to see exactly who (or what) he is holding over his shoulder.

His own eyes go wide as he spots the black, blue and purple splatter jacket over the small form, and then his jaw unconsciously goes slack as he registers the green skin, orange bandanna, and familiar beak that Raphael and all of his brothers share.

Well, even if this night ends worse than expected, they at least managed to complete their main goal of finding Orange. And now they know he’s also a mutant turtle. Who is currently being brought into the Foot Clans home base in chains and does not look happy about that fact if his seething glare is anything to go by. He squirms violently in Rahzars hold, looking like nothing more than a sack of potatoes flung over the large mutant's shoulder.

Before Raphael can even comment on the fact that there’s another mutant turtle Leonardo is jumping off their perch and shooting the grappling gun. As soon as it lodges into the concrete his brother is swinging in towards the two Foot-bots stationed by Rahzar, knocking both of them to the ground sparking and brandishing his katanas towards the larger mutant.

Raphael curses under his breath, aiming his own grappling gun to swing down beside Leonardo and shoot him a glare. He knows immediately Leonardo’s entire attitude towards Orange changed as soon as he saw that he was a turtle like them being kidnapped by the Foot. The idiot has too big of a heart for his own good and jumping into danger because of it is going to get him hurt down the road.

Well, if Raphael isn’t there to protect him, at least.

Rahzar snarls at them, unceremoniously dropping Orange head first on the ground to brandish his claws. Orange falls to the road with a muffled yelp behind his gag but quickly recovers, whipping his head towards the commotion with wide eyes. Raphael locks eyes with him for a moment to see the kid's shock that is quickly overcome with uncertainty as he tries to wiggle away from Rahzar.

“No! Don’t let them take the other turtle!” Karai orders from the top of the steps. She takes a step forward but is quickly intercepted by Michelangelo’s ‘booyakasha!’ as he drops down from above and harshly whacks the end of his weapon into her skull. Donatello follows closely after and knocks down the two remaining Foot-bots with deadly accuracy, sending the blade attached to the end of his bō cleanly through their robotic heads.

Raphael glances over to Karai as she quickly recovers from the hit and turns on the offensive but then has to sloppily block a slash from Rahzar with his sai’s. He jumps back, readying for another hit when Leonardo intercepts the next strike, slicing the back of the larger mutant's hand. Rahzar howls and charges wildly at his brother, claws swinging. Katana’s block every fast paced hit as they dance across the road and further away from the Foot base. Raphael lunges forward with both sai raised to divert the other mutant’s attention but stops in his tracks at Leonardo’s barked orders.

“Raph, get the kid out of here! We can’t let him be taken by the Foot!” The leader grunts, leaping back as Rahzar cracks the concrete where Leonardo had just been with a fist.

“Are you kidding me!? I’m not just going to leave you guys here!” Raphael counters as he jumps and lands a kick against the back of Rahzars head, causing him to turn and slash at him with a snarl.

Leonardo shoves him away and deflects the strike with the dull side of his katana, sending him a glare.

“That’s an order, Raph! We’ve got this covered, just get him to safety!” Leonardo yells as he catches a hard hit to the plastron, sending him onto his shell. He quickly rolls around to recover and sends Raphael a warning look from his crouch before Rahzar is charging at the leader once again.

Raphael growls, reluctantly sheathing his sai and jogging over to the kid who has somehow managed to crawl halfway across the street on his plastron during the commotion. He sneaks a look at Michelangelo and Donatello who are holding off Karai near the entrance to the base. Her face is frantic as she keeps trying to get past them with eyes locked on Orange, but is intercepted every time and driven further back by his brothers.

Yeah, he knows his brothers can handle themselves. That doesn’t mean he has to like it when he gets excluded from the ass-kicking. Especially when it’s Karai and the Foot Clan.

Raphael skids to a stop beside the squirming turtle, harshly rolling him onto his shell. He is met with wide eyes and a shaking head as Orange tries to wriggle away from him in his chains. Raphael rolls his eyes and grabs the kid's arm, making sure he has his entire attention.

“Look, I want nothing more than to kick your ass for what you’ve been doing around the city, but we need to get out of here first. So don’t squirm when I pick you up or I will give you straight back to the Foot Clan and Shredder, got it?” Raphael says, glaring at Orange as he abruptly stops struggling.

Orange makes no move to acknowledge what he’s said, simply staring with narrowed eyes where Raphael is tightly gripping his bicep. A few more seconds pass as the kid scans the surrounding area with a critical gaze. Just as Raphael is about to give up and throw him through the Foot base window he looks back to him and gives a sure nod.

“Good, and don’t think I won’t drop you if you start to struggle,” Raphael grunts before scooping Orange into a fireman's carry. Orange squeaks behind his gag as he shifts the kid to get more comfortable, then starts his sprint down the street and away from the ongoing fight. He hears Karai shriek about letting him get away and picks up the pace as much as possible with a fifteen year old turtle mutant strapped to his shoulders.

Thankfully his threat seemed to be taken to heart, as other than a couple of grunts and wheezy breaths when Raphael stumbles, Orange is completely still. When the sounds of fighting are faint enough he turns sharply into an alleyway, using his momentum to jump onto a dumpster and then to the first platform of a fire escape. He wheezes from the extra weight of the landing, trudging his way to the rooftop.

Raphael stops for a moment to scan the area and catch his breath. The roof is deserted, and the next thing he hears is a small explosion from the Foot Base before all goes quiet. His brow furrows in worry before he reassures himself that it was probably just Donatello making a diversion for them to escape.

With a sigh he dumps Orange onto the ground where he glares at him, sitting up with a small grunt and rattle of chains. Raphael raises an eyebrow then kneels beside him and rips out the gag. Orange roughly coughs, spitting onto the ground as Raphael takes the brief moment to draw a sai and poke it into the tip of the kid's beak when he quiets.

Not enough to scratch, but definitely enough to be intimidating.

“That’s a little unnecessary, considering I’m still in chains,” Orange says, and Raphael’s grip on his weapon falters slightly at the squeaky voice. Raphael wasn’t really expecting him to sound so young. “It would be very helpful if you removed them, by the way, so I can go about the rest of my night–”

“Oh no, let me tell you how this is going to work,” Raphael interrupts, jabbing the tip of his sai more forcefully into his skin. Orange raises an unamused brow, glancing down at the weapon then back up at Raphael. Brat. “We’re going to have a little talk about what exactly you’ve been up to, especially now that the Foot’s involved. Then, we’re going to take you to a secure location to make sure you aren’t able to hurt anyone anymore.”

They both fall into silence after the proclamation, neither breaking eye contact as the moment stretches on.

“Hey, quick question, do you happen to feel the universe being ripped apart right now?” Orange suddenly asks, tilting his head with narrowed eyes. All of Raphael’s thoughts about the upcoming interrogation screech to a halt, looking at the kid in front of him with more confusion than he’s ever felt in his entire life.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Raphael sputters, slowly lowering his sai from Orange's face in shock. This is not how he thought this conversation would start. He expected a lot more whining and complaining.

“Y’know, do you feel off? Have any weird feelings? Are your atoms being forcibly torn apart as we speak?”

Oh, Raphael knows what’s happening now. Orange isn’t just a kid who likes to graffiti and go on murder sprees, he’s also clinically insane.

“No? What is that even supposed to mean?” Raphael asks before shaking his head to get rid of the confusion. “Don’t try to distract me, it won’t work.”

“It was a genuine question! Just needed to make sure I wasn’t causing the end of the universe. You know that feeling, right?” Orange asks with a bright smile, completely chipper now that he had a concrete answer for his question.

“Can’t say I do,” Raphael deadpans in response to the suddenly bubbly kid in front of him. Thankfully, before Orange can go and ask any more insane questions, Donatello climbs onto the roof closely followed by Leonardo and Michelangelo.

Raphael stands and fully sheaths his sai, raising an eyebrow at the slight char and smoke covering their skin. Beside him the chains clink as Orange turns to his brothers with a bright smile, and Raphael crosses his arms to glare down at him before turning his attention back to the others.

“You made sure you weren’t followed, right?” he asks. The leader rolls his eyes and pushes past Raphael to stand in front of Orange, sending him a mildly confused smile before turning back to Raphael.

“Donnie had that covered, even if he didn’t make sure we were all clear before activating the diversion,” Leonardo replies with an eye roll, making Donatello huff behind him.

“It’s not my fault you didn’t listen when I said to move,” the genius grumbles, glancing at Orange with a frown as he keeps smiling giddily at them all, eyes almost sparkling.

Orange is an odd one, that’s for sure. Probably why Casey latched onto him so quickly.

“Dude, you gave us like five seconds to get away. We may be fast, but we’re not that fast,” MIchelangelo retorts, bouncing up to Orange and returning his smile with one just as bright. He plops down next to the kid before Raphael can reprimand him and starts to fiddle with the chains restraining his legs.

Leonardo bats his hands away with his foot, sending Michelanglo a flat look. “Not yet, Mikey. We need to ask Orange some questions first.”

“Yeah, and how about I get us started,” Raphael says, pushing his way back to be front and center in front of Orange who is still, somehow, smiling wide. “How exactly did you end up with the Foot Clan in the first place, huh? Did some kind of deal go wrong and they were going to make you pay for it?”

“Nope!” Orange chirps, “Just a case of the wrong place, wrong time. They thought I was one of you guys at first, actually.”

“That makes sense,” Donatello chimes in, kneeling next to where Raphael is looming over Orange and sending the kid a knowing smirk. “They don’t really like us if you couldn’t tell, so another turtle mutant popping up probably made them attack on sight.”

“Yeah, I kinda figured that out,” Orange drawled.

“Speaking of–holy crap, you’re a turtle! Like us!” Michelangelo exclaims, practically vibrating where he sits cross-legged next to Orange. “And you have tiny little spots on your legs and face which is so cool! Were you holding your pet turtle when you mutated or did it just happen like that–”

Leonardo harshly clears his throat, catching even Orange's attention as his mouth snaps shut from where he was about to answer Michelangelo. “Can we have a talk about this, guys? We need to figure out what we’re going to do with him, sooner rather than later. There’s probably Foot-bots trying to track us down as we speak.”

“Um, I am right here, y’know, still chained up–”

“What do you mean? We’re totally bringing him home, right? He’s hurt, his arms are all bloody!” Michelangelo says, pouting at Leonardo. The leader hastily avoids their little brother's gaze, and Raphael shakes his head in annoyance.

“No way we’re bringing him to the lair. Have you all just forgotten what he’s capable of?” Raphael snaps. He glances around, and as his brothers avoid his eyes his temper steadily rises. He turns to Leonardo with a snarl. “You can’t seriously be considering this. That’s a terrible idea! Who’s to say he won’t rat us out to our enemies? And what will Master Splinter have to say, huh?”

“Raph, c’mon, he’s just a kid–” Donatello starts to say, but Raphael quickly cuts him off, utterly dumbfounded that they are considering bringing an unknown mutant back home, where it’s supposed to be safe.

“It’s not like he’s five years old! He’s 15, not an actual kid!” Never mind that ‘kid’ has been the nickname Raphael’s been calling him ever since he found out his age. They’re all technically still kids, but they don’t need to acknowledge that and start babying each other because of it.

“Yeah, I’m not a kid!”

“You need to shut it, Orange, before I make you,” Raphael growls as he points a sai back into his face. Orange merely shrugs, causing Raphael’s eye to twitch in annoyance at the blatant disregard for the threat.

“Raph, you need to calm down. We haven’t decided anything yet, but wouldn’t it be safer for everybody if we could keep an eye on him?” Leonardo says, placing himself slightly between Orange and Raphael.

He huffs, glaring down at his feet and then at Orange. He gets a grin and a wink in response which has him snarling and nearly lunging until Donatello stands to block his path with his bō.

“Chill out, Raph,” Michelangelo says from his position still sitting beside Orange, then shrinks back when he turns his glare onto his little brother.

“‘Chill out’? No! We’re about to bring a complete stranger, one we know for a fact has been going on a killing spree, right into our home! Why should I be chill about this?!” Raphael exclaims.

How can they not see how bad of an idea this was? It was different with the homeless man, he was harmless and no one would believe that nut-case about giant talking turtles. Even when Casey had discovered the lair it was better than what his brothers wanted to do right now. Why on Earth were they going to trust a known threat and potential enemy with the location of their home?

“It’s not like I’m going to say anything about where you live. I’m pretty sure the only person I’ve talked to knows about you guys, anyway,” Orange says in what Raphael is sure is supposed to be a reassuring tone, but only makes his blood boil at the mention of Casey. Orange's eyes suddenly go wide as he groans and throws his head back. “That’s how you know the name Orange! Next time I see Casey I’ll give him a piece of my mind–”

“Like hell you will! You’re not going anywhere near him if I have anything to say about it,” Raphael growls only to get an eye roll from Orange.

“Think about it, Raph. The best option right now is to take him back to the lair where we know he’ll be safe from the Foot until we can figure something else out,” Leonardo says. Raphael lets out an angry shout and stomps across the roof, pausing only when he hears chains rattling and shortly falling to the floor. He glances back with narrowed eyes and sees Orange stretching his now free legs with a grin.

Leonardo goes over to him, leaving Michelangelo to talk Orange's ear off while Donatello releases his arms from the chains and observes them with calculating eyes. The leader attempts to put a hand on Raphael’s shoulder but he shrugs it off with a glare.

“I know this isn’t the safest option, but c’mon, just look at him,” he nods his head towards the others, where Michelangelo and Orange seem to be getting along like bees on honey. “He’s obviously in his right mind, regardless of what we know he’s done to the Kraang before. Don’t you think he might just need some help? And if it makes you feel better we can have a watch to make sure he’s never left alone for even a second.”

Raphael's eyes pause briefly on the dried blood, small cuts, and lightning-like scars that peek through the black wrapping on his fingers and hands when the sleeves of his jacket ride up his arms. His tense shoulders unconsciously relax at the sight, gaze lingering over the injuries and wondering just how he got them. He quickly shakes his head, turning to glare back out into the city. Leonardo sighs beside him and goes to join the others to start the trek home.

It shouldn’t matter if he’s hurt, or that he’s clearly been through some kind of dangerous shit, Orange is still a threat to Raphael’s family and friends. Raphael glances back to where Orange is now standing beside Michelangelo, the top of his head barely passing his little brother's chin.

He looks especially small next to Donatello, not even reaching the genius's shoulders.

“So, before I have to answer a bunch of questions, can I get something to eat? A double kidnapping really makes a turtle hungry.”

“Oh, we’re totally having a pizza party, dudes!”

Raphael lets out a deep sigh at the ensuing pizza party planning between Michelangelo and Orange. Tonight was going to be even more rage inducing than he first thought.

Chapter Text

Mikey finishes off the last piece of veggie pizza placed in front of him with a pleased hum. The other turtles sit on the couch in front of his place on the floor, staring at him impatiently.

Overall, his night could have ended up a lot worse. Most notably this universe could have been torn to shreds as soon as Raphael had touched him, but seeing as Mikey was now being watched like a hawk by said turtle that obviously wasn’t going to happen any time soon. And, after he had been told that he had been kidnapped by the Foot Clan of all villains, it was probably a miracle that he was even alive at all.

He would prefer to be in his own lair having a pizza party with his own brothers, but he’d take not getting torn to pieces by this universe's Shredder, too.

The walk to the lair had been surprisingly pleasant. The others had needlessly introduced themselves before heading out, and Mikey repaid the favor by formally introducing himself as Orange, since that seemed to be the name they knew anyway. Michelangelo attached himself to Mikey’s hip, rambling on about all of the different pizza toppings he loved and how they were ‘twins’ since they wore the same color bandanna. Mikey had absorbed the talk with ease, shooting back his own opinions and favorite pizza toppings to his alternates delight. Donatello had interjected at points too, adding in his own thoughts and trying to slip in ‘innocent’ questions about Mikey’s mutation story. Leonardo was obviously listening in, but didn’t comment on anything as he led the way back to their lair in the subway. Raphael stayed behind them the entire way back, and Mikey could feel the glare on the back of his head the entire time.

As promised, Mikey had been delivered food and was told by Leonardo to dig in, which he eagerly did after peeling off the blood-soaked and grime covered tape on his hands and arms. After weeks of nothing but chips, junkfood, and canned fruits and vegetables, even the greasy pizza tasted like absolute heaven. He had devoured an entire pizza within five minutes while Michelangelo cheered him on and the others looked on with both disgust (Raphael and Donatello) and awe (Leonardo).

But now, as he finishes the last available slice of pizza, Mikey finally takes a good look around the lair. Just like the rest of this universe, it is shockingly dull. There are a couple of arcade games that he wants to check out (and beat the high score on) but not nearly as many as back home. This lair is much more open, too, with one large space acting as both a living area and kitchen. There is one hallway with stairs and a small moat below that Mikey would bet leads to a dojo, and another large opening that looks to lead to bedrooms.

“Are you finally done? I think you’ve eaten enough for all of us,” Raphael grumbles from where he sits, arms crossed with one hand resting on his sheathed sai.

“Yep! Best meal I’ve had in weeks,” MIkey cheerfully replies, not about to be beaten down by Raphaels salty attitude. He pats his stomach happily as he watches Donatello and Leonardo share a look then turn back to Mikey with sad smiles.

Mikey tilts his head. Was it something he said?

“I’m glad you’re not hungry anymore, but now we have some questions,” Leonardo starts, resting his elbows on his knees.

Mikey laughs nervously, picking at a thread on the end of his sleeve. “Shouldn’t you guys get cleaned up first? Cause you still look like chimney sweeps.”

“They’re fine. How about I ask the first question,” Raphael says, pointing an accusing finger at him. “Why are you running around vandalizing things? We know you can fight, so why not use your mutantion for, I don’t know, violent crimes against humanity?”

“Why would I want to do that?” Mikey shoots back with a raised brow. “There’s no point in hurting people, especially ones that haven’t done anything wrong. Plus, I’m doing everyone a favor by livening this city up with some paint! Who doesn’t love that?”

“He’s got a point, dude,” Michelangelo says, getting a swift smack to the head from Raphael. “What!? Those paintings are so sick!” Michelangelo wiggles his eyeridge with a smirk. “Or are you just jealous of Orange’s skills?”

Raphael growls but is stopped from lunging at his brother by Leonardo gripping his arm. Mikey grins. He can definitely play along with this.

“Oh, I think he is jealous of me,” Mikey drawls. “You wish you were as cool as me, don’t you?”

“I swear I’m going to stab you right in your–”

“Okay!” Leonardo quickly intercepts Raphael, forcibly pulling one of his sai out of clenched hands. Mikey smirks at Raphael and he can practically see the fire pouring out of his ears. “Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves.”

“Oo, I have a question!” Michelangelo exclaims, sticking his hand straight in the air with a large grin. “Where’d you get those clothes for your disguise? That jacket is wicked!”

Mikey giggles and rocks back and forth, eagerly matching Michelangelo's energy. Who knew he'd get along so well with himself?

“It’s amazing what you can find in a bargain bin. I also have the best fashion sense of anyone I know.” Mikey grins even wider at Michelangelo’s muttered ‘wow’. His alternate practically has stars in his eyes and Mikey feels a weird sense of pride from putting that kind of expression on his face.

“Guys, can we please focus on the more important things–” Leonardo attempts to corral his brothers, but Donatello interrupts before he can say anything more. The purple turtle has been scrutinizing him this entire time, and Mikey was just waiting until his mouth finally took control over his brain.

“When were you first mutated? You’ve adapted to your non-human body quite quickly,” Donatello starts with a glare from Leonardo that he either doesn’t see or ignores. “And is there a reason you mutated into a turtle, specifically? It seems like too much of a coincidence for it to happen naturally, perhaps you were holding a pet? Or something contaminated by both mutagen and turtle DNA? Maybe turtles are simply attracted to some kind of property found within the mutagen…” he trails, already becoming lost within his theories.

Mikey scoffs. Better to answer this question as truthfully as possible, if only to make sure Donatello’s brain doesn’t fry itself with all of his theories.

“I was born in all my turtle-y glory. Never human to begin with, Barry would have never used humans when he was trying to create his soldiers,” Mikey states.

Evidently that was the slightly wrong thing to say. Donatello's eyes widen and he silently mouths the word ‘soldiers’ to himself, Leonardo doing something similar and looking at Mikey with a sense of caution, now. Michelangelo’s brow has furrowed and his smile is suddenly gone as he sits up straighter, and Raphael, impossibly, grips his remaining sai even tighter.

“Soldier? You were made with a…purpose?” Donatello asks faintly.

Out of everything Mikey is about to reveal to these guys, this is what makes them uneasy? The fact he was created to be a soldier? Were they also not created with the sole purpose to hunt down humans and subjugate them under the iron thumb of a secret race living under New York?

“Uh, yeah. Were you guys…not?” Mikey hesitantly asks. He is slightly taken aback by the sudden horror dawning over all of their faces at the question. Well, except Raphael. He looks about one second away from driving his weapon straight into Mikey’s shell, damn the consequences.

“No,” Leonardo states softly, looking at him with so much sadness that Mikey actually feels a little bit bad. “We were mutated by accident. Someone created you specifically to be a weapon, then?”

Mikey hesitates. Obviously this is a weird subject for them, and he doesn’t want to bring down the mood even more than he, apparently, already has. He contemplates trying to change the subject, but by the saddened and desperate looks on all of their faces that would probably end very poorly.

“Yeah, but get rid of those long faces! We were rescued before Barry had any time to train us for his evil plans, and it ended up working out for everybody in the end, anyway,” Mikey answers with a bright smile. He hopes that’s enough explanation for them to feel better.

“Wait a second, ‘we,’? There’s more of you?” Michelangelo has gained his smile back, looking towards Mikey with excitement. “There’s more long lost turtle cousins out there?!”

“You mean more killing machines?” Raphael sharply mutters. Mikey feels a flash of annoyance at that, turning a glare towards the red turtle.

“We don’t kill people. That’s not how we were raised, and that’s not what heroes do,” Mikey says.

“Says the one who has been killing–”

“Raph, seriously, knock it off,” Leonardo growls, kicking him harshly in the shin. Raphael snarls at him but begrudgingly complies and doesn’t say another word. Leonardo turns back to him with a stoic expression. “The only thing I want to know right now is your real name, not whatever nickname you gave us. And where’d you come from if you weren’t mutated because of the mutagen we lost?”

Mikey hums, considering his options. He could just come right out and say his full name, but where’s the fun in that? Hiding his identity from them isn’t really an option for him with his terrible ability to lie, so he might as well make a game out of how long he can divert attention away from it. Because while he may be a notoriously bad liar, he is well known for being the reigning champion of causing distractions.

“Why can’t Orange be my real name? It’s what Dad calls me most of the time, anyway,” Mikey says as he abruptly rolls to his feet to wander over to one of the pinball machines.

The others are immediately on his tail, with Raphael attempting to cut off his route with crossed arms. Mikey rolls his eyes and darts around him, leaving Raphael spluttering behind him as he reaches the machine and quickly starts up a game.

“Oh, that's a nice shot,” Michelangelo comments from his new perch on top of the machine when Mikey quickly hits the highest scoring obstacle. “But you really don’t have, like, a last name or anything?”

“No, I do,” Mikey sticks out his tongue in concentration, huffing when the ball almost falls into the pit and undoes his hard work.

“So is there a reason you can’t tell us?” Leonardo asks, one eye on the pinball going back and forth across the board and another on Mikey.

“Other than increasing the shock factor? Not really, no,” Mikey replies breezily. He shouts when he is suddenly ripped away from the game by the lip of his shell by Raphael, being spun around to face his angry grimace. He hears the pinball sink into the pit and groans in his face. “C’mon, I was doing good too–”

“I’m done playing this stupid game with you. Tell us your real name, and I won’t beat you into the floor, how about that for a reason?” Raphael growls, grip tight on the top of Mikey’s plastron.

“Raph, threats obviously don’t work,” Donatello says tiredly from the side, poking his brother in the side with his bō. “Why don’t you try being nice for once? I know it could fry your brain, but it could be worth a try.”

“Yeah, what he said,” Mikey chirps happily. Raphael’s glare gets even more intense and Mikey can’t help but feel giddy on how worked up he seems to be getting over this. It’s funny how after almost no goading Raphael is this emotional.

Mikey quickly spins out of his grip, strolling over to the kitchen now as the others follow on his heels. He crouches to attempt to open one of the cupboards to see what kind of ingredients they have but it is immediately slammed shut by Raphael’s foot. Mikey rolls his eyes at the dramatics and goes to open another which leads to the same outcome.

“Are you still hungry? I can whip up some of my special gourmet pizza for you–”

“No!” Donatello desperately cuts off Michelangelo, eyes wide. “You are not making another disgrace to science!”

MIkey raises an eyebrow at the exchange. Was Michelangelo not the cook of the family here? That would be a bit odd in his mind, but he is in a different dimension so anything is possible. Yet, thinking about this Leonardo, or pizza supreme forbid, this Raphael in the kitchen is a little hard to believe.

“Nah, I’m pretty full. Just snooping, you know how it is,” Mikey readily admits, standing to try to open yet another cupboard only to be harshly knocked out of the kitchen by Raphael.

“Can you answer the question already?” Raphael growls as he stalks up to him, getting right into his face. Leonardo makes a half-hearted attempt to pull him away but is quickly shaken off. “Who. Are. You.”

Mikey sighs, glancing at the other turtles. While they obviously don’t approve of Raphael’s methods, they all look to be desperately wanting to have that answer, too. Well, he supposes that it might finally be time to break the news. He had managed to postpone it for almost eight whole minutes, though, which Mikey gladly takes pride in.

“Alright, I guess I can tell you guys,” he relents, feeling slightly bad delaying it for so long seeing the relief and eagerness on the other turtle's faces. Except Raphael, who is still in his business with a mean glare. “You might want to sit down, though. It’s going to blow your guys’ minds!”

He keeps the smile on his face as a beat passes and no one moves. Michelangelo eventually shrugs and drops cross legged to the floor, gaining an eye roll from Leonardo and Donatello.

Jokes on them, his alternate is going to be the only one prepared for the truth bomb he’s about to drop.

“Are y’all ready for this? Drumroll, please!” Mikey exclaims, throwing his hands up and nearly smacking Raphael in the face. He leans back with a grunt and a roll of his eyes. “Introducing to the lair, the one and only…” he pauses, grinning as Michelangelo eagerly leans forward.

“Hamato Michelangelo! From another dimension! Please, hold your applause,” Mikey finally shouts. He drops into a bow, arms splayed behind him. There’s an unexpected beat of silence where there are supposed to be gasps and exclamations of awe, so he looks up from his bow with a frown.

Michelangelo’s jaw is practically on the floor, staring blankly past Mikey. Donatello looks lost in his own head as he mutters big words under his breath that Mikey has no chance of understanding, eyes flicking back and forth between him and the floor. Mikey straightens and crosses his arms, looking to Leonardo who looks torn between joining Michelangelo in his obvious awe or having an existential crisis.

It’s Raphael who has the most obvious reaction, busting out into hysterical laughter as he doubles over himself, clutching his stomach.

“You can’t be serious, right? This is just some practical joke to make us lower our guard so you can attack,” Raphael wheezes, gaining control of himself to shoot Mikey a wicked sneer.

He isn’t sure what to do now. Mikey hadn’t considered the option that the other turtles might not believe him. He was expecting awe, and attention, and too many questions he could barely keep up with them. The only one fulfilling those expectations was Michelangelo, who seemed to believe him without question if his glazed over stare was anything to go by.

“It’s true! My name is Michelangelo, and I’m from a different dimension! Why would I lie about that?” MIkey exclaims, trying not to freak out too much. He’s not sure how he’s supposed to move forward with them if they don't even believe him.

“I suppose it’s not completely out of the realm of possibility,” Donatello rubs his chin, eyes narrowed on Mikey and scanning him with a single minded focus. “We know other dimensions exist because of Dimension X, so it stands to reason other universes containing alternate versions of ourselves are out there. But that would mean almost everything about the laws of physics would have to be re-written and that the multiverse theory–which I’ve been tweaking and hypothesizing about on and off for years–is actually true!”

“We’re for real twinsies!” Michelangelo exclaims. He bounces to his feet and attempts to run up to Mikey but is stopped by Raphaels arm across his plastron holding him back. “And my alternate dimension self is already super cool!”

“He’s not you from another dimension,” Raphael snaps, any kind of humor he had found in the situation is gone. “He’s a crazy mutant who belongs in the loony bin for murdering those Kraang!”

Mikey flinches, taking an unconscious step back. His mouth is suddenly dry as he swallows and tries his best to keep a smile on his face. “I’d, uh, actually prefer if you use ‘K-word’, instead, please.”

He cringes at how thready and weak his voice has suddenly become, and the others quickly take note of it as well. All but Raphael look concerned, now, but of course it’s Raphael who starts to approach him again.

“Why, huh? Can’t stand to think about the crimes you committed? Even if they’re Kraang, it’s still murder, and I think you understand that just as much as we do.”

Mikey glares. He crosses his arms to try to hide the shaking in them (as well as the glow of his scars if it escalates that far) but Donatello’s eyes immediately drift towards them with a furrowed brow. His breathing is becoming more shallow and he snarls right back at Raphael, now plastron to plastron.

“I’d recommend you take my advice, unless you want to have a visit from Dr. Delicate Touch,” MIkey growls.

“Everyone needs to calm down,” Leonardo yanks Raphael back by the shell but is quickly shoved off as he brings up his remaining sai. “Raph, can you think clearly for just one second–”

“No way! I went along with your plan to bring a total stranger that we knew was dangerous into our home, but now he’s making up complete lies and expecting us to be gullible enough to believe them! I’m not going to be listening to anything else he has to say!”

Mikey gulps, taking cautious steps back as Raphael follows closely, violence shining clear in his eyes.

“Why can’t you believe me? I’m not a threat to you guys, haven’t I proven that yet?” Mikey begs, hugging himself. Raphael stops his advance when they arrive back to the couch and barks out a laugh. Mikey feels his anger and frustration growing. What the hell does Raphael have against him? Why does he already hate Mikey so much?

“‘Not a threat’? Please! We’ve seen what you’ve done to those Kraang, you no good murderer–”

“Raph, you’re making it worse–” Michelangelo tries to interject but is briskly pushed behind Raphael. Leonardo looks ready to jump into action at any time while Donatello stands off to the side, watching the scene unfold with wide eyes.

“I’m not a murderer!” Mikey shouts, gritting his teeth as he grabs and unfurls his kusari-fundo from his pocket. His entire body is shaking now as he glares at Raphael who readies his own weapon.

“Then how’d you create those massacre’s we’ve walked into? Just trying to have a bit of fun?” Raphael spits, spinning his sai once before starting his advance again. Mikey stands his ground, frustration and anger flooding his mind until all he can think about is how good it would feel to knock this Raphael down a notch.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” MIkey growls and raises his weapon as Raphael stalks closer.

“C’mon, guys! You don’t need to fight, can’t we just talk this out–”

“Shut up, Mikey!” Raphael snaps. “We can’t talk anything out if he refuses to tell the truth. So I’ll make him tell the truth.”

So, it’s a fight he wanted. Well, if that’s truly what Raphael wants, who is he to deny him the pleasure? Mikey could use a good outlet to get this rage out, anyway, and Raphael's face is looking like a great target since he’s the cause of it.

“Oh yeah? Come and get some then!” Mikey exclaims as he whips the bulk of his weapon at Raphael. Leonardo and Donatello say something but it’s drowned out by the clang of metal as Raphael blocks the attack and lunges, sai first, at Mikey plastron.

Mikey dodges to the side, swiping away the fist aimed at his face with his forearm. He drops to the ground and rolls away, ending in a crouch while swinging his kusari-fundo at the other's legs. Raphael deftly hops over it and launches into a kick straight for Mikey’s head. His eyes widen, retracting his weapon and using a bit of chain to catch Raphael’s foot before it makes contact with his face. He pushes outwards with a grunt and Raphael twists in the air, landing back on his feet and throwing his sai straight at Mikey with a shout.

Mikey yelps and smacks it away with the handle of his weapon, but the tremor that rings through his hand at the action makes him drop the kusari-fundo. Taking a moment to shake out his now tingling hand he glances up to see Leonardo trying to restrain Raphael. He gets an elbow to the face for his efforts and then Raphael is lunging at Mikey again, fist raised with a snarl.

Before Mikey can retaliate Donatello's bō comes down on Rapahel’s arm, making him drop the fist. There’s no way to stop his momentum, however, and he crashes into Mikey, sending them both sprawling across the floor, sliding shell first into the television.

“Not the TV! Anything but that!” Michelangelo screams off to the side.

Mikey shakes off the bits of glass littering his shell and jolts up to stand, but is pulled right back down onto his plastron with a thud when Raphael grabs his ankle and pulls. He struggles and starts to hit and kick any part of Raphael he can reach as the other climbs atop his shell, attempting to grab his flailing arms and pin them to the floor.

He can hear the others arguing with each other as Mikey bucks off Raphael’s hold on his wrist and flips onto his shell to face him. Smacking his face and neck Raphael reels back, bringing up an arm to try and block Mikey’s flawless attack.

Just what he wanted to happen.

Mikey latches onto the top of Raphael’s shell, leveraging himself up as his other hand grips onto one of Raphael’s raised arms. He hangs off of and half on Raphael's shell as he stumbles to a stand to try and pry Mikey off of him.

“Get off of me!” Raphael shouts, using his one free hand to try and scratch at Mikey's right arm that’s now wrapped around his neck in a headlock. Mikey grunts out a ‘no’, yanking the arm in his grip closer to his beak.

Donatello’s staff suddenly wedges itself between Mikey’s plastron and Raphael’s shell, the purple turtle desperately attempting to pry the two apart. Michelangelo launches himself towards them, joining in on the tussle by latching onto one Raphael's legs. The move nearly sends them all sprawling to the floor again but Raphael quickly regains his balance and continues trying to scratch Mikey’s eyes out.

Mikey continues to yank Raphaels arm even closer through the struggle, eyes locked on his forearm. With one more pull his arm is nearly close enough for his plan. He hears Leonardo let out a pained groan off to the side as Mikey opens his beak to chomp down on Raphael’s forearm.

That’s what Leo had always done when Raph was trying to wrestle with him, and it worked really well until Raph’s spikes became too sharp to even attempt it. Mikey figures the move would work just fine in this instance, though.

Just as his teeth are about to sink into Raphael’s arm a sliding door slams open. Everyone freezes in place, turning wide eyes to the source of the noise.

If MIkey’s mouth hadn’t been open before to bite Raphael, it would have been at the sight of the absolutely giant rat man that emerges from the doorway. His ears are flicked back as he glares at them all.

Was that supposed to be Splinter? Mikey’s eyes went wide as he took in the agitated state that the other turtle's Dad was in, grip tight against the large staff he carried.

The staff itself might be just as tall as Mikey, and this guy makes it look small in his hands.

“What on Earth are you boys–” he starts in a deep, accented voice before cutting himself off as he locks eyes with Mikey, mouth still open and poised to clamp down on Raphael’s arm. His previous flicked back ears shoot up as he blinks in surprise.

Mikey looks between this Splinter, the arm still in his grasp, then back to the large mutant. No one has moved except for Leonardo, who has covered his face with his hands and is slowly shaking his head. Donatello has stopped trying to pry Mikey and Raphael apart and simply holds onto his bō with a pained expression while Michelangelo still clings to the leg of the now frozen Raphael.

Splinter lets out a large sigh, shoulders drooping from their previous tense posture. He brings up one clawed hand to rub at his closed eyes as the silence between them all grows.

With one more huff he looks back at them all, a furry eyebrow raised, obviously unamused at the sight before him.

“I see you boys are keeping the unfortunate habit of bringing strangers to our secret lair.”

Chapter Text

“I see you boys are keeping the unfortunate habit of bringing strangers to our secret lair.”

Splinter’s words seem to break the other turtles out of whatever trance they had been stuck in, leaving Mikey behind to reel at the vast physical differences that this version of his Dad shows. While the alternate turtles are obviously not the same species as what he knows, they are at least easily recognizable by their colors and weapons. This Splinter, however, looks absolutely nothing like his Dad.

First off, his fur is a muddy brown sprinkled with dustings of gray and white. Secondly, the robe he’s wearing is way too fancy for lounging about in the lair. Finally, this Splinter is tall. Not quite Draxum height, but very close to where Raph stands at the very least.

Still caught in his stupor Raphael suddenly bucks, sending Mikey flying off his shell and to the ground with a dull thud. Mikey yelps and sends a glare at him which Raphael gladly returns.

“Sensei, I promise we can explain everything—”

“Yes, you will. Come, let us get more comfortable in the dojo,” Splinter says curtly, cutting off Leonardo’s words. The leader hastily nods and follows him into what Mikey had correctly guessed was the dojo. Michelangelo and Donatello follow at his heels, while Raphael stays by Mikey’s side as he hops back to his feet. He starts to follow the others when Raphael harshly knocks his shoulder into Mikey as he passes, sending one more glare his way before charging into the dojo.

Rude. He could have at least let Mikey go first, he is the guest here after all.

Shaking off as much of the previous anger as he can, Mikey slowly steps into the dojo. His eyes widen as he wanders further in, spinning around to take in the vast, open space. Old rugs cover as much of the concrete floor as possible, the walls littered with various wooden and real weapons. A screen covers one wall of the room, and directly in front of the screen is a large tree that Splinter sits beneath, the other turtles kneeling in front of him with slightly bowed heads.

How in the world had they managed to grow an entire tree in the middle of the sewer?

As Mikey’s eyes catch on some kind of shelf covered with candles, a vase of flowers, and a singular picture frame, Splinter softly clears his throat. Mikey darts his gaze back to Splinter as he gently nods to the space beside where Michelangelo is kneeling at the end of their line. Taking the hint Mikey picks up the pace and, after the thought of kneeling like them briefly crosses his mind, plops down cross-legged next to his alternate. It gains different reactions from the other turtles, but Splinter merely raises a brow.

“What?” Mikey asks, crossing his arms and throwing the exact same look back at Splinter. The rat merely hums and curls his tail tighter around his legs.

“Is there a reason my sons have brought you here, little one?” Splinter asks. Mikey scowls at the nickname.

“I’m not little, alright? What if everyone else is just freakishly tall, ever think of that?”

While Michelangelo tries to hide his snicker beside him, Splinter narrows his eyes and tilts his head curiously. Mikey tries to meet his intense stare, but lasts barely four seconds before he is averting his gaze and focusing on the loose thread sticking out of his sleeve, blankly picking at it.

“May I ask you what your name is, then?” Splinter continues after it becomes clear to him Mikey isn’t going to add anything else.

“You can, but he’s just going to lie to you,” Raphael grumbles from the other side of the line, and both Leonardo and Mikey shoot him a quick glare. Splinter seems to be ignoring him for now, as his eyes have yet to leave Mikey’s face.

“It’s not a lie. My name is Michelangelo. Hamato Michelangelo, specifically.” Mikey can already see the frown forming on Splinters lips and hurriedly continues. “I’m from a different dimension. That’s not a lie, I swear to the pizza supreme in the sky. You guys have to believe me.”

“Oh yeah, let’s believe the mutant who’s been going on a murder spree. Real smart thinking.”

“Y’know, I think I feel a new surge of homicidal urges, Raphael, and you since you seem pretty eager to see them–”

“Yame,” Splinter shouts. Mikey has no idea what he just said, but the tone makes him straighten up with the others all the same. It doesn’t stop him from glaring daggers at Raphael, though.

“You must admit that your claim is quite hard to believe,” Splinter placates, expression back to a blank slate. “If you are who you claim to be, perhaps you have some sort of proof?”

Mikey blinks once, then twice, and nearly face-palms. Of course they just needed proof. Why couldn’t he think of that? Mikey’s going to blame it on all of the candy and junk food he’s been eating for a month straight. Definitely not because he got too distracted talking with everybody and wanting to bash Raphael’s face in. Of course not.

“Duh, I can totally do that,” Mikey states and then pulls out his phone from the top of his shell with a flourish. He powers it on and cringes at how low the battery is, but it should be just enough to give them the proof they need to finally believe his story. And stop trying to constantly throw hands with him in Raphael’s case, hopefully.

Mikey quickly brings up the best picture in his whole gallery as Michelangelo peeks over his shoulder. With a triumphant grin he holds out the screen to make sure all of the people gathered can see and then sits back to wait on their reactions.

The new family photo is truly the pinnacle of his album. April had sent it to them all as soon as it was taken, and for a while after the invasion all of them used it for their lock screen as a concrete reminder of their world-saving accomplishment. The only thing that would make the family photo truly complete would be Draxum, but he had been too busy dealing with political affairs in the Hidden City to even think about hanging out. That’s what Mikey told himself when the invitation to grab celebratory pizza was hastily rejected, anyway.

“See? That’s me, my Dad, my brothers, April, and Casey Jr.!” Mikey exclaims, pointing to each person. “Is this some good proof or what?”

Finally, the others have the reactions he had been expecting. All of their eyes go wide (barring Splinter and Raphael) as Donatello quickly snatches the phone from Mikey’s grip. His eyes rove over the screen and Michelangelo and Leonardo lean over his shoulders to study the picture more.

“Holy sewer apples…” Donatello murmurs. He quickly looks back up at Mikey, back down to the photo, and then back up again. “This really does change everything! The implications of this development–”

“Everyone looks so different! Why is that Raph so big, that’s a terrifying image–”

“Guys look at Sensei! He’s so small–”

“Please, that’s clearly photoshopped–”

“Boys,” Splinter says, cutting through the pandemonium. Mikey smugly looks on, reveling in the shocked and excited expressions on the other’s faces. Proves them right for not believing him when he was telling the truth the entire time. “May I study this picture further?”

Donatello silently hands it over. Mikey snorts at his glazed over eyes, drawing Donatello’s attention. He stares at Mikey for a moment, expression blank and slack jawed, before it cracks into a frankly disturbing grin. Maybe he should have taken into account Donatello’s need to experiment on anything he didn’t understand when he broke the dimensional news.

Hopefully these guys had their own rules when it came to ethical experimentation, too.

Leonardo is staring at him. Unlike Donatello, he seems more concerned than anything. Mikey finds it touching that without even truly knowing him, Leonardo still musters up concern for an alternate version of one of his brothers. He sends him a small smile in acknowledgement, and his concern melts away in favor of a joyful grin. It’s not quite as large as the one his Leo would be making, but it was definitely better than the unwarranted concern. Mikey was fine, after all, there was no need to worry about him.

Michelangelo looks like he wants to tackle him into a hug, but is valiantly trying to keep the urge in check in front of Splinter. He is biting his lip hard, as if he is trying his best to hold his tongue from asking questions at a mile a minute as Splinter examines the photo closely. Mikey smirks and sticks out his tongue at him, to which his alternate eagerly copies. They devolve into soft giggles when Splinter numbly lowers Mikey’s phone to the floor.

His eyes are narrowed in Mikey’s direction once again. Splinter very obviously studies him, and it doesn’t escape Mikey that his ears pull back slightly when he catches sight of the scarring on his hands. He hastily pulls his sleeves further down and Splinter takes the hint, posture relaxing as he meets Mikey’s eyes with a smile.

“Well, it seems you are very far from home,” Splinter says. Mikey opens his mouth to retort but stops as Raphael makes a noise similar to a strangled cat.

“Wait, you believe him too, Sensei? How!? Am I the only practical one left in this family?!” Raphael is practically foaming at the mouth, now. Mikey groans and exasperatedly throws his hands into the air.

“Once again, why would I lie? I’m a terrible liar, you’d know if I was lying! Plus, wouldn’t I try to come up with something more believable? Like I’m some kind of government creation made to destroy the human race?” Mikey pauses, bringing a hand to his chin in thought. “Well, I suppose that’s not actually a lie, just leave out the whole government part.”

“While I would love to get into the implications of that–seriously, I will need to know all of those details later–how did a parallel Michelangelo, of all people end, up in our world?” Donatello asks before Raphael can argue more. The tall turtle looks to be on the edge of his seat, hands twisting back and forth as his eyes bore into Mikey’s soul with sudden intensity.

“I would like to know that as well. Along with any possible threats you may have brought with you, as I can only assume that your travel here was not in the best of circumstances.” Splinter’s smile is gone, now, replaced with what Mikey can only interpret as a mix between pity and concern.

“Um, well good news is there’s no way any threats from my world could have come with me,” Mikey starts nervously, going back to pulling on the loose thread of his sleeve. It’s steadily gotten thinner the more he’s been picking at it, as well as being much longer and more noticeable now. “Bad news is…I’m not totally sure how I ended up here? But–!” Mikey quickly says as Donatello tries to interrupt, “I do know that it was kinda my fault. No machines, enemies, or any other junk like that.”

“You don’t know how you got here? How does that work?” Leonardo asks, obviously very confused. Mikey gives a nervous chuckle, pulling even more on the thread between his fingers.

“You see, my world isn’t like yours. There’s…magic?” Mikey trails. He winces at the skeptical looks that earns him from everyone, even Michelangelo. “I think it would be easier if I just tried to show you.”

Before anyone can try and stop him Mikey summons his ninpō to the front of his mind. He frowns when it protests for a moment, and then pushes through it until his nunchaku sits ready and glowing in his open hand. It’s just as much of a struggle to keep it there as it was the first time he tried to summon his chains, and before long his concentration breaks and the weapons dissipate into thin air. Mikey feels a flicker of annoyance once again that he can’t manage to do something that used to be as easy as breathing for him, then is quickly shocked out of it as Donatello lunges across the floor and tightly grips the hand that held the nunchaku.

“How did you do that?!” he exclaims, twisting his hand around and waving one of his own through the space that held the weapon. Donatello falters in his examination briefly to lightly run over a line of scar tissue with furrowed brows. Mikey quickly yanks his hand away, stuffing it into the pocket of his jacket and leaning away.

“It’s part of my ninpō. Everyone in my family is capable of summoning their weapons that way, but…usually it’s a lot easier to do.”

“Ninpō, you say?” Splinter says, stroking his beard with narrowed eyes.

“Are we seriously just going along with all of this?” Raphael finally snaps. Mikey rolls his eyes as Raphael clenches his fist and desperately looks to any member of his family to be on his side.

“I mean, he has provided quite a bit of evidence,” Donatello remarks, still sitting close to Mikey.

“Yeah, and just look at him!” Michelangelo wraps an arm around Mikey, bringing him to his side with a bright smile. “It’s like looking in a mirror! Well, except for the spots. And his skin is darker. And his eyes are brown. He’s also a little smaller–”

“He literally swore to a pizza god, Raph. If that’s not a Mikey thing to do I don’t know what is,” Leonardo cuts off Michelangelo’s list, knocking his shoulder into a now still Raphael. “Plus, how would he have a picture of three other turtles with our exact colors and weapons, let alone two humans and a mutant rat?”

“...I guess you have a point, only a Mikey would pray to a pizza god,” Raphael mumbles after a moment of silence. He crosses his arms and glares at the floor, avoiding everyone's gaze. Mikey snorts as he is squished further into Michelangelo’s side. This Raphael is such a sore loser.

“Back to the topic at hand,” Splinter says, gathering the attention once more. “You believe it was your fault that you landed in our world because of your ninpō? Would you mind expanding on that?”

“Oh, no, not because of my ninpō. It’s because of my mystic powers, I think. I’ve, uh,” Mikey stutters, going back to picking at the thread that is now barely hanging on and gently prying himself from Michelangelo's hold. “I’ve opened a portal before, but it wasn’t like this. Different…circumstances. But ever since then my powers haven’t been working right.”

Mikey can feel Donatello’s eyes boring into the side of his head as Splinter hums and goes back to stroking his beard. “Interesting. So your ninpō and these…mystic powers are not the same?” Splinter looks slightly pained when saying ‘mystic powers’, but Mikey brushes it off. He supposed they were just as confused and questioning when they first encountered the mystic artifacts in Draxums old lab.

“From what Draxum and Donnie have told me, no, they’re not the same. Apparently they’re connected in some way, but please don’t ask me to explain. I couldn’t remember that many big words when they were going over it.”

“I could always come up with something if you let me run some experiments–”

“Really, Don?” Leonardo deadpans, interrupting Donatello’s slightly breathless request. Mikey giggles at the ensuing angry pout and glare that Donatello shoots at his brother.

“What?! It’s a perfectly reasonable request and I promise I won’t use anything that’ll hurt too badly or leave any permanent damage!”

“There will be no experimenting on Michelangelo, Donatello,” Splinter orders and Donatello wilts under it, grumbling about ‘fairness’ and ‘scientific breakthroughs’ under his breath. Mikey feels a small pang at the familiar action from Donatello before Splinter turns his gaze back to him, looking between him and his alternate with furrowed brows. “I suppose there should be a new naming system used while you are with us in order to not confuse the two of you further.”

“I can just use the name Orange, it’s no big deal,” Mikey says with a grin. “Dad usually calls us by our colors, anyway, so I’ll answer to that name no problem!” Splinter tilts his head at that, ears twitching back. Mikey’s grin falters slightly at the weird reaction, but he brushes it off just as quickly.

“I...see,” Splinter eventually says. The others are giving him strange looks, too, and Mikey twists the thin thread on his sleeve around a finger. They’re looking at him like he’s said something wrong, but he has no idea what. They wanted a name and he gave them the nickname he’s the most familiar with, what’s wrong with that? Maybe these guys are just weirder than he first thought.

“I would like to speak with Orange privately now, my sons. There are some things I wish to clarify and learn more about that your presence may not help with,” Splinter announces. Mikey frowns at that, a sense of dread growing in his gut at the very thought of being left alone with this Splinter.

Not that he’s done anything specific to set off Mikey’s ‘creepy’ alarms. If anything, he’s been the most hospitable and agreeable one he’s talked to while in the lair. Throughout the conversation, however, something kept niggling at the edges of his mind. It was similar to a hazy version of deja vu, but Mikey couldn’t place it for the life of him. He knew that Splinter wasn’t a danger to him, no version of his Dad would be, but nevertheless his instincts were still telling him to be wary.

Obviously his mind was determined to work against him for this little dimensional vacation. First the off the handle reactions to the k-words even after Mikey knew they didn’t pose the same threat, and now it was warning him about some kind of danger that he knew this Splinter wasn’t going to pose.

Maybe his subconscious was the one who really needed the vacation, not him.

“But Sensei, shouldn’t we be here to know all the information too? Especially since we’re going to be the one to help him get home?” Leonardo asks. Mikey turns to him with a wide grin, joy and hope bubbling in his chest to replace the negative feelings about being left alone with Splinter.

“Really? You’re going to help me get home?”

“Of course, mini me!” Michelangelo exclaims, lightly punching Mikey’s bicep. “I would want some help from your awesome brothers if I ever got stuck in your world, too.”

“Aw, you guys!” Mikey says, voice thick and eyes slightly wet, grinning wide at them all who gladly return the gesture. Well, except Raphael, who takes one glimpse at Mikey’s face and harshly turns away with a glower. No matter, now that he knows his other brothers are helping Mikey get home he’ll warm up to him eventually. He hopes.

“I am sure Orange can tell you what you need to know afterwards. It will be easier to tell the whole story without an audience,” Splinter says, once again getting them all back on track.

Mikey scrunches his nose at the words. Does this Splinter really think he knows Mikey well enough to assume that it would be easier with just him? Because right now, no matter how much he tells his subconscious that he’s fine, just the thought of the other turtles leaving him alone makes his heart beat faster. He’d even be happy Raphael stayed behind, as long as it wasn’t only Mikey and Splinter left inside the dojo.

“But Master Splinter–”

“I have told you what will happen. Now, please, leave us,” Splinter orders, cutting off Donatello’s plea. The others share a brief look before they all stand and mutter a ‘yes, Sensei’. Mikey looks at them all, brows furrowed as he realizes that throughout the entire conversation, no one had called this Splinter ‘dad’. Weird, considering they aren’t in any kind of training session, which is the only time Mikey can remember ever referring to Dad with those kinds of official titles.

The thoughts about the odd behavior quickly slip out of his mind as the other turtles move towards the door. Mikey’s eyes widen at their retreat, heart starting to beat faster as a sense of panic comes over him. Despite everything his rational mind is telling him, his instincts are screaming that he can’t be left alone with Splinter, ever.

“Yeah, no,” Mikey announces, popping to his feet. He avoids Splinter’s shocked gaze and focuses on the fact that the others have finally stopped moving towards the door, turning back to face him. “I’m not going to do that.”

“What do you mean no? You can’t just say no to Master Splinter,” Leonardo crosses his arms, giving Mikey a look of complete and utter confusion. Michelangelo and Donatello shift their posture, distinctly uncomfortable, while Raphael’s narrow gaze is locked curiously on Mikey.

“I can, and I have. Deal with it,” He shoots back, still avoiding Splinter’s gaze that he can distinctly feel on the side of his head. His fingers once again find the thread of his sleeve, weaving it between his fingers and gently pulling on the base. He can feel how weak it is, barely hanging onto the rest of the jacket.

“That’s not how that works–” Leonardo begins, but Mikey cuts him off before he can go on.

“So you’ve dealt with people from different dimensions then?” Silence. “That’s what I thought. You don’t know how any of this is supposed to work. You don’t know anything.”

“You’re right,” Raphael suddenly announces, stepping forward and towards Mikey. His guard immediately goes up as Raphael stops right in front of him with crossed arms and a piercing gaze. “We don’t know anything. Not about you, or your dimension, or how things work there. But what I do know is that right now you’re in our world.” He pauses, leaning into Mikey’s space. Mikey briefly looks to the others, who seem torn between letting this happen and interfering on his behalf. “And in our world, murder is wrong. Even when it’s something as evil as the Kraang.”

Mikey’s eyes widen, and he unconsciously takes a step back. Raphael follows, undeterred.

“So if you’re not going to tell Master Splinter about your world and how you ended up here, then how about you explain why you’ve been beating Kraang bots to a pulp? I’m sure everyone wants to know.” Mikey’s breath stutters at Raphael’s words and he swallows with a dry mouth.

“I told you I prefer the term K-words–”

“I don’t care what you prefer,” Raphael snarls. Mikey sees Michelangelo make an aborted movement towards them before he’s stopped by Leonardo. “K-words, Kraang, they’re both the same thing.”

A ringing starts in his ears and all Mikey can focus on to distract himself from the memories is the piece of string wrapped tight around one of his now trembling fingers. It isn’t as effective at pushing away the flashes of terror as he wants it to be.

“You killed them. That’s on you. What I want to know is if you pose as much of a danger to us and the surface world as you do to the Kraang.”

“Raphael, that is enough–”

“Stop it!” Mikey cries, the thread around his finger snapping free from his sleeve as a fire ignites in his veins and glass shatters behind him. He startles and spins around, seeing the floor in front of the shrine now covered in bits of glass, spilled water, and scattered flowers.

The only sounds Mikey hears in the ensuing silence is the ringing in his ears and his own harsh breaths as he tries to calm his heart down. He lets the thread attached to his finger float to the floor, staring miserably at the mess he’s made.

Mikey huffs, frustrated tears forming in his eyes that he harshly wipes away with his sleeve. He’s embarrassed himself in front of them now, and they probably think he’s even more dangerous than before. Mikey glares at Raphael’s tense stance, whose eyes are glued to the slight glow still present in his hands.

If he hadn’t been egging him on, then none of this wouldn’t have happened, and that flower vase would still be fine.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to,” Mikey apologizes with a hoarse voice. He wraps his arms around himself, avoiding the others' looks of shock and sudden wariness.

“H-how are your scars glowing?” Donatello asks in a faint voice.

Mikey swallows, waiting until the glow from his arms disappears completely before sighing and meeting the many shocked eyes trained on him and his trembling hands. He slowly retracts them fully into his sleeves, completely out of sight, and squeezes his eyes shut.

Man, he could really use a nap right now. This little outburst, being kidnapped twice, combined with…whatever had happened earlier that night that messed with his ninpō, had sapped all of his energy right out of him. But, as he pried his eyes open and looked around the room, meeting Splinters now very concerned gaze and passing over the turtles wide eyes, Mikey knows there isn’t any backing out of an explanation now.

He’ll just have to be as concise and vague as possible. Then, when they’re satisfied, he can crawl back to his shelter, bury himself in a blanket cocoon, and pass out for the next three days.

Yeah, that sounds like a great plan. Leo would surely approve of his planning skills.

Chapter Text

“–and then the armor disappeared, Oroku Saki reunited with Gram Gram, and everyone fully unlocked their ninpō!” Mikey finishes with a tired flourish for his rapt audience. They had migrated to the living room as it became clear the recounting of his life would take longer than anticipated, since he kept having to backtrack and give context for certain things. Mikey was perched on the small coffee table, front and center, with Splinter and the others taking their seats on the couch in front of him.

Michelangelo had even gotten popcorn from…somewhere, during the middle of the storytelling.

“So…you’re biologically related to the Shredder in your world?” Leonardo asks, brow furrowed in thought. Splinter is the same, a slightly troubled look still on his face when Mikey had first revealed that apparent shock.

“Yep! He’s our great, great, too many greats to count, grandfather,” Mikey confirms. Leonardo shakes his head in disbelief.

“Well that explains your bloodlust, at least,” Raphael grumbles from his slouched position at the end of the couch. He had been the least interactive out of all of them, never questioning something Mikey had said or making any kind of dramatics during the bits of his story that shocked the others.

Such as the fact Mikey’s Dad was a movie star before he got mutated. Or that there was an entire city under New York chock full of mutants and Yokai. Or the fact that not only was his Shredder a literal demon, but also a direct blood-relative to the living Hamatos.

Throughout all of that breaking news, Raphael had simply sat there, absorbing all of the information with a stony mask. Even when Mikey had tried to amp up some parts as much as he could to try and get him more engaged like the rest of his family, there was no breaking his resolve. It annoyed Mikey to no end, but he supposed he would have to deal with Raphael's prickly attitude for the foreseeable future.

The task ‘Get the Stick Out of Raphael’s Ass’ is looking to be the hardest mission he’s had to undertake in this dimension so far.

“And you guys defeated Shredder a few months before you found yourself here, I’m guessing?” Donatello asks, pen tapping against the paper notepad clutched in his hands as he eagerly waits for Mikey’s response. Already, four whole pages have been filled with his chicken-scratch of information from Mikey’s world.

“Oh, no, that was two years ago,” Mikey tells him, absently smoothing down the top sticker on his plastron. He’s been picking at it a little too often lately, and if that keeps up he’ll need to replace it sooner than he’d like.

“Wait, you were thirteen when all that happened?!” Michelangelo exclaims, throwing popcorn into the air much to the disgruntled protests of the others. “Dude, that’s insane!”

Mikey tilts his head, confused. “Didn’t all of you start to go out more at 13, too? That’s the age we pretty much agreed was alright for solo missions.”

“Solo missions? You were going up to the surface by yourself at thirteen!?” Leonardo smacks a palm to his forehead, wide eyes staring past at Mikey as he continues. “And your Master Splinter was okay with that?”

“Psh, please,” Mikey scoffs, rolling his eyes. “Like Dad could stop us. Get him in front of his TV with a good show and some cake and he wouldn’t know the difference between Raph and a mop bucket.”

Mikey giggles at his joke, then abruptly stops when he realizes no one else is laughing along with him. Instead they are staring at him in varying degrees of concern. Splinters ears are pinned back again, and the pity he can see in his gaze makes his skin itchy underneath his jacket.

Donatello is the first to shake out of the impromptu pity party, interrupting the awkward silence with another question (thank you Donatello for never knowing when to stop asking questions). “If the last battle with your Shredder was two years ago, then how did you get those scars on your hands? Based on their healing they seem pretty recent, and they resemble Lichtenberg figures but much more…permanent.”

His throat suddenly dry, Mikey shifts so most of his hands and arms are covered by his sleeves. The image of what exactly happened to leave those scars briefly passes into his mind before he sharply shoves it back into the far corners of his brain. Instead, he flashes them all a smile that he hopes isn’t too strained.

“Oh, just a permanent reminder of when I first opened an interdimensional portal a couple months ago. No biggie.”

“‘No biggie’? You’re implying you have the power to make multiple trips across dimensions and your reaction is ‘no biggie’?!” Donatello exclaims, nearly ripping through his notepad with how hard he grips it. He has a crazed look on his face, and Mikey wonders just how much he can say without his subconscious trying to take over and making him go crazy.

“I mean, I didn’t really have a choice at the time. It was something I needed to do to…save my brother,” Mikey finally says, voice soft. He can’t look at any of the others, but he can feel the stares boring into him and the sudden shift in atmosphere.

“Orange, I would like you to be honest,” Splinters says. His voice is soft, too, and lilting in a way Mikey really wants to find relaxing but just can’t. “What exactly happened that you are not telling us?”

Mikey hugs himself tight. The memories of that day play on loop somewhere in his mind and he studiously ignores them all. Scrunching his eyes shut he takes a breath, pushing all of that deep, deep into his mind where he doesn’t have to acknowledge them and brings forth a peaceful, easy-going mask instead.

“Just the invasion. It doesn’t matter too much now, we won before it spread out of New York and Earth was saved, so everything’s cool now.”

The others say nothing, staring at him blankly. He’s aware that they are waiting for him to continue, to give more details like he had during the retelling of his life, but Mikey isn’t having it. He’ll give the information necessary to help get him home and that’s it. This other version of his family doesn’t need to be burdened by all of the horrors Mikey had to live through. No one does.

“Invasion? Like, alien invasion?” Michelangelo squeaks, eyes going wide with a gasp. “Do you mean a Kraang invasion?!”

Mikey twitches, clenching his hands inside his sleeves. He tries his best to keep his smile light as he replies. “Yeah, that. And can we all please call them K-words from now on? It would help a lot, thanks.”

The statement gets a variety of reactions, most of them being confusion, worry, and a disbelieving scoff from Raphael. Mikey can clearly see all of them, even Splinter, share a knowing glance before they focus back onto him and his still forced smile that he worries looks much more like a grimace at this point. His foot taps a fast rhythm against the floor as he waits for some kind of response, ready to divert attention away from the invasion as soon as he can.

“So, just to recap. This…K-word invasion happened a few months ago in your world,” Leonardo starts, hesitant in using Mikey’s suggested replacement. He still appreciates that Leonardo is trying to go along with it, despite how uncomfortable he looks doing it. “And ever since then, your powers haven’t been working right?”

“Yeah, Draxum says I should have died opening that first portal, actually,” Mikey says with a shrug, relieved to be talking about the actual problem again. He chooses to ignore the now frantic looks being shot his way. “Whatever I managed to do really messed with my razz-ma-tazz, and before I ended up in this dimension I was working on getting my powers under control. But, obviously, that hasn't really been working.”

The others take that in, and in the brief moment of silence Mikey feels all of the events of the night pile back onto him. He fights back a yawn and subtly stretches his hands out, rolling his shoulders to release any remaining tension from the brief close call about the K-word conversation. Splinter seems to catch on to his exhaustion immediately, and gently clears his throat to gain their attention.

“Our guest has had a long and stressful night,” he begins, gliding to his feet and towering over them all from where they sit. “I believe it would benefit all of us if we continue these discussions after a good night's rest.”

“But I still have so many questions!” Donatello exclaims. His paper notepad crinkles as he frantically looks between Splinter and Mikey. “I don’t suppose you could spare a couple of hours to come to my lab so I can run some tests on your powers–”

“Donnie, we’ve talked about this. No unethical experiments.”

“It’s not unethical if it gets us answers!” Donatello argues back at Leonardo, glaring at the blue-banded turtle. “And of course I wouldn’t do anything that would knowingly hurt him, but not every experiment works on the first try!”

“I’ll let you do all the experiments you want after everyone gets some sleep, okay?” Mikey interrupts before the two can dissolve into a full-blown argument. Donatello looks ecstatic while Leonardo looks at him in horror.

“I think you just signed away your life, bro,” Michelangelo whispers to him as Donatello trots off with manic giggles. Mikey just shrugs. He’s not too worried, his Donnie was never intentionally malicious in his experiments and he doubts Donatello is either. And if whatever he has planned can get him a step closer to getting home than he’ll take it.

He doesn’t mind being a lab rat too much, anyway. It always leads to treats and special favors for Mikey.

“I better be getting back to my little home-away-from-home, then,” Mikey announces, standing and walking towards the same tunnel they had entered in earlier. “I’ll be back tomorrow at some point, don’t bother waiting for me if you’re busy with other things, though.”

“Hold on.” Leonardo grabs onto Mikey's shoulder and turns him around with a confused head tilt. “Don’t you want to stay here?”

Mikey opens his mouth to refuse, not wanting to impose and make more problems for this family than he already has, but Splinter beats him to the punch, approaching them with a kind expression and Michelangelo on his tail looking like a kicked puppy.

“I must insist that you stay with us, Orange. I am sure you have managed fine by yourself, but you will not be a burden here. I would feel much better having you somewhere I knew you were safe. Especially since it appears you have gained the attention of the Foot Clan.”

“Yeah, and then we can have an awesome turtle sleepover! It’ll be wicked,” Michelangelo adds with a fist pump. Raphael scoffs as he stands from the couch, stalking off to what must be his room without another glance at them.

Mikey's gaze lingers on where he disappeared for a moment before turning back to the others with a tired smile. Had he been less exhausted he might have argued more, but none of them look like they are about to drop the topic. And while he’s grateful that they want him to be safe, he feels a twinge of annoyance about it as well.

He can handle this world's Foot Clan. He was just caught at a bad time was all, any other day and he would have kicked their asses.

“Yeah, I guess I can stay here,” Mikey replies. The tension he hadn’t noticed before releases from both Leonardo and Splinters shoulders and he gently moves out of Leonardo's grip. “I’d like to get some of my things first, though.”

“We can come with you! I bet you really decked out wherever you’ve been staying,” Michelangelo exclaims, jumping closer and slinging an arm around Mikey’s shoulders.

“And we can make sure you don’t run into any trouble, too.” Mikey rolls his eyes at Leonardo's statement, but doesn’t say anything to refute it. He just wants to get his blanket nest and go to sleep already.

“The boys will help you settle in when you get back,” Splinter says before turning and striding towards the dojo. He pauses and turns to meet Mikey’s gaze one last time with a kind smile. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Orange. I will see you all tomorrow during training.” With that, Splinter disappears into the dojo and closes the sliding door with a soft thud.

Man, Splinter is really formal in this dimension. It’s unnerving not to see him joking around.

“Let’s get going. The sooner we leave the sooner we can get back,” Leonardo says, leading the way into the dark tunnel. Michelangelo gives him a little shake before starting forward and dragging Mikey with him. He lets the other turtles guide the way for a bit, making his own private bets on how long it will take Leonardo to realize he has no idea where he is going.

Leonardo stops after ten minutes of walking aimlessly through the tunnels, turning back to him with a sheepish smile. “Uh, where did you say we were going, exactly?”

Dangit, his twelve minute prediction was just off.

==========

Getting to his little shelter is more complicated than Mikey thought it would be. He had easily led them to the surface to get his bearings on where they were in the city, but their progress was constantly being slowed by the Foot-bots that seemed to be patrolling around every corner.

Mikey had been intending to strike up some conversation to get to know Leonardo and Michelangelo better and compare dimensions more, but it became clear after the first two times of having to dive into the shadows that talking wasn’t going to be something that happened on the journey. He had briefly asked Leonardo if there were always this many crawling around, only to get a solemn shake of the head and orders to be careful.

Mikey rolled his eyes at that. Why wouldn’t they be careful with this many enemies surrounding them?

He lets out a relieved sigh as his primary manhole cover comes into view, dropping down into the alley below after making sure the coast is clear. Mikey hesitates for a moment, looking down at the dented cover and then his hands, but before he can go through the humiliation of asking for help with it Michelangelo is darting past him. He lifts the cover and chucks it to the side, barely missing Leonardo’s shell.

“Whoops, sorry bro,” Michelangelo whispers to his brother's scowling face, but Leonardo just shakes his head and gestures for Mikey to hop in. He gladly follows that order and takes a breath of relief as Leonardo jumps down and closes the opening behind him.

“Just a little bit more down this way, and then we’re home free.” Mikey struts forward, hastily leading the way towards his little shelter. The other two follow close behind with a much more relaxed gait now that they’re not out in the open.

Finally, Mikey sees the tunnel entrance. WIth a grin he spins around to face Leonardo and Michelangelo, walking the last few steps into his ‘mini lair’ with a flourish.

“Welcome, gentlemen, to my temporary crib. It’s not much, but it’s served its purpose well,” Mikey says with a fond sigh. Leonardo looks around the dark room critically while Michelangelo's eyes light up at the many paint tests and small drawings littering the room.

“Oh, you have to teach me how to do this! Raph never lets me anywhere near his art stuff,” Michelangelo says, stepping further into the room to study the paintings further.

“Of course! I can totally show you how I do my thang,” Mikey answers as he hops onto his ledge and starts to gather his many blankets. He takes the biggest one and piles the others into it, tying the four corners together to make a large, makeshift bag. The little tid-bit of information on Raphael seemingly being the family artist here peaks his interest, but Mikey quickly shoves it in the ‘details’ column of his brain and doesn’t ask anything more about it.

“I see you’ve been eating healthy,” Leonardo deadpans as he glances towards the pile of discarded chips and candy wrappers built in the corner. Mikey laughs sheepishly, hopping down from the ledge and walking around him to get to his stash of paint cans.

“Who’s going to tell me no, amiright?” Mikey shrugs and stuffs the cans that seem the most full into his bag, leaving behind those that are close to empty or less than half.

“I would have, and now I am,” Leonardo states with his arms crossed.

Mikey rolls his eyes, holding back an exasperated sigh. “Who do you think you are, my mom?”

“Ooo~, sick burn!” Michelangelo crows from where he’s climbed onto the ledge to trace over a small drawing of a bull with his finger. “He’s gotcha there, Leo.”

Mikey smirks at the reddening of Leonardo's face and his sputtered attempts to save his pride. He makes a mental note about the mother henning, as well as one to keep telling him off about it until he backs off.

Jeez, and he thought he had at least managed to get rid of Raph’s overprotective big brother mode when he hopped dimensions. Apparently not.

“Do you have everything, then?” Leonardo finally asks, giving up on his ignored arguments about how ‘I’m just watching out for you’ and ‘you need a healthy diet to grow’.

Mikey looks around, slightly tempted to grab the discarded items of clothing, too, but ultimately decides against it. He really only wants to keep the jacket, anyway, even though the top is a mess of stitching and fabric, now. He’ll have to ask someone for the stuff to try and repair it, but that can wait until tomorrow.

He really wants to sleep.

“Yeah, that’s everything I need right now. I can manage without the rest.” Mikey gives a firm nod and walks toward the entrance, flanked by Leonardo and Michelangelo.

“Good news is I know roughly where we are in the sewer system, so we don’t have to deal with any more Foot-bots, at least,” Leonardo says, subtly squeezing past Mikey to start leading the way. Mikey simply shrugs, falling into step with Michelangelo beside him.

“So,” Mikey begins after almost ten minutes of complete silence, “Are you guys always that formal with your dad?” He gets confused looks from the question but Mikey plays up his innocence about the probing as much as possible.

That seems to be happening a lot, actually. All of his questions seem to confuse or worry the others, but why? They’re perfectly reasonable things to ask when flung into another dimension.

“We’ve always called him Master Splinter or Sensei, if that’s what you mean,” Michelangelo finally answers.

“Even outside of training and serious moments? Why, though? He’s your dad, shouldn’t you call him that most of the time?”

“That’s just what he wants to be called,” Leonardo quickly interjects, sending Mikey a look as if he should know this already. Why would he be asking if he already knew? “It’s a sign of respect to his skills and teachings that he’s been passing down to us.”

“And he doesn’t use any nicknames for you guys, either? Only full names? Cause that just makes it sound like you're in trouble all the time.”

“Those are the names he gave us, of course he’s going to use them,” Leonardo grinds out. Mikey can see his hands clench once, then twice, before he glances over his shoulder to send Mikey a cold look. “It’s better than using colors when talking to us. Isn’t that a little weird?”

A pang of defensiveness bursts in Mikey’s chest as those words sink in and he scowls. Beside him, he can feel awkward tension rolling off of Michelangelo from Leonardo’s comment.

“It’s not like it’s anything bad,” Mikey retorts, crossing his arms as much as he can with the makeshift bag slung over his shoulder. “I mean, we’re pretty sure it just stuck from when Dad still thought we were overgrown pet turtles and not, like, actual babies. He does know and use our names. Sometimes. Mostly in life threatening or world ending situations.”

“I think it’s pretty cool!” Michelangelo hastily butts in before Leonardo can say anything more. “We don’t really have anything like that other than the regular nicknames. It’s like…a super secret code system.”

Mikey giggles, despite being able to spot the attempt to lessen the tension from a mile away. Like knows like, after all, and that was his favorite trick in the book when trying to get Raph and Leo to stop arguing before it became actual fighting. He hadn’t had to use it too much after the invasion, but those two years beforehand were rough, to say the least.

Leonardo, on the other hand, blithely ignores Michelangelo’s attempt at de-escalation and continues on his ‘self-righteous’ crusade. “It takes the world ending for him to call you by your names? That’s ridiculous! And he just didn’t notice that you were going on dangerous missions by yourselves when you were thirteen? How irresponsible can you be?”

Mikey glowers, staring daggers into the back of Leonardo's head. He might not win an argument that his Dad was the best parent to ever exist, but that didn’t matter because Mikey knew that he tried his hardest to give them all the best lives he could considering the circumstances. Dad made sure they had an education, they learned about the world, and allowed them to be kids for as long as possible when that luxury had never been afforded to him. He wanted so much better for Mikey and his brothers than the life they had been dealt, and he gave his all trying to give it to them.

He couldn’t fault his Dad completely when he started drifting away, either. All of them had been angry about it at the time (and scared, they had all been so scared when suddenly they were expected to take care of themselves and each other), but they had a much better understanding of it now. They all knew about the trauma that he had gone through and just how much his life had been overturned when Mikey and his brothers had entered his life.

There was still resentment, of course. Raph resented how he was forced to grow up too fast to take care of them, Donnie resented the parental support and praise he never got, and Leo resented the lack of attention and reassurance about his place in the family. Mikey, on the other hand, resents the fact that his Dad made his brothers feel that way in the first place.

But no matter how complicated their relationship with Dad was, he had truly turned over a new leaf and was doing his best now to not let his depression get the best of him and be much more present in their lives. And, really, that’s all they had ever wanted.

Leonardo, however, had no place to say Mikey’s Dad was a terrible father.

“And you think your Master Splinter is any better? At least my Dad knows how to separate family time and training, your ‘Sensei’ doesn’t seem to know the difference,” Mikey fires back. Leonardo's shoulders tense as he gives him a weak glare, eyes roaming over Mikey’s stony face before turning back around with pursed lips.

“Heylooitthat!” Michelangelo exclaims, rushing ahead and sliding into the entrance to the lair with a too-wide smile. “We’re home now!”

Leonardo shakes his head, a slight smile forming on his lips and tension draining as he passes Michelangelo and gives his head a short pat. Mikey huffs in amusement as his alternate preens under the small act of affection.

Before Mikey can ask where he’s going to be bunking because oh boydoes he need to sleep for three days a clatter comes from the room directly across from the dojo. Donatello bursts out of the door with crazed eyes, locking onto Mikey and skipping over to him with a manic smile.

“I am so happy you’re back! Now, how about I get some quick and simple DNA samples? It won’t hurt too much and the blood draw will probably help you get to sleep even faster! I have everything already set up in my lab for testing your powers too if you’re interested–”

“Don, knock it off,” Leonardo orders, rolling his eyes. “Your tests can wait until tomorrow.”

“But…this is going to be the largest scientific breakthrough of this century! Or even in the history of the world!” Donatello whines. He gives Leonardo his best puppy dog eyes and Mikey can’t help the sliver of longing at that look.

It’s very similar to the one Donnie would give Raph when he was about to be dragged out of his lab for some quality rest. The scene playing out before him itself was enough to tug on Mikey’s heartstrings, but that look quickly pushes him to his limit.

His already sour mood plummets, and combined with his utter exhaustion Mikey just wants this night to be over.

“I call dibs on showing him the guest room!” Michelangelo suddenly exclaims, grabbing Mikey’s wrist and pulling him towards the other rooms before either of the other two can protest. Mikey jerks but follows obediently, feet dragging as with a flick of a light he is presented with an empty concrete room with a single thin bedroll shoved into the corner.

“It’s not much, but with the blankets it should be okay.” Mikey nods, taking in Michelangelo’s words and trudging into the small room. He drops his bag of blankets and quickly unspools the bedroll so the edges border the corner of the room. “And my room is right across the hall, so if you need anything I’ll be right there. Try not to make too much noise, though, because Raph’s room is right next to you and he gets an attitude when he’s woken up too soon.”

“More attitude than he already has?” Mikey mumbles as he kneels and unties the big blanket, taking out all of the paint cans and setting them to the side as he piles the rest of the soft things onto the bedroll. He unwraps the tape from his legs and pulls off his bandanna, tucking it safely into his jacket pocket.

Michelangelo snorts from where he leans in the doorway. “Trust me, it gets even worse if you interrupt his beauty sleep.”

“Good to know,” Mikey hums, shucking his jacket to the floor and diving into his new nest with a sigh. He scrunches his eyes shut and nuzzles into the blankets until he’s finally comfortable.

“Well, I guess I’ll see ya tomorrow, mini-me,” Michelangelo announces when it becomes clear Mikey isn’t going to say anything more. “Have good dreams.”

“You too,” Mikey mumbles. The light shuts off and the door gently closes, Michelangelo’s footsteps petering off as he goes back into the living area where he can still hear the murmurs of Donatello and Leonardo.

Mikey sighs, turning away from the door to stare at the cracked wall. Out of all the ways his night could have ended, this is, objectively, one of the best. He’s figured out that interacting with his alternate family won’t destroy the universe, he isn’t perpetually alone anymore, they’ve agreed to help him find a way back to his home, and more importantly he isn’t a hostage to the Foot Clan.

Despite this, he can’t help but feel like this was also the worst outcome. Mikey knows that these people aren’t his brothers, and none of them are his actual family, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t had to push down the feelings of hope when he catches sight of their bandannas and green skin. None of them look anything like his own brothers, but that doesn’t stop his mind from being tricked. The only good thing was how different Splinter was, as there was no way he would be confusing him with his Dad any time soon.

Mikey had also been holding out some hope that maybe mystic powers and ninpō did exist here and he was simply missing it, but now it was confirmed that there was no such thing in this universe. And while he trusted any Donatello to figure out an interesting problem dropped in front of them, they had to start at zero now, which only makes the amount of time Mikey is going to be stuck in this dimension longer.

The incident with his ninpō weighs heavily on his mind, too. He tugs on it, and while it is getting stronger, it is still much weaker than it has been the entire time he’s been stuck here. He tosses fitfully in his blanket nest, eyes scrunched tight as he tries to let his worries flood past him.

Mikey shakes the thought off as best as he can, telling himself that he’ll mention it to Donatello tomorrow when he is inevitably dragged into his lab, and flips onto his plastron to bury his face into the blankets with a sigh. His body is screaming for rest along with his mind but his anxious thoughts keep circling in his brain, preventing him from concentrating on just going to sleep.

Through the churning of his gut from the unfamiliar smells of this lair and the worry swirling in his mind around his ninpō problem, Mikey admits to himself that sleep will likely elude him tonight despite all his wishes on slipping peacefully into a coma.

Chapter Text

When Mikey finally wakes after a fitful night of rest, the first thing that registers is the smell of something burning.

He slowly emerges from his shell with a groan, burying his face into the soft fabric. It does absolutely nothing to get rid of the smell, and after a few minutes of it seeming to get even worse Mikey sighs and reluctantly peels himself from the covers.

Stretching, Mikey wrinkles his nose. He rubs his eyes and yawns, crawling out of the bedroll and hopping to his feet.

What he wouldn’t give to sleep for at least ten more hours. He doesn’t feel well rested at all, eyes heavy and thoughts clouded from going back and forth between dozing and the feelings of overwhelming anxiety and worry all night long. It’s still better than no sleep at all, but if he didn’t get proper rest soon Mikey was going to have some words with people.

Especially whoever had woken him with the horrendous smell most likely coming from some monstrosity in the kitchen.

With one more stretch Mikey sighs, glancing down at his hands. They feel much better today, and he’d confidently say they are almost normal right now. He flexes his fingers and grins when there is barely any tremble and only a slight feeling of static. Take that, Universe, he finally gets to have a Good Hands Day™.

The only problem is the scarring, now. Mikey would have to be blind not to notice every time one of the others had snuck a glance at them, and the pity he could see afterwards was going to get old really fast. It wasn’t that he was self-conscious about the scars themselves, he had plenty more everywhere on his body, but the reactions to his hands was not something Mikey wanted to deal with today.

He glances towards his jacket in the corner. Wearing it would definitely cover the scars, but the top was still a mess of thread and stitches from where the hood had been ripped off. Mikey is already shuddering at the phantom feeling of that textural nightmare rubbing against his neck all day.

But right now, it seems to be his only option to cover the scars.

Biting his lip Mikey resigns himself to wearing it, walking over to slip it on before he goes to confront whoever had woken him up. He only makes it a step before his foot knocks something across the ground, and Mikey looks down with a grin to see black athletic tape that had been placed near his bedroll.

That was a much, much better option than the jacket.

Mikey quickly wraps the tape around his hands and up his forearms, making sure it’s snug before his legs get the same treatment, sliding on his knee pads as soon as he’s finished. He’ll have to thank whoever left it for him (probably Michelangelo) after he makes sure the lair isn’t being burned down.

He makes sure his weapons are strapped in and strides out of the room, in much better spirits even with the abysmal amount of sleep he’s gotten. He almost gags as he takes a step into the living area, though, being assaulted by the smell of…burning scales?

Mikey takes off towards the kitchen with a hand over his snout, brow furrowing when he sees Michelangelo hunched over a large frying pan with narrowed eyes. He approaches his alternate slowly, mouth still covered as the smell gets stronger and he can finally see the amalgamation of fish, tomato sauce, shredded cheese, and small bits of burnt white bread sprinkled into the frying pan.

“What in the pizza supreme is that?” Mikey exclaims, startling Michelangelo out of his concentration with a yelp. His surprise is immediately overcome with a bright smile when he waves Mikey closer.

“Morning, dude! I’m making breakfast for everyone, wanna see?” Michelangelo pulls him to his side as soon as Mikey gets close enough, and the smell is even more rancid than before. Mikey does gag this time, staring at what he called ‘breakfast’ in horror.

“That’s supposed to be food, chico?” Mikey whispers, eye twitching as a bubble pops in the tomato sauce. Michelangelo’s grin gets even wider, nodding his head enthusiastically.

“Yep! I don’t know how it is for you, but I’m kinda the resident chef around here,” he states proudly, and suddenly Leonardo’s comment about eating junk food gets a lot more hypocritical now that Mikey knows this is what he’s been subjected to eating.

He has to put a stop to this.

“No, no, no, absolutely not,” Mikey mumbles, gripping the handle of the frying pan and chucking the entire thing into the trash before Michelangelo can protest. His alternate pouts at him as he stares longingly at where his abomination now rightfully belongs. “We can make something else. Something that’s actually, y’know, edible.”

“We could have eaten that! I think.” Michelangelo rubs the back of his neck, avoiding Mikey's skeptical look.

“If that’s what you call food I’m surprised any of you are still alive,” Mikey retorts, hopping over to the fridge to see what he can work with. He’s disappointed when he finds it mostly empty aside from some leftover pizza boxes, a single carton of eggs, and a questionable carton of milk. Closing the fridge he starts to open the freezer and is immediately met with a tiny ‘meow’.

Mikey blinks, a smile growing on his face as he takes in the cat made of ice cream that apparently lives in the lairs freezer.

“Aw,” he coos, reaching out a finger to scratch under its chin. It gives an affectionate purr and nuzzles against his hand, spreading a glob of strawberry ice cream. Mikey squeals. “They’re so cute!”

“I know, right! Ice Cream Kitty is the best, aren’t you girl?” Michelangelo says, reaching in beside him to give Kitty a gentle rub to her ear. She meows to confirm their words, and Mikey quickly shuts the door to make sure she doesn’t start to melt. He sniffs the ice cream smeared on his hand then licks it off with a shrug. Best not to think too hard about that.

After a moment to feel a sliver of jealousy seeing a pet in the lair (Dad never let them have a pet, and no, Dad, S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N didn’t count), Mikey continues his search through the cupboards to see them similarly bare as the fridge. He puts a hand to his chin, thinking about all the ingredients and spices he saw in the fridge and cupboards, and comes to a quick and easy breakfast that they can make before the others wake up.

“Want me to teach you how to cook something that won’t give anyone food poisoning?” Mikey asks Michelangelo with a grin. His alternate nods, then stands up straight and salutes.

“Your wish is my command, Captain! I will be the best student you’ve ever had.”

Mikey grins, gathering the loaf of bread, the carton of eggs, the still questionable milk, a small container of ground cinnamon, and a dusty bottle of vanilla extract.

“Then come, my student, as you shall learn from the master.”

==========

They end up burning a couple of pieces, but when the lair starts to come alive they’ve almost finished setting up the breakfast spread.

A small pile of steaming french toast sits in the middle of the table, with a bottle of blueberry and strawberry syrup replacing maple as no matter how much Mikey raided the cupboard he couldn’t find a single bottle of the stuff.

Who the heck has strawberry syrup but not maple? It’s blasphemous.

And, thankfully, the burnt smell that had lingered in the air is now completely covered by the smell of vanilla and cinnamon. Mikey still caught his alternates longing glances towards the bin that he had to weigh shut in fear that Michelangelo would try to salvage it. Luckily, Mikey managed to distract him with the cooking lesson just enough that there were no actual rescue attempts.

He looks over the table with a large grin, Michelangelo matching him and meeting Mikey’s raised fist for a victory bump.

“This looks amazing! They’re going to be so surprised when they get out here,” Michelangelo exclaims, smelling the air with a pleased sigh. “I wish I could cook like this all the time, you’re like a wizard.”

“It just takes practice. You think I was able to make anything close to this when I started out?” Mikey replies. He bumps his shoulder into his alternates, smiling up at him in pride. “And you helped me, so I can’t take all the credit for making this.”

Michelangelo looks close to tears at the small praise about his skills. His smile turns wobbly and he gives Mikey’s shoulder a soft squeeze before moving back to the kitchen to finish cleaning up. Mikey tilts his head, following his lead as he tries to figure out where the clean pans go. He gets so caught up in his task that he forgets to ask Michelangelo what the sudden burst of emotion was all about.

But, as he hears more sounds of shuffling coming from the other rooms, he supposes he’ll have to ask about it later when they have more time for privacy. Mind now lingering on the bedrooms, the mysterious black wrappings that appeared in his room pop back into the front of his brain.

“Thanks for the wrappings, by the way,” Mikey abruptly says, placing the last clean pan back into a cupboard. “I wasn’t really psyched to wear my jacket again until I can fix it.”

Michelangelo looks back at him with a frown, glancing down to Mikey’s wrapped arms in confusion. “Uh, I didn’t leave anything in your room. Besides, only Raph uses black tape for his drumst–”

“Does the kitchen actually smell good for once, or am I still dreaming?” Raphael announces through a yawn, stretching his arms over his head as he saunters towards the table. Leonardo follows behind him, looking much more awake as he makes a beeline for what Mikey has concluded must be Donatello’s lab.

“We made breakfast!” Michelangelo announces, bouncing towards his brother and pushing him towards the table. Raphael reluctantly allows it, falling into a chair with a grunt. His eyes widen as he catches sight of the pile of french toast sitting on the table.

Raphael narrows his eyes as Mikey plops into the seat directly across from him, sending the red-banded turtle a bright smile that is resolutely not returned.

If Raphael had left the tape for him, that must mean that he’s finally warmed up to Mikey crashing their lair, right?

“You better not have slipped poison into this.”

The thankfulness he was about to express to Raphael for the show of kindness abruptly dies on Mikey’s tongue as his smile turns strained. Okay, so maybe he still has some work to do. “I’ll have you know poison actually tastes delicious, and would enhance the flavor profile significantly.”

He blankly stares at Mikey for a moment before shaking his head with a tired sigh. “Why am I not surprised that you know what poison tastes like?”

“Is that cinnamon?” Donatello groggily interrupts before Mikey can respond. Leonardo’s grip on his arm is firm from where he’s being dragged out of his lab.

“It’s french toast! I promise there are no surprises in it this time. Orange helped make it, and he has some serious skill in the kitchen,” Michelangelo answers, hopping into the seat at the head of the table right between Mikey and Raphael.

“Well it looks fantastic, you two.” Leonardo lets go of Donatello and sits down in the space next to Mikey, Donatello taking the seat next to where Raphael is poking at a piece of toast he brought to his plate.

Mikey and Michelangelo send each other proud grins as they start to dig into their meal. There’s multiple pleased hums from Leonardo where he’s drowned his toast in strawberry syrup, as well as from Donatello as he nibbles on the plain edges. Mikey waits patiently for Raphael to give up the blueberry syrup to drizzle a small amount on his own serving and cut into it with a pleased smile.

“Where’d you learn how to cook like this anyway, Orange?” Leonardo eventually asks between bites. “You could definitely keep teaching Mike a thing or two.”

Mikey ignores Michelangelo's indignant pout for now as he gladly turns to face Leonardo. Staring at a grumpy Raphael as he devours piece after piece of blueberry toast was getting boring.

“My Raph and I would sneak into Dad’s TV room when he fell asleep and watch the cooking channel when we were little. From there, as soon as I was tall enough to see over the counter, I took over cooking from Raph since I was tired of everything having a charcoal taste to it.” Mikey takes his final bite of toast and speaks through his mouthful. “Ruppert Swaggart is the best chef I know and his show taught me all the basics!” He swallows, grinning up at Leonardo. “It sucks that he wants to eat us alive, now.”

Donatello promptly chokes on his bite, coughing as he looks at Mikey with wide eyes. “I’m sorry, I think I misheard you. Did you just say he wants to eat you alive?”

“Yeah, which is the worst since the few times I’ve cooked with him were dreams come true. His risotto is some of the best cooking I’ve ever tasted,” Mikey sighs dreamily, staring into the distance as he thinks back on all the times Meat Sweats at least pretended to be nice. Sure, he completely betrayed Mikey every single time, but that was some of the best culinary experiences he can remember.

“That seems like it’s on brand for you,” Raphael remarks, shoving the last of the french toast into his mouth. It breaks Mikey out of his reverie and he rolls his eyes.

Before Mikey can retort, the sliding door to the dojo opens and Splinter glides out, looking at them all gathered around the table in surprise. He blinks then shakes his head, gesturing towards the open door behind him.

“Are you all ready for training?” Splinter asks, and Mikey startles as, in sync, the others mutter a ‘hai, Sensei’ and stand from their seats. “Would you like to join us, Orange? You are welcome to watch or participate, whichever you prefer.”

Mikey watches as the others filter into the dojo and fidgets in his seat, slowly hopping off the chair and towards Splinter. “Um, I’ll just watch for now, I think.”

“Very well, join us when you are ready.” With that Splinter turns back towards the dojo, leaving Mikey to slowly follow behind. He isn’t quite sure what training entails in this dimension, but based off of vibe alone he can tell it’s going to be a little more serious than what he’s used to.

Mikey climbs the stairs and pushes open the door to the dojo, softly closing it behind him. He takes a glance around the room to see the others in various stages of warming up, Raphael shooting him a challenging glare as he shifts away. Splinter sinks to his knees below the tree, locking eyes with Mikey and gesturing to his right side.

He glances around the room one more time before shuffling his way over to Splinter. Michelangelo enthusiastically waves at him and Mikey musters a tiny smile and wave back as he sits cross-legged next to Splinter.

From this position, the other mutant absolutely towers over Mikey. He can feel Splinter glance at him out of the corner of his eye, but he studiously avoids his gaze and mindlessly starts fiddling with the sticker on the bottom of his plastron. A nervous feeling is sprouting in his chest the longer he sits next to him in silence. Yet, once again, Mikey can’t place where this feeling is coming from, and tries to tell his mind to ‘shut up’.

It barely works.

“Today you will be sparring,” Splinter finally announces. Mikey flinches slightly beside him, bringing his attention back to the others who have gathered in front of them with their weapons. “It will be a group activity to test your skills against each other as well as how you handle multiple opponents. The last one standing will be declared the victor. Do you all understand?”

“Hai, Sensei,” they chorus once again, moving throughout the dojo to get into their positions. Mikey grimaces at the uniform movements and formal address, but holds his tongue on mentioning it. They obviously have different customs here, and no matter how weird they are, he's going to try and respect them as long as they’re not hurting anyone too much.

He doesn’t really want to get into another argument like he did with Leonardo, but he will if he sees something that needs to be called out.

“Hajime,” Splinter announces. Mikey briefly looks to him in confusion but his attention is drawn right back to the others as Leonardo launches himself at Raphael.

Oh, that must mean ‘go’, then.

His attention doesn’t deviate from the fight as he watches the precise kicks, swipes, and punches being thrown. It is much less chaotic than his own training sessions at home, and Mikey can clearly see just how much training these turtles have gone through. Almost every attack is thoughtful and precise, the only flailing and jabs being thrown when Michelangelo manages to catch the others off guard and they have to awkwardly adjust.

The only person he’s seen fight similar to this spar is Cassandra.

Mikey also takes the opportunity to study their fighting styles. Overall, most of them are accurate to what he’s picked up on from his own brothers. Sure, all of the movements are much more deliberate, but the general attacks and thinking behind them seems to be roughly the same.

Donatello is knocked out first by Leonardo, quickly followed by Michelangelo being disarmed and thrown across the room by Raphael. His alternate and Donatello take places by Mikey's side, grumbling about unfairness as they watch the remaining two battle it out. It’s a close match, both getting in good hits, but in the end Leonardo wins the battle with a well timed block as he sweeps Raphael’s legs from underneath him.

“Yame,” Splinter barks, causing Leonardo to drop his weapon to his side and offer his hand to Raphael with a smug smirk. He bats his brother's hand away with a grumble, climbing to his feet with his arms crossed as they come to stand in front of Splinter. “Well done, Leonardo. You as well, Raphael, you managed much longer this time.”

“Leo still kicked your butt, though,” Michelangelo chirps from the side. Mikey snickers at the glare Raphael gives his brother. His alternate suddenly turns to him with an excited smile, leaning back on his heels. “We should spar next! Then we can prove who’s the better Michelangelo.”

Mikey snorts at the eager look on his face, and before he can think about it he finds himself nodding his head. “Yeah, but you better not be a sore loser when–”

“If you wish to spar, might I suggest Donatello as your first partner?” Splinter interrupts. Mikey looks up at him with wide eyes, gulping at the raised eyebrow. He can feel the excitement lessen at his words, but Mikey has a feeling that his ‘suggestion’ was more of an order.

“Uh, sure, if you’re up to it,” Mikey directs towards Donatello. Michelangelo pouts as his purple brother perks up, launching to his feet with a grin.

“Obviously! If I can’t get you in my lab yet this is the perfect time to test your skill set,” Donatello exclaims, twirling his bō with a flourish. Mikey stands and takes position opposite of him, drawing both of his ‘chuks with a smirk.

Oh, he’ll get some data collection alright. Right as his shell hits the floor, because Donatello has no clue what he’s in for now.

“Hajime,” Splinter announces once again. Immediately Mikey launches toward Donatello with a cackle, swinging the end of his weapon towards his face. Donatello blocks it, as predicted, and attempts to twist his staff into the chain to disarm him. What he doesn’t expect is Mikey letting go of his weapon, causing the end he had been holding to whip towards his face.

Donatello yelps as the end catches him in the jaw, shaking the weapon off his staff with a hiss. He narrows his eyes at Mikey as he giggles from his crouch, lazily spinning his remaining nunchaku. Mikey zeros in on the minute tightening of his grip on the bō, grabbing both ends of his weapon just in time to catch Donatello’s staff with the chain.

Donatello gives him a victorious smirk and before Mikey can react the bō twists and his weapon is flung across the room. With wide eyes Mikey flips away from the next two strikes, trying to maneuver his way back to one of his nunchaku but being cut off by Donatello every time. He slides across the floor on the next strike, and as Donatello pivots once more to block his path a sudden idea pops into Mikey’s mind.

Mikey smirks, leading the other closer to his destination before stopping in his tracks right in front of Donatello’s next strike. He can see the others confusion as he makes no move to block the attack, but just as the staff is about to slam into his arm he twists his torso out of the way, bringing up his hands to grip the end of the weapon. Donatello’s eyes widen as Mikey pulls, whipping the staff through the air with Donatello still attached. Mikey finishes his twist and sends him slamming into the wall where he gasps for air, grip on his bō loosening just enough for Mikey to rip it out of the other's hands.

Donatello catches his breath quickly, narrowing his eyes at Mikey as he flawlessly spins his bō around with a cocky grin. Mikey’s smirk grows as the other launches off the wall with a growl. He aims a kick right for Mikey’s stomach but he dodges around it, smacking the end of the bō into Donatello’s shell.

He yelps, whipping around to stare incredulously at Mikey. He simply cackles harder, going on the offense as he chases Donatello around the dojo, making him dance by cracking the end of the bō to the ground near his feet.

It’s on the last strike to the floor, when a blade pops out of the end of the bō and Mikey turns to a wide eyed Donatellos with a much more feral grin, that the spar is called off.

“Yame,” Splinter finally says as Donatello collapses to the floor with a wheeze, trying desperately to catch his breath. Mikey crouches down in front of him, laying the others’ bō across his knees. Donatello sends a glare his way, weakly bringing up a hand to swipe back his weapon and retracts the blade, which Mikey graciously allows.

“Why didn’t you finish the battle when you took Donatello’s weapon?” Splinter sharply asks. Mikey shrinks slightly under his gaze, but musters as much confidence as he can to stand up and face him head on.

“Because it was more fun to drag it out and make him dance. C’mon, I know it was entertaining for you guys, too, just admit it,” Mikey goads, looking towards the other turtles and desperately hoping they’ll at least sort of be on his side.

“It was pretty funny,” Michelangelo admits. Splinter sends him a sharp glare along with Leonardo. Raphael is biting his lip hard and looking anywhere that doesn’t contain a person, visibly fighting back a smirk.

“We do not aim to humiliate our enemies. Every opponent deserves the opportunity to be defeated swiftly and with honor,” Splinter explains. It takes all of Mikey’s willpower not to cripple under the words, his sharp tone digging into his mind. “I do not expect to see that kind of behavior again.”

Annoyance flares in Mikeys chest. What is it with these guys and trying to parent him?

“Well it’s a good thing you’re not my Sensei, then. I don’t have to listen to what you have to say about how I fight,” Mikey retorts. Splinter looks as if he is about to say something more about the issue, but quickly deflates with a long, blown out breath.

“While it is true that I am not your Sensei, and I do not know how your dimension operates, I would advise you to take my advice with you during your next battle in our world,” he stiffly replies, rising to his feet. Mikey tries his best not to flinch back as the height difference becomes apparent once again. “Training will be cut short today. I have much I need to meditate on.”

Splinter abruptly turns and walks into the room at the very end of the dojo, closing the shade behind him with a sharp snap. Mikey sighs, quickly snatching up his nunchaku from the floor and placing them back on his strap.

Donatello is slowly sitting up from the floor when Leonardo approaches him with a stern look. “You should really start listening to Master Splinter. He’s only trying to help you.”

Mikey scoffs, crossing his arms with narrowed eyes. Frankly, he doesn’t care if he’s trying to help or not, he very clearly overstepped a boundary. And Mikey’s mind was still telling him that he was bad news. He was more willing to trust his gut than anything else. After all, that’s what led him to rehabilitating Draxum even when everyone else insisted that he was a lost cause.

“He can try and help me without acting like what I did was the end of the world, too,” Mikey grumbles, avoiding Leonardo’s gaze. Raphael snorts at the comment as he makes his way out of the dojo, quickly disappearing through the doors.

“Ahem, now that everything else is out of the way,” Donatello interrupts before Leonardo can say anything more. He throws an arm around Mikey's shoulders and whips him around to lead him out of the dojo, Leonardo and Michelangelo following close behind them. “I believe you agreed to, in your words, let me ‘run all of the experiments I want’ in my lab yesterday.”

Mikey rolls his eyes, smiling up into the excited face of Donatello as he leads him closer to his lab. “Yes, I did. And I’m a turtle of my word.”

“I think you’re going to regret that dude–”

“Exactly what I wanted to hear!” Donatello exclaims as he throws open the doors to his lab, effectively cutting off Michelangelo. Mikey takes a moment to gawk at just how plain it is compared to the lab back home before he is shoved onto a chair in front of the largest computer and a cotton swab is being forced into his beak. It removes itself only a few seconds later, Donatello placing the sample into a glass tube and sealing it off before moving on.

“Remember what I said about ethical experiments, Donnie?” Leonardo asks as he leans against the metal table in the corner of the room, watching as Donatello scurries around collecting cables from various boxes strewn around the lab. Donatello scoffs, approaching Mikey with a wide, manic smile.

Maybe he should have thought this through a little more.

“Yes, yes, don’t hurt him on purpose, I’ve got it,” he mutters as he unceremoniously grabs Mikey’s right wrist in a firm grip. Michelangelo opens his mouth to say something where he is perched on the edge of the desk holding the computer swinging his legs, but Donatello hurriedly shushes him.

Mikey awkwardly looks around in the silence, sending a slightly pleading look to Leonardo asking what he’s supposed to do. The other turtle simply shrugs, as if saying ‘don't look at me, you agreed to this’. He sends Leonardo a playful glare and sticks his tongue out, to which the leader rolls his eyes with a smirk.

“It seems your pulse is the same as ours, which will be helpful when I monitor your vitals,” Donatello suddenly announces. He drops Mikey’s wrist and goes to pick up a cable with a tiny suction attached. “I wasn’t sure if it would be different considering we’re a separate species of turtle and mutated by different circumstances.”

“What kind of turtles are you guys, anyway? All of you looked different in that picture you showed us,” Michelangelo asks.

“Oh, that’s an easy one! Donnie did all of the research and told us when we were kids, but Draxum confirmed it for us. Leo’s a red eared slider, Raph’s an alligator snapping turtle, Donnie’s a spiny softshell, and I’m an ornate box turtle, complete with the best markings of the bunch.”

“My alternate self is a softshell?” Donatello blinks, pausing his actions in spreading some sort of gel on pads as his eyes light up. “That’s why he wears a metal shell! It’s genius!”

Mikey giggles at how excited Donatello is to have that information. “Oh yeah, my Donnie is super smart! Half of the things he says go straight over our heads, but the things he makes are so cool! Like, he made this really big drill this one time, and–well, it didn’t really do anything, but the theatrics were out of this world!” Mikey rambles, cringing slightly as Donatello sticks a cold pad on each side of his head, placing another on his plastron right above his heart and the last two on the inside of his left wrist and bicep. “In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s trying to build some sort of portal to get me back home right this minute.”

Donatello’s frantic energy stops for a moment as he sends Mikey a soft smile. “If he’s anything like me, I don’t think there would be much that would stop him from getting you back home.”

Mikey’s bright smile fades a bit, another pang of longing hitting his chest at Donatello's heartfelt remark. His brothers must be really worried about him by now, and they probably weren’t taking care of themselves like they should be.

But it’ll be okay, because now that he had Donatello’s help he would be able to get home and ease his brother's worries in no time.

“Alright, I think everything should work as planned. Tell me if you feel any sort of electric shock, because that is not part of this experiment,” Donatello announces, turning back to his computer and typing too fast for Mikey to keep up with. Multiple different tiles fill the screen, but the only one Mikey can make any sort of sense of is the one displaying his heart rate.

He types in something else, scanning over the screens one last time before turning back to Mikey. “Okay, what I want to start with is your ninpō. You said it was harder to access in our world, right?”

“Yeah, like it’s being weighed down by something,” Mikey replies as he summons a glowing chain to his hand. He has to concentrate a lot more than normal, and if anything it feels even heavier than it did before. A low humming noise coming from the screen startles him enough that he releases his ninpō just before Donatello could poke it with a tweezers.

Donatello huffs but turns back to the screen, eyes roving over the tiny bit of info that appeared. His eyes narrow as he requests for Mikey to activate his ninpō again, to which he dutifully does, Leonardo approaching the screen with open curiosity.

“What is it?” Leonardo asks as Mikey lets the chain dissipate once again, feeling whatever weight that is being pushed onto his powers become even heavier.

“This…doesn’t make any logical sense!” Donatello exclaims, looking over both pieces of data repeatedly. “My assumption that I would be able to pick up on something with the spectrogram was correct, and if you look here–” he points to a black screen with a rainbow of colors covering about half of the tile, “–his ninpō can be seen, as indicated by these colors, getting more intense the longer it’s activated. But then, when it reaches a certain threshold, it stops dead, which shouldn’t be happening unless Orange knowingly keeps it at that level. But based on what we know about ninpō that shouldn’t be possible. I assume you aren’t doing that on purpose?”

“Nope. It is kinda like hitting a wall, though,” Mikey responds, absorbing as much as he can of what Donatello is saying.

“It must be our universe trying to compensate for something that doesn’t exist here. After all, you can’t make matter out of nothing, and even if it was possible those building blocks would have to exist in our dimension in the first place, which they don’t.” Donatello hums, bringing up another window showing a long, flowing line. “The ninpō was also caught in soundwave form as infrasound, at an even lower frequency than elephants use to communicate. There’s three other barely visible wavelengths picked up, too, which is fascinating.”

“So, what does all of that mean?” Michelangelo asks as he studies the colors from the spectrogram, whatever that’s supposed to be.

“It means that unlike how you’ve described mystic powers, your ninpō appears to be stable but contained in a sort of bubble. You most likely won’t be able to use it like you’re used to doing in your own world, and I would be careful not to overdo it. I’m not sure if that ‘bubble’ will constrict your ninpō even further if it loses any stability.”

“Good to know,” Mikey concludes with a slight shiver. He had already guessed the basics of that, at least not using his ninpō part. But the thought of it being constricted even further if he uses it too often? Unconsciously he reaches out towards the specs of light that are his brothers ninpō, uneasy at the thought of being cut off from that simple comfort. All of their eyes flicker towards the screen as another small line of color shows up, and Mikey immediately stops.

“So what about his other powers, then? Are those being affected by our universe too?” Leonardo asks, breaking Mikey out of the spiral he was about to fall into.

“Well, I suppose it’s time to find out.” Donatello lets out a nervous chuckle, stepping slightly away from the computer and Mikey. “Could you try and activate your mystic powers? It doesn’t have to be too much, only enough for me to get a good reading.”

Mikey swallows uneasily but nods anyway. He takes a deep breath, trying to center himself, and focuses on the feeling of his mystic powers. The warmth starts from his chest this time, slowly flowing into his arms as they pulse with a soft glow. Mikey waits with bated breath, anxiously looking down at his glowing hands and trying his best to keep his mind blank as he lets the energy flow through him.

He’s not sure if he’s supposed to be channeling this feeling into doing something specific, but before he can even try a bottle on the table in the corner abruptly shatters. Everyone yelps and Mikey quickly drops the concentration, ducking his head and giving a small laugh.

“Heh, sorry. Was that…good enough?” he asks, looking back at a wide eyed Donatello peeking out from behind Leonardo, who is giving him an unamused glare. He lets out a nervous chuckle before stepping away from his brother and walking back up to the computer.

“Interesting,” Donatello mumbles after a beat of silence, looking between the black screen with the colors and the white screen that now shows a new, much sharper squiggly line. “While your ninpō appears to be a form of infrasound, your mystic powers are ultrasound, meaning it’s too high of a frequency to hear.” He squints at the two readings, zooming in further to the screen with the colors. Turning to Mikey he raises a skeptical eyebrow. “You only activated your mystic powers, right?”

“Yeah, I think I know the difference between them.”

“That wasn’t meant as an insult,” Donatello snaps at Mikey before turning back to the screens. “I was asking because while these red and orange sections on the spectrogram are a completely separate entity from your ninpō, the blues and purples overlap. Look.” He drags the other reading directly over the new one and merges them. Sure enough, Mikey can see the red and orange sections from the first graph with his ninpō almost exactly mirror the blue and purple sections from the second graph using his mystic powers.

“Wait, are you saying that my ninpō activates at the same time as my powers?” Mikey realizes, turning to Donatello with wide eyes. He looks back at him with an expression just as shocked.

“You could figure that out on your own?” Donatello asks. After Mikey sends him an unamused stare he hurriedly continues. “I mean, of course you figured it out yourself! But, yes, that is what these readings suggest. Although the wavelengths and the frequency of your mystic powers fluctuate a lot more than your ninpō does, which may be because of some kind of previous overload. I’m not too sure about that, since I still don’t know your complete history with the mystic powers.”

Mikey looks back to the screen to see that, yes, the second readings are much more random than the first. The red and orange parts of the second reading with his mystic powers seem to be a lot lower on the screen than the readings with his ninpō, too.

He can already feel a big headache coming on if this kind of talk continues. Right now, he just needs Donatello to tell him if this has helped him understand the whole alternate dimensions situation.

“Can this help get me home, then?” Mikey asks, and the inquisitive light that was growing in Donatello’s eyes abruptly dims to something more somber.

“Considering that you think it was your mystic powers that brought you here, this helps a lot. But it’s still going to take time for me to completely understand it and make sure I’m not going to hurt you in any attempts to make another portal. It’ll take a while.”

Mikey purses his lips, disappointed. Part of him hoped Donatello would come up with some crazy plan right on the spot and he could get home within the week, but that obviously wouldn't be happening. He’s not sure why he set his hopes so high, but he knows that at least this information is a start and will definitely help Donatello get him home.

And if Donatello really did need to create some more crazy, possibly harmful tests, then Mikey would agree to them on the spot. Anything if it meant he could get to see his family just that little bit sooner.

But, since that was going to take more time than anticipated, Mikey needs a phone charger. Like, right now. And after Donatello promises he won’t go snooping (too much), all talk of ninpō and mystic powers come to a halt as Donatello begins work on a custom charger.

In the meantime, Mikey regales them all with more stories about his home dimension, the longing in his chest growing with each recounted memory he tells to the people who aren’t the family he wants to see.

Chapter Text

The following week in the lair follows roughly the same pattern as that first day. Breakfast, training, and then they are allowed to do whatever they please. Well, not anything, as Mikey soon finds out after roping Michelangelo into a skateboarding competition and being told off by Leoanrdo and Donatello after crashing into his lab.

Breakfast easily becomes the part of the day Mikey looked forward to the most. He had fully taken over the kitchen within three days, and everything was just as he liked it back home. Almost every morning Michelangelo would join him in making whatever Mikey came up with that day, and other than a few suggestions he had to shoot down (“We are not putting worms in my omelets, you absolute heathen,”) his alternate was a model student. He was picking up Mikey’s techniques in the kitchen at an alarming pace, and he could feel Michelangelos pride in their creations radiate across the table every time they sat down to enjoy the meal.

Training, on the other hand, was Mikey’s least favorite part of the day. They always started with the same stretches, the same katas, and the same chorused words. Mikey had been persuaded (AKA ordered) by Leonardo to start the daily training with them, and while normally he would be jumping at the chance to hang out with them, it was a struggle with how boring they managed to make it.

If he thought Raph’s idea of training was dull, this was on an entirely different level.

There was barely any laughing, or goofing off, or jokes spread around the dojo until they had to stop and compose themselves. Mikey had tried to emulate Leo to crack a few jokes and one liners to lighten the mood, but they had been met with unamused stares and huffs from Splinter about ‘taking training seriously’.

He is fully capable of taking training seriously, thank you very much. It’s just hard when he’s bored out of his mind and can barely focus on what he’s supposed to be doing. Mikey feels like his brain is turning to sludge with the ‘angsty’ atmosphere that flows over everyone when it’s time for training.

After every single session he always makes sure he’s the first one out of the dojo. Splinter had taken to trying to trap him in some one-on-one talks after training, and while the uneasy feeling he had been getting around the larger mutant had faded somewhat, it was still present. If he were here, Leo would be congratulating him on his superb evasion tactics. Mikey always caught the slightly disappointed and hurt expression on Splinter's face every time he managed to slip away, but any guilt he felt was buried under the reassurance that his gut was rarely wrong.

The rest of the time after training had become stilted. Half the time Donatello pushed Mikey back into his lab to do some more tests, but after another full day of being poked and prodded and asked an endless amount of questions about his dimension the taller turtle finally had to admit that there wasn’t too much he didn’t know about Mikey’s world, now. All that was left for Mikey to do was wait as Donatello studied what he had and tried to make sense of it.

When he wasn’t in the lab, he was following Michelangelo or Leonardo as they went about their daily tasks. It wasn’t very exciting, but it provided company, at least. Mikey had tried to convince them both to head to the surface with him and give an actual tour of the city, but it was quickly shot down by Leonardo.

He only saw Raphael in glimpses after training was done. If Mikey was any less observant he would say the other turtle was purposefully avoiding him. Yet, any time he was in the living area watching the really cool space show Leonardo introduced him to or trying to beat the high scores on the arcade machines, Raphael was lurking somewhere nearby. Mikey hadn’t seen any point in calling him out on it and he had taken to simply shrugging it off, but Raphael was almost always near whenever Mikey wasn’t in the privacy of his assigned room.

It didn’t bother him too much at the moment, but if it continued Mikey might have to set him straight. If he really thought Mikey was still a threat to them, he’d double his efforts in winning him over and get Michelangelo to tell him his favorite foods. That always worked.

Mikey appreciated the peace of the last few days, he really did, but seeing this alternate version of his family 24/7 just made him miss his home even more. Multiple times he had to catch himself from trying to tackle Leonardo in a friendly wrestling match whenever he passed the couch, or jumping up on Raphael’s shell after a particularly good sparring to congratulate him on the win.

They were so similar, and yet so different, and Mikey’s mind and heart were hurt and confused about it. At least Splinter was nothing like his Dad, otherwise Mikey might have attempted to sneak to the surface by now just to get a breather from it all.

Which, he thinks as he shakes back to awareness squished between Donatello and Michelangelo on the couch, might just be needed soon. He’s been confined to the lair for a little bit too long, and he’s starting to itch for a change in scenery.

“Oh, this is one of my favorite episodes!” Leonardo exclaims from his spot sitting beside the newly fixed TV. “Captain Ryan and his crew go to this planet called Jennikus, and there’s these aliens that look like narwhals that try and take down their ship and enslave the crew–”

“Are you going to narrate the entire thing or are you going to let him watch it?” Raphael grumbles from the opposite side of the couch from Mikey, eyeridge raised over the comic book spread open in front of him. Leonardo huffs at him but regains his bright smile a moment later and eagerly turns back to the screen as the title sequence finishes.

Mikey shifts in his spot, slowly removing a snoring Michelangelo’s head from where it had come to rest on his shoulder. His head thunks to the back of the couch, and when the snores stop for a moment Mikey thinks he’s accidentally woken him up, but they swiftly continue. Donatello looks up from his laptop with an amused smile at the two of them before he is once more engulfed in his work.

Hopefully it’s work related to getting him back home.

Fingers bouncing restlessly on his thigh, Mikey’s eyes dart around the room, no longer able to focus on the TV like he had when they started the impromptu marathon. The character’s dialogue becomes background noise as thoughts about what he’s going to make for breakfast tomorrow, the next boring thing Splinter will have them do in training, and how much his older brothers would enjoy the show they’re watching twirl mindlessly in his head.

He’s not sure how much time passes like that, but he finally decides on making breakfast burritos tomorrow when Donatello’s shell phone rings. Mikey jumps and shakes his head, trying to focus back on the show but the other’s slightly dopey smile brings his attention to Donatello.

“Hey April, what’s up?” He still has that lovesick smile on his face as he answers the phone, and Mikey is extremely confused about the expression as it clicks that he’s talking to this universe's April of all people. “Oh, how close are you? We can order some pizza so that it gets here around the same time.” Mikey waits as Donatello listens to her response, mouth twisting into disgust after a moment. “Okay, thanks for the heads up. See you two in a minute.”

Donatello pushes the end call button rather harshly in Mikey’s opinion and goes back to grumpily typing on the laptop.

“April and Casey will be here soon,” he announces to the room, tone sullen. He gets a distracted nod from Leonardo and a grunt from Raphael in acknowledgement.

Mikey immediately perks up. A bright smile crosses his face and his excitement grows at the prospect of seeing Casey again. And this time, he can come clean about who he really is and not have to worry about hiding all of his mutant-ness. He is just wondering how soon they’ll be getting to the lair when two pairs of echoing footsteps become clear from one of the tunnels.

His eyes land on Casey and he has to pinch his leg in order to stop himself from immediately running over and tackling his friend in a hug (another thing he learned; Michelangelo is the only hugger here, and surprise hugs are not encouraged). The other teen looks relaxed, sauntering into the lair with one of his hockey sticks strewn over his shoulders. Mikey takes a relieved breath to know that he’s alright as his gaze moves to the girl he’s chatting with and–

Hold up. Is that supposed to be April? As in April, badass with a bat, licensed crane operator, O’Neil?

“Why is April white?” Mikey finds himself blurting rather loudly before his brain can catch up with his mouth. Both of the human teens stop in their approach as a blush creeps across his face. Michelangelo springs awake beside him, flailing for a moment before trying to stand up and collapsing on the ground with a yelp.

Mikey winces as something thumps against the side of his head. He glances down to the rolled comic book in his lap, then to Raphael who is looking at him with the most extreme version of a ‘what the hell was that’ expression Mikey has seen in a while. His cheeks heat even more as Leonardo turns to face him, jaw agape.

“What!? I think I have a right to ask that question!” Mikey tries to defend, but even he knows that that wasn’t the best thing to blurt from out of nowhere, especially to a stranger.

“Um, did you guys forget to tell us about your other little brother?” April tentatively asks as both her and Casey continue to come closer, albeit a little slower this time. Her eyes seem to be taking in every little difference and marking they can, while Casey’s are narrowed as he tilts his head and studies Mikey’s hands.

“No, no! I promise we don’t have any more siblings!” Donatello rushes to explain. “And if we did, we would have taught them manners,” he grumbles, shooting Mikey a scathing look.

Mikey simply shrugs, refusing to bow under whatever weird mood Donatello’s fallen into. The taller turtle's eyes narrow and he opens his mouth to no doubt chew Mikey out but is interrupted by a sharp bark of laughter from Casey.

“Well, I like your spunk, whoever you are,” Casey announces, stepping closer so he is standing just in front of where Michelangelo has made his home on the floor, watching the interaction like a tennis match. The human teen puts a contemplative hand on his chin. “Say, have we met before or something? You seem kinda familiar.”

Mikey smirks, leaning forward. “I don’t know whether to be hurt or proud that you don’t recognise me. With all the time we spent on rooftops, I would have thought I made a good impression. Especially after that last beatdown I gave you.”

There’s a beat of silence, and Mikey can practically hear the gears in Casey’s head turning before his face cracks into a wide smile.

“No way! Orange, I thought you died or something!” Casey exclaims. Mikey launches to his feet with a wide grin, no longer able to hold back as he crashes into Casey with a cackle. The tall teen matches him, catching Mikey in a headlock and nooging the top of his head. “Don’t disappear on me like that again, dude! I got for real worried!”

Mikey giggles, breaking out of the headlock. Casey gives him one more once over and then he’s groaning, slapping a hand to his face. “How did I not figure out you’re a mutant, too? It was practically staring me in the face!”

“Not everyone can be geniuses, Jones. Why don’t you leave all of that heavy thinking to me?” Donatello snips from the couch. Mikey frowns as they both send each other glares. Did these two not get along? Before Mikey can ask about it, though, April intrudes in their space, hands on her hips.

“Is someone going to explain to me what’s going on? Who is this?” She waves a hand at Mikey, very clearly confused. Mikey side steps Michelangelo's form splayed on the floor and extends a hand to her, smiling bright.

“I’m Hamato Michelangelo, but you can just call me Orange,” he announces. His hand stays in the air as she looks to him, then pointedly glances at Michelangelo who is staring up at them with an oblivious grin. “I’m from a different universe, obviously. Not a clone or anything. Pinky promise.”

That seems to disturb her more, and Mikey slowly drops his hand as she desperately looks to the other turtles for an explanation.

“It’s…a long story,” Leonardo admits, finally taking pity on her and standing with a sheepish expression.

“Well I don’t have anywhere to be tonight, and I think this is a story I need to hear,” she finally admits, sinking down onto Mikey’s previous seat by Donatello with a heavy sigh. “How is my life getting even weirder? I thought talking turtles, robot ninjas, and aliens would be the worst of it.”

“A different universe!?” Casey hysterically exclaims. He grips onto Mikey’s biceps as he leans down so their faces are only an inch apart and he can’t see anything other than the teens severe expression. “I have to know–am I a sexy lady in your universe?”

Mikey barks out a laugh. “Yes and no. There’s actually two Casey Jones’s where I’m from.”

“Oh god, I never want to step foot there,” Donatello whispers in a horrified tone. Raphael snorts at him then goes back to carefully watching Mikey and Casey from over his retrieved comic book.

Casey’s eyes sparkle as he releases Mikey to excitedly fist pump. “Oh yeah, double the Jones’s, baby! Who wouldn’t want more of me?” Donatello immediately raises his hand, April hastily pulling it back down and giving Donatello a look. “You gotta tell me more! You want to go put up some tags and catch up? The walls around here are looking a little blank, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh my stars, yes! I’ve been dying to get out of here! Let me go grab my stuff,” Mikey exclaims. He attempts to dart towards his assigned room, already thinking about what cans he’ll be able to fit in his newly fixed jacket (thank you, Donatello, for the sewing supplies), but is stopped by Leonardo’s sudden grip on his arm.

“Where do you think you’re going?” He asks, letting go of Mikey and crossing his arms across his chest.

“Uh, out with Casey? Were you not listening?” Mikey replies. He slowly starts to inch away from Leonardo but the other follows him with an eyeridge raised.

“No way, you’re not leaving the lair unless it is absolutely necessary, and not without one of us. Leader’s orders.” Mikey stares at Leonardo with a slack jaw. He glares at the leader, mirroring Leonardo’s crossed arms.

“Why not?” he questions slowly, fearing he already knows the answer. This conversation seems a little too familiar to the ones he’s constantly having to deal with back home.

“It’s too dangerous out there. The Foot Clan has been more active lately, and it’s probably because they’re looking for you. You’ll just be putting yourself in the line of fire.”

Annoyance flashes bright and hot in Mikey’s chest, thinking back to the times his brothers have said basically the same thing to him. Who is Leonardo to say that something is too dangerous for him to handle? Sure, they’ve been training together for a couple of days now, but he’s kept up with the others just fine through spars and katas. Mikey knows himself enough to be the judge on whether something is too dangerous.

“Psh, yeah, okay. You’ve seen me fight, you know I’m capable of defending myself and Casey if something bad happens. We’ll be fine, Mamanardo.” Mikey walks off with a smirk at Michelangelo’s wheezing laugh at the nickname. Leonardo huffs from behind him, catching him around the top lip of his shell and spinning Mikey around to face his stern expression.

“No way, you need to stay here, where it’s safe–”

“And continue to be bored out of my mind being jailed in this lair? I don’t think so.” Leonardo grimaces at Mikey's statement, opening his mouth to continue beating his point into the ground where it will be studiously ignored when, surprisingly, Raphael speaks up.

“Just let him go, fearless,” Raphael states. Mikey shoots him a surprised stare, slightly confused that he’s so easily letting him go running around with Casey, before he continues. “We don’t want a stir-crazy, murderous mutant stuck with us, do we?”

“While I resent the latter half of that statement, he is right, you should just let me go,” Mikey concedes, ignoring Raphael’s exaggerated eye roll. Whatever strategy will get him out of this lair and up onto the surface with his friend the fastest will work for him.

“Orange’ll be fine, dude. After all, he’s got Casey Jones protecting his six,” Casey adds. He pushes down another pang of frustration at the suggestion that he needs protection, knowing Casey likely only said it to convince the leader. Leonardo looks between them all, expression pained, before letting out a long sigh.

“Fine, but don’t stay out too long–” before he can even finish his statement, Mikey is darting towards his room and slips on his jacket to cram two random cans of paint into his pockets. He sprints back out of the room, grabbing Casey’s wrist as he passes and pulling him towards one of the exits with a joyful cackle that his friend quickly reciprocates. “Be careful and watch out for Foot-bots!”

Mikey twirls around with two thumbs up, gaining one last glance at the ensemble in the living room and the mixture of wary, worried, and amused stares before spinning back around and continuing his sprint for the surface with Casey by his side.

He is so ready to have some real fun and get a taste of the smoggy, refreshing NNY air. Whether or not he’ll listen to Leonardo’s orders is still up for debate, because what’s more fun than breaking some rules?

==========

Mikey giggles, walking across a metal pole on the edge of a roof as Casey follows beside him on the flat rooftop. He already knew balancing on it would be no problem, but Casey seems amazed that he’s managing to walk across the slim piece of metal while fiddling with the top of a spray can.

“So the original, hot lady version of me was a part of the Foot Clan who ended up helping to defeat your Shred-head, and the other one is a badass from an apocalyptic future?!” Casey exclaims, looking up at Mikey with stars in his eyes. “Your universe sounds wicked!”

“Oh yeah, my world is the absolute best! It’s so much more colorful than here, too, but I don’t really understand how that’s possible. I’ve just decided to roll with it.” To punctuate his statement Mikey hops off the ledge and into a somersault, popping back up right next to a grinning Casey.

He’s really missed this. Even after coming clean about the whole ‘alternate universe’ thing (he made the executive decision that Casey didn’t need to know about the K-words or mystic troubles, Mikey’s got those under control just fine right now), there’s been no judgment or caution from his friend. There’s no worrying that he’ll say the wrong thing, or make his friend unnecessarily pity him about something. Mikey finally feels free to speak his mind with no restraints, and it’s so refreshing.

Not that talking with the other turtles is a chore. Most of the time it’s pretty enjoyable. But if Mikey says something that’s normal to him but rubs the others the wrong way, they make it very obvious. Sometimes they’ll go quiet before quickly changing the subject or try to pry with more questions, but the answers he gives only bring up expressions of pity or concern.

It’s almost like they’re walking on eggshells around him. Where if they make the wrong movement or say the wrong thing, he’ll immediately snap. He hasn’t missed the wary glances that have been tossed his way when he enters the room while in a broody mood, or the way all of them make their presence very clear when trying to get his attention. Or if there’s a loud crash in the lair they all immediately look at him like he’s some sort of wounded animal that’ll run off because of the noise.

Somehow, even though he’s surrounded by people for the first time since he ended up in this dimension almost a month ago, Mikey feels more isolated and alone than ever.

All of the mental and emotional gymnastics have been exhausting to keep up 24/7, so it’s a relief that now he can finally just exist and feel like he belongs somewhere again. Even if it’s only for a night.

“I hope you like my dimension, though, even if it is dull compared to yours,” Casey announces as he plops down on the edge of the rooftop, legs swinging over the side. Mikey mirrors him, taking the moment to look up at the full moon above and pull in a deep breath.

“It’s been nice so far, I guess. But it’s not home, y’know?” he says softly. He feels Casey shift to face him, but Mikey keeps his eyes to the sky, not wanting to see whatever expression is on his friend's face.

“Yeah, I get that. I don’t know what I’d do if I was separated from my world like you’ve been.” Casey matches his tone of voice, and Mikey chances a look to see him give a sympathetic smile. Mikey returns it, about to apologize for ruining the mood but Casey hurriedly continues. “You seem to be holding up pretty well, all things considered. The guys are probably treating you like royalty, huh?”

Mikey snorts, shaking his head and hugging his knees to his chest. “More like a bomb that’ll explode if touched wrong. Or a threat, in Raphael’s case.”

Casey scoffs and rolls his eyes, bumping his shoulder into Mikey’s. “C’mon, Orange, I’m sure it’s not that bad. Raph is just uber paranoid, he’ll warm up to you eventually. Heck, I’m pretty sure he was trying to break all of my bones the first time we met, and now we go patrolling together at least once a week. Just annoy him enough and he’ll come around.”

“Well if there’s one thing I like doing, it’s annoying him,” Mikey responds, sending Casey an amused grin. His friend laughs, shaking his head and clasping Mikey on the shoulder.

“Everything else is good, though? Other than the guys being weird about the alternate universe thing?”

Mikey purses his lips, considering. He glances once more at Casey, sees his open expression, and for a moment he’s tempted to tell him everything. All the worries, the fears, and insecurities that jumping dimensions have caused, but it’s only a brief second. His fists clench his knees tighter as he sends Casey his best reassuring smile.

He doesn’t deserve to be burdened with any of Mikey’s troubles. They came out here to have fun, not for Mikey to have a complaining session that he definitely doesn’t need to have. He’s not going to ruin the night by talking about the problems he’s been handling by himself just fine. He’s not a whiny kid, he’s got everything under control, and his situation is the best it’s been since first arriving here. In the grand scheme of things, what’s there to really complain about?

“Yeah, everything else is fine. Just awkward sometimes, but there’s not much I can do about that right now,” Mikey replies, forcefully letting go of the tension that had been unknowingly growing throughout the short conversation.

Casey grins. “Good. Now, less talky-talky and more vandalism. That’ll take your mind off of everything happening at the lair, and you can show off how much of a badass you really are as we return to the streets to cause absolute mayhem!”

Mikey giggles, reaching into his coat pocket and shoving a red can of spray paint into Casey’s chest before springing to his feet. He really likes how Casey thinks.

Casey follows suit, glancing at Mikey with a challenging smirk, gesturing towards the end of the rooftop. He meets the grin with one of his own and mentally prepares himself for the impromptu race that they’ve agreed on. A mere second later they’re both sprinting for the edge, trying to trip each other up with wide grins as their finish line comes closer.

Mikey crouches, about to jump to the next rooftop to secure his victory in the footrace, when a sharp flash of metal glints in the corner of his eye. He immediately tenses and before he can shout a warning a knife heads straight for Casey’s chest.

On instinct Mikey shifts his weight to spring towards Casey, tackling him to the ground. He feels the swish of air as the knife narrowly misses Mikey’s temple. The weapon lodges itself into the gravel rooftop and he’s back on his feet the next instant, drawing his nunchaku as Casey catches his breath behind him. Mikey tenses as three Foot-bots emerge from different shadowy corners of the roof, weapons at the ready.

“C’mon, not these guys again–” Casey begins to wheeze before cutting himself off with a yelp as another throwing knife lodges into the spray can that fell out of his hand. Mikey growls at the Foot-bots in front of him, lowering into a defensive crouch as they raise their weapons.

Well, at least todays not a Bad Hands Day™

Casey springs to his feet and takes up position beside him, mask quickly flipped down and hockey stick wielded threateningly in front of him. Mikey’s eyes narrow, neither side moving for a moment, and then in a blink of an eye all three Foot-bots lunge right towards him, weapons first.

A katana slices over his head, causing Casey to leap to the right with a single chain-spinning Foot-bot following on his heels. Mikey swiftly ducks his head inside his shell to avoid the returning blow as he strikes blind with his nunchaku. He knocks the katana wielder to the side as his weapon hits home square in the torso, but after popping back out of his shell he has to instinctively flip out of the way of the throwing stars from the third Foot-bot. Mikey barely has time to anticipate where the next projectile is coming from as he dodges, flips, and rolls out of the way while also keeping track of the katana wielding robot trying to coral him into the corner farthest from Casey’s battle.

Finally the Foot-bot runs out of projectiles, morphing one of its hands into a mace. Before Mikey can take a breath and say just how cool that is he’s on the defensive again, barely missing the katana swipe aimed towards his plastron. He leans back with wide eyes, shifting his balance into a crouch and quickly spinning his leg around, aiming to swipe out the robot's legs. It deftly jumps over the swipe, landing lightly back on one leg and sending a kick straight into Mikey’s face.

While he manages to bring his forearms up just in time to block, the force behind it sends him rolling over his own shell. He swiftly brings his arms over his head to catch his weight on his knuckles, nunchaku still gripped tightly in his hands. He uses the momentum to spring back towards the robot feet first, aiming towards the robot's face since apparently that’s where they’re aiming their hits today.

Mikey smirks as his attack connects to the robot's head with a satisfying crunch. He lands deftly back on his feet in a lowered crouch, watching with a cackle the sparking mess of the robot's head after meeting his foot. It starts to glitch before heavily falling face-first onto the pavement in front of him.

Casey grunts from the other side of the roof. Mikey spins and his grin grows even larger as he sees a hockey puck being shot straight through the next Foot-bots chest. It falls to the ground in a heap of metal, and he meets Casey’s expression of triumph for a brief moment before both of them turn to surround the last mace wielding Foot-bot.

Nothing happens for a moment as Casey readies his stick and Mikey spins his nunchaku. The Foot-bot looks between both of them blankly, body crouched and ready to attack.

“What, not so confident now that your buddies are gone, huh?” Mikey taunts, slowly inching closer to the stationary Foot-bot. He’s not sure if they have any sort of intelligence to them or if they’re simply just machines, but the snort he gets from Casey makes the comment worth it. “Did they really think we wouldn’t be able to handle three stupid robots?”

“They were simply meant to stall you,” a familiar voice announces as the Foot-bots eyes glow a bright red before it is charging straight for Casey.

Mikey spins around after double making sure Casey is doing fine, coming face to face with the same Foot Clan woman who kidnapped him. She holds a metal naginata loosely at her side, flanked by four more armed Foot-bots.

Mikey scowls, continuing to spin one of his nunchaku. “What is with you, lady? I know I’m special and all, but why the heck do you want to kidnap me so bad? I don’t even know who you are!”

“My name is Karai, and after our first encounter my father admitted interest in wanting to speak with you.” Karai raises an eyebrow and pokes the end of her weapon into the concave face of the Foot-bot Mikey had destroyed. “I believe he will be even more interested now that it’s clear you’re not simply a defenseless freak.”

Against his will Mikey lowers his weapons, staring wide-eyed at the woman in front of him (Karai, this was her, she’s still alive here–). He supposes now that he knows, Mikey can see some resemblance to his Gram Gram, but why was she fighting against him and her family? Why was she part of the Foot Clan?

Unbidden tears start to flood his eyes as even more similarities start to draw his attention. He opens his mouth, attempting to say something, maybe ask a question, but Karai only narrows her eyes in curiosity before raising the point of her weapon straight at him.

Mikey’s eyes widen, any wetness in his eyes drying immediately as the four Foot-bots stationed behind her leap towards him, weapons raised. He jolts as realizes that he’s fallen out of his defensive stance and his nunchaku dangle useless by his sides.

With a shocked inhale he raises his weapons, hastily blocking two of the robots that charged his front with little trouble despite being caught off guard. He pushes outward, sending the two stumbling back, but has no time to counter as there is the glint of blades in his periphery. The other two robots had flanked him with their blades aimed straight towards his shell. Despite how fast he may be, Mikey knows there’s no way he can maneuver enough to completely block the blades from making contact.

Nevertheless, Mikey attempts to spin and catches at least one of the katannas, teeth gritted as he braces for the sensation of a blade being run against his shell. He knows that the blade won’t pierce his scutes (it takes a lot of force and pressure to really harm their shells, Draxum had made them specifically with the ability to tank a wide variety of weapons and attacks), but the sensation and sound will be extremely unpleasant.

Not to mention he’ll have to repair his jacket again.

Mikey winces as he hears his jacket ripping, blade just touching his shell, but before it goes any further two sai lodge themselves into the heads of both the robots, sending them sprawling to the ground in sparking heaps.

“Wha–” Mikey starts with wide eyes, taking a moment to adjust his balance before spotting Raphael jumping across the gap of the neighboring roof, rolling to a stop. He takes two strides towards Mikey, leaning down and yanking his weapons from the sparking robots heads.

“No!” Karai screeches, readying her weapon and glaring daggers at Raphael. Mikey furrows his eye ridge and gets back into position with Raphael at his side, weapons at the ready as they face down Karai and the other two Foot-bots. “You’re not taking him again!”

Raphael growls, snarling at Karai but not saying a word in response. Karai grits her teeth, expression fierce, and then the battle resumes with even more ferocity.

Karai and Raphael meet each other head on, leaving Mikey to deal with the two charging Foot-bots. One of them turns its arm into a saw and he yelps, leaping back from a strike as the other robot forms a drill with its hand. Mikey dodges another swipe, leaning back to drop onto his hand and spin kicking the robot with the saw so hard it ends up flying straight off the roof. He lowers his feet back to the ground, blinking at the spot the robot had disappeared over the edge before turning to face the drill robot with a grin.

Mikey definitely hadn’t meant to kick it that hard and end the fight so early, but hey, a win’s a win.

He chances a glance at Karai and Raphael where they are still locked in fast paced combat, and seem to be having some sort of snarling conversation that’s too low for Mikey to hear. Karai locks eyes with him briefly, smirk slowly creeping across her face as she traps Raphael on the ground with her weapon. Raphael cranes his head to follow her gaze and then he’s breaking out of the weapons lock with an enraged shout.

Yeah, Raphael’s doing fine, they’ll beat these Foot Clan guys in no time.

“Hey, my brother has a copyright on weaponized drills!” Mikey taunts as the Foot-bot attacks and he effortlessly dodges. Who knew fighting these guys could be so much fun? “Your weapon is illegal! I’m making a citizen's arrest!”

He manages to maneuver himself closer to Casey, who’s smacking his opponent to the ground and knocking the end of his hockey stick against the neck of the robot until it’s nothing but a mess of wires. Mikey shares a triumphant smirk with him before his friends eyes widen, and he turns back to the last Foot-bot as it lunges towards his plastron drill first.

Casey shouts a warning, but Mikey’s already got it covered. He leaps to the side at the last possible moment, letting the drill pass by his body, before wrapping his nunchaku just below the whirring machine. With a cackle Mikey grabs onto the handle of his weapon with both hands, spinning around and yanking the robot off its feet and into the air. After two full turns Mikey loosens the chain from around the robot's wrist, sending it flying off the roof just like its friend.

Before Mikey can say any witty line Raphael is suddenly there, gripping his shoulder and dragging him into a run closer to Casey. Karai shouts in frustration behind them, and Mikey risks a peek back to see her picking herself off of the roof, a long jagged cut bleeding sluggishly from her forearm. They briefly meet each other’s eyes and Mikey is taken aback by how much hatred is being directed towards him.

If he needed any more proof that this Karai was a complete 180 from the Gram Gram he knows and loves, that confirms it.

“We’re getting out of here, right now!” Raphael shouts, bringing Mikey’s attention back to where they’ve stopped in front of Casey. “Get ready to disappear!” With that exclamation he shows two small eggs that are cradled in his palm. Mikey is extremely confused on why Raphael thinks eggs are going to help in this situation, but then he slams them onto the ground, where they erupt into a dark purple cloud of grit and dust.

Smoke bombs made out of eggs? Okay, maybe this dimension had some creativity after all.

Mikey slides his third eyelid down as soon as he realizes what’s happening, giving the other turtle a brief glance to see the same white eyes staring back at him. Raphael grabs a coughing Casey and throws him over his shoulder, gesturing silently for Mikey to follow as he leaps backwards and down into the alley below.

He follows right on Rapahel’s heels, staying that way even after they’ve long cleared the area and Karai’s frustrated curses have faded into the distance. Casey is still coughing and spluttering protests on being carried over Raphael’s shoulder, rubbing fruitlessly at his eyes that are likely full of dust and grit from the DIY smoke bomb. Mikey pulls his third eyelid back up as he cringes thinking about the experience Casey must be having as they keep going.

Finally Raphael seems to deem them a safe distance away, crouching in the darkened alley and leaning down to set Casey on the ground. Casey lets out a disgruntled thanks, still rubbing his eyes, blinking them open only for them to close just as fast.

“You couldn’t have given him a warning about that?” Mikey questions as he hovers by Casey’s side, wishing he could help but knowing there isn’t much he can do without having water on hand.

“We needed a distraction, and Casey wouldn’t have been able to keep up with us, anyway,” Raphael blithely replies, crossing his arms as he stares down at the two of them. Mikey frowns at the snide remark, but Casey is already going on the defensive.

“I can totally keep up with you guys! I do it on patrol all the time!” Casey sputters, trying his best to glare at where he believes Raphael is, but is about five feet off.

“We don’t go full out when running around on patrol, that would be a waste of energy,” Raphael fires back. Casey looks like he’s about to say something more but Raphael cuts him off. “Stop being a baby and go home, Casey, your eyes will be fine in a minute. Orange and I are going back to the lair, now.”

Mikey bristles at the hard, no-nonsense tone. He stands to face Raphael, mirroring his crossed arms. The other turtle gives him a once-over with an unamused eyeridge raised. Mikey holds firm, refusing to back down. Whatever Raphael finds in his stance has him rolling his eyes with a sigh and sharply turning, starting to walk further into the alley and towards a manhole cover.

Mikey sullenly follows, but only because he knows that it is a good idea to head back to the lair now that the Foot Clan has been riled up. Not because he’s listening to Raphael’s orders, certainly not that.

“Ugh, see ya later, I guess,” Casey grumbles from behind. “Man, we didn’t even get to vandalize anything.”

Mikey understands that disappointment whole-heartedly, the weights of the remaining can in his pocket seemingly becoming heavier than ever in its disuse. This was supposed to be a fun night out with Casey, and instead the Foot had to come and ruin it like they always do. Why did the Foot Clan have to hate them so much? Couldn’t they find other ways to have fulfilling lives other than ruining other people’s nights?

Mikey breaks out of his thoughts, face unknowingly twisting into a pout, as Raphael lifts open the manhole cover and very obviously gestures for Mikey to jump in first. He trudges forward, about to jump down when a thought has him stopping dead in his tracks. He hopes he doesn’t visibly wince when he looks hopefully up at Raphael with the best innocent face he can muster.

“So, Leonardo isn’t going to hear about this little adventure, right?”

“Just get in the hole.”

“I’m going to assume that’s slang for ‘of course we won’t tell him’ in this dimension.”

“I should have left you with Karai, then she’d have to deal with you.”

“But’cha didn't, did you?”

Chapter Text

No matter how much Mikey tries to start a conversation to build rapport with Raphael on the journey back to the lair, he’s blown off by a snapped retort to be quiet or by pure silence. He even goes on a tangent of how much those Foot-bots suck, which he thought was a sure fire way to get Raphael to connect with him, but it’s fruitless.

Honestly, he was about to drag Dr. Feelings away from sabbatical to figure out why he was getting a sudden silent treatment. Even the sharp insults would be better than nothing.

“I’m just saying, frowning as much as you do is a great way to create more wrinkles as you age. And I don’t know how you feel about that, but I want to keep this face as youthful and spry as possible when kicking bad guy butt–”

“Is all this a joke to you?” Raphael finally snaps as they are about to cross the threshold into the lair. Mikey nearly bumps into him with how abruptly he stops and spins around, a scowl on his face and arms tightly crossed over his chest.

“Oh, you want to hear a joke? That’s more Leo’s thing, but I’m sure I can think of something–”

“No! Is this entire ‘alternate dimension’ thing some kind of fun getaway in your mind? ‘Cause it’s not, and you need to realize that our world is dangerous before you go and get yourself killed.” Raphael jabs a finger into Mikey’s plastron, hard. “If I wasn’t there tonight, that sword would have gone straight through your shell and you would have been taken to Shredder. What then, huh?”

Mikey rolls his eyes, a light smirk on his face as he sees the others' expressions get more tense. “It wouldn’t have even scratched me. You need to relax, Casey and I had that situation completely under control until–” he quickly cuts himself off as the situation finally dawns on him. His jaw drops, indignation swirling in his chest as he pokes his own finger into Raphael’s plastron. “Hold up, were you following us?”

The other suddenly sputters, stepping back into the lair with a dismissive wave of his hand. Oh, he is not getting away that easily.

“You totally were!” Mikey exclaims, darting to stand in front of Raphael and pin him with a heated glare. “Did you seriously not trust us enough to be careful?”

“I wasn’t following you! I just…happened to be on patrol around that area, okay?” Yeah, Mikey is smelling some major bull, especially with how fidgety Raphael’s gotten. “It’s not Casey I don’t trust to know when to call for help, anyway. Obviously I was right,” Raphael growls, shooting Mikey a challenging look.

Mikey’s hands clench, gritting his teeth as he meets his stare head on. He doesn’t know how he can still be on Raphael’s bad side. Mikey helps make breakfast for them every morning, he’s shown that he can control himself and his strength within the dojo, and he’s been nothing but peaceful, nice, and playful with his brothers ever since it was determined he would be staying in the lair. Raphael shouldn’t still hate him as much as he does, so what is Mikey doing wrong?

Does he need to try and be even nicer to everyone? Or maybe he really does need to bring out Dr. Feelings to get to the bottom of whatever is continuing to bother Raphael about his presence.

That’s for later, though. Right now, Raphael is going to face the full power of Dr. Delicate Touch.

“What’s your problem with me, dude? I know I probably didn’t make the best first impression for you guys, but I thought I proved that those were just accidents! I promise it won’t happen again! Is there something specific I need to do to make you trust me not to hurt anyone?” Mikey rants, not letting Raphael try and slip away. The other is visibly getting more frustrated, foot now tapping a fast crescendo on the ground as his mouth turns down into a snarl.

“For a start, maybe you can start listening to people when they tell you to not go looking for trouble. I don’t like following Leo’s orders either, but they’re usually the right call! And he explicitly told you to stay away from the Foot!” Raphael exclaims, face getting almost as red as his mask. Mikey’s probably not much better, blood boiling with pent up frustration and anger.

“You were the one who vouched for me to go up to the surface in the first place! And we didn’t go looking for them, it was an ambush! Was all this some sort of test for you to see if I would flip sides or something?” Mikey’s panting slightly by the end of his tirade, sending Raphael his most scathing glare. His nails are digging into his palms with how hard he is clenching them in an attempt to keep from lunging at the other turtle.

“That’s not–I didn’t–you’re not listening to me!” Raphael grinds out.

“No, I think I’m hearing you loud and clear,” Mikey shoots right back in a hiss. “You think I’m still a threat, don’t you? Even after all I’ve been trying to do, you can’t trust me to be alone with someone you care about. Am I getting that right? ‘Cause don’t think I don’t notice you creeping around every corner to ‘keep an eye on me’ or something. You think I’m…some kind of monster that’ll snap at a moment's notice.” Raphael stares at him with wide, shocked eyes, silent as the fight abruptly drains out of his tense stance.

Mikey deflates in turn, hating to have his suspicions confirmed. He hates it even more that he can’t fully blame Raphael for thinking that way, knowing the kinds of gruesome things he’s done. He knows that he wasn’t fully in control of his actions, but it doesn’t change the fact that he’s the one responsible for them.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Mikey grumbles, lowering his gaze to the floor. He doesn’t want to see whatever triumphant expression is on Raphael’s face as Mikey skitters away to his room. He doesn’t need it rubbed in his face how right Raphael is.

“Orange, wait a second–”

“No, I get it. It makes sense. I would appreciate if you stopped trying to act like that’s not what you think, though. I’ll…see you in the morning,” he replies, leaving a now silent Raphael in the middle of the lair as he strides towards his room. Mikey hugs himself tight as he softly closes the door behind him and slides down to the cold floor.

A tear drips it’s way down his cheek before he can fully stop it, and he slowly wipes it away with the edge of his sleeve. Mikey sniffs, crawling his way to his blanket nest and collapsing into it, not bothering to remove his jacket or gear.

He swallows the lump forming in his throat, berating himself for thinking this could be something that wouldn’t come to light. Mikey wasn’t exaggerating when he said he understood why Raphael thought that, but it still hurts like hell to see the evidence of it. And while that sentiment is the most obvious in Raphael, Mikey wouldn’t be surprised if the others subconsciously think that, too.

Why else would they be so careful around him if they didn’t think he was one bad word away from becoming a killing machine? Mikey’s eyes flood with tears, a sob wrenching its way out of his throat before he can pull himself fully into his shell to muffle the sound. He doesn’t need anyone knowing that he’s upset and might hurt someone, after all.

The cries continue as he is enveloped in the warm darkness, the blankets and jacket on top of him making it hot and suffocating.

He could really use a big brother hug right about now. Those always make him feel better.

==========

Mikey’s eyes are crusted together after sobbing himself to sleep. He basks in the silent, dark warmth of his shell for a little while longer before deciding he needs to get up and start on breakfast before anyone gets suspicious with the absence of food.

While there was still a heavy weight being pressed on his chest from the truth of Raphael’s feelings being brought to light, at least the crying session helped him clear his head and come up with a plan to try and counter them. So far, he had been attempting to be his usual self around the others. And while normally that was enough to bring up people’s spirits and make them trust him, Raphael made it very clear that he needed to bring out the big guns.

It was time for Dr. Positive to make his entrance. No one, not even Draxum, is able to resist the energy and optimistic attitude of Dr. Positive. When he’s around, no one can claim that Mikey is in a bad mood.

If he can’t get the other turtles to trust him and get rid of the idea that he’s a monster with Dr. Positive, then, and only then, will Mikey accept that he can’t change their minds about it.

With forced pep Mikey rolls to his feet, rubbing away any evidence of a crying session from his face and striding out the door towards the kitchen. Thankfully, someone had gone out and brought back plenty of fresh groceries while Mikey had been with Casey, so he has plenty of inspiration to work with.

He quickly gets to cooking up all of the breakfasts he knows the others prefer, making each plate unique. Donatello seemed to favor the plain french toast he made that first day, Leonardo and Michelangelo devoured the waffles he had made yesterday, and Raphael had eaten his omelets with much less grumbling than usual. Making breakfast would take much longer than usual with the personalized palates, but Dr. Positive was on a mission and he would see it through, no matter what.

Just as he is folding the omelet, Leonardo approaches him with a confused grumble. Swallowing any reservations he turns to face him, a wide smile plastered onto his face as he gives him a tiny wave.

“Morning! I’m just finishing up, please take a seat!” Mikey beams at the other turtle. Leonardo is still blinking sleep from his eyes but follows the suggestion, sitting down at the table with a yawn. It’s then he seems to catch the array of different foods littering the kitchen and his eyes widen in surprise.

“Wow, what’s the occasion?” Leonardo asks. Mikey’s cheeks are starting to hurt with how forceful the smile is, but Dr. Positive refuses to break the immersion.

“Can’t I just be glad to provide for you guys? I’ll always be ready to help out,” Mikey replies as he slides a plate of waffles in front of him. “I’m glad to help with anything, really. All you need to do is ask! I’m a great helper!”

Leonardo glances up from his waffles with a frown at the squeak in Mikey’s voice, but he turns back towards the kitchen to finish plating Raphael’s omelet before Leonardo can look too closely. Silence envelopes them as Mikey finishes up his preparations and Leonardo digs into his breakfast.

“Morning, Raph,” Leonardo says, breaking the slight calm that had fallen over the lair. Mikey stiffens for a moment, making doubly sure his smile is still on, then turns around with the omelet in hand.

Raphael doesn’t respond as he plops down into the seat next to his brother, avoiding eye contact with hunched shoulders. Mikey can see Leonardo frown at his lack of response and quickly hops up to the table. He slides the omelet below Raphael’s snout, causing him to reel back and blink at Mikey in both shock and confusion.

He strains the smile as wide as it will go as he meets Raphael’s eyes. “I hope you like it! I can make something else or put different stuff in it if you want. It’s no big deal,” Mikey chirps, spinning away from Raphael’s very confused expression and goes back to plating Michelangelo's and Donatello’s plates.

“So,” Leonardo trails into the now awkward tension that had enveloped the room. “How was hanging out with Casey? Everything go okay?”

Mikey almost drizzles syrup straight onto the counter at the question. He manages a quick glance at Raphael, but he’s too busy trying to sink into the floor to try and respond for Mikey.

Well, it looks like Dr. Positive is already seeing results if Raphael is willing to keep quiet about last night. Mikey knew it was the right call.

“Yeah, it was fun! Just went around tagging some buildings, nothing too crazy, y’know,” he lies with as much casualness as he can muster. His smile starts to crack as he turns and finds Leonardo giving him a skeptical look, abandoned waffles half-eaten in front of him.

Mikey tenses as he feels his eye twitch (a tell-tale sign of his lies if one knew his ticks, which his entire family does) when Leonardo refuses to break the stare. He swallows, the others eyes narrowing. His mouth opens to ask something else, but Mikey is saved from having to lie terribly out of the situation by Donatello barreling out of his lab, phone clutched to his chest.

“Just got a call from April, she needs some help with a guy who was following her around on patrol. She followed him to his apartment and is waiting for us there,” Donatello announces, rushing past the kitchen and into Michelangelo’s room, dragging his younger brother out as he groggily pulls his mask around his head.

“Alright, let’s move,” Leonardo announces as he and Raphael hop up from the table. Mikey watches them retreat, hesitating for a moment before hurriedly following. At his approach they pause and turn back to him and his wide, strained smile.

“Mind if I tag along?” Mikey asks, rocking back on his heels and playing up his innocent factor to the max.

Leonardo purses his lips. “I’m not sure that’s a great idea. The Foot Clan is still after you and–”

“C’mon, dude! Orange and Casey were fine last night, right?” Mikey simply winks at Michelangelo’s question, staying silent. Raphael doesn’t say a word from his hunched position at the leader's side. “See, nothing bad is going to happen. And if it does, he has us as back-up this time!”

Leonardo sighs, looking between Michelangelo and Mikey. He shoots him the brightest grin he can manage to convince him that everything will be fine.

He’s going to follow them whether he allows him to go or not, but he hopes he doesn’t have to do it in secret. That’ll definitely not line up with Dr. Positive’s plans on making everyone happy and unconcerned about Mikey.

“Alright, but stick close and follow our lead, okay?” Leonardo finally concedes. Mikey gives him a chipper thumbs up to which the leader shakes his head with an amused smile and they begin their silent trek up to the surface.

Michelangelo makes small talk with him the entire way, chatting about nothing and loosening the nerves Mikey hadn’t realized were building the longer they walked. By the time they spot April crouched behind a roofs ledge and staring across the street into an apartment complex, Mikey feels much better. Dr. Positive is pacified for the moment, too.

“There you guys are,” April announces as they land on the roof behind her. She catches Mikey's eyes for a brief moment in surprise, giving a friendly wave. “Hey, Orange, nice to see you again.”

“Right back ‘atcha,” Mikey replies with a wink, causing her to giggle softly.

“What’s the situation, April,” Leonardo says, striding forward. He stops at the edge of the roof and squints down to where April had been looking. Mikey and the rest slowly follow, scanning the area for anything that seems out of place.

“Right, so I was on patrol–don’t look at me like that, I can handle myself, you guys know that–and I sensed some kind of presence. Turns out, this random guy with a camera was stalking me, and when I tried to confront him he ran off. I didn’t manage to catch him, but I did track him here.” April points towards a window that’s covered with dark shades. “Pretty sure that’s the one, but I figured it would be best to call for backup before trying to break in.”

“You made the right call, April. This guy sounds like he has bad intentions,” Donatello praises, giving her a soft smile. Mikey sees Raphael and Michelangelo roll their eyes and he is inclined to do the same. If he didn’t know any better, he’d say Donatello is crushing on April, which is just plain gross to think about.

“Alright, here’s what’s going to happen,” Leonardo starts, turning to them all with an air of authority. “Half of us are going to approach through the window, the other half is going to cover the apartment door to flank him and make sure all escape routes are blocked. Then, once we know we have him cornered, we’ll figure out exactly what this guy wants with April.” Mikey and the others all nod in response, but before he can go on to delegate teams their target's window is blasted open by a bright pink explosion.

“Wow, I think that’s the fastest one of your plans has ever gone south. And we didn’t even do anything this time,” Raphael remarks as he pulls out his sai and jumps into action. Everyone else follows suit, drawing their weapons and moving to converge on the apartment now filled with the sounds of blaster fire and destruction. Mikey pulls out his kusari-fundo and whips it onto a lamp post across the street, swinging across and onto the roof of the apartment building with a cackle.

While training in the dojo with the others had given him a decent understanding of how the others fight together as a team, Mikey’s excited to see just how well it works in a real situation. He’s interested if all of those katas and drills really do come into play or not, and how different it is from the natural improvisations Mikey’s family has perfected.

The others use some kind of grappling gun to cross the distance, landing on the fire escape and, in Leonardo’s case, straight into the apartment window. The sounds of blaster fire increase as the others follow the leader's idea, Mikey bringing up the rear and rolling into a defensive crouch inside the apartment.

His heart stutters as in between the chaos and destruction being wrought to the small space, his eyes lock with a K-word staring right at him.

“Kraang, abandon previous objective. Kraang is ordered by Kraang Prime to kill the Turtle Who is Not the Normal Turtle immediately and by any costs,” the K-word in front of him announces, turning his blaster away from the terrified man sprawled on the ground and straight at his chest, not wasting a moment before firing.

Mikey easily dodges the blast, hiding behind an overturned couch as the other K-words (he doesn’t even want to know how many there are) acknowledge the new orders. He can hear Leonardo shout something through the blood rushing through his ears, but Mikey can’t understand it. The blasts are still hitting the couch, getting dangerously close, but all he focuses on is trying to get his pulse and breathing under control.

He can’t afford to go crazy right now. Not in front of the others. It would mess up all of Dr. Positive’s plans.

Donatello and April are suddenly crouched in front of him, mouths moving but Mikey can’t understand any of the words through the ringing. The others' brows furrow in concern as he glances down and sees the shaking in his arms, and Mikey desperately looks to Donatello as the shots continue. Donatello flusters for a moment before being pushed aside by April, who gently takes his hands and gives them a gentle squeeze, directing eye contact towards her.

He is still trying to catch his breath, telling himself over and over that it’s okay, the others are here, he’s fine, these K-words aren’t the same. And, as the ringing in his ears lessens and he can start to hear the fighting again, he thinks that it’s starting to work. Mikey tries to turn and glance around the couch at what’s happening but April redirects his gaze back to him before he can. Now, he can hear the other trying to calm him down, saying what’s supposed to be soothing phrases in a somewhat frantic tone.

“It’s okay, it’s okay, there’s no need for you to fight, we’ve got this all under control–” April is softly saying, running a soothing thumb over his still shaking hands. Her eyes are wide and slightly panicked, but she is still trying her best to calm him down. Mikey distantly feels an unnatural peace try to slither its way into his mind, but he resolutely pushes against the intrusion. April winces in front of him, bringing one of her hands to her temple.

Blaster fire still echoes around them as Mikey finally feels like he can breathe again over April's continued soft speech. Donatello hovers to the side, anxiously flicking his eyes between the battle and Mikey.

“Oh sewer apples, this is not how tonight was supposed to go–Raph, look out!”

All of the panic rushes back to Mikey in an instant and he is leaping out from behind the couch, weapon left on the floor in front of April. His eyes immediately land on Raphael, fighting a K-word relentlessly while another aims its blaster at the back of his head, weapon lighted and ready to fire.

Mikey sees red. His heart pounds as he crosses the distance and bodily slams the K-word into the wall, it’s shot blasting a hole right by Raphael’s head. On the edges of his vision he can see Raphael’s wide eyes as he kicks the K-word he was fighting away, the little blob inside vacating it’s robot body with a squeal, but the words the other turtle says is drowned out by–

Not again, not again, they’re not getting Raph again–

With a growl Mikey slams the K-word even harder into the wall, gripping the arm that held the blaster with his now glowing arms and ripping it off with a metallic screech. It makes a series of panicked beeps, the latch of the stomach opening with a small hiss as the K-word inside tries to escape with wide, terrified eyes.

It doesn’t get much farther than dropping to the floor before Mikey slams the robot arm into its flesh with a squelch. Breathing heavily he does it again and again and again, the tentacles finally falling limp when he is heavily tackled to the floor.

Mikey squirms, hissing at whatever's on top of him with his eyes scrunched tight and his hands trying to grapple for the metal arm he had dropped. He just manages to touch it with his fingertips when he’s unceremoniously slapped across the face, hard. His senses rush back to him, eyes flying open to be greeted by Raphael’s slightly panicked face above his, hand reeling back for another slap but freezing at Mikey’s now open and alert gaze.

He hears the panting from the others around the room as the chaos stops and the husks of the robot bodies spark (and the blood of the actual body spreads). Mikey can’t look away from Raphael’s face, an ever changing mix of shock, confusion, anger, and…horror.

There are tears gathering in his eyes as he finally registers that he failed to keep himself in control, turning into a monster right in front of their eyes. Mikey takes a quick glance at the others where they are scattered around the room, their own faces openly shocked and cautious. They haven’t even lowered their weapons yet.

He slowly looks back up to Raphael, who is still grounding him to the floor as his expression finally settles on anger.

Dr. Positive’s mission has completely and utterly failed, all because of one mistake. All because he couldn’t control it.

“What the hell was that?” Raphael snarls from above. Mikey avoids his gaze and tries to shrink back as much as he can from his position on the floor. “Why did you do that?”

“It…was going to shoot you,” Mikey mumbles softly enough that he’s sure only Raphael is able to hear, wiping away the gathering frustrated tears as unsuspectingly as he can. “I couldn’t just let you get hurt.”

Raphael blinks rapidly, anger falling away to complete and utter bafflement. “What? Why wouldn’t you want to…” he mutters just as softly.

“Raph, let him up,” Leonardo orders, katana still at his side. Raphael looks to the leader then back down at Mikey, lips pursed, slowly standing off of him.

Mikey pries himself up, trying to make himself as small as possible and avoiding the accusing eyes he can feel boring into him. He swallows, throat dry, and tries to tamp down the residual anger he feels at his own lack of self control before the questions and barbed threats start. He doesn’t need to go all Dr. Delicate touch right now, not when the others are so keyed up.

Who knows, they might just feel like they need to defend themselves against the monster.

“There’s another one of you?” The man this apartment belongs to mutters from the floor where April is helping him sit up. “I thought it was just you four and the girl.”

“We’ll deal with you in a minute, and how exactly you know about us,” Leonardo says before striding over to Mikey. He refuses to look anywhere but at his feet as the other slides his katana back into his sheath. The leader crouches down in front of him, but Mikey keeps his watery gaze strictly on the other’s knee pads. “Orange, you need to head back to the lair.”

Mikey’s eyes darted up at that, looking pleadingly at Leonardo’s soft yet stern gaze. “But–”

“No, that’s an order. We’re probably going to run into more, uh, K-words if they’re after this guy, and…well, we don’t need another repeat of what just happened,” Leonardo interrupts as softly as he can, reaching out cautiously to give Mikey’s shoulder a small squeeze.

He really wants to retaliate, reassure the others that he’s fine and that this was only because he was caught off guard, but he knows no one will be on his side. Why would they, after they all saw the monster up close and personal? Pushing back the frustration and anger that’s building Mikey simply nods, slowly standing and walking towards the window.

Michelnagleo intercepts him before he can make his escape, holding out Mikey’s discarded kusari-fundo with a small, peaceful smile. Mikey blinks at the hand and slowly takes his weapon, his alternate’s smile becoming wider and he unconsciously finds himself trying to mirror it. He’s sure it comes out very strained, but Michelangelo looks happy at the effort, anyway. He doesn’t know why Michelangelo is trying after what he just did, but he appreciates the one kind face.

Without looking back to where he’s not wanted, Mikey hops out of the window and slowly trudges his way back to the lair. The entire way back his mind screams at him, his anger at his brain coming to a peak as he finally crosses the threshold and starts to drag himself straight towards his room where there’s no way he can hurt anyone other than himself, even by accident.

His plans, however, are ruined by Splinter's silent presence in the kitchen, standing in front of the stove boiling a kettle. Mikey tries to quicken his pace, but the other’s ears flick towards him and he turns his head.

“I thought you had followed the boys to the surface,” Splinter says as he removes the pot from the burner. Mikey's shoulders hunch and he scuffs his foot on the ground, pursing his lips.

“Uh, yeah, I did.” Mikey swallows and hugs himself, hoping that the end of the conversation and he can continue on his quest to get out of everyone's way. Splinter hums, retrieving two small cups. Mikey’s stomach swoops at the implication of that.

“Would you like to talk about why you have returned by yourself, then?” He asks, placing the cups onto a tray and slowly pouring out a small amount of a sweet smelling tea into them. Mikey shakes his head while trying to slowly inch his way out of the common area. “Can I entice you with my special blend of blackberry tea and hoshi imo?”

Despite knowing it’s a deliberate bribe Mikey pauses, stomach growling as it reminds him he didn’t have any of the breakfast spread. He nibbles on his lip, looking longingly towards his room before turning back to Splinter. Mikey doesn’t have any excuse not to talk this time, so instead of fighting he merely sighs and nods his head. Splinter gains a soft smile as he gathers the tea and treats onto the tray.

“Wonderful. Let us get comfortable in the dojo.” Mikey wordlessly follows, softly shutting the door behind him as Splinter sets up a small table and kneels on one side, blowing on his steaming cup of tea. Before joining him, Mikey takes a steadying breath, reassuring that voice that is once again screaming at him for being alone with Splinter that he’s fine.

Granted, he really doesn’t want to be in this situation in the first place, but he knows that this kind of talk was inevitable. The only bright side is he doesn’t have to worry too much about hurting Splinter, because if anyone can handle his monster, it would be him.

Mikey takes his seat across from Splinter, picking up the tea and giving it a small sniff before cautiously sipping. His eyes go wide at the pleasant taste and he immediately takes another gulp, feeling himself gradually relaxing as a peaceful silence forms. He takes a slice of the hoshi imo and quickly devours the piece, followed immediately by another. Before he knows it he’s eaten all of the snack, looking up to Splinters amused expression with a small blush.

“Uh, sorry,” Mikey mumbles, busying himself with the half empty cup in his hands.

“There is no need to apologize, it was meant for you,” Splinter responds, cradling his own cup as he takes in Mikey’s slouched position and slightly shaking hands. “Now, would you like to explain what happened?”

Mikey stiffens, avoiding Splinter's prying eyes. He takes a long sip of the tea, obviously stalling, but not really in the mood to care. The anger he had pushed down comes surging back all at once, and it takes all of his focus not to accidentally crush the small porcelain cup in his hands.

“I was causing a problem, that’s all,” he admits through clenched teeth after a lengthy bit of silence where it became clear Splinter was going to wait for a response. The larger mutant hums, setting down his tea and folding his hands in his lap.

“How so?” Splinter continues in a soft, monotone voice. Mikey sighs, looking up into his kind eyes. Just by his expression he can tell Splinter isn’t going to be dropping this line of questioning any time soon. The argument with Raphael and the mission he had completely messed up roll through his mind, and with one more glance down into his tea and back up again, a small dam inside of Mikey’s chest cracks.

“I…lost control again. I swear I didn’t mean to, and I tried to calm down, and it was working for a minute, but then Raphael was in danger and I just…” Mikey grinds out, clenching his unoccupied hand. “It’s like something else takes over my brain when it happens, and I can’t stop myself from becoming–that. I know this world's K-words aren’t as dangerous as the ones I knew, and I know I don’t have to use as much force, but I can’t control it. The others see me as some sort of monster and…they’re right to think that.”

“Orange, I am certain that that’s not true–”

“But they do!” Mikey interrupts. His lip trembles and he forces himself to down the rest of his tea, slamming it back down to the table. He takes a deep breath, trying to rein in his emotions before he actually starts shouting. Splinter is silent for a moment, staring at him with ears downturned, before he averts his gaze down to the tea in front of them.

“Do you believe my sons think I'm a monster, too?” Splinter announces into the silence, thoroughly knocking Mikey out of his angry spiral of thoughts to give him an incredulous stare.

Where in the world did that come from? He knew his gut was telling him Splinter was bad news, but why would the other turtles think that their dad was a monster?

Obviously seeing the confusion written across Mikey’s face, Splinter picks up his tea with a sigh, taking a small sip before continuing. “There is a very evil man in this dimension, Victor Falco. He now calls himself ‘The Rat King’, and is able to control the minds and actions of rats and mutated rodents.” Mikey’s eyes widened, looking at Splinter in shock. The other nods, ears pinned back and eyes closing as he recounts the tale. “He made me attack my sons, intending to force me to kill them. It was only their quick thinking that allowed me to break free of his influence.”

Splinter opens his eyes, a saddened expression across his face as he gazes back down at Mikey. “I was not in control of my actions when trying to hurt my family. Do you believe me to be a monster? Do my sons share that sentiment?”

“Of–of course not!”

“Then why do you believe yourself to be a monster for doing things outside of your own control? And why would my sons think that?”

Mikey leans back at that revelation being thrown in his face. He blinks as it sinks in, and unconsciously his shoulders relax and his anger and frustration diminishes. It’s still lurking (he really should be able to control these outbursts by now, after all), but everything about being a monster slowly floats out of his list of worries. If all of that had happened and the others don’t think that about Splinter, then the other mutant is probably right. Why would they think Mikey is a monster for being in a similar position? It would be completely hypocritical if they did.

That probably explains why his subconscious is so wary around Splinter, too, if he had attacked his family before, unwilling or not. Is that what was going on with the others, too? Were they simply acting on their instincts around him?

“Huh, I guess this is what happens when Dr. Feelings is on sabbatical,” Mikey announces, making Splinter huff a tiny laugh. The air is much lighter than before, and Mikey meets Splinter's soft gaze with a tiny smile. “Uh, thanks for…talking with me. It's a little weird to be on the other side of that, usually I’m the one doing it for my brothers.”

“It is no problem, Orange,” Splinter replies, reaching across the table and grasping one of Mikey’s hands, to his shock. He tenses for a moment, subconscious still on edge but much less insistent than before, then relaxes in his warm hold as he meets his eyes. “I know that we are not your true family, and you have many troubles that you do not feel comfortable sharing, but we will be here for you until we can send you back home for the help and healing you truly need. All you need to do is ask.”

Mikey smiles at Splinter as he releases his hand and picks up the kettle to refill their cups, moving the conversation to something much less serious. He isn’t sure how long they spend chatting, with both Mikey and Splinter going into smaller stories about his childhood and the trouble he’s caused with his brothers, but by the end he feels significantly lighter.

Splinter's assurances about offering ‘help and healing’ swirl around in his mind, but in the end he ends up brushing them off, knowing he won’t really need to ask for help beyond this point. His only problem are his outbursts, after all, and had Raphael not been in such obvious danger then he would have gotten ahold of himself eventually, especially with the others there and willing to keep him grounded.

Just like always, he doesn’t need any help with his emotions or P-TSD. Mikey has always had his trauma under control for the sake of taking care of his family's problems, and none of that is going to change now. He’s fine, and the next time he runs into the K-words, he’ll prove to all of them that he’s capable of keeping himself in check, for real this time.

That is, if Mamanardo ever lets him go on the surface again.

Chapter Text

Mikey was already hauled up in his room by the time the others returned from their mission, and no one had disturbed him until the next morning. Michelangelo was the only one who acted like nothing had happened, still making jokes and roping Mikey into the conversation. And while the others weren’t outright hostile after the K-word incident, they definitely approached him with a very careful energy.

He attempted to ignore it and continue to try and win the others over by doing any favor asked or simply providing company, and while things were still tense the lair had settled back into an awkward sort of normal. Mikey still made breakfast every morning with Michelangelo’s help, he still participated in boring training (although Splinter was trying to keep Mikey on his toes with random questions or swings of the staff when he started to space out), and the others had finally started to let their guard down again.

Mikey had been making every possible effort with Dr. Positive to make his presence warm and welcoming in the following two weeks after completely messing up on the mission, and he would be keeping up the effort as long as it kept yielding results.

There were still moments of doubt, though. Every time he got frustrated by a game or by a recipe going wrong, Mikey saw the way the others would tense and gave him a very obvious side eye. While he may now know that they didn’t actually think Mikey was a monster, their responses to his negative emotions still struck a chord.

So he had been trying very hard to keep those frustrations and feelings of anger completely bottled up, only projecting the positives and happiness, until he was left alone for the night. If the others were uneasy when Mikey wasn’t laughing, smiling, or being positive, then he would make sure that’s all he was. It didn’t matter that Dr. Delicate Touch was practically rippling under his skin to be let out, there was going to be as little negative emotions as possible to make sure the others felt comfortable around him.

If the way the others were currently sprawled around him in varying states of relaxation were of any indication, then that tactic had been working very well the past two weeks.

Splinter announced after training that he would be stepping out of the lair for a few hours to go and scavenge some non-food essentials, leaving the dojo completely open for activities. Not that anyone particularly wanted to train any more since Splinter really put them through the ringer with his endless drills, but it was nice to get a small change in environment for relaxation.

Mikey sighs, folding his arm under his chin to cushion against the hard bark of the tree branch he had claimed as his own. Directly below Michelangelo was leaning against the trunk playing go fish with Raphael, with Donatello focused on his phone and Leonardo sitting cross-legged in a classic medication pose a fair bit away, eyes closed.

Man, while training really did tire him out, this was just boring. No one was talking other than Michelangelo and Raphael, and that was only when they needed to ask for cards.

“Go fish, loser,” Michelangelo says, earning a small pout from Raphael as he picks up a card with a sigh.

“I still don’t understand how you always win this game. It’s based entirely on luck,” Raphael grumbles as he adds the card to his hand. Michelangelo grins from behind the only card he has remaining.

“You just gotta go with the flow. Let the cards speak to you, and you will be rewarded,” Michelangelo replies in a serene voice. Mikey snorts in amusement from above, knocking a few leaves loose from the tree to send them fluttering onto Raphael’s head. “Observe; give me a king, and then bask in my glory!”

Raphael groans before handing over the king, shaking off the leaves on his head while Michelangelo flaunts another victory.

Mikey sighs again, now straddling the branch and swinging his limbs idly back and forth. While it is somewhat entertaining watching Raphael constantly lose, boredom still sits heavy on his mind. Had he been in his own world he would bother one of his brothers to go with him to the surface or the Hidden City, but with his ‘positive’ plan in place he can’t exactly go make a nuisance of himself.

He would add some color to the lair with his paint, but when he first tried he was swiftly caught by Splinter who immediately forbade it.

Michelangelo and Raphael are about to start yet another round when Casey bursts into the dojo, panting and sweaty. Mikey perks up at his entrance, not having seen him since they had beat up those Foot-bots, but the others don’t even flinch at his loud arrival.

“Guys!” he pants, hands on his knees. “April, sewers, hurry!”

“What about April?” Donatello says, instantly jerking his head towards the other teen. Mikey still thinks it’s very weird that he has such an infatuation with April, but because of his other ‘No Negative Emotions’ plan he’s been hesitant to bring it up in case it leads to some sort of argument. He’s sure it will come out eventually, but for now Mikey is left reeling at the odd behavior.

“Are the Foot-bots back?” Raphael asks as he hops to his feet, leaving Michelangelo to pout at the discarded cards on the floor.

“We were on our way here, and the next thing I know April starts freaking out and runs off! She’s gone!”

“Wait, you lost April?!” Donatello exclaims. He shoves his phone back onto his strap and launches forward, grabbing his bō as he strides towards the door.

“Relax, guys. I’m sure there’s a logical explanation, like she was eaten by a giant sewer snake or something,” Michelangelo assures from where he is also now hurrying towards the door. Mikey snickers at the horrified look that appears on Donatello’s face, dropping from the tree to follow the others on this apparent rescue mission that was dropped into their laps.

Well, he was just complaining that the day was incredibly boring, so the Universe must have heard his anguish and sent something to keep him occupied. All he has to do is keep quiet and hope Leonardo doesn’t say anything about him tagging along.

Mikey quickly falls into step by Raphael near the back of the group as they make their way farther into the sewer system. One thing that he had noticed during his stay here was that the tunnels and chambers of the NNY underground were much smaller and more compact than the ones back home. And they sometimes actually carried sewage, which was practically unheard of in Mikey’s sewers.

They all have to clump together to fit through the tunnels, and Mikey makes extra sure to keep as far to the wall as possible since Raphael always got prickly when his personal space was invaded. Luckily, Michelangelo demonstrated that fact for him plenty of times before he had to find that out himself. Mikey idly runs his hand across the cracks and grooves on the wall as they continue even further, dulling out the constant sounds of argument between Donatello and Casey.

He would love to jump in and mediate to figure out the root of the problem between those two, but once again, he was determined to keep himself distanced from any of the negative emotions.

“Ah!” Casey yelps, gaining Mikey’s attention back as it’s finally something other than arguing. “Rats? Why’d it have to be rats?”

“Wait, you don’t like rats? But they’re so cute and fluffy!” Mikey interjects from the back of the cluster, Michelangelo shouting his own agreement. To demonstrate he gently picks up a rat near his feet, turning to Casey with a big smile and a rat dangling limply from his hands.

Casey shudders, backing further away from everyone. “Orange, what the heck is wrong with you, man? That’s disgusting!” The other teen slips on a patch of sewage, falling into a small side tunnel face-first. Mikey cackles along with Raphael and Michelangelo as he hurriedly gets back to his feet and stumbles back out onto the main path, coughing and rubbing at his nose. “That was hideous,” he spurts out between coughing fits.

“Dude, you put your nose in a New York sewer. I’m not sure what you were expecting,” Raphael says from beside him and Casey finally stops coughing.

The lanky teen straightens and glares at both Mikey and Raphael, but his eyes quickly flick to the space behind them. Casey’s eyes widen and he starts to cough again, stumbling away from them.

Mikey frowns as Casey pants, frantically whipping back to stare into the darkness behind them while drawing a hockey stick. “Casey, you okay?” he cautiously asks. The other teen shakes his head, taking one more look behind them before sighing in relief.

“Yeah, just thought I saw–” he cuts himself off with a scream as he stares into another side tunnel. Mikey startles when Casey turns and runs into the opposite tunnel, screaming all the while. “No! Not the demon rat! Anything but that!”

“Casey! Where are you going!?” Leonardo yells after him, the other teens frantic footsteps quickly fading to a distant echo. Mikey is about to chase after him (because who knows what is lurking in the sewers of NNY) when Michelangelo bounds past Leonardo in the same direction Casey did.

“Don’t worry, I’ll catch him!” He assures his brothers before he is taking off down the tunnel, too, shouting bribes to try and entice Casey to stop running.

“Ugh, Mikey!” Raphael groans, looking like he wants to give chase too until Leonardo stops him.

“No, we’re not going to split up even more. Raph, keep an eye on Orange while we focus on finding April, then we can–”

A feminine scream rips through the tunnel, echoing off the walls.

“That’s April!” Donatello exclaims. Everyone is sprinting towards the direction of the scream, being led by more shrieks that rattle through Mikey’s bones. Whatever is happening is bad news, and Mikey hopes beyond hope that it’s nothing K-word related so he can actually help without getting in the way again.

They all skid around a corner, weapons at the ready to fight off whatever April is scared of, but they stall when they are met with a large, nearly empty chamber. April crouches near the edge of a drop-off into the sewer below, moonlight illuminating her shivering form as she weakly bats her hands at nothing.

Donatello darts forward immediately, sheathing his bō and lightly gripping April by the shoulders. “April, are you okay? What’s going on, are you hurt?”

“No! Don’t eat me! Dad, stop it!” she screams, swatting Donatello away and continuing to mutter a stream of pleas begging for the bats to leave her alone.

Mikey knows he’s missing the context for those comments, because why is she so afraid of bats? And what does her dad have to do with it?

He’s about to approach her as Dr. Feelings to try and help Donatello calm her down when a dash of bright blue catches his eye. Mikey whips towards the movement and, with a glance at where the others are trying to figure out what is going on, creeps toward the faint glow coming from one of the many small cracks littered throughout the walls.

Mikey kneels onto the floor to get a better look into the crevice, and when he sees the source of the soft blue glow he coos.

“Aw, it’s so cute!” He announces, reaching in a finger to lightly brush down the slope of the mushroom-like Sprite's head. It lets out a tiny squeal that Mikey mimics as it leaps into his hands. “Look, they like me!”

“Orange, maybe you shouldn’t touch the unknown glowing mushroom when April’s freaking out? Just a thought,” Raphael says as he cautiously approaches and crouches down behind him, peering over Mikey’s shoulder.

“C”mon, this little guy looks harmless!” Mikey rebuffs, quickly rubbing down the cap of the Sprite's head in apology when one of its tiny little hands gets momentarily caught in his hand wraps. “I’m gonna keep ‘em! They’re name will be Estaban Julio-Rodriguez, and they shall be–”

He’s cut off from the tirade as Estaban, the little backstabber, sprays a foul smelling gas straight into Mikey and Raphael’s faces. Immediately he starts to cough, gagging at the taste of it in his mouth. Raphael does the same, coughing hard and trying to take in as much clean air as possible.

Mikey’s lived in a sewer his entire life, has been on way too many misadventures to count, and was even roped into picking up after Todd’s little puppy sanctuary, but whatever gas Estaban had sprayed them with was worse than all of them combined.

“The betrayal!” Mikey manages to cry between coughs. Estaban has long since scurried back into his little hole, and if he didn’t know any better he could swear he heard the Sprite laughing as it retreated.

“Are you guys okay?” Leonardo asks, voice much closer than before. Mikey gives a shaky thumbs up, eyes squeezed shut as he rides out the last of the coughing fit. Raphael grumbles something beside him, and when Leonardo asks once more if they’re alright, Mikey pries his eyes open to give the leader a much stronger ‘a-okay’.

Or he would have, if the moonlight wasn’t tinged pink. Mikey’s brows twist in confusion, still trying to catch his breath, but when he glances over to ask if Leonardo sees the weird pink light, too, he nearly stops breathing altogether.

Leonardo is standing there, concern etched into his features, as slimy pink tentacles start to climb up his legs. Mikey can only watch, beak gaping and horrified, as tiny branches slink off of the main vines and burrow into Leonardo’s flesh. Before his very eyes the leader’s skin begins to morph and stretch to accommodate the intruding tentacles, and the infection has slithered all the way up to Leonardo’s neck when Mikey finally registers what’s happening.

It’s impossible, they’re not even here, but he knows with terrifying clarity what’s crawling along and into Leonardo's body.

Leonardo takes a shambling step forward, the entire right side of his body now succumbing to the slimy pink infection. Mikey takes a shaky breath and scrambles backward until his shell harshly collides with the wall. The leader stops his pursuit, the tentacles creeping over his mouth, sealing it shut as Mikey’s breathing becomes labored.

His eyes dart to the side at a pained groan from Raphael, heart leaping when he realizes that those pink vines are slithering through the cracks in the walls, turning the once dull gray concrete into a patchwork of grotesque flesh. Raphael is still on the ground as those tentacles race towards him, and Mikey isn’t even thinking as he pounces forward and yanks Raphael away and sends him slamming into the wall farthest away from the writhing vines.

“No, no, this isn’t right, this can’t be happening,” Mikey mutters desperately to himself as the walls get completely covered by the pulsing, dripping flesh. There’s another moan mixed with a threatening hiss, and Mikey can barely process what’s happening through the terror as he meets the yellowed eyes of an infected Donatello approaching, four spidery pink limbs emerging from his shell. “No, this isn’t you, you can fight it off! I can help you, I can help get it away–”

“How can you help them,” interrupts the voice of his nightmares, and he frantically darts his eyes around looking for the large mechanical suit and glowing red eye only to be met with nothing but fleshy walls and the blank gazes of the two infected in front of him. “When you can’t even help yourself?”

An ear-shattering roar erupts from his right. Mikey presses his hands to his ears and squeezes his eyes shut, tears building, because he recognizes it and he really doesn’t want to–

Something lands heavily beside him, and on instinct alone his eyes fly open as he scrambles across the floor and away from a now infected Raphael trying to pierce an infected Leonardo’s plastron with one of his sai. Leonardo screeches from beneath his brother and bucks him off, surging to his feet and facing off against the now growling Raphael from where he picks himself off of the floor.

Mikey needs to stop this, he needs to help them remember who they are, but suddenly a slimy tentacle is creeping up his arm. He lashes out, catching an infected Donatello across the face with a flailing fist. Donatello screeches as he stumbles back, gripping his face and falling onto his shell. Mikey takes the moment to shoot back to his feet because if this is real he needs to be prepared for anything to happen and be hyper-vigilant because they’re so fast–

With a jolt Mikey remembers that he has his weapons, he isn’t unarmed, but as he tries to draw them he finds his grip failing him. Both arms tremble violently and he can’t hold onto his weapons for more than three seconds before they’re clattering to the floor. He vaguely registers that his scars are glowing too brightly and there's more pain than he’s felt in a long time but it quickly fades to the back of his mind as Raphael lets out another roar that immediately has him whipping towards the sound.

Mikey can feel all the blood drain from his scales as instead of seeing Raphael, it’s Raph, his big brother, leering over a shaking Leonardo.

“How…but you’re not…we saved you–” Mikey whispers in disbelief and horror. How is his big brother here? Were his other brothers here, too? But if they were then why was Raph infected, why was he still trying to hurt them?

His heart stops as Raph snarls and launches a tentacle straight at Leonardo’s throat, raising him into the air by his neck to strangle him. The infected Leonardo screeches, frantically clawing at the flesh wrapped around his neck. Mikey’s eyelids flutter as between one moment and the next Leonardo is replaced with Leo, hanging limply in Raph’s hold as he accepts his demise by their oldest brother's hand.

Mikey waits with hopeful bated breath for the moment Raph breaks through and comes back to himself so they can fight off the K-words together. For a deathly silent moment no one moves. Then, before Mikey can shout, or cry, or try to stop it, Raph is forming three deadly points on his knuckles and drives them straight into Leo’s plastron without an ounce of hesitation.

Mikey’s mouth flaps in horror, letting out a weak chirp as Leo’s bleeding, crushed, stabbed body is dropped to the ground with a sickening squelch and the cackle of K-word One echoes in the chamber.

“Did you really have hope that you could save him? Your dear brother is mine to command, and soon you’ll be the only one left, all alone in this sad, pathetic world.”

Mikey frantically shakes his head, backing up towards the tunnel’s exit with halting steps. His eyes are locked on the still body of Leo on the floor, slowly losing all color as blood steadily seeps out of the three large wounds going straight through his plastron and out of his shell.

No, this isn’t how it happened, they saved Raph and he didn’t kill Leo. He tells himself this over and over, but still backs away as the world begins to rumble and large cracks form on the ceiling. This isn’t real, but he trembles and shakes as the vines along the walls shiver with excitement. The k-words didn’t win, but his eyes are watering with guilt-ridden tears because why couldn’t he do more to protect his brothers like they’re always protecting him?

This isn’t his dimension, and yet everything is so painfully familiar and terrifying and world-ending that Mikey lets his fear overtake him.

“I’m going to take great pleasure in tearing your happy little family to shreds, and I’ll be sure to make sure you watch every. Single. Second.”

The lights of a train car, of the train car that could have very easily killed Mikey and Donnie while inside the Turtle Tank, blind him from the large opening of the drop-off of the sewers. Mikey’s heart is beating out of his chest as the train car blares its horn in a snarl aimed right at him.

With one choked, terror-filled sob, Mikey turns and does what his mind has been screaming at him to do while his heart pleads with it to change course, to stay, to try and save his brothers and fight.

Instead, he runs.

The haunting laughter of the K-words follow his sprint out of the tunnel where Raph stands perfectly still over the corpse of Leo. His breathing wobbles as he runs as fast as he can through the tentacle-covered tunnels, nearly slipping on the flesh underneath his feet to skid around a corner.

He needs to find the others. If Leo and Raph were here, then Donnie has to be here, too. Casey and April and Dad are probably somewhere in these tunnels as well, and he needs to get to them so they can regroup and come up with another plan to get rid of the K-words because they were back and he doesn’t know how but he needs to find his family before anything else happens to them where he can’t try to help–

Mikey yelps as his shin catches on a sharp piece of metal, sending him crashing to the floor. He gasps in pain as he tries to catch himself on his hands and they collapse under his weight. Knives dig into the insides of his hands and forearms when he cradles them briefly to his chest before hastily trying to get his feet back under him.

He needs to keep moving. Mikey’s a sitting turtle-duck right now, and through the blood rushing through his ears he can swear the K-word’s screeches and laughter is getting closer.

Picking himself up he finds his balance quickly, about to keep running when he turns to see what tripped him up and his entire being freezes. Donnie’s battle-shell lies shattered to pieces on the floor, droplets of blood coating the edges. Mikey stares, mind going terrifying blank. With a jolt of horror he realizes that it means Donnie must be close by, and without his battle-shell he’s completely vulnerable.

“Donnie!” Mikey cries, frantically shooting off into a side tunnel where bits of the battle-shell are trailing into. “Please, where are you!? I can help, we can find the others together!”

He pants into the ensuing silence. Mikey gulps as the only thing that echoes back from the tunnel is the sounds of the vines slithering against the walls. He whines and turns back, ready to try another tunnel, but freezes as something clatters onto a patch of concrete in the darkness. Whipping around Mikey pushes back the terrifying thought of it being a K-word trying to trick him in favor of throwing himself towards the noise.

It could be Donnie, and his big brother is hurt and needs his help.

The only light source in the tunnel comes from the steady glow of his shell and markings combined with his throbbing and trembling hands. Hurriedly Mikey makes his way further into the darkness, hands outstretched in front of him, stopping in his tracks as the glint of glass catches his eye.

Tears streak their way down his face as Donnie’s cracked and sparkling headgear stares back at him from the floor. No, no, he wouldn’t go anywhere without his gear, without his tech, Donnie has to be in really big trouble and Mikey has to save him, all alone–

Mikey lets out a shriek as a tentacle shoots down from the ceiling to destroy the goggles even further. He scrambles back, following the limb with a panicked gaze as it retreats back to the slithering mass above. Mikey watches with nothing but static between his ears as the vines of flesh peel back to reveal the deformed body of Donnie, strung up like a puppet to the ceiling, completely limp as tentacles run over his scales and slowly start to burrow in his shell.

It’s exactly what Mikey witnessed on the Technodrome. The same thing that happened while he just stood by and watched as his brother was absorbed and physically connected to an alien spaceship.

He can barely catch his breath, throwing caution to the wind as he is confronted with the slim possibility of saving his brother. Mikey jumps to the ceiling, trying to grab onto the vines and screaming out in agony when his fingers do nothing but twitch. He falls and lands harshly on his shell, staring up at Donnie as he tries to think of some other way to get him down and away from those things.

His thoughts are harshly cut off when Donnie’s eyes snap open with a snarl, his glowing yellow gaze striking pure terror into Mikey’s soul.

“Why didn’t you do anything?” Mikey whimpers at the harsh hiss of his brother's words. “You let me sacrifice myself to the Technodrome. How could you, after all I’ve done to protect you? After I lost my battle-shell saving you from your own hubris in the subway tunnels?”

“No, you…I didn’t let you, I couldn’t stop you!” Mikey cries, pleading with his brother to understand that he’d always protect him, too. He’d lay down his life in a heartbeat for one of his brothers, and he knew they’d do the same for him. Hell, they’ve already done that for him, countless times over putting themselves in the line of fire to protect Mikey from the worst of things.

But Mikey hates it. Why would they risk themselves so often when they know he’s a capable fighter? Why would they risk leaving Mikey all alone, forever–

“You’re nothing but a pathetic leech to our sacrificial tendencies, little brother. How many years will it take before we’re all dead because we kept having to save you?” Donnie sneers, slowly being absorbed back into the writhing mass supporting him until only his purpling face remains. “Even now, in a different dimension, our alternates have to save you from your mistakes. Are you willing to let them die, too?”

Mikey sobs as his brother is fully enveloped in the tentacles once more, stumbling out of the tunnel to escape through the halls, almost tripping over the battle-shell again in his haste.

Memories of being rescued from Bradford and Karai by the turtles flash through his mind, followed immediately by Raphael intercepting the Foot-bot about to stab him in the shell, and then having to be calmed down by April and Donatello and being tackled by Raphael when they ran into the K-words.

Was Mikey really that pathetic? Why was he always the one who was being saved, both in his own dimension and in this one? What was wrong with him?

Mikey distantly realizes that he’s hyperventilating as he mindlessly weaves through the tunnels as fast as his body will take him. His hands and arms are on fire and he can’t simply ignore the pain anymore as it jolts to the forefront of his mind with new, painful sobs erupting from his chest.

He needs to find his other family, his brothers might be gone but Mikey has to have hope because he can’t be alone, there’s no way he can survive being stripped away from his family for the rest of his life–

Mikey turns another corner and almost trips over himself in his haste to stop at the scene laid out in front of him. Bile rises in his throat and he hastily leans on the flesh covered wall as his stomach expels the breakfast he had that morning, leaving a burning acidic taste in his mouth and throat. He wipes around his mouth the best he can and sobs start anew at the image of Leo, skin completely gray and lifeless, body clearly broken and his entire shell cracked and crushed, propped limply against the wall with a small piece of paper sitting loosely in his hand.

But…didn’t he just watch Raph–

“Mikey…” the corpse whispers, blank eyes pouring tears and staining the skin on his cheeks a darker gray. “You could have saved me…”

Mikey stumbles towards the image of his brother, tears similarly leaking down his face as he collapses to his knees next to him. “I did save you, I got you out of there! I opened the portal and–”

“You only did it after they thought I was dead,” Leo spits, face twisted into an agonized snarl. Mikey’s breath hitches and he tries to reach out to him but his brother pulls away, clutching that small piece of paper to his chest. “Why couldn’t you open a portal to trap him before that? Why did you let me be tortured? Why did you make me think I was going to die?”

“I didn’t know how! I didn’t want you to be hurt, I promise!” Mikey cries, once again trying to get this echo of his brother to look at him. He finally makes contact with his arm and both of them cry out in pain, the glowing cracks on Mikey’s hand creeping over and overtaking the gray on Leo. Mikey whines and tries to rub it off, but only seems to cause more pain for himself and Leo as the fissures start to travel his entire body.

Leo heaves a weak sob as the cracks reach his face. “You would have been with me as the portal closed if Raph didn’t need to save you from falling. If you were a better brother, a better mystic warrior, you could have protected all of us from that monster.”

He stares uselessly as Leo starts to crumble completely into dust, unable to do anything as his brother fades with a knowing and bitter smile directed at Mikey. His vision gets hazy as the lack of oxygen finally catches up to him, but he can’t stop sobbing as he gets back up, hugging himself and numbly walking past the pile of ash that used to be his brother.

Mikey squeezes himself tighter, pressing into his scars and making them burn even worse. He needs to find Casey Jr., or Dad, or April. His running has slowed to a stumble, head light as he gasps for breath between sobs and sniffles.

He can protect them. He can help them, not just mentally but in battles as well. He’s going to get back to them, make sure they’re okay. He almost killed himself when getting Leo back, and if he has to go that far to get back to them then so be it. As long he isn’t the one at fault for being all alone.

Blearily he notes that the pink flesh that’s been coating the concrete of the tunnels is slowly petering out until there is nothing but familiar, blank walls. Mikey keeps his feet moving, recognizing the area and making a sharp turn into a passage that leads back to the other turtle's lair.

Surely his family would have gone there first if they were trying to find him. That’s where he would go, at least. Or that’s where he thinks he would go if his mind was clear, which Mikey knows it’s not right now but he can’t think of any other place because he knows that the lair is safe. The lair has to be safe, because all evidence of the K-words has been going away the closer he gets to the entrance.

Mikey stumbles through the threshold, sucking in what feels like his first real breath in hours. Blinking rapidly he looks around and forcefully tries to relax as he finds that nothing is out of place.

He takes as many deep breaths as he can handle without passing out, closing his eyes and willing himself to calm down and start looking for his family.

Whatever his brother’s–or what was posing as his brothers–had said to him wasn’t going to get to him. It didn’t matter how much truth they were saying, or how much it terrified him to have to hear it straight from their own mouths, he needed to find his remaining family and prove them wrong.

“April? Casey Jr.?” Mikey says. His voice comes out soft and hoarse, mouth tasting foul from his encounter with Leo. He clears his throat, calling out once more, louder this time. “Dad? Are you guys here?”

Silence greets him as Mikey pads further into the lair, stopping in the middle of the room. He swallows, digging his nails into his arms with a pained wince. They still haven’t stopped glowing, neither has his shell or markings, but he doesn’t know why since he’s safe here.

“Dad!?” He asks the room one last time, the shout grating against his sore throat. Mikey unconsciously lets out a distressed hiss, curling into himself more and trying to prepare himself to head back into the dangerous, K-word infested tunnels to keep looking for them when someone finally answers his call.

“Orange? Are you alright?” Mikey nearly collapses in relief hearing Splinter's voice. It’s not who he was hoping for, but at least he’s not in this alone anymore. Splinter will help him find the rest of his family once he tells him what’s happening, no matter how many bad feelings he’s had about the mutant previously.

Taking a steadying breath Mikey turns around and promptly stumbles back until his shell hits the wall. Unconsciously he summons his ninpō constructed kusari-fundo to his grasp. It causes him to get even more lightheaded as it flickers in his grasp but he pushes through it because Shredder, not Master Splinter, is looming over where Mikey had just been standing.

Shredder lets out a grating laugh as purple flames creep up from the floor and begin to engulf the lair. Mikey knows he’s hyperventilating again as the beast shifts ever so subtly closer, burning pink eyes locked onto his own.

“Ah, the youngest, standing all alone,” Shredder hisses, advancing even more with metallic arms outstretched. “I wonder how long you will be able to last against me? Will it be longer than my daughter?”

Shredder makes a grand gesture, shifting his body to reveal more of the room steadily being filled with flames and destroying anything in its path. Mikey’s attention is briefly grabbed by the cracking ceiling and the rumbling chuckle of the Shredder before he locks onto the lumps hidden by his claws.

“No…” Mikey whispers, more sobs building as he takes in the mutilated forms of Gram Gram, Dad, April, and Casey spread onto the floor, barely recognizable behind the blood and deep slices into their flesh. “This isn’t possible.”

Shredder laughs, his deep voice mixing with a metallic shriek and stalks closer. Mikey’s weapon flickers in and out of existence as the blood dripping down the monster's claws and teeth is illuminated by the flames dancing around them.

“They couldn’t stop me. What makes you believe you even stand a chance? Where were you when they needed your protection? Cowering in your fear? Connecting with your ‘feelings’?” Shredder snarls, stopping his advance and leering down at Mikey from his impressive height.

“But we saved you! Oroku Saki, you’re not supposed to be trying to hurt us anymore! We’re your family! Please, stop!” Mikey desperately cries. His vision is fading between the heaving of his sobs and the concentration needed to keep his fading weapon in his shaking grasp.

“My daughter turned her back on me when I was trying to do what was right for our clan, just as you have taken yourself away from your family because of your insolence!” Shredder snarls, taking one more halting step forward. Mikey shakes his head because that’s not true, he didn’t turn his back on his family. He didn’t want to be stuck in a different dimension, it just happened and he doesn’t know how to get back when all he wants is to see his family again.

“You’re lying!” Mikey screams, and before Shredder can spout more lies he whips his weapon towards him, catching him in the jaw with the spinning blade. The beast stumbles back a few steps, quickly righting himself and screeching at him in rage.

Mikey pants, preparing for the inevitable attack, but something in his chest snaps. With a gasp stuck in his throat his muscles lock and all of the glowing on his body flickers out of existence along with his ninpō. His legs collapse from under him, lungs seizing and desperately trying to breath through the paralysis as he slumps shakily against the wall. Mikey’s entire body feels entirely too cold even as he’s surrounded with flames, and the Shredder's grating screech rattles through his ears. He tries to pull on his ninpō to do something, because right now he’s completely defenseless. Yet the more he pulls the larger the empty crater where it is supposed to be grows. It’s only when he stops his efforts, on the brink of losing consciousness and body feeling like it’s been dunked into a frozen lake, that a tiny spark flickers back to life.

Not even close to enough to be able to make a weapon, but that little spark in his chest reassures him that he’s still okay.

Mikey sucks in a deep breath, vision swimming as Shredder crouches menacingly over him, purple flames casting shadows across his armor, and then in the next blink everything stops and it’s Master Splinter’s blurry form whose kneeling in front of him, hands outstretched.

He pants shallowly, entire body shivering and mind swarmed with confusion to see that there are no flames and there is no Shredder waiting to tear him apart. Mikey’s ears ring as he tries to focus on the movement of Splinter’s mouth and understand whatever he’s trying to say. Splinter’s ears are pulled all the way back, and he rolls his left shoulder with a wince as his low voice finally breaks through the turmoil in Mikey’s head.

“You are safe, Michelangelo. The Shredder is not here, it is only us–” Mikey gasps a sob as his eyes latch onto Splinter’s gaze, uncontrollably shaking as it’s Shredder's voice that comes out of his mouth trying to comfort him. He looks over Splinter's shoulder to confirm that Shredder is really gone, and there’s no flames, no corpses of his family, and when he comes up with nothing he turns his eyes back to Splinter with heavy eyelids.

“Shredder?” Mikey croaks, trying once again to scan the room to see where he had gone. Did Splinter manage to fight him off that fast? But if he did then why were the flames gone? And where did the bodies go–

“No, he is not here. It is only me,” Splinter says, once again in the Shredder’s voice. Mikey chirps fearfully and squeezes his eyes shut, tears flowing freely as he tries to wrap his head around what was going on. His mind feels a lot clearer, albeit still completely scrambled, but that’s no reason why he should be hearing that voice when the owner is clearly not here.

“Oro…Oroku Saki?” he quietly pleads, gaining just enough strength to wrap his arms around himself. Whatever Splinter says next is lost in the fuzz of static as all of the adrenaline is leached out of his body and he slumps even further into the wall. Mikey blinks sluggishly, vision swimming with black dots every time he blinks.

His body still feels alarmingly cold, but something warm and inviting swiftly washes over the sensation, stroking his ninpō encouragingly. Mikey lets out a tiny hum in contentment as it grows into a tiny flame under caring hands.

Slowly, Mikey lets his panicked and confused mind drift into the warm caresses of the soothing green energy with the whispered assurances that everything will be alright.

Chapter Text

Wherever Mikey is, it’s quiet. It’s absolute silence, no trace of any kind of city life, wind, or nature. Mikey groans as he raises his head from the floor, slowly bringing his hands under him to push himself to his knees. Blearily his eyes crack open, squinting when he registers the shallow puddle of water below him.

Raising his head further, he tries to blink away his confusion when he’s met with nothing but a black void. But, interestingly, his mind doesn’t panic at the complete darkness that surrounds him. Mikey’s whole being is flooded with a sense of calm and comfort even as he registers that the water on his skin doesn’t feel like…anything. Tilting his head he curiously runs his hand through the puddle, but when he lifts it up his hand isn’t wet.

“I don’t think that’s scientifically possible,” Mikey groggily mumbles. He thinks that he should be afraid, waking up in a place that appears to have no end with only water he can’t feel for company, but it’s familiar in a way he can’t place. Shaking his head he settles onto his heels, squinting into the void in the slight hope that he’ll see an end.

“Hello?” he softly calls out, confused when his voice doesn’t echo like it should given the space. “Is anyone here? Where even is here…?”

That’s all it takes for his memories to come flooding back, and that feeling of calm wavers as he remembers the hallucinations. Mikey’s mind is clear now, and he knows that what he saw wasn’t real because all of that was impossible, but in the moment that hadn’t mattered. He saw his absolute worst nightmares, all of the things that tormented him inside his head that his brothers didn’t (and couldn’t) know were laid bare, and that residual terror had his breath catching in his throat as everything flashed through his mind like the world's worst slide show.

Mikey quickly studies his hands in case any new cracks have formed but thankfully he finds none. And when he flexes his fingers there’s no pain, either. Not even a single tremble. He observes in awe as he twists and moves his hands and there’s no static, pain, or ache. It’s like nothing had ever happened to them.

“One of the benefits of this In-Between,” a familiar voice states behind him. Mikey whirls around with a yelp, landing with a silent splash in the water and staring wide eyed into the smug face of Oroku Saki. “Any mortal pain does not follow you here.”

Mikey stays silent as he takes in the glowing green ghost. Saki says nothing more, serenely staring down at him from his loose meditative stance. Images of the Shredder, both real and hallucinated, briefly pop into his mind but he pushes them down with a resolute shake of his head.

They had saved him from the armor. Oroku Saki was free with the rest of their ancestors. He wasn’t a threat anymore, despite what the hallucinations made him see.

Mikey relaxes his tense shoulders, sending Saki a smile as he pulls himself back into a kneeling position opposite of him. “It is pretty nice not having to worry about my hands for once.”

Saki hums in acknowledgement, letting them fall back into a comfortable silence. Mikey purses his lips, drumming his fingers idly on his thigh as he takes another look into the void. He’s still not sure where he is or how he got here, but if he’s with an ancestor than wherever he is must not be that bad. Unless…

“Wait, am I dead?!” Mikey exclaims, looking anxiously back to Saki. “I can’t be dead, I still have to win Kondescending Kitchen! And get back home, that’s equally as important!”

Saki snorts. “No, you are not dead. Although, if you are not more cautious, that could be a path you are starting towards.”

“Oh okay, good. I think my brothers would kill me if I died without some kinda cool last words, or in a badass way–wait, what’s that supposed to mean?!” Mikey cries, hands on his head. Another realization comes to him, and he looks hopefully back at Saki. “If…if I can see you and I’m talking to you, does that mean I’m back home?”

Saki deflates and shakes his head with an aggrieved sigh. “No, you are still very far from home.”

Mikey frowns at that, shoulders drooping. He had hoped that maybe in the time he wasn’t in his right mind he had managed to get himself back in panic, but evidently not. Huffing, he looks down to his hands clenched in his lap. Guess he’s still stuck in another dimension. Or, he muses as he once again runs an idle hand throughout the not-water, another another dimension.

“I suppose I should offer some explanation as to how this is all happening,” Saki begins, schooling his face into something more somber. “The ancestors have brought you to an In-Between world. Here, you are neither dead nor alive, which gives us the ability to communicate without expending quite as much energy.” Saki rubs a contemplative hand on his chin, staring into a middle distance above Mikey’s head. “Although with the amount of power and distress that was needed in order for us to finally make contact, this is quite the special case. It may not work the same as it has in the past.”

“Huh,” Mikey says, looking around this ‘In-Between’ world once more. “So you guys brought me here on purpose?” He gasps and leans forward with wide eyes. “Did my brothers send you here? Are they trying to communicate with me? And if they are, why did they send you and not Gram Gram? No offense. And why couldn’t you do this sooner?”

Saki sighs and rubs the bridge of his nose with a pinched expression. “You’re brothers did not send me, no. As for why I am here and not my daughter, it’s complicated. Part of it has to do with my name and image being the last one you thought of as you broke the barrier. You may have been calling out in terror at my perceived presence, but I still felt it and responded accordingly.” Mikey winces at that, but he knows there’s nothing he can do about it now. It was just a hallucination, after all.

And even if it wasn’t, he has a perfectly good reason to still be wary of anything Shredder or Foot Clan related. Sue him for being cautious when the majority of his time with Oroku Saki has been when he was trying to kill his entire family.

“My daughter has also been expending the majority of her energy on the rest of the family. They have been calling on her everyday for the past week to be reassured that you have not joined us in the ancestral realm. Every visit costs her energy that takes time to rebuild.” Saki concludes with a solemn nod. His face then twists in annoyance as he mumbles under his breath, “If they had listened to our advice about ninpō, then they would be able to see for themselves that you’re fine.”

Mikey absorbs the news about his family like a particularly eager sponge. So his brothers didn’t send Saki specifically, but they have been asking the ancestors for help. His heart hurts that they think he might be dead even though he knows his ninpō is still visible, but maybe they can’t reach out? Or maybe they can’t feel him at all, and it’s only on his end? If they lost sight or feeling of his ninpō for even a second Mikey knows they would go into a frenzy.

His brothers must be getting really desperate for leads on his disappearance if they’re considering the possibility of his death after only two months.

“But if you’re here then you can just tell me a way that I can get home, right?” Mikey asks only to deflate when Saki frowns in dismay.

“I wish I could help, but even the spirits are unsure where you are. You have been effectively cut off from us as well as your brothers, but at the rate your connection was weakening before this mess you should still be tethered to us quite strongly. It is concerning how quickly it was whittled down.”

“Okay, you can’t help me, and not even the literal ghosts know that I’m in an alternate dim–” Mikey abruptly stops his train of thought as the last of Saki’s statement sticks in his mind. “What’s this about something happening to my ninpō beforethe big thing happened?”

Saki sighs, looking at him with a mildly twitching eye. “It is my understanding that you’ve been having trouble with your mystics, correct?” Mikey nods. “While your troubles stem from the way you unlocked your powers, it also has to do with the weakening of your ninpō. It has been corroding ever since the Invasion you all stopped.”

A slight ringing starts in his ears at that, and he instinctively reaches for his ninpō but it feels…different here. Instead of being something inside of him it’s as though he is swaddled in a warm blanket. Mikey hums in confusion, prompting Saki to continue.

“Ninpō is connected through the bond to your family. As a Hamato, your ninpō has always been a part of you and always will be, even after death. But, it can be weakened if the bond is strained.”

“I’ve been helping my brothers this entire time, though!” Mikey counters. “I’ve always been there for them and I practically have to sneak out to get them off my back! How could our bond be strained?”

It doesn’t make any sense. Everyone in his family had been closer than ever after the Invasion, not wanting to let each other out of their sight after such a close brush with death. And with Dr. Feelings running things everyone had been opening up and coming clean about everything which, in Mikey’s opinion, would strengthen their family ties. Right? Or did he do something wrong and miss something that had his brothers drifting away from each other?

“Why would my brother’s ninpō be going away? Dr. Feelings has been working overtime to get to the bottom of all the problems that were dug up during the Invasion.”

“It seems you’ve misunderstood. It is not the bond between the others that is weakening. It is yours that is drifting away.” Mikey stares blankly at Saki, impatiently rolling his hand to have him continue because this doesn’t make any sense. “It is not only physical proximity that makes a bond. You must be willing to bare yourself and be truly vulnerable for ninpō to thrive within each of you. And while you have been having your brothers talk through their feelings, strengthening their own connections, your own have been left festering, unacknowledged in the wake of your family’s.”

“But I don’t have anything to talk about! I’m fine!” Saki takes a steadying breath at that, pursing his lips and letting out the clear annoyance in a slow exhale. It causes Mikey to groan in defeat. “Okay, maybe I’m not super great, but my feelings aren’t important enough for anyone else to be concerned about! My brothers are the ones who need support, not me,” Mikey states, defiantly staring back at Saki because what he’s saying is just wrong. He’s not drifting away from his family, there’s no way that’s possible. His ninpō isn’t working right because of the new dimension, like Donatello said, nothing else.

His feelings on what happened during the invasion don’t need to be talked about. Mikey was the one who was being shielded and protected the most during that day, he didn’t go through nearly as much as his brothers. Sure, it was torture watching his brothers suffer while he felt helpless to stop it, and it sucked to know that they still thought he needed to be protected 24/7, but they didn’t need to know that.

His brother's problems and experiences were so much worse than his own. Mikey doesn’t deserve to be a cry baby about it. He can handle himself and his P-TSD, no one needs to help him, and his silence sure as hell isn’t a reason that he could be drifting apart from his brothers.

It was only the dimension that was messing with his ninpō. Saki didn’t know what he was talking about.

“I don’t know what exactly is going on with my ninpō, but it’s definitely not that, trust me,” he says. Saki rolls his eyes and goes back to staring at him with thinly veiled annoyance. Mikey takes offense to it as they fall into a slightly awkward silence.

Mikey fumes at the implication that his bond with his family is weakening, but he knows he’ll be able to prove Saki wrong as soon as he gets home. But first, he has to get out of this place and get away from Saki, who doesn’t seem to want to be here to talk with him anyway.

“I appreciate knowing that the ancestors are trying to look after me, but I don’t need protection. I’m fine. I need to get out of here so I can try to get home, since you’re obviously not going to help me,” Mikey says. Saki’s mouth twitches briefly into an angry frown at the brisk tone but he says nothing, gazing imperiously down at him.

Mikey huffs at the attitude and goes to stand. If Saki’s not going to help him get out of this ‘In-Between’ then he’ll just have to find the exit himself. He takes a look around, still not seeing anything, then shrugs and starts walking in a random direction. Wherever he goes will be better than being stuck with Saki who refuses to give him any more useful information.

Mikey keeps walking into the void, not turning to see whatever expression is on Saki’s face as he gets further away. Nothing more comes into view as he continues moving into the blackness and he’s not sure how long he’s been walking in silence before he finally sighs and turns back around.

He startles as he sees Saki’s still form sitting in the same place, raising an unimpressed eyebrow at Mikey. He sputters, whipping his head around and trying to understand what happened. He had been walking away from Saki, how’d he get back here without passing him at least once?

“While I admire your tenacity, you need to start listening to advice other than your own. You are never going to make forward progress if you continue like you have been.” Mikey scrunches his face at the random piece of wisdom. Sighing he plops back down into the water across from Saki, pouting with his head in his hands.

No one speaks, and Mikey finds his thoughts drifting back to how he ended up here in the first place. Thinking back he can admit that maybe he should have left the unknown mushroom-sprite alone while April was freaking out, especially considering what it did to him. The visions start to creep back into his mind but he pushes them away quickly. They weren’t real and their words meant absolutely nothing. He wasn’t a coward, he was capable of protecting his brothers, and he definitely wasn’t going to end up all alone without his family. He wasn’t going to be the last brother standing, he’d make sure of it.

Mikey could use this experience as another kickstarter in getting back home. Yeah, as soon as he wakes up, he’ll go and ask Donatello how much progress he’s made and offer to help in any way he can. Now knowing his brothers were considering the fact he might be dead, Mikey needed to get home to make sure they were alright as fast as possible.

“Are you sure you can’t give me any hints on how to get home? A shortcut, maybe? I mean, you are a super powerful mystic ancestor, I’m sure you have some tips and tricks you could share,” Mikey probes with a small grin. Saki raises an unamused eyebrow at his antics.

“No, I cannot. I can only give you advice and hope that you take it. The results if you do not will be unfortunate for everyone.” Mikey pouts more at that, crossing his arms tightly across his chest. “Even if I was allowed to help you more, I would not know where to start. I cannot tell where you are, I can only feel the concern of whomever you have surrounded yourself with.”

“The others are with me right now?” Mikey asks. Saki nods, and he goes to say more but snaps his mouth shut when a glowing, pale yellow rift cracks the black void between them. All of the water around them evaporates in an instant, making Mikey whip his head around in alarm.

“It appears you are waking up,” Saki says calmly (and does he sound relieved?). He glides into a stand and Mikey quickly follows suit, squinting as more pale cracks appear in the void. “While I am disappointed you seem to have rejected all of my advice, I suppose I should have seen it coming. Stubbornness comes with the Hamato name, after all, and you are nigh impossible to stop when you’ve made up your mind.”

“That’s it? You're not going to say anything cryptic to help get me home, or give me some kind of puzzle to solve like in all those movies?” Mikey questions. Saki huffs a tiny laugh, his glowing green form flickering as the cracks grow stronger.

“I’m afraid I have helped as much as I can. Everything else that happens is your own destiny to choose.” At that Orokus Saki turns and starts to stride away, leaving Mikey floundering for a response as the previously stable ground under his feet starts to shake.

“Can you at least tell the fam that I’m safe and not actively dying? I don’t want them to worry too much, cause I’ll be home in no time. And then everything will go back to normal, y’know,” Mikey pleads with Saki’s retreating form. He pauses, the green of his body almost completely enveloped by the now blinding light. His head turns, revealing his sad eyes but contemplating expression.

“I am hoping you are able to overcome this, Michelangelo. And remember, no matter where you may be, anatawa hitori janai.” Oroku Saki grows a soft, barely visible smile on his dissipating form. “I know the people that you have surrounded yourself with have pure intentions, and out of all my descendants it should be you that knows that family is more than blood.”

“That didn’t answer any of my questions!” Mikey yells back in response but is greeted by silence as Saki gets absorbed into the glowing light. He groans in frustration at just how unhelpful and annoyingly smug Saki had been, but Mikey isn’t sure what he expected when faced with him. There hadn’t been any time to try and get to know him or bond when they freed him from the Shredder armor, but he had hoped to get a little bit more help with his situation.

Instead, he basically got ‘figure it out, you’re on your own’. Which, to be fair, was how Mikey had been operating before the chat with Saki, but he had been hoping to get more insight on what to do from the first actual family he had been in contact with since arriving in the other dimension.

Mikey closes his eyes tight as the light becomes blinding, stumbling back. He shakes his head furiously when the distorted ringing gradually becomes louder until it is almost deafening. Wincing he slams his hands onto his ears to try and block out the noise but it keeps going. Mikey stumbles back, and without warning the floor drops out from under him. For a heartstopping moment his stomach lurches to his throat as he registers that his body is falling. Then, just as fast as it had started, everything stops.

There’s no more ringing, the light disappears in a sharp flash of green, and indistinct murmurs flood over his senses. Mikey shivers, and with a jolt he realizes that he could actually feel it. His throat is as scratchy as sandpaper, his eyes feel like they’ve been dusted with shards of glass, and holy shell his arms hurt.

Maybe that dark void filled only with Oroku Saki wasn’t so bad after all.

Chapter Text

Mikey twitches, wincing as feeling leeches back into his body. The scars on his arms ache something fierce, and he knows his wrappings have to have been taken off based on how cold they feel in the air. He tries to swallow around a dry throat and almost gags at the lingering taste of bile.

The murmurs of hushed conversation around him become much sharper as one of his eyes is forced open and a bright white light is shined directly into it. Mikey whines and wrenches his head away, squeezing his eyes tight.

“Well, he doesn’t have a concussion, at least,” a voice says, quieting the others as something wet and sticky is slathered onto his arms. “It looks like the only physical injuries are from some of his scars reopening.”

Mikey hisses as whatever was put on his arms stings, and he pulls them close to his chest. A large hand lands on his head, making him flinch, before he leans into the warm palm with a huff.

“Hey, I think he’s finally waking up,” another voice announces. The warm light filtering through his eyelids gets blocked by a dark shadow. “Dude, you in there? Do you actually need CPR like I thought?”

“He’s breathing fine, dork. How do you think you’d even manage that with our shells? And while he’s on the couch?”

“You have no imagination, Raph.”

“Enough. Give him space–” Mikey is lurching upwards at that voice, eyes flying open and blinking rapidly in the direction it came from. His vision spins at the sudden change with a strong hand coming to support him by the shell when he feels himself falling back. Eyelids fluttering as he adjusts to the light, Mikey groans when his scars send staticky pain shooting through his arms.

When his vision finally smooths, he glances back to see Leonardo perched behind him on the couch, strong hand rubbing a soothing rhythm into his shell. The leader gives him a soft smile that Mikey wants to return but can’t muster up the energy, instead turning to see the others sitting closely all around him. Even Splinter is there, his shoulder bandaged and whiskers twitching from where he stands behind his kneeling sons.

“Orange?” Splinter cautiously asks and once again Mikey whips towards him with wide eyes when he hears Oroku Saki speaking from the larger mutant's mouth. “Do you need to lie down again?”

“Yeah, you look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Donatello comments as he twists the lid back onto a small tin can. He wipes his hands on a small cloth, and Mikey with a glance recognizes the sight of the slime as the same stuff that’s slathered over his arms. His very red and slightly bloody arms are still clutched to his chest.

Mikey darts his gaze back towards Splinter, his conversation with the spirit of Oroku Saki still fresh. He swallows, thinking back to that bad feeling he got whenever he was around him, all of the pieces falling into place as to why his subconscious didn’t like Splinter.

“More like I’m hearing one,” Mikey mutters, promptly starting to cough at the dryness of his throat. He flinches as a plastic water bottle is tossed into his lap by Raphael, but simply nods his thanks and guzzles down half of it before Leonardo stops him with a comment about not getting sick.

“What’s that mean? Oh, did you hear some super scary ghosts after you got sprayed by the mushrooms? That’d be so creepy,” Michelangelo says near his feet, giving an exaggerated shiver. Raphael slaps him across the head with a scowl. “What?! I saw those squirrel mutants, and that was the worst time ever, but ghosts are even scarier!”

“It’s…” Mikey interrupts before the others can get into an argument, and then finds himself clamming up when the attention is brought back to him. “I mean, it is kinda a ghost, but…” he huffs, not knowing how to put this gently. He doesn’t know how Splinter or the others will react to the new knowledge he had figured out. Maybe it’s best if he gets it out as fast as possible?

“If you are not comfortable telling us, then we will understand and not push–”

“You sound like Shredder!” Mikey blurts, cutting off Splinter's kind words because now that he knows, hearing his ancestors' voice coming from him is slightly unnerving. He bites his lip as he anticipates the blow up from that piece of information, yet they simply stare at him with wide eyes, the only other reaction being the slight drooping of Splinters ears. “Like, my Shredder, from my dimension. I don’t actually think you’re him–I mean, I literally just had a conversation with my Oroku Saki–but you two…basically have the same voice,” he finishes weakly.

“Ah, I suppose that is why your mind saw me as…the Shredder of your world, when you were under the influence of the spores,” Splinter says just as softly. Mikey pales at the words since that means that everything he said during those hallucinations was actually spoken aloud. He had a small bit of hope that all of the voices, including everything he said, were simply a part of the illusion, but evidently not.

“Sorry,” Mikey apologizes, shrinking away from Splinter's saddened gaze. “It probably doesn’t feel too good knowing you sound like your worst enemy in my dimension.”

“It is not your fault. Let us simply call it an unfortunate cast of fate,” Splinter placates, turning around with a sigh. “That being said, I shall retreat to the dojo. I do not wish to cause you undue distress while everything is still fresh in your memory.”

“No, wait, you don’t have to! I’ll get used to it eventually–”

“It is no issue, Orange. Please, rest and do what you need to do.” With that Splinter is entering the dojo and closing the door behind him with a soft thud. Mikey stares after him in guilt, looking at the others only to see them staring right back at him in concern.

“It’s…an interesting coincidence, that’s for sure,” Donatello says in the silence, fiddling with his hands and averting his gaze. “But with the reveal of that little tidbit, I think we all want to know what you were seeing after that mushroom got to you. I heard the beginning of it before it got me, too, and what I heard wasn’t exactly comforting.”

Mikey stiffens as Leonardo steadily grabs his shoulder from behind. “I’m assuming that whatever you saw had to do with the Invasion you stopped in your world?”

He shies away from Leonardo’s words, giving a nervous giggle. Mikey’s mouth goes dry and he avoids everyone's prying eyes as he tries to think of a way out of this. He can understand why they want to know, because if he’s remembering things right then what he said before he ran further into the sewers would be concerning to an outside perspective.

But he doesn’t want to talk about it, especially to these guys who, based on what Michelangelo said he saw while out of his mind, had much less intense hallucinations. No doubt still harrowing to each of them, but he doesn’t want to add to the distress and mental exhaustion they must all be feeling by dumping everything onto them.

They don’t even know the barest details on what happened during the Invasion. Even if he did want to explain what he saw, it would mean going into the specifics of what happened that day. When his arms start to tingle with more stinging pain and he finds his vision going fuzzy in his efforts to block out the hallucinations, Mikey knows that the decision to stay quiet about everything has already been made.

It’s easier to just keep ignoring it, anyway. If he’s gone this long, then it’s better to continue his silence on the matter.

“Uh, yeah. It was about the Invasion,” Mikey states shortly. He holds his breath as the others continue to stare, Raphael even rolling his hand in a ‘go on’ motion. “I think that covers most of what I saw. Other than when I got back to the lair, and I was confronted with Shredder.” Mikey sucks in a quick breath as he remembers that encounter and turns to face Leonardo. “If I attacked Shredder, does that mean I actually attacked Splinter? That’s why he was bandaged, wasn’t it? Is he okay–”

“Master Splinter is fine, his shoulder is just a little bruised,” Raphael interrupts, waving a dismissive hand. “Now how about you tell us the details of your hallucination road trip? ‘Cause it sure looks like you had the worst time out of all of us.”

“It’s not important what I saw, okay!?” Mikey snaps. The others lean back with wide eyes, and when Leonardo attempts to start rubbing his shell again he jerks away from his hand.

“It seems pretty damn important from where I’m standing. I got sprayed at the same time as you, but I still remember what you said in the beginning. It seemed to have to do with me–well, your version of me. Don’t I deserve to know why you’re always so jumpy about trying to protect me?” Raphael snaps right back. “Something obviously happened to me during your Invasion, so just spit it out–”

“And you don’t need to know about it, so back off,” Mikey growls, glaring at Raphael as his heart starts to pound. Is he really going to make him explain? No, he wouldn’t push that hard, the others would stop him before that would happen and Mikey can continue studiously ignoring everything like always.

“I think I should get an explanation actually–”

“Raph, cool it, dude. We’re all stressed right now, you don’t have to take it out on Orange,” Michelangelo reasons. He attempts to punch his brother's bicep but Raphael catches his hand and bends one of his fingers back at a very awkward angle. Mikey winces as Michelangelo whines before Raphael lets go of his finger with a huff.

“Fine. If all of you want to keep playing this little game of ‘keep away’ go for it, I’m sick of it. Come and get me when you all let Orange decide when he wants to talk. Newsflash, it’s never gonna happen,” Raphael spits before stomping off to his room.

Mikey incrementally relaxes at his departure. Raphael is really the only one he has to worry about pushing for concrete answers, after all. The rest seem to take his vague and half-answers for what they are, and as he looks at the slightly concerned and tense gazes left around him, he knows he’s in the clear.

None of the others will make him explain anything. They’ll respect the clear boundary Mikey’s put up about the Invasion, even if they are jumping at the bit to know the whole story, too.

There’s a beat of silence as they all continue to give him wary glances, and it’s with wide eyes that he realizes he broke one of his rules. All of this commotion has made him display his negative emotions, and that’s a big ‘no no’ in the book of Dr. Positive. He doesn’t want the others to get too uncomfortable around him, especially after he attacked Splinter, no matter if it was on purpose or not.

“So, uh, you’re okay then? Mentally, at least?” Donatello cautiously asks. Mikey snorts at the tone and gives a nod with a small, plastered smile.

“As much as I can be right now. I think I just need some time alone, and then I’ll be as good as new!” he exclaims, jumping to his feet and striding towards his own room.

“Okay, glad you’re feeling better?” Leonardo drawls in confusion. Mikey peers over his shoulder to see Donatello is also reeling from the drastic personality change, but Michelangelo is looking on with a concerned and curious furrow to his brow.

“Yep! I’ll just sleep it off, no worries!” Mikey chirps in parting as he promptly opens and closes his door before anyone else can say anything. As soon as the door closes he drops his smile with a sigh, dragging himself over to his bed roll and plopping down with a huff.

Slowly Mikey stretches out his hands with a wince, the gel of whatever Donatello had put of them cracking where it had dried. The gel created a small cooling sensation when it was still wet, but now that it was dry it was merely uncomfortable as it started to flake. Mikey starts to pick it off of his hands and arms to keep his mind away from the events of the past day.

He almost has his left arm completely gel free when a small knock sounds from the door. Mikey startles, biting his lip as he stares and hopes whoever is there will go away if he pretends he’s asleep. He’s not sure if he can keep up Dr. Positive right now, and he doesn’t want to say anything that he might regret.

When there’s no other knocking after a full minute of waiting he starts to relax again, only to startle once more when another knock sounds, much louder this time.

“Hey, Orange! Are you really asleep, or are ya just faking? ‘Cause I fake sleep all the time to get out of stuff, so I’m a master of that tactic!” Michelangelo’s chipper voice says with another light knock. “Hello? I got some paint for you if that’ll cheer you up! We can chill for a little while, if you think you can handle it.”

Mikey hesitates for a moment, a large part of him wanting to ignore him and go back to his silence. But as he glances around the blank concrete walls and back to the door, he finds the invitation more tempting than he expects. He shakes his head of the thought, resolving himself to stay silent and wait for his alternate to go away when Michelangelo speaks again.

“I also have snacks~” he sing-songs through the door. Mikey’s stomach rumbles on que, and with a small groan he finally relents. Standing up he trudges to the door, piecing together a slighter more positive attitude, and opens it to Michelangelo’s bright grin and arms full of bottles of paint, brushes, and a multitude of chips and candy.

Mikey’s eyes widened in surprise at seeing all the junk food. “Where’d all of that come from?”

“Shh!” Michelangelo exclaims, pushing into the room and closing the door behind him with a well placed kick. “I have a secret stash in my room for all of the stuff April brings me. Leo would be ticked if he found out about it. And then Raph would make me share it with him because he’s lame.”

Mikey huffs a laugh as Michelangelo drops his bounty onto the floor, bottles of paint and brushes scattering into the corners. He finds his mood naturally lifting in the face of Michelangelo’s bright enthusiasm. His alternate drops onto the floor and pats the space beside him, wiggling his brows at Mikey.

Mikey relents and sits across from him, about to grab a paint brush to fiddle with when his hand spasms and he immediately drops it with a hiss. Michelangelo hums in concern and looks at the other brushes with a frown.

“Huh, guess the brushes won’t work,” Michelangelo quickly rushes to continue when an unconscious frown comes to Mikey’s face. “But that’s totally okay! We can just finger paint!”

Mikey watches with a giggle as Michelangelo grabs a bottle of orange paint and proceeds to pour it over his fingers. He reaches over to the wall to make a couple of streaks, slowly forming a primitive turtle smiling out at them. With a grin Michelangelo turns to pour more paint onto his fingers and continues to make orange streaks along the wall.

He finds himself unconsciously becoming more relaxed and loose watching Michelangelo paint on the walls. His technique could use some work, but his pictures add a certain levity to the room that had been dearly missing before. Carefully Mikey picks up a bottle of red paint, turning it over in his hands thoughtfully.

“Where’d you get paint? I thought Raphael was the one who had all this stuff,” Mikey asks into the silence. Michelangelo looks back to him with wide eyes, tongue still stuck out in concentration.

“Well…I might have ‘borrowed’ some from Raph’s room a little while ago. He hasn’t noticed yet, so we’re totally fine. Hopefully,” his alternate breezily replies, easily going back to his painting of what looks to be a large pizza with tiny little cats on it.

Mikey rolls his eyes with a smile at the answer. He hopes Michelangelo is prepared for the fallout of that move, especially since Raphael’s in a worse mood, now.

Popping open the cap of the paint, he lobs a small amount onto his fingers, rubbing the cold between his fingers. Mikey moves over to the wall next to Michelangelo and raises his hand, but stops just an inch away. He hovers over the concrete, brows creased as for the first time in a long time, he can’t think of anything he wants to draw. Frowning he lowers his hand, staring at the blank wall in distress.

“You hungry little dude? I’m starving!” Michelangelo quickly exclaims, ripping open a bag of chips with wet fingers. He goes to pick up a chip, pauses at seeing the paint on his hands, then shrugs and dumps the bag over his face with his mouth wide open.

Mikey erupts in uncontrollable giggles as his alternate looks to him, grin wide and mouth full of chips. He brushes away the ones he missed into a corner and throws the now empty bag there, too.

“They’re pwetty goof, you should twy some,” Michelangelo says through the mouthful of chips, struggling to swallow. Mikey snorts and opens a bag himself, using his one free hand to shove a few into his mouth. He hums in surprise when they do taste good, and snacks on a few more before turning back to Michelangelo’s bright smile.

“Got anything you want to paint? My stuff’s looking a little lonely,” his alternate asks. Mikey’s matching grin sours a bit and he looks back to the wall in contemplation.

“I’m not sure, actually. I’ve…never been at a loss for what to draw before,” he mumbles, going back to rubbing the red paint gently in his hand. Michelangelo hums as he moves over to sit next to him, also staring up at the wall with a tilted head.

“Sometimes it’s good to draw some things you already know. Drawing and painting can be pretty therapeutic. That’s what I’ve heard, at least,” Michelangelo says, gesturing grandly to the blank canvas in front of them.

Mikey narrows his eyes at the still grinning Michelangelo. It seems like his alternate has another reason for wanting to hang out, and Dr. Feelings can see the attempt from a mile away.

“I’m not drawing anything from the Invasion, or from my hallucinations,” Mikey replies blandly, giving his alternate his most unamused stare. Michelangelo rubs his neck with a nervous laugh, glancing away from him.

“Yeah, I figured. Worth a shot, though, right?”

“Sure,” Mikey says with a snort. He glances at the paint in his hands that’s slowly drying, back at the wall, and then to Michelangelo, who is wearing a much more somber expression. Mikey tilts his head in curiosity, gaining his alternates attention.

“You’re really cool, you know that?” Michelangelo begins softly. “You’re strong, you can handle yourself, you make great art, the things you cook are to die for, and you even help your brothers when their emotions get too big for their brains. Being a therapist for them is so amazing and I’m sure they’re missing that kind of support.”

The gears in Mikey’s mind start turning as Michelangelo looks at his orange paintings with a sigh, frowning down at his paint covered hands. Dr. Feelings is worming his way to the forefront of his mind as he continues.

“Even though you’re hurting you still always try to think about how we feel and what we can handle. I wish I was as cool as you are, my brothers have probably been thinking about how much better it would be if I was more like you. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if they want to send me to an alternate dimension and keep you here.”

“Hold on a sec,” Mikey says, Dr. Feelings now completely taking over the conversation. “Why do you think your brothers want you to be like me?”

“They always think I don’t know what I’m talking about, that I can’t take care of myself, or that my ideas are stupid. They only started liking my cooking when you came around, and they never ignore what you say. The only reason Leo won’t let you out of the lair is because Shredder’s after you. If the Foot gave it a rest he would let you do whatever you wanted!”

Mikey takes in his alternates rant with a single nod, placing his hand not covered in paint on Michelangelo’s ankle. “Have you talked with them about how they’ve made you feel with their actions? They most likely don’t know that you’re feeling this way.”

“They wouldn’t listen even if I did. I know they care about me but sometimes I feel like I’m just…the funny one. Or the mascot. Like, Leo’s obviously the leader, Donnie’s the tech guy, Raph’s the big fighter, and then I’m just—there to lighten the mood, I guess? I don’t know what my ‘thing’ is other than that.”

Michelangelo is slowly picking at the drying orange paint on his hands, avoiding Mikey’s gaze as he deciphers the rant. Like a lightbulb going off, Mikey gives his alternate a little tap on the ankle to bring his attention back to him, then shoots off a soothing smile. He knows exactly what’s going on, because it’s very similar to a conversation he’s had with his Leo about a year ago while everyone was still trying very hard to get used to Leo being the new leader..

“None of you have to have a specific ‘thing’ to belong in a group. Sure, everyone has their own special talents that they put to use in the team, but everyone is stronger when all of those skills are put together. And, even if you think you are just the ‘funny one’ or the ‘mascot’, those guys could definitely use it. Seriously, they’re so broody all the time.”

“I know, right!? Sometimes they need to learn to take things less seriously, it’s so dumb when they get like that,” Michelangelo responds. Mikey nods in agreement before he continues.

“And as much as I relate not being taken seriously or them being protective, it all comes from a place of care. Trust me, when my brothers get like that it’s really annoying and sometimes I do snap at them for it, but I know it’s because they love me and want to make sure I’m safe. It’s unnecessary, but at least they’re trying, right?”

Michelangelo sighs in defeat, giving him a knowing smile. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Wish they would see that I’m not just some dumb kid, though.”

“Same, bro. Same,” Mikey mumbles under his breath. The ensuing silence is nice, where Mikey was worried it might get awkward. There’s a growing warmth in his chest as they sit together, simply basking in each other's company. Michelangelo quickly breaks the reverie by grabbing more paint and slathering it onto his hands, turning away so his shell is facing him.

“If no one has to have a ‘thing’, then why are you so convinced you’re only the therapist of your family?” Michelangelo asks while he is turned to the wall, making more marks on the wall. Mikey pauses putting more red paint over where the rest had dried, looking at his alternates shell in slight shock from the question before shaking it off.

“Because no one else pushes them to let out their feelings, so that’s my job. Things would completely fall apart if the others weren’t forced to talk about their problems,” he answers simply. Mikey pours a little bit of dark green onto his hand to cover the red and looks to the wall in front of him, still coming up with a blank on what to put.

“So who does that for you?”

“Hm?” Mikey hums, turning to look at Michelangelo from where he’s turned to face him with a questioning gaze.

“Who do you have to talk out your problems with if that's what you do for everyone else? Do they return the favor or is there some other kind of thing that you do?” Mikey blinks dumbly at that, thinking it sounds much too close to what Oroku Saki had been trying to tell him. He quickly shakes it off and turns away from Michelangelo’s curious stare and back to the blank wall.

“I’m fine, I don’t need to talk about my feelings, that’s not something I do. They’re not as important as my brother's stuff, anyway, I’ve got myself handled,” he quickly responds, ignoring the stab of ice that overtakes the warmth that was budding in his chest by blurting the first thing that comes to mind when Michelangelo opens his mouth to speak again. “Can I paint your shell?”

Whatever Michelangelo was about to say quickly disappears under a blinding smile and sparkling eyes. “You want to paint my shell? That sounds awesome! Go all in, man, I’ll try to stay as still as possible for you.”

Michelangelo sits cross legged in front of a blank space of wall with two bottles of paint at the ready to keep his hands busy. Mikey eagerly saddles up behind him and pours more dark green paint onto his finger, mind finally made up on what he wants to paint on the back of his alternate’s shell.

Slowly, he draws his hands in a circle around the middle of his shell, whispering in apology when Michelangelo shivers at the cold paint. He does two more glides until there’s a thick green circle of paint, then makes five rounded triangular slices in the middle of the circle with black paint. While waiting for that to dry Mikey picks up a light green and yellow, proceeding to draw tiny lightning strikes starting from the edges of his shell and ending towards the large circle in the center.

When the five triangular slices are dry enough, he grabs an orange, blue, red, purple, and bright yellow bottle of paint to color in each slice in their respective colors. Mikey looks on with a small, somber smile as he dabs a small circle of black into each colored slice.

“You okay back there?” Michelangelo asks as he takes a break from painting quite a few stick figures with shells facing off against a big, pink and gray monster with red eyes and sharp teeth.

Mikey nods and goes back to add the last little details to the Hamato Clan symbol now sitting proudly on Michelangelo’s shell. “Yeah, I just miss doing this to Leo’s shell, that’s all. It’s been a while since he’s let me do it, and Raph’s shell is too spiky while Donnie doesn’t like anything sticky near his real shell. He lets me put stickers on his battle shells sometimes, though.”

“That’s so sick! I should get my brothers to do this together sometime,” Michelangelo replies, trying to turn his head enough to see the finished product of his shell and failing miserably. Mikey nods his agreement, but before he can say another word a glob of paint is being thrown into his face.

He blinks in shock for a few moments before turning on a hysterically laughing Michelangelo with a creeping smile. His alternate’s giggles petered out as Mikey arms himself with several bottles of paint and pours them into his hands.

“Uh oh.”

Mikey proceeds to attack Michelangelo with globs of paint, his alternate giving just as much of a fight back. He giggles and stumbles out of the door right on the heels of Michelangelo where he is trying to escape, taking great care to avoid the Hamato Clan symbol on his shell while he launches even more paint at him.

Both of them are covered head to toe in color as they run out into the middle of the lair to the shocked expressions of Leonardo and Donatello on the couch, looking on with growing amusement as they continue their battle all across the lair. Mikey is just about to rub a hand covered in orange paint into Michelangelo’s face when Raphael storms out of his room with a scowl on his face.

“Mikey! If you’ve been digging through my room again I swear–” he starts to growl before catching sight of Mikey and Michelangelo still battling it out, briefly looking back at him with wide eyes. Raphael’s expression turns murderous as he sees the amount of paint covering both themselves and the trail they’ve left throughout the lair.

Donatello clears his throat with a knowing look. “I’d suggest the two of you start running now.”

“Both of you are dead meat.”

Mikey trips up Michelangelo when Raphael pounces, his alternate shrieking in betrayal as he makes a beeline away from the crime scene to the angry ranting of Raphael and Leonardo and Donatello's uproar of laughter.

Chapter Text

Mikey sighs as he mindlessly scrolls through his phone, trying to learn a little more about the world outside of the lair. The TV drones on in front of where he spins in Donatello's chair he stole from the lab, playing a rerun of some kind of soap drama that he couldn’t care less about.

Everything on this internet is severely outdated. Websites have terrible design, garish colors, and very limited interactivity. There’s barely any kind of social media, either, leaving Mikey to scroll through different news articles and his old videos from home to try and alleviate his crippling boredom.

Raphael had finally seemed to forgive (or at least not be actively mad about) Michelangelo and Mikey ruining his paint after the incident a week ago, and Mikey had spent the time hiding from him sequestered in Donatello’s lab. He badgered the tech genius relentlessly about what he had figured out on how to get him home. At first Donatello was genuinely excited to talk through all his theories on creating a new dimensional portal, but after three days of Mikey going to the lab Donatello’s nerves were shot.

It was on the fifth day of asking that Donatello finally snapped at him to get out of his lab and leave him to work. Mikey smirked at him and collapsed to the floor when he did, and Donatello had to drag him out by his feet. The slamming of the door was harsh enough to push his head forcefully into his shell, but Mikey still felt accomplished knowing Donatello was trying his best to figure out a way to send him home.

A soft smile grew on Mikey’s face as he tabbed out of a news article about the sightings of a New York ‘half-man half-bat’ cryptid and went back to looking at his photo album. He left off on a year-old selfie of his own smug face with Leo being lectured by Dad and Raph in the background. Leo had broken Mikey’s skateboard and, truthfully, he could have easily gotten another one. But Leo had chipped one of his favorite kitchen knives, so Mikey let the crocodile tears run wild when the skateboard incident occurred just days later.

Getting that selfie of Leo trying (and failing) to convince Dad and Raph that Mikey was manipulating them with his ‘cutesie, youngest sibling powers’ was worth it. Even after his brother retaliated by teleporting Mikey onto the top of the Statue of Liberty.

Swiping through more photos makes his smile grow wider, but his heart starts to ache. He misses the antics of his brothers. The turtles here had their own spats, sure, but there was a certain amusement that Mikey got from tormenting and teaming up with his own brothers that was missing here.

Just as Mikey is swiping back to the many news articles tabs, a rumbling starts within the lair. He stops spinning in alarm as the shakes get more intense. Whatever is balancing on shelves starts to fall, and the crash of glass shattering sounds throughout the lair. Mikey dizzily takes in the scene as the concrete above starts dusting the ground below. He goes to stand and find cover somewhere when the rumbling peters out, leaving him squinting around the lair in confusion.

“Um, that was definitely not normal,” he announces to himself as he makes a lap around the living area to make sure nothing important was damaged. While he may not be too scientifically minded, he knows earthquakes aren’t a regular part of New York life back home.

Well, maybe it is for Not New York. Splinter hasn’t made a single noise, and isn’t coming out from the dojo as Mikey cautiously sits back down on the chair. Either way, he should probably call the others to make sure nothing world ending is going on.

He may have been benched from patrols by Leonardo, but a possible apocalypse situation would be a good excuse to disregard that order. Mikey’s not going to sit by and let something like that happen in this dimension when he can help.

After peering at his contact list he clicks on Michelangelo’s icon and presses the call button. He knows with certainty that his alternate is always checking his notifications, and if anyone would take a phone call during patrol it would be Michelangelo. It’s the same thing he would do, after all.

And, like he thought, Michelangelo picks up on the third ring. “Shello~”

“There’s not an apocalypse going on right now, right?” Mikey asks, glancing up at the TV to see the soap drama being interrupted by breaking news talking about the freak earthquake.

“Not that I know of, but let me ask the others,” there’s the sound of muffled talking followed by a thump and a whine from Michelangelo, “Nah, no apocalypse happening.”

“Earthquakes are normal in this New York, then? ‘Cause that’s another thing that would be insanely weird about this dimension.”

“Oh, you felt that, too? Don’t worry, that’s not normal for us either. But there’s not any kind of screaming about the end of the world, so it must not have done apocalypse-level damage.”

“What on earth are you two talking about?” comes Raphael’s muffled voice through the speaker. There’s a sound of wind and shuffling as Michelangelo presumably ducks away from his brother's reaching hand.

“We’ll be back to the lair soon, and then I can tell you all about how we just kicked Foot Clan butt! Karai seemed real bummed not to see you, by the way. She got all jittery about it, tried ordering us to tell her where you were, y’know, typical bad guy things,” Michelangelo says breezily.

Mikey frowns at that as the news anchor keeps droning on about the earthquake. It still hurts to know Karai is fighting on the wrong side, but he has hope it won’t be a permanent decision. She has to have some good in her, and he’s the master of drawing out the good in people no matter how far down it’s buried.

Of course, some people are simply monsters, cut and dry, and he’s had to learn that the hard way. But Mikey doesn’t think Karai is like that. Maybe Shredder, but since he has yet to actually meet this version of Oroku Saki he’s reserving that judgment for later.

“Oh! Leo also kinda got crushed by a chimney, but don’t worry, he’s all good! See ya in a bit!” Michelangelo cheerily says before hanging up. Mikey looks down at his phone in slight alarm, then immediately shrugs it off. If Michelangelo isn’t too worried, then he shouldn’t think too hard about it.

He scrolls through more breaking news articles about the earthquake as he waits for the others to return, bouncing his leg to try and get rid of the building anxious energy inside him. Several smaller, less noticeable quakes punctuate his time waiting, and each one makes the nervous feeling in his gut grow. The amount of times he flips between the news and his photo album is too many to count by the time the other turtles come strolling in.

Mikey is immediately bounding up to them with eager eyes, pursing his lips when he sees the bruises forming on Leonardo’s legs. “Wanna let me know what those freak quakes are about?”

“Follow me and we’ll try to figure it out,” Donatello says as he strides into the lab with Michelangelo, Raphael, and Mikey right on his heels. Leonardo says something about going to talk with Master Splinter when he breaks off from them and strides into the dojo. Mikey eyes him before entering the lab, concluding for himself that Leonardo really is okay when there’s no sign of any kind of limp.

Donatello sits down in front of his laptop and wastes no time before he’s typing in some kind of code and bringing up a blueprint of the city. Michelangelo and Raphael hover over each of his shoulders while Mikey decides to perch on the back of the chair, resting his arms on top of Donatello’s head. The genius shoots him a small glare from below. Mikey raises his eyebrow and sticks out his tongue with a smirk, and with an annoyed roll of his eyes Donatello leaves him to focus back on his screen.

“I’ve been having one of my programs graph the earthquake epicenters,” Donatello begins as multiple red dots appear on the screen. “And according to this they’re not happening in a random pattern.”

“Is that a good thing or bad?” Mikey asks, tilting his head around as another small shake rumbles through the lab.

“Very bad, Orange. There’s some weird energy readings near the epicenters. I think it’s some kind of tech causing the quakes,” Donatello answers grimly as he continues to type at the screen, trying to localize the data even further.

“I don’t like the sound of that. You thinking what I’m thinking?” Raphael says, turning to look towards Mikey and Michelangelo. He furrows his brows when neither Mikey or his alternate answer, staring at him with blank gazes. “C’mon, guys. Who do we know who uses this kind of tech on such a large scale?”

“...Baxter Stockman?” Michelangelo hesitantly says.

Raphael groans in defeat, looking to Mikey hopefully but he just shakes his head. How’s he supposed to know how all the villains in this world work?

“It’s the Kraa–K-words, you two,” Donatello states, stumbling over his words. Mikey stiffens slightly but wills himself to relax. It’s just a word, he needs to stop being afraid of something so dumb. He takes a steadying breath and glances over to see Raphael staring straight at him with a hard expression which he returns just as stonily.

“If they’re doing something like this, they must be getting ready for something big,” Michelangelo says, getting a far off look as he imagines some kind of deadly scenario.

Mikey swallows and looks back down at the screen to the red dots that are now popping up more frequently. His beak purses as he studies the screen, already trying to prepare himself for what must be brewing underground. If this really is this world’s K-words getting ready for their own invasion, then Mikey is going to be there to help, and that means making sure he doesn’t lose control again.

Although, if it really was the start of an invasion, then Mikey doesn’t think the others would be as opposed to letting him air out his anger.

“Hey, everyone needs to gather in the dojo,” Leonardo says from the doorway. Mikey shakes his head to try and get rid of the feeling of dread and glances towards the leader's assured expression. “Master Splinter has something he needs to tell all of us.”

Donatello looks as if he wants to protest, but pushes out of the chair with a drawn out sigh. The movement dislodges Mikey from the back and he has to quickly right himself with a little squawk when his feet touch the ground. Raphael is already moving past him, snorting at the fumble, but Mikey lunges and launches himself over Raphael, using his shoulders as springboard with a taunting smirk plastered on his face.

Raphael growls and chases him all the way to the dojo, where Mikey dodges his swipe one last time and plops to the ground in front of Splinter, expression innocent. The other rolls his eyes with a small smack to the back of Mikey’s head and kneels down next to him, giving him a suspicious glance when Mikey keeps his care-free smile in place.

The rest soon follow in and make a line in front of Splinter who, Mikey notes with a small frown, almost seems to be fidgeting with his hands behind his back. His whiskers twitch once, twice, before he turns to them all with stiff posture.

“This may be difficult news for you all to hear, but Leonardo has convinced me that it would be wise to share this with everyone before things spiral even more out of control.” He stops, taking a breath. “The child that I had lost in the fire, Miwa, is Karai. She is my daughter, raised in darkness by the Shredder to be a deadly Foot assassin.”

Michelangelo, Donatello, and Raphael are reeling from the bomb that Splinter had dropped, but Mikey can’t help but light up with excitement at the news.

“That’s amazing!” he exclaims, turning to all of the others gobsmacked faces with an eager smile. “We’re all related to a Karai! That’s crazy! And–” Mikey quickly continues when Leonardo opens his mouth to interrupt, “It’ll help a ton when trying to get her to leave the Foot!”

“She’s still our enemy, Orange, sister or not,” Raphael gruffly replies, turning back to Splinter with narrowed eyes. “She was raised by Shredder.”

“Yeah, how could we even begin to trust her?” Donatello adds.

“I know there is still light inside of her. The truth must be told and I fear it, too, will be an earthquake,” Splinter finishes solemnly. Mikey nods his head vigorously in response.

“We’ll get her to see that Shredder is the evil one in no time! If I can convince a hairy old goat-man to renounce his ways, then Karai is going to be a piece of cake,” he says with a flourish, practically vibrating. Mikey’s mind buzzes with all the possibilities and ways he can try to sway Karai over to their side.

He can help rebuild another family! And they won’t fail to protect her this time, he swears.

“I like the enthusiasm, Orange, but it’s going to take time,” Leonardo placates as he gestures for them all to exit the dojo to leave Splinter to his meditation. Mikey falls into step beside the leader with happy wiggles that have Leonardo’s lips twitching into a smile. “We won’t give up on her. She’s family, and we’ll rescue her no matter what.”

“It’s so cool that we have another another sibling!” Michelangelo announces, hopping back towards the lab on Donatello’s heels. “It’s like they’re falling from the sky! First Orange, then Karai, I wonder who’s going to be next!?” Michelangelo gasps. “Do you think maybe it’s Fish Face!?”

“I think I’m all good with random siblings popping out of nowhere, thanks.” Mikey rolls his eyes at Raphael’s grouchy tone. He really needs to learn how to lighten up and give some things hope.

“Hey guys! You’ve gotta see this thing we found on patrol,” April’s voice announces from one of the tunnels. She has an excited grin on her face that matches the one Casey wears next to her.

Mikey darts towards them with a mischievous grin, leaping into Casey for a surprise hug attack. Casey nearly buckles under his weight but holds him up after a bit of adjusting. Arms wrapped around his shell Casey starts to spin, Mikey letting out a little squeal as they keep going and going until, finally, the other lets go of his shell and sends him flying across the room with a cackle.

Mikey lands and rolls to his feet with a bright smile, about to launch another attack, when April stands in front of Casey with a stern frown. “Sorry, but I think we should leave wrestling for later. Donnie really needs to take a look at what we’ve got.” She holds up a small metal box, giving it a little shake before darting towards Donnie’s lab.

Leonardo and Raphael quickly follow April, leaving Mikey and Casey to shove at each other to see who can get into the door first. Mikey claims his victory when he trips Casey and he lands hard on his chest, perching on the teens back so he can’t get back up.

Raphael huffs a laugh when Mikey looks at him with a victorious smirk, hopping off of Casey and helping the grumbling teen up. He immediately punches Mikey’s bicep with a playful glare to which he responds with a blown raspberry.

“–and then you press that button, and ‘whoosh’, portable portal,” April says as Mikey tunes back into the conversation at the table Donatello is hunched over. The world ‘portal’ immediately sticks to his mind as he wanders closer, eyeing the piece of silvery metal with curious interest.

Donatello hums as he flips it in his hands. “Wow, they’re always one step ahead. I wonder if this is what’s behind the earthquakes? Maybe we should test it out.”

Mikey is instantly nodding to that suggestion, having never taken his eyes off of the device. The little bundle of hope in his chest grows at the possibility of that device creating a portal. He’s not sure where it would lead, exactly, but he’s already jumped through one portal, so what’s one more to add to the list? And if it gives him even the slightest advantage in getting back home, he’s willing to take it. Especially, he thinks as he absentmindedly flexes his hands, if it meant he wouldn’t have to try and use his mystic powers again.

Yeah, Mikey’s getting that portal activated.

Slowly he stalks over to where the others are arguing on whether to use the device, keeping a keen eye on where it’s held loosely in Donatello’s hand. Mikey glances around to make sure they haven’t caught on to what he’s planning, and when he’s finally close enough he pushes into the bundle they’ve created and snatches the device from Donatello.

With exclaims of surprise following him Mikey darts a few feet away and slams a finger onto the button April had pointed out. It hums to life with a small whir, jumping out of his hand and breaking apart to create a triangular, staticy-pink screen floating off the floor. Mikey turns to glance at the others’ wide eyed expressions behind him before giving a cocky, two-finger salute.

“See ya on the other side!” Mikey taunts as he leaps into the portal. He’s immediately hit with a wave of fuzz, pressure pressing down on his entire being before he’s spit out on the other side. Shivering at the little bits of static still jumping over his scales, Mikey recoils at the cold traveling through his limbs. .

His portals were hot and fiery, as if they were alive. Not that he had too much experience with his own portals, but even Leo’s were completely different. Leo’s feel like energy, or a current of water rushing past. That portal felt as though it had invaded his privacy.

Shrugging off the feeling as much as possible, Mikey finally takes a look at where he’s ended up, eyes widening. There’s nothing but invisible space around him and even under him, the only things populating this world being more portals. He blinks and cautiously takes a step, jumping once just to be sure the empty space beneath him is solid.

This place is freaky, whatever it is.

Before he can venture to one of the other portals, Raphael stumbles out of the original, closely followed by Casey and then the others. All of them glance around the space with tense stances, fingering their weapons and looking at Mikey with exasperation.

“What? It’s a portal, and a portal could mean home,” Mikey bluntly states, wandering over to one of the other portals and peering inside. His eyes sparkle when he’s met with the view of planets and galaxies slowly spinning in their orbits, stars glittering and swathes of color painting every inch of the scene.

“Whoa…” Raphael whispers from over his shoulder, just as entranced by the worlds inside. The rest slowly gather around and breath out their own exclamations at the enchanting sight.

They are broken out of their spell, however, when the portal they had come from makes a small beep and slowly fizzles out of existence. Mikey’s heart drops a little at the panicked cry that they all make.

“The door’s gone! We’re trapped! How the heck are we supposed to get back home now!?” Michelangelo exclaims as he clings to Leonardo’s arm.

“Let’s all just take a breath. This place looks like the Grand Central Station of dimensional travel, there has to be a way back to our world somewhere,” Dontello says. Mikey nods along. While they’re all trying to find a way back to their dimension, he can start looking for a doorway to his own, too. If this really is a train station for dimensional portals, then his home has to have a connection to it, right?

“There’s thousands of doors here. Everyone, start searching but don’t wander too far,” Leonardo orders. They all split off into little groups to check out different portals. Mikey’s eyes widen even more at each new world uncovered and their wild differences. Some of them look like a dry, scorching desert, while the next one could be nothing but an endless ocean.

But, the more portals they look into and the more worlds they see that don’t look anything like Earth, Mikey’s enthusiasm starts to flag. Maybe this place was only for the dimensions that had very little to no life on them? He doesn’t think that would be the case, but the longer they’re wandering with only alien environments to greet them, he’s starting to believe that maybe he had really messed up by jumping through that other portal.

“Whoa, check this out!” Casey suddenly exclaims, leaning towards the portal in front of him with a wide grin. Mikey bounces over, hope lifting as finally, finally, they found a dimension that looks like Earth. It looks a lot less detailed and flat then what he’s seen before, but it’s undeniably a city.

Then, more mutant turtles walk into frame, followed by a tall woman in a yellow jumpsuit.

“Yo, it’s us! We look like total weirdo’s here,” Michelangelo says, nudging Mikey with his elbow. “Glad you got stuck with us instead of these losers.”

Mikey snickers but blocks out the rest of their conversation as his mind latches onto the sight of more alternates of his family inside the portal. It confirms that while they might be few and far between, there are worlds like the ones they come from.

With that now certain, Mikey takes off with renewed vigor.

The others yell something behind him but he ignores it, darting past multitudes of doors and peeking inside before quickly moving on when he doesn’t see anything familiar. The voices of the others behind him slowly disperse until he can only hear the distant shouts of Donatello, April, and Casey still chasing him.

They yell at him to stop and slow down, but Mikey heeds them no mind. If there really are as many doors as he’s expecting in this place then he needs to travel as much ground as he can to find his the fastest.

His mind is on a constant loop of find home, find it, it has to be here somewhere when his ninpō abruptly flares in his chest. Mikey screeches to a stop, the warmth bigger and brighter than it has been his entire time being stuck in a different dimension. Desperately he latches onto it, feeling the energy pushing him forward. Slower now he continues, following his ninpō as it grows with each step taken until finally he stops at the door it desperately lashes towards.

Mikey peers into the portal, heart beating louder as he registers the deep craters, faint green glow, and jagged spires of the most sacred place in the Hidden City, completely abandoned after the final fight with Shredder. The Crying Titan, the largest source of Empyrean known in his dimension.

Tears of happiness sprout in Mikey’s eyes as he takes in the familiarity, blearily acknowledging the others finally catching up to him with a huff and slowly approaching. He turns towards them with a blinding smile and then back into the portal. Who knew an abandoned battlefield could look so beautiful.

He was going home. Mikey was finally going to see his family again.

His ninpō flares once more in his chest, urging him to go back where he belongs. April gasps beside him, placing a delicate hand on his shoulder.

“Is this…your home?” she asks quietly, and Mikey can only give a small nod. If he talked right now he’d surely end up crying his eyes out in utter bliss.

It’s right there. All he has to do is jump through and he’ll be back, and he can give his family the biggest hugs he can manage. Everything will finally start going back to normal.

“Whoa, that’s your dimension?” Casey exclaims, leaning to get a closer look and frowning with dismay. “No offense, but when you were describing it I wasn’t picturing this kind of dump.”

Mikey giggles, spirit soaring. “This is where we freed Oroku Saki. It’s a bit of a mess but…” he trails, reaching a hand towards the portal with misty eyes.

Without another thought about not being able to say goodbye to everyone and leaving his new friends behind, Mikey launches himself through. Donatello yells something behind him but it gets garbled through the portal. The fuzz washes over him once again, but once he’s landed on cold rock and taken a breath of musty air, it all fades away as his body is filled with buzzing, fiery energy.

Mikey lets loose a cackle, doing a cartwheel to let out the joy. His face is permanently split into a smile as he closes his eyes and absorbs the warmth that seems to be coming from all around him, as if the very atmosphere was welcoming him back. With watery eyes he quickly pokes at his ninpō, letting loose a relieved sigh when Leo fires a passionate jolt back instantly. Then, he stumbles back at the sudden onslaught as all of his brother's desperate energies reach towards him, their ninpō in a frenzy as they try to smother him. Their out-poor of concern and desperation brings even more tears to his eyes, and he quickly embraces it all. Mikey pushes as much effort as he can into their energies, trying to calm them down and tell them ‘safe, I’m safe, I’m home’.

All at once they push back. ‘Where.’

Blinking past the tears he concentrates on trying to describe where he is, and hopes it’ll be enough for Leo to open a portal for him, pronto. Mikey has no objections to finding his own way home, but it would be much more convenient to simply be dropped into the arms of his awaiting family.

Mikey is unceremoniously ripped away from his brother's comforting presence by sharp burning traveling up his limbs. He gasps in pain, almost collapsing from the sheer shock. Looking down to his arms with wide, panicked eyes, he trembles as his scars glow with a blinding gold. Mikey’s lip wobbles as the sensation gets worse, the burning licks of golden fire spreading quickly to the rest of his body.

Any thoughts of connecting with his brothers scatter in the wind as he watches his skin start to flake away.

Agonizing pain unlike any he’s ever felt rips through him, the cracks on his arms pulsing even brighter as more of himself starts to evaporate. Mikey screams, knees collapsing under him, letting loose a choked sob as he catches sight of more golden seams appearing on his legs. His skin chips away there, too, and he falls to his side writhing in agony.

It wasn’t this bad before. Opening that first portal was painful, excruciatingly so, but it was never like this. Back then it felt as though he was draining his very soul away, but now his body crumbles under the overwhelming feeling of too much.

Somewhere through the bright, blazing wildfire he can feel his brothers completely panicking, their energies dancing around his own but never getting too close.

‘Pain? Pain? Why pain who pain where pain–’

They desperately reach out but recoil immediately when Mikey’s ninpō unconsciously lashes out. He doesn’t know what’s happening anymore, he’s supposed to be home, and safe, why is this happening–

‘Hurts, hurts, too much, dying–’

Mikey screams as a large hand grabs his shoulder. He cracks his teary eyes open and lets out another painful sob as more of his body flakes away with the movement of whoever had touched him. Thankfully it was only for a moment, the offender quickly backing away with a choked hiss, but even that was more than Mikey could handle.

Is he really going to die here, while practically on the doorstep to home? Mikey gasps before gritting his teeth, rolling onto his plastron and stretching out a shaky hand that was more light than scales.

He’s going to see his family again, even if he had to crawl through this hell.

His breath is nothing more than pain filled gasps as his body trembles, trying and failing to drag his body across the ground. Letting out another scream as he digs his disintegrating hand into the hard rock, he uses as much strength as he can muster to pull, but he barely moves an inch before his limbs go weak and limp.

There’s nothing but light and bright, fiery pain. Mikey's vision whites out for a moment, eyes trying to focus on a landmark he can get to and seeing nothing but indistinct blobs through his tears.

Fire licks through his soul, drowning out all else.

It’s pain. It’s agony. There’s too much. Mikey can’t handle more.

He’s going to die. He’ll never see his brothers again. He’ll be nothing but dust.

While he never wanted to be the last one standing, all alone, Mikey also didn’t think he’d be the first of his brothers to join the ancestors. He doesn’t want this.

Nothing else is important other than the pain.

Hurt.

Fading.

Dying.

Sorry.

‘Sorry.’

‘No.’

Mikey can only breathe through shaky lungs. All movement hurts. The golden light is getting too bright.

More fire (how is that possible) erupts at the distant feeling of his body being dragged across the ground. Mikey thinks he chokes out another sob, and if he’s hearing things right there’s another scream that matches his own as he continues to be moved.

With one more shrill, broken scream, Mikey feels himself being thrown through the air, passing through a layer of fuzz. He lands on something hard, eyes popping open in a silent, shrill whine as it jostles everything.

Then, miraculously, the fire starts to lessen. Mikey is still in agony, too much to even attempt to move, but the inferno isn’t growing. Through blurry vision he sees someone kneel in front of him. They go to reach out but stop short when a panicked and pain filled voice screeches something to them. Mikey has no idea what was said through the cotton in his ears, but it must have been enough to dissuade the person in front of him from touching.

He’s not sure how long it takes, but he gets used to the pain. Now that it isn’t growing, he knows what he’s got to deal with and can act accordingly. Everything inside him is still too big and too much. Mikey knows something is disastrously wrong.

His ears start to sharpen, and through it he can recognize the pained voice of Donatello, and the two frantic tones of April and Casey.

Did they follow him back into his own dimension? Why would they do that when they were trying to get back to their own world?

Mikey blinks away the tears in his eyes, forcing them to focus on the scene in front of him. Donatello looks much paler than he should, eyes glossy with unshed tears as April gently cradles his hands. From his position he can see the palms and fingers are blackened with what looks like charcoal, fading back to regular green the closer it gets to his wrist.

Casey mutters something under his breath beside him. He glances over to see his friend jumping with his hockey stick poised to hit the small metal box creating the doorway back home.

The wave of agony abruptly spikes as Mikey attempts to do something, anything, to stop Casey before he breaks his best ticket back. His intended yell comes out barely louder than a squeak, still glowing limbs twitching with the aborted movement.

Mikey’s eyes fill with painful tears of a different kind when Casey’s strike hits its target.

He watches despondently as the portal flickers once, then twice, the image of his home beyond wavering in the pink static. Then, just before it closes for good and seals Mikey’s fate, a brilliant flash of blue through the doorway, morphing into a large, flowing disc.

It’s Leo’s portal. They had found him, they were coming to get him, and Mikey isn’t there–

The pink door flickers out of existence before he can see anyone jump through the ring of blue. With it, something in Mikey snaps, and his brothers’ ninpō gets abruptly jerked away, back to where he can’t get to them.

Everything still hurts. The roaring fire is running circles in his veins, lighting every single inch of his body into agony. The cracking may have stopped, and the pain may be stagnating instead of steadily growing, but there’s simply too much for him to process.

Someone is trying to speak to him. Mikey blearily opens his eyes (he doesn’t remember closing them), trying to focus on Casey’s panicked and concerned face hovering above him. Before Mikey can think better of it his face pulls into a snarl at the sight of the person who took away his portal home. His anger rises into a crescendo when Casey tries to reach out to him, to help him.

He wouldn’t need his help at all if they had simply left him there, in the portal, back home with his real family.

Casey flinches back at his expression, eyes wide. Mikey shakes with pain and anger, trying to roll away from his extended hand and make it clear that he doesn’t want his help. With the anger, however, comes a different kind of burning energy, one that wants to fight. One that is pushing to get out.

“Guys, we got company!” April’s shrill voice announces. Casey knocks out of his stupor and looks up with a fierce expression, standing above Mikey with his hockey stick at the ready. Through his labored breathing and the agonizing fire, he turns his head towards where the others are facing. He sees April standing in front of a still pale Donatello, bō held loosely in his blackened hands. And beyond them, a small battalion of K-words in tiny ships, robotic bodies and large, hairy metal suits advances towards them, weapons drawn.

At the sight of them, Mikey’s mind snaps back into focus. The fire and energy inside him burn brighter, and with one more agonized scream he knows exactly what he needs to do with the mystic power that’s too much.

The pain slips to the back of his mind as he rolls to a battle ready position like a man possessed. Mikey can physically feel the way his body burns brighter, and in his peripheral Donatello mutters something with wide eyes that he can’t hear over the adrenaline rushing through his ears. The K-words briefly pause in their advance and share cautious glances with each other as Mikey drags himself in front of the others.

As easy as breathing his kusari fundo appears in his hands, glowing brighter than it ever has. More chains appear around him, floating aimlessly towards the K-words. There’s a moment of stillness where no one dares to move. All Mikey can focus on is the agonizing fire rippling through him and the anger, the rage of being ripped away from his home once again, especially when his brothers were so close.

As one unit the K-words raise their weapons directly at him. A spark ignites in his chest, and with a scream of newfound grief he lets the feeling of too much escape. The chains around him explode into action, lighting into a wall of flames as they launch towards the K-words, ripping through their machines and weapons like paper. Mikey jumps into the fray just as fast, using his kusari fundo to rip through the little ships filled with wide-eyed and fearful K-words, leaving splatters of blood and viscera in his wake.

One of the larger, hairier robots attempts to attack him, but to Mikey he moves in slow motion as he leaps up with a snarl, using a chain to rip the K-word piloting the machine out. And, with the clenching of his fist, the weapon squeezes the K-word until something pops.

Breathing becomes labored, Mikey spinning around to the few remaining K-word robots and taking in their terrified expressions. He tries to take a step forward but stumbles, chains briefly flickering and extinguishing their flames. A few disappear completely, and looking down he sees his markings flickering in and out of their golden glow. Blearily Mikey takes stock only to feel a lethargy digging into his bones where there was previously nothing but agony.

“Kraang, inform Kraang Prime of the potentially disastrous outcome of the Turtle Who is Not the Regular Turtle's continued existence,” one of the K-word’s orders. “The plan of Barbarian Retrieval may be necessary for furthering Kraang’s conquering of Earth-12.”

Gathering up what mystic power he has left and combining it with his weakened ninpō (he just had too much and now he has not enough why) Mikey whips his kusari fundo at the remaining K-words. The glowing weapons rip through their robots, sending the squishy pink bodies scattering with frightened cries. He takes a step to try and follow them and make sure they don’t escape, but his knees shake and with one more deep exhale, Mikey’s weapons flicker out of existence.

The fire and pain he had felt in his body is now completely drained, leaving Mikey exhausted. His legs wobble as he takes deep, shaky breaths, tightly holding himself only to let go immediately when the pressure sends lightning-like shocks through his arms. Mind racing he looks down at his palms, choking on a sob when his hands are covered in more gray scar tissue than bright green scales. Following the path he starts shaking even more as the scars continue up and up, the ends just creeping over his shoulders and into his shell.

“Orange?” April hesitantly calls from behind, voice soft. Mikey shakily turns his head, eyes drooping from exhaustion as she slowly approaches, hands spread wide. His fingers twitch as the invading feeling of calm and peace try to worm inside his head the longer he keeps eye contact, but instead of fighting it, he lets it wash over him.

Mikey doesn’t have the energy to combat the feeling, not right now. Not after his hopes were so thoroughly dashed.

April lets out a breath of relief when Mikey’s shoulders slump. The all consuming exhaustion has him swaying on his feet, and in the next moment April is right in front of him. Her eyes shine with unshed tears the longer they stand together, eyes locked.

With the exhaustion, the anger inside of him fades into a dim sizzle, only to be replaced by an overwhelming, dark pit in his chest. His mind feels fuzzy and blank. Mikey knows what he’s feeling is intense grief, but he doesn’t want to believe it, because he’s only ever felt this way once before and he was able to fix it that time.

Mikey sniffles, a tear he can barely feel tracing its way down his cheek. April carefully reaches out, placing one hand delicately on his shoulder. She gasps, eyes growing distant and her tears finally falling as she pulls him into a soft but firm embrace. Mikey buries his face into her shirt with a wobbling lip and hitching shoulders.

"I’m sorry,” she whispers against the top of his head. Mikey’s arms lay limply at his sides, even when one of her hands slowly starts to rub a soothing circle on the top of his shell. “I’m so, so sorry.”

Mikey takes a choked breath. He buries his face even further into her soft, comforting presence. “I’m tired,” is the only thing he manages to croak back. April’s hold on him tightens for a brief moment before she is pulling away, hastily wiping away her own tears.

Mikey blinks at the floor with hazy eyes, only looking up as footsteps approach them. Donatello and Casey stop beside them, the other turtle wearing a crestfallen expression while Casey fiddles with the handle of his hockey stick, avoiding his eyes. He glances down at Donatello’s hands where they lightly grip his staff, and Mikey can’t help the shock of guilt seeing the blackened palms and fingers.

He has a sickening suspicion that he has something to do with whatever happened to Donatello's hands.

Mikey’s gaze skirts lower and his heart jumps at seeing the broken and mangled portal device hanging from Donatello’s hip strap. He looks back up to see the other turtle giving him a small, hesitant smile.

“Look, I’m not sure what happened in there, but I won’t stop until I figure it out,” Donatello began. His eyes turn steely with determination as his posture straightens. “And as soon as I do, we’ll get you back home, for real this time. It’s only a matter of how fast I can fix this thing.”

Mikey sniffles one more time, looking up at Donatello with a grateful smile. The dark chasm in his chest sparks with a dim light of hope, and he leans forward to gently nudge the larger turtle's plastron with his forehead in thanks. Donatello huffs and lightly rubs a hand across his head.

“Before we do that, how about we find a way back to our dimension before more alien robots come try and kill us,” Casey rambles, breaking away from their group and starting a march towards more portals. Donatello follows with an exaggerated eye-roll, gently dislodging Mikey from his plastron. Mikey catches him glancing towards his hands, brows pinched in either concern or pain, he can’t tell, and another pang of guilt rips through him.

April stays right beside him as they make their way past the massacre Mikey created. He tenses, uncomfortably aware of what he had knowingly done. There was no dissociating, no blacking out, and he remembers exactly how much he wanted to rip those aliens apart. This time, he has no excuse for what he did.

Before he can get too lost in his thoughts, April is wrapping an arm around his shoulders and leading them behind the other two who almost immediately start arguing about which way is the best way to go. She snaps something at them and they quiet down, but Mikey can sense the glares they still send each other.

She’s glued to Mikey’s side as they continue, adjusting to his slower, dragging gate with ease. Mikey’s mind is comfortably blank and fuzzy around the edges, April giving him a small squeeze when the bad thoughts and ice cold feeling of grief start to creep back inside. He leans into her warmth, wanting nothing more than to sink into the peace and calm she projects with only her presence.

Mikey’s so lost in the peace, in fact, that he barely even notices when he’s being ushered through a portal and the floor beneath him turns into the cold, steady concrete of the subway tunnels of NNY.

Chapter Text

The fuzz of peace and calm starts to leach out of Mikey’s being when April removes herself from his side to check the area. He takes to hugging himself in lieu of her comforting presence, watching with hazy eyes as the others make sure there aren’t any enemies around.

Now that the adrenaline is gone, Mikey’s exhausted. Physically, his entire body aches, and his scars keep tingling as they send shooting stripes of pain up his arms. His mind is a jumbled mess of half-formed thoughts and the constant ringing of ‘you were home, now you’re not, you were home’. In his chest there’s nothing but a dull pang of grief, the anger of being pulled away from his home and the frustration of being stuck in this constant cycle of pain. It’s only diluted by the hopelessness of his situation.

Mikey always had hope that he’d be able to leave this adventure behind him soon. But after getting home and then being painfully ripped away from his family once again, his spirits are crushed in a way he hasn’t felt since the Invasion. On instinct he reaches out through his ninpō, trying to find his brothers, and his heart nearly stops when he finds nothing. They’re presence is gone. He backs away from their void with a wobbling lip, a new darkness finding its way into his mind.

But it’ll be okay soon, because Donatello will fix it. He knows how to fix everything, and he seemed confident he’d be able to repair the portal. Yet even as he reassures himself of that, Mikey’s chest still rings with an unsettling hollowness broken only by the dim spark that is still hanging on from Donatello’s promise.

“Orange?” Donatello calls out, standing in front of him with a pinched expression. “Did you hear me?”

Mikey slowly blinks at him and shakes his head. The other turtle's expression hardens for a moment before quickly softening in something kinder the longer he stares at him. He brings up one of his blackened hands and gives Mikey’s shoulder a light, reassuring squeeze. The action has him holding back a wince as it presses on his new scars.

He repeats himself, but Mikey can’t hear it as he locks onto his charred hands with pursed lips. The regret and guilt builds seeing the damage he had done to Donatello, because that had to have been from him. But what exactly did Mikey unknowingly do to cause that kind of damage?

“Sorry,” Mikey finds himself mumbling. Donatello raises a concerned eyebrow, prompting Mikey to nod towards his hand gripping his staff. “About that.”

“Oh!” Donatello exclaims, releasing Mikey’s shoulder and displaying one of his hands between them. “No need to apologize. You obviously weren’t in control of…whatever that was, and I needed to get you out of there. While it was initially agonizing and felt quite similar to sticking my hands on a flaming stove, there’s barely any pain left. The marks have even faded a bit, look.” He turns his wrist, showcasing how the blackened palms had, indeed, faded to a lighter gray. “Based on the rate it changed it should be completely gone in a couple more hours, so nothing to worry about.”

Mikey hums in acknowledgement, but can’t chase away the guilt at hurting Donatello in the first place, permanent or not.

“So, you agree, then?” Donatello asks, and Mikey slowly blinks at him twice before the other drags his hand down his face with a groan. “Of course you still weren’t listening–okay, let’s try this one more time. April, Casey and I think it’ll be best if you head back to the lair to recover.”

“Yeah, no offense dude, but you look pretty miserable right now,” Casey adds, earning a small smack and glare from April.

“What he means is your arms need medical attention, and if you head back to the lair you can try and catch the others up on what’s been going on. Plus, you can make sure they’re at home and okay, too,” April says. Donatello nods along, elbowing Casey when he mutters something under his breath.

For once, Mikey can’t find a reason to fight being benched right now. He knows he’s hurt, his head is not in the right place, and he’s way too tired to be trying to get away from any more K-words. It doesn’t hurt that under all the other negative emotions, he really does want to make sure the others are safe, too.

“Okay, that…that sounds good,” Mikey says. He turns and is about to start walking down the tunnel when Casey grabs his shoulder, only to immediately release it at Mikey’s tight wince.

“Sorry! Sorry! But, uh, the lair is that way,” Casey awkwardly apologizes, pointing the opposite direction Mikey was about to start walking.

“Oh…” Mikey trails before listlessly passing the others. “Thanks.” He catches them all giving each other concerned looks in the corner of his eye at his hollow, monotone responses, but he can’t bring himself to care about his unhappy mood.

He was home, and now he’s stuck again. Mikey doesn’t care about his positive plan of action anymore, and even if he did, there would be no energy left in him to be happy in the face of the turmoil of emotions rolling through him.

The others don’t say another word as he continues further down the subway tunnels. Ceilings get lower and walls become more compact the further he ambles, thoughts sloshing together in a haze as he tries to figure out what went wrong.

Mikey knows he went through the right portal, his brother’s ninpō was enough proof of that. Their presence, warm and encompassing after these long months of withdrawal, had been a soothing balm on his frayed nerves. Then, with no warning, there was simply pain. Everything else about what happened got fuzzy in his memories after that first lash of fire. Yet he could clearly remember wanting (needing) to go home to his family, and then his flesh was flaking away again, and finally he was thrown back through the portal and the gadget was destroyed.

Mikey briefly stumbles as it clicks that Donatello had to have been the one to throw him back through the portal. And that his hands must have been hurt by just touching him. But why? When Mikey had last been in that much pain with his body flaking into golden dust (don’t think about that) his brothers had touched him just fine. So why did Donatello’s hands look burnt?

None of this provided an answer as to why everything started to hurt in the first place, though. Mikey had made it home, wasn’t that supposed to make things be normal again? He was going to be with his family, and then everything would have been better.

Instead, he had nearly killed himself and hurt Donatello when he was saving his life.

But why had he started disintegrating into a ball of agony in the first place? It was Mikey’s own dimension, there shouldn’t have been anything wrong with him going back. That’s where he belonged.

Mikey is broken out of his spiraling loop by raised voices in the distance. He knows he is close to the lair, and as he creeps closer he can make out the harsh tones of Leonardo and Raphael spitting insults at each other.

“This is your fault, Leo! If you hadn’t called Splinter, then we wouldn’t be in this mess!” Raphael shouts. Mikey quickly speeds up and rounds the corner, where he catches sight of a fuming Raphael and Leonardo. Michelangelo, looking decidedly uncomfortable, is squished between them as the leader bandages some kind of injury on his arm.

“I didn’t have a choice, Raph. It was him or Mikey. I thought…” Leonardo trails, pursing his lips. “I thought Sensei would take care of him.”

No one notices him as Mikey creeps closer, a bad feeling growing in his gut at the obvious signs of a fight and no sign of Master Splinter. Could this day really go more wrong than it already has?

“Well, you thought wrong!” Raphael spits, turning on his heel and jumping slightly when he comes face to face with Mikey’s dim and exhausted expression. “Orange! Where have you been!? Where is everyone else!?” His frustration abruptly turns to something else Mikey can’t place when Raphael’s gaze locks onto his slightly shaking, newly scarred arms. “What the hell happened to you?”

“I…I found a way home, but it–” Mikey’s throat goes dry and he has to take a deep breath to continue. “It didn’t go the way I thought it would.”

Leonardo peeks around Raphael, eyes going wide when he sees the new scars littering Mikey’s arms. “Orange, come over here, let me see them.”

Mikey nods softly and trudges toward him, being directed to sit next to Michelangelo. He plops down and avoids his alternates wide eyed stare of concern. Leonardo immediately takes one arm, unwrapping the black cloth and wincing along with Mikey as it peels off the tender skin. As soon as it’s off Leonardo is putting on a cool salve which does little to reach the deep muscles in his arm, but it does provide some relief to the stinging of his skin. He repeats the process with his other arm, wrapping them in white bandages before putting everything down and fixing him with a stern look.

“Okay, give us a rundown on what happened while you guys were stuck in there,” Leonardo says. Mikey purses his lips, but when faced with the hard expression of the leader, Raphael hovering over his shoulder, and the unmoving presence of Michelangelo at his side, he finds he doesn’t have enough resolve to try and worm out of an explanation.

He quickly gives them the chain of events that led Mikey back to the lair alone, the others nodding along and absorbing everything they can. There’s a few moments where he trips up recounting the fiasco of jumping through the portal back to his own dimension, but luckily none of them push when he hovers around those kinds of details. He could deal without the sympathetic looks, but he knows there’s nothing to be done about that.

“Sounds like they’re having better luck than we are, at least,” Michelangelo announces at the end. He had ended up gluing himself to Mikey’s side during the explanation, taking care to avoid putting pressure on any of the new scars.

“What have you guys been doing?” Mikey asks softly. Raphael turns angered eyes onto Leonardo at that, crossing his arms with a glare.

“Oh, not too much. Just being attacked by a giant tiger working with the Foot, and then Splinter getting kidnapped by Karai and taken to Shredder. Nothing that couldn’t be prevented,” he hisses at the leader. Leonardo glares right back while Mikey’s heart lurches to his throat. He remembers when his Dad was taken by Shredder, and he sincerely doubts this situation could be any better than the one he had to deal with before.

“We have to go rescue him!” Mikey announces, adrenaline finally overpowering most of his exhaustion and giving him a much needed boost of energy. He needs everything he can muster if he’s going to help rescue Splinter. The new mission would also provide a great distraction from the hollow cavern that had been ripped into his chest.

“No way, even if you were in top fighting shape, the Foot still has it out for you. We’re not going to deliver you straight to their base,” Leonardo counters, standing from his crouch and stepping away. “You’re going to stay here to make sure nothing happens to the lair and keep an ear out for Donnie, Casey and April.”

Mikey gathers as much steel as he can, straightening and standing to meet Leonardo head on. “I’m going to help, no matter if I’m hurt or not. I can’t just sit on the side as everyone else is in danger, that’s not how I do things. I know I can help somehow. So you can either bring me along and tell me the plan from the start, or I can follow you and bust into the Foot Clans base with more razz-ma-tazz than anyone’s ever seen.”

There’s a beat of silence. Leonardo’s lips are pursed as he crosses his arms, mirroring Raphael’s pose. Michelangelo doesn’t seem to be taking his words into account at all, simply squinting hard at his left eye. He eyes his alternate in confusion but Michelangelo doesn’t break his intense stare into the left side of his face, now worrying his lip in thought.

“That was a lame speech, but as much as I don’t want Orange anywhere near this fight lookin’ like that, I think this is an ‘all-hands-on-deck’ situation,” Raphael says. He doesn’t look particularly happy about agreeing with Mikey, but it breaks Michelangelo's impromptu staring contest as he shoots him a bright and encouraging grin. Leonardo takes a look at all of them before deflating with a drawn-out sigh.

“Fine, but Orange is sticking to back-up only. No engaging with Karai, the mutants, and especially Shredder. Is that clear?”

“Crystal,” Mikey responds, even though he knows that those rules probably won’t matter as soon as the fighting starts. And, based on the sour expression on the leader’s face as he takes one last glance at his heavily bandaged and still shaky arms, Leonardo knows that, too.

“Alright, let’s go save Master Splinter!” Michelangelo announces, leading the way out of the lair. Leonardo nods, determined, and follows right on his heels. Raphael locks eyes with Mikey briefly, expression tight and lingering on his left eye (seriously, what’s with that?), before gesturing for Mikey to go ahead so he can bring up the rear.

Mikey breathes out slowly, catching up with the others and clenching his fists as tight as he can. They can barely close around air, and Mikey knows he won’t be able to wield his weapons with this kind of grip. But he has to help get Splinter back, so he’s not going to let a little thing like fighting without his weapons stop him.

==========

Mikey steadies his breathing as he watches over the building he was almost brought to after being kidnapped by Bradford and Karai. The others follow loosely behind Leonardo as he scales the building and sneaks inside, leaving him behind to act as a scout to make sure no one calls any reinforcements.

He keeps his eyes locked onto all of the windows and exits, waiting for the moment the others escape with Splinter so he can provide backup. Restlessly he shifts on his feet, worrying his lip as he tries his hardest to keep his mind on the mission and nothing else. Right now he needs to focus on rescuing Splinter, not on the pain, and certainly not about the fact that he had been home, and he was so close to seeing his family again–

Mikey shakes his head with a huff. He needs to remember what he's doing here, and those other things will be future Mikey’s problem to deal with after the smoke settles.

The sounds of firecrackers catch his attention immediately, and with a larger explosion a window on the Foot Clans base bursts open. Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo leap out with Splinter in their grasp. Mikey feels an immediate sense of relief to see that Splinter seems to be okay, if not incredibly weak based on how he leans on his sons for support.

They all scale up the building Mikey is perched on and he runs over to make sure they’re making good progress. Leonardo and Raphael each support one side of Splinter as they scale up the fire escape, Michelangelo taking up the rear. Mikey darts his gaze back to the Foot Clans base at the various exclamations being shouted through the broken window, and with a chorus of yells and growls the mutants and Karai start pouring out of the base.

With alarm Mikey looks back down at their progress and quickly realizes they won’t make it to the roof in time, even with Michelangelo running interference. Jumping onto the ledge he locks on to the large, jet-pack wearing tiger mutant that is beelining toward the others. Michelangelo is too busy fighting off straggling Foot-bots to notice the impending danger.

Steeling himself, Mikey takes a deep breath and, waiting just a moment longer, launches off the roof straight towards the larger mutant. The tiger has its sights locked onto Splinter. He raises a blaster of some kind, but before he has a chance to fire Mikey is landing on his chest feet first like a missile. His breath gets knocked out of him as Mikey uses him as a platform to push off towards the roof again, landing just behind where the others are rushing along.

“Nice one, dude!” Michelangelo exclaims as they hobble further away from the Foot Clan base, managing a few more rooftops before coming to a halt.

Mikey sends a small smirk back. “Thanks, you got some good action in, too.”

“Oh yeah, no one can stop the Michelangelo Menace’s!”

“It was foolish to have come. None of you should be here,” Splinter weakly says as Leonardo and Raphael prop him up below a water tower. “But…I am glad that you have.”

“We’d never leave you behind, Sensei,” Raphael states. He adjusts Splinter into a more comfortable position, hovering over him with worry. Mikey and Michelangelo stay a distance away, staying on edge for the incoming enemies as Leonardo softly speaks to Splinter. He shares a wary look with his alternate that is quickly returned, both of them jolting back to attention at the sound of jet’s getting closer.

“Let him rest, we’ll keep an eye out for those goons,” Raphael announces as he appears by Mikey’s side. He shifts on his feet, getting ready for the inevitable fight against Karai and the mutants on their tail. Mikey tries once again to clench his hands and, when that brings nothing but pain, weakness and discomfort, sinks in to the fact that he’ll be weaponless for this battle.

Well, good thing Splinter’s been hounding him for his lack of close combat skills lately. And at least it isn’t the first time he’s going to be facing off against a group of mutants without his weapon.

Granted, he was in peak physical condition at that point. And he had his brothers beside him. Draxum was also looking to capture first, kill second. But that’s just semantics.

Mikey has no more time to think about his less than stellar fighting condition as the tiger, Bradford, a fish mutant, and Karai leap onto the other side of the roof. Everyone takes up a defensive stance in front of a still weak Splinter, glaring at their opponents.

The tiger growls. “Attack!”

The gravel of the accented voice has him hesitating for a split second. He had only ever heard that kind of anger once before, but Mikey could have swore that sounded like–

His thoughts get cut off as he yelps, leaping back and out of the way of the blade being struck at him from the fish mutant. With a garbled snarl the mutant pushes forward. Mikey slides out of the way of each strike, body falling back into the familiar dance of improvisation. His first reaction is to reach for his weapon, but he knows it’ll be knocked out of his hands as soon as he tries to use it.

On the next swipe Mikey instinctually dives close enough to drive a fist into one of the fish’s gills. As he is bringing it up and putting quite a bit of force behind the strike, his newly open and fresh scars fill his vision. Unfortunately it’s too late to make the attack a feint, and with a prepared wince he follows through.

The punch sends the mutant flying into the other side of the roof, slumping unconscious to the concrete and interrupting the battle between Raphael and the tiger. Mikey crumples in on himself with a pained cry. Knuckles in agony and a lancing pain cutting through the adrenaline rushing through his veins, he looks through wet eyes to see the tiger staring at him with a wicked smirk. In the next moment he is turning away from Raphael and aiming a blaster straight towards him and bringing his other clawed hand towards his ear.

“Master Shredder, the other turtle you seek is at our location,” the tiger says. “The small cub will be easy pickings once I am done with him.”

The voice finally clicks in Mikey’s mind. He stares in shock as the tiger that sounds like his Dad fires off the blaster too fast for Raphael to interfere. His feet are locked in place as the first thing that truly reminds him of comforting memories stares him down with gleeful malice, even as Raphael attacks with renewed vigor.

Mikey barely manages to move his arms to the side as the bolt from his gun makes contact with his plastron.

Breath instantly knocked out of his chest, the shockwave from the blast sends him catapulting into the air. Instinct alone has him retracting fully into his shell as the wind whistles around him. Mikey slams into a concrete wall with a harsh crack, ears ringing from the impact as he clatters to the ground.

He stays still for a minute, the sounds of the battle and desperate screams of his name muffled in the darkness of his shell. Mikey coughs and gasps for breath as the vitriol coming from the voice of his Dad bounces around in his mind.

He knows, just like how Master Splinter isn’t Oroku Saki, that the tiger mutant isn’t his Dad. But that doesn’t mean it hurts any less to hear that voice and know it wants you dead.

Slowly he emerges from his shell, sounds coming back much clearer and harsher. It makes Mikey wince and he shakes his head to get his bearings back. His plastron aches but he doesn’t even need to look to know no lasting damage was done. Mikey’s been hit much harder and been thrown much further than that before, sometimes by his own brothers. That doesn’t mean it gets any more enjoyable, though.

Propping himself up on his elbows, he looks up to see the blast rocketed him a full two rooftops away. The battle is still waging away from him, and with wide eyes he can see that Splinter even joined the battle with Leonardo, facing off against the tiger with viscous efficiency. Raphael and Michelangelo are obviously trying to get to him, but every time they get close to the edge Karai or Bradford occupy their attention.

Mikey slowly levers himself onto his knees, eyes locked onto the battle and raring to get back there to help. Now that Splinter is back in fighting shape, there’s no way they’re going to be losing against those Foot goons–

Locking eyes with Michelangelo reveals his terrified expression as his alternates gaze darts to the space above him. Hackles rising, Mikey rolls forward and out of the way just in time to hear harsh metal rip through the concrete where he had been kneeling. Spinning around in a crouch Mikey looks up with wide eyes as what has to be this universe's Shredder rips two claw-like blades out of the rooftop.

Mikey swallows, throat dry as Shredder stands to his full height, looming over him as he subtly tries to slink further away from the man in front of him.

“Impressive instincts,” this Shredder comments in a deep, grating tone. Mikey can’t tell the expression he is wearing beneath his helmet, but those steely eyes lock on to his slowly retreating form with intrigue.

He really wants to say he can beat the Shredder of this universe in a one-on-one battle, but with his weapons out of commision Mikey is pretty sure he’s the underdog in this situation. Especially when the man is lunging at him in the next moment, his ‘impressive instincts’ the only thing saving Mikey from being beheaded.

More swipes from the claws and kicks come in quick succession. Mikey side-steps or slides out of the way of each one, barely an inch to spare between his skin and the blades. He wants to start doing his thing and fight how he normally does, but he doesn’t have enough time to think of something before more flurries of metal, kicks and fists come flying towards him.

After what feels like hours of dodging the blows, Mikey starts to realize that his movements feel…practiced. On the next side step of blades, his eyes widen when he unconsciously falls back into the beginning of a kata Splinter had been teaching them. Giving him no room to breathe, Shredder slices at him, but now Mikey deliberately goes through the defensive steps he was taught.

With a small grin Mikey sees a small opening on Shredder’s flank. Dodging one more attack he lowers into a crouch, balling his hands as tight as he can and launches his fist into the man’s side. Shredder goes flying while Mikey gasps with pain from the shockwaves sent up his arm from the blow. He glances up at the sound of screeching metal to see the man digging his claws into the concrete to skid to a stop, a new, possessive light entering his eyes as he straightens, cape billowing out behind him.

“And you’re even stronger than Tiger Claw,” Shredder states. The man starts to circle him and Mikey mirrors it, the thumping of his heart in his ears almost drowning out the desperate screams of the others telling him to run.

He’s not going to run and let Shredder attack Splinter and the other turtles. If he enters that fight, Mikey’s not sure who will win. But Mikey can probably hold him off long enough to give the others a chance to thoroughly beat the other Foot Clan members into the ground. At least, he hopes he can hold off Shredder until the others can come help.

Shredder pauses next to the area Mikey had slammed into after the blast, observing the cracks in the concrete and turning back to Mikey with a pleased hum. “Very durable as well.”

“Is this how your fights usually work? Just compliment the other person until they feel flattered enough to surrender?” Mikey snarks, muscles coiled and ready to spring back into action at the first off movement.

“My daughter and Bradford did say you had a mouth on you,” the man replies blandly, resuming his circling. Mikey follows, making sure there is always an equal distance between them. “Your form, while effective, is also sloppy. Nothing that can’t be trained out of you with the right Master guiding your hand.”

Mikey pauses at that, curiously tilting his head. Shredder copies, halting his stalking and staring at him with narrowed eyes.

“I’m sorry, what?” Mikey says, taking a risk and forcibly relaxing his body language. He has a feeling he knows where Shredder is trying to go with this, and while he absolutely would never consider joining the Foot Clan and training under him, it would work great as a distraction to keep the man busy while the others finished their battle.

Shredder takes a confident step forward. “I can see you have great potential. Orange is your name, correct?” Mikey gives a slow nod, not taking his eyes off of him as the man takes another step forward. It takes all of his willpower not to shuffle away from him. “With my guidance, you could become the greatest ninja the Foot Clan has seen in years behind my own self. And yet, you are wasting that potential by aligning yourself with the disgrace that is the Hamato Clan.”

So, this Shredder really likes to make cliché, villainous monologues. Mikey can work with that. All he has to do is channel his inner, most annoying version of Leo.

“You see someone who you think could be a good student and your first thought is to send out robots to try and kidnap them? No offense, but I think a business card would be much more effective in convincing them to join your clan.”

Shredder’s eyes flash with anger, his fist clenching, before he lets out an aggrieved breath. “That rat and those other turtles never would have let you come willingly. One could say that Yoshi kidnapped you before I even got the chance.”

Oh, that was a good point. If Mikey didn’t know any better and he was some random person or turtle who had been mutated, he might have started putting credit to Shredder’s arguments.

“I’ll give you that one, sure. Why do you want me specifically, though? I’m sure plenty of other people and mutants are eager to earn a place as your student and top ninja warrior. Karai is probably really gunning for that position,” Mikey states. The sound of battle is still going on behind him, and he has no idea which side could be winning.

He hopes the others beat them down and fast, because he’s not sure exactly how long he can drag this interaction out for. Mikey may be good at physical distractions, but when it comes to the balance of verbally annoying a villain into letting down their guard, that’s Leo’s wheelhouse.

“Your kind may be an unnatural part of this world, but they can be shaped into the strongest of warriors. And as much as my daughter has excelled, she is much too brazen, and there is only so far my teaching can go before she hits the end of her potential. It is clear to me that time is hastily approaching.” Shredder is almost looming over him now, cold eyes boring into his skull. “Having a turtle as an esteemed member of my clan would also give Yoshi a taste of his own medicine.”

Mikey nearly rolls his eyes at that statement. He also feels a slight fury on Karai’s behalf with how readily Shredder is writing her out of the picture as soon as a new, shiny mutant comes into play.

“So you mean to tell me that this entire time you’ve been trying to kidnap me, it’s all because you got jealous and wanted something that Splinter already has? A teenage mutant ninja turtle for yourself and the Foot Clan? That’s younger brother behavior if I’ve ever seen it, and I would know–”

Shredder snarls and before Mikey can react his feet are being swept out from underneath him. He tries to catch himself with a yelp when the man above him grabs the front of his plastron and slams him onto the ground. With a sucked in breath he attempts to hide in his shell for Shredder to take out his anger, since it is extremely unlikely those metal claws will be able to pierce through his scutes, but is immediately stopped.

He only manages to tuck his arms in when those two claws are slamming down on either side of his neck. Mikey swallows with wide eyes, trying for a moment to stick his head into his shell anyway only to freeze when the two sides of his chin meet cool metal. Shredder kneels above him, glaring at him with angered, furrowed brows.

“Enough of your meaningless talk!” He spits into Mikey’s face. “Will you embrace your glory and honor with the Foot Clan, or will you waste your potential by joining Hamato Yoshi?”

He could lie. The easy way out would be to pretend to succumb to his threats and agree to become the Shredder’s student. But Mikey can’t bring himself to even think to lie about betraying his family name.

Mikey’s a terrible liar anyway. He doubts Shredder would believe anything he said that wasn’t the truth.

“I’ll pass. I’m a Hamato, through and through. Nothing’s ever going to change that,” Mikey states with a cocky grin. Shredder growls, digging his claws further into the roof on either side of his neck until his knuckles brush the scales on his neck.

“Very well, Hamato Orange. If you insist on claiming the title of Hamato, then you will be exterminated as one.”

Mikey's breath stutters as all of his limbs shoot out of his shell. He tries to leverage his arms between their bodies but the man presses closer until there is no wiggle room, releasing his grip on his plastron and raising his glinting metal blades right above his eyes. The claws around his throat dig into his skin from his thrashing, but those cuts will be nothing if Shredder brings down his other fist.

His thoughts race, trying to figure out a way to get away through the panic and constant stream of ‘I’m going to die’ running through his mind. Mikey already had a brush with death today, why not add another one to the pile? It doesn’t help that he can hear the distant, shrill, and obviously terrified screams of his name.

Just when Mikey thinks that this is the anticlimactic way he joins his ancestors, a harsh, growing rumbling erupts from the Earth. It takes Shredder off guard just enough for Mikey to wiggle his legs between them, pushing off of the man's armored chest, ripping out the blades beside his neck and sending him stumbling to his feet.

Mikey rolls and hops into a shaky defensive crouch, the ground growing more unstable beneath their feet by the second. He manages to chance a glance toward the others to see only the tiger (Tiger Claw, is what Shredder called him) left standing. A glance is all he manages to catch of them before the street below is suddenly erupting with a giant, blue worm-like creature roaring into the sky.

“Goongala!” shouts Casey’s voice from the direction of the worm. Incredulously, Mikey can spot both Casey and April riding on the alien worm's back. A large smile finds a home on his face at how perfect and dramatic the entrance was for him. Before he can shout something to them about how cool they were, Splinter knocks Tiger Claw off of his roof with a well timed strike while he is distracted. He tries in vain to activate his smoking jet-pack, but it quickly fails and the large tiger falls into the jaws on the blue worm.

Mikey winces at Tiger Claw's unfortunate fate as worm food, and then with a glance to the side is brought back to reality where he’s still on a roof with a Shredder now hell-bent on killing him. The man shouts in rage and once again attempts to behead him. He goes to roll out of the way, hoping he’s fast enough, but Shredder never gets close.

Splinter crossed the distance between them faster than Mikey could even comprehend. He intercepts Shredder’s lunge and beats him back, standing protectively in front of him. Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo fall into step right beside him with weapons drawn. Shredder snarls at them all, going to launch another assault when the world starts shaking again as the worm (as well as Casey and April) gets forcibly sucked back into the ground.

While Shredder stumbles, Splinter takes the opportunity to attack. All it takes is one harsh kick to the helmet to discombobulate and a hefty ‘thwack’ to the chest from his tail to send Shredder sailing over the edge of the roof with a deep grunt.

As the ground stops rumbling, the only sounds that fill the air are panting breaths of exhaustion and the distant wailing of city sirens. Mikey takes the moment of peace to relish in the energy he still has from the adrenaline rush and to be thankful that he wasn’t ‘game over'd' by a normal man with anger issues in an old metal suit.

Splinter quickly turns to face him with down-turned ears when it becomes clear no more surprise attacks would be happening. Mikey jolts slightly in surprise when he gently cups his face between his claws, turning his head to look at the small cuts on his neck with a furrowed brow.

“Are you alright, Orange? Did he hurt you anywhere else?” Splinter asks in a strained voice, whispers twitching as he rubs a soft finger under his left eye. Mikey blinks and shakes his head, holding onto Splinter's wrists to absorb the warmth from his palms. The hold is familiar, one his Dad often did when he was feeling particularly sentimental about how much they had grown up without him knowing about it.

“No, I’m okay. I think I’m the one who should be asking if Shredder hurt you,” Mikey says back, still not releasing his grip. Splinter relaxes with a gentle smile on his face, ears perking up from their drooped position.

“I am just fine, and I appreciate the concern. It was you who I was truly worried about when I saw he had you cornered,” Splinter replies.

“Yeah man, that was totally nuts! You were like dodging, and rolling, and then you two just started circling each other and–”

“That’s never happening again,” Raphael says tightly, interrupting Michelangelo’s excited rant to push towards Mikey and give him a harsh flick to the forehead. “You got that through your thick skull?”

“I mean, you never know what could happen in the future. This kind of situation might be doomed to repeat itself over, and over, and over–” Mikey cuts himself off with a tiny yelp as Leonardo lightly gives his head a shove, dislodging Splinter's hands.

“Don’t even think about it,” Leonardo says with a fond shake of his head. He levers Mikey a soft and relieved smile. “But you did handle yourself pretty well considering your injuries. So, y’know, good job. But no one is facing off against Shredder solo again. Ever.”

Mikey nearly glows under the praise, sending a warm smile back. The slowly relaxing atmosphere has him letting out a tired yawn, followed by a pained wince as the pain from his arms becomes the forefront of his attention again.

Splinter catches on immediately. “Come, my sons. Let us go home and regroup with Donatello and your friends. I believe we all deserve a peaceful rest after this ordeal.”

Mikey doesn’t need to be told twice. Without all the action, threats of death, and world domination hanging over their heads for the moment, his body is starting to feel the toll of the day’s less than stellar events. They all drop down to an alley and Splinter swiftly begins to lead the way to the nearest manhole cover, and Mikey can feel himself lagging behind as all the aches, pains, and tingling rushes back into his limbs.

The others are having some sort of conversation ahead of him, but he can only pick out Karai’s name between the sluggish nature of his mind. Leonardo keeps glancing back at him until finally he breaks away from the conversation, leaning in towards his ear with a low and soft voice the others won’t hear. “Do you want me to carry you back?”

Mikey thinks on it for a minute, not wanting to be babied, but as his vision starts to swim and every thought in his head becomes mush, the offer is too tempting. After a pause and a mental ‘screw it, he offered’, Mikey tiredly nods his head. Leonardo gives him a small, knowing grin and crouches down to offer his shell.

He climbs on with heavy limbs, the leader's arms latching around his legs where they loosely wrap around his waist. Mikey’s arms limply drape themselves over his shoulders as his head lolls against the handles of the katanas. With one more check that Mikey’s comfortable Leonardo starts following the others again at a steady pace.

The soothing rock of his walk lulls his eyes to flutter shut. Mikey has an errant thought that he should stay awake so he can interrogate Donatello about what happened with his portal home as soon as possible, but sleep sounds like a much better option right now.

Plus, with his eyes closed, he can pretend that it’s really his Raph that’s carrying him off to sleep in one big, warm turtle pile.

==========

Kraang Prime’s tentacles flare in agitation at the screens displaying the events of the failed enterprise to create reusable energy on Earth-12. They snarl at the screen as the Turtle Who is Not the Regular Turtle rips through their Kraang underlings with little more than a thought.

At least the regular Turtles are worn down after their battles with the mighty Kraang.

This little pest had not been accounted for in their plans. It had been making an unsalvageable mess of the Kraang soldier’s it had come across, and if the powerful display being replayed on the monitors was any indication, it was about to become a much bigger problem for the larger invasion. The floating Kraang underlings milling around Prime flit about nervously as they study the events.

Prime knows what kind of damage mystic power can do. They had made a point when banishing the Barbarians to steer them in the direction of worlds inhabited with those kinds of abilities. As pristine and advanced as their technology may be, and as large as their greater Kraang Empire had grown, it was still no match for the mystic powers flowing through the desolate, junk-filled Outer Rim worlds connected to Dimension X.

“No, no, no!” Prime screeches, slamming a tentacle onto the screen and destroying the image of orange mystic power flowing seamlessly through the Turtle Who is Not the Regular Turtle. “This is not possible!” Prime seethes as their underlings and soldiers shift in their positions, making themselves smaller targets.

Kraang Prime doesn’t want to sink to the level of bringing the Barbarians out of banishment. They were cast out for a reason, their refusal to adapt to their technology hindering Prime’s crusade to expand their empire. The Barbarians were savage, under-evolved, and refused to fall in line with Primes' vision for their expansion. Barbarian’s valued their mysticism and biology over the advancement of technology, something Prime could not have interfering with their plans.

Unfortunately, their involvement seems to have become a necessity if Prime wishes to continue on the path to conquering Earth-12. The Turtle Who is Not the Regular Turtle has, unfortunately, forced Prime’s hand.

“Kraang, send a scout to the Outer Rim,” Prime ordered with a snarl. The two communication Kraang in the room hesitate for a moment, sending each other wary glances before sending up their tentacles in confirmation. Prime lets out an aggravated breath, glaring at the sparking screen stuck on the image of the screaming, golden glowing turtle.

“It appears we have a once in a millennium need for the Barbarians' archaic specialties.”

Chapter Text

Rise

Leo stares hazily into his third cup of cooling peppermint tea. He takes a mechanical sip, emptying the small mug and placing it next to the other two on the table. Sighing, he rubs a sluggish hand across his face and taps on his phone to look at the time. 3:24 am, three cups of tea deep, and yet another sleepless night plagues him.

Not that he’s the only one who’s been suffering from them for the last 2 and a half months. Everyone has been working tirelessly, running themselves ragged until they pass out wherever they happen to be standing. Leo would like to claim that he has been getting the least sleep, but that honor had to go to Donnie, who made and operated his own delivery system for caffeine when Dad had destroyed the coffee machine.

He had only seen his twin with his eyes closed once between the times he emerged from his lab. And Leo was pretty sure it was only because Casey Jr. sedated him…somehow.

None of them were faring well without Mikey, especially now that they were at a complete standstill. There weren't just the sleepless nights, but the heightened tensions, frayed emotions, and endless cycle of blame that passed from one member of their family to another as they thought about all of the mistakes they had made in the beginning. Or, rather, all the mistakes Leo had made.

He was the one who reassured everyone that their little brother was probably just stretching his rebellious muscles. After all, there’s only so long their darling, mostly sweet Mikey could rein in his independence, especially with how he had been getting completely smothered from their coddling. It was well-meaning as he was really stupid to hide those injuries from them for so long, but Leo knew the feeling. It was only a couple months ago he had finally been allowed off of his crutches full time, after all.

Mikey deserved some time away, just for himself. Plus, he had been getting snappier with all of them, and Leo thought that letting him stretch his legs would be good for him.

While Leo completely understood that, the others had a harder time believing it. Regardless, he had persuaded them to leave it for the morning when Mikey got back. Casey Jr. had backed him up, claiming his Master Michelangelo often needed time alone to better keep his emotions under control.

How he wished he had listened to Raph’s big brother instinct just this once when Mikey was still missing in the morning.

Leo started getting nervous when he walked into the kitchen and found no sign of his little brother. Then, after shaking Donnie awake to suggest using his tracker to find out where Miguel had run off to in his newly found teenage angst, everyone turned to utter panic when the tracker was gone.

And, to make it worse, the last known ping had been stationary all night in a desolate alley.

Immediately Leo opened a portal to the location after smacking Raph awake, heart leaping to his throat. His head had gone fuzzy from worry when they saw the mess of metal and wood, obvious signs of a fight. Donnie started scanning the area, noting a severe increase in mystic energy but no sign of Mikey. Leo and Raph started digging through any hiding places they could find anyway.

Slowly their search grew until they were combing the city, filling in everyone they could to be on the lookout and join the search. Despite having everyone, even Draxum, spend the entirety of their day looking for any trace of him, Mikey was nowhere to be found. And no one liked the implication of his tracker simply disappearing. Not disconnected, not ripped out, but completely gone.

Donnie had put those trackers under their skin for a reason. While extremely creepy and invasive, it made sure they could find each other in almost any dangerous circumstance. Leo nearly smacked the gauntlet straight off Donnie’s forearms when he manically theorized what a tracker disappearing could mean.

They had taken to tearing apart the Hidden City after that. Everyone searched high and low for any clues about where Mikey could have gone, the only one being the spike in mystic energy at the trackers last known location. Leo, against the wishes of both Draxum and Dad, had even confronted Big Mama about any sort of meddling she could have had in Mikey’s disappearance. While endlessly infuriating, that had led to nothing new. She promised to keep an eye out for ‘the orange turtley-boo’, but Leo knew her word meant little to nothing.

Things quickly fell apart after an entire week of endless searching through New York and the Hidden City. No new clues, no threats, no ransom note, and no sign of Mikey.

It was after two weeks that Draxum suggested that Mikey might have succumbed to the unstable nature of his mystic powers. That was quickly and viciously shot down after they spat at the goat-man about their little brother's ninpō, he wasn't gone, he was just…really far away. And they needed to find him.

A month into the search Leo nearly had a heart attack when Mikey’s ninpō flickered, and then disappeared. It only lasted a moment before it came back, but that event sent everyone into a new frenzy. Donnie had been coming up with new theories working off of the information Draxum could give him about everything mystic, and after that incident he suggested that it was theoretically possible Mikey had unconsciously made a portal to somewhere, and now he was stuck.

But the only place their little brother had opened a portal to before was there, and Leo refused to believe Mikey was stranded all alone with that monster breathing down his neck.

After a month and a half Dad had finally cracked. He had been as zealous in the search as everyone else, going to every shady corner of New York and the Hidden City he could think of to try and find Mikey. Then, as if a switch flipped, that energy was completely gone. Now, he spent the growing days either sitting listlessly in front of the powered down TV, staring with blurry eyes into Mikey’s train car, or sequestering himself in his room.

Leo could still hear his cries at night, though.

The two month mark was where Raph was gaining cracks, too. He had joined forces with Dad and they had contacted Gram Gram together, but she had no news about where Mikey could be. Leo could have told them that exact same thing, because they knew their little brother wasn’t de–gone. His ninpō was still there (albeit too small and too far away for anyone's comfort), and that meant he was still alive. Maybe not fine, but they could deal with the fallout once they finally got him back.

And then Mikey’s ninpō disappeared for the second time, longer than the last, before it slowly sparked back to life. Shortly after that was when Raph had apparently decided looking for their little brother wasn’t going to be their main priority.

It was unfathomable to Leo that he even suggested taking a break from the search to focus on getting back on their feet. Sure, they were tired, constantly anxious, and may not have been taking the best care of themselves, but that didn’t mean they should stop. As long as Mikey’s ninpō was still kicking, Leo was never going to stop until he had his little brother in his arms and he could smother him to death for giving him a chasm as big as Raph’s

Leo startles as someone steps through the kitchen, turning heavy eyes onto the hesitant form of his older brother. He blinks as Raph’s tail swishes an anxious rhythm on the ground and he fiddles with his claws.

“Uh, you…doing okay in here?” Raph asks quietly, shuffling on his feet and avoiding eye contact. Leo rolls his eyes, humming in confirmation and turning back to the empty mug in his hands. “Well, um, did you want to…talk about anything?”

“Anything I need to talk about can wait until Mikey gets home,” Leo plainly says. He can see Raph stiffen in the corner of his eye but ignores it, even as he lumbers closer. Raph takes a shaky, steadying breath before settling a gentle hand on his shoulder.

“And what if that takes longer than we think?”

“Unlike you, I know it’s going to happen soon. I’m not going to give up just because this hasn’t resolved itself in less than a week like most of our problems do. Mikey never lost hope in me, so there’s no way I’m letting him get away that easily,” he breezily replies, shaking off Raphs hand. Leo goes to stand to make his escape because he really doesn’t have the patience to deal with Raph right now, but he moves to block his path.

“I’m not giving up on him, Leo. I’m trying to make sure I don’t lose any other brothers along the way because they refuse to take care of themselves,” Raph states. Leo raises his unamused gaze to his brother's hard expression, letting loose a scoff of disbelief.

“Says the one who was obviously not sleeping either. When’s the last time you did something other than break all the equipment in the dojo, huh? I can smell the hypocrisy all over you~,” Leo taunts. He can tell Raph is already walking on the edge of a full blown screaming match, much too easy to push to the edge lately.

Good thing that’s exactly what Leo needs right now. He needs someone else to confirm that whatever had happened to Mikey and his mystic powers was Leo’s fault. That his little brother would still be happy and healthy and home if he hadn’t been having trouble with abilities that he was pushed to unlock because of Leo’s dumb choices.

“That’s not the point and you know it,” Raph says in a low voice. “Gram Gram stopped responding to our summons, but we know Mikey is alive. Wherever he is, his heart is still beating. It’s going to be your guys’ hearts that stop working if you keep pushing yourselves like this.”

“Who’s ‘we’ in this situation? Because I don’t think you’re looping yourself into this hole with us, big guy.”

“When’s the last time you’ve seen Donnie? For all I know that doofus has started injecting caffeine right into his arm. April hasn’t been around in an entire week after you snapped at her just for trying to lighten the mood. And Casey Jr. has been MIA ever since you freaked him out when Mikey’s ninpō disappeared, and no one knows where he ran off to. That’s not even getting to how you’ve been looking lately.”

“Wow, way to compliment a guy. You can call me ugly, that would be easier,” Leo snarks, once again moving to sneak around the hulking form of his big brother. Raph simply moves with him, arms crossed tight across his plastron.

“I know you’ve had trouble sleeping since the Invasion, but this is getting completely out of control! Heck, I saw you trying to shove a pillow into the microwave the other night, completely convinced it was leftover pizza! You need sleep, right now,” Raph stated, reaching out to grab Leo.

He quickly side steps away, ignoring the knowing look Raph gives him when he almost stumbles. “I don’t need sleep, I’m fine. I’ll get plenty of rest once Mikey’s home.”

Raph takes a deep steadying breath, slowly unclenching his fists. He lets out a defeated sigh and plops down in Leo’s previous seat, leaning forward to rest his head on the table. The action makes Leo pause in his retreat as he eyes his older brothers slightly shaking shoulders.

“Please listen to me with this, Leo. Raph…Raph’s tired, and…” he trails off into a wet sniff. “...he doesn’t want to fail to protect any of his other brothers.”

Leo purses his lips, his own eyes glistening as he watches the cement wall that is his big brother crumble before him even more. Guilt swirls in his gut, knowing how selfish he’s been thinking lately, but it's hard to break the habit.

With a quiet huff Leo approaches Raph and cautiously wraps his arms around one of his shaking biceps. “Yeah, okay. I’ll try to sleep,” he says softly into his spiky scales.

Raph sniffs, bringing around his other hand to give Leo’s arms a small, thankful squeeze. “Thank you.”

Leo retreats from the kitchen and back to his dark, empty room. He falls onto his bed with a sigh, staring up at the softly glowing star stickers on his ceiling. Mikey had picked them out when he was eleven and said they could decorate his room like space. Leo had been ecstatic and spent the entire day putting them up with his little brother, staring up at the stars like Jupiter Jim did during his adventures.

Yeah, he has a feeling he won’t be able to follow Raph’s directions of getting sleep as thoroughly as he wants.

==========

Leo sleeps a total of three hours while waiting for his alarm to go off. He dips in and out of a hazy place between unconscious and awake, never fully committing to either. But in the end it’ll at least reassure Raph that he wasn’t milling around the lair like he usually does, so it’s not all in vain.

The shrill alarm on his phone knocks any kind of grogginess from him, and he slaps at it with a groan until it shuts off. Leo rubs at the grit in his eyes but they still feel as heavy as usual.

He doesn’t get a chance to try to get up and start his new routine of tea and obsessively checking the tracking app Donnie installed on their phones. Raph is ripping through his curtain the second after his alarm shuts off, making him snap awake. Leo shrieks, rolling to his feet with a katana immediately summoned to his hand and pointed lazily at the equally startled Raph.

“What the hell was that for?! I thought you wanted me to sleep, not take a six-foot dirt nap!” Leo shouts, flailing his weapon through the air. Raph at least has the decency to look sheepish as Leo’s heart stops trying to beat out of his chest.

“Sorry ‘bout that, but I need your help getting into Donnie’s lab,” Raph explains, rubbing the back of his neck. Leo narrows his eyes as Raph’s tail beats against the ground and his room starts to smell like his anxious stink.

“How long were you waiting out there?” Leo drawls, raising a knowing eye ridge when Raph swallows with wide eyes.

“I was just passing by when I heard your alarm I swear–” he pushes out almost too fast for Leo to catch, but rolls his eyes nevertheless. “–and I need one of your portals to get into his lab.”

“You banned me from invading Don’s space with my badass portals, like, two years ago. Why are you going back now? You could always break down the door, I’m sure that will annoy Donnie more since he’ll have to fix it,” Leo says. He flips his katana to lean easily against the handle, watching Raph scramble for an excuse to break his own rules.

“It’s not about annoying him! It’s…I haven’t seen him for way too long, and I know you haven’t either, so I want to make sure he hasn’t hurt himself of somethin’,” Raph mumbles, avoiding Leo’s gaze.

“Mh-hm, sure, bud. But who am I to ignore a request to annoy my dearest twin.” Leo gives his brother a wink and tiny smirk to which Raph shakes his head. He’s only doing this because he has been missing his favorite pastime annoying Donnie, and not because he’s been worried about their resident genius, too. Absolutely not.

Leo brings up his katana and easily slices it through the air, ninpō thrumming through his veins (and lightly trying to brush on Mikey’s but he’s always falling frustratingly short) as a portal appears in front of them.

“After you, big bro,” Leo announces, gesturing to the portal with a flourish. Raph doesn’t acknowledge him as he practically dives into his portal with a single-minded focus. He huffs fondly at Raph’s worry and jumps in right behind him.

The familiar energy of his portals flows over him in a calming rush before he lands in the dimly lit purple of Donnie’s lab. Leo raises an eye ridge at the messy state of it, but he supposes that’s to be expected when his genius brother isn’t feeling like himself. Donnie was practically wild the last time he had seen him looting the cupboards. He had actually hissed at him.

Speaking of hissing, he looks to the side to see Donnie latched onto Raph’s arm with his teeth, eyes narrowed into a glare as his big brother profusely apologizes for barging into the lab. He winces internally at the sight, knowing how painful it is to bite onto those spikes. Donnie must really be out of it. Leo cautiously approaches them as Raph continues rambling and Donnie keeps hissing from where he dangles off the floor.

“Sorry, sorry! I didn't know if you’d passed out or you were dead, you neck was all weird–”

“Alright, alright, break it up,” Leo says, grabbing Donnie’s legs and pulling away from Raph’s arm. Donnie hisses louder and refuses to let go no matter how hard Leo pulls. “Donnie, seriously, stop being a feral kitten!”

That gets Donnie to release his grip, sending him flying straight into Leo as they collapse to the floor. “I am no kitten, ‘Nardo!”

Leo pushes his twin off of him roughly as he scoffs, dusting himself as he rises from the floor and mocks brushing dust off of his shoulders. Donnie follows to glare at him, and it’s then that he really takes in the state of him. Like all of them, dark bags hang under his eyes, but his mask is streaked with oil and stains and his battle shell is looking a little looser around his shoulders than usual. Donnie has always been the leanest of all of them, but Leo knows he makes everything he wears regularly form fitted.

“‘Coulda fooled me with all that hissing, you puss–”

“Language, Leo,” Raph grumbles, cutting him off. “We didn’t come in here to annoy him.”

“Well you two are doing a pretty poor job at whatever you are trying to accomplish, because you can consider me thoroughly annoyed,” Donnie snaps. He turns away from both of them and sharply sits back down in his chair, spinning towards his screens with a flippant wave of his hand. “Now if you would be so kind as to close the door behind you. I’ll lock it when you’re out.”

“Nope, we’re not going anywhere till you choke something down, mi hermano,” Leo says as he leans against the back of his chair. He gets unceremoniously lifted into the air by the lip of his shell with one of Donnie’s spider arms, letting out a yelp as he is thrown towards the door. “C’mon Dee! I can cook you up a scrumptious, tasteless muffin in no time.”

“I only eat Mikey's homemade treats.”

“In that case I can just as easily shove a dry block of ramen down your throat–”

“Would you two knock it off!” Raph erupts. The genuine anger undercutting his tone makes both Leo and Donnie pause, sharing a cautious look before deflating from their verbal sparring. The snapper takes a calming breath before stepping towards Donnie’s chair and spinning it around to show a guilty expression on the softshells face. “But Leo does have a point. When’s the last time you’ve eaten something?”

“Technically, the seeds of the Coffea plant do have a limited amount of caloric value.”

“Something other than coffee?” Raph asks between a sigh, pinching the bridge of his snout. Donnie stays silent as he averts his gaze to the floor with pursed lips. “I know you get absorbed in your work, but you won’t be able to continue doing it if you pass out from starvation.”

“But I’m close, I know I am!” Donnie exclaims hysterically, spinning back around to bring up various screens with a multitude of blueprints and numbers that fly over Leo’s head. “I just need some more data points on how mystic energy affects homeostasis in mutants and yokai, as well as how our ninpō could affect that and possibly throw it off balance! Or vice versa, that is also a theory I’m working on in case this one falls through.”

Leo bites his tongue at the manic glint in Donnie’s eyes as he goes on to ramble about the different ways the mystic energy that Mikey possessed could have thrown something off balance. Normally he’s a fan of when his twin goes slightly off the rails, but this time he simply looks desperate for someone to believe him.

Leo wants to believe him and have faith in Donnie’s abilities, and when there’s tech involved there’s no question who reigns supreme. But all of them are still amateurs when it comes to the ins and outs of how mystic energy works.

Donnie’s rant is interrupted by his screens abruptly turning a bright, flashing red. Leo tenses and fiddles with the handle of his katana as his twin turns back to the screens and quickly types something in. There’s a moment of silence as some kind of code appears on the screen, then Donnie sighs as the flashing stops and he turns back to where Raph is now worryingly hovering over his shoulder.

“No need to worry, dear brothers. It is merely an explosion a few blocks into New Jersey, unfortunately no new updates on the more pressing situation,” Donnie says with a flippant wave of his hand, bringing back the screens that were there before. Leo’s tense stance relaxes incrementally but his hope that it was something to do with Mikey drops like a rock.

At least the explosion is in New Jersey, not somewhere important.

“What explosion? Are people hurt?” Raph asks nervously. Donnie doesn’t turn around as he answers.

“I don’t know, and I don’t particularly care. It doesn’t have to do with Mikey, so it’s not important.”

Raph huffs, crossing his arms and straightening his posture. Leo knows that pose. He groans and slumps down, katana dragging across the floor as he confronts his big brother’s ‘hero’ face.

“Raph, it’s in an area that is literally just empty warehouses. No one with good intentions would have been in that area, anyway. It’s fine, we don’t have to go and check it out,” Leo reasons. He tries to give him a puppy dog face a la Mikey, but he either falls short or is completely ignored as Raph’s hero pose grows bolder.

“No, we should go check it out. All of us could use some fresh air, and what better way to do that than to kick some bad guy butt,” Raph states with a short punch to his hand.

“But it’s in Jersey. When has anything ever gone right when we go there,” Leo whines. He does feel slightly guilty for wanting to ignore an explosion in the city, but there are more important things they could be doing in their search for Mikey. Plus, as he very much wants to reiterate, it’s only New Jersey.

“For once I agree with Leo, it should be none of our concern,” Donnie mutters while continuing to type on his computer. He nods at his twin and gestures towards him, but can’t escape when Raph goes to scruff the both of them by their shells.

“It don’t matter where it is, people could be hurt, and it’s our job to make sure they’re okay,” Raph concludes, striding out of the lab as Leo fights just as hard as Donnie to get out of their big brother's grip without seriously hurting him. “So let’s all take a break and blow off some steam.”

When it becomes clear that Raph has taken control of the situation Leo and Donnie reluctantly agree. Leo wants to simply open a portal and get there as fast as possible to be done with it, but Raph insists they should stretch their legs, instead. Donnie opens his hover shell to spite them all and follows from above as Leo and Raph make their way to the destination on foot.

The only one to talk is Donnie, who mechanically tells them when they need to turn and which way will get them to the site of the explosion the fastest. Leo’s legs feel sluggish the longer they go, the lack of sleep and overexertion from constant training finally catching up to him. When he chances a glance at Raph, he doesn’t seem to be faring much better with the way sweat gathers on his beak.

Leo can’t help but feel a sense of wrongness the longer they run. There’s a tense stillness to the air and he knows it presses down on the others, too. They are still nearly a mile away from the explosion, smoke rising into the night sky, when Leo finally skids to a stop. He rolls his tense shoulders as Raph nearly falls off the roof with how hard he digs his feet in, and Donnie almost flies into a billboard in his haste to stop.

“Are we really doing this?” Leo blurts, starting to pace the roof and avoiding the questioning gaze of his brothers. “Going on a patrol like everything’s supposed to be normal? It doesn’t feel right, and you all know it.”

Raph swallows as he ducks his head, biting his lip. “Yeah, it’s weird, but we still have a job to do. You think Mikey would want us sitting around while there’s danger in the city that we can stop?”

“Well maybe if we weren’t out here on a patrol, acting like nothing’s wrong, then we could go looking for him again and ask him when we get him home. Stop acting like he's dead,” Leo snips, jutting out a hip. “And why are you calling the shots? You said you trusted me to lead, and frankly I don’t think this is a great use of our team's time or resources.”

“I do trust you, Leo. But sometimes you have too thick of a skull to realize you're focusing too hard on only one thing,” Raph shoots right back, brow furrowed. Leo scoffs and slings his katana over his shoulder, sneaking a glance at Donnie where he hovers, silently anxious, between the two of them.

“This thick skull has saved my life from plenty of beatings, thank you very much,” Leo states. He saunters over to the edge of the roof beside Raph, giving him a sideways glare. “My mind isn’t going to give up on Mikey that easily. Not sure why yours is. I know from experience that wherever he is, he hasn’t given up on us finding him, either.”

“I told you, I haven’t given up on him,” Raph growls. He moves to loom over Leo but he simply side-steps away, going to stand near a now fidgeting Donnie who looks like he’d rather be anywhere else but here. That won’t do, he needs to be a part of this ‘family meeting’, too.

“I don’t know, kinda seems like you have. I’m sure Don can see it just as well as I can, can’t you?” Leo asks, startling Donnie out of his own head. He exchanges a wide eyed glance of surprise at both of them before his expression sours.

“I think I see two stubborn brothers who need to get it together so we can get back to the lair already. The longer you two argue, the longer it’s going to be until I can get back to my lab and experiment with my theories.” With that Donnie hovers away, looking over his shoulder expectantly as he heads towards the slowly dwindling smoke.

“That wasn’t a no to my question! I know it’s your pride that’s stopping you from agreeing that Raph’s given up on Mikey!” Leo shouts to him before he flies out of earshot. Donnie flicks him the finger over his shoulder.

“You know I wouldn’t do that, Leo. I have just as much faith and hope in him as you do. I thought you had finally stopped being so selfish and thinking that just because we aren’t doing it your way that we aren’t doing anything at all,” Raph snarls quietly at him before taking off behind Donnie. His entire body is tense as he runs away from where Leo still stands, fuming at his big brother's words.

Leo can readily admit he’s always been self-serving, even in the best of times, but that never stopped him when it came to protecting his family. Even through his many mistakes. That’s the whole reason he locked himself in a different dimension with a murderous alien in the first place, and he had gotten the beating of a lifetime for that decision.

With spite Leo twirls his katana around and slashes through the air. A portal opens in front of him and he steps through easily, coming out the other side on top of a roof overlooking the crumbling building where the explosion happened. Thankfully it seems to be a pretty deserted part of Jersey with dilapidated buildings and empty storefronts, just like he said before. Leo takes a bored look around to see if there are any civilians, but comes up with no other sign of life other than himself.

Great, this really was a huge waste of time. No sign of bad guys, or hurt people, or anything other than the smoldering remains of the building that’s about to collapse.

Leo sits down on the roof with a sigh, swinging a leg back and forth over the edge as he waits for the other’s to catch up. He hums a mindless tune he thinks he heard Mikey singing once, watching the flames light up the area with glazed eyes. Letting out a yawn he stretches and winces as something in his shoulder pops. He may not have let enough time pass in the physical therapy stage of healing before jumping back into large strains of exertion, but to be fair he has more pressing issues than his physical therapy right now.

It’s as he hears Donnie’s jets approach that movement catches his eye below. He tilts his head in the direction and in an instant he’s up on his feet, all previous lackadaisical nature gone as he takes in the forms of the Foot Brute and Foot Lieutenant moving pieces of rubble out of the way.

Leo narrows his eyes at the two as they bicker, trying to figure out if Cass lied to them about their deaths or they had somehow lived even after total Kraangification. He decides it doesn’t matter too much when they wander close enough to his perch to eavesdrop on the conversation.

“I thought we were supposed to be laying low?” Foot Brute mutters, brushing dustings of concrete off of his shoulders.

“Yes, and that wouldn’t have been a problem if you hadn’t chosen the one building in the area that had a gas leak!” The Lieutenant shrieks, glaring up at his partner. Brute frowns and scratches his forehead.

“What does gas have to do with anything?”

The Lieutenant looks as though he is going to explode as he gestures to the little tufts of flame sitting on top of both of their heads. Brute stares blankly for a moment, eyes narrowed, before his mouth drops into a perfect ‘o’ of realization.

Right, Leo’s had enough of the chit-chat between these two. Time to see exactly what they needed to lay low for, other than being zombies back from the dead.

He can see Raph approaching him out of the corner of his eye, mouth open for most likely yet another lecture. Leo doesn’t wait for him as he jumps off the roof and comes to a rolling stop in front of the Foot Clan. The two startle as Leo slaps on a large smirk, striking his katana into the ground and steadily on the handle.

“While it’s quite a nice night for a fire, gentlemen, I think you’ll need a permit for one this big,” Leo drawls, watching in amusement as the two gain fearful looks. Well, they’ve never exactly been intimidated by the Mad Dogz before, so this is quite the welcome change. He feels the ground rumble as Raph jumps down right behind him, standing over Leo like a particularly spiky bodyguard.

The fear in the Foot Clan’s faces only grows as Donnie comes to hover beside them. Leo’s smirk fades a bit, tilting his head curiously. It makes sense that they would be wary of them now, but this amount of fear is…weird, definitely not normal Foot Clan behavior. Especially from these two, who have been a thorn in their side for years.

“Ah, the three annoying turtles! Fancy seeing all of you here, together,” Lieutenant stammers out, widening his stance as if to run. Leo breaks from his slumped posture and shuffles his feet in response, not about to let these guys make a run for it if he can help it.

“Yes, only the three, like it’s always been! There’s never been a fourth, smaller orange turtle that was a part of your group! And if there was, we’d know nothing about where he is,” Brute reiterates with a sharp nod and what Leo thinks is supposed to be a charming smile. It comes out more terrified, than anything.

Leo narrows his eyes as the words echo through his mind, and then before anyone can blink he has the Lieutenant slammed against a brick wall, katana to the throat, as the implications settle in. Unconsciously his third eyelid slides into place as he growls into the face of the quickly paling man in his grasp.

“Where is he?” Leo hisses at him. He hears the Lieutenant swallow dryly, blank yellow eyes blowing wider when Leo presses the edge of his weapon harder into soft skin. “What do you know!?”

He feels Donnie sidle up beside him, a blaster made of his purple ninpō pressing hard against the man's temple. Leo’s heart beats faster in anticipation as the Lieutenant starts to shake. Behind him the Brute gasps for breath, and Leo chances a glance to see Raph kneeling on the Brute’s back while one hand pushes his face into the ground by his neck. Leo feels a lick of satisfaction curl in his chest as the larger man struggles for breath, Raph refusing to budge his grip with an enraged snarl.

“We don’t know what happened!” Lieutenant breathes out. In reward Leo lets up on his sword a bare amount, but Donnie still has his blaster pressed tightly to his temple. His twin hisses lowly into his ear beside him and that triggers more panic. “Suddenly the orange one was freaking out and then he disappeared in a flash of light! We don’t know any more, I swear!”

“What were you doing to him?” Donnie grumbles, the light on his blaster flashing with a sharp whine when the Lieutenant doesn’t immediately blubber an answer.

“More like what he was doing to us! He had us in those glowing chains and, well, we had to try and escape, that’s how you play the game! I merely mentioned Kraang and the turtle was the one who lost his mind! We couldn’t do anything further before he was gone!”

Leo has half a mind to run the Lieutenant through with his blade, right here and now. He’s can clearly imagine Mikey, his bombastic little brother, facing off against these two while they antagonize him into a blind panic, wanting to get away from them as fast as possible–

Jagged puzzle pieces suddenly start to click in his mind. The powerful burst of mystic energy, wanting to get away from any talk of Kraang, and Mikey’s tracker popping out of existence without a trace. Despite not wanting to entertain the possibility of him making another portal, it seems his little brother had done just that.

While the excitement of finally finding a new lead bubbles in his chest, there also comes strings of fear. Where exactly would Mikey end up if he wasn’t thinking clearly when making a portal? The only other place they know of is the Prison Dimension, but that still doesn’t sound right. As much as Leo has faith in his little brother’s abilities, had Mikey portalled there his ninpō would surely have been snuffed out by now.

He knows exactly how bloodthirsty they left Kraang. No one would be able to survive long in the face of it. But with that possibility highly unlikely, and combined with all of the other clues they had, that would mean the only other option left would be–

“Theory 2-37B. I discarded it during week two as without sufficient evidence it was likely to be a dead end,” Donnie breathes out, the glow from his blaster petering out as it dematerializes into purple haze. Leo feels his third eyelid retract as he curiously looks over to his now maniacally grinning brother. “I knew it was possible! Eat your words, Hawking! And my dum-dum brothers, who laughed in my face when I first proposed the idea all those years ago!”

“Guys? Wanna loop Raph in on what you’ve put together?” Raph asks as he gets off a now unconscious Foot Brute. His expression is murderous as he growls at the still shaking Lieutenant under Leo’s blade.

Leo turns back to the man with a steely gaze, pressing his katana harder. “Anything else you wanna get off your chest? This is a safe space, I promise.”

“No! That’s everything that happened! We had nothing more to do with it!” he exclaims, eyeing the point of his sword fearfully. “You can let us go now! We’ll promise not to get in your way again, I swear!”

They all snort at that promise, knowing how unlikely that is to happen. Nevertheless, the Lieutenant has outlived his usefulness to them. “Oh yeah, we’ll let you go. But first…”

==========

Donnie sends out a message in the group chat to gather in the lair as soon as possible. He got a little pushback, but as soon as he said it was for new information on where Mikey was, everyone gave their ETA.

Leo wasted no time in portalling them straight into the main area of the lair, pacing around the space while he tries to get his thoughts in order. Raph was losing his mind on trying to figure out what they had figured out and they had yet to tell him, figuring it would be easier to let everyone in on it at once. Donnie had beelined to his lab and was still rolling out all sorts of maps, conspiracy boards, and equations Leo tried his best to ignore for the moment.

Dad had finally emerged from his room, fur disheveled and smelling particularly ripe as he frantically asked what was going on. Raph had managed to calm him enough to set him in his recliner, but his thin tail was still lashing out wildly, claws nearly ripping into the arms of the chair.

Fiddling with his mask tails Leo takes one look around then glances at the clock to see almost 15 minutes has already passed since sending out the message. With a nod he makes an executive decision. Sliding his other sword out of his sheath he closes his eyes briefly, focusing on the power of his ninpō as it thrums through his weapons. Eyes snapping open he brings down both swords in two different arcs, opening up three portals hovering over the floor.

April is the first to fall, scream still on her lips as she adjusts her glasses and glares at Leo when she realizes what’s happened. He gives her an innocent shrug and in the next moment Draxum is falling through and landing on his face. Leo doesn’t try to force back his cackle at the way he fumes, standing briskly to brush off his robes.

He turns towards the last portal, waiting for Casey Jr. to come swinging through. They hadn’t had quite enough time to break him of the habit of striking anything that moves when startled, so Leo stands ready to parry an attack. Yet, as the portal stays open for longer and longer, nothing falls through. He waits another few seconds, thinking maybe he’s finishing something up wherever he is, before a small piece of paper flutters down right as it is closing. Leo picks it up curiously only to wince at the strongly worded note. Obviously Casey Jr. is still mad, so Leo’s not going to push too hard.

If he doesn’t want to be there for more news on Mikey, then shame on him.

“Thank you for the…expedited transport, Leonardo,” Draxum growls, showing his teeth. April cocks her hip out as she continues to glower at him, fingers tapping a slow rhythm on her crossed arms.

“No problem, sheep man,” Leo responds, walking over to lean against one of Donnie’s many conspiracy white boards. He gets a ruler to the forehead from said brother for it, but the action still made him look cool, so, worth it. “Now, let’s get this Mikey rescue meeting started!”

“What exactly did you find? I was in the middle of destroying some great Chinese take-out,” April grumbles.

“Why, my dear April, we have found out exactly what happened to cause Mikey’s disappearance! And now it’s only a matter of finding out how to reach him!” Leo exclaims, throwing his arms out and practically vibrating in place. He gives them little jazz hands when everyone blankly stares at him, shaking them more aggressively when no one speaks up or expresses their joy.

“Spit it out, then, Blue! All of these dramatics are giving me a headache,” Dad says as he sinks further into his chair. That makes Leo deflate a little bit, but before he can go on and explain with his ‘pizzaz’ Donnie is pushing him face-first to the floor, wheeling one of his whiteboards front and center.

“You see, one of my previous theories was that our dear Miguel unconsciously opened another portal to somewhere not of this world, and that’s why his transmitter wasn’t working. If he was still anywhere on Earth, we would have known about it immediately and been able to track him down. And now we have evidence from the remaining Foot Clan that that’s exactly what happened!” Donnie rambles, pointing to different thumbtacks on his board and paying particular attention to what Leo can only describe as pictures of fans cosplaying them.

“The Foot Clan? I thought those guys were toast, and that Cass has been rebuilding what’s left of it into something better,” April counters, very clearly trying to keep her hopes down.

“That’s what we thought, too, before we ran into those creeps checking out an explosion no one else wanted to go see,” Raph points out, raising a smug eyebrow at them. Leo blows a raspberry at him before leaping up off the floor and slugging his arm over his twin's shoulder.

“Don’t worry, they’re not going to be able to do anything else evil for a while. We gladly took care of it. But they were the last ones to see him, and apparently they were pushing his buttons to the point where he decided to dip, but to some other dimension!” Leo finishes with wide eyes, looking excitedly to the others.

“Hm, if true that’s troubling news,” Draxum rumbles, eyes far away as he rubs a hand through his beard. “There’s no guarantee that he even made it to this other dimension as you’re proposing. He is still highly untrained, and that amount of mystic energy would likely tear his atoms apart without any conduits. Michelangelo likely had no clear destination in mind, either, so it is in the realm of possibility for him to land somewhere that isn’t even close to Earth.” He sighs and shakes his head. “These are all theories, of course. The exploration and idea of a greater multiverse has been banned from experimentation for very good reasons. Everyone who has tried to harness the energy required has either been killed immediately or suffered a long, painful, and terrible death.”

Everyone stares, gobsmacked and in varying states of horror after his speech. Leo feels a brand new spike of fear for his little brother sharply stab his gut. He’s still alive, they know he is, but his ninpō has been uncharacteristically quiet and far away. What if that’s because he’s been poisoned by mystic energy somehow? Could his own body be working against him? Is that why he hasn’t found a way home yet–

Unconsciously Leo reaches towards Mikey’s ninpō. He’s expecting the same far away, distant feeling, and his brain abruptly stops functioning when his little brother's ninpō brushes right back against his, filled with overwhelming joy. His shoulders start to shake as his markings glow brighter, pushing as much desperate energy into their bundle of energy as possible. The others are trying to ask him what’s wrong, but Leo doesn’t hear a word of it as he urges Raph’s and Donine’s ninpō closer so they can feel it for themselves. To make sure Leo isn’t imagining things.

Their energy lets out a little shock, and then they’re just as desperate to reach back for Mikey. It feels like their little brother is practically bouncing off the walls with how eagerly he’s trying to connect back to them, his fiery presence a balm as he flits his presence around.

‘Safe, I’m safe, I’m home’ Mikey seems to be saying, doing his best to envelop them all in a spiritual hug. Leo feels tears come to his eyes and has no doubt his brothers are in the same state when they gather behind him. He doesn’t even care to question how he’s suddenly back, especially if they were right about him being in a different dimension. Evidently, they are all on the same page, as instead of asking they desperately push back–.

‘Where’

Leo’s entire being fills with lighthearted joy and relief as he chokes out a response to the continued panicked voices of the rest of the family who don’t know the miracle that’s unfolding. “Mikey, he’s back,” he whispers, and immediately Draxum, Dad, and April burst into a frenzy, all of their expressions hopeful.

And then his heart immediately drops when instead of more joy and happiness, Mikey’s ninpō suddenly recoils back in pain. His breath catches and Raph chokes behind him. Donnie curses and starts tapping buttons on his gauntlet, no doubt trying to reconnect the tracker to his systems.

Leo’s tries with as much as he has to reach out to Mikey to find out what’s wrong, Raph doing the same, but they can’t get close enough. His bright, fiery presence flails and writhes in agony, and even though they can’t reach him completely they can feel his confusion and fear about what’s happening. The voices of the others bring Raph’s panic to a new high, dragging Leo and Donnie right with him as he leans on them to try and reach past everything and get back to their little brother.

‘Pain? Pain? Why pain who pain where pain–’

There’s too many questions and not enough time to figure out what’s going on with Mikey. Leo goes to raise his katana to slash a portal to somewhere, but hesitates at the last moment. He had been doing this before. Trying to reach Mikey with his portals, like he usually can. Yet no matter how much he focused, meditated, or reached out for his brother's ninpō, his portals did nothing except bring him back to the same alley that started all of this. Leo can’t afford to get people's hopes up by running in blind. He’s learned his lesson about thinking things through, and with Mikey’s life possibly in the crossfire he’s not willing to risk opening a portal to the wrong place. They can’t go on a wild goose chase right now, Mikey needs them.

Mikey’s ninpō grows brighter and even more agitated. Raph once again uses Leo and Donnie’s energy to try and get close, but they all recoil when Mikey rejects them. Leo’s soul is crushed at the vehemence, but there’s no chance he did it on purpose. Based on the amount of agony he’s projecting, Mikey probably thinks everything is a threat.

“Don, hurry it up! He’s getting worse!” Leo snaps towards his twin. He holds his katana at the ready, waiting for the moment Donnie can tell them exactly where Mikey is so they can go and help. Donnie’s face is just as panicked as Leo feels. His fingers shake slightly as he types against his gauntlet, teeth gritted.

“I’m trying as hard as I can! His tracker needs time to reconnect to my network and I’m manually speeding it along–”

‘Hurts, hurts, too much, dying–’

“We don’t have that kind of time!” Raph snarls. He once again tries to bulldoze his way into Mikey energy, relenting only when it becomes clear his ninpō isn’t going to stop lashing out at him. All of their energies glow brighter the longer they try to get close. Leo tries one more time to stick it out, staying close so Mikey knows they haven’t left him, that they haven’t given up, but has to back off once he starts feeling his body grow unreasonably warm and uncomfortable.

“I’m fixing it, I can fix it, I swear–” Donnie mumbles. Leo feels that overwhelming warmth start to leach out of him, shaking it off as much as he can. If his body decides to start getting sick at this exact moment he’ll need to have a serious talk with his immune system.

Leo can almost feel himself pale when Mikey’s ninpō abruptly stops trying to fight them, but the pain is still there. That can’t mean anything good. Especially when the warmth and light is still growing, showing no signs of stopping until it becomes too much for Mikey to handle.

No, Mikey isn’t going to give up. He had never fully given up on anything before, and Leo sure as hell wasn’t about to stand by and do nothing as Mikey gave up on himself.

“Don!” Leo desperately screams, fearful tears budding in his eyes as Mikey’s ninpō starts swirling with grief. He can’t give up, not after all they’ve been through. Not like this.

“I’ve almost–”

‘Sorry.’

‘No.’

“DONNIE!” Leo alongside Raph, raising his sword so they can go. They’re not letting Mikey slip away from them again without a fight. And whenever they figure out who or what is making their little brother hurt, Leo’s holding nothing back until they get what they deserve.

“G-got it! It’s, um–”

Leo knows a tear rolls down his cheek as Mikey’s ninpō gets yanked away. He’s not in reach anymore. It’s still much too bright and warm, and now he’s by himself again.

“Hidden City! Uh, the…Crying Titan!” Donnie grits out, frantically looking towards Leo as he slings his tech bō out and grips it with white knuckles.

No need to tell Leo twice. Immediately he swings the katana down, not bothering to wait for the others as he jumps into the blue just as it’s big enough to fit him. He lands on the harsh, rocky ground of the Crying Titan battlefield, frantically scanning the area and unsheathing his other weapon for threats.

A tiny spark of pink catches his eye to his left, but it’s already gone by the time he whips his head in that direction.

The rest of his family pours out of the portal less than a second behind him. All of them are ready for a fight, but freeze behind Leo’s tense form when nothing looks amiss. Tentatively, Leo reaches through their connection again, and while Mikey’s ninpō is getting dimmer and weaker than he’s ever felt it, he is, once again, completely out of their reach.

The other’s murmured questions and confusion coast over Leo’s rising frustration. His grip on his weapons grows tight, eye twitching as he stares out at the destroyed battlefield.

Mikey was right here. He was here, and in pain, and he was about to give up and now he was gone again before they could even figure out what was causing it. Leo lets out a harsh breath, eyes flitting down to the ground. His heart stutters in his chest as he catches sight of the three-fingered handprint left in the ash and dust beside his right foot. Leo tenses even more when he looks closer and sees that he was obviously dragged away by something, or someone.

That meant Leo could now look forward to beating the offender who dared touch Mikey into the ground once they caught up with them.

With an angered shout Leo chucks a katana through the air where it embeds itself in a rocky pillar. The frantic jumble of a conversation behind him immediately comes to a halt as Leo spins around with fire in his eyes.

“He’s gone,” Leo snarls, staring directly at Donnie’s shocked and guilty expression. “We didn’t make it in time.” His twin flinches, fingers wringing around his tech bō and twitching towards his wrist gauntlet. Donnie slowly hides behind April and brings his gauntlet closer as April glares daggers at him. “Now we’re right back to square one, but don’t worry guys! At least we know that Mikey was in excruciating pain before being taken again! That’s something, right!?”

“Leonardo–”

“Don’t.” Leo points the tip of his remaining katana at his Dad, blinding anger faltering at the sad and disappointed look that is shot his way. “Just…don’t try it right now.”

“Leo,” Raph begins, hesitantly approaching. When Leo doesn’t move, he lays a heavy hand on his shoulder. “We got set back again, that’s all. But…Mikey’s still there. We gotta keep trying, right? That’s what you were getting on my case about before this happened.”

Leo goes to snap something scathing back, because Mikey should have been home with them right now (if only they had been faster) but is interrupted before he can purposefully burn that bridge to a crisp by Donnie harshly clearing his throat.

“We’re not back at square one,” he blandly states, stepping out from behind April and giving Leo a blank stare. Leo cringes. Donnie only shuts his emotions off when something gets to him really badly. Like, almost complete bodily shutdown bad. Leo really messed up. “I’ve picked up an unusual energy signature. It’s not mystic, it’s tech, and it might have been strong enough to be a different kind of portal. The closest thing I can compare it to is what I’ve studied of the leftover Kraang technology.”

Everyone tenses at that statement. If there were somehow more of those aliens and they had made their way back to their home, then that meant bad news for everyone.

“So Mikey did make a portal to the Prison Dimension?!” Raph exclaims. The hand on Leo’s shoulder tightens and then he’s being smashed against his older brother's chest with a yelp. “We can’t let him stay there! Leo, we gotta get him out!”

Raph is panting heavily, slowly increasing his squeezing grip on him. Leo knocks his fist against the snappers plastron as it gets harder and harder to breathe.

“I said that it’s close to Kraang tech, not that it is. This signal is purely technical in nature, and the Kraang technology we know is an amalgamation of perfectly bound biotech. They’re not the same.” Donnie pauses, catching Leo’s eye quickly as he is released from Raph’s hold with a gasp of breath. “I… might be able to replicate the signal with the right resources. I’ll also keep it on a scanner at all times just in case it shows up again. We’d be able to find it as soon as another signal goes live, if it ever does.”

“I will gladly lend my services however I can,” Draxum says, nodding solemnly towards Donnie. His twin nods back, and then turns to stare straight at Leo stonily.

“Attempting to replicate it, however, will take time. I don’t know how long or if it’ll even be possible with the resources we have, but either way it’s not an immediate solution.” Leo purses his lips at Donnie’s statement, guilt eating away at him from snapping about how long it took to get Mikey’s tracker back. He didn’t need to say that so pointedly, but he can’t take back what happened in the heat of the moment.

“Leo, you know we’re all running on fumes as it is,” April says, crossing her arms and giving him a hard look. “This is our first good lead, and it’s best if we all dedicate our time to following it instead of running around aimlessly hoping for another miracle.”

“April is right, my son,” Dad quickly agrees, walking up and lightly placing a clawed hand where Leo still clutches onto his katana. “You are tired. We all need to slow down. This does not mean we are giving up on Michelangelo, but we need to step back and start taking care of ourselves, and each other, again.”

Leo sighs, loosening his grip on his weapon and slumping his shoulders. He sniffs before hastily wiping away the drying tail of tears on his cheeks. They’re right, but that doesn’t mean Leo likes it. In fact, he absolutely hates that they need to slow down. And while they can reiterate that they’re not giving up on Mikey all they want, it sure feels like they will be to him. He can only hope that when they get Mikey back he doesn’t think the same.

“Yeah, I know,” he says softly, getting a pat to the hand from his Dad. “It…sucks, though.”

“Very eloquently put.”

“Shut your trap, Bo Peep,” Leo snips, glaring at where Draxum looks down on him, unimpressed. Raph gives him a little smack to the head for the nickname he knows Draxum hates, but it was worth it. If Mr. Sheepman couldn’t keep a good enough eye on Mikey that he ended up in an alternate dimension, then he’ll put up with as many nicknames as Leo throws at him.

“How about we all head home for now? That way we can all take a rest before we help Purple get to work in whatever way we can,” Dad suggests. The rest nod and look to Leo, waiting for him to open another portal home.

With a flick of his wrist he summons the katana lodged in the pillar back to him, rolling his neck. He slashes open a portal and watches everyone file through. Donnie hangs back with him as Leo looks back down at the handprint left in the dust, heart clenching when he tries to reach for Mikey’s ninpō again and it remains as far away as before, and still frighteningly small.

Donnie flicking his forehead brings him out of his thoughts. He glares at his twin's inscrutable expression, but softens when Donnie’s eyes start to water as he bites his lip.

“Y’know, I may need to run some experiments on your portaling abilities to get more hypotheses on how this all works. For science. And…and for Mikey.”

Leo takes a breath. Looking back over the scene one last time, he steps through his portal with Donnie right on his heels, a new feeling of determination flooding his being.

They’ll get Mikey back, no matter what needs to be done.

“Stick and poke me as much as you want, my dear brother. I’ll be the best and brightest lab rat you’ve ever seen!”

“I believe that title goes to the actual rat, although I hesitate to call him ‘bright’.”

"Draxum!”

Chapter Text

Mikey doesn’t remember getting back to the lair. He knows he dozed on and off the entire way back as he rode on Leonardo’s shell, but he must have been really out of it if he didn’t even notice being left on the couch.

He fights back a yawn as he stretches, immediately wincing when every part of his body screams in protest. Moving feels like dragging weights when he reaches up to wipe the grogginess from his face. His hands are gently grabbed before he makes contact, and even that small pressure has him grimacing from the lighting-like pain. He whimpers as his arms are carefully placed back by his side.

“Sorry, but you're not supposed to put pressure on those until Donnie’s done making sure there’s no permanent damage,” Raphael whispers somewhere above him. “Or at least more than there already was.”

Mikey groans and peels his eyes open, trying his best to blink away the grit in his eyes. The blurry form of Raphael hovers above him as his eyelids flutter. He grimaces seeing the other turtle's inscrutable expression, wrinkling his snout when he feels how dry and tacky his skin has gotten. Before he can say anything about it Raphael ducks away from view, only to reappear a moment later with a wet hand towel.

He flinches as Raphael brings the rag to his face and gently starts wiping around his eyes, realizing for the first time that someone had taken his mask off at some point. Closing his left eye as the other turtle runs the towel over it, Mikey cranes his neck as much as he can to see his arms have been rewrapped in new, clean bandages. Raphael pushes his head back down and rubs slightly harder over the bridge of his snout. Sending a small glare his way, Mikey can’t make out anything other than annoyance in Raphael’s tight expression.

Well, no one asked him to help Mikey clean his face. He was 15, and while it might hurt like hell to do it with how his hands are he’d still manage if push came to shove.

“So, does this mean you finally like me?” Mikey teases, voice hoarse. Raphael raises an unamused brow and promptly drops the wet towel over both of his eyes.

“You wish,” Raphael tartly replies. He doesn’t move and neither does Mikey, now blinded from the cold seeping into his eyes. Admittedly, it does feel nice compared to the feverish heat under his skin. After a drawn out sigh Raphael picks the cloth back up and moves out of his view with a grumble.

Mikey rolls his shoulders as much as he can before attempting to sit up. His muscles are extremely stiff and it’s more of an effort than he would prefer, especially with the way every nerve ending in his body seems to be shot. Cradling his arms to his chest he tries to flex his fingers, but immediately stops with a hiss when shooting pain travels up his entire arm at the action. Mikey takes a deep breath, centering himself as he follows the scars peeking out from the bandages all the way to where they disappear into the top of his shell.

He blinks away the beginnings of tears seeing the spread of damage. Mikey has to swallow down the ever growing dark pit in his chest as those scars sear themselves into his eyes. Remembering exactly how they appeared makes his heart ache even more.

They were there. Leo’s portal had opened, and Mikey had no doubt that they were a second from jumping through and finally finding him. They could have brought him home, figured out why he was hurting so much and fixed it. But instead he was still stuck here, in a dimension that already had one of him and a complete version of his family.

Why hadn’t they just left him there? And why would Casey break the one thing that would have easily brought him back? Mikey could be home right now. Whether that be in his last moments of life or in recovery from whatever had been happening didn’t matter, because he would be with his family again.

“Hey, uh, you alright, dude? I don’t think the TV could have insulted you that much,” Michelangelo announces, sitting down lightly beside him on the couch. Mikey blinks, realizes his face is pulled into an unappealing snarl, and tries his best to smooth it out. Based on the wary look his alternate is giving him, his attempt doesn’t work as well as he hopes.

“I’m okay for now. Casey, however, is going to get a real piece of Dr. Delicate Touch when I see him next,” Mikey grits out. He tries to keep his gaze firmly on the blank TV screen in front of him, but he can see the worry and concern coloring Michelangelo’s face in the reflection. Mikey looks back to his own closed off expression and it’s in that moment that he catches sight of his left eye.

That’s definitely gray. His right eye is very clearly the brown he’s intimately familiar with, but the left almost looks…empty. Like all the color had been leached out of the iris. How long had it been like that? Why didn’t anyone tell him before? Is that why they’ve been giving him weird looks?

“I guess it’s a good thing Casey and April already went home, then. Don’t want you going all murdery on him,” he says with a forced laugh, nudging Mikey in the shoulder. It takes all of his power not to flinch, both at the implication, the color drained from his eye, and the painful touch. Mikey merely hums noncommittally through clenched teeth.

He wants to appreciate Michelangelo’s attempts to lighten the mood, but nothing short of Donatello magically having repaired the portaling device home could get rid of the grief hanging over him. His entire mind feels more drab and gray than it ever has and for once Mikey can’t find the will to clear it. Not even the reminder of Dr. Positive’s plan of ‘positivity’ is enough to make an effort to respond to Michelangelo. At least his eye matches his mood.

Mikey gazes blankly at his alternate in the reflection of the TV with dropping, tired eyes. He sighs heavily when Michelangelo begins to squirm beside him, looking at everything but Mikey as the silence grows.

“Did you, uh, want to borrow one of my masks? Yours is in the wash right now, but you can have it back as soon as it gets done?” Michelangelo hesitantly offers when the silence becomes too much for him. Mikey blinks, holding back the shiver as the lifelessness of his left eye is once again made apparent.

“No,” Mikey answers shortly. “What happened to my eye?”

Michelangelo’s eyes go wide and flash with hurt at the curt, blunt tone. He wants to feel bad, but everything is being drowned out by the cold cavern inside that is supposed to be where his family lives. For the first time in years, Mikey can’t think about anything other than the bad feelings in his mind and body.

That’s not a good sign. He needs to find an emotion to fill that void and quickly.

“Yeah, that. Um, I think it started happening after you got back to the lair. Your eye was looking a little blank before we went to the Foot Clan base, but I just thought it was shock or something. Afterwards it only got worse until…” Michelangelo trails, helplessly gesturing towards his eye.

Mikey feels a spark of anger in the space between his ribs and desperately latches onto it, letting it control his thoughts for the moment. It’s better than nothingness, at least. And certainly easier to manage than the rising anxiety.

“And no one thought to tell me about it? What if I knew what it meant?” Mikey snaps. His alternates eyes grow wider at the vitriol in his tone but Mikey can’t see past the rage that he’s nurturing into a steadily growing fire.

“We didn’t even know if it was really happening until we got back home! There would be no point in freakin’ you out if it really was just, I don’t know, a light trick or something,” Michelangelo whines, putting up his hands and leaning away from him. Mikey glares, about to give him more of a piece of his mind because he’s desperate to stay out of that pit of emotional void, but he’s stopped before he can start by the quiet squeak of the lab’s door opening.

Donatello cautiously peeks his head out, eyeing the two with suspicion. “Not sorry to interrupt, but if Orange is awake then I need him in the lab immediately. I’d rather find out if there are any more side effects of his jump sooner rather than later. I also need to do some tests to figure out why going back to his home dimension created that reaction–”

“Coming,” Mikey shortly says. He tries to leap off the couch but ends up stumbling instead. Michelangelo hovers immediately behind him, hands out as if ready to catch him. Giving him a stony glare Mikey continues in an ambling gait towards the lab, only hesitating in the threshold when he catches sight of Donatello’s hands.

They look better than when he last saw them. The discoloration only appears on his fingertips, as if he had been fiddling around with soot and stained them gray. Guilt from before starts to fade a bit as Donatello moves past him and further into the lab, using his hands freely and with no sign of pain or restriction. Hopefully that means Mikey didn’t hurt him permanently. He knows exactly how frustrating being limited like that can be, and it would have been even worse for the other turtle with all of his experiments and equipment he builds.

Mikey creeps further inside the lab, eyeing Raphael leaning casually on the far wall and Leonardo sitting pensively at the table as he stares blankly at the many idling screens.

“Sit here, and I’ll get you all set up,” Doantello says, gesturing to the same place he had done all of the tests before, when he had first been taken to the lair. Mikey gingerly lowers himself onto the seat and waits as patiently as he can as the other turtle types rapidly on his keyboard. No one speaks as Donatello finishes his preparations on the computer and finally goes to stick the probes onto Mikey’s scales.

He winces as Donatello gingerly unwraps the bandages on his arms, muttering a ‘sorry’ as he sticks one of the pads onto his forearm. With a final probe stuck on, he turns back to his computer and presses a single key before turning a grim expression to Mikey.

“Okay, this’ll be just like last time, but with a few adjustments. We’re going to try your ninpō first to make sure that it hasn't been damaged in any way. I should also be able to use the disrupted radio waves from your phone to pinpoint exactly what kind of readings you were giving off when you made the jump,” Donatello explains. He gives Mikey a small, encouraging smile. “Whenever you’re ready, then.”

Mikey swallows dryly. He’s hesitant to reach for his ninpō again so soon after what happened. But, he knows this is the only way to figure out what went wrong so he can fix it and go back home. With one more deep breath he cautiously reaches to his ninpō, nearly backing out when it’s noticeably dimmer. Mikey feels his mouth twitch down into an unconscious frown as he latches onto his power and slowly brings it to the surface.

His kusari fundo briefly flickers into his awaiting hands, and it’s less of a solid object and more like a hologram. Mikey can barely feel it where it touches his skin. Before long he’s dropping the projection and pushes back the fearful tears welling in his eyes. It’s even harder to summon them now and his ninpō isn’t supposed to be that…weak.

“Good, that should be enough for me to work off of. And while it does seem more dim than previous tests, there aren't any lasting worries that I can see,” Donatello reassures as he rapidly types. A small rainbow graph appears on the screen like last time, displaying the date and popping up right next to the first graph he made. That lingering fear starts to come to the surface again when the most recent reading is visibly less colorful than the first. The other three lines of energy on the graph are noticeably missing this time, too.

Donatello stops typing and cautiously faces Mikey. Out of the corner of his eye he can see Raphael come closer and lean on the table next to Leonardo and Michelangelo.

“Now it’s time for those mystic powers. I don’t need a lot, only as much as you can manage without hurting yourself further,” the other turtle gently explains. Raphael visibly tenses where he leans, and Leonardo straightens in his seat. Michelangelo gives him a small, encouraging smile that he has to quickly look away from.

Mikey relaxes as much as he can into the chair, rolling his shoulders with a huff. He closes his eyes tightly and, as quickly as he can, tries to summon his mystic powers to the surface. It’ll be better to get this part over with as fast as possible. And with as little power as possible. For a moment, he thinks nothing is happening, and then with a sharp flare of heat his scars quickly flicker with dim light. Mikey holds it for as long as he can before the pain becomes too much and he drops his concentration.

Taking a couple deep breaths, he peels his eyes open only to come face to face with Donatello’s curious expression. “Fascinating. Did you feel any disturbance in your left eye when your powers activated?”

Mikey frowns, bringing up a still stinging hand to brush against his left eyelid. “No, why?”

“It was glowing the same color as your scars behind your eyelid. But it didn’t happen with your ninpō, only your mystic powers. I wonder what that means…” Donatello trails, once more turning back to his screen and inputting different sequences into the keyboard. Leonardo’s lips twist in displeasure on the side of his vision as Mikey’s brow furrows in thought.

He opens his mouth to question Donatello on whatever he’s thinking but is cut off when said turtle thrusts an impatient hand in his face. “Phone. Now,” he orders shortly, flexing his fingers as if that’ll make the phone appear faster.

Mikey rolls his eyes but nevertheless reaches into the top of his shell for his phone, wincing as he lightly grabs it and hands it to Donatello who snatches it as soon as it’s in reach. Immediately he plugs it into his system and continues to type. No one speaks as Donatello works, leaving Mikey to stew inside his head.

He doesn’t really want to do that right now. Not until he knows exactly what’s happened to him.

Despite the pain, Mikey nervously taps his fingers against his thighs. He chews his bottom lip between his teeth and rubs it raw as Donatello continues his typing. The longer the other turtle works in the thick silence, the more the anxiety rises for not having an answer for his troubles. Does it usually take this long? Was it like this the last time he was hooked up to the computer?

Mikey idly starts to hum along to a random song to alleviate the tightness growing in his gut when something red flashes across the screen. He glances toward it with tense shoulders, anxiety spiking when he spots the way Donatello’s face falls. The others shuffle out of view, Mikey not taking his eyes off of the other turtle as he hesitantly starts typing at the computer again.

“That…can’t be right. There must have been a variable that was wrong…” Donatello murmurs hurriedly. Mikey’s eyes flit between the growing panic on the other's face and the lines of what look like gibberish flowing across the screen.

“What is it, Don?” Raphael asks for him, approaching him with a tight expression. Donatello doesn’t acknowledge through his concentration.

Mikey swallows dryly, the panic and fear growing the longer Donatello types and the deeper his frown dips. That feeling only digs deeper into his gut when the screen flashes red once again. Donatello’s hands turn into fists as he stares angrily at the bright notification.

“What’s going on?” Mikey desperately asks when Donatello hangs his head with a loud swallow. His eyes are wide as he glances at Mikey, flitting about his face before glancing back up at the screen with a wince. “Well, tell me!”

“Yeah, you’re kinda weirding me out, too,” Michelangelo meekly voices behind him. Donatello freezes for a moment before shaking his head, about to go back to his keyboard before hesitating. He stares at the red with pursed lips.

“I must have typed it wrong again. Just one more time–”

“Donnie, tell us what you found. Now,” Leonardo orders. He goes to stand behind his brother, looking up at what must be the results of his tests with a worried tilt to his head.

Mikey feels faint when Donatello straightens with a small growl, glaring at the keyboard. “This isn’t supposed to happen! This…this complicates things to an astronomical degree–”

“We’re not mind readers, Donnie! Spit it out already!” Raphael exasperatedly yells. The panic spikes to a new high when Donatello rears around and looks about ready to break Raphael to pieces.

“I am trying to figure out how to word this, Raph! It’s not something I can just say as if it’s a casual conversation!”

“What is it?” Mikey hesitantly asks, looking worriedly between the three of them. Donatello scrunches his eyes tight and releases the tension in his body with a sigh, collapsing back into the rolling chair behind him. He rubs a hand over his face, groaning and briefly turning back to the screen before facing Mikey with a defeated expression.

“Do you remember those first tests? Where it was concluded that it was our dimension that was keeping your powers behind some sort of wall?” Donatello begins. Mikey hesitantly nods, remembering that conversation vividly. “As it turns out, the lack of mystic energy in our dimension, which I thought was the problem, is the thing that kept you alive when you first portaled here.”

Mikey swallows as that sinks in. So he would have been dead if he teleported to a dimension that also had mystic energy? That meant he was lucky to have ended up here, right? Why was Donatello saying that like it was a bad thing?

The other turtle must have seen the confusion as he solemnly continued. “When you first made the portal to our dimension, I believe you used up all the mystic stores that you had saved in your body and then some. That’s why you’re having such trouble accessing your mystic powers here, even though they’re an intrinsic part of you. You essentially had to start back at zero building up your mystic energy, and since that doesn’t exist here, when you’ve been attempting to draw on that power it’s been trying to use the next best thing it can find–your ninpō.”

The information slightly goes over Mikey’s head, but he thinks he’s got the gist of it, and not a ton of it is new. Yes, he’s having trouble with his mystic powers. Yes, it’s been harder accessing it since he’s been in this dimension. What’s Donatello trying to work towards, here?

Donatello takes the silence with a frown, rubbing a hand on his chin in contemplation. “Hm, I suppose I’m not explaining the main issue quite right.” Then, as if a lightbulb went off, he perks up and looks to Mikey with wide, excited eyes. “Okay, okay. I think I’ve got it.”

Mikey feels his alternate hover beside him as Donatello springs up and drags a whiteboard in front of them all. He draws two wavy, parallel lines with the space between them hastily colored in before turning to face them.

“So, imagine this is a river,” Donatello begins. “And this river represents your mystic power. And all of the nature around that river–” he quickly draws stick trees and flowers. “–is your physical body. The river is sourced naturally by the environment, but can be greatly affected by outside sources.”

Mikey nods along, actually following Donatello’s train of thought for once. That in itself makes the anxiety worse, as from his experience when a Donatello makes something extremely easy to understand, it must be very dire information.

“The river has natural fluctuations based on how the nature around it uses resources. If nothing uses the river for long, then the water level, or your mystic energy, increases, but not enough to cause any real harm. The same thing happens if the nature around the river uses more energy than usual, and the river’s water level will decrease. Either way, both of those scenarios are natural and it’s likely that’s how your body has been keeping homeostasis your entire life.” Donatello pauses with a contemplative hum as he taps the end of the marker against his chin.

“Your ninpō, on the other hand, is more like a well that is fed by the river,” he continues, drawing a crude well off to the side. “The well exists by itself, but since it’s still connected any major changes with the river will affect the well, too. Those tiny changes made from the unconscious control of homeostasis wouldn’t make much difference to the power and abilities of your ninpō. Are you still following?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” Raphael drones. Mikey nods as well, eyes locked onto the diagram being made before him. While he still hasn’t connected whatever dots Donatellos has, the tightness in his gut reaches new heights at the foreboding air falling over the room.

“Okay. So, the river is your mystic powers, nature is your body as a whole, and the well is your ninpō. Everything exists together and works with each other to keep balance, but then something–” Donatello side eyes him. “–which I am going to assume was the first time you tried to use your mystic powers on a large scale, throws everything off.”

Mikey watches with a growing frown as Donatello erases a part of the river until only a sliver of it is left. “My best hypothesis is that nature, acting as your body, absorbed too much mystic energy than it could handle. But, based on the readings I was able to gather from your home dimension, there was no time to feel the effects of such a drought since the very atmosphere of your home is chock full of mystic energy you could draw on to replenish that river.”

Donatello makes the river larger again, bigger than it was last time. “After that first usage of mystic power, the river attempted to go back to normal, but your body tried to overcompensate. It absorbed much more mystic energy than it was used to in order to keep powering whatever you were trying to do with it, and those levels were still above normal. That’s likely a reason you were having trouble with it even before you ended up in our world, even if you weren’t actively drawing on it.”

“But my ninpō–the well–wasn’t affected by that, right? Why is it all wacky now?” Mikey asks. At least he has an explanation on exactly why his mystic powers were still giving him trouble back home. Draxum and Donnie hadn’t explained any more than ‘you pushed yourself too hard’. Which, now that he thinks about it, might have meant they knew exactly what was wrong but didn’t tell him.

And if that was the case, it better not have been because they didn’t think Mikey could handle that information. If it was, they were both going to get yet another lecture when he got back home.

“No, your ninpō wasn’t affected too badly by that first usage. The jump to our dimension, however, may have…weakened it. And because our dimension doesn’t have any mystic like yours does, it’s been stuck at that weakened level. There may be something else affecting it as well, but that’s just a side theory that I don’t have much evidence for,” Donatello continues with a wave of his hand.

“The big problem comes from what happened when you went back to your dimension.” Mikey perks up at that, blocking everything else out as the other turtle turns back to the whiteboard. “Our dimension was keeping your mystic levels, aka the river, in a drought from when you first arrived here. When you stepped back to your home, that barrier was removed and the mystic energy in the atmosphere flooded your body. It was too much for you to handle and the river experienced a flash flood, wrecking nature and spilling into the well so much it started to overflow past its limits.”

The previous jitters Donatello had when explaining abruptly stops as he quickly scribbles all over the board, destroying everything on it. Mikey feels his eyes go slightly blurry when he turns a grief filled expression towards him. He avoids meeting his eyes, fiddling with the marker in his grip.

“It stopped destroying things when I got you out of your home dimension, but it only started to get better when you expelled as much mystic energy as you could. Now everything’s at even lower levels than when you first appeared here.” Mikey stares hard at Donatello as he stops, pursing his lips with a deep breath.

“That is to say, if you go back to your dimension with your current mystic energy levels, you’ll die within a minute,” he finally grits out, voice strained and soft. Mikey’s ears start to ring as he hurriedly continues. “But there’s still a chance to get you home! Based on my calculations your mystic can slowly feed on your ninpō, and eventually it should level out enough that you won’t be in immediate danger going back to your dimension! Problem temporarily fixed!”

He stares blankly at the ground, distantly aware of the others waiting for his reaction. But, really, he just wants to know one thing.

“How long would that take?”

“...about seven years, if we make sure your ninpō isn’t permanently damaged by the process.”

Mikey swallows, letting out a nervous laugh as something drops in his gut. “You’re joking, right? ‘Cause…that’s not very funny.”

Donatello purses his lips and averts his gaze. Immediately Mikey is shaking his head, screwing his eyes shut. No, he can’t be away for that long, he needs to go home. He needs his world, and he needs his family. And Mikey knows that they need him, too. Everyone would definitely think he was dead by then.

Mikey doesn’t know if he’d be able to survive that long without them, either.

Everyone is jumping onto Donatello with their own exclamations but Mikey can’t focus on anything but the steadily increasing ringing. His vision fills with fuzz and he can feel his mind retreating, that void in his chest taking over. Mikey thinks he’s shaking, and that might be Michelangelo murmuring softly beside him, but none of that really matters.

He can’t be stuck here for seven years. That’s not something that’s going to happen.

Mikey doesn’t want to be stuck in this cold void of emotion anymore. Slowly, he picks through the other things that are hovering on the edge of the shock. Pushing away the mounting fear, and grief, and sorrow, Mikey allows the dim spark of anger take over. Yeah, that’s the easier emotion to deal with, and he won’t have to try and explain that to the others.

He ignores the pain as his hands inch their way into fists. Mikey lets out a harsh breath, vision becoming sharper.

Why did he have to have these powers in the first place? He didn’t ask for them, and he sure as hell isn’t happy about where they’ve gotten him. Why was it so unfair? Why couldn’t he get the happy ending they had fought so hard for? It was all because of his mystic powers, if he didn’t have them then none of this–

Mikey abruptly straightens and hardens his expression to lock eyes with Donatello. Red seeps into the corners of his vision as his breathing deepens.

“Then get rid of them,” he orders. All talk around him stops at his harsh tone, and Donatello is obviously wary as he continues. “My mystic powers are causing all the problems, right? So get rid of them.”

As soon as the words leave his mouth Donatello is frantically shaking his head. “No way, that’s not an option. Even if I knew where to start doing that, the harm it could cause to you–”

“I don’t care if I get hurt!” Mikey snaps. Donatello reels back. “These powers are ruining my life, and I want them gone!”

Leonardo cautiously moves to stand in front of his brother, hands raised. Mikey glares through him at where Donatello still stands shell-shocked. “Orange, I think what Donnie is implying is that it could kill you to try and get rid of them.”

“And I’m implying that I don’t care! That’s a risk I’m willing to take if it gets me home faster,” he shoots back. Mikey’s breathing picks up and he shoots to his feet to meet the leader's slack jawed stare. “I’m not waiting seven years to see my family again, even if I only see them for a second before...before dying. That would be enough for me.”

“Are you out of your gourd?!” Donatello finally exclaims, pushing past Leonardo with just as fierce of an expression as Mikey. Michelangelo swallows nervously from where he still hovers beside him when the other turtle jabs a harsh finger into his plastron. “Why on Earth would I get rid of your mystic powers when there’s a chance it would kill you?! What’s wrong with you!?”

“What’s wrong with me?” Mikey incredulously asks, letting out a harsh laugh in Donatello’s face. “What’s wrong is that I’m stuck in this stupid world, with your stupid family, and I have a solution to go home and none of you are taking it seriously!”

“Who would take what you’re asking seriously, Orange!?” Raphael chimes in, righteous anger clear on his face. “You’re basically telling Donnie it’s fine to kill you!”

Mikey scoffs, stepping away from Donatello to whirl his white hot anger onto Raphael. “Why do you even care if I live or die?! You’ve never liked me in the first place!” he screams. The only thing he manages to catch is Raphael’s shoulders dropping in disbelief before his vision is filled with Leoanrdo’s plastron as he steps into his line of sight.

“That’s enough, Orange!” the leader orders. Mikey continues the stare down, refusing to back off even when he starts to loom over him. “No one’s getting rid of your mystic powers, and that’s final.”

He seethes as he continues his staredown with Leonardo, neither breaking the lock. None of them understand the void he feels being away from his family, away from his home. They don’t know just how much of a burden these powers have laid on his shoulders. If they did, they'd be as desperate as he is to get rid of them, willing to do whatever it takes to get back where he belongs. Even if it means going back knowing it’ll be the last minute of his life. Anything to see his family again.

“Fine,” Mikey grits out, still locked eyes with a stiff Leonardo. Michelangelo lays a cautious hand on his shoulder that he shrugs out of, not even looking at him. “Don’t try it, ‘Angelo.”

“Dudes, I think we should all take a second and try to chill out–”

“Shut up, man!” Mikey shrieks, finally whirling around as Michelanelo shrinks into himself. “God, am I always this dense, too? It’s obviously not the time for an emotional intervention!” He ignores the hurt tears gathering in his alternates eyes as he rounds back onto a still glaring Donatello. “So you won’t get rid of my powers, whatever. Dumb, but whatever. Just fix the portal device and I’ll be outta your hair that way.”

“Did you miss the part where going back right now will kill you almost instantly?!” Leonardo exclaims, pulling on his mask tails over his shoulder in agitation. Mikey doesn’t answer him, keeping his eyes on Donatello as he nervously fidgets with the device he has yet to remove from his belt.

It falls silent as everyone turns to Donatello, waiting for his response. Mikey’s arms twitch from the tension he’s holding in them and he fights back a wince at the new throbbing starting in his fingers where they still curl into fists. He’s a second away from snapping at Donatello again when he straightens with a determined expression and meets Mikey’s heated stare head on.

“No,” is all he says, but it’s enough to momentarily break Mikey out of his angered spiral. “I’m not going to fix it.”

“But…you promised you would!” he yells, trying to bring back the anger since that’s easy to deal with but only coming up with the growing sorrow. His eyes fill with frustrated tears and he fights to keep them from falling. “You have to!”

“I don’t have to do anything, actually,” comes Donatello’s smarmy reply, accompanied by an ugly sneer. “I’m not going to fix it only for you to go behind our backs to kill yourself on your suicide mission. I’m not stupid.”

Mikey’s breath starts to come faster as the only other hope for quickly getting back to his dimension fizzles away. His body starts shaking even more when the realization that he really is stuck here digs its claws further into his mind.

He can’t fix that machine by himself. He needs Donatello to do it, and if he won’t then Mikey doesn’t know who else could.

No, there has to be something else he can do, something else he can find. There’s no way he has to sit and wait to get home. There’s a way to get back home somewhere else and he’ll have to go out and find it, no matter how much his mind is telling him that’s way past hopeful thinking. Mikey is capable enough, and smart enough, and strong enough, he’ll find some other way, because he’s not going to be stuck here with this facade of family and low-budget Kraan–

His throat closes on a sob as he wrenches himself out of his thoughts. Leonardo is in front of him, arms outstretched in concern with Michelangelo and Donatello right beside him. Raphael hovers near the doorway, eyes still unfocused from the earlier comment aimed towards him.

They’re trying to say something, but through the noise in his head it’s nothing more than distant murmurs. Everything is too loud, and too much, he has to get out. He has to get away so they don’t see when he inevitably breaks. Stumbling back he hugs himself with a wince, blearily feeling the tears that had started falling some time ago.

Michelangelo tries to reach out to him, but he bolts before he gets close enough to touch.

Mikey sucks in choking breaths as he stumbles as fast as he can towards the door to the lab. The others call out for him but he ignores whatever they’re saying, focused solely on getting out of the lab, out of the lair, before his entire being shatters into nothing more than grief filled shards.

He’s stopped at the threshold by Raphael moving in front of the door, expression returned to annoyed. “Where do you think–”

“Away,” Mikey desperately gasps before ducking past Raphael, who makes no more moves to stop him. In fact, as he drags himself as fast as he can to one of the lair exits, no one seems to be following him.

Good. They shouldn’t follow him, anyway, not after what he said to them. All his harsh words flow back to him in a rush and he fights back a sob when he realizes how horrible he acted. Mikey was supposed to be the feelings guy, but now those were completely out of his control, too.

First his home gets taken away, along with his family, and now his whole schtick is gone, too? What else does he have left?

As soon as Mikey passes the threshold of the exit a sob lets itself out, echoing in the tunnels. He really hopes the others couldn’t hear that from the lab. He stumbles further into the sewers and away from the people he had hurt in his anger. They were only trying to help, and in the back of his mind he knows that. But why couldn’t they just let him go home as fast as possible–he was already away from his family for too long–hell with the way he had treated them he wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t want try anymore–

Mikey doesn’t even know where he’s going. He stops his shuffle and sniffs, looking between two crossroads with blurry, tear-filled vision. It takes almost an entire minute of blankly staring at the two paths before he realizes where he is, and the closest safe place where he can be alone.

Sharply turning down the right tunnel he ambles on, trying his best to bite back his sobs until he reaches the chamber at the far end of the tunnel. With heaving breaths he lurches inside, the old graffiti and paint tests he made on the walls of his previous base blurring together in a dark miasma of colors. He takes a quick look to make sure no unwanted guests crashed his space before lightly hopping onto the small ledge above the entrance where his bed used to reside.

Mikey sits there in silence for a moment, legs dangling limply off the edge of his ‘bed’, before promptly bursting in heaving sobs. He scoots back until his shell hits concrete, hands shaking as he looks down at the bandages and the scars littering his scales. Without thinking he jams his palms into his eyes, rubbing them until he has to lower his hands with a whimper at the way his scars flare with pain.

He realizes in the back of his mind he never grabbed his mask. And his phone is still in Donatello’s lab, hooked up to that stupid computer. His last little bits of home and he didn’t even think to grab them. And now he’s right back where he started; alone, angry, scared, and with no clue on what he’s supposed to do next. Fearful and desperate chirps and trills he hasn’t made since he was a little tot escape his throat, and he does nothing to smother them as they spill into the shadows surrounding him. He only wishes his big brothers were there to soothe them like they always had before.

But now it’s more than likely that’ll never happen again.

Mikey retreats fully into the darkness of his shell with a wailing whine that echoes in the still air of his cold and empty self-imposed prison.

Chapter Text

The tears and sobs had finally turned dry. He doesn’t know how long he’s been at it, but the corners of his eyes are heavy and prickling as his mind wants to let loose more tears than he has to spare.

Mikey’s breath hitches on another quiet whine, echoing slightly in the confines of his shell. His arms still sting with shooting stripes of pain even as he coils them tight to himself, but he has a worse kind of suffering to linger on, one that he can’t push away.

The connection between his brothers is gone, no matter how much he strains to find it. The one tether Mikey had to his own world, the one thing that had brought him comfort and reassurance that they were waiting for him, snuffed out as easily as a candle. Mikey pokes at his ninpō dejectedly, and hiccups when it barely flickers to life.

He doesn’t know how he can help it grow stronger. It’s never been this weak before, and it shakes Mikey to his very core. He’s only been completely cut off from his ninpō once and–

Mikey lets out a deep whine as he desperately pushes away those memories, but his jumbled mind inevitably lets some slip through the cracks. Despite feeling wrung out like a used towel, pinpricks of tears roll down his cheeks when he remembers how cold it had felt during the invasion. Being cut-off from his ninpō, the very essence of his family, was quite possibly the scariest part of that day until Leo did what he did.

He couldn’t feel them then. So, he had done the next best thing and stayed as close to one of his brothers as he could. Thankfully Donnie hadn’t minded the unusual level of clingy-ness in the circumstances. Now, though, there was nothing Mikey could do to reassure himself that they were with him, and reassure them that he was there, too.

Everything felt so…cold without them. They’re presence, both physical and through their connection, had always been there to provide warmth when one of them needed it. And Mikey couldn’t find that anymore.

He sniffles, wiping his snout on the edge of his shell. Donnie always told him it was gross when he did that, but Mikey couldn’t be bothered to do anything else. What he wouldn’t give to have Donnie yell at him, or Raph to baby him, or Leo to try to cheer him up with lame jokes and bribes. Dad would kneel next to him, murmuring about his day in a soft tone until Mikey retreated from his shell to ask questions. April would simply reach in and pull his head out until she was satisfied, then patiently ask him what was wrong in that ‘big sister’ voice that none of them could ignore.

Mikey licks his dry lips with another sniff. His head is filled with cotton from the excessive crying, and everything around him feels fuzzy. The haziness of his surroundings and muffled heartbeat in his ears is almost enough to make him miss the patter of footsteps steadily getting louder.

His eyes peel themselves open as he listens closer. It’s only one pair of footsteps, and they don’t seem to be in a hurry. Hopefully it’s some human that got lost and they’ll bypass his little alcove entirely. Mikey wouldn’t be able to deal with that kind of attention right now.

He tiredly closes his eyes again, the footsteps ringing in his ears as they creep closer. Mikey makes no move to try to run or scare whoever it is away. If they come into his hidey-hole, then they can make whatever conclusions they want. He isn’t going to fight it. They finally stop right below him at the entrance and Mikey hears the shuffling of fabric and clicking of metal before the intruder slowly steps inside.

He refuses to emerge from his shell. Mikey waits a moment to see if whoever it is, human or mutant, will even notice him in the dark before moving on with their lives. Some people want to continue to have a complete and utter mental and emotional breakdown in peace.

He waits. And then he waits even longer. The intruder doesn’t move, and Mikey can feel the eyes boring holes into his shell. He tries to burrow even further into the warm darkness to hopefully signal to whoever it is that he won’t be coming out any time soon. They can go ahead and try to kidnap or kill him if they want, Mikey doubts anything human-made in this universe would be able to puncture his shell, anyway.

The intruder lets out an aggravated breath. “You’re really not even going to check that I’m not a Foot-bot? Or an angry mutant? Nothing?”

In his surprise Mikey peeks his eyes out of the shadow of his shell to squint at Raphael through the dark. He has a very judgemental eyebrow raised and in his arms is a lumpy blanket with a shock of orange fabric that Mikey immediately identifies as his mask, now perfectly clean. They stare at each other for a moment, no one saying a word, before Mikey slowly retreats back into the darkness with a blank expression.

The shock of hearing him had quickly worn off, replaced with nothing but confusion. There was no reason Raphael should be here, especially after what he said to him as well as his family. It even looks like he’s giving him his mask back. Maybe he was sent to give Mikey the things he left in the lair so they don’t take up space? They had no need for his stuff, after all, and would want to get rid of it as soon as possible.

“You can leave now,” Mikey croaks out. “Just leave my things somewhere.”

Raphael scoffs at that, shuffling on his feet. “Fat chance I’m leaving you alone. I know exactly where your sense of self-preservation is at, and with how this dump looks I don’t think you’d survive long.”

Mikey glares stonily at the wall. If Raphael came here only to insult him, then he doesn’t deserve a response. He should leave Mikey’s mask and the lumpy blanket by the entrance and go back to where he belongs with his own family. At least someone will be able to enjoy the wonders of having a home to readily go back to.

Mikey says nothing more, and he can practically hear the way Raphael rolls his eyes. “Fine, ignore me. I’m still not going anywhere, so you’re going to have to suck it up.”

Something in Mikey’s chest tightens at that, and for once he doesn’t know if the sensation is good or bad. The silence stretches again. Mikey purses his lips, resisting the urge to peek out to see what Raphael is doing. Is he standing there like a statue? Is he looking around at the test paintings and smears? Is he looking at him?

“How…how’d you even find me here?” Mikey asks quietly into the still air. Raphael clears his throat and shuffles his feet.

“Mike squealed about where this place was. Took about seven different threats and a couple creative pressure points, though. Haven’t seen him that worked up to keep something hidden for a while,” Raphael answers nonchalantly. Mikey hums irritably in response.

Of course his alternate would tell him. He was probably just as bad at keeping big secrets as Mikey was when confronted.

“Y’know, he was pretty upset after you left. Everyone was, actually,” he continues in that same even tone. It makes Mikey’s scales itch, and he winces as he remembers how he shouted at Michelangelo. How he had shouted at all of them. That was definitely not cool, but he couldn’t really control it. Everything started popping out, all of his anger and frustration that he had been trying his best to keep down for the sake of the other’s comfort erupting in the worst way possible.

He called their family stupid. He called their whole world stupid. Mikey would stand by what he said about their world, but their family wasn’t like that. It’s pretty great, actually, even with the bumps in the road. But seeing them all together, breaking the news that it’s more than likely that Mikey will never see his family together again, broke something inside of him.

Maybe the universe really has cursed him.

Mikey doesn’t say anything in response to Raphael’s comment. What he should do is apologize to all of them, but he doubts that they even want him back in their lair anymore. He was already pushing his luck staying there as long as he had when they thought he could go on a murder spree at any moment, but now it was extremely unlikely they would want him back.

No sane mutant would want an emotional ticking time bomb in their home with their loved ones. He supposed Raphael was right about that all along.

“Don’t got anything to say to that?” Silence. “Then let me say that I don’t like anyone making my little brother upset other than me, and it doesn’t matter if you’re a different version of him. So I’m expecting you to apologize when we get back.”

“Who says I’m going back?” Mikey blandly mutters. That tightness in his chest gets tighter the longer Raphael speaks about going back. He really hopes he leaves him alone before it snaps, because Mikey isn’t sure what will happen when it does.

“I say you are. And as the older brother here, you have to listen to me.” Finally, Mikey gets a reprieve from the sorrow and emptiness. He just manages to catch himself from shooting out of his shell in anger.

“You’re not my brother,” he spits, face pulling into a snarl aimed at the concrete wall in front of him. “None of you are. My brothers are back in my dimension, and they probably think I’m dead right now, which I may as well be since I’ll never be with them again.”

“That’s a bit dramatic, don’t you think?” Raphael drolls. “You will get to go home, it’s just going to take longer than any of us thought.” Mikey lets out a humorless huff of a laugh. He pauses, and he can hear the other turtle sink down to the floor with an exasperated sigh. “Never thought I’d see any version of Mikey give up this easily, especially when it comes to family,” he mumbles.

Mikey has to swallow the harsh retort that was building in his throat. He purses his lips, eyes scrunched tight as he tries to push the words to the side. But that’s what he's doing right now, isn't it? Giving up?

Time stretches as Raphael’s words circle in his mind. The sense of dread and hopelessness grows when he realizes that Raphael is right, he’s never given up on anything to do with his family before. Not when Draxum was still evil, not when the Foot Clan became their biggest problem, and not when Shredder almost took their Dad away from them permanently. The Invasion was the closest he has ever come, but he never truly lost hope and had never given up.

“I–I’m not supposed to give up,” Mikey softly says. He hears Raphael shift below him as he hums in confirmation. ”I didn’t know that’s something that could happen. Even when things were the worst they’ve ever been, I never really thought about it. But now…I don’t see what else I’m supposed to do.” Mikey snaps his mouth shut on a whine, determined not to let the dry tears he can feel building loose. It would just be another thing Raphael would point out and relentlessly ask about.

“Well here’s a brilliant idea. I’m sure you haven’t thought of this one. How about you actually talk about what’s been bothering you so much?” Raphael must sense Mikey’s intent to interrupt because he hurriedly continues. “Because, y’know, if we had some idea of what the root of the problem with your powers was, we could try and help with it. And after, maybe you wouldn’t be so eager to jump back into a dimension where you’ll instantly die.”

“It wouldn’t be instant. I’d have, like, a minute.”

“You’re not helping yourself the way you think you are,” Raphael growls back. “I don’t get it. Sure, your Invasion must’ve been terrible, but why can’t you just tell us what happened?”

Mikey shakes his head from inside his shell. The memories start to creep back in, and it takes all of his concentration to bat them away. He takes shaky breaths that barely help his rising heart rate.

“Something to do with your Raphael really made you freak out when the mushroom stuff was going on, and we know you saw stuff from your world’s Invasion.”

He doesn’t know if Raphael can see the way he’s shaking. It sure feels strong enough to be visible only by his shell, but if he does take note of the way his words are affecting Mikey then he doesn’t acknowledge it and he doesn’t stop. Mikey wants to retreat even further into his shell, but there’s nowhere left for him to go.

“What was so bad that whenever you see a Kraang you go into berserker mode?”

A whine escapes his beak at that, and he sincerely hopes it wasn’t loud enough for Raphael to hear it. The word jumps around in his head, over and over and over, but he doesn’t want to think about it. He’s not allowed to think about it or talk about it because there’s more important things to be focusing on other than his mental health, which he has been trying so hard to keep under control–

“You obviously know you’re messed up in the head because of it, so why–”

“Yeah, I do know!” Mikey erupts his head from his shell with a snarl. He immediately glares at a slightly wide eyed Raphael. “I know that murder isn’t right! I know my mind isn’t okay! I know I have PTSD! Bu–but no one else can know about it!” He takes a deep, stuttering breath, leveling the other with a hard look from where Mikey sits on his ledge. “I’m the emotional rock of my family. I’m supposed to know how to deal with all the emotional pain and baggage that everyone else carries. How can they trust me to do that if they see how much I’m hurting, too? Why would they let me try to help them if they all knew that I’m just as messed up as they are?”

Raphael averts his eyes with pursed lips. A beat of silence goes by, with only the puffs of Mikey’s heated breath surrounding them. When the other doesn’t speak up Mikey scoffs and slowly retreats back into his shell.

He doesn’t know why he said all that to Raphael, of all people. He’s the least in touch with his emotions. It’s embarrassing that it even came out at all.

It doesn’t make it any less true, though. Mikey should be able to handle all of this by himself, especially since it was his own mind he is dealing with. And sure, it hasn’t been going according to plan, but he has the excuse of being flung into a different dimension for that. Mikey knows how important the proper support system is when facing trauma and working through problems, it’s what he’s always been telling his brothers.

And now his support system is completely gone, and he can’t get them back. Even if he did feel the need to talk it would be impossible. For the very first time in his entire life, Mikey is utterly alone with no way to change that.

“I…kinda get it,” Raphael mutters under his breath. Mikey scoffs and rolls his eyes where the other can’t see it, and gets an indignant huff in return. “Hey, this stuff isn’t easy for me, either. And I’m only going to say it once so shut up and listen.”

A second of silence passes that Raphael takes for confirmation of his rules. With a shaky inhale from him, he continues. “You get angry a lot. So do I, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

No kidding. Mikey can’t remember the last time Raphael said something that didn’t have some kind of sharp barb of an insult attached to it.

“But that’s not really what I’m feeling most of the time. It’s just easier to be angry than it is to try and pick apart everything else that gets all mixed up in my head. So that’s what I am; angry.” Raphael pauses, clearing his throat. “Don’t get me wrong, I do genuinely get angry, especially with my brothers. But whenever we go on missions, or split up, or someone does something really dumb…I’m scared. Like, a lot.”

That has Mikey popping completely out of his shell with wide eyes, staring at where Raphael is playing with the tails of his orange mask still in his hands. Raphael, scared? Those two things don’t belong in the same sentence.

“My brothers can’t know that, though. And if you ever say anything to them about this I’ll pop you right out of your shell,” Raphael quickly threatens before going back to winding the orange fabric around his fingers. “I’m the one who runs headfirst into danger when I don’t really need to. They all think it’s because I don’t think things through, but…it’s so none of them get hurt doing it before I can.”

He lets out a quick laugh, aiming a knowing expression up at Mikey where he is curled up on the ledge. He must be giving the other turtle the most dumbfounded expression, but everything he’s saying is blowing his mind. All of the embarrassment and frustration about letting loose his own monologue earlier dissipate.

“If they knew that’s the reason I did it, though? To keep them safe? I’d get made fun of to the moon and back, not to mention they’d act all weird about it. And I don’t really need them worrying if I’m constantly scared whenever we’re on missions. So, better to just not say anything at all and go on with life as best I can. Sound familiar?”

Mikey purses his lips and curls tighter around himself. Yeah, that does sound familiar, unfortunately. And it hits a little too close to home. Sure, it’s not exactly the same circumstances, but Mikey thinks that maybe Raphael really does understand, to some extent. He chances a glance at the other to see him still patiently staring at him, his expression the most open he’s ever seen it. It causes that tight feeling in Mikey’s chest to return, and he tries to ignore it by flipping onto his side to face the wall.

Mikey doesn’t move a muscle as Raphael gives a little sigh. He stares at his still shaky hands in front of his face, the scars deeper and more pronounced than ever. Trying to flex his fingers results in little more than painful twitches.

“...you must be pretty scared a lot too, huh?” Raphael softly continues. Mikey tenses, sight going blurry. He shakes his head in denial, hugging his arms to his chest.

“I think you’re projecting,” Mikey hoarsely replies, knowing the other will see through his words immediately. It’s not that he’s lying about it, he does think Raphael is projecting his own emotions onto him a bit too hard, but there’s a grain of truth to it that Mikey doesn’t want to face right now. Or ever, as a matter of fact.

Normally he’s not scared at all. He knows his family will be there for him, no matter what. He’s always had that safety net on almost every single mission, outing, and world-ending disaster they’ve stopped. Every situation he’s entered with more confidence than he knows what to do with, and every time fear poked its head out of the ground he was able to squash it with the knowledge his brothers would be there to help him.

Now he’s got nothing. From the very first moment he stepped into this dimension, he’s been alone. There’s been no safety net and no reassurance that everything would be okay. The only thing that had kept Mikey from succumbing to the constant simmering of his anxiety was the ever-present warmth of his brother's ninpō, but now that it was gone he didn’t know what to do.

Mikey’s always been touting that he’s capable of taking care of himself. That he’s not the baby, and he doesn’t need to be coddled. But without his safety net backing him up, he’s been left to flounder in a world that he doesn’t even know.

“Nah, I don’t think so. I mean, if I was in your situation without my brothers? I’d be completely terrified, all the time. And I know I’d be a total jerk to everyone because of it,” Raphael calmly states. Mikey still faces the wall, but he can feel the hesitation before the other continues. “But I know that’s not it. All of that stuff from your Invasion is still floating around up in that head of yours, no matter how much you want to deny it.”

Mikey stills, taking a slow, deep breath.

“I’m not denying anything. I know that it’s messed me up…but I’ve told you, I’ve been handling it.”

“Is murdering Kraang your version of ‘handling it’?” Raphael suddenly snaps. He shivers and turns his head to glare at the other turtle over his shoulder. His fierce gaze meets Mikey’s straight on. “If it is, I don’t think I need to tell you that’s a terrible way of coping. And it’s not going to make things better.”

Raphael narrows his eyes at him, lips turning into a deep frown. Mikey returns it with just as much force and refuses to be the one to break eye contact. There’s a time of silence where they simply stare at each other, neither willing to succumb to the other. Raphael’s expression scrunches more, and without looking away he lets out a huff.

“Look, I know I’m not the one who should be telling you this, but we all want to help you. Or at least make it so you can function normally again. And as much as I hate doing it, the only way is for you to talk about what actually happened that day.”

Mikey vigorously shakes his head, whipping back around to stare at the wall. His throat is dry as he fights the offending shakes that want to wrack his body. He doesn’t need to talk about it. Mikey has been handling it just fine, and he would have been completely back to normal had he not been thrown into a different dimension.

Through the growing anxiousness he hears Raphael give a long sigh before getting to his feet. He stalks closer to him until he’s jumping up and gently sitting on the end of Mikey’s ledge. His shell enters his peripheral and Mikey makes a point by shuffling further away from him.

“Nope, there’s no escaping this time. The other’s aren’t here to stop me, and you seriously need to let it out. So, I’m just going to keep guessing what happened until you correct me,” Raphael smugly says, leaning back on his hands. Mikey takes a quick glance down to see his mask still in the others grip but quickly looks away, tensing even more.

No, Raphael wouldn’t do that. He’d be crazy to try with everything that’s been happening with his mystic powers and ninpō. Especially after having witnessed what happens when he loses control first hand.

“No? Still got nothing? Maybe I’ll keep saying Kraang a bunch, that’ll probably do the trick,” Mikey shoots up with wide eyes and a now pounding heart, sending Raphael a pleading look, but it’s completely ignored. “Kraang this, Kraang that, Kraang all around–”

“Stop it,” Mikey grinds out, wincing when the scars on his arms give a bare flicker. His mouth gets even dryer and swallowing becomes a chore. Breathing normally is an intensive task, but he’s sure it still sounds wobbly. Raphael spares him a glance but does nothing more than raise a challenging brow.

“You want me to stop?” Mikey vigorously nods, sitting with his shell to the corner as he pulls his knees to his plastron with shaking hands. “Then tell me about the Invasion. It’s the main cause of your problems, so nothing is going to get better until that happens.”

“I can’t,” Mikey whispers, vision becoming overrun with the memories he’s trying desperately to push back. But no matter how hard he tries, they come flooding through until he has to squeeze his eyes shut in an attempt to block them out. It doesn’t work as well as he hopes.

“You can, and you will. I know something happened to your Raph, and you mentioned having to save your Leo, too. So what led up to that? What are you still so scared of–”

“I’m scared I’m not good enough!” Mikey finally blurts, wrenching his eyes open and staring desperately at Raphael as the floodgates get hammered to bits. “I’m always trying to prove to my brothers that I’m not a baby anymore and that I can handle myself, but…” he sniffs, knowing that if he had any more tears to spare they’d be flowing with no sign of stopping. “During the Invasion I couldn’t do anything. My brothers were all using their skills as best they could and I was just…there. It wasn’t until we thought Leo was gone that I was able to do something worthwhile, and it was only pure luck that I figured it out in time.”

Mikey takes a shuddering breath, slightly surprised Raphael hasn’t butted in by now. He takes a glance at him to see an open expression and more words start spilling out, faster than he can process.

“And I know in every other fight, I can handle myself. I know my strengths and all my weaknesses. I’m always trying to prove that to them, to show them the skills that they’ve taught me are going to good use. But…that doesn’t mean I want to be alone all the time. Or that I don’t need Raph to catch me when I fall. Or Leo to tell me a stupid pun when something goes wrong. Or Donnie to always be hovering over my shoulder and giving me cool new stuff to try out. I thought I was fine doing things by myself but…” Mikey turns his head, burying it into his shoulder so the rest comes out muffled. “Obviously I’m not.”

Raphael takes a breath in the silence, letting Mikey come down from the rush. He feels almost lightheaded after letting all of that out. The thought of going into more detail, especially about the Invasion (because he knows that Raphael won’t give up until he spits it out), is almost enough to make him want to pass out on the spot.

“I don’t know where you got that from, because from where I stand you’ve been doing pretty good by yourself for someone in a completely new world. Hell, you found this place and made it all cozy before we ever knew you existed. And, y’know,” Raphael clears his throat, and Mikey’s eyes flicker to him as light color comes to his cheeks. “You’re not alone. We’ll have your back, too.”

“But you’re not my family!” Mikey exclaims, lip wobbling. Raphael flinches back, obviously hurt, but nevertheless Mikey plows on. “And…and that’s who I need right now. I need my dads. I need my friends, my brothers. I–” he chokes back a dry sob, burying his head into his knees. “I need to be home.”

Mikey can feel himself shaking in the corner he’s backed himself into, arms wrapped as tight around himself as he can manage. The dark pit in his chest grows once more, remembering just how impossible that task is for him. Try to get home himself? He won’t even be able to make a spark before he passes out. Try to fix the machine since Donatello refuses? No way Mikey will be able to figure it out. Get rid of his mystic powers so he can at least have a chance? Who knows what that’ll do to him, not even mentioning how Donatello didn’t want that to be an option, either.

He jumps as a soft hand lands on his shoulder. Popping his head up slightly, Mikey see’s Raphael sitting on his knees in front of him, face stern.

“You might not see us as family, but we sure as hell do. You’re our little brother now, like it or not, and that means we’re not going to give up on you or let you do something ridiculously stupid. And, yeah, we’re not your…real brothers,” Raphael spits out, pained. “But that doesn’t matter. We’re not letting go of you any time soon, and I’m not going to sit by as you let go of yourself.”

The tightness in Mikey’s chest reaches the bursting point, and as he stares into Raphael’s determined gaze it crests into a crescendo. He wants to push it away again, but it brings a warmth with it, too, one that he finds himself desperately wanting to chase. Without being able to feel his brother's ninpō (and with his own being frighteningly dim), the cold has become overwhelming. The sudden warmth is a nice change, but there’s a part of him that feels like he’ll be betraying someone if he lets it in.

“But you know what families do, too?” Raphael continues, hand gripping his shoulder tighter. “They tell each other when things are getting bad. So why don’t you just get it off your chest? I’ve had to be pushed to talk about how I’m feeling every time, and it sucks, but I always feel a little better afterwards.”

Mikey’s lip wobbles as he unconsciously leans into the contact, allowing himself to bask in the touch. It’s yet another thing that he’s missed about his world, how tactile everyone is there. In this world there’s a barrier between everyone and he’s been hesitant to cross it too much with anyone other than Michelangelo.

But this simple touch from Raphael has more warmth and understanding than he’s felt from anyone in this dimension. It sends tingles of comfort throughout his body. And in the end, it’s that single effort to understand and support that loosens the lock that he’s been guarding with everything he has.

“I think…” Mikey trails, averting his gaze when Raphael nods for him to continue. He swallows as he impossibly hunches in on himself more. “...I’m afraid that I’ll survive.”

A tense silence follows before Raphael knocks his shoulder into the wall, making him wince. “You’re going to have to explain that real quick, because if I’m understanding that right–”

“No, no, it’s just–” Mikey stammers, acutely aware of how bad that sounded as soon as he said it. “My brothers are always protecting me. And I know it shows how much they care but one day…that kind of thing will get them killed, and it’s going to be because of me. Donnie almost died twice during the Invasion trying to protect me because I wasn’t good enough, and that terrifies me. If I can’t get them to see that I’m capable and they keep throwing themselves into danger in a misguided attempt to protect their ‘baby brother’, then eventually I’m…I’m going to be the only one left.”

Mikey takes a stuttering breath. His eyes scrunch tight when Raphael shuffles closer, releasing his grip and moving to sit inches beside Mikey. He hesitates, but follows his instincts and leans into the offered contact as he gathers himself once more.

“And then I’ll be all alone in a big world that wasn’t made for me to exist in by myself. I’m not meant to live without my family. They’re my home, my everything. I…need them there to catch me when I mess up. But now I can’t–” Mikey chokes on a dry sob, pushing further into Raphael. He pushes back, but stays quiet. Mikey resolutely does not look to see what kind of expression is on the other’s face.

He sighs, slumping down as the unknowing tension in his body is suddenly released. “I know it’s a selfish thing to think, but…since the Invasion I’ve kinda been hoping that I would be the first one to go down in a blaze of glory, so I don’t have to face living a life that doesn’t have my family in it.”

Mikey tiredly blinks down at his hands, still shaking and sending tiny little spikes of pain through his arms. He’s so tired now. It’s not exactly what Raphael wanted to hear about the Invasion, but he hopes it’s enough for him. Mikey did air out his greatest fears for him, after all, and even if he presses for more he would be too wrung out to say it.

And, as much as he hates to admit it, after that outburst he does feel marginally better. There’s still too many thoughts and feelings of despair floating around in his head, but that particular file has been emptied and freed up some space for the better things. Like how the longer Raphael stays by his side, simply offering his silent support, the more that darkness in his chest lessens. It doesn’t go away, but Mikey doesn’t think anything short of finding a quick way home would get it to vanish.

Raphael doesn’t move, seeming to take all of his monologue in and sorting through it. Mikey doesn’t complain, and as his head gets heavier and eyelids start to droop, he feels himself starting to list further into his steady warmth. Then he abruptly gets knocked out of the stillness as one of Raphael’s hands comes up to knock against the side of his head.

“You are one of the dumbest motherfuckers I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. And I’ve lived with Mike my entire life.”

Mikey gapes at the other openly, jaw slightly slack. That’s really all he has to say after he just poured his heart out to him?

“You’re really bad at cheering people up, you know that?”

“Never claimed I was good at it,” Raphael calmly states, wrapping an arm around Mikey’s shoulder and bringing him impossibly closer. “But I stand by what I said. You’re being stupid. You think that you’re brother’s are protecting you just because they don’t think you’re capable?” Mikey opens his mouth to protest but gets pulled into a light headlock for the trouble. ”Nope, my turn to talk. Sure, being the youngest might be a part of it. I know we can get kinda overprotective of our Mikey sometimes and it’s not always necessary. But that’s not the only reason. Would you protect your older brothers if they were in danger?”

“What kind of question is that? Obviously I would!”

“Exactly. They’re doing it because you’re family and they care about you, just like you care about them. I would do the same for any of you guys, and I know my brothers would do the same for me, no matter how much any of us deny it. As for being left alone…” Raphael trails before sighing. “I can’t really assure you that it won’t happen, not with the kind of lives we all have. But what I can do is knock it into your thick head that you’re not alone right now. No matter how hard you try, we’re not going to let you leave. I’ll happily kidnap you again if it comes to that.”

Mikey says nothing, absorbing the warmth slowly overtaking his chest. It acts as a balm to the fissures and cold cracks from before. While it’s not quite the same as having his brother's presence and ninpō, he might be able to get used to it and…maybe even enjoy it.

“We’re not going to leave you alone, no matter what. I know it’s not the same as having your own family here, but I hope–” Raphael chokes slightly, clearing his throat. When Mikey cracks open an eye he can see the color on the other's face grow. “I hope that we can become something like it if, in the worst case scenario, you…are actually stuck here.”

He turns his head fully to Raphael, taking in his fidgety posture and averted eyes. That fuzzy and tight feeling inside grows more and finally starts to bloom when it becomes clear that he means every word that he’s said. Mikey feels a small, unconscious smile appear on his face at the embarrassed blush that keeps spreading the longer he stares.

And, yeah, now that he thinks back, this little family that he’s bursted into has accepted him into their fold without question, haven’t they? Even with his angry retorts, flighty behavior, and downright (unintentional) homicidal actions as of late, they never made any move to kick him out or distance themselves. In fact, all of them have always been trying to help him in their own ways.

And all he’s been doing is brushing them off and snapping at them. His eyes gather with apologetic tears thinking about all of the times he’s ignored them or yelled at them just for trying to help. Mikey’s been completely unfair, being blinded by his need to get home as fast as possible and not even thinking how that would make this other family feel. As much as he’s been ignoring it they've become attached to him, and while it feels like a small betrayal to his own family, he’s linked with them, too.

Mikey starts shaking. He’s been really terrible to all of them, especially Raphael. And yet he still came to make sure he was okay. He still came to help him calm down in his own angered, roundabout way.

“I…I think I’d like that,” Mikey whispers. Raphael turns to him with a small, hopeful smile. “And–” he sniffs, lowering his gaze for a moment before hastily wiping away a tear that broke free. “I’m really sorry,” Mikey sobs.

Before he can start blubbering his apologies more he’s tugged into a warm, enveloping embrace. Mikey leans desperately into the hold, tucking his face into Raphael’s shoulder as his hiccuping continues. Raphael’s chin rests calmly on his head with his hands firmly locked around his shell.

It’s not the big brother hug he wants, but as he hides his tears in the other’s neck, Mikey knows it’s one that he needed.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I was being so mean and I didn’t want to but I didn’t know what else to do and I probably hurt your feelings but I didn’t really mean it, I swear–” he desperately says between dry sobs. Raphael quickly squeezes him tighter.

“Hey, quit apologizing. Yeah, we were all upset at what you said, but we get it. That wasn’t exactly what any of us wanted to hear, and it’s no wonder you acted out. I probably would have done the same,” Raphael assures, tapping a soft rhythm on his shell. The action lets loose another dry sob from Mikey. “Plus it would be better to save it for when we get back home, don’t you think?”

Mikey sniffs, nuzzling further into Raphael’s shoulder. He wants to rebel, saying that the lair isn’t really his home, but hasn’t it been acting like it for long enough? Slowly he nods his head, sighing in defeat.

He loses all sense of time with Raphael’s arms looped around him. His hiccups and sobs slowly peter out as he tries to catch his breath. Mikey doesn’t take his head out of the crook of his neck the entire time, simply enjoying the closeness that he’s been missing. Sure, Michelangelo has hugged him plenty, but it’s not quite the same thing as this.

Michelangelo’s hugs had been playful, more roughhousing than anything. This is warm, comforting, and soothes something inside of him that had been unknowingly upset at the lack of attention. He doesn’t really want to leave and have Raphael go back to his usual gruff, tough-guy attitude as soon as they get back to the lair. But, no matter how comfortable he might be, he knows that he’ll have to go back and apologize to the others sooner rather than later.

Raphael lets out a small sigh and shifts, dislodging Mikey enough that he looks up at him with tired eyes. “You don’t have to do it right now, but can you promise me that you’ll tell us what happened during the Invasion? We…I don’t want to see you this upset anymore.”

Mikey purses his lips as he avoids the others' gaze. The thought of talking about it still makes his stomach churn, and he vehemently wants to keep saying he’s fine, but who’s he trying to kid at this point? He’s already at the end of his rope, and while this family will probably still pity and try to coddle him, he already knows what will happen if he keeps trying to push it down.

There’s no ignoring it anymore, not after today. Mikey doesn’t know when exactly he’ll be ready to fully talk about it, but he’s not going to keep pushing it away. He’s tired of being constantly on edge, fearful and ready to lash out on anyone who tries to get it out of him. Maybe, if he finally lets them know about it when they ask, Mikey can start to feel better.

And he won’t start spiraling into a panic over a single spoken word.

“Yeah, I can do that,” he finally answers in a hoarse voice. “But not…not right now.”

Raphael huffs out an amused breath, knowing smirk blooming on his face. “Good idea, you kinda look like shit right now. Seriously, did you have to wipe your snot and tears all over me?”

Mikey rolls his eyes as he fights back a smile. Back to snarky Raphael, it seems. And yet, he still hasn’t let go of him. He leans back into his hold with a raised eye ridge while Raphael gives him a playful glare.

“I just thought it’d make you smell better, is all,” Mikey shoots back. Raphael growls with a growing smirk and lightly punches the back of his shoulder. He winces at the slight shocks of pain from the tender scars, and Raphael frowns in concern, but Mikey giggles through it. The other relaxes at hearing his laughter with a shake of his head.

“You’re not as funny as you think you are,” Raphael snarks. Mikey merely sticks his tongue out in retaliation. The other snorts a laugh, then perks up and reaches to the side. He brings his hand back clutching Mikey’s mask, holding it out in offering.

Mikey blinks at it, slowly taking it from his grasp. Even this is hard to hold onto and he barely manages to twist it around his fingers. Twitching, he rubs his thumb over the material that’s soft and clean for the first time in months. Glancing up at Raphael shows him simply watching him with a curious head tilt, waiting to see what he does.

Taking a steadying breath Mikey looks back down at the bandanna, now determined. Despite the pain he wills his fingers to move, tying the two ends into a little bow in the back before slipping it over his head to rest around his neck. It feels odd to not be wearing his mask for so long, but he doesn’t think he needs one to hide behind right now.

Simply knowing it’s there for when he’s ready for it again is enough for him. Plus, this is a much easier way to wear it considering his current physical limitations.

Raphael hums in recognition when Mikey stops fiddling with it, letting it settle and looking back up with a comforting smile.

“It’s a good look, makes you stand out,” he comments, tugging on the end playfully. Mikey swats his hand away with a smirk. “So, now that all of that gross emotion stuff is out of the way, how about we head up to the surface and put up some art? We still got a few hours before sun-up. While it’s not really my style I think it’ll still be fun.”

Mikey’s smile grows and nods his head fast before his hands remind him of their pain with a sharp jolt. He looks down with a wince, frowning to himself. He couldn’t even hold a paintbrush before, so how’s he going to use a spray can? Raphael realizes the problem too, squinting down at his hands with a hum.

He opens his mouth to assure him that it’s okay, he doesn’t have to participate at all (even if he’s itching to go out again) when Raphael snaps his fingers.

“I’ll be your hands. You can guide me on what colors you want, the lines, and what it’ll look like. My style is pretty different from yours, but I think I can adapt it so it looks like you,” he announces, pushing Mikey off of him and jumping down to the discarded pile of blankets. Mikey’s eyes widen in surprise when he unties the blanket and multiple colorful caps poke out. Did he really bring spray paint assuming that he would agree to it?

That spark of warmth in his chest flares at the sight and he sends the other a warm smile as he, too, hops down from his perch and goes to survey their color choices. The cold absence of his brothers still permeates his being, but his own energy perks up in the face of Raphael’s unique brand of thoughtfulness.

“What’dya say? You up for it?” Raphael asks, bundling the blanket up again with the cans inside and gesturing towards the exit. “We can go back home if you want, too. I’ll make sure no one bothers you if you just want to sleep.”

Sleeping does sound nice, especially with how wrung out his mind and body feel after the events of the last day or so. But, as he thinks about heading back to the lair and facing the consequences of his actions, Mikey wants to delay that as long as he can. And now that he’s made the resolution on being more honest about what he experienced during the invasion, there’s an idea for a mural that’s only been floating on the edge of his consciousness for a while now.

With Raphael’s help, maybe he can finally bring it to light.

“As long as you think you can keep up with my creative genius,” Mikey brags as he starts to saunter out of his shelter. Raphael follows right on his heels, gently whacking the back of his head. He shoves a shoulder into his side in retaliation and almost knocks Raphael off balance. Mikey gives him a cheeky smile at the exasperated huff and leads the way to the nearest manhole cover.

They come across a roadblock when they get to the ladder and he realizes he can’t really climb it. Mikey nearly shouts in frustration but is quickly calmed when Raphael drops the blanket full of cans to quickly scale it and push the cover open. He furrows his brow when the other slides back down and kneels down, offering his cupped hands. It clicks a moment later what Raphael is suggesting, and the frustration quickly melts away as more warmth flickers to life in his chest.

Mikey steps into the foothold with a determined nod. Raphael hurls him through the opening with a loud grunt and he barely catches himself before he falls back in. He looks back down with a victorious grin that Raphael shares as he grabs up the blanket and pops out of the hole himself.

The other quickly leads the way to an out-of-the-way warehouse district that, to Mikey’s surprise, he’s never been to before. When he mentions it Raphael merely snorts a laugh as he drops the cans to the ground in front of a blank, crack-free wall.

“You still have a lot to learn about our world, Orange.”

Mikey blows a raspberry at him but he only gets an eye roll in response as Raphael starts to unload the cans. He looks up at the vast wall before them, already imagining the lines and proportions that will be needed to fit the mural he’s thinking of doing. Unconsciously he backs up, bumping into a trash can and hopping onto it as Raphael finishes organizing the many paint cans he had shoved in the blanket ‘bag’.

Seriously, how did he fit that many spray cans in there?

“Got an idea yet?” he asks as he turns around, dusting off his hands. Mikey gives a curt nod and without further prompting, starts instructing Raphael on how to bring his vision to life.

“Mix the orange and yellow more…it doesn’t have to be perfectly straight, make it messy…the purple needs to be darker…don’t be so heavy on the blue…why are you questioning whether it’s pink or red, this is my memory…”

Finally, just as the sun peaks over the horizon and the city starts to come to life, the mural is finished. Raphael steps back to admire the work, paint smeared over almost every inch of his arms and plastron. Mikey swallows as he stares up at the alien from his nightmares rendered in paint hovering over a swirling orange and yellow portal, wisps of purple and red supporting the orange while a bright, lightning-like spark of blue emerges from the portal. In the mech's claws sits a miniature version of New York encased in a protective light green mist, preventing the sharp points from destroying the city.

Mikey licks his lips, absorbed into the glowing red eye staring down at him. It doesn’t quite look true to life, but with how his instructions stuttered over the description when Raphael was painting it’s no wonder it looks a little bit off. But it still looks similar enough that he’d know that silhouette anywhere.

Raphael knocks a hand into his knee, startling him out of his tense staring contest with the painting.

“It’s just a wall. Not going to come to life or anything,” he briskly says, looking back up at the painting he created through Mikey’s vision with a twisted expression. “Although if this looks anything like it did in real life, then I have to admit that thing’s pretty intimidating. Definitely not like the ones we have here.”

Mikey nods, slowly looking back into the monster's eye and then down to the swirling portal below it. “Yeah…” he whispers, an unconscious shiver wracking his frame. He sees Raphael give him a slow once over in the corner of his eye before he’s striding forward to pile the cans back into the blanket.

“C’mon, let’s get back before the sun fully rises. The other’s are probably wondering where we are, too.” Raphael heaves the blanket bag over his shoulder, nodding his head in the direction they came from.

Mikey hums, hopping down from his perch and going to follow. He hesitates before they leave the area, taking one last glance at the mural that was his creation but painted by Raphael’s hand.

He was right in that it looks different than the others he's done in this dimension. Raphael’s style seems much more traditional than what Mikey usually prefers, and even when taking his directions there’s still areas that look a little too grounded in reality. The lines are also much straighter than what Mikey could accomplish, making it more polished than the others. Not necessarily a bad thing, but nevertheless a pang of unfairness rises.

He wishes he could make straight lines again. Mikey’s had to adapt because of his scars, and that means traditional and realistic art have been tossed out the window.

Sending a quick glare down to his still shaky and tender hands, he shakes off the unfairness as fast as he can. He doesn’t need to get upset about what he suddenly can’t do. As Raphael has pointed out and demonstrated, the family is ready and willing to accommodate him however they can.

Even if Mikey feels like he doesn’t really deserve it with how he’s been acting.

Raphael’s sharp whistle breaks him out of his thoughts and he turns to see him gesturing impatiently to the other side of the alley. Right, these guys get uneasy being out in the day. That warm, fuzzy feeling jumps even further seeing the way the other fidgets the longer it takes for Mikey to follow him away from where he might be seen.

“I’m coming,” he reassures, stepping forward and casting one last look at the painting. Mikey’s gaze lingers on the swirling of the portal and the colors surrounding it, heart panging in remembrance of that earth-shattering moment.

It hurts knowing he might not see them for years if Donatello is right about his calculations. With their ninpō no longer something Mikey could see or feel, he has to wonder if they’ve been completely cut off from him, too. He cautiously pokes his own energy and lets out a surprised breath when it feels marginally stronger than it was before he rushed out of the lair. That means it’s on its way to healing, right?

With a hopeful smile Mikey turns to follow Raphael back to the lair, nervousness nipping at his consciousness. He hopes the others will forgive him for what he said before he ran off and they can start with a clean slate.

And then, just maybe, he’ll be able to embrace his role in the family that he’s been graciously roped into.

Chapter Text

While Raphael’s comments are still as sharp and tinged with annoyance as ever, Mikey can plainly hear the joking tone underlying it. He’s not at the top of his game with his own quips back, but it’s still the most laid back and enjoyable time he’s spent with Raphael so far.

He complains about the paint all over him as well as how late Mikey’s made him stay out, but nothing about it rubs him the wrong way. It’s the kind of thing that he’s used to hearing from his brothers back home and it fills him with a constant fuzz of comfortable warmth all the way until they get to the entrance of the lair.

“We could have gotten back a lot faster if you carried me like I suggested,” Mikey says breezily as they pass the turnstiles. Raphael snorts and rolls his eyes.

“It’s your arms that are messed up, not your legs,” he shoots back.

With a dramatic gasp Mikey stops in his tracks, bringing a hand to his plastron in shock. “How dare you! I have just been through a very hard experience, and you have the gall to insult moi?”

“Yep, and I’ll keep doing it for as long as you keep saying stupid shit,” Raphael replies with a smirk. Mikey guffaws in fake offense as the other continues further into the lair. He hastily follows with a tired grin, waiting for just the right moment to strike. Then, as Raphael is stepping down the steps towards the common area, Mikey sticks his foot out mid stride.

Raphael lets out a surprised shout as he falls the rest of the way to the floor. He tries to catch himself but with the blanket filled with spray cans in his arms it’s useless. Mikey bursts into triumphant giggles and lightly hops down the steps next to where Raphael lays face down on the floor, taking multiple deep breaths and not moving.

“Still wanna keep insulting me?” Mikey innocently asks. Raphael immediately glares up at him, playful annoyance clear on his face.

“Count your days,” he mumbles, pushing off the floor and dusting himself off. Mikey hums in bored acknowledgement and earns a small slap to the back of his head as Raphael goes to pick up the blanket of cans again. He opens his mouth to inform him about the influences of positive reinforcement instead of punishment but snaps it shut when someone else loudly clears their throat.

Mikey quickly looks to see a very tired looking Leonardo in the kitchen, wide eyes blinking slowly as he stands next to a boiling kettle. His lighthearted mood slightly sours as he realizes, oh yeah, he’s going to have to apologize to all of the others soon. Unconsciously his shoulders draw up in uncomfortable tension, but luckily before Leonardo tries to say anything Rapahel is pushing him forward by the shell.

“Don’t worry, fearless, Orange is fine. He’s going to be going straight to sleep, though, so save your boring lectures for the morning, alright?” Raphael quickly says, continuing to push Mikey past a blurry eyed Leonardo.

He risks a glance back into the kitchen and spots the leader's narrowed, confused expression. For a moment Mikey thinks he isn’t going to listen to Raphael’s ‘orders’ and he’s going to have to deal with this before he gets a chance to rest, but instead his eyes are clearly trying to focus on his brother.

“Is that…paint?” Leonardo groggily mumbles right before they leave his sight. Raphael pushes Mikey behind the wall where Leonardo can’t see and, giving him a sly smirk, turns back to give his leader a very poorly acted worried expression.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Maybe you’ve been drinking too much tea lately,” he says, quickly getting out of his sight. Mikey smothers a giggle hearing the leader's soft murmurs followed by water being poured down the drain. Raphael gives him a successful thumbs up and then points towards Mikey’s room.

“Seriously, get some rest. Both of us have been awake for way too long, and I have to wash off all this paint you got on me,” he says while leading the way further down the corridor. Mikey follows on his heels with a quick nod, not even bothering to correct the other on how he technically got the paint on himself.

His entire being is screaming for sleep. Raphael’s right in that he has been awake for way too long, and passing out on Leonardo’s shell earlier didn’t give him any energy. Not to mention the emotional whirlwind he’s been dragged through. And now that he has sights on his room, that exhaustion just keeps piling on until he can barely keep his eyes open.

Tiredly he opens the door and sees that everything is still how he left it sans his blankets. Although, when Mikey squints into the dark, he catches sight of his phone sitting on top of the bedroll.

That was…nice of Donatello to do. He easily could have kept it to play around with all of Donnie’s encryptions that he’s been trying to get through with no avail, but instead he left it right where he thought Mikey would find it.

His heart pangs thinking about how he yelled at him before. Donatello was only trying to explain the situation and options Mikey had, and he completely blew up at him. The tech genius should be the first one he apologized to when he woke up. Preferably after getting about fourteen hours of uninterrupted rest.

Mikey goes to step into his room and pauses, turning slightly just as Raphael goes to close his own door.

“Um–” he softly begins, catching the others' attention enough that he peeks back through the crack in his door with curious eyes. “I just…thanks, again.”

Raphael huffs a tiny laugh. “Don’t mention it.” And then, with a more serious air to it, “Seriously, don’t. The others better not hear about anything that happened tonight, capiche?”

Mikey smirks. Of course Raphael is worried about his ‘tough guy’ representation again. At least that hasn’t changed.

“My lips are sealed,” he assures, earning a tight nod from Raphael.

“Good. I will hurt you if you squeal,” he threatens, entering his room fully and softly closing the door behind him. Mikey rolls his eyes.

“Night, I guess,” he whispers to himself as he walks back and seals himself into his room. The events all pile right back onto his shoulders as soon as the door closes. He releases a tired sigh and stalks towards his little bed, flopping down and avoiding landing on his hands and arms at the last second.

Mikey would love to use this time to formulate all of the apologies he was going to be giving out when he woke up, but between one blink and the next he’s out like a light.

==========

Coming back to the land of the living was something Mikey very much did not want to do. His entire body felt like jelly and the simple thought of moving was enough to sap whatever energy he managed to muster. It didn’t help that he knew as soon as he got up, he would have to face the others and hopefully come up with an apology good enough for them.

It was odd, however, that he didn’t hear anything from the kitchen. Michelangelo usually tried to get a headstart on whatever they had planned for breakfast the next day to get more practice in, but even when he strained Mikey didn’t hear a single thing.

That made the nervousness in his gut grow. If his alternate wasn’t making breakfast or even any noise at all, he must still be really upset.

But, as Dr. Feelings whispers in his ear, he has to find everyone and apologize if he wants to move past this. No matter how much his stomach churns or how awkward it might get, he needs to get everyone on the same page about his ‘outburst’. Mikey knows intimately what happens when he doesn’t face things head on now, and he knows if he doesn’t get it out of the way it will continue to fester between all of them.

And he really doesn’t want to blow up again. They don’t deserve that.

With a steadying breath Mikey sits up, wincing as he stretches the lingering ache out of his muscles. The scars on his arms twinge and he frowns down at them. He’s able to curl his hands into fists with a grunt of effort but it is still a problem he’s going to have to think around. But for now it looks like he won’t be doing anything with his fine motor skills any time soon.

Sighing Mikey rolls onto his feet, adjusting the mask-turned-bandanna around his neck to be somewhat presentable. There’s still no noise from outside of his room as he stalks closer to the door. He stays there for a beat, pressing his ear closer to the seam, and still nothing. That should reassure him, as it gives him time to come up with the best things to say, but instead it makes his gut twist further.

Taking a quick look at the time says that everyone should be awake by now. The fact that it is completely silent means something is wrong and Mikey knows he’s the cause of it. Mikey straightens his shoulders, drawing in a deep breath before slowly letting it out. It does little to calm his nerves, but it’s the thought that counts, right?

Slowly Mikey pushes the door open, wincing at the tiny creek in the otherwise quiet lair. He pauses to look around and, not seeing anyone, cautiously stalks closer to the main room. His heart beats slightly faster taking the first step into the open and seeing Leonardo perched on a stool in the kitchen. The others eyes flick up in surprise from where he chews into a piece of slightly burnt toast, leveling Mikey with his stare.

He pauses and looks away from Leoanrdo’s gaze, looking at anything else other than him as he creeps further towards him. Mikey is halfway across the room, arms drawn around himself and becoming more tense by the second when someone clears their throat on the couch. After a quick look he feels himself relax seeing Raphael sprawled across the sofa, comic book in hand. He doesn’t look at Mikey as he flips the page but his presence releases some of the tension that had been building inside of him.

He takes a quick look to see Leoanrdo still staring at him with a painfully open expression, and in a cowardly move Mikey diverts course towards Raphael. He comes to the couch and stands in front of it for a moment, and when Raphael refuses to move and make room Mikey internally shrugs and sits down right across his legs.

It earns a glare from Raphael and in return he raises a challenging eyeridge. With narrowed eyes Raphael pulls out both of his legs from underneath him, unbalancing him for a moment, before placing them down on Mikey’s lap with quite a bit more force than necessary. He even jabs his toes hard into his plastron. Mikey opens his mouth to start their witty commentary for the day but is interrupted by Leonardo’s quiet voice.

“So…” he trails, standing from the stool and wiping stray crumbs from his plastron as he comes closer. “I take it you guys hashed out whatever was going on between you two?”

“Oh, uh, yeah,” Mikey quickly mumbles. Leonardo steps closer and he can feel himself starting to shrink back and think about pushing off the apology for later. Looking into the leader's honest, caring eyes makes him feel even worse for worrying him like he did, and the thought of talking to him about it twists his mind into knots.

He’s just about to call his whole mission off and tell Dr. Feelings to shove it when Raphael harshly digs his foot into Mikey’s leg. He looks away from Leonardo to glare at him but is met with Raphael’s narrowed, knowing look over the top of his comic before he’s bringing it back up to hide his expression.

Right. He has to do this, no more hiding behind a mask. Mikey needs to get it off his chest before it gets bad again.

“Well, I’m glad you two figured it out, and that nothing happened while you were gone. I was pretty worried you’d do something…drastic,” Leonardo says with a small smile, sitting down on the floor in front of the TV and grabbing the remote. Mikey’s heart drops at that and he’s speaking before he’s even realizing it.

“I’m sorry,” he blurts out. Leonardo pauses his channel surfing and looks back at him with a concerned gaze. “For worrying you so bad. I…that’s not what I wanted.” The weight of Raphael’s legs on his lap steadies him and he hurriedly continues before he loses his commitment. “And I’m sorry for, y’know, calling everyone stupid. And for not listening to you. And–”

“It’s okay, Orange,” Leonardo interrupts with a raised hand and a humorous expression. “Everyone was pretty stressed and some things came out. You think we’ve never had screaming matches like that and needed some time apart? Plus, you’re still in one piece and you look like you’re feeling better. That’s enough for me. Even if you gave me a bit of a heart attack.”

The heavy weight in Mikey’s chest lifts a little bit at that, filling with a small trickle of warmth. He sends Leaonrdo a grateful smile which he gladly returns, reaching out to give his calf a small pat.

“And I know we’ll get you back to your dimension. We just need to find a way that doesn’t hurt anyone, okay?” the leader reassures. “You can count on us.”

“Yeah, I know,” Mikey soberly says, lightly playing with his mask tied around his neck. Leonardo’s eyes drift towards it with a curious expression. “Thought it would be easier to wear it this way since I’ve got…all of this happening, y’know?” he explains, gesturing towards his heavily scarred hands.

Leonardo’s eyes soften and he gives him a gentle nod before turning back to the TV and settling on some kind of cartoon channel. Raphael groans and drops his comic to his plastron, sending both of them exasperated looks.

“Did you really have to have that talk with me right here? I think my ears are bleeding,” he complains, overdramatically rubbing his head. Mikey rolls his eyes as Leonardo sends him an unamused stare.

“I know you’re allergic to emotions, but I think you’ll be fine,” the leader blandly states. Mikey snorts at that and gets another kick to the plastron from Raphael. He grumbles a ‘whatever’ and quickly goes back to his comic. Humming Mikey turns his attention back onto the TV and time passes in companionable silence.

Mikey finds himself slowly sinking further into the couch, Raphael’s legs a warm weight that keeps him from drifting too far into his own head as he tries to focus on the cartoon. Leonardo is completely engrossed in the giant robot fights and Mikey can’t blame him. Even Raphael eventually drops his comic to watch the epic battles as one episode turns into two, and then three. Just when Mikey is about to start ranting about the horribly executed and oddly creepy romantic tension of the show, he clocks the fast footsteps coming from behind him.

He doesn’t even get a chance to turn his head. With a relieved shout Michelangelo jumps onto Mikey’s shell, enveloping him in a hug that feels much more like a tight headlock. Both of them yelp in surprise as his alternate can’t stop his momentum and they end up catapulting off the couch and into a pile on the floor.

Mikey hisses as he lands on his arms, Michelangelo’s weight pressing them harshly into the floor. He’s swiftly yanked up and roped backwards into a bone-crushing hug, shell pressed tight to the other’s plastron.

“Orange you’re okay! I got really worried when I didn’t see you come back and then Raph went to find you and I’m sorry for telling him about your place but I didn’t know what to do and oh my gosh is this what it feels like when your little brother does something dumb ‘cause I have so much I need to say sorry for if it is–”

Michelangelo gets cut off as Raphael thwacks him in the head with his rolled up comic book. He lets out a huff of laughter when his alternate whines in response and cradles him closer, one arm wrapped loosely around his neck while the other hand rubs soothingly against the top of Mikey’s head.

He’s not sure whether it’s supposed to be soothing to him or Michelangelo, but it feels nice either way.

“His arms are still sore, doofus. Can you not be clumsy for five minutes?” Raphael reprimands. “And stop with the word vomit, it’s gross.”

“I was scared, dude! I’m a big brother now and Orange just left! I could barely snooze knowing he was out in the wild with only you for company,” Michelangelo says, shifting so Mikey is more firmly in his lap.

Something in him still squirms at the insinuation of being a part of this family, but it gets quickly overwhelmed with the fuzzy feeling knowing how much they all care for him. Even the laid back Michelangelo was obviously going out of his mind with worry after Mikey suddenly left. And now that he was going to be stuck here for an indefinite amount of time, it would be best to finally allow himself to care about them in the same way, too.

“Don’t worry, I put him in his place,” Mikey says with a small smirk. It earns a glare from Raphael but he avoids his gaze and looks earnestly up at Michelangelo behind him. He looks down at him with a beaming smile and it makes what Mikey said during his outburst all the more sour in his chest. “And I’m the one who should be saying sorry. I didn’t mean what I said. You’re not dense, and I’m sorry for shouting. I know you were just trying to help with the tension but I was…a little too far gone to listen.”

Michelangelo’s smile softens and he cuddles Mikey to his chest even more. “No worries, man. Yeah, what you said hurt, but I get it. Besides, Raph says worse things to me all the time.”

“It’s true, I do,” the other blithely replies, once again hidden behind his comic. Leonardo sighs in annoyance and Mikey watches on, amusement clear on his face.

“Are those comments really necessary?”

“When all of you are getting mushy and I’m sitting right here, then yes. We have plenty of other places in the lair to talk about ‘feelings.’”

“I think It’s good that we air out everything that happened together–”

“You would think that, Lame-o-nardo–”

Mikey and Michelangelo witness the ensuing catfight with small grins, looking at each other and with several pointed head nods, bet on who’s going to back out first. His alternate has his money on Raphael, but Mikey easily disagrees. Leonardo is obviously going to bow out first out of frustration when the other refuses to listen.

As the two keep going back and forth, Mikey relaxes back into the other's warm hold and briefly closes his eyes. Most of the anxious energy has been tamed from the easy acceptance of his apologies, but he knows that Donatello is going to be the trickiest one to tackle. He’s the one he blew up with the most, and based on how fiery he also got it’s not going to be so simple to earn his forgiveness. Mikey is going to have to be on his best behavior and have luck, as well as hope, on his side.

Speaking of Donatello, he had expected the other to have made an appearance by now. But the longer Leoanrdo and Raphael argue, the longer the time that Donatello is conveniently missing. Slowly Mikey’s attention diverts and he finds himself staring at the door to the lab that is firmly closed. The tension in him grows as he refuses to look away, Raphael and Leoanrdo’s ongoing argument fading into the background. Behind him Michelangelo shifts, catching Mikey’s attention and when he glances up into his face he’s greeted by his alternate in deep thought as he also looks towards the lab.

“I didn’t see him all night,” he softly says, just loud enough to hear above the bickering. “I tried to get him out earlier but he just yelled at me. Like, really yelled. Maybe…you could try?”

Mikey purses his lips and looks towards the lab. He knows he needs to go, but every ounce of his body is telling him to push it off. Let more time pass. Ignore it until it goes away. And while he really wants to listen to that part of himself, he knows he can’t anymore. Surrounded by Michelangelo’s warmth and the easy back and forth of the other two, it gives him enough fortitude to give a stern nod and slowly release himself from his alternates grip.

Leonardo and Raphael don’t notice as he starts to creep away. Mikey reaches the door and hesitates before he grabs the handle, looking back at Michelangelo. He gives him an easy thumbs up and reassuring smile as he probes him further. Managing a shaky smile back he tries to let his alternates confidence leach into him when he finally grabs the doorknob, pushing away the throb of pain from his hands.

Half of him expects the door to be locked, but it easily swings open with a light push. Mikey stops before it opens more than a crack and takes a steadying breath. He needs to do this, no matter how awkward it might get. Donatello is going to hear his apology, and then Mikey will stand back and see if it gets accepted.

Slowly Mikey enters the lab, softly closing the door behind him. Most of the space is dark aside from the monitors and it takes a moment to spot Donatello slumped back in his rolling chair. He can’t tell if the other is passed out or not.

Licking his lips he walks further towards Donatello. His heart pounds the closer he gets, and he almost lets out a breath of relief when he sees the other’s eyes firmly closed. Well, at least he tried. It would be rude to wake him up, especially if he really did stay up for as long as Mikey thinks and if he knows anything it’s that the Donatello’s across the multiverse need to sleep more–

“I told you to get out, Micheal,” Donatello suddenly grits out. Mikey startles and leans back with wide eyes. There’s silence for a beat before the other harshly sighs, spinning his chair to face him. “I said, get–oh,” he cuts himself off when he spots Mikey. His mouth turns down in displeasure. “It’s you.”

Mikey swallows, giving a tiny wave. “It’s me,” he dryly responds. Donatello raises an unamused brow before curtly turning back to his keyboard. He doesn’t even start typing anything, simply staring at it with narrowed eyes.

“If you’re here to ask me to kill you again, the answer hasn’t changed,” Donatello spits when the silence lingers too long. Mikey flinches and shrinks in on himself, grabbing his arm. He looks to the ground in shame and musters up all the courage Michelangelo was trying to give him.

“No th-that wasn’t okay for me to say,” Mikey admits. “I was just desperate, and scared, and I still kinda am. But it wasn’t fair of me to ask, and I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.” His voice trails off, and he takes a chance to look at Donatello to see his impassive stare. Mikey averts his eyes again and unconsciously rubs his arm, immediately stopping with a wince when it aggravates his scars.

Donatello's eyes flicker towards his arms and with a small huff gets up from his chair. “Come here, you need some salve on those.”

Mikey hurriedly follows him to the chair, sitting down as instructed and holding out his arms obediently when the other asks. Donatello brings a stool around to sit in front of him, opening a small tin container and slathering a liberal amount of mint smelling goop onto his arm. He cringes at the odd sensation but it does help somewhat when it starts to dry.

Neither speaks even after Donatello has wiped his hands off with a spare rag. Mikey purses his lips and looks anywhere but the turtle still sitting in front of him, avoiding his pointed stare with all he has. The other leans forward and drops his head with a sigh, tapping his fingers together between his knees as he finally looks away.

“Look, I want to help you get home,” Donatello starts, causing Mikey’s eyes to flicker towards his still dropped head. He brings up a hand to rub at his neck and once again he catches sight of the burnt-looking fingertips. “But what you suggested…that’s not something I would ever be comfortable doing. And I’m not going to risk fixing the portal device if I can’t trust you to not do anything impulsive. So we’re at a bit of an impasse here.”

“It’s alright, I know I wasn’t being reasonable,” Mikey reassures. It hurts that Donatello doesn’t trust him enough to even try fixing the machine, but he can’t exactly blame him. He didn’t exactly seem sane when he last brought it up. “I’m glad you’re still willing to do this. I thought that you might have changed your mind after all that I said.”

“What? Are you crazy?” Donatello exclaims, jerking up and leveling Mikey with an incredulous stare. “Of course I still want to help! You’re family and–” he stutters, as if just realizing what he’s said, and coughs to try and hide his rising blush. “I’m not going to give up until we get you home safely, and that’s a promise I know I’ll be keeping. No matter how long it takes or how impossible it might seem. Heh, it wouldn’t be the first time someone expected me to do the impossible, anyway.”

Okay, Mikey really wants to dig into that last statement because there definitely seems to be some kind of unpleasant history there, but now’s not the time. All he has to do is be thankful that Donatello is still determined to find a way to get him back to his dimension.

Mikey’s chest is nearly bursting with newfound affection and he can’t help himself as he launches into Donatello’s arms. He leans back on his stool with a yelp but Mikey merely burrows himself into the taller turtle's neck, squeezing. Donatello freezes for a moment before his arms gently encase Mikey as well. He gives his shell a tiny pat and sighs, all the unseen tension leaving Donatello's frame.

“Thank you so much,” Mikey whispers, releasing him from the hug to see Donatello’s kind expression.

“Not to worry, good ole’ Donnie is on the case,” he says with a wink. Mikey lets out a little giggle that makes the others smile widen even more. “And I think you’ll be glad to hear that I’ve been thinking about what you said before. Y’know, about getting rid of your mystic powers.”

Mikey jerks back, eyes wide. Didn’t Donatello just say that he wasn’t going to try anything that would hurt him? The other must see the utter confusion as he hurriedly continues with frantically waving hands.

“Not about removing them completely! That would be the equivalent to taking a piece of your heart out, and there’s no way that’s going to happen. But there could be a way we can lock your mystic powers away permanently, if…that’s something you’d be willing to try.”

Mikey falls back into his own chair, face scrunched in thought. What he was suggesting sounded eerily similar to what happened to his ninpō during the Invasion and even the suggestion of it made him nervously fidget. If it felt anything like having his ninpō forcefully locked away then he was immediately hesitant to go through with it. But, on the other hand, if Donatello was really able to do it, then he'd be able to go home a lot faster and his mystic problems might be solved that way.

Sure, it was the easy way out, but doesn’t Mikey deserve to have some things come easily?

“I think if it’s something that you’re able to do, I’d be down for it,” Mikey confidently says. “But I don’t want to ask you to do it if it’s going to stress you out too much.”

“Please, I do my best work under life threatening situations. This is going to be a piece of cake.” Donatello pauses, bringing a contemplating hand to his chin. “Well maybe not that easy. But with your knowledge of mystic magic and my genius I’m sure we’d be able to figure something out.”

Mikey beams a bright smile at him, spirits high. It’s always nice to see Donatello so confident and that feeling bleeds right into Mikey’s own mood. He knows the other will be able to find a way to do it, because a Donatello won’t stop until the problem in front of him is solved. Or obliterated. Mikey hopes it’s the first option in this case.

“But it’s not going to be instant, it’ll take time to figure out since all of this ‘magic’ is still a pretty big mystery to me. There’s also no guarantee I will be able to do it,” the other warns with a cautious tone. It sobers Mikey enough to feel the emptiness start to creep back in, but it’s almost immediately smothered back down by knowing Donatello still cares enough to even try.

“That’s okay, I’m still trying to figure out all this mystic stuff half the time, too. It’s alright if nothing comes of it, as long as we keep trying, right?” he hopefully asks. Donatello’s face sours but there’s a new creative and competitive spark in his eye.

“Agree to disagree. There’s no progress if everything fails, and I refuse to have this experiment of ours fizzle into nothing before we even begin. Now–” Donatello abruptly stands with a confident smirk, yanking Mikey up and pushing him towards the door. “--get out of my lab so I can get started. I need absolutely zero distractions or clumsy brothers here while I work on a solution.”

Mikey’s heart flutters at being lumped together in the ‘brother’ column by yet another turtle, but before he can fully bask in the glow he’s being shoved out of the lab and the door gets slammed after him. He raises a brow with a shake of his head. Half of him wants to storm back in there and demand Donatello properly rest before fully digging into his new mission, but he knows it likely won’t work and just make the other annoyed. And while it’s always fun to annoy the others he feels like it would curdle the positive energy he had just created between them.

“Wow, you survived the purple devil unscathed,” Raphael blandly comments when he makes his way back over to the couch. Mikey rolls his eyes and plops cross-legged to the floor in front of the TV where Michelangelo sits mesmerized. Leonardo is nowhere to be found and he takes great pleasure knowing he was right about who would win the argument when he left.

He takes in the relaxed atmosphere with a smile, once again relieved that his outburst didn’t ruin everything. If he really had destroyed all the relationships he had built here then Mikey would be completely lost, and he knows he likely would have tried something very drastic.

Letting the show take his attention he finds himself slowly leaning until he has his weight up against Michelangelo’s arm. The other shoots him a quick, affectionate look out of the corner of his eye and then he’s scooching closer so Mikey’s head rests squarely on his shoulder. He snuggles into his warmth and both of them focus back on the cartoon playing out, letting everything else fall away. Eventually Mikey can feel his eyes starting to droop, and he lets out an ear-splitting yawn as Leonardo strides back into the room.

He blearily looks up into the leader's warm face and gives him a tiny wave. Leonardo returns it joyfully, turning a harder stare on where Raphael still sprawls with his comic.

“C’mon, guys, it’s almost time for patrol,” he announces, hands on his hips as he looks between Michelangelo and Raphael. His alternate throws his head back with a groan and dislodges Mikey from his rest enough to sit up on his own.

“Do we really have to go, Leo? I don’t think anything’s going to be happening so soon after that whole wormquake stuff,” he complains. Leonardo stands straighter and Mikey is immediately reminded of his Raph’s hero pose.

Yeah, the other two are definitely not getting out of that patrol.

“That’s exactly why we have to be on high alert right now. This would be the perfect time for criminals to go out and do…criminal, stuff,” he lamely stutters. Mikey smiles as that only reminds him further of his own big brother. Raphael scoffs behind him and sits up, sending the leader a questioning look.

“And why is Donnie getting special privileges? He should have to suffer on patrol with us, too,” Raphael questions but nevertheless stands to make sure he has all his gear.

“Because Donnie hasn’t slept properly in over thirty-six hours.”

“Isn’t he always awake for that long?” Michelangelo retorts. He gets a glare in return from Leonardo that has him hopping to his feet and mocking the leader under his breath. Mikey watches them head towards the turnstiles with a tired eye, not tempted in the slightest to try and join them. He’d just be shot down, anyway, and Mikey can gladly live with that.

They are almost out of sight when Leonardo stops and turns back to him, the others continuing down the tunnel. He fiddles with the strap across his plastron as his expression turns soft.

“I really am happy you’re okay. I know Raph isn’t the greatest at handling things delicately, so if you need to talk to someone who won’t threaten to rip your shell off then know I’ll always try to listen,” he says with an assured nod. Mikey finds his lips twitching into a pleased smile as the warmth inside pulses with joy. He shoots out two weak thumbs up that Leonardo takes as answer enough, slowly backing out of the lair.

“Don’t do anything dumb while we’re gone! Donnie and Master Splinter are here if you need anything, and we’re one phone call away if–”

“I got it Mamanardo! Be safe!” Mikey finally shouts back. He huffs a tiny laugh at the echoed sputtering of the leader before he fully leaves and he’s left alone in the lounge. Taking a look around he feels an almost uncomfortable dissonance at the only noise being the drone of the TV in front of him.

Time passes and he tries to pay attention to the cartoon but the sudden silence and absence of people grates on his mind. Mikey is about to bite the bullet and sneak back into Donatello’s lab for some company when the dojo door softly slides open. Master Splinter carefully steps out, a tray with a used tea kettle and cup balanced perfectly in the middle as he makes his way to the kitchen.

Mikey stares at his back, biting his lip. He has no idea if Splinter knows about the news regarding his newest problem in going home. Does he try to tell him now? It’s really his decision if Mikey stays in the lair after all, and if he does end up being stuck here for almost seven years then that would be another student for him as well as another person he feels obligated to feed and protect–

“Your thoughts are particularly loud today, Orange,” Splinter says without turning from his task, the only indication that he is acknowledging Mikey being the twitching of his ears.

He swallows, not taking his eyes off the larger mutant as he goes to make more tea. “Uh, yeah. They’ve been…pretty loud for a while, actually. I’ve just been ignoring it for too long.”

Splinter hums and grabs another cup from the cupboard before adding it to the tray while the water boils. Mikey already knows what that means and he levers himself off the ground, letting loose a defeated sigh as he hovers on the other side of the counter. Looks like he’s going to be the one telling Splinter the news of his extended stay whether he wants to or not.

He waits patiently as Splinter takes the now boiling water off the burner and turns around to place it in the center of the tray. Mikey tries to read his expression but it is almost perfectly blank and open, giving no indication on what he might or might not know. The larger mutant only spares him a passing glance before he is sprinkling tea leaves into the cups and picking up the tray, striding back towards the dojo.

“Come,” he softly orders, and Mikey follows right on his tail, closing the sliding door behind him. Splinter kneels in behind one end of the small table and delicately picks up one of the cups. Letting loose a breath that does nothing to calm the sudden nerves, Mikey takes his place on the other side.

He plays with the handle of the other cup before using both hands to bring it up and quickly take a sip. It’s the same blend that he had before, a sweet blackberry that perks him up immediately. Mikey gives Splinter a grateful smile that is returned with a nod and the silence continues. Obviously he’s waiting for him to start the conversation, but Mikey’s not entirely sure what the best thing to begin with is. Or if he’s even right in what Splinter wants to talk about.

Biting his lip he taps a fast tempo onto his knee, relieved to find that the goo Donatello had applied to his scars had dulled the pain on his scales considerably. His muscles still ache and he knows his grip strength is nowhere near at its peak, but at least it’s a start.

“Leonardo tells me that your circumstances have grown more bleak,” Splinter finally begins after it becomes clear Mikey’s too far in his own head. He jerks to attention and quickly looks away from the other’s saddened gaze. “That is unfortunate news to hear.”

Mikey hums in confirmation, taking another sip of the tea. Hopefully if he stays quiet long enough Splinter will do most of the talking for him before he starts his plea to stay.

“That being so, if…” Splinter clears his throat, and it’s so out of character for what Mikey knows that he finally looks back up to see the others head lowered. “If you do not feel comfortable in our presence, I would be happy to find somewhere else that is safe for you to stay during the rest of your time here.”

“What?” Mikey blurts, eyes wide in surprise. Is Splinter suggesting that he might not want to stay in the lair? Why would he think that? The tone grabs the others attention and he raises his head, observing Mikey’s shell-shocked expression with somber and curious eyes.

“Having reminders of what you are missing constantly surrounding you has to be painful, and considering the circumstances I would not be surprised if you wished to step away from the family to adjust.”

Mikey slowly blinks at him, absorbing that information. He had come in here expecting to try and appeal to the head of this clan to stay in the lair, and now Splinter was ‘allowing’ and attempting to help him leave because he thought Mikey wanted to? The ridiculousness of the situation shocks a single stunned laugh that has Splinter’s ears flickering upright in attention.

“What are you talking about? Of course I don’t want to leave!” he asks with a humored chuckle. Splinter looks on with surprise and a slightly sheepish expression. It makes Mikey’s smile grow wider seeing the more emotive side of the man, something that usually gets tucked away and has to be tediously drawn out.

“Well, I may have assumed that my presence in particular may not be wanted as I remind you of a darkness from your past,” Splinter admits, quickly taking a sip of his tea.

Mikey’s smile fades a bit at that before it all clicks. Ever since that incident with the mushrooms Splinter had always seemed to be in a different room and other than training, he had only seen him in passing. There had been no further attempts to talk and even during the moments when interaction was a necessity, Splinter kept it relatively brief.

Was he really afraid he would scare Mikey just because he sounded like his world's Shredder? That’s why he had been avoiding him and asked that stupid question?

“I know that you two aren’t the same, y’know,” Mikey says, raising a disbelieving eye ridge. “There’s no way I could even compare you two. You’re not even close to an Oroku Saki type, you’re–” he abruptly cuts himself off with a strangled noise, eyes widening as he realizes what he was about to say. His face flushes with heat and he tries to choke the words back, but one glance at Splinter's hopeful, soft, and curious expression has them pouring forth anyway. “...more like a father type.”

Mikey jerks his head to the side but knows his face is redder than a tomato. A beat of silence follows his statement and he internally cringes, thinking he’s crossed an invisible line, but slowly looks back to Splinter when he hears a heavy swallow. He blinks away the embarrassment when he sees the infinitely warm expression in the other’s eyes accompanied by an immensely pleased smile. Hesitantly Mikey relaxes, draining the rest of his tea.

“I am pleased that you do not hold that unfortunate coincidence against me,” the man says. “And that you have chosen to stay with us. I will admit, I was selfishly hoping you would decline the offer. Your light is something we would dearly miss.” Mikey’s beak turns up into a bright, warm smile that matches the glow inside of his chest. “As I have said before, we will be here for you for as long as you let us, Orange.”

Looking down into the empty cup in his grip, Mikey gives a mellow nod. Splinter hums, obviously content, and they fall into a comfortable silence, merely enjoying each other's steady presence. He chances a glance back up after a time to see Splinter having fallen into a meditative pose, a soft smile on his lips.

It’s nice to see him acting more like a Dad than a Sensei. He hopes that trend continues.

With all of the nervous tension out of the way, Mikey can feel himself tipping towards complete exhaustion once again. Obviously his sleep before didn’t restore nearly enough of his energy. But, he contemplates with a gaping yawn, the task of dragging himself to his room doesn’t seem worth it. And he doesn’t really want to be alone right now. Master Splinter won’t mind if he takes a quick nap in the dojo, surely.

Letting his head fall forward Mikey rests in a cradle of his arms on the small table. He snuggles in and gets as comfortable as he can, quickly allowing the pull of sleep to drag his eyes shut.

Floating in the blank space between dozing and dreaming, Mikey swears he feels a large, soft hand rub soothing circles over his scalp. And if he unconsciously leans into the small scratches, then that’s between him and the Pizza Supreme in the Sky.

Chapter Text

Mikey takes a deep, relieved breath as soon as they hop out of the sewers, immediately bolting towards a fire escape. He revels in the fresh air and wind on his scales for the first time in weeks after finally convincing Leonardo to let him out of the sewers again. Granted, it was with the exception that all of the other turtles had to be with him, but it was better than nothing.

It was also a night where they were going to be ignoring their patrol duties. They would jump in and help if needed, of course, but all of their goals for the night consisted of fun and relaxation.

Things had loosened up in the lair ever since Mikey apologized, yet he could still sense the undercurrent of tension. He’s fairly confident it has nothing to do with him and more to do with his situation, but nevertheless when he suggested heading to the surface to stretch his legs there was less pushback than he expected. Leonardo had been understandably cautious, especially since his hands still had yet to get back to a relative normal, but with the combined power of Michelangelo, the new compression wraps Donatello had whipped out surprisingly quick, and Raphael’s probing, the leader gave up his resolve and led the way to the surface.

Mikey adjusts his new wraps further up his arms, the light gray material bunching up slightly at the elbows. They weren’t quite as good as the ones he had back in his own dimension but he wasn’t going to complain. If the only drawback to getting some more relief from the constant aches and pain was the edges pinching his skin every once and a while? Then it was worth it.

Donatello assured him they were just prototypes, anyway. And with the critical side eye the other gives him as he hops onto the roof with Michelangelo, Mikey assumes he’ll be forced to give a full run down on the flaws when they get back to the lair.

“Oh, dudes, y’know what we should do first?” Michelangelo asks. “We totally need to get some of Murasaki-san’s pizza gyoza! Orange hasn’t had a taste of heaven yet!”

Mikey gasps, looking at his alternate with stars in his eyes. “Why have I never thought of that combo? It’s genius!”

“I know, right!?” Michelangelo exclaims. Mikey bounds along with him as he makes his way to the other side of the roof overlooking the city, a wide smile on his face and brimming with pent up energy.

He hadn’t quite felt it when in the lair, but now that he was out and had all the room in the world to roam every part of him is jittery to keep moving. His first instinct is to launch himself off the roof to swing around with his chains and it takes all of his self control to remember he can’t do that right now. Mikey tries not to dwell on it too much.

“Wait, wait! Aw, man, if only we brought our skateboards! Then we’d be able to travel in style~,” Michelangelo says with a forlorn sigh. He joins his alternate in daydreaming about the cool moves they could be pulling off right now with his own disappointed hum.

“It wouldn’t be wise to eat so much before running around. That’s just asking for cramps,” Donatello informs them. “Although I also vote to stop by Murakami’s before heading back. It has been a while since we paid him a visit.”

“Alright, cool, we know what we’re doing later. How about what we’re doing now?” Raphael asks grumpily, kicking a small pebble across the roof. “Is there even a plan for tonight or are we going to be standing here until the sun comes up?”

“Aw, did someone wake up on the wrong side of his shell?” The baby voice earns a swipe from Raphael, but Mikey easily ducks under it. He’s getting too predictable. “Besides, who needs a plan? My bros and I rarely ever have plans and things work out fine for us. Maybe you need to loosen up! Go with the flow! Y’know what I mean?”

Michelangelo throws an arm over his shoulders with an excited shout. “You’re totally speaking my language! Finally someone else who understands the mood!”

“You’re…basically the same person?” Leonardo questions, sending them both a confused stare. Mikey shares a knowing glance with his alternate before devolving into giggles. He jams a playfully elbow into Michelangelo’s side and darts out from underneath his arm. His grin grows when his alternate immediately chases after him, creating an impromptu game of keep away that soon has Mikey jumping to the next roof over.

The others follow closely but it’s only Michelangelo who’s trying to catch him. Mikey ducks, lunges, and parkour’s his way around the block before he’s finally caught by a lucky tackle, sending them both rolling onto the roof with laughter. Raphael shakes his head at them, but Mikey can spot the small amused smirk growing on his face. He has half a mind to drag him to the ground, too, but he has a feeling his wrestling won’t be as playful as Michelangelo’s.

Mikey rolls around on the roof with Michelangelo, both of them trying to get the upper hand and failing miserably each time. His alternate even makes a cheap grab at his bandanna around his neck, and Mikey pushes a sharp elbow into his arm for that one. At one point he see’s Donatello open his mouth as if to speak but Leonardo promptly slaps a hand on his mouth with a solemn shake of his head. Donatello huffs but goes back to exasperatingly waiting for the end of their wrestling match.

With a shout of triumph Mikey finally manages to pin Michelangelo beneath him. He sends him a bright grin as his alternate whines. A quick frown overtakes his expression as something inside him almost seems to click, chest flushing with a surge of warmth, but he shakes it away just as fast to go back to gloating at Michelangelo.

“C’mon! No way should you be that strong, dude! Look at you! You’re so tiny!” Michelangelo pouts with a poorly contained smile as Mikey hops off of him.

“I think you’re just a sore loser,” he brags, miming dusting off his shoulders. Michelangelo shoots to his feet, playfully smacking him in the shoulder.

“No way, Raph’s the one who’s the sore loser!”

“Am not!” Raphael immediately refutes with a glower. Mikey raises a skeptical eye ridge. He already knows that Michelangelo’s words are indubitably true. He’ll have to gain some evidence, but before he can suggest his experiment Michelangelo is grabbing his shoulders excitedly.

“Wait, wait! You can show me some tips for art tonight! Everybody else can learn too!” He gives him a little shake, still beaming. Mikey perks up in response, a smile growing as turns the idea over in his head. Before he can agree, though, Michelangelo frowns. “I don’t think there’s anything up here we can use, actually.”

Mikey deflates a bit at that realization, too. It doesn’t last long as he quickly comes to the fastest solution.

“I’m sure there’s some kind of store with paint or chalk close. We can just get it from there,” he suggests. Instantly Michelangelo brightens up again, but Leonardo is quickly stepping between them with a stern expression.

“We’re not stealing from a store, guys,” he orders, giving them both a pointed look. Mikey crosses his arms and frowns. Why did he feel that was mainly aimed at him?

“Why not?” he shoots back.

“Because it’s a criminal act?” Donatello incredulously says, staring at him as if he’s grown a second head. Mikey shrugs in response and looks back up into Leonardo’s exasperated face. He waits a moment to see if they’ll add more, but the silence grows.

“...and? Do you really think they’d be able to catch me?” Mikey finally says. Leonardo runs a hand over his eyes with a sigh, looking up at the sky imploringly. Like that will help him. Raphael snorts a laugh and Michelangelo is practically vibrating with the prospect of thievery.

“You’re a seasoned criminal in your dimension, aren’t you?” Raphael jovially says, giving him a sharp smirk. Mikey gladly returns it while Leonardo shoots his brother a death glare for encouraging him. He’s ready to confirm it (his entire family is made of criminals, both in the Hidden City and New York–everyone but Raph is quite proud of it) when their attention is grabbed by a loud explosion in the distance.

Everyone is instantly on alert. The shift is palpable as the others share a grim look and a new sense of seriousness falls over them. Mikey wants to whine at it all. Why does everytime he wants to have fun it gets ruined by something?

Mikey sighs to himself and rolls his shoulders, fully ready to follow them towards the explosion before Leonardo turns to him with a conflicted expression.

“Look, I’m not saying this because I don’t think you can handle it, but I think you should head back to the lair,” he says. Mikey sputters, looking at the others for backup but they are all avoiding his gaze, even Michelangelo. A flash of indignation rises in his chest and he wants to argue, but deep down he knows Leonardo is only trying to look out for him.

While his hands have been improving, they’re still a far cry from being able to effectively wield his physical weapons again. He can finally hold basic things like cups, pens, and kitchen supplies with his compression wraps, but it’s still way too easy to disarm him with the barest amount of pressure. Master Splinter has been trying to work on it in training, but it’s not enough to give the others full confidence in his ability to defend himself.

Mikey knows all of this, but that doesn’t mean he’s happy about being sent back to the lair at the first sign of trouble.

“Fine, but I’m going to complain about it later,” Mikey grumbles with his arms crossed. Tension he hadn’t seen bleeds from Leonardo’s frame as he gives him a grateful smile. He probably wasn’t expecting him to give in so easily. Which, overall, is smart of him to think, but Mikey’s trying to listen to his limits instead of constantly pushing himself to the brink.

“We’ll see you back at the lair then?” Mikey nods at Leonardo, to which he returns. “Alright, let’s get going.”

Leonardo takes off, Donatello following with an apologetic smile towards him. Mikey tries to match it but he doesn't know if it’s seen before he’s also running off towards the smoke rising into the sky.

“Don’t worry, we’ll still get you those pizza gyozas on the way back home!” Michelangelo reassures with an easy grin as he flips off the roof. Mikey huffs a laugh and turns to find Raphael eyeing him critically. He sends him a suspicious glance that has Raphael shaking out of his stupor.

“You better be going straight home. No messing around, alright?” Raphael says slowly. Mikey rolls his eyes and pushes him towards where the others are slowly fading into the distance.

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll be home before you can say ‘sidetracked’,” he says, giving him one last shove. Raphael narrows his eyes before giving a tight nod and racing off to catch up to his brothers. Mikey sighs, watching him run off with a pout. He glances down at his hands and balls them into fists, fighting back a grimace as they jolt with pinpricks of pain.

He wishes he was back to normal already. Well, not quite normal, but at least to the point where he can actually help again. Being sidelined sucked, no matter how much Mikey knew it was for the best. He’s missed his weapons, too. Sure, he’s been using them in training, but all of those times he’s had to pay attention to how they were affecting his hands and couldn’t let himself get lost in the moment.

It’s been a long time since Mikey has had to think about how to use his kusari fundo and nunchaku. Just remembering the previous training sessions makes his brain hurt all over again.

With one more glance at where the others have run off to, Mikey turns around with a sigh. He slowly makes his way across the roof, kicking stray pebbles in his path for some form of entertainment. His pace slows more when he realizes he’s going to be even more bored in the lair, with nothing to do but wait until they get back and watch TV.

Maybe Splinter would be up for some company? Or he could train some more, too.

Mikey shivers as that thought crosses his mind. That sounds way too much like what his Raph would do when bored, and he definitely doesn’t want training to become his idea of fun. As he gets to the edge of the roof and contemplates how angry Raphael would be if he stole some of the new acrylics, a flash of movement catches the corner of his eye.

He quickly turns towards it, and any and all sense of boredom immediately leaves when he sees the retreating shell on a nearby rooftop. A shell that’s big. And spiky. Connected to an even bigger and spikier figure.

Mikey’s heart nearly beats out of his chest as he watches the figure try to melt into the darkness. Despite knowing how futile and unreasonable it is, his first thought is that they’ve found him. His brothers have managed to find where he is and they’ve split up to try and look for him. Instinctually he reaches for their ninpō and gets slapped back to reality when his family's energies are nowhere to be found . He huffs, shaking out his arms and looking back to where he saw the shell only to find all trace of it gone.

Panicking, he does the first thing that comes to mind and races off towards where he last saw it. Raphael’s voice rings in the back of his mind about going straight home but he shakes it out with an apologetic wince. Even with all the likelihood of him being wrong, if he doesn’t check it out then it would take up way too much space in his thoughts.

Mikey has to hold on to the hope that it could be his Raph here to get him home.

He makes it to the other roof in less than a minute, frantically looking around for any more traces of where they could have gone. Mikey spins in place, brow furrowed when nothing jumps out at him. It’s strange how something so big and tall could disappear like that, but he supposes Raph had gotten pretty good at the whole ‘ninja’ part of their job so it’s not impossible–

His senses scream at him to move, and with a yelp he leaps forward into a roll, spinning around with wide eyes where a large mace is being yanked out of his previous spot. Mikey stays in a cautious defensive crouch as he looks up and up at a large, spiky, mutated turtle that’s glaring at him with narrowed eyes covered by a black mask, mace being slung across their shoulder.

Despite himself he can feel his heart sinking as soon as he gets a good look. Any and all hope that this turtle could have been his older brother gets crushed, and Mikey internally berates himself for even thinking of it. He knows he’s going to be stuck here for a while and he needs to accept that he might not see his brothers for who knows how long. Constantly setting his hopes too high is only going to make everything else hurt more in the future.

Mikey focuses back on the mutant in front of him when they let out a curious hum, eyeing him up and down from where he still crouches. Hesitantly he stands taller and finds to his displeasure that the larger turtle still completely towers over him. Why does everyone get to be so much bigger than him?

“You’re a new one,” the mutant says in a deep, raspy voice, adjusting his weapon. Mikey purses his lips, tense and ready to run at any sudden movement.

“I could say the same to you,” he responds, swallowing when the mutant gives a rough laugh. Mikey’s not exactly sure if he should be treating him like a friend or foe right now. He doesn’t know who this is in his own universe.

“I suppose you could.” He moves to rest the top of his mace on the ground and Mikey eyes it warily. That thing looks heavy, and this guy is waving it around like it’s nothing more than a baseball bat. This mutant can definitely pack a punch. “Who are you, and why’re you try’n to track me?”

Mikey lets a beat of silence pass. How honest can he be with him? He hasn’t made any aggressive moves so far other than that first surprise attack, so maybe he isn’t a complete bad guy?

“Um, I’m Orange. And I just…thought you looked like someone else I know,” he finally manages, finding some of the tension loosening the longer the mutant in front of him doesn’t seem to have any more ill intentions towards him. The other turtle lets out a small growl, tapping his mace harshly against the ground.

“No one else around here that looks like me. The name’s Slash,” he grinds out. Mikey files away his name as Slash goes back to eyeing him up with a suspicious, narrowed gaze. “You look like Raphael and his dumb brothers. Are you part of their group?”

Oh, he’s not liking that tone. While not outright aggressive, there’s definitely some bad blood between the other turtles and Slash. Especially Raphael it seems, as he’s the only one mentioned by name. What’s the best approach here?

“I live with them, I guess. I don’t have that many other options being a mutant turtle and all,” he says as nonchalantly as he can. “Can’t go on patrol with them or anything, though.” That’s enough degrees of separation without completely lying, right?

Slash snorts derisively and quickly turns away, not sparing him another glance. “Great, another one I gotta deal with now. As long as you don’t get in my way and aren’t some spy for the Kraang, I don’t really care. I gotta get back on track to bust some more Kraang heads, that explosion will only distract them for so long.”

Mikey twitches at the mention of…the K-words, but takes a deep breath and stares blankly at Slash’s retreating shell before the rest of the sentence registers. He darts forward with wide eyes and Slash stops to turn and shoot him a suspicious glance.

“That was you? The explosion? And what about the…uh, aliens? Are you trying to stop them?” he quickly asks, grimacing as he still can’t manage to get the word out. Slash turns all the way around, visibly intrigued.

“What’d you know about the Kraang, pipsqueak?” Mikey once again twitches at the name, but so far his mind is keeping quiet. For now, at least. He has faith he can at least make it through the conversation without stumbling into a panic attack. The nickname, however, isn’t appreciated.

Swallowing past a drying throat Mikey stares straight at Slash with a snarl growing on his face, all of his hate bubbling to the surface. “I know that they’re evil, and don’t have an ounce of empathy. They've done…this to me,” he bites, gesturing to his hands and the scars all along his arms, along with his colorless eye. “I know that if they ever try to invade Earth things will get really bad.”

Slash eyes him with contemplation as Mikey lets out a harsh breath and tries to get the rising anger back in control. They’re not even here, no need to get too riled up about it. He can save that for when he next sees them. Silence grows between them before Slash lets out a small sigh, looking Mikey up and down one more time as a wicked smirk twists his beak.

“How’d you feel about getting a little revenge on those Kraang? My partner won’t let you stay for the whole plan, but it’s always nice to get back at those alien freaks for what they’ve done to us, and for what they’re going to do.” Slash huffs, mouth twisting in displeasure. “Raphael and his brothers have no idea what they’re really up against. They need to fix the problem permanently before the Kraang can go through with their invasion plan. At least you seem to understand that.”

Mikey bites his lip, looking between Slash and the way back home. He’s already gone against what the others wanted from him, and he really should be getting back to the lair. But then he really thinks about the larger mutants offer. It’s very tempting, to say the least. And he is right in that the others have no clue just what they’re up against.

Slash is also implying that he knows they’re planning an invasion. Mikey’s already lived through one, and while the K-words here are much weaker than the ones he knows, their invasion force is likely no less deadly. Just thinking about this world being invaded, having to go through all of that again and being surrounded by slime and death and complete and utter terror as no one knows what to do–

But Mikey does know what to do, now. And that’s stopping the invasion before it even begins. It’s what Casey Jr.’s original mission was, and had he been sent back in time only a day earlier he would have succeeded. The entire Invasion as they knew it would never have happened.

He looks back up at Slash and gives a stern nod. “They can’t start an invasion. Whatever it takes, they need to be stopped.” Mikey hops up next to Slash as he gives a pleased rumble, leading the way to the edge of the rooftop.

“That’s what I like to hear,” Slash says. “Maybe I can forgive you for hanging around Raphael’s brothers if you keep thinking like that. Now follow me.” He slings his mace into a strap over his shell and crouches as if to jump.

Faced with a large, spiky shell in front of him, Mikey doesn’t think twice as he leaps onto it and finds the footholds and handholds around the mace. It’s only when he finds his perch by Slash’s shoulder does he realize the mistake, as well as how stiff the body below him has gotten. He doesn’t say anything as Slash looks back at him with a startled and slightly annoyed expression.

“That’s…different,” he says under his breath. Slash shakes his head and rolls his shoulders. “Doesn’t matter. Hang tight.”

Mikey lets out a relieved breath he didn’t realize he was holding and quickly ducks further down as Slash takes off across the rooftops. He hangs on tight to his spines, moving much faster than what Mikey thought he’d be capable of but he’s not complaining. There’s still a chance he can help out Slash and his partner with their mission and get back to the lair before anyone even knows he got sidetracked.

Plus, this could be like more exposure therapy for him. If Mikey wants to help stop an invasion then he needs to keep his head on straight when confronted. Talking about it will definitely help, too, but he’d much rather dive into the deep end as soon as possible and this is the perfect opportunity for that. And if he messes up again at least the others won’t be around to see it and he can save that embarrassment.

He has a gut feeling that if he does lose himself fighting the K-words with Slash, the other mutant would probably encourage the behavior. Mikey knows that isn’t what the end goal should be, but the pressure of explaining his actions would be gone.

Trying to get those thoughts out of his head for the moment, Mikey shakes himself off and focuses on where they’re going. Rooftops fly past and they’re getting further and further away from the smoke of the explosion. He tries peeking around to get a grasp on which direction Slash is running to but nothing looks familiar enough to recognize. A pit grows in his gut as they keep moving, and he really hopes his sense of direction is strong enough to get him back to the lair in time.

Finally Slash slows and comes to a stop on the edge of a roof, jostling Mikey on his shell and nodding towards the ground. He pokes his head over Slash’s shoulder and looks down, tensing when he sees four Kra…K-words with blasters guarding an armored van.

“We need to get what’s inside that van. You take out the bots on the outside and I’ll take care of the ones inside,” Slash says lowly, glancing back at him. Mikey swallows, shifting and never taking his eyes off of the aliens below them. He can feel his heart starting to race even before the fighting starts.

Taking a deep breath and slowly letting it out, Mikey tries to center himself. He knows he doesn’t have to be lethal. Even though he’s not in top shape, he can take these guys out with his regular razz-ma-tazz. He’s not going to blank out and panic and ruin whatever plan Slash and his partner are brewing to get rid of the K-words for good. And then, after he helps him out with this, he’ll go back to the lair and wait for the others to return like he was ordered to do. Easy peasy.

Slash is still looking at him for confirmation of his hastily laid plan. With one last moment to steady his mind he gives him a curt nod, the larger mutant nodding back and crouching, ready to jump. But, before he leaps, four other figures melt out of the shadows below and quickly take out the robots in quick order.

“Oh, great,” Slash rumbles angrily under his breath. Mikey pales as he watches Raphael dispose of the last remaining K-word, the other three turtles looking to get inside the van.

“The plutonium trail ends here. Whatever the Newtralizer is after is in this van,” he hears Donatello whisper as he goes to open the doors. Mikey is panicking, getting ready to leap off of Slash’s shell and make a run for it. He doesn’t get the chance to try before his perch is jumping over the roof's ledge and straight towards the ground.

“No no no wait–!” Mikey harshly whispers as they land in front of the others, ducking further behind Slash’s shell and hoping against hope that they didn’t see him. He’s going to get chewed out so hard for this stunt, but in his defense he has good reason to want to follow through on a plan to get rid of the K-words permanently. Granted, the others don’t understand that yet, but maybe they’d simply trust his word.

“Spike?!” Raphael exclaims, and there’s some shuffling as Mikey focuses on planning the best escape plan. There’s still a chance he can escape without the others noticing he was here, right?

“It’s Slash now,” Slash spits out, shifting on his feet. Mikey holds on for dear life to try to not accidentally lose his grip on the shell. His mind flicks through all the possibilities ways this encounter could go and none of them end up well for him. “Did you miss me, Raphael?”

“What’s going on, Slash? And what does the Newtralizer have to do with it?” Mikey hears Raphael draw his sai and cowers deeper into his hiding place. Oh, he’s going to be in so much trouble.

“We’re doing what you couldn’t; wiping out the Kraang. I’ve got a new partner now, as well as another one who decided to come along for the ride.” He winces at the reference to him, shaking his head frantically in the hope Slash might feel it. Alas, he has no such luck, and with a slight turn of his shell Mikey is just barely in sight of the others and has the perfect view of their eyes widening in shock.

“Orange!?” they all shout incredulously, and Mikey slowly hops off Slash’s shell and gives a slow wave, avoiding all of their eyes.

“Ha, ha, it’s…funny seeing you guys here?” he says with a wince, fighting the instinct to hide behind Slash’s larger frame. Mikey glances up and sees the disappointment, anger, and confusion on all of their faces and promptly looks away again.

“How does it feel to be betrayed like you betrayed me, Raphael?” Slash hisses, breaking Mikey out of his cocoon of guilt to look between the two with wide eyes. He wasn’t betraying the others, this was just a simple act of disobedience, which is completely normal and healthy for someone of his age and, in his opinion, totally justified in this situation.

At least that clears up where some of that bad blood comes from, though.

“Okay, wait, that’s not what this is–” he starts to say, being immediately cut-off when a futuristic looking lizard with armor lands heavily on the roof of the van, scowling down at all of them.

“Keep out of our way!” he hisses, using what looks to be a laser to quickly cut into the metal and dig out two metal devices. Leonardo jumps up to stop him but gets brushed aside by his large tail, sending him flying across the alley. Mikey can only stand there in shock as the lizard fills the devices with something and promptly throws one to Slash.

“We have what we came for. Leave the little turtles and let us go,” the lizard orders. Before his eyes he disappears with the press of a button and Mikey looks up to Slash in a panic to see the larger turtle about to press the button, too. Slash spares him a single glance, looking at the others with a challenging smirk, and then back to Mikey.

“Good luck dealing with them, pipsqueak,” he says before his claw lands on the button and just like the lizard, he’s gone in a flash. Mikey quickly blinks and slowly turns back to the others. He winces even more at the stern, upset glares being sent his way, and Raphael looks positively furious.

This isn’t going to be fun.

==========

“You’re grounded young man! Completely and utterly grounded!” Michelangelo exclaims with his arms crossed as they trudge back into the main area of the lair. Mikey sighs as he’s herded back into the lounge with the others right behind him, no one taking their eyes off of him the entire way back.

“You don’t have the power to ground him, Mike,” Donatello grumbles. “No matter how much it’s warranted.”

His alternate sticks his tongue out at Donatello and goes to flop onto the couch, letting out a deep groan. Mikey fidgets with the compression wraps on his arms as he avoids the others accusing stares when they similarly disperse into the lounge. He resolutely stays standing, refusing to take a seat like Michelangelo and Donatello and shuffling guiltily in the face of a stern Leonardo and a pacing Raphael.

“We told you to head back to the lair, Orange. What part of that was unclear?” Leonardo says accusingly. His stare bores into the side of Mikey’s head as he studiously avoids his gaze.

“I was seriously going to, but I…I saw something that looked familiar and I needed to check it out, and then it all started going sideways. I thought I’d be able to handle it before you guys got back to the lair–”

“What could have possibly happened that made you team up with Slash!?” Raphael finally explodes, pausing in his pacing to face Mikey head on. “He easily could have hurt you and he’s obviously up to something bad! You just blindly trusted him without knowing a thing about him!?”

“He looked like my Raph from a distance, alright!?” Mikey yells, making all of them tense. “And I didn’t blindly trust him right away, he said he was going to stop the Kra–the K-words for good and I think we can all agree that’s a good thing. I was trying to help him and save this dimension before an invasion could start!”

“That’s not your job to do! This is our world and our problems, and you have no idea what you’re getting yourself into!”

“Would you two knock it off–”

“I know better than anyone what I was trying to get into! It’s you that has no idea how dangerous a full invasion is!” Mikey pushes on through Leonardo, glaring at Raphael in challenge. “I’m going to be stuck here for who knows how long, so I’m going to do whatever it takes to make sure this world doesn’t experience what mine did!”

He heaves in deep breaths, not realizing how worked up he’s gotten. Raphael seems taken aback for a moment before another scowl rests on his face, slightly bitter as he crosses his arms.

“Yeah, I don’t know what would happen if the Kraang really invaded, or what happend with your world because guess what? You still haven’t told us the whole story!” Raphael starts pacing again, hands on his head in frustration. “I know the most and it’s barely anything! How do you expect us to understand what you’re doing if we don’t know what you’re comparing it to!?”

Mikey opens his mouth to retort and then quickly shuts it when Raphael’s point sinks in. They don’t know all of the catastrophic things that had happened or how quickly everything fell apart. The only one who has the slightest idea of how everything went wrong is Raphael and it’s only the smallest bit. Mikey hasn’t told them anything about how it happened, or how it could have been stopped way before it even began.

Raphael snorts and shakes his head, already knowing he’s won. Mikey wraps his arms around himself and looks away as the fight drains out of him immediately. Leonardo is obviously trying to find something to say, but all he manages to do is clench his hands and fidget on his feet. No one says anything, and it is silently agreed to drop the topic for now when Donatello clears his throat.

“If you children are done arguing, then might I suggest we listen in to the Newtralizer and Slash’s plan?” He waves his T-Phone in the air with a raised eyebrow. “While you were busy confronting Slash I let out one of my spyroaches that crawled onto his shell. We should be able to hear everything they’re saying and figure out what those two are up to.”

Grateful to be back on task, they all gather around Donatello as he brings up the feed from the spyroach. Mikey doesn’t really know what that is but it sounds cool. Guilt still swirls in his gut at having gone against the others wishes, but he holds onto his belief that he had the right to try and stop a possible invasion.

Donatello fiddles with his phone a bit more, a burst of static coming through the speakers before the hissing voice of the Newtralizer fills the air.

“–the Kraang orb revealed a new weapon. They’re testing it on the docks at midnight. But we can use it to wipe out the Kraang once and for all, destroying the whole stinkin’ city with it.”

Mikey’s eyes widen at that, and at the ‘I told you so’ looks being thrown his way he can do nothing but wince and bashfully rub his neck. “Uh, so I didn’t know that’s what they were planning to do. That one’s on me, totally my bad.”

“And every innocent human with it. Are you crazy? I’m here to take out Kraang, not people,” Slash vehemently defends. Well, Mikey feels a little bit better that the other mutant wasn’t keen on what the Newtralizer was saying, either. He’ll take those kinds of wins where he can get them. Especially if it means Slash might be on their side after all.

He didn’t seem that bad during their short interaction. The larger mutant may have attacked him at first sight, but he still let him tag along for the chance of revenge. Slash couldn’t be completely evil, despite his gruff, spiky exterior, overly violent actions, and rocky relationship with the other turtles.

“Why should I care about anyone in this city?” Newtralizer hisses back, accompanied by some shuffling on their end. “If it comes down to it, I won’t take my chances, brother.”

The connection fizzles out, everybody straightening at the dire information. Mikey feels even worse for possibly going along with that plan, now. Maybe Raphael was right when he said he still had a lot to learn about this dimension.

“Alright, this just got a little too real. Let’s move,” Leonardo solemnly orders, quickly moving towards the lair exit. Mikey follows right behind everyone else with Raphael and is surprised when the leader simply glances back at him with a tired expression and rolls his eyes.

“You’re not going to say I can’t come?” he asks, brushing off the slightly aggravated look Raphael throws his way.

“You wouldn’t listen even if I did,” Leonardo sighs and says nothing more as he leads them to the surface. Mikey feels a pang of guilt about how defeated he sounds but is grateful for it anyway. It’s better to be invited along than having to find it himself, because there was no way he was missing out on this mission now.

They make quick pace racing to the docks, seeming to arrive before either Slash or the Newtralizer. Hiding behind a shipping container, Mikey tenses at the sight of all the K-words crawling around, directing others to prepare for something. No one speaks, but he can sense all the glances being tossed his way. Raphael draws closer to him and presses quickly against his shoulder. Mikey draws in a deep breath and nudges the other back in reassurance, trying his best to keep his heartbeat and breathing even.

He knows his hands start to tremble when a massive portal is opened and a large, mech-like construct steps out. The K-words below are saying something but it takes all of his concentration to stop his mind from wandering a little too far. Mikey’s breathing hitches, eyes not leaving the mech as it faces away from them towards a conveniently placed container.

Michelangelo scoffs beside him. “Is that the weapon they were talking about? Psh, doesn't look like much to me.” Mikey doesn’t get the chance to correct his alternate on that comment before the mech is powering up, releasing a pitched whine as it charges a lightning-like laser that blasts completely through another shipping container. “Oh, uh, never mind.”

“Alright, here’s what’s going to happen–” Leonardo begins, immediately cutting himself off with an annoyed groan as the Newtralizer materializes on the top of the machine. He doesn’t last long, being instantly blasted off when the K-words go on high alert at his presence. Down below Slash makes his entrance by bulldozing through the robotic bodies, drawing fire away from where the Newtralizer crouches above the mech.

The others waste no time in jumping into the battle but Mikey hesitates. His hands can’t wield his weapons, and there is still a likely chance he won’t be able to stay calm enough to really help. He jerks in place, his body and mind warring with themselves on what Mikey wants to do. While his mind jerks itself in two different directions he watches the fight anxiously, biting his lip when Donatello attempts to throw some kind of grenade and fails miserably.

The K-words are shouting orders among themselves, the word knocking around in his head as he tries his best to shake it off. Blasters shoot all around, and when he finally takes one more steadying breath, getting ready to jump in the fray to actually help, the mech suddenly shudders, a flying pink blob being thrown carelessly out as the weapon turns on everything and anything below.

Well, looks like the Newtralizer managed to get inside the robot after all.

His attention is grabbed by Raphael’s desperate yell of ‘Spike!’ from across the battlefield as the other K-words attempt to retreat from the wildly shooting mech. Following his frantic gaze Mikey’s heart drops at the sight of Slash pushing away the ground troops, unaware of the mech's giant foot about to squash him into turtle paste.

Raphael’s cry sparks a deep warmth inside of Mikey’s chest, and without thinking he launches his arms out. To his infinite surprise corporeal, flickering chains materialize in the air, quickly latching onto the leg of the mech and, before he can register what’s really happening, Mikey is yanking his arms to the side to topple the machine to the ground. Hands shaking, his ninpō gives one last flicker before his chains dissipate and a heavy exhaustion leeches its way into his very bones.

Knees buckling, he surveys the scene to see almost every single eye below trained on him. He focuses on Slash’s shocked gaze as he pants. The shouts of the remaining K-words who couldn’t retreat fast enough to focus fire on him barely register in his now muddled mind as he lists to the side.

The others are handling their own battles, drawing attention away from his position and corralling the remaining K-words towards the still open portal. Mikey focuses on the minuet twitching of his hands, blearily trying to figure out what the shell just happened. He knows that was his ninpō, but that shouldn't have been possible. Last he checked it was still way too weak to summon his normal weapons, let alone whatever that was. He absentmindedly rubs at his chest, some of that warmth still lingering as his mind twists in confusion.

Mikey gets jerked out of his hazy thoughts by the panicked shouts below. Blinking past the heaviness of his eyelids he looks out onto the rest of the dock, flinching as the mech gets back to its feet with its laser right at him. His eyes go wide and he attempts to move out of the way but stumbles over his feet, falling to his knees and catching himself on his hands with a wince.

Turning his head has him coming face to face with the now charging laser. Mikey desperately tries to get back to his feet but can barely make it into a crouch before he’s falling back once again. The machine whines and Mikey, with no other options of escape flying through his head, makes a last ditch effort and retracts into his shell. He waits for the pain to hit and send him spiraling somewhere through the city for a rough landing, tensing every muscle possible in his body.

He hears the desperate voices of the other turtles below, along with many thuds and ringing of metal on metal as they presumably try to stop the mech before it fires. Mikey appreciates the effort, but as the ringing of the laser drowns out their cries he knows that this is going to hurt.

Scrunching his eyes tight as the whine comes to a peak, he braces himself and hopes to any higher power that might be listening he doesn’t get flung too far away from the docks so he can get back quickly.

He hears the blast, but then he’s being scooped into large hands and starts tumbling head over heels. Mikey yelps from within his shell as he’s jostled around, hearing the whistling of wind before they land with a grunt. With wide eyes Mikey pops out of his shell to realize he’s being held tightly in one of Slash’s arms. The larger mutant looks down at him with a blank, controlled expression.

“I’ve gotcha, pipsqueak,” Slash rumbles, still holding him firmly around his shell as he turns them to face the now smoking and violently shaking mech. Mikey squints at the Newtralizer still inside the machine, mashing at his teleporter with too many clicks and hisses to keep track of in his murky head. He doesn’t know if the lizard makes it out in time before the entire mech crumbles completely, the last of the remaining K-words making a hasty retreat back through the portal in the commotion, quickly closing it behind them.

Dangling limply in Slash’s grip he looks up at the larger mutant, giving him a lazy but grateful smile. Slash’s beak twitches into his own sharp smirk before it vanishes just as fast as Raphael and the others run up to them.

“Spi–Slash! Orange! You two okay?” he asks frantically, looking between them with wide eyes. Mikey nods tiredly and does nothing to get out of Slash’s hold, looking on through slitted lids as the others cautiously scan him for injuries. Finding none they relax one by one, even more so when Slash slowly lowers him to the ground, making sure he’s steady on his feet before backing off.

Michelangelo is immediately on him, bundling Mikey into his chest with a relieved laugh. “Oh yeah, they just got totally newtralized, son!”

Mikey tiredly chuckles while he leans most of his weight onto him. Donatello quickly comes around and shoves a small penlight right into his left eye. He whines and weakly pushes his hand away, Donatello grumbling but backing off with his protest.

“Y’know, there is always a spot on the team for one more,” Raphael suggests after eyeing Mikey over one last time, turning back to face the larger mutant with a hopeful smile. Leonardo nods his assent before also eyeing up his still shaky arms with a troubled frown.

Slash huffs and shakes his head. “You know I need to go on my own path. Besides, I think I’m better off going solo. Goodbye, Raphael.” He looks down at Mikey with an appraising eye. “You better keep that tiny one alive while I’m gone. He’s going to be a powerful ally some day and I’m looking forward to seeing it.”

Mikey preens at the compliment as much as he can, sending Slash a friendly smile. He doesn’t return it but he does catch the subtle nod thrown his way in acknowledgement. Without another word Slash turns and lumbers out of the docks, heading towards the city. Looking to the side he deflates seeing Raphael’s disappointed expression watching Slash walk away. He’ll need to get the context for it later, but Slash and Raphael definitely used to be close friends. He wonders what happened with that.

Michelangelo jostles him around, bringing his wavering attention back to the others who are starting to crowd around him. His alternate carefully swings his arm around his shoulders, one hand coming around his shell to better support his weight. Mikey shuffles on his feet and while he thinks he’d be able to stand on his own he’s still grateful for the assistance.

“So, what exactly happened back there? I thought your mystic powers were basically nothing,” Leonardo asks, wonder and curiosity shining through the stern expression he’s trying to keep up.

Mikey shrugs and answers as honestly as he can. “I’m not sure, but it was definitely my ninpō that was acting up. It…took a lot out of me, though, and I wasn’t really thinking about doing it.”

“Hm, interesting,” Donatello murmurs. “Perhaps you’re ninpō is regaining energy at a faster rate than I thought. I wonder why that is?”

“Who cares, dudes. Mini-me was totally awesome! It obviously deserves–” Michelangelo cuts himself off with a pained groan, aiming a pained gaze at the sky. “There’s no way Murakami-san is still open! We missed our chance to introduce Orange to pizza gyozas.”

“You’re really focusing on food right now? With Orange leaning on you just to keep himself from falling on his face?” Raphael questions, crossing his arms as he sends his brother an incredulous look. Michelangelo merely whines and gives a solemn nod, earning a small flick to the temple.

“We really should be getting back to the lair. All this fighting probably attracted some unwanted attention,” Leonardo interjects before Michelangelo can retaliate against the ‘assault’. Mikey yawns and hastily nods his head, the heavy feeling pushing down on him. He would much prefer to be laying down on something soft and warm while he recovers from whatever his ninpō decided to do.

No one else protests as Leonardo quickly leads the way to the closest manhole cover. Mikey leans against Michelangelo almost the entire time as they walk back to the lair with Raphael hovering on his other side. The longer they travel the more energy starts to seep back into his muscles, but the exhaustion lingers in the back of his mind.

Finally they cross the threshold into the lair, no one speaking as they all flop onto various places around the lounge. Mikey takes his place with a sigh in the corner of the couch, clutching his knees to his plastron and using them to hold his head up. Closing his eyes he sorts through everything that had happened. And all the things that went wrong.

He disobeyed direct orders. Briefly teamed up with a mutant he knew, at the time, had a rocky relationship with the other turtles. Got into an argument because they had no idea why he would do anything he could to stop an invasion. And, to top it all off, he almost got himself killed because he wasn’t thinking and his ninpō decided to go rogue.

Well, he supposed it wasn’t all bad. The fact that Mikey was able to use his ninpō so soon, regardless of how little it was and how exhausted it made him, meant that he was building up his power again. It would help to know exactly why his ninpō inexplicably grew stronger, but at the end of the day that was semantics best left to Donatello. All he cared about was the fact he successfully used his ninpō again and how it was likely he’d be able to use it in the future. Hopefully, after he had some time to recover, it’d be even next time.

Then his mind cycles back to the reason he got caught up in all of this in the first place, and his mood sours with guilt. Mikey knows exactly why stopping a full scale invasion before it has a chance to start is so important, but the others don’t get it. It’s not their fault that they don’t understand the desperation he felt when given the chance to stop the Kra–the Kraa–the aliens for good. They don’t know the horrors that would be unleashed if they’re able to go through with their plans.

It’s completely his own fault, too. The others still don’t know half of what happened during the Invasion of his own dimension. And, logically, he knows his experience would likely be different than what they would go through if the aliens did invade any time soon, but there had to be some overlap, no matter how different they looked and acted.

They deserved to know. They needed to know so that they could be prepared, so they weren’t taken by surprise and then had no idea what they could even do to fight back against such a strong force when it was just them fighting to save the entire planet and all of their friends and family–

“Orange? You alright?” Donatello’s voice rips Mikey out of his spiraling thoughts with a flinch, opening his eyes to see the worried tilt to his brow. Mikey licks his dry lips, heaving in a deep breath.

“Yeah, yeah I’m okay.” He winces as his voice comes out thin, clearing his throat and speaking again, stronger this time. He avoids all of their eyes as he continues. “I was just thinking…a lot of the arguing could have been avoided if you guys, uh, actually knew why I did what I did. And…” Mikey purses his lips, letting out a deep breath. “And why the–the Kr–why the Kraang freak me out so much.”

His throat almost closes up on the word, but he pushes through and tries to calm his suddenly racing heart. Mikey takes a quick glance up to see the others' surprised expressions, all looking at each other as if to confirm that they heard right, then turning their wide eyes back to him. He shrinks down at all of their stares, already regretting suggesting the idea, but then Raphael is moving. Tensing as the other faces away from him on the couch, he makes a questioning noise when he flops back and presses his shell into the side of Mikey’s arm where he’s still curled into himself.

“It’s about damn time, I’ll tell 'ya that,” Raphael says in triumph. Mikey sends a confused look down at the top of Raphael’s head resting on the top of his shoulder. The others seem just as puzzled at Raphael’s action as him, but as they look at him with hesitance he finds that Raphael’s calm, heavy presence against his side…helps him regain whatever composure he has left, if only a little bit.

“Are you sure, Orange? We don’t want to force you to do anything you're not comfortable with,” Leonardo says slowly, narrowing his eyes at his brother laying against Mikey’s arm. He appreciates the sentiment, but he knows they need to know the seriousness of the situation. And, hopefully, they’ll be able to understand more of the things he’s done while trapped in this dimension.

“I’m sure, I can’t keep it to myself anymore,” he resolutely answers, giving as confident a nod as he can. Leonardo purses his lips but accepts his answer, murmuring about getting Master Splinter as he strides towards the dojo. Donatello leans against the other arm of the couch while Michelangelo gets comfortable on the floor, back against the base of the cushions.

Mikey closes his eyes one last time, trying to find the little voice of Leo in his head to hype him up. He doesn’t quite find it but the moment of peace is enough to solidify his decision in his mind. It’s now or never.

“I think it would be easier to start with something they used to tell kids during the bad timeline...”

Chapter Text

“‘...And behold, from their perch atop New York City, the Kr–the Kraang ripped open the sky itself. What came out was terror and what rained down upon us was worse than death.’”

“That’s pretty metal, dude.”

“Shut up, Mike!”

==========

“Casey Jones Jr. came from the future to warn us and help stop it, but we were too late.”

“How is time travel possible in your world again?”

“Keep your questions to yourself until the end, Donatello.”

“Sorry, Master Splinter.”

==========

“Leo got the key, but…we lost Raph. We were attacked in the subway tunnels trying to get him back, and…and I almost really messed up and Donnie had to save me. But…we found Raph. I had no idea what they had done to him. He wasn’t himself. It was terrifying. No one knew what to do other than run away, but…but Leo wouldn’t give up on New York or our big brother, so that meant neither could I. I had to have hope, too.”

==========

“Donnie completely gave himself to the Technodrome to pilot it. And it was working, but something went wrong. He–he got ripped out and there were all of these tentacles and slime and we couldn’t move–”

Mikey’s voice finally breaks, staring off into the distance, his eyes overflowing with tears even more tears. He knew he started shaking at some point which caused Raphael to lean more of his weight onto him. It helped a little, but his body was still wracked with uncontrollable shivers. No one said a word, now, the atmosphere turning solemn and heavy.

“I was terrified. I didn’t know how we could win, especially without our ninpō. Raph…he was going to kill Leo, and Leo wasn’t fighting back. If Raph hadn’t broken free of the control then–then–” Mikey swallows thickly, taking multiple deep breaths to try and calm the heart jackrabbiting inside of his chest. “But he did, and our powers came back, and things finally started to go right. We were all together again, putting up a good fight.”

Mikey makes himself impossibly smaller in his corner of the couch. He refuses to look at any of the others expressions, knowing that if he does his voice will catch and he won’t be able to get through this.

“Then everything went so, so wrong.” He hiccups, hastily wiping a shaking arm across his eyes to stem most of the tears spilling from them. “Leo did something so stupid and we–we couldn’t get back up to stop him, he just did it and then he was alone with Kraang in the P-prison Dimension. Casey pulled the key and the portal closed and…Leo was gone, I couldn’t even say goodbye–”

Mikey’s voice morphs into a whine and he buries his head into his knees, barely feeling the way Raphael shifts to have even more of his carapace leaning into him. He lets a few sobs loose before willing himself to keep talking. He’s almost done, and then he won’t have to do this ever again. All he’ll have to do is field questions and the others will know why his brain goes into panic mode with anything Kraang. Easy peasy.

“I couldn’t believe he was–dead, just like that, so I didn’t believe it. Everyone else said that it was over and there was nothing else to do, but it wasn’t. I knew it wasn’t. So…I pushed myself. I bundled all of those feelings, the grief, the desperation, the hope, and how scared I knew Leo must be trapped with that monster thinking he was going to die. Everything started hurting, but there was a portal opening and my brothers were telling me to keep going so I did, no matter how much it felt like I was dying. I kept it open and Raph pulled Leo through and he was hurt really bad but he was alive. Kraang was so mad but it didn’t matter because I knew that he’d be gone for good after I dropped the portal.”

Mikey manages a bleak chuckle. “Everyone was hurt, New York was almost completely destroyed, and it felt like I was burning from the inside out, but we won. Barely, but we still did it. We saved the world and no one died. That’s all that I really wanted. My family, safe and alive. Stopping the apocalypse was just a perk.”

He falls into silence, softly wiping away the tear tracks on his cheeks. A few sniffles let themselves loose before he can stop them and he scrunches his eyes tight to revel in the moment.

Mikey did it. It took multiple Kraang deaths, roughly three months languishing in another dimension, countless misunderstanding and endless emotional turmoil, but it was finally free. While his mind feels heavy and exhaustion–physical, mental, and emotional–anchors him to his curled spot on the couch, a sense of peace washes over him. All of the darkness from that day that had been circling around in his mind nonstop was finally being let out of the floodgates. The pressure had been infinitesimally lifted, yet even that felt like the cloak that he had woven around himself was being torn to shreds.

As much as Mikey had been fighting tooth and nail to keep it to himself, to not burden anyone with his thoughts and trauma, he has to admit that it feels better to have it out in the open. He was never one for keeping big secrets, anyway, and Dr. Feelings internally pats him on the back for being willing to open up about his experience.

There is still a part of him that feels guilty for dropping all of this on the family so suddenly. All the other parts of him, however, argue adamantly that they are only trying to help like he’s always helping those around him. Why can’t he let someone else help carry the burden his mind carries for a little while? All of them have expressed how badly they wanted to know, and as he cracks open his eyes, he absorbs all of the saddened, sympathetic, and slightly horrified expressions on their faces.

Despite making them feel like that, Mikey’s heart warms at the signs of care and compassion they share towards him.

“After all that, I think I really do understand why you have a bit of a…homicidal streak when it comes to Kraang,” Donatello says mildly. Mikey hums in response, not exactly knowing how to respond to that.

“We may be able to understand it, but that doesn’t mean that kind of thing is excusable,” Leonardo quickly says, softening his stern tone when Mikey unconsciously flinches at his voice. “We’ll work on it. I know it’s probably hard for you to separate them in your mind, but whenever you start to feel like that you tell one of us and we’ll try to get you somewhere to calm down.”

“How’s that going to work in the middle of a battle, fearless?” Raphael points out. Mikey can’t see his face from where he’s still leaning heavily into his side, but he has a feeling a pointed stare is being directed towards the leader.

“Um, well, I–” Leonardo stammers before shaking his head and averting his gaze. “We’ll think of something in the moment I’m sure.”

“Oh, Orange!” Michelangelo suddenly shrieks, his own tears budding in his eyes as he launches himself at Mikey and Raphael. He lets out a huff at the collision, Raphael immediately starting to try to wriggle out of the hold.

“Mikey, let me go!” he exclaims with a growl.

“No way, man! W-we need all the hugs the world can get us right now! Especially Orange, he gets dibs on all of them!” Michelangelo rebuffs, voice thick and squeezing them even tighter. Raphael squirms harder before slumping back in defeat.

Mikey softly giggles as he melts into the embrace, slowly relaxing from his tight ball he had drawn himself into during his retelling. He blinks his eyes slowly, looking up into the warm and saddened gaze of Splinter. The downward folding of his ears during his trauma dump was enough of a sign that the larger mutant was not taking the events well. While his expression seems to have lightened his whiskers keep twitching and his ears are still much too low.

Slowly Splinter reaches out a paw to lay on the top of Mikey’s head, a warm weight between the sandwich that he’s become with Raphael and Michelangelo, who refuses to let go of either of them.

“You are very brave to have told us, Orange. It is an insurmountable pain to believe you have lost what is most precious to you. Thankfully for all of us, you and your brothers made it to the other side in one piece. That day will be one that you never truly forget, but I believe you have taken a large step towards healing the scar it has left on you.” Splinter pauses, using his other hand to lightly grasp the hand sticking out of the embrace. “Both mentally and physically.”

“…Hey, Leo,” Raphael suddenly calls out, all eyes darting towards the leader who looks on in confusion. “You try any of the self-sacrificing shit again, I’ll kill you myself after knocking some sense into your skull. I don’t know if I ever made that clear before.”

Leonardo looks affronted while Mikey just giggles.

“You’ll have to beat me to it, I’ve already got 7 prototypes for containment devices made specifically for Leo in case that kind of scenario pops up again,” Donatello blithely replies. The leader whips around to Donatello, aghast at that information. Mikey giggles harder, Michelangelo quickly joining.

Splinter gives a weak chuckle before swiftly leaning over and delivering a precise chop between Raphael shoulder and shell. “Language, Raphael,” he says after the other turtle's sharp yelp.

Mikey looks over the scene, eye heavy. A large yawn escapes as he absorbs the warm atmosphere. Michelangelo is suddenly leaping away from the hug with a gasp. He stands in front of them all, hands on his hips and a playful yet determined smirk.

“You know what I think this calls for? A super awesome, totally rad, completely amazing sleepover! We can bring out all our blankets and pillows and just chillax together like we used to do. It’ll be totally sick!” he exclaims, already running to his room before anyone else agrees.

“I…guess we’re having a sleepover tonight,” Leonardo slowly says, a small grin on his face as he also excitedly hops up and goes to collect his things. Donatello goes next, and it takes Mikey practically dragging Raphael towards his room before he’s gathering his own things while Mikey eagerly grabs his mound of blankets.

Michelangelo is artfully ‘arranging’ the pillows and blankets, which ends up more as a glob of fabric than anything presentable. Mikey watches on with a growing smile and warm embers in his chest when Leonardo attempts to straighten everything out only to be slapped away by his alternate claiming he’ll mess it up.

“How are you even supposed to sleep when it looks like a tornado ran through here? Where are the divides going to be?” Donatello asks, clearly exasperated by the bickering happening over the blankets. Mikey, however, sees no problem with the arrangement, and promptly snuggles into the middle of the pile, adding in his own blankets on top of himself.

“See, Orange has the right idea!” Michelangelo exclaims, plopping down beside him and wrapping an arm around his shoulders. “Just have to go with what feels right.”

The others eye the pile warily, but Mikey doesn’t mind. Even if they end up sleeping on the couch or somewhere off to the side, their presence was enough to make his soul sing. Mikey abruptly leans forward to fall onto his plastron. If Michelangelo hadn’t fallen directly on top of his shell he would have started making lazy blanket angels in the sea of soft fabric.

“We could always do a turtle pile,” Mikey murmurs, eyes slowly falling closed. He basks in the warmth around him, a weight finally off his chest that he wasn’t aware was there until it was completely gone.

“What? We haven’t done one of those since we were tots–” Donatello starts to say before he’s unceremoniously dragged down by Michelangelo, landing on his shell right next to Mikey. His alternates bursts into laughter as Donatello sighs and begrudging flips over, making himself comfortable next to him. Leonardo follows closely after, a thoughtful and almost nostalgic sheen to his eyes sitting cross-legged next to Michelangelo.

It takes a bit more cajoling to get Raphael to join them, but as soon as Splinter returns with a tray of healthy snacks and multiple soft goodnights shared, he relents. He sits directly behind them all, his legs splayed over Mikey’s own and leaning against the base of the couch. Once everyone is deemed comfortable Leoanrdo starts a cartoon on a low volume.

Mikey lets the sounds wash over him, simply enjoying the comfy atmosphere. His mind keeps pulling him towards sleep, but everytime he gets close he jerks awake, a small part of him afraid the comfort will go away as soon as he does. Afraid that he’ll wake up alone and that the others will have had time to think over everything he said and they’ll look at him differently. As much as he can tell himself that it won’t happen and he can sleep, he fights sleep by listening to Raphael’s soft snores, Michelangelo’s gruff snorts, and Leoanrdo’s even breathing.

Mikey sighs softly, looking around at the others as best he can with Michelangelo passed out on his shell. He blinks away the heaviness in his lids and almost flinches when he turns his head the other way to see Donatello staring at him through slitted eyes. Mikey stares back, waiting for him to say something or even just turn over and fall asleep.

The silence stretches for a moment, and Mikey can feel the awkwardness rising, when Donatello finally speaks.

“I think I’ve made a little progress on finding a way to lock away your powers,” he mumbles. It wakes Mikey up a little, and he gives him a sleepy but grateful smile.

“That’s good,” Mikey says through a small yawn. Donatello’s expression hardens a bit as he shakes his head, mouth twisting into a frustrated frown.

“Yeah, but I should have made more leeway by now, everything is moving too slow. I’m sorry I can’t work faster, I promise I’m really trying,” he pleads, eyes wide. Mikey sleepily blinks back at him, thoughts sluggish and confused.

“It’s okay? I’m happy that you’re still working on it at all. I know how hard you try, and I don’t want you to work yourself to death just for me, so you can take breaks from it if you want, yeah? I won’t be happy if you hurt yourself trying to do this, so it’s okay to take it easy every once and a while.”

They blink at each other for a moment before Donatello hastily turns away with a muffled cough. Mikey barely catches the wet sheen to the others eyes but in his sleep-riddled mind he easily brushes it off as a reflection from the TV softly droning in front of them. He yawns one more time, finally feeling sleep pulling him under when Donatello softly speaks.

“Thank you. I’m glad you still believe in me.”

==========

Mikey is nearly vibrating from his readied crouch, eyes locked onto Murakami’s back as he prepares even more pizza gyozas. He’s already basically stuffed full from all the previous food the man has made, but there’s no way he’s letting Michelangelo, Donatello, or Raphael get this victory.

“This is about to get real,” Michelangelo says to his right. His gaze is also not straying from Mirakami and it’s the most focused Mikey’s ever seen him.

“You don’t want this kind of pain,” Raphael gruffly replies, shoving his way closer for a better advantage. Mikey maneuvers more to the side to inch his way just that little bit in front of him.

“Big talk for someone with such a limited vocabulary, Raph,” Donatello shoots back, causing Mikey to let loose a cackle when his face is shoved away by Raphael and he nearly goes tumbling to the floor.

“Oh, he got you good,” Mikey goads. Raphael sends him a cruel smirk that promises pain. He’s going to be so embarrassed when Mikey wins.

“Okay, Mr. Murakami,” Leonardo says. Swiftly Murakami turns around, a single pizza gyoza on a pizza oven paddle. Mikey starts drooling at the sight of such a genius creation and he knows the others around him do exactly the same.

“One pizza gyoza, coming up,” Murakami announces, flinging it in the air towards them. Pandemonium immediately breaks out while they all shove each other to get in prime position to catch it. The piece of deliciousness is kept in the air as they battle it out, shoving, pulling, and tripping each other to get a chance at having the first gyoza of the night.

With his eyes locked onto the prize, Mikey’s unsure of how they all end up twisted on the floor, immobile, but he doesn’t complain as the treat starts falling directly in front of his face. His eyes light up and he eagerly opens his mouth to catch it, only to blink in confusion when instead of it landing a sword interrupts his vision and his mouth (and stomach) remain empty.

He pouts up at Leaonrdo as he flicks the gyoza off his katana and into his own beak, chewing with a smug smirk on his face. Everyone untangles from their pile, groaning and glaring at the leader's cocky expression.

“What happened to Mr. ‘I’m too broody for this game?’” Raphael complains as they slump back to their seats.

“Mmh, these things are good.”

Mikey whines and gives his best puppy eyes to Leonardo, hoping he feels guilty for depriving him of what he’s sure is the taste of heaven. He catches the edge of his smug mask starting to crack under his offensive when Murakami turns to them all with a whole tray filled to the brim with more gyozas.

Immediately abandoning his task Mikey grabs as many as he can before the others get to it, shoving one into his mouth and melting into his seat in bliss at first taste. He can definitely say that Michelangelo had not been exaggerating when talking about these gyozas. The dough is perfectly crispy with just the right amount crunch, with the gooey, cheesy inside oozing across his taste buds, the bits of pepperoni adding a perfect dichotomy of spice to the lightly salted dough and cheese–

He gets so absorbed into enjoying the goodness that’s blessing his mouth that he nearly misses Raphael’s comment about Leonardo staring longingly out the window.

“He’s thinking about Karai again,” he grumbles out. “Who knows why.”

Mikey chances a glance towards the leader's now sullen expression, shoving another gyoza in his mouth. If he’s being honest, he almost forgot about the issues with this dimension’s Karai. Between the emotional turmoil of being stuck here, trying to get through talking about the Invasion, and the last few days of fun and games with the others, the last thing on his mind has been Shredder and the Foot Clan.

Well, looks like he’s getting his reminder now.

“Master Splinter is her father, how can she still be loyal to the Shredder?” Leonardo complains, still staring out the window.

Mikey finishes his last bite and clears his throat, ready to go into the pains and unfortunate consequences of Stockholm Syndrome and gaslighting, but before he can Michelangelo is leaping onto the table and giving his own speech with multiple gyozas stuck in his mouth.

“You have to have faith, Leo,” he starts, talking through the food in his mouth. “Her entire life was shown to be a lie. It’s a challenge to everything she knows. The truth will set her free, we just need to give her the time she needs to accept who she really is.”

The others blink at him in confused silence. Mikey gives a sharp nod, wide smile on his face as he turns to Leonardo.

“Yeah, that pretty much sums it up,” Mikey confirms. Donatello shakes his head and looks between the both of them with a furrowed brow.

“...Right,” he starts slowly. Did they not understand what Michelangelo was saying? It was pretty clear to Mikey’s ears, that’s for sure. “Look, she'll come around.”

“Personally, I hope she doesn’t. I don’t trust her, not for one second,” Raphael heatedly says. Mikey turns to him with an eye roll and a deadpan stare.

“Like how you didn’t trust me?” he says flatly. Raphael deepens his glare and quickly averts his gaze. “That’s what I thought. You have to keep trying to help her or she’ll never trust you when the time comes that she does want to come home! That’s how I got Draxum on our side, I just kept being there until he gave into my charm and I grew onto him. Like mold!”

“While that may have worked before, I don’t think that’ll work this time, Orange. We shouldn’t put all our trust in her,” Donatello rebuffs. Mikey sighs and wilts in his seat. The others may be right, but that doesn’t mean he likes it.

It’s still odd to think that this version of Gram-Gram is evil. Karai is supposed to be kind, and strong, and warm enough to keep their entire family happy. But that’s not how it is here, at least not yet. If Mikey has anything to say about it then that’s going to change as soon as they run into her again.

He’s the master of redemption arcs, so he’ll have Karai living in the lair in no time.

“Um, guys, I think something might be going on,” Donatello cautiously says. “I called April to ask if she wanted us to bring her some food, but she didn’t answer. She always answers.”

That gets the others to straighten in concern but he doesn’t see what all the fuss is about. April still has her own life outside of them, so surely nothing too bad had to be going on. Maybe she was simply in a movie or the shower. That’s a much more reasonable explanation. Why does everything have to signal danger?

Immediately after that thought crosses his mind a loud alarm rings on the other T-Phones, screens flashing red with a picture of Casey. That gets him to hop out of his seat and look towards the others' now panicked faces.

“That’s Casey’s emergency signal. Something’s really wrong,” Leonardo announces. His face tightens as he enters leader mode. “Donnie and I will try to find April. Orange, Raph, and Mikey, you’re going to go and meet up with Casey at the ice rink. Be ready for anything.”

==========

Even though Mikey’s stomach twists into anxious knots as they wait for Casey to show up, he still has a pleasant enough time skating around on the ice with Michelangelo. They circle each other, sliding and twisting and occasionally using each other as pillars to try new tricks.

His mind races at the thought of seeing Casey again. He knows he wasn’t exactly the nicest in that pocket dimension when his home got ripped away from him yet again, and he hopes he won’t hold that against him. Mikey had the thought to try and call him to properly apologize, but every time he picked up his phone and clicked his icon he backed out. He’s slightly hoping that Casey would simply forget about it and Mikey could go back to ignoring anything that happened between them, which he also acknowledges is the problem that got him into this mess in the first place.

Habits are hard to break, after all.

“Casey? Casey? Answer me! Ugh,” Raphael complains from his place behind the wall, glumly watching Mikey and his alternate skate around the ring. “Something really wrong, what are we going to do?”

Mikey can’t do anything but shrug, that twist in his stomach growing. He skates faster to try and release some of the anxiety. Thankfully, it’s Michelangelo who comes to the quickest solution.

“I know exactly what we do. We can use our T-Phones to triangulate the location of Casey’s phone by bouncing the locator signal off a satellite,” he says simply, coming to a stop by the wall. Raphael blinks at him for a moment, seemingly speechless. Mikey also stops skating as that runs through his head, cogs turning. That kind of thing sounds familiar…

“That…is actually a good idea,” Raphael says, shock and awe coloring his voice. Like a lightbulb going off Mikey snaps his fingers, skating over to them with a knowing smile.

“You can also track pizza delivery guys that way! Leo’s the one who figured that out in my dimension,” Mikey tacks on. His alternate raises his fist up to him while Raphael furiously taps into his phone.

“Booya–” Michelangelo starts, looking knowingly at Mikey. He smirks back and meets his fist in the middle, making a mini explosion with their fingers.

“–kasha,” he finishes.

“Alright you two, I got his location. Let’s go before something happens,” Raphael announces, shoving his phone away and sprinting towards the exit. Both of them follow right on his heels to start making their way across the city.

Mikey’s stomach drops to his feet when they stop, stepping into an alley only to come face to face with Caseys still body laying on the concrete. Racing up to him in a panic Mikey lets out a small sigh seeing that his friend’s still breathing, at least, but he’s in really bad shape.

Thankfully Raphael takes the lead, slinging Casey’s unconscious form over his shoulder and barking at them to head back to the lair. Neither Mikey nor Michelangelo complain as they quickly find their way back home, Mikey keeping a close eye for any changes with Casey’s state the entire way there. His gut twists in dismay seeing all the bruises and cuts that litter his body. Something big must have attacked him to get this bad.

Mikey stays by his friend's side as he’s carefully laid down on a couch. He looks over the visible injuries one more time but is at a loss at how to deal with them. Bandages and stitches are as far as his medical knowledge tends to go, and he doesn’t want to make something worse if he tries to help and something else is wrong inside his body.

Michelangelo seems to be in the same boat as him, hovering awkwardly around them while Raphael tries to connect with the others. None of his calls are going through and he’s getting more agitated by the second. It’s when he nearly throws his phone into the nearest wall that Mikey decides to leave Casey in Michelangelo’s hands to make sure Raphael doesn’t give Donatello more work to do.

“I’m sure they’re okay, just got distracted by something,” Mikey tries to reassure. It only gets a heated glare from Raphael, but no one can say he didn’t try. Rolling his eyes he goes back to his spot beside Casey who has yet to make a sound.

Is that bad? Does that mean he might have a concussion? Mikey’s had enough of those to last two life times and they’re never fun, especially with overprotective older brothers who think you’re made of glass every time you’re hurt.

Raphael keeps pacing around the lounge, but Mikey can tell that at least his phone isn’t in danger anymore. The longer they go without a response from the others, though, the more the little voice inside his head that sounds suspiciously like Mind Raph suggests that something might actually be wrong. While Leonardo and Donatello aren’t always known to pick up their phones quickly, they know to have it on hand in case a mission goes sideways.

Before Mikey can spiral about the ‘what-ifs’, he hears the approaching footsteps in the tunnels. With a sigh of relief he looks towards the turnstiles and has to do an immediate double-take when it registers just who is in their little group.

Leonardo, Donatello, April, and Karai, of all people, waltz straight in, looking as relaxed as ever. The leader has a giddy smile on his face, turning to Karai and gesturing to their home. Karai hums in thought while glancing around at the space with a calculating gaze. Her eyes quickly take in his presence and Mikey thinks he sees a tiny snarl appear before it’s gone just as fast.

“Casey!” April gasps, rushing towards him and kneeling by his side. Mikey moves to make more room for her and looks back towards the others.

Unwittingly a large smile creeps along his face. It would be different if the others were tense and ready to fight, but all of them were relaxed. No one looks to be in any danger and, while there is still clearly tension rolling off of her frame, Karai doesn’t have the patented looks of blood-lust that Mikey had begun associating with this version of Gram-Gram. Hope blooms in his chest and before he knows it he’s jumping to his feet, striding towards the group with a warm and welcoming grin.

“Karai! You’re here!” Mikey exclaims. He’s about to go in for a hug, just to cement the idea that they mean no harm, but Raphael grabs him around the shell before he even gets close. Mikey sends him an annoyed look but then really takes in Karai’s expression. Oh, he probably would have been stabbed if he made that hug.

“No you don’t, she’s tried to kidnap you multiple times, remember?” Raphael harshly whispers to him.

“Everyone makes mistakes. But all that’s in the past! She’s here now, as part of the family!” Mikey replies, turning his wide, hopeful eyes back to Karai. She’s looking at him as though he’s deeply disturbed.

“Whatever, I’ll deal with your screwy viewpoints later,” Raphael grumbles, turning back on the new group with a threatening aura. He still has yet to let go of Mikey so he takes advantage and leans back into his plastron. “What have you guys done!? In what world is bringing the princess of the Foot Clan to our secret lair a good idea!?”

“What happened to Casey?” Leonardo asks. Raphael fumes more at his questioning being obliviously ignored, and gestures back towards their injured friend.

“I have no idea, but I’m certain she has something to do with it,” he hisses. Mikey squirms a little in his grip, and Raphael finally seems to realize he’s still holding onto him. He hurriedly pushes him off to the side to bring both points of his sai towards Karai.

“I had nothing to do with your friend getting hurt. And all those times we fought were mistakes. The Shredder lied to me, I didn’t know the truth!” Karai pleads, eyes blown wide.

Mikey moves in front of Raphael, blinding Karai with his smile. He grumbles behind him and grunts at him to move so he can ‘stick his sai up there’ but Mikey holds firm. Nearly bouncing on his feet he flits around Karai excitedly. This family is finally going to be complete, and it’s going to be so much easier than he thought it would be.

“See, she gets it now! Everything is going to be great and Karai’s going to fit right in, just like how she did in my world and she totally won’t be killed this time!”

“...is this turtle truly as delusional as he sounds and he lives here out of pity, or–”

“That’s it, I’ve heard enough! She’s probably leading the Shredder here right now!” Raphael shouts, readying his sai. Mikey rolls his eyes as hard as he can and heaves a large sigh. He should have known Raphael was going to be the hardest one to get onto Karai’s side. After all, look how long it took him to trust Mikey, literally another version of his little brother.

Getting ready to intervene in case a fight really does break out turns out to be useless when Splinter whips open the door to the dojo. A deep frown mars his face as he glances over them all.

“Enough!” he gruffly shouts. His eyes finally catch on Karai, and all of his features immediately soften. “Miwa.”

“Splinter,” Karai says stiffly. Her entire frame goes stock still at the stare down, no one moving a muscle. A tense second seeps by until Splinter moves out of the doorway, gaze still caught on his daughter. “Come with me.”

Karai gives a curt nod and marches into the dojo. Mikey watches the door softly shut behind her, and instead of getting into the argument that is quickly ensuing between Raphael and Donatello on the merits of Karai being in the lair, he creeps up to the dojo. A quick glance behind shows Leoanrdo hot on his heels. Mikey gives him a mischievous smirk that has the leader blushing in embarrassment but doesn’t dissuade him enough to not eavesdrop on the conversation.

Listening closely only proves to reveal murmurs of whispered conversation. Leonardo stands across from him, nearly pressing his head to the door to try and figure out what’s happening behind it. Mikey registers the argument stopping and a quick glance shows the other turtles approaching now, too, and Raphael looks particularly unhappy.

He opens his mouth to goad him on when the first piece of conversation finally gets loud enough to filter through the door.

“I…I can’t believe it. You’re telling the truth. All these years the Shredder has been lying to me.”

Leonardo furrows his brow and is immediately barging into the room, privacy forgotten. Mikey can’t help but frown as what Karai said turns in his mind, doubts about Karai’s loyalty finally filtering through the joy of seeing her in the lair.

“What do you mean you can’t believe it?” Leonardo accuses, worry coloring his expression. “I thought you did believe it. Why would you come down here if you didn’t?”

Horror creeps over her as she grips her hair, eyes panicked. “Father…what have I done?”

“What’re you talking about?” Mikey hesitantly asks, stepping closer to the now obviously startled Karai. Her skin is even paler than normal and a wet sheen covers her eyes. He wants to do nothing more than give her a hug and figure out what’s wrong, but his gut is saying something more is at play and he doesn’t like it.

“You had to see it with your own eyes and learn the truth for yourself,” Splinter solemnly says, laying a calming hand on her shoulder. Karai looks up at him in shock and stumbles out of his hold. Mikey watches anxiously as realization dawns on her.

“You knew I was lying,” she whispers through a hoarse voice. Splinter nods as he folds his hands behind his back, ears drooping.

“Yes, there is no doubt the Shredder’s forces are on their way.”

“What!?” Mikey exclaims, gripping his head tight. His mind races with all the signs he missed while his heart drops knowing that she had betrayed them. All the joy he had felt in finally having Karai on their side leaks out, being replaced by lingering grief as pandemonium erupts in the face of the betrayal.

Mikey ignores it all to stare at her, taking in all of the expressions and body language he can to be sure this isn’t some other trick Karai’s shoulders slump and she has yet to let go of her hair, running her fingers through the loose strands and staring into space with a vacant gaze. He sees the slight tremble to her fingers as she obviously goes through some kind of breathing exercise.

All of this is enough to calm Mikey’s nerves enough to realize she is really telling the truth. Unless she is an A-List actor with some serious skills, she is genuinely remorseful and, if he’s reading the cues right, going through the right amount of crisis after having your life flipped on its head.

Mikey’s willing to restore most of that trust from before based on that alone. Hopefully it won’t end up with him looking like a fool as a knife gets stuck in his shell later. It’s happened too many times for him to be completely certain about his decision.

“There’s no time to argue, I have to get out of here! I–I can lead Tiger Claw away, he’s the one who hurt your friend and he’s closing in fast,” Karai exclaims shakily. She starts to storm towards the door and Mikey is immediately on her trail. Stepping out of the dojo, he stays close and Karai quickly glances at him before stopping and full on staring at him like he’s lost his mind.

Mikey flashes her a smile. “So, where’re we leading the big cat? Also, wasn’t he eaten by a worm? How’d he get back?”

It wouldn't be the first time one of their enemies came back from being presumed dead, but it would be the first time they came back from being eaten. That’s impressive, at least to him.

Mikey remembers vividly his first and only experience with Tiger Claw and it had not been a good one. Even taking out his exhaustion, grief, pain, and Shredder’s attack that had happened that night, it still hurt to hear his Dad’s voice coming from someone so eager to kill him and hurt the others. The tone didn’t fit the lazy, carefree rat that had raised them. He tries to shake off the lingering feeling of unease at the thought of hearing that voice again and glances back to Karai.

She blinks at him for a moment, obviously confused, before shaking her head. “No time to explain. Why do you even want to come with me? We don’t even know each other, and as Raphael said, I’ve tried to kidnap you multiple times.”

“Who hasn’t tried to kidnap me at this point,” Mikey mutters under his breath before looking back up at Karai with a hopeful smile. “And we don’t really know each other now, but we will! And as for that stuff you did to me before, it’s whatever. You want to fix your mistake and do the right thing, and that’s all that really matters.”

Karai rolls her eyes and starts a light jog out of the lair that Mikey easily catches up with, and looking back he can see the other turtles not far behind.

“That’s too sentimental to be directed at me,” Karai states without looking back. Mikey just shrugs and catches up to run beside her, flashing a smug grin even Leo would be proud of.

“What can I say, I’m a feelings guy. Well, I’m not quite there, Dr. Feelings is still a little under the weather but he’ll be right as rain soon–”

“Would you stop making chit-chat with princess over there!” Raphael shouts as they catch up. “And who said you could come along for this, anyway?”

“I did! I’m not going to let long lost family just run away,” he blithely answers, getting a disturbed look from Karai and an exasperated groan from Raphael. Taking a peek at Leonardo shows his reluctant expression, but as he doesn’t say anything Mikey assumes he won’t be forcibly kicked off the mission again.

Is it a bad thing that Leonardo’s given up on trying to keep him away from the danger? Mikey isn’t sure, but it works out for him most of the time so who is he to question it.

As he is about to go deeper into that thought Karai suddenly pauses in a small atrium, looking around worriedly. Everyone skirts to a stop beside her and waits for her next move, but she stays frozen, indecision clear on her face. Mikey frowns and shifts on his feet as she whips her head around wildly.

“So…where to now?” he hesitantly prompts, his only response being Karai’s frustrated groan.

“I…I don’t know,” she grits out. Mikey can see Raphael getting ready for a snappy retort beside him and quickly slaps a hand over his mouth to prevent it. Raphael stumbles away from him spitting and gagging, which, okay, that’s dramatic. His hands are not that dirty..

“That’s okay, we only need to lead him away from the lair, right? That means it doesn’t matter where we end up, only that it’s far enough that he can’t track us,” Mikey reasons. Leonardo nods and lays a careful hand on Karai’s shoulder. She doesn’t shrug it off, but he can see the way she instantly tenses as if she was expecting an attack.

“Orange is right, let’s keep moving and hope he takes the bait,” he says. Mikey nods along with the others and they take off down more tunnels. They make so many twists and turns he’s beginning to feel like it’s overkill before they run into a dead end with a locked steel door staring them down.

Donatello makes quick work of the padlock and they slink inside, a shiver going through Mikey stepping through the threshold and into a freezer with multiple hanging carcasses hanging from the ceiling. No one is quite sure where they’ve ended up, but it’s quickly agreed that this is as good of a place as any to wait for Tiger Claw to show.

Quickly they all split up into the darkness, melting into the surroundings. Mikey makes a quick leap onto one of the poles suspending the meat and briefly wishes he brought his jacket. He wraps his arms around himself, rubbing his skin to keep as warm as possible. Crouching down into a squat he catches sight of Karai’s armor slipping into her position below, kunai drawn and expression steely.

Mikey doesn’t take his eyes off of her, waiting and listening for any sign of Tiger Claw. The promise of battle must have calmed her somewhat, as where there was only frazzled panic before now sits a stony cold mask. He hopes that when they go back home she gets the chance to truly relax and embrace the family she’s been missing.

Mikey lets the daydream take him away from the moment as they wait. He imagines Karai eating breakfast with them all, laughing and joking with the others. Then there’s training, where she would probably kick all of their asses and Splinter would be proud of them all, showering them equally with praise and critiques. Afterwards they could all hang out and introduce Karai to all of their favorite things and help her figure out what she likes, too (other than training, because Mikey feels like her and Leonardo would be similar in that regard).

Slowly but surely she would be incorporated into the family, and all of the thoughts bring a bright ‘zing’ to his chest that instantly warms him. His brow furrows as it definitely feels more like a physical sensation rather than the usual emotional warmth, but he doesn’t get the chance to dwell on it as a low growl echoes throughout the freezer.

Mikey tenses, hands drifting towards his kusari fundo. Heavy steps stomp closer with the sound of Tiger Claw scenting the air around him. The large mutant is nearly under his perch when he finally speaks.

“I can’t smell you, but I can hear you,” he rumbles, his voice making Mikey’s teeth grind together.

There’s the barest sounds of a breeze as Raphael darts from behind one of the pieces of meat, sai raised to strike. Tiger Claw is faster, raising his sword and deflecting the blow, causing Raphael to melt back into the darkness only for Donatello’s bō to come slamming into his side.

Mikey leaps from his perch as Tiger Claw roars in outrage, slicing one of the hanging carcasses clean in half. He creeps along the floor to get to a better vantage point to strike. Trying to grip the handle of his weapon as hard as he can he catches sight of Michelangelo across from him, nunchaku drawn. Glancing to Tiger Claw and then back to his alternate, Mikey nods, receiving one back and creeping forward to get into position.

“Show yourselves! Are you too afraid to face me?” he snarls, whipping around and squinting into the dark to try and pinpoint their location. With one more nod Mikey and Michelangelo take the distraction, whipping out their chains and latching them on to each of Tiger Claws wrists. Both of them yank back and down, attempting to bring the tiger to his knees, but Mikey’s arms revolt the action with spasms of pain.

It’s enough that with another roar Tiger Claw violently crosses his hands across his body, lifting Mikey and his alternate off their feet and sending them flying to the other sides of the room. He catches himself just in time to avoid slamming into the wall and lands lightly on his feet. Only glancing up for enough time to make sure Michelangelo is okay, Mikey is forced to leap back onto the poles as one of Tiger Claws swords rips through where he had landed.

Shaking out his arms he silently jumps further away, a smirk appearing on his face as Leonardo takes the momentary distraction to drive both of his feet into Tiger Claws chest. He goes flying through a wooden door, snarling. Mikey can see the others congregate on the floor and hurries to join them in stalking into the smaller conjoined room away from the freezer. Taking a quick look he can now tell that they’ve landed in some kind of butcher shop’s basement, multiple saws, chains, and knives littering the area.

Mikey stays close to Raphael as they face off with Tiger Claw in the low light, gripping his kusari fundo weakly. The large mutant growls lowly and eyes them with obvious distaste. He draws his swords up and crouches low, frame still.

“Let us finish this,” Tiger Claw mutters. Mikey takes a quick peek at the others, momentarily wondering where Karai had run off to, and then immediately has to dodge the oncoming flurry of attacks.

As much as he wants to jump into the thick of it he knows it’s a bad idea with his hands now tingling with pinstripes of pain. Mikey keeps to the outskirts of the main battle, doing what he can to land a kick or two here or throw a knife towards Tiger Claw to distract him. For a moment he thinks that they’re winning and Tiger Claw is about to go down, then with one large roar something changes in the gleam of the larger mutant's eyes.

One by one the others get taken down, and in his attempt to help Mikey gets slammed into the wall by Michelangelo’s body flying through the air. He groans, doing his best to push his alternate off of him to get back into the fray, but freezes when he catches sight of Tiger Claw’s sword aimed at the base of Leoanrdo’s throat.

His heart beats faster with Karai appearing out of the darkened freezer, expression unreadable. The air stills as she takes her place beside Tiger Claw. She looks impassively down at Leonardo’s form, twirling the kunai lazily in her hand.

“Karai, would you like the honor of finishing him?” Tiger Claw asks, still not removing the tip of his sword from the leader's throat.

A beat of silence passes and for a moment, MIkey thinks he might have been wrong. That Karai really was playing the long con just to kill them all. He holds his breath as her eyes flicker around the room to take one last glance at them all before zeroing back in on Leonardo. Her shoulders straighten and Mikey tenses even more, knowing that she’s finally come to a conclusion in her mind.

“I have no honor,” she mutters, and it nearly makes Mikey’s heart stop all together until she finishes. “But that’s about to change.”

Karai explosively turns her weapon on Tiger Claw, attacking without mercy. He has to bring his sword away from Leonardo to deflect the onslaught, giving Mikey and the others enough time to regroup and join the new offensive against him. He doesn’t know if he’d say they’re still winning the fight, but Tiger Claw is growing increasingly more frustrated.

It’s in this frustration that he manages to catch Karai’s leg on a jump, slamming her into the floorboards and knocking her out cold. Mikey freezes, as do the others, as Tiger Claw aims a blaster right at her head.

“If you value her life, do not take another step,” he growls. Everyone exchanges glances, each wondering what the next move is between Tiger Claw chuckles. “Just as I thought.” He pauses, looking down passively at Karai’s still form. “Although, I doubt Master Shredder will have any use for a mole within the Clan. No matter how much he may be blinded by sentiment.”

Everything slows at the minute twitch of Tiger Claws finger on the trigger. The others are leaping towards him, weapons drawn and expressions panicked, but Mikey listens to the hum of his instincts. He brings forth that warm, tingling ‘zing’ from before, eyes widening as he finally places the warmth of his ninpō flowing through him. It’s tiny, nothing more than a couple sparks, but the fact that he can willingly draw upon it feels ecstatic.

His spots flicker with energy as with a brightening grin he shoots a glowing chain off to the side to wrap around a large buzzsaw that immediately comes to life with a loud whir. Without thinking too hard about it he chucks it towards the hand holding the blaster just as his claw comes pressing down on the trigger.

He’s not going to let Karai die here, too. And this will also be the perfect redemption for what this big cat did to Casey.

Mikey’s smile immediately drops into horror when, unlike what he was expecting, he doesn’t dodge out of the way. Tiger Claws hand comes clean off his arm, dropping to the floor with a dull thud. His ninpō drops the second the first spout of blood gushes out of the wound and Tiger Claw yowls in pain. The large mutant hastily grabs some sort of cloth from a pouch, panting in pain, all attention focused on the gaping hope where his hand used to be.

He was supposed to move.

The other’s shake out of the shock much faster than he can, darting forward and keeping an eye on Tiger Claw while Leonardo scoops Karai off the floor and away from the quickly growing pool of blood. Mikey’s eyes latch onto the hand on the floor as his ears start to ring, hands shaky.

Raphael mostly snaps him out of it with a harsh shake, dragging him along behind the others as they make their escape upwards, leaving a roaring and raving Tiger Claw in the small room to try and stop bleeding out. They get up to the roof, gasping in exhaustion and, in Mikey’s case, existential horror.

Killing Kr–Kraang while not totally in your right mind was one thing, but he had just cut off someone's hand. On accident. How does someone even do that? His delirious mind briefly flashes back to when Leo had cut that worm guy in half in a panic, but at least he was able to regenerate extremely quickly. There’s no way Tiger Claw can magically grow back his hand like that.

Mikey blinks and then suddenly Leonardo’s in front of him, saying something while manhandling Karai over to him. He shakes his head and carefully adjusts Karai to his side, holding up her weight as the leader's words finally punch through the cotton in his ears.

“Tiger Claw is still coming after us, we need you to take Karai and get somewhere safe while we lead him away. He’s probably going to be after you now, too. And don’t worry about what happened back there, we’ll deal with it later. You got that? You need to answer me,” Leonardo frantically says, eyes wide. Mikey swallows and gives a nod, licking his suddenly dry lips.

“Yeah, yeah okay,” he hoarsely agrees. Taking a deep breath he makes sure Karai is tight to his side and hobbles off in the opposite direction. He hears the others quickly run off and at the sound of loud, thundering footsteps from below Mikey ducks behind an AC unit, praying that Tiger Claw's sense of smell is all messed up now.

A door bursts open with the sound of shattering bricks. Mikey holds his breath and after making sure Karai is still alright, cautiously peeks out the side of the AC unit.

Tiger Claw looks completely enraged, all his teeth showing in a permanent snarl highlighted by his crazed eyes. His remaining hand grips one of his swords with a white knuckle grip while his other stump is wrapped tightly in seeping bandages slowly turning red. Ears fluttering around he whips his head away, roaring into the night air as he must catch sight of the others retreating forms. He lets out one more pained snarl and activates his jet pack. Then he’s gone, flying towards the others with clear bloodlust.

Mikey releases the breath he didn’t know he was holding and collapses against the flimsy metal behind him. His eyes flutter shut as he takes multiple deep breaths to calm down.

That definitely wasn’t how that was supposed to happen. Mikey knew he was fast, especially when he was powered up, but the bad guys always dodged attacks like that. Most of his enemies would have brushed off an attack like that as though it were nothing more than a needle.

Mikey doesn't have time to think about the implication of continuing to fight people in this world with his ninpō and all of his razz-ma-tazz as Karai painfully groans next to him. He’s immediately in front of her, his own worries and crises pushed to the side for the moment to make sure she’s okay.

“Karai?” he hesitantly asks. At the sound of his voice she is flipping from groggy to wide awake in an instant, drawing another kunai from…somewhere and pressing it lightly against his throat with a small snarl. “Ohmigosh, calm down!”

Karai’s eyes clear of their haziness and slower than Mikey would prefer she brings down her weapon, raising her other hand to her forehead through a wince. He frowns and attempts to move closer to try and see if she’s bleeding from anywhere but she warily leans away, eyeing him with thick suspicion.

“Where…where are the others? What happened?” She groans, rubbing harshly at her temple. Letting out a heavy sigh Mikey sits on the ground in front of her. Bringing up his knees he hugs them tightly to his chest, averting his eyes in shame.

“Tiger Claw knocked you out. He was going to kill you for disobeying orders and, uh, well…I may have, maybe, on accident…sawedhishandoff?” he rushes out, trying his best to ignore the wide eyed look Karai shoots his way. “I didn’t think it would happen, but it did anyway, so we got out of there and the others are leading him away right now. We’re safe.”

A beat of silence, and then Karai lets out a hysterical, disbelieving laugh that has Mikey instantly whipping his gaze back to her. “Really? I didn’t think you turtles were capable of that kind of violence, I’m impressed.” Mikey shrinks into himself, wincing at the guilt and shame curling in his gut. “Hey, don’t be ashamed about doing what needs to be done. It’s not like he didn’t deserve it. And if you’re worried about how the other turtles will react, I’m sure they’ll get over themselves. I’ve done worse things and they’ve…” she trails, eyes going distant as she, too, curls into a ball. “They’ve been trying to help me. Even after all I’ve done.”

Mikey peeks at her, frowning when she buries her head into her knees, shoulders tense. Her hands grasp tightly onto her armor, knuckles going ghostly white.

“I’ve done horrible things under the Shredder’s command. And worse, I did them not because I was afraid, but because I wanted to. He’s molded me into a monster in his quest for dishonorable vengeance,” she rants, nails scraping across the metal of her shin guards. “None of you should be near me. The only thing I know how to do is bring pain and suffering to the Hamato Clan. To my real father’s clan. My clan.”

Unfolding completely, Mikey crosses his legs and limply rests his still twitching arms in them. He glances down at the scars marring his skin and lets out a deep sigh before nudging Karai until she glares at him.

“You’re not a monster. All you’ve ever known is the Shredder, so you had no reason to believe anything other than what he told you.” She brings her head fully up, staring at him with eyes filled with hesitant hope. “I don’t really know the whole story but it sounds like you’ve been lied to your entire life. That’s something that’s hard to break. But you’re starting to see through it, right?”

Hesitantly Karai nods. Mikey purses his lips and clears his throat, channeling all of his energy into finding where Dr. Feelings has run off to. He’s in desperate need of his assistance right now.

“Then that’s what the others are going to see. They’ll recognize that you’re trying to be better, and if they need reminders I’ll make sure to knock it into their thick heads.” That comment earns a scoff and a roll of her eyes, but at least she isn’t as sulky anymore. “It’ll be hard but they’ll forgive you eventually. I’m pretty sure most of them already have. Gaining their trust will be harder than being forgiven, though. But you’ll have me in your corner, so you won’t be alone, yeah?”

The side of Karai’s mouth twitches and Mikey knows something he’s said as gotten through to her. He sends her a calming smile and most of the tension in her frame drains away. She rubs against her shin guards and down to her boots, fiddling with the tops. Mikey’s distracted from watching the nervous gesture by her brows furrowing. Her eyes narrow at him and he straightens, waiting for whatever question she’s brewing up in her mind.

“You seem to trust me even though you barely know me. Why? What is it about me?” she asks slowly. Her eyes remind Mikey of a hawk with the way she catalogs every fidget and blink he makes as he comes up with his simple answer. He sends her a shrug and lopsided, warm smile.

“You’re family. Of course I’d trust you, that’s what family does. Families need to believe that they’ll be there for each other no matter what. Even if they get stuck in a different universe with no way to communicate and no clue how to get home.”

Karai raises an eyebrow at him, obviously waiting for some kind of punchline, but Mikey keeps staring at her with a soft smile. She blinks, and he blinks obliviously back.

“You’re sweet. Very odd, naive, and possibly insane, but sweet.” She purses her lips and leans forward. Mikey startles, smile growing and attempting to meet her halfway, stretching his arms out for the obvious hug she is going in for, an obvious congratulations for making her feel better– “It almost makes me regret this.”

“Huh? Ow!” Mikey squeaks, abruptly leaning back at the sharp prick in the crook of his arm. He looks down at the tiny pinprick of blood in confusion. Karai lets out a huff through her nose and stands, flicking some kind of small, unassuming syringe off to the side.

Attempting to stand and follow her as she turns away from him and walks across the roof ends with him collapsing straight back onto the ground, mind and eyes going dizzy. Mikey scrunches his beak and blinks furiously, trying to push back up but only able to get to his elbows before his bones turn to jelly.

“Karai, what…?” he mumbles, speech becoming syrup. Mikey squints at the fuzzy image of Karai approaching, crouching down and tilting his head towards her. He looks on in confusion, blinking away the spinning dots to try and focus on what he thinks is her remorseful expression.

“I’m sorry, but I need to make things right. And the only way I can do that is taking down the Foot Clan. Starting with Shredder. But I need to do it alone,” she says. Mikey looks up at her in a panic, but while he’s telling his body that he needs to move and stop her from leaving, his limbs do nothing more than weakly twitch.

He opens his mouth to try and make her reconsider because even he knows that’s going to end badly, but the only thing that comes out is a reedy whine.

“You’ll be alright. It’s just a mild paralytic, enough to make a grown man immobile for two days. For you, though, I suspect it will only last a couple of hours at the most.” With that she straightens and walks towards the edge of the roof. Mikey whines again, begging his body to do something to make her stay and make the family whole.

She can’t go back to Shredder. There’s no telling what he might do to her when he finds out about her betrayal. None of this is going according to plan.

Karai stops, sparing him one last saddened glance. “I truly am sorry. Make sure the others don’t hate me too much.”

Then she’s gone. Mikey tries his best to squirm, roll, and move his body any way he can, but never manages more than a few twitchy movements that lead nowhere. Man, whatever she dosed him with was definitely not just a mild paralytic. Donnie had to make an extremely special and potent formula to even attempt to sedate them, so whatever this is would likely kill a normal human.

He’s not sure how long he struggles to get up and follow her. It’s long enough to gain some more feeling in his arms and legs and roll to his knees, but not enough to stop the constant dizziness and spinning of his vision.

Mikey groans and rolls back to lie flat onto his shell. He glares up at the slowly lightening sky, huffing through his nose. He really should have expected Karai to do something like this, but he was so concentrated on the joy of having her near and not trying to kill him that he forgot how cut-throat she tends to be. Sometimes literally.

He squeezes his eyes shut, letting out a sigh and finally giving in to having to wait out the drug's effects. As much as he has faith in his skills, there’s no way he’ll be able to catch up to Karai. He’ll need to go and find the others, too, before they start thinking he either ran off again or, in Raphael’s case, that Karai killed him and dumped his body in a dumpster.

Mikey sits there a little while longer, doing nothing but stewing in all the things he could have said differently to make her stay, when he hears quiet approaching footsteps. He tenses and using all of his strength leverages himself into a sitting position. Squinting into the shadows he tilts his head to the side, immediately relaxing when Raphael melts out of the lingering darkness closely followed by the others.

“What the hell are you still doing here? I thought we told you to get somewhere safe. And where’d the witch go?” he gruffly asks, taking a knee by his side. Mikey shakes his head and immediately regrets it when his vision swims dangerously. He registers the way the others all take on more concerned and guarded expression at the action but waves them off with a flutter of his hand.

“M’fine, jus’ goopy,” he slurs, causing Donatello to immediately get to his knees and place a hand on his forehead. “Kar’s gone. Gav’ me th’good stuff.”

Mikey smacks his lips and clears his throat while pushing Donatello’s hand away from his head.

“What!? Where’d she go? We have to go after her!” Leonardo exclaims, looking around wildly as if that’ll make her appear faster. Raphael growls and promptly smacks him across the head while Michelangelo moves behind Mikey and wraps his arms around his shell to lift him to his feet.

“We’re not doing anything other than going back to the lair! Look what she did to Orange, we barely managed to lose Tiger Claw, and it’s almost sunrise anyway,” Raphael argues. Leonardo flinches and looks to Mikey who dangles in Michelangelo's grip. He tries to send the leader a reassuring grin but it must come out wrong since he winces and averts his gaze to the ground.

“But why would she run off again? She knows the truth now.” Leonardo sighs and hugs himself tightly.

“Proov’ hr’self,” Mikey tries to explain, but only gets confused looks from all of them. “She w’nts to beat F’t Cl’n butt to say sr’y for bein’ mean.”

That only seems to panic Leonardo more as he begins to pace along the length of the roof. “But she’ll be captured for sure! There’s no way she really thinks she can take down the Foot Clan and Shredder by herself, that’s insane!”

“It doesn’t matter, she’s probably long gone by now,” Donatello says and he examines the small pinprick of blood in the crook of his elbow from the needle. “We should get Orange back to my lab to make sure that the drug isn’t messing with his system too badly.”

Mikey sags into Michelangelo’s grip behind him with a low hum. Feeling is slowly coming back into his legs, but he knows that without help he’d collapse straight back to the floor. His alternate huffs a laugh and mutters something about Mikey being high as a kite which is absolutely not true. His mind is still completely sober, it’s his body that refuses to listen.

“But Karai–”

“She’s gone, Leo! Daddy’s probably welcoming her home right now, and we need to be getting back too. Give it a rest, already,” Raphael says with his arms crossed. Leonardo hesitates, looking out over the buildings and then back at Mikey, who still tries to give him a big smile. Sighing in defeat the leader deflates and gives a small nod. He straightens and starts towards the fire escape and Mikey gets one arm thrown around Raphael’s shoulders while the other stays over Michelangelo’s.

Before they start their descent to the ground Mikey spares another glance towards where Karai ran off to, heart heavy. He had really hoped that she would stay and be a part of the family like she was destined to be, but he supposed it would take time. There was no doubt in his mind that Karai would be taken hostage by Shredder as soon as she made herself known and they would be attempting rescue missions in the very near future.

He knew she would fully come around soon, though. There’s no way Mikey would be letting Karai slip through their fingers. Not again. He would make sure of it.

Mikey stumbles down the first step of the fire escape, jostling him out of his thoughts to lean his entire weight between the two holding him up. Raphael rolls his eyes beside him and he tries to stick his tongue out at him, but instead it just lolls dumbly out of his mouth.

“While we walk, how about a conversation starter?” Michelangelo jumps in before Raphael can punch him in the face. Mikey whips his head towards his alternate and groans internally at his mischievous smile. “Why’d you cut off Tiger Claw's hand?”

“While on that note, why did you feel it necessary to do that?” Donatello cautiously adds from behind.

Mikey winces, more shame and guilt building as he takes a look at their expressions. When he doesn’t see judgment and only sees curiosity and slight wariness, he lets go of the tension in his body and sighs.

“...t’was an accident?”

The response gets both groans and a facepalm from Leonardo. But, hey, at least he's telling the truth. They should appreciate that.

Chapter Text

Mikey skips out of the lab with a new pep to his step, rubbing his arms covered by the improved compression wraps. Donatello had finally worked out the kinks of the first version and now it fits as snug as a glove with no sign of loose fabric or pinching. And, while he had Mikey cornered in his space, Donatello had run the now routine tests and told him the exciting development.

His ninpō was growing exponentially. Donatello had made it obvious that it wasn’t supposed to happen based on the outcomes of the previous tests, but Mikey wasn’t going to question the how. He was going to bask in the fact that he was once again defying the odds. Donatello had cautioned his optimism and warned that even with this new development it was going to take years to build up his mystic powers, but Mikey took it with a grain of salt.

With a bright grin he flops onto the couch and hums, absentmindedly reaching for the comfort of his ninpō. It’s still low and not up to full capacity but it’s there and he can feel it now. It only takes a thought and it hums through his body like a warm compress, making Mikey melt further into the cushions.

It’s a comfort that he’s dearly missed. Granted, his brother's energies are still glaringly missing, but it’s a start. All he has to figure out is how to keep making his ninpō stronger.

That’s what puzzled Donatello the most about the tests. He argued that there should have been something glaringly obvious that made his ninpō grow like it has, but no matter how hard he thought nothing came to mind that would mark the improvement. The first data point he had to work with was during the Newtralizer’s attack, and for the life of him Donatello couldn't figure out what might have triggered the sudden resurgence.

Mikey had simply shrugged. All he knew was that he heard Raphael’s cry of desperate warning to Slash then ‘boom’. His ninpō had come to life to save him. That’s all his instincts had been saying in the moment. Save Slash. Help Raphael.

He also distinctly remembers how tired he had been afterwards.

When he was saving Karai (and cutting off Tiger Claws hand, which he was choosing to simply brush past because he already had plenty of other horrific things to dwell on, and omigosh is that what Dad would sound like if he hurt him like that—), he knew it strained him but it was nothing like that first time.

But it’s not his job to figure out why he suddenly has some access to his ninpō again. Mikey gets to sit back and enjoy it while hoping that whatever’s making it stronger continues.

He lifts his head at the sound of soft footsteps, his mood wilting at seeing a sulking Leonardo trudging into the kitchen. The leader has been a complete mess for the past week after Mikey had lost Karai. He was training even more than usual, drinking way more tea than even Mikey thought was healthy, and the eye bags were visible even through his mask.

Biting his lip Mikey shrinks back down behind the couch as Leonardo goes to make another kettle of tea, pouring the leaves directly into the pot. He can’t help but feel partially responsible for the obvious decline of his health. While he knows there was little chance of him being able to stop Karai drugged to all hell, he should have known she would want to prove she was trustworthy. And that she would do anything to make sure she did it alone.

He misses her, all things considered. Mikey hasn’t known this version of her for long but he also hadn’t known Gram-Gram for long before she was taken away. This Karai was prickly, dangerous, and manipulative to the max, but Mikey knew there was someone soft under that hard exterior. He saw a glimpse of it on the roof and he wants the others to be able to see that, too.

The whistle of the kettle brings him out of his thoughts and he opens his eyes only to startle seeing Leonardo’s tired face hovering directly above his. There’s nothing breaking through his expression other than exhaustion and it makes something twist in Mikey’s gut.

“Uh, hi,” he says softly. His concern morphs into a frown on his face when Leonardo does nothing to acknowledge his greeting other than blink. “Are you alright?”

“...I’m fine,” Leonardo mutters after a moment. He blinks one more time before finally registering the whistling and shuffling over to the kitchen to remove the kettle from the burner. Mikey follows his movements as his frown deepens, watching as he nearly burns his hand on the kettle while trying to pour the tea into a cup. He even spills a little bit. That’s very out of character.

Slowly Mikey sits up and his expression twists trying to think of how to help. He had tried nearly everything to get his mind off of Karai’s absence but so far nothing had worked. Even Michelangelo and Donatello’s attempts to bring him out of his funk had failed.

Raphael didn’t try at all. Mikey had begged him but he had refused despite the largest puppy dog eyes he could muster.

He’s brought back to Leonardo by the sound of wet slurping and looks on with horror as he brings the spout to his lips and drinks the tea straight from the kettle. Yeah, things have gone way too far. It’s time for a serious intervention.

Mikey jumps up from the couch and sidles towards Leonardo with an unassuming smile on his face. The leader stops guzzling the tea and jumps at Mikey’s sudden presence right in front of him and nearly spills the rest of the pot down his plastron. He folds his hands behind his back and rolls back and forth on his heels waiting for Leonardo to start the conversation.

“Did you need something?” he cautiously asks while slowly setting down the kettle. Mikey smirks and rolls his head side to side as if contemplating.

“Not really, but I could use your help coming up with a plan,” he innocently says. Leonardo’s brow furrows as he scans Mikey up and down, looking for some kind of trick.

“A plan for what?” Leonardo slowly crosses his arms. His shoulders are tense as if expecting the worst, which is fair, honestly. Mikey hasn’t exactly made himself known for having any good plans, but he’s sure Leonardo will like this one. It’ll benefit all of them and hopefully get him out of his funk so he can start behaving normally again.

“Rescuing Karai, duh!” Mikey exclaims. Leonardo’s eyes widen as he relaxes, suspicions flying straight out the window with a new glint to his eye. Looks like he’s got him hooked, now it’s time for the sinker. “We gotta get her back to her real family as soon as possible, don’t we? What have you been doing if you haven’t been thinking of a plan?”

Leonardo bristles at that and stands taller. “I have been thinking of plans! It’s just…I know the others won’t be happy with it, and I don’t feel like getting into a screaming match with Raphael about this again.”

Mikey tilts his head, mind whirring as he takes it in. All Leonardo needed was support for his plans on rescuing Karai? Well, he can easily provide that, considering he’s just as eager to get Karai back where she belongs.

“I thought you were the leader?” he asks with a knowing smile. It gets something to spark in Leonardo’s as he stares down at Mikey with a new light. He blinks at the revelation, a knowing smirk growing on his face and Mikey knows he’s got him right where he wants him.

All Leonardo needed was a little push.

“Yeah, you’re right. I’m the leader of this team, and if they don’t want to listen then I’ll order them to,” Leonardo announces. He’s got a new energy to him that’s been missing the previous week and Mikey pats himself on the back for his success on dragging it out. “C’mon, let’s get them and I’ll lay out the plan to rescue Karai. And we’re going to do it tonight. There’s no way we’re wasting any more time while she could be hurting.”

Mikey wants to argue that maybe they can wait at least one night so Leonardo doesn't look dead on his feet, but he seems awake enough now. He can’t say he isn’t just as eager to get Karai back, either, and if Leonardo has been planning a way to do that all this time then surely it’ll work like a charm.

He waits patiently as he sends a text through their group chat to meet in the lounge for an emergency meeting. A frazzled Donatello is the first to appear from his lab, looking confused when he’s met with Mikey’s smile and Leonardo’s pacing form. He opens his mouth then promptly closes it when the leader jerks his head towards the couch. The other raises an unamused brow, looking to Mikey for context but he doesn’t indicate that he has any ideas on what’s going on, either. With an annoyed sigh Donatello listens to the silent order and lightly takes a seat next to Mikey, arms crossed tightly and looking like he’d rather be anywhere else.

Michelangelo storms into the room next, eyes wide as he scans the room. “What’s the emergency? Did the pizza guy get lost again!?”

“No, Mikey. Take a seat,” Leonardo orders. Michelangelo pouts but nevertheless makes his way to the couch, grumbling to himself about his missing pizza as he slouches on the other side of Mikey. He pats his alternates shoulder in consolidation. It’s always a dark day when the pizza delivery guys don’t get the hint that they’re delivering to a sewer. Dark days indeed.

Mikey taps his fingers against his thighs as they all silently wait for Raphael to appear. The leader is still pacing with a hand to his chin and his expression is getting even more frustrated the longer Raphael takes. It’s only when he can sense Donatello’s own frustration tip to a boiling point and he considers intervening that Raphael strolls into the room with a yawn. Leonardo glares at him as he absentmindedly leans against the back of the couch, scratching at the top of his plastron.

“Did you not see the ‘emergency’ part of my message?” Leonardo snips, staunchly crossing his arms.

Raphael shrugs and examines his nails. “Nah, I saw it. I just didn’t hear anyone screaming, so I figured it couldn’t have been that important.”

Mikey frowns as Leonardo growls and deepens his glare. He shares a knowing glance with Donatello and attempts to catch Michelangelo’s gaze, but his alternate looks to be settling in for the show.

“Of course it would be important! We’re going to go get Karai, and we’re going to do it tonight,” he announces. Leonardo stands straighter with a determined smirk that immediately falls into a frown when Raphael groans and throws his head back. Mikey turns towards him, slightly disappointed at his continued reluctance to do anything when it’s related to Karai.

“Ugh, not this again,” Raphael mumbles, catching Leonardo’s glare. “Look, maybe she believes Splinter is her father, but that doesn’t change the fact that she was raised by Shredder. You really think she’s going to turn on him that easily?”

“I think she will,” Mikey interjects, fielding the exasperated eye roll from Raphael with his hopeful smile. “You guys weren’t there on the roof. Karai wanted to do better!”

“And wanting to ‘do better’ includes drugging you?”

“She just didn’t want to be followed, I don’t blame her for that.”

“How you brush past being drugged will always be a mystery to me–”

“Enough!” Leonardo snaps. Mikey whips towards him, eyes wide at the tone. There’s something sharp in it that he’s never heard from him before. It wriggles some kind of memory in his mind that he tries to bring up as the leader continues. “Orange is right, Karai wants to get away from Shredder. Now, am I the leader of this team or not?”

Michelangelo stretches beside him, groaning as he splays more of his body across the cushions. “More or less.”

Leonardo angrily sputters at that, eyeing his brothers with narrowed eyes. Mikey shifts in his seat as the memory starts to get dragged up, of another blue clad turtle speaking in a very similar tone while also desperately wanting to rescue a lost sibling.

“”More or less’? So I’m only the leader until I tell you something that you don’t want to do?” Shrinking down Mikey studiously tries to avoid Leonardo’s glare at the others, knowing that he’s just as guilty of that as the others since being integrated into the team. He huffs and turns away from them to trudge towards the turnstiles. “Fine. I’m going to go check out Shredder’s lair, see if it has any weak points.”

Alarm bells raise in Mikey’s mind as Leonardo gets further towards the exit and he shoots up to bound after him. Whatever mindspace the leader is in is obviously not a good one, and there’s no way he’s letting Leonardo go into enemy territory alone while like this.

“Hold up, I’m coming,” Mikey announces and gets a pleased smile in return. He tries his best to shoot one back but the sense of unease from the parallels playing in his mind lingers.

“Well at least someone is willing to listen to me. C’mon, let’s go get Karai back,” Leonardo says, happier now that Mikey’s fallen in line. It brings the flashes of his time in the Turtle Tank trying to find Raph to the forefront of his thoughts and he bites his lip, trying to figure out if he should mention it.

“Wait, we’ll come, too,” Donatello hurriedly assures as he catches up to them. Raphael huffs but follows along as well, with Michelangelo dragging his feet to bring up the rear.

“But this doesn’t mean we’re going into Shredder’s lair,” Raphael positions, taking pace to walk side by side with Mikey. He takes a glance at him and the older turtle is obviously unhappy with how the night is starting. Flashing him a reassuring grin only earns a quick eye roll.

“But what about my missing pizza?” Comes Michelangelo’s whine from the back. Mikey waits for one of the others to reassure him but no one speaks. His alternate pouts and goes back to wallowing in his misery as they continue their trek further into the subway tunnels until they come into sight of a modified train car with wheels.

All the unease he had been feeling about Leonardo’s attitude melts away and is replaced with blinding excitement. He bursts ahead from the group to run an appreciative hand along the side.

“Whoa, way to ride in style!” he exclaims, not missing Donatello’s proud smirk as he shoots inside to touch all the buttons he can find. A slap to the wrist from Raphael stops his button quest but that doesn’t discourage him from eagerly taking everything in. “I mean, it’s no Turtle Tank, but still wicked cool!”

Donatello strides into the space, cooly sliding into a seat behind a large screen. Mikey can practically see the way he preens as the others go to what must be their designated spots. He tries to find a seat for himself and finds them all occupied, so with a shrug he squishes into the seat beside Donatello to marvel at the screen that comes to life when Leonardo turns the keys. The turtle beside him mumbles in distaste but accepts his presence by scooching over that little bit more.

“The Shellraiser is my baby, and while I am glad someone appreciates the marvel that she is, I must ask that you don’t. Touch. Anything. Especially now that it’s on.” Donatello looks him right in the eyes with that. Michelangelo grumbles something about discrimination behind him but Mikey simply nods, looking back to the screens with wonder.

No one else gets the chance to speak before Leonardo is pounding on the gas, making Mikey grip onto Donatello’s arm for dear life in order not to get thrown around. The taller turtle tries to shake him off but eventually concedes to his grip when he moves it to his bicep so he can keep typing into his workstation. He hangs on as they breach the surface and Leonardo finally slows to get out onto the street.

No one speaks and Mikey fidgets in the tense atmosphere that’s suddenly formed. He knows it’s likely because of Leonardo and his steadfast, brisk attitude, but he’s unsure if he should interfere. Mikey was the one to encourage him to get the others in on a plan to save Karai (even though he still had yet to tell them any details, which makes him think that there might not have been a real plan at all), but if this is how the mission is going to go then he’s not for it.

It’s too similar to the other time that he needed to rescue a sibling. The leader needs to be right, in charge, and won’t listen to any of the others inputs.

“I’m thinking we’ll have better luck if we tunnel up from beneath Shredder’s lair,” Leonardo says to break the silence. Mikey bites his lip and before he can think better of it immediately speaks up.

“We wouldn’t be able to escape as easily if we did that. The underground has a lot of tunnels but it also makes it easier for whoever’s chasing to follow,” he says. His voice is softer and more cautious than he would like and it gains curious stares from everyone other than Leonardo who completely disregards his warning.

“But we also know the sewers like the back of our hands. We’ll be able to lose the Shredder’s men in no time. Donnie, I’ll want you to work on getting any kind of blueprints for the building that you can–”

“But what if we tunnel in from above–”

“We’re not tunneling in from anywhere!” Raphael exclaims, cutting off Michelangelo’s suggestion. “We can’t do this, Karai is one of the bad guys! She was raised by Shredder!”

Mikey winces as that sparks a new argument between the two, going back and forth screaming at each other with Michelangelo attempting to run some sort of interference. He tries his best to ignore the sharp barbs and insults being thrown by turning back to the colorful screen that Donatello is also pointedly staring at.

His mind swirls as the arguments happening now mesh with everything that happened in his own world. Anxiety rises while the shouts continue, echoing in his ears and for a moment he has to remind himself that he’s in the Shellraiser and not the Turtle Tank. Raph is fine back home and they’re trying to rescue Karai, not him. She’s most likely completely fine other than being imprisoned, not being forced to become a drone to an evil alien race hellbent on destroying the world as you know it–

There’s a distinct shape of a man in the colors. Donatello catches it immediately and looks out the window in a panic, Mikey following suit and frowning when there’s nothing through the glass. They share a look and look back and forth between the rapidly approaching figure on the screen and the distinct lack of humans out the window.

“Is that a guy?” Donatello says in confusion. His eyes widen as the figure gets way too close and he’s shouting to the front of the vehicle, where Leonardo is decidedly not paying attention to the road. “Leo! Hit the brakes, hit the brakes!”

Donatello’s shriek has the leader's foot slamming onto the pedal in a shocked panic, but there is a very harsh ‘thunk’ before the Shellraiser screeches to a stop. Mikey’s grip on Donatello’s arm isn’t enough to hold him in place and he gets thrown to the ground with a yelp. He gets winces from the others as he quickly scrambles back up to get a look at the screen only to find the figure gone.

“What did we hit?” Michelangelo asks, hopping up from his seat and leaning over Donatello’s shoulder. Mikey continues looking between the window and the bright screen in confusion. How could there be a man on the screen and then nothing shows up outside? Was this something like Donnie’s mystic goggles?

“A…guy? But he was invisible! He only showed up in the infrared,” Donatello explains, scratching his head.

“Is this some sort of Kraang thing?” Leonardo asks as he scans the area in front of the Shellraiser. Mikey rolls his shoulders and pops open the door to hop out onto the street, scanning the area for a very injured man. Or a corpse. Leonardo was driving really fast. It wouldn’t be the first time he had to placate someone that had been run over by one of their vehicles.

He frowns when nothing comes up, not even a blood stain or dent on the front of the vehicle. The other’s are still debating on what happened inside as he checks the surrounding area and nearly trips over a backpack that appeared on the ground. Tilting his head Mikey grabs the strap and without thinking opens the zipper to see what’s inside. There might be some kind of identification in here if it belongs to the person they hit.

Instead of finding a wallet or drivers license Mikey nearly drops the entire thing when Shredder’s helmet stares back up at him.

With wide eyes he slowly brings it out of the bag and examines it closely. His first thought is that someone had made a very convincing replica, but running his hand over the cool metal he knows that this is, somehow, the real deal. Who on earth has such a death wish that they’d steal Shredder’s helmet?

The others are still arguing inside the Shellraiser. He’s not a fan of the glum mood that’s been cast over them because of Leonardo’s attitude, and when he looks back to the helmet in his hands he’s struck with a great idea on how to bust them out of it. Mikey’s beak turns up into a mischievous smirk while he creeps up to the front window and stays out of sight. He waits patiently until he hears Raphael question where he went to make his move.

“I’m the Shredder and I’m here to suck your blood!” Mikey exclaims in a deep, gravely inflection, shoving the helmet above his head in view of the window. He giggles as the others inside shriek and the entire Shellraiser rocks with the speed the others lurch out, weapons drawn in preparation to attack. All of them immediately deflate when they’re greeted with Mikey’s amused grin.

“Grr, I’m the big bad man and I’m going to kill you all!” he continues in his growl, the helmet thrusted in front of him. The others are looking at him as though he’s lost his mind but at least they’re not arguing anymore. He’s accomplished that goal if nothing else.

“Where the hell did you get that?” Raphael exclaims. He tries to rip the helmet out of his hands but Mikey dances away from his swipes, causing the other to chase and glare at him as he runs laps around the Shellraiser with a bright grin. “Orange, knock it off! Give it here!”

Mikey cackles, continuing to evade Raphael and laughing harder when he lunges and tumbles to the ground when he evades. Michelangelo laughs along with him and cheers him on even when Leonardo catches him off guard and snatches the helmet from his grasp. He pouts and tries to steal it back but it’s kept firmly out of his way.

“Well, tonight just got a lot more interesting,” Leonardo mutters. His eyes rove along the shiny metal of the helmet before they light up with an idea. “This is the perfect chance to trade–”

Leonardo doesn’t get a chance to finish his thought. Tens of Foot-bots emerge from the shadows and surround the Shellraiser, weapons drawn and eyes glowing a bright, blood red. Mikey shifts into a defensive stance with the others as they try to close in, their beady eyes locked onto the helmet in Leonardo’s grasp.

Which makes it even more offensive when the leader shoves the helmet back at Mikey, bringing all the attention to him. He’s opening his mouth to complain about it but he’s quickly shielded from a lunging Foot-bot by Leonardo’s katana slicing straight through its head.

“Put it back in the bag and let’s get out of here!” he commands and Mikey quickly complies. Diving into the Shellraiser he clutches the bag to his plastron. The others follow suit and as the Foot-bots try their hardest to get into the hull of their vehicle Leonardo shoots off down the road. He looks behind them at the robots falling off of the top of the Shellraiser and disappearing from view after turning a corner.

Mikey has no doubt they’ll be in hot pursuit, along with all of the Shredder’s other goons, but in the meantime he opens the bag and pulls out the helmet again. Resting against the back of the Shellraiser, he shifts the metal in his hands in the hope there would be some kind of secret compartment he could break into.

“Why exactly are we running away with Shredder’s helmet? How is this helping us!?” Donatello exclaims as he keeps an eye on the cameras for any more pursuers.

“I don’t know but pass it over, bro! I wanna see what Shredder vision is like!” Michelangelo answers quickly, making grabby hands at the helmet. Mikey looks at him, back at the helmet, and uncertainty rises in his mind. While it would be hilarious to see his alternate squeeze his head into it, there’s a small, miniscule part of his mind that wonders if this armor has any of the same properties his own world's armor did.

He’s been told again and again that mysticism and magic doesn’t exist in this dimension, but it could be a different kind than what is known to Mikey. Should he really take that risk?

“While I would love to see you wear this–trust me, I really want that to happen–my experience with Shredder armor includes life sucking juice when someone puts it on.” Mikey furrows his brows at the sudden incredulous looks being thrown his way as Leonardo continues to weave through the streets. “What?”

“Pretty sure that’s just a piece of metal,” Raphael says slowly. There’s a beat of silence where they all send wary glances towards the helmet sitting in his lap. “But, y’know, better safe than sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter if the helmet can possess people or not, this is perfect!” Leonardo briefly turns to them all with a wicked smile. “We can use it to trade for Karai.”

Excitement rises in him at that suggestion. It is a good idea. If Shredder is willing to send out hordes of people to retrieve a silly helmet that he could easily replace with another, then it has to be really important to him. He’d probably trade Karai, who’s likely now a traitor in his mind, for the piece of his armor in a heartbeat.

“You’re completely delusional! How many times does Karai have to try to kill us before you get that she’s not on our side!” Raphael shouts. His glower worsens when Leonardo refuses to reply. Mikey shifts, about to grab onto Raphael’s leg before he can storm up to the front and make them hit someone again, when the entire Shellraiser is rammed and flipped roughly onto its side.

He clutches onto the helmet with a yelp as he’s tossed around, sticking his head inside his shell until the movement stops and the others all groan. Mikey pokes out cautiously and takes a glance at everyone sprawled across the side of the Shellraiser. They seem a little out of it but relatively unharmed. He brings the helmet closer to his chest and frantically looks around for where the bag has been tossed, grabbing it and looping the straps over his shoulder until it rests on his plastron to easily slide the cargo inside.

“Everyone alright?” Donatello asks, seemingly satisfied by the lackluster responses. “We should get out of here, we don’t know what attacked us.”

Mikey leads the charge in exiting the Shellraiser, quickly propping open the door that’s now more of a skylight and scanning the area for whatever had flipped them. Keeping one eye on the others he adjusts the pack on his chest, freezing when he spots a faint flicker on top of one of the nearby roofs. He squints at it to try and see it better but only gets a small glimpse of a purplish man before it’s vanished.

It’s as he’s wondering if he’s beginning to see things that a swoosh of air goes right by his head. Following his gut he rolls off the side of the Shrellraiser and into a crouch on the ground. Whipping back around he searches for where an attack could have come from and, seeing absolutely nothing except the slightly confused faces of the others, starts to relax.

Something hits his head, hard. Mikey yelps and attempts to side-step whatever is attacking him but ends up smacking his shell straight into a wall of nothing. The wall, apparently, has arms, and while one arm attempts to get ahold of his neck the other one is obviously trying to get the backpack off of him. Not knowing what he’s fighting but knowing that it’s attempting to steal the helmet Mikey does the first thing he thinks of and rams the back of his head into what feels like a chin behind him.

It pushes the attacker away from him with a shouted curse, spinning around with fists ready for whatever comes next. What Mikey’s not prepared to see is a man in a glowy purple suit with a similarly glowing mohawk to flicker into existence while clutching a very bloody nose.

Well, he now sees that the slight crunching noise was not a cracked tooth, but rather a broken nose. Good to know.

The others are surrounding him in the next moment, weapons drawn towards the glowy, cursing man in front of them. Mikey’s attention, however, is back on the backpack strapped to his chest, hastily pushing the helmet back inside and zipping it back up from where his attacker had tried to snatch it.

“Who are you?” Leonardo snaps, snarling. The tip of his katana points directly at the man's chest as he straightens and his eyes greedily latch back onto Mikey’s bag.

“That ain’t none of your business. I’m just tryin’ to make a quick buck and not get killed, but…” he trails off, his hands coming away from his nose bloody as he jerks his head at something behind them.

In the next moment he fizzles back into nothingness and the others ready their weapons, not taking their eyes off of where he disappeared. Mikey, on the other hand, is a teensy bit more worried about what made him disappear so fast than having to deal with another surprise attack by the Purple Guy, as he’s decided to name him for the moment.

Turning around, his eyes widen at the large figure crouched on the opposite roof, two smaller ones flanking them as they jump down onto the street.

“Uh, guys? We have more problems,” Mikey harshly whispers as Rahzar growls lowly, Fishface and a large, buzzing fly-man glaring at them. He clutches the bag closer when the other’s eyes fixate on it, ready to run at the slightest of movements and even more so when Foot-bots start raining down from the sky to surround them.

Mikey follows the others lead and forms a defensive circle, pulling the backpacks straps as tight as they’ll go to draw his kusari fundo from his strap. He starts a lazy spin with the weapons and meets Rahzars glare head on.

“They have the Kabuto,” the wolf growls, elongating his claws. “Retrieve it or Master Shredder’ll have all our hides!”

“Actually, that would be impossible for me as my skin is made of mostly scales–”

“Don’t make me kill you too, Xever!” Rahzar snaps at the fish. He shrinks back in disgust and sends his partner a glare.

Mikey wiggles where he crouches, eyeing up the approaching robots and the other mutants in front of him. Despite the circumstances he can’t help the grin creeping across his face at the prospect of a full-on free-for-all. That’s exactly the kind of fighting he’s been missing. Enough with all the pointed and thought out attacks and plans that involve such a high level of tactical precision that there’s no fun or struggle to it.

It’s about time things got chaotic. Mikey is about to throw down and annoy the shit out of these villains, and they have no idea what’s coming for them.

“Don’t let them get the helmet,” Leonardo orders, his voice thick with tension. He’s just about to make fun of him for making everything sound so serious when the mutants and Foot-bots lunge towards him.

With a cackle Mikey splits from the group and starts flipping, dodging, and bouncing off of every available surface imaginable. The others follow in his wake to pick off robots and distract Fishface and the fly-guy (seriously, who is he? Has he always been there?), leaving him to fling the end of his kusari fundo into the chests of the bots in his path.

Rahzar suddenly jumps into his vision and swipes his claws towards his chest exactly where the helmet rests. Mikey drops to the pavement and deftly slides between the wolf's legs, popping up behind him with a teasing smirk and having to immediately dodge a snap of the larger mutant's jaws.

More slashes and snaps come his way and he dodges each one, a large smile dominating his face while the adrenaline soars. Rahzar is visibly getting more frustrated the longer Mikey evades him which only makes him cackle more. It’s refreshing to not go into a fight fearing for your life at every single moment. This is what Mikey’s used to dealing with; the taunts, the playful adrenaline, and the feeling of fighting a battle fairly confident you’ll win.

“C’mon little doggy, you’re not going to get your treat if you keep fighting like that!” Mikey jabs after kicking Rahzar straight in the jaw. The other mutant reels back, snarl warping his features as he attempts to claw his head straight off his shoulders. He laughs and rolls back, springing back to his feet just in time to dart away from another snap of his maw.

“Idiotic brat, your life ends now!” Rahzar roars and launches another barrage of attacks. Mikey snickers, jumping to the side and bouncing off a light post and soaring over the charging mutant.

His laughter cuts off as with a speed he’s certain Rahzar shouldn’t be capable of, he throws his claws up towards Mikey. With wide eyes he twists in the air so at least if the claws connect it’ll be with his shell. It only takes the sound of ripping fabric for him to remember the straps of the backpack looped across his shell.

As he falls the bag starts to slip off his chest. Yelping, Mike quickly hugs it before it can fall onto the ground and launches into a roll to get himself farther away. One of the straps is completely torn through with no chance of repair, the two pieces of fabric slipping off his back. Yeah, that’s not great.

Rahzar growls, coming straight at him once again but now with eyes latched on the bag he’s clutching to his chest. He can’t let it be taken. It’s likely their best chance of getting Karai out of the Shredder's influence. Quickly he looks around for the others and curses himself for getting carried away in the game. They’re almost on the complete other side of the block.

Mikey dodges another swipe by jumping to the side while taking one more look at the scene he’s been leading Rahzar away from. They seem to be keeping up just fine, luckily, and he latches on to the person surrounded by the least amount of enemies. Righting himself he throws the bag into his arm, reeling back and taking a deep breath, hoping Rahzar isn’t too close.

“Heads up, Donatello! Hot potato!” Mikey shouts, slinging the bag all the way across the block. The other turtle finishes skewering the head of a foot-bot and whips his head toward Mikey, looking at him in confusion. That confusion is wiped off his face when the bag lands square on the forehead.

Mikey winces as Donatello is harshly brought to the ground from the force of the throw but can’t do more than shout out an apology to him as he peels himself from the grounf. Rahzar is on him again, swiping and snarling while Mikey does his usual routine of jumping, sliding, and even landing a quick bash to the head with the end of his kusari fundo.

The battle takes a pause as Rahzar finally remembers what he’s really here for and turns away to start bounding towards Donatello who’s frantically weaving through the Foot-bots trying to jump him. Mikey darts after him, leaping into the air and unfurling his weapon to whip over and under Rahzar’s chest, grabbing onto the end of his weapon. With a whoop he lands square in the middle of his back and tightens the chain looped around his chest. The mutant screeches to a stop, flailing his arms in an attempt to reach Mikey and, when that doesn’t work, he drops to all fours and starts bucking.

“Oh yeah, check it out! I’m a cowboy y’all!” Mikey exclaims in a shoddy southern accent. Rahzar roars beneath him and rears up to try and reach him again.

“Would you stop messing around, this is serious!” Leonardo shouts, slicing a Foot-bot that had been chasing Donatello in half. He almost can’t hear the leader over the laughter of Michelangelo as he bats away Fly-Guy with his nunchaku.

“I know this is serious! That’s why you have to have some fun!” Mikey shoots back with a grin but, nevertheless, lets go of his grip on Rahzar and jumps off towards the others. “Trust me, a little laughter goes a long way–!”

“My baby!” Donatello squeals, eyes wide and terrified. Mikey’s head whips around to the sight of Rahzar clawing into the Shellraiser with a heaving grunt, raising it above his head and chucking it towards Donatello. He lets out a raspy chuckle watching it fly on its way to crush the turtle beneath it.

“Donnie, move!” Raphael screams. He does his best to push away Fishface but several more Foot-bots block his path.

Donatello himself is frozen as his creation is launched towards him, bag clutched to his chest and scales paling. Mikey’s heart pounds behind his ribs when it becomes clear that even if he were to start moving now, there’d be no chance to fully escape its weight.

Grounding his feet Mikey thinks nothing of it as he whips his arms out, reaching into the warmth in his chest that houses his ninpō. His glowing chains conjure around the Shellraiser and, with one harsh yank and grunt, stops its descent a foot away from Donatello’s face. Mikey lets out a sigh of relief, still straining to keep the vehicle afloat as Donatello’s shrill scream filters through his ears.

Everything pauses for a moment as he continues to scream. One of his eyes peek open and it abruptly stops, followed immediately by a nervous chuckle.

“Oh, hah, it’s floating, that’s…it’s floating!?” He exclaims as he quickly darts away. The bag acts as Donatello’s own personal stress ball as he stares up at the Shellraiser in disbelief. He shoots an incredulous look to where Mikey tensely rotates the vehicle until the wheels point towards the ground again.

“There’s way too many freaks in this town. Imma’ punch out, tiny magic turtles and big bad wolves are not part of the deal.” An invisible voice says to his left, followed by hurried footsteps running away.

“Shell yeah, let’s go Orange!” Michelangelo yells, smacking his nunchaku repeatedly into the face of Fly-Guy while he desperately tries to struggle out from under his alternates weight.

“It’s no big deal, really, I’m just totally awesome–” Mikey’s air is knocked out of him when Rahzar abruptly backhands him into the pavement. He hacks out a cough, distantly hearing the Shellraiser plummet back to the ground over the roar of the mutant above him. Scrambling back he yelps as a fist connects to the pavement in front of him. Thankfully the move has Rahzar reeling back in pain from the hit and Mikey gets a chance to roll to his feet and bolt towards the Shellraiser.

“All aboard everyone!” Mikey shouts, prying the bent door open and darting inside. The others follow in short order, knocking their opponents away just enough to slip through the cracks and dive into the Shellraiser. He grunts when Donatello shoves the backpack into his arms, muttering ‘it was floating’ as he gets into his position. Leonardo wastes no time in slipping into the now crooked driver's seat and slamming on the pedal.

He holds on to anything he can while rolling around on the floor, barely getting a glimpse of Rahzar attempting to run after them as Leonardo plows through Foot-bots without mercy. Everyone lets out a breath once they fade from view, slumping down wherever they had ended up in the wrecked interior of the Shellraiser.

Mikey takes stock of himself in the relative peace that has fallen. Taking deep breaths he cautiously reaches into the space his ninpō lives to give it a cautious poke, relaxing immediately when it doesn’t flinch away. Overall it’s still stable from that stunt and he only feels a dull ache, like stretching a muscle that hasn’t been used for a long time. It’ll still be in his better interest to limit the usage in order to keep from straining it too far, but having some fun in combat wouldn’t hurt too much, right?

“Are we seriously still going straight for Shredder’s lair right now?” Raphael’s fists are clenched tight as he yells. “Even if Karai isn’t an evil backstabber, there’s no way Shred-head’s going to give her to us just because we have his stupid helmet.”

“You don’t know that, and Karai isn’t evil. We owe it to her to get her back, whatever it takes.” Once again Mikey gets a tiny shiver at the tone. Squeezing the helmet tighter he sighs, mentally saying screw it, bringing Dr. Feelings into his consciousness. And if a little bit of Dr. Delicate Touch bleeds through, then oh, well. He’s not going to go through this a second time.

“I want to save Karai, too, but you need to listen to them. This kind of stubbornness only leads everyone into more danger. Trust me on that,” Mikey says, a steal to his tone. Any kind of argument easily dies in the face of it. Leonardo glances back at him and winces as it becomes clear what Mikey is talking about, quickly turning away to face the road.

“...I’m sorry,” he admits in a sigh. “I should be taking your concerns into account. Even if they’re not relevant.”

Well, it’s more of a sassier response than he expected, but Mikey will take it. As long as Leonardo doesn’t make the same mistake Leo did when trying to rescue a sibling. Raphael grumbles out a weak apology, too, and he’s pretty sure Leonardo doesn’t even hear it. He’ll work on that with Raphael once they have the time.

“Uh, dudes? They have motorcycles now,” Michelangelo hesitantly says, pointing out the back window. Everyone who can immediately huddle around to see that, yes, the Foot Clan has motorcycles now. And Rahzar in particular looks extremely angry.

“How…? You know what, this day doesn’t make any sense anyway. Sure!” Donatello angrily throws his hands up, whirling back to his station and hurriedly tapping at his keys. “Why wouldn’t this happen?!”

“Don, how much ammo we got?” Raphael grunts. Mikey watches as he slides into the seat that has what looks to be a telescope attached, a game controller in his hands. He turns his gaze back out the window in the next moment, fiddling with the straps of the bag as the Foot Clan steadily gains on them.

“I don’t know! Why am I the one that has to keep track of it? I’m not the one shooting them!” Donatello retaliates.

“Better make those shots count then, Raph. Be precise, practiced, and–”

“Come and get some, Foot idiots!” Raphael shouts, vicious glee shining in his eyes as he starts mashing the buttons. Mikey stares in fascination when a sewer grate, of all things, goes flying into one of the Foot-bot’s bikes, completely destroying it as well as the robots riding. In the next moment two trash bags careen towards more of the bikes, hitting their mark.

It’s not as cool as the lasers and multiple guns that the Turtle Tank has, but the fact that the Shellraiser has weapons at all is wicked.

Both Mikey and Michelangelo whoop as more projectiles get blasted towards the enemies. “Whoo, let’s go, big bro!”

“Oh, that one's going to hurt!” Mikey chuckles, smiling wide while watching one of the remaining Foot-bot driven bikes get pummeled by a bag of garbage. The only one left following is Rahzar, who had to put some distance between them during the assault, but is gaining ground with each passing second. “Light ‘em up!”

Mikey’s shout gets no answer and nothing goes flying at Rahzar. The longer they wait the closer the mutant becomes, and turning back to see what Raphael is waiting for shows the issue. The other turtle is mashing the buttons hard enough for them to creak, yet nothing happens.

“The damn things out of juice!” Raphael growls, still trying to press the buttons harder as if that’ll make more ammo appear. He shakes the control within an inch of his life before chucking it into the wall where it cracks down the middle.

Donatello glares at him. “Perfect, another thing I’ll need to fix,” he deadpans. Raphael crosses his arms in defiance and slouches back into his seat to pout at not being able to shoot anything anymore.

Mikey bites his lip as Rahzar continues to get closer. Without any more projectiles to launch the other mutant is bound to catch up with them eventually, it’s only a matter of time. No matter how many twists and turns they could take there’s no way they’ll be able to lose a motorcycle. Maybe there’s something else in the Shellraiser they could throw at him–

A lightbulb goes off in Mikey’s head and he turns excitedly to Donatello who’s grumbling over having to fix the game controller. “How big is the garbage cannon on here?”

“...what?” he asks, utterly confused. Mikey hurriedly restates the question only to get more judging looks thrown his way. “Uh, I don’t have the exact measurements on hand, but it can carry up to 40-gallon bags filled to the brim. Why–”

“So if I go into my shell I’ll fit into the cannon?”

A beat of silence follows his question. Mikey looks expectantly at all of them, buzzing with the prospect of being shot out of the cannon. He hasn’t done that in ages on the Turtle Tank.

“Orange, that’s insane! Why on Earth would–”

“Yeah Orange, that’s insane!” Raphael repeats, cutting off what must have been a lecture from Leonardo. He’s quiet, narrowing his eyes at Mikey, and doesn’t break his gaze as he scoops up the cracked controller. “The hatch is on your right.”

“Raph why would you tell him that–”

“Thanks!” Mikey quickly says, shoving the bag into Michelangelo’s plastron and ignoring Doantello’s sputters that he hasn’t calibrated it for living things. “I’ll see you guys in a minute!”

He finds the hatch before anyone can try to stop him and slides right in, popping into his shell at the last possible second. Making eye contact with Michelnagelo earns him a big grin and his alternate eagerly slams the latch closed. Muffled shouts are all he hears as the platform he rests on slowly raises. His heart pounds excitedly when he’s met with the cool night air and the sight of Rahzar’s snarl, eyes locked solely on the main compartment of the Shellraiser.

Mikey wiggles, waiting for the moment he gets launched. There’s jolting, the muzzle of the cannon aiming up towards the rooftops, and then the pressure behind him explodes. Whooping, he’s launched out of the cannon with a bang, popping out of his shell to the wide-eyed surprise of Rahzar below.

He grins wider, wind whipping across his face. Summoning his ninpō Mikey creates chains around his hands, quickly looking to the side for any easy projectile to launch. The perfect thing, however, makes itself known by the faint sound of frantically buzzing wings soaring beside him. With a passing glance and maniacal grin he latches his chains onto the Fly-Guy who immediately starts to fall, but before he even loses a foot of air Mikey’s whipping him straight towards Rahzar.

The two mutants collide and are forcefully thrown off the bike while Mikey cackles. He makes sure the bike gets totaled then throws out more glowing chains to wrap around the satellite dish on top of the Shellraiser. One pull sends him flying onto the roof with a metallic thud. Buzzing excitedly he crawls his way towards the door and pries it open from the top to slip inside.

Michelangelo immediately rushes him as he lands, shaking his shoulders excitedly. “Dude that was so cool I’m totally jealous I didn’t think about doing that sooner holy shell–”

Leonardo levels him a hard stare. “You’re never doing that again. Ever.” Mikey simply nods, too hyped up on adrenaline and endorphins to really take into consideration what the leader said. He’s totally going to convince him to do it again. “...but, good job.”

He practically glows at the praise while Michelangelo keeps rattling on about how cool he is (obviously) and Donatello goes on about how his stunt opens up way more possibilities for Michelangelo based weapons than he could have ever imagined. Raphael is simply smug. Leonardo clears his throat, gaining their attention from the steady stream of praise.

“Listen up, team. This is how we’re going to get in…”

==========

Mikey knew sneaking in was too easy. There were no guards, no Foot-bots, no anything. And now they all stand ready to fight beneath the Shredder’s throne, Mikey hanging on to the remaining strap of the backpack for dear life.

“You’ve come to make a trade I assume?” Shredder’s boredly asks, fully burned face on display. Mikey knows he isn’t supposed to judge someone based on their looks, but come on. That’s totally a super villian look if he's ever seen one.

Leo gives a derisive nod, pointing the tip of his katana up at the man. “The helmet for Karai, that’s the deal.”

Shredder steeples his fingers over his face in contemplation. His eyes lock onto Mikey, lips twitching down in displeasure. He mirrors the action, causing a sneer to light up on the man’s face as he abruptly stands from his throne. Everyone tenses with each step Shredder takes down the stairs towards them.

“I’ve heard Tiger Claw's tale.” Mikey winces at that. Thanks for the reminder of accidentally chopping someone's hand off, it was much needed. “You have turned into quite the force to be reckoned with in battle. It truly is a shame that you chose such a cowardly and disgraceful teacher such as Yoshi.”

Mikey scowls at that, bristling just like the others at the insults towards Splinter. “You snooze, you lose, old man. They kidnapped me first, I gotta stay loyal.”

“No matter, your reckoning will not come from my hand.”

“And it won’t come from Tiger Claw’s either,” Raphael mumbles, causing Michelangelo to snicker.

The man growls, stopping his descent at the end of the staircase. His eyes bore into Mikey, and while he knows it’s Shredder trying to intimidate him he doesn’t feel an ounce of fear. He’s not in this alone. Something akin to respect flashes in the man's gaze before it snaps to Leonardo, katana having followed Shredder’s movements the entire way down the stairs.

“Very well. She’ll have to be brought up from the dungeons.”

“You raised her as your own and yet you locked her in a cell? How could you ever do that?” Leonardo hisses, and Mikey’s inclined to agree with him. That’s pretty cold-blooded of a father to do, but he supposes this is the Shredder they’re talking about. There’s not an ounce of good intentions in this man's soul.

“In any conflict, the winner is the one who is prepared to do what the loser is not.” Mikey shudders. No matter how much he wants to deny it, he knows just how true that statement is.

The rest of the exchange goes worryingly smooth. Karai is dragged out by Foot-bots, a bag over her head, and Shredder demands the Kuro Kabuto. Mikey slides the bag with the helmet to Shredder as soon as Leonardo and Donatello have Karai in their arms and they make a quick retreat before anything bad happens.

He does wish he’d be able to see Shredder’s face when he picks up his helmet and a paint bomb blows up in his face, though. Mikey filled it with the brightest green and he really hopes he likes the gift.

Hopping their way to the rooftops is harder with their extra passenger but they manage fine, setting her down on the ground and taking a relieved breath. Mikey can tell the others are on edge about how well the interaction went, too, but no one wants to say it and ruin a good thing. They’re plan actually worked for once. It was an odd sensation.

Karai is also eerily still. She hasn’t said a single word, either. It rubs Mikey the wrong way but he supposes it’s to be expected when there’s still a sack on her head.

“Alright, let’s get this off,” Leonardo says once he deems enough time has passed to not be followed. Without hesitation he rips the sack off.

They’re immediately greeted by the sight of a bomb ticking down in seconds. Mikey wishes he could say he’s surprised, but he knew this mission went too smoothly. Something had to go wrong, and who said it couldn’t be because Robot-Karai’s head is a literal bomb?

Mikey sighs and scrambles away from the bomb with the others on his tail as the timer ticks down 5, 4, 3, 2…

“Turtles have the best luck in the universe, don’t we?”

Mikey doesn't hear if the others respond to his comment as they take cover behind anything they can find just as the bomb goes off. When they come out of their hiding places the others are clearly shaken up about the explosion but Mikey doesn’t know why.

They almost get blown up every other day by bad guys, too, don’t they?

Chapter Text

Back, and forth.

Back, and forth.

Mikey lets out a small sigh, his pencil rolling back to him on the lopsided table. He readies his finger and once again flicks it away to continue the cycle. His attention briefly leaves the pencil, flicking over to Leonardo brooding over the many discarded rescue plans laid out on the table.

Ever since the attempted trade two weeks ago, Leonardo has been determined to come up with the best laid plan anyone had ever seen. At first, Mikey was eager to help, but as hours turned into days turned into weeks, his brain had been slowly melting with how many steps this plan had gained. Even Raphael, who begrudgingly came around to the idea of rescuing Karai after he and Mikey had a talk, noticed how tired he gets after these sessions with Leonardo.

Which, in Mikey’s mind, doesn’t make sense. He doesn’t do much during these meetings. His presence is mostly used as a soundboard for whatever Leonardo wants to suggest. Mikey’s never been one for plans in the first place, but he still wanted to help. Yet every single time the leader calls it a day and goes about business as usual, Mikey’s left with a sluggish mind and drooping eyes.

If this is how Raph went about all of his hastily made plans back home, it’s no wonder he has such a big chasm.

In Mikey’s opinion, they should be trying to rescue Karai as many times as they can and see what sticks. That had always been what worked for him. As long as he had enough idiotic and stubborn determination, their goal would be reached one way or another. The only question would be how banged up their enemies and/or themselves would be after the fact.

But that’s not how things work here. Everything needs to be done with a plan and a purpose, calculated down to the very minute. It boggles Mikey’s mind, and not for the first time he wonders why they can’t just do it.

Is this what his life will be now? Having to listen and help make plans for no reason since, from his experience, everything will get blown up anyway? Why bother creating a plan when improvising and going with the flow is how all plans end anyway?

Mikey shakes his head. That’s too much thinking than he wants to do right now, but looking back to Leonardo and his narrowed gaze that hasn’t left the table in five minutes he’s not exactly sure how to get out of this. These plans are clearly important to him no matter how effective they turn out. He doesn’t want to rub the leader the wrong way by suggesting they discard everything he’s been working on these past two weeks in order to wing it.

Michelangelo, his blessed savior, strolls into their ‘meeting room’ (the kitchen) humming a catchy tune, throwing open the freezer to grab a popsicle. Ice Cream Kitty gives a pleasant little meow at the quick head scratches before she’s shut away again and his alternate approaches the ‘war zone’ (the dining table). Crossing his arms over Mikey’s slumped form Michelangelo leans over his shell and scans the many, many, many pieces of paper that have been scribbled on only to be crossed out.

“How’s the plan coming, bros?” Michelangelo asks, slurping on his popsicle. Little wet droplets fall onto Mikey’s head but he doesn’t have enough brain power to care. He’ll deal with the stickiness later, at least he has something more interesting to occupy him now.

“It’s…slow.” Leonardo reaches out a hand to straighten one of the papers, going straight back to brooding. “But we’re making progress, right Orange?”

“Yeah. Sure. Whatever,” Mikey mumbles with his cheek squished against the table, still watching as the pencil rolls back towards him, then away, then back again. The repetitive flicking makes the scars and muscles in his hand stretch uncomfortably, but he’ll write it off as a form of physical therapy if he must.

Donatello won’t be too happy if he strains it but that’s a problem for future Mikey. Right now, he needs to make sure his brain doesn’t melt out of his ears.

“Sounds boring.” Michelangelo leans more of his weight onto Mikey’s shell, propping his chin on the top of his head. The popsicle comes down near Mikey’s mouth and his tongue lolls out to give it a lick. Leonardo catches it and grimaces, mouth twisting even further in disgust when his alternate brings the popsicle back up to him for his own nibble.

“It may be boring now, but as soon as we polish off the kinks in the plan we’ll be ready to rescue Karai,” Leonardo says confidently. He even mashes his fist into his palm for dramatic effect.

Mikey lets out a deep sigh, scrunching his eyes tight. He’s going to be stuck here for at least another hour based on Leonardo’s rekindled spark. Michelangelo groans and his popsicle dips into his line of vision again, and to steal himself for the coming headache he takes a big bite off of the top. His alternate whines in complaint but he can consider it compensation for giving Leonardo more energy and prolonging Mikey’s suffering.

The squeaking of the dojo door draws all of their attention as Splinter makes his way to the kitchen, pausing when he spots the absolute mess that is the kitchen table. He diverts his course and curiously steps towards the table, raising an eyebrow at all of the hastily scribbled ideas and crossed out plans.

“You have been busy, I see,” Splinter rumbles. His eyes rove over everything with a calculated stare, ears twitching. Humming, his gaze lands on Leonardo staring off into space, no doubt coming up with even more ideas that he’ll eventually get rid of when he thinks of something better. “My son, may we have a talk?”

It startles the leader out of his head, and giving a small but confused nod Leonardo follows him into the dojo. Mikey melts further into the table at Leonardo’s exit and tries to focus on the weight of Michelangelo on his back. Annoyingly his popsicle is being held purposefully away from him so he can’t get another bite.

“Why are you helping him, again?” Michelangelo asks, chin moving against his head. “It would be way more fun to go play video games or watch Crognard, y’know. You could also teach me how to rob a store~.”

“Leonardo needs to be supported in his passions, even if they’re incredibly boring and have little to no results,” Mikey drones like a textbook. He defocuses his eyes to stare further into the void of boredom and hopefully save what sanity he has left. “I’ll gladly help you rob a store later, though. Raphael and I are running out of art supplies.”

“Sweet,” his alternate says, sucking obnoxiously loud on his popsicle right into Mikey’s ear. “Is he any closer to coming up with a plan that’s going to get blown to pieces as soon as he tries it?”

“Nope,” he intones, popping the ‘p’. “Still in the planning phase. I think my brain is too scrambled to really help anymore but I’d feel bad leaving.”

Michelangelo hums in contemplation. They fall into a small silence where Mikey thinks he’s going to leave and abandon him to Leonardo’s whims. He mentally commands his alternate to stay so he doesn’t have to suffer alone.

“Want me to try and give you a concussion? No way Leo would want you planning anything with one of those, and then it wouldn't be your fault if you left.”

“...tempting. But won’t you get in trouble for that?”

“It could be an accident. Like, I was trying to show you a wicked skateboard trick and the board ‘slipped’ into your face. Boom, free pass out of being an emotional support turtle.”

“We’re not supposed to skateboard in the lair, though.”

“Has that ever stopped us before?”

“You are so right. I don’t know why I would ever question you.”

“No clue, I am obviously the smartest big brother you have. Lemme’ go get my board and you prepare your face to get smashed into freedom–”

The door of the dojo slamming open cuts off Michelangelo’s plan of attack and Mikey inwardly groans. Leonardo stomps back towards the table looking even more broody than before. There’s no way they’ll be able to get away with giving him a concussion now that he’s back, and Mikey will be stuck here to wallow alone in his misery.

“Yo, what’s with that face? It’s all, like, ‘grr’,” Michelangelo says, miming little claws. Leonardo’s eye twitches, looking across all the paper laid out on the table, expression hardening.

“Master Splinter doesn’t want us to rescue Karai in case we have to confront Shredder, but…we can’t just leave her there!” he exclaims. Mikey perks up, knocking Michelangelo away to stand at his shoulder to watch as Leonardo paces, shaking his head. “No, Splinter’s wrong. We can’t wait and see if Shredder’s going to be around or not. We’re going to get her back. Tonight.”

“Finally! Yes!” Mikey exclaims in relief, bouncing from his seat and whipping his arms out in joy. No more mission planning events for him for the next decade if he can help it. He won’t be tricked into going through this torture again, no matter how happy it makes Leonardo. He’ll provide that happiness in a different way next time. Probably with snacks.

“Let’s go, dude! And Orange didn’t even need a concussion!”

“Yeah!…wait, what?”

==========

Donatello quickly motions them out of the revamped Shellraiser, reassuring Leonardo that he’ll keep watch for any suspicious activity and be ready for pick-up as soon as they have Karai. Mikey sticks close to Michelangelo, splitting off from Raphael and Leonardo to head towards the roof where Rahzar and Fishface are on patrol.

The plan was simple. Donatello stays back in the Shellraiser for a quick getaway and emergency back-up, Leonardo and Raphael infiltrate the Foot-base and get Karai out of whatever dungeon she’s being kept in while Mikey and Michelangelo provide a distraction to keep the heat off everyone else. He doesn't know why this plan couldn’t have happened days ago so Mikey wouldn’t have had to sit through hours of brain melting torture, but that’s not something he’s going to bring up. For now.

Mikey follows Michelangelo to the roof, keeping to the shadows and out of the enemy's sight. Creeping along by his side they stop just out of smelling range for Rahzar. Michelangelo smirks and pulls out a flashlight, wiggling it in his hand and turning towards the backs of Rahzar and Fishface. Setting up the light takes little time, Mikey sitting below it and waiting eagerly for it to turn on.

Michelangelo catches his eye and gives him a questioning thumbs up that he returns with a bright smile. Nodding, his alternate flicks on the light that immediately catches the other two mutants' attention. They stalk towards it while Michelangelo joins him below the flashlight for a quick game of rock-paper-scissors to decide who will distract first. Mikey wins, pumping his fist in Michelangelo’s pouting face before turning towards the blank wall the light is projected on.

Smirking, he brings his hands up and starts to make different shadow puppets. It’s a little awkward with only three heavily scarred fingers to work with but he has fifteen years experience in this skill. He manipulates his hands as much as they will go to make different creatures and the other mutants watch the show with open curiosity.

He’s so lucky he got placed on distraction detail. This job is always the most entertaining one.

Mikey is attempting to make a chicken when Michelangelo pushes him out of the way and starts his own show. He jabs an elbow into his alternates side for the frankly rude interruption but Michelangelo only sticks out his tongue in defiance. But, he has to admit, he’s weirdly skilled with shadow puppets.

Mikey gets just as enamored by the show as Rahzar and Fishface. Michelangelo creates shadow beings that should have been impossible even with five fingers. He tries to figure out how he’s doing it but it’s lost on him and Michelangelo only spares him a smug smirk.

The other mutants have a running commentary, changing every time the shadow turns into a different creature. Mikey taps his hands against his thigh to resist the urge to push Michelangelo out of the way to try out whatever magic he wields with shadow puppets. He really wants to learn how he’s doing that.

A small ‘boom’ erupts from below, shaking the roof. The shock knocks the flashlight to the ground with a small clatter. Mikey rushes to pick it up and forgets that he’ll be in plain sight, wincing at the low growl Rahzar lets out at the sight of him.

“It’s a trick!” Fishface exclaims, and, yeah, of course it was a trick. It was a wicked trick that he’s totally going to gently persuade Michelangelo to teach him later.

“Booyakasha!” Michelangelo shouts, whipping around both nunchaku and launching himself straight at Rahzar. Mikey draws his kusari fundo and joins him with a cackle, engaging Fishface while his alternate handles the big bad wolf.

He makes sure to pull some of his hits this time, trying to stick to dodging and light smacks with the end of his weapon. The last time he remembers fighting Fishface he managed to almost knock him out with just one punch and he’s clearly been practicing, but not enough to make too much of a difference. Mikey flips around, dancing along the edge of the roof to avoid the slashing blades.

In all honesty, it feels more like a heavy spar than anything else. Sure, there’s the threat of dismemberment and he really doesn’t want to know what exactly those fangs are capable of, but Mikey is quickly falling into a rhythm. He knows he’s faster and stronger than him even without his ninpō. The only thing even slightly tripping him up is the pointed attacks in his blind spots, but with the training Splinter’s been giving him he’s able to recover faster and mostly see them coming.

Mikey smirks, dropping to the ground and sweeping his leg. Fishface manages to lift one metal leg above the attack but his foot catches on the second one to make him stumble. Taking the opening he unfurls his weapon and sends it straight across his face with a hard ‘thwack’. He retreats further back to regain his footing, and Mikey is one jump away from following through the attack when Michelangelo’s pained yell reverberates through the air.

Whipping towards the sound his heart drops at the stream of blood running through Michelangelo’s fingers where he grips his bicep. His vision tunnels on Michelangelo’s pained and panicked expression as he ducks under another of Rahzars swipes. The wolf chuckles lowly and goes on a hard offensive while his alternate is visibly weakened.

Mikey immediately abandons his own fight to leap up to Rahzar, swinging a leg straight into the side of his face before he can get close to Michelangelo. He glances behind him while Rahzar recovers and relaxes, seeing Michelangelo pulling out his communicator to hopefully call a retreat to Donatello. With that out of the way he turns back to the large mutant, his own snarl marring his face when Rahzar’s eyes narrow in rage.

Michelangelo slowly backs towards the roofs edge behind him and Mikey follows, eyeing Fishface and Rahzar warily. He makes sure to stay in the middle of them all as they close in on them.

“Not so tough with only one arm, are ya?” Rahzar spits at Michelangelo. Mikey growls at the mutant and puts himself further in front of his alternate. No way is he letting Rahzar get close to him.

He lowers into a more defensive stance as they reach the edge of the roof, Michelangelo’s elbow pressing lightly into his shell. Rahzar and Fishface smirk at the perceived dead end and, as one, lunge for them. Mikey quickly lashes the end of his kusari fundo straight into Fishface’s gut faster than he can comprehend, knocking him back to smash straight through a chimney. Rahzar is closer than he would have liked when he turns his attention towards him, jaws wide and aimed straight at his head. Mikey pulls on his ninpō, attempting to summon his chains to push him back, but doesn’t get more than a few links before Michelangelo is grabbing the lip of his shell and yanking him off the roof.

He yelps and whips around to wrap his arms around Michelangelo’s waist, feeling the displacement of air on his legs from the snapping of Rahzars jaws. They’re in a freefall straight towards the ground and he throws his hand out, eyes wide as his ninpō reacts and shoots off a chain to embed into the other roof. Mikey’s arm latches harder onto his alternates waist before they start to swing, both letting out a small scream when his grip slips and they tumble across the alley below.

Michelangelo groans in pain under him and he quickly leaps off, kneeling beside him and checking over his arm. The bleeding has mostly stopped and the cut looks shallow but it’s obviously still causing quite a bit of pain if his wince is anything to go by. With no hesitation Mikey starts to unwrap the cloth from Michelangelo’s hands and wrist to wrap it around the cut.

“Oo, that stings,” he hisses after Mikey finishes tying it off. Rahzar roars above them and they both stare up as the large mutant leaps towards a fire escape to follow them. “And he looks really mad.”

“Yep, so let’s get back to the Shellraiser,” Mikey says, heart beating fast. He helps Michelangelo to his feet and lets him lean some weight against him, brow furrowing in concern when they take a step and there’s a slight limp. Guess that tumble knocked something loose in his alternates leg, too.

Quickly stumbling around to the front of the building Mikey wilts in relief as Leonardo, Raphael, and Karai bust out of the large doors. They dispose of some lingering Foot-bots and the other turtle's eyes go wide when they spot Mikey and Michelangelo. Karai slowly follows behind while Leonardo checks over the scratches on Michelangelo’s arm.

“I’m fine, I’m fine!” he insists, leaning away from the concerned prodding. “It’s not my water balloon throwing arm.”

“It still shouldn’t have happened,” Leonardo murmurs.

Mikey looks away from them and towards Karai awkwardly hanging to the side, still tense and ready for a fight. He catches her gaze and sends her a bright, relieved smile that she squints at with a pinched expression.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” Mikey says, his smile not leaving his face. Karai’s face scrunches and she quickly looks away. Her shoulders hunch in on themselves as she scans the area.

“...thanks,” she stiffly whispers. The warmth in his chest blossoms at her acceptance of care, but he doesn’t have long to bask in the glow. Foot-bots start to swarm around them with weapons drawn and eyes glowing neon red. A low rumble starts from the open doorway up the steps, and when Mikey turns to the sound his stomach drops.

Tiger Claw stands tall in the darkness, hatred shining bright while his gaze roves over the group, landing straight on Mikey. The anger only grows as he stalks down the steps and circles them until he boxes them in front of the Foot base. Mikey glances towards his hand and is surprised to already see a shiny metal prosthetic in its place. It doesn’t look well-developed, the fingers jittery and stuttering as he flexes his paws, but it works well enough to still be dangerous.

“Surrender, reptiles. You are outnumbered,” Tiger Claw growls, eyes never leaving Mikey. “If you do, I agree to only kill the smallest cub. The rest I’ll leave for Master Shredder to deal with.”

“Not a chance,” Raphael spits right back, moving to stand directly in front of him. “And I’m not afraid to get my hands dirty to make sure of it.”

Tiger Claw snarls, showing all of his teeth and drawing his sword. They form a circle to face all of the enemies surrounding them and Mikey doesn’t feel great when he ends up facing the larger mutant’s full fury.

Mikey crouches lower, kusari fundo in a white-knuckle grip. He’s fully prepared, waiting for Tiger Claw and the Foot-bots to make the first move. His attention is completely diverted from the burning hatred by the squeal of tires and a loud siren. Before he can even register what’s happening the Shellraiser is barrelling into an unprepared Tiger Claw, sending him flying down the street.

He can practically feel the shock of the others around him when Donatello throws open the door to the Shellraiser, a manic grin on his face.

“Well, what are you waiting for!? Get in!” he yells, disappearing back into his seat. Mikey quickly shakes off the shell-shocked (and slightly prideful) feeling seeing Donatello absolutely destroying Tiger Claw. He launches into the Shellraiser with Michelangelo by his side. Everyone follows on their heels and the door closes at the same moment Donatello pounds on the gas.

He falls to the floor and drags Michelangelo down, too, both yelping as they hit the hard metal. They quickly stabilize themselves by latching on to each other and try to sway with the harsh rocking of Donatello’s reckless turns.

“Donnie! Cool it! No one’s following us!” Raphael yells, clinging to one of the seats and glaring ahead at the driver.

“You don’t know that!” Donatello snaps back, not taking his eyes off the road while making another sharp turn, jostling everyone not strapped down. Karai tumbles to the floor beside Mikey with a grunt and he wastes no time in bringing her into their impromptu cuddle session.

“Ugh, what–” she screeches, clawing at the arm he wraps around her. Mikey simply locks her to his side and squishes his cheek into hers. Karai growls and attempts to reach her nails up into his face but he leans his head away with a cheeky grin.

“Safety first! Especially with who’s driving right now,” he reasons matter of factly. Mikey doesn’t budge his arm and keeps her to his side even as she continues to try and get out of his hold. Waiting for the moment Karai pulls out some kind of knife or another dose of drugs to inject him with, he’s pleasantly surprised when she slumps down and begrudgingly accepts the cuddles.

Warmth bubbles in his chest and he gives her a little squeeze to express his gratitude. Mikey can feel the glare Karai levels at the side of his head, but hey, it’s progress. At least she’s not drugging him again.

==========

Mikey skips back into the lair in glee, glancing back behind him every so often just to confirm that Karai is still following. She’s looking particularly ruffled and uncomfortable stepping foot into their home again but he knows it will take time for her to adjust. He’s already thinking about all the fun bonding activities to try and get her out of her shell.

“I hope this means you’ll finally stay. After all, you’re family,” Leonardo says lightly. Mikey turns on his heel and bounds back up to Karai, barely holding himself back from dragging her further in.

“Yeah, Splinter’s going to be so happy to see you!” he exclaims. His cheeks hurt with how much he’s been smiling but he can’t help it. The fact that Karai is finally home, right where she belongs, is a cause for celebration. Mikey will need to find out what kind of food she likes ASAP.

“With Shredder after me, I don’t think I have much of a choice.” She sighs lowly, stepping around them and further into the lair. Wrapping her hands around herself she gives a noncommittal hum while surveying her new, permanent home. “It’s actually not that bad. Y’know, for a sewer.”

“It’s totally awesome, right? This calls for a family hug, bring it in,” Michelangelo announces, practically reading Mikey’s mind. He doesn’t waste the opportunity and latches onto Karai again and ignores the way she immediately tries to pry him off. She’ll get used to it, and Mikey’s preferred method for these kinds of cases is immersion therapy.

The mood sours when Michelangelo tries to join them but instead hisses in pain when he stretches his arm too far. Coincidently it is also the exact moment Splinter decides to emerge from the dojo to discover what the chatter is about. His eyes latch onto Michelangelo’s wrapped arm, completely grazing over Karai as his ears turn down.

“Michelangelo, what happened?” he murmurs, hastily approaching and grabbing the injured arm.

His alternate hisses, trying to pry out of his grip to no avail. “It’s just a scratch, Sensei. You should see what Orange did to the other guy.”

At the mention of him Splinter raises his head to lock eyes with his own wide stare, still clinging onto Karai’s now tense and frozen form. If he didn’t know any better he’d assume she was a statue. It takes a moment for Splinter to fully realize what he’s seeing, but once he recognizes the form of his daughter his eyes melt into softness.

“Miwa,” he whispers, straightening and slowly approaching them. Mikey latches on a little tighter, unwilling to let Karai go now that he has her in his arms again, but gets forcibly yanked off by Raphael. He whines in annoyance, trapped in a headlock, and only gets an exhausted eye roll for his trouble.

“Father,” Karai replies. She rocks forward slightly, hesitating, then steps forward and firmly hugs Splinter. He stiffens at first, but quickly recovers and envelops his daughter with a warm embrace.

Mikey stops trying to sneakily wriggle out of Raphael’s grip, staring at the scene with a warming heart. A softer smile graces his face the longer they stay together, neither willing to break the connection quite yet. His eyes sting with unshed tears at the image. It had been too long since he had seen his Gram-Gram truly happy in the flesh, and even that was only for a short time before her life was unfairly snuffed out.

It fills something warm in his soul to see that at least some version of Karai can be happy with her family.

The rest of the night passes in soft, companionable conversation. Mikey tries to scooch closer to Karai any chance he gets but most of the time he gets intercepted by Raphael before he can get back to his hugs.

No, Raphael, he doesn’t care that she looked murderous all the other times he’s touched her. And, no, he also doesn’t care about personal boundaries at the moment. Those can wait for another day, not when Karai is finally home.

Michelangelo eventually drags him away to help make a quick dinner of sandwiches for everyone. He’s not paying as much attention as he should be to the process and he may miss how his alternate plants a plastic cockroach in the middle of Raphael’s meal, but he’d say the high pitched scream was definitely worth his sub-par preparation skills. It gets Karai to relax just that little bit more, too, with everyone bursting out into giggles while Michelangelo runs for his life.

Overall, Mikey ends up snuggling into his blanket nest more content than he’s felt in a while. The missing piece of the family has finally been brought home and things are looking up for them. Riding the high of the knowledge that Karai is merely a room away, claiming the dojo until they can find a more permanent solution for sleeping arrangements, he allows himself to fall asleep knowing his brothers would be proud of him for helping rescue her.

The giddy feeling is still there when he wakes up, feeling more refreshed than he has in a long time. Mikey wastes no time bouncing to his feet and pulling on the compression wraps, grin growing when there’s barely any twitching or pain. He adjusts his mask-turned-bandanna around his neck and strolls out of his room humming a cheery tune.

There’s a small crick in his shoulder from his sleeping sprawl that he quickly shakes out while making his way towards the empty kitchen. His mind gets carried away thinking about trying to find a hammock he could set up in his room as well as rummaging through a bottom cabinet that he doesn’t realize he’s not alone until they noisily clear their throat.

Mikey bangs his head on the counter with a yelp in his haste to straighten from his search for pans, rubbing the smarting spot. His sharp retort dries on his tongue seeing Karai sitting on the kitchen table, wincing in sympathy from the hit. Shaking it off he sends her a bright smile and all plans for breakfast get thrown out the window with a plain piece of toast in her hands. Well, there’s plenty more days to make the best meals she’s ever tasted.

“Mornin’ Karai!” Mikey chirps, skirting around the island and hopping onto the counter so his feet lightly dangle off the edge. Her brows furrow and she says nothing, simply nibbling on the edge of her toast. He doesn’t speak as they stare at each other. Karai looks like she’s trying to figure something out but Mikey doesn’t mind the oppressive gaze, he’s simply happy that she’s here. Right in front of him. Not evil, and most certainly not dead.

Mikey lets the minutes flow by as she continues staring and he keeps smiling, rocking his feet back and forth, continuing to hum his tune. Her eyes become steely and she abandons her toast to the table to steeple her fingers in front of her face, never breaking eye contact.

He doesn't mind. Staring contests are always fun, and even though he wasn’t super prepared for one he’s not going to give in. Karai seems to like doing that a lot, actually. She’ll keep staring and staring as if waiting for something to happen, but Mikey’s not sure what. He’s as eager to see what happens as she appears to be.

“Uh, are you guys…good?” Comes Leaonrdo’s voice from the side, standing in their periphery. Karai’s eye twitches with something Mikey can’t quite place but nevertheless he keeps smiling.

“...yes, we are fine,” Karai murmurs, finally breaking contact to glance impassively at Leonardo’s confused expression. “I am simply trying to figure him out.”

“Good luck with that,” Raphael grumbles, stretching loudly while making his way out of his room. “I’ve been trying for almost four months now and he’s still a nutcase.”

“Aw, you want to get to know me? Ask any question you want! I’m all ears,” Mikey encourages, leaning eagerly towards her and cupping his hands on the side of his head. It’s good that she’s taking an interest in him, it means she’s opening up a little! So much progress in such a short amount of time!

Karai purses her lips. Her head tilts in curiosity, ignoring Raphael’s approach and subsequent glare. Mikey doesn’t take his eyes off of her, almost able to see the cogs ticking in her brain. Hands quickly press into her lips as her eyes narrow in concentration.

“Exactly how many mental illnesses do you have?”

“Professionally diagnosed by a licensed psychiatrist? None,” Mikey answers simply. Not the question he was really expecting, but it’s true. He’s never been to an actual psychiatrist much to Draxum’s chagrin. If she means how many he suspects that he has, and the accusations his brothers throw at him, then it’s probably at least four.

“Okay!” Leonardo hastily butts in, looking between the two of them as if they’re both crazy. It was a simple question, Mikey doesn't know why he looks so frazzled by it. Raphael looks to be desperately holding in laughter, actually. “How about we go wait for the others in the dojo? So, y’know, we can start training as soon as possible?”

“Hm,” Karai hums, lips twisting into a frown. “I don’t believe you. But I agree to drop it for now in order to see what you all consider training.”

“Sounds good to me,” Mikey chipperly responds, hopping down from the island and strolling towards the dojo. Karai is slower to follow than the others and he can feel the stare being aimed at the back of his head. He preens under the attention, grandly holding open the door as they filter in.

Grinning under Karai’s suspicious stare he skips inside, leaving the door open for Michelangelo and Donatello and making his way back to her side. She skitters away but Mikey follows, never more than a foot away. Raphael sends him a look of warning as he continues to follow Karai like a duckling. He merely skips along beside her, ignoring the growing annoyance and murderous glare she keeps aiming towards him.

Splinter steps out of his room during the third round, watching him circle Karai with an unamused stare. She picks up her pace passing him, and as Mikey speeds up to keep close Splinter reaches out a hand to snag him around the lip of his shell. He pouts, watching Karai escape his grasp and slouching to give Splinter the best hurt puppy dog eyes he can manage in an attempt to let him go.

“Why don’t we let Karai have her space, hm?” Splinter gently ‘suggests’. Mikey sighs, limbs going loose while Karai takes a place next to Leonardo. Her shoulders relax incrementally and he can admit, just maybe, he’s been laying on the affection a little too thick.

He can’t help it. It’s Karai, and she’s here. Mikey has a lot of hugs and love to make up for since his time with his Gram-Gram was so short.
“Fine…” Mikey groans, stalking over to Raphael and jabbing him when all he sees is his smug expression. Raphael bristles and goes to retaliate but stops his attempted slap mid-air with Splinter pointedly clearing his throat. Letting his arm fall he grumbles about unfairness while Mikey grins in victory.

Karai stays near Leonardo’s side as they wait for Donatello and Michelangelo to make their appearance, slowly relaxing under the ease of conversation with him. Mikey ignores the small jabs Raphael throws his way to focus on the way Leonardo fidgets with the strap over his chest, something he’s never seen him do before. He barks out an unusually loud laugh to something Karai says and a blush covers his face.

The gears in Mikey’s head turn. It’s almost like he has a crush on Karai, but that can’t be right. That would be troubling on multiple levels. So, it has to be something else, but what–

“M-Dog is in the house, dudes!” Michelangelo says to announce his presence, strolling lax into the dojo. Donatello follows behind and closes the door behind him all the while rolling his eyes. Mikey grins and meets his alternates fist bump eagerly before getting into position to start training.

Splinter refuses to let Michelangelo do more than the warm-up katas due to his arm, and Mikey can’t help jealousy staring at his smug face where he sits by Karai while the rest of them are run through the wringer with drills.

It wouldn’t be so bad if Leonardo wasn’t try-harding so much. The leader has always taken training seriously, but right now it’s like he’s giving his all and then some. Mikey stares in confusion as Leonardo strains himself, going for stances and hits that he knows he’s only practiced a few times. His mind continues turning, gaze periodically shooting to Karai after a particularly difficult move.

The price for his distraction comes in the form of getting knocked around by a joyous Raphael, but he’s not too worried about that. Even as he’s pinned to the ground and Raphael touts his victory in the spar, Mikey doesn’t take his eyes off of Leonardo’s circling around a panicky Donatello looking for the best opening. The leader ducks in under the swing of his bō and jabs the hilt of his katana into the base of his throat, sending Donatello sputtering to the floor trying to catch his breath.

Mikey shakes Raphael off of him and watches closely. Leonardo grins, victorious eyes flitting back to Karai. She has a slightly impressed smile on her face, and as Leonardo visibly preens under the attention the weird behavior finally clicks into place.

He’s trying to impress her. And, as she shoots him a compliment on his form that has Leonardo’s smile growing, Mikey realizes that the amount of admiration he must have for his sister is insurmountable. The way he’s always trying to get her comfortable, making sure Mikey and his other brothers don’t cause her too much trouble, and showing off his moves? It’s eerily similar to when Mikey’s trying to impress and show his brothers all the skills he has, hoping to get compliments from the people he admires more than anything in the world.

It’s pretty cute, actually, how much Leonardo cares and wants to impress his older sister.

“What the heck was that for, Leo?” Donatello groans from the ground, rubbing his neck. It snaps the leader out of his preening and he looks bashfully down at his brother.

“Sorry, I didn’t–” Leonardo sputters, a water balloon coming from nowhere and hitting him square in the head. Mikey laughs, bouncing to his feet and grinning at Michelangelo standing behind the leader, clutching his stomach in fits of giggles.

“Oh yeah, son! Never underestimate the throwing balloon arm!” Michelangelo shouts. Karai laughs on the sidelines amid Leonardo’s rising blush, and doesn't hesitate in tackling Michelangelo to the floor to duke it out. “No, no, no, no, dude, wait! Ow, my arm!”

Donatello yelps as they roll over him and drag him into the scuffle, all of them making pot shots and attacking blindly. Mikey shares a look with Raphael, and before he can change his mind he shrugs and pushes the other into the ball of turtle. Raphael reels back, eyes narrowed and manages to snag his wrist to drag Mikey down with him. He goes into the mass giggling, squirming around and wrestling with all of them even as Leonardo still attempts to get to Michelangelo.

“Is this how training always goes?” He hears Karai ask, voice light with a hint of genuine amusement. Mikey glimpses her relaxed face and the way Splinter shakes his head in annoyance before Doantello’s elbow knocks straight into his chin, making his teeth rattle.

“Yame!” Splinter shouts. All of them freeze and slowly detangle from each other. It doesn't stop them from tripping and elbowing while getting to their feet but the all out brawl has stopped. “My sons and daughter, that is enough for today.”

Mikey lets out a sigh of relief, thankful that it’s over. While he’s definitely gotten used to the routine of training, as well as how Splinter attempts to make it more engaging for both him and Michelangelo, it’s still in no way his favorite thing to do. He stretches his arms over his head and accidentally (read; purposefully) smacks Raphael in the face, darting out of the dojo before he can grab him.

Avoiding him turned out to be a fruitless endeavor. After getting a mini smack down and both of them figuring out his leg can bend a lot farther than he thought without it hurting, things calmed down. Karai stayed in the dojo a lot longer than the others, and while she was visibly agitated when she emerged she simply sulked to the couch to sit by Leonardo. He looked ecstatic to see her and proceeded on a rant about Space Heroes when she glumly asked ‘what on Earth is this?’.

Mikey rode through the day on a joyous high. He tries not to corner Karai and encroach on her space too much, but it was a battle he fought viciously to win. All of his being wanted to be close to her and get to know this version of Karai better. He wondered what her favorite weapon was, or her favorite book, or even her favorite TV show, if she had one. What was Karai made of? What made Karai, Karai?

Unfortunately he never gets a chance to ask. Before he knows it they’re all retreating to their rooms and he still has all of the ‘get to know you’ questions bouncing around in his head. Mikey tosses and turns in his nest, once again wishing he had a hammock, as he makes his plan of attack for the next day.

While he still doesn’t know what Karai might want for breakfast, he’s willing to pull out all the stops. Maybe something with Japanese roots? If he remembers right, that's where she mostly grew up, so a little taste of home would be nice for her. Mikey goes over his options in his head as more and more time passes.

The silence of the lair is a complete void compared to the whirlwind of ideas bouncing around his mind. It makes it all the more jarring when the slight squeak of the dojo's door opening breaks through the quiet. Mikey sits up, rubbing his eyes and glancing towards his door to make sure he heard right. A few seconds later the noise comes again, the door now shutting, followed by complete silence.

He’s not sure how long he’s been lying there coming up with the perfect plan to get Karai to open up, but he knows it’s too late for Splinter to be up and about. Which only leaves one option for who it could be.

Without thinking too hard he rolls to his feet and opens his door, peering out and catching sight of Karai moving quickly and silent towards the turnstiles. Mikey’s breath catches and he’s immediately stepping out of his room to catch her. He doesn’t bother to hide his approach and Karai wheels around to face him, stopping before she can cross into the abandoned railways leaving the lair.

“What’re you doing?” Mikey softly whispers. “I…I thought you liked it here.”

Karai’s eyes narrow and she straightens, meeting his saddened eyes head on. “Yes, that is the problem. Father told me the truth about what happened to my mother. It’s all Shredder’s fault, and he won’t rest until all of you are dead.” She takes a deep breath to compose herself. “That is why I must stop him before he can ruin the only good thing I have left.”

“Going after him alone is a bad idea. You can’t beat him,” Mikey pleads, hesitantly stepping closer. “Look what happened last time.”

“I wasn’t sure what I was fighting for before. Now I do,” she replies solemnly. A beat passes and Mikey flounders on what to do, even more so when she turns away and starts towards the tunnel exit. “Don’t try to follow me. I won’t hesitate to incapacitate you again.”

“Yeah, I know that, but–” Mikey stutters, lurching forward as Karai stalks away. He can’t let her go. He doesn't know what will happen, or how far Shredder might take things, she could get killed again. “It’s going to kill you!”

His whisper shout stops Karai short. Mikey grips the turnstiles in front of him, hands shaky while she turns her head back. Her expression is undecipherable, but he can see the hesitance shining through. He takes the opportunity for what it is, hurriedly continuing while he has her attention.

“Your entire life has been about revenge, hasn’t it? If you can’t let that go it’s going to kill you. His mission is going to get you killed.” Mikey fights back the rising tears in his eyes. Flashes of his Gram-Grams battered and bruised face overlays onto the Karai standing in front of him. “I don’t want to go through that again. The others don’t deserve that. Just–let us help you. Properly.”

His voice cracking has Karai fully turning around, cautious. Mikey sniffles and quickly wipes a hand over his eyes to dispel the beading tears.

“You seem…very certain about that,” she begins, shaking off the caution for yet another steely mask. “But you’re wrong. I’m strong enough to defeat him by myself, I don’t need help.” Despite her hard look Karai’s voice shakes, uncertain of her own words.

She knows that she’s probably wrong. That there’s a good chance things will go very, very bad when she confronts Shredder. And yet Karai is still too prideful, too scared to open herself up for help.

…Yeah, he knows that feeling.

“Y’know, it’s okay to let others help you,” he says softly. “Even if you don’t think you need it, or if you’ve never needed it before.” Mikey takes a breath, clenching his hands to his chest. He glances down at them for a moment, at all of his scars, ruefully smiling before meeting Karai’s even more uncertain gaze. “Trust me. You might think you’re capable of handling everything that’s thrown your way, and a lot of the time you are, but…when it’s something too big for just yourself, you need to reach out for help. Before it’s too late.”

Karai clenches her fists and glares hard at the concrete beneath her. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” She swallows harshly. “You’re just some insane turtle who’s getting in my way. I don’t need help.”

“But we’ll help anyway,” Mikey insists. “Me, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello; I know Raphael would be there, too. And you don’t even have to ask for it. But we can’t do that if you run off to get yourself killed because of Shredder’s stupid quest for revenge.” Karai twitches and opens her mouth to most likely defend that she’d be fine, but Mikey powers on, barely keeping his voice to a whisper to avoid waking the others. “Do you really want to let Splinter go through the grief of losing his daughter again?”

That snaps Karai’s mouth shut, lips pursing. It was a bit of a low blow but Mikey doesn't regret it. And if he’s projecting and he really only said it because he doesn’t want to go through that terrible time again, either, then no one but him needs to know about it.

“Please, just–” Mikey shudders, locking eyes with her to pour every ounce of pleading into his voice. “Don’t leave us.”

He feels a tear roll down his cheek and hastily wipes it away. Karai stares at him for a moment, biting her lip and then staring out into the exit tunnel. Mikey tensely waits, squeezing his hands together and hoping against hope that she makes the decision to stay. He’d obviously follow after her and alert the others to her plan if she attempted to run but he doesn’t want to make her feel like she’s trapped here.

Abruptly the tension releases from her frame on a heavy sigh. Mikey’s hope lifts into a crescendo when she turns back to him, eyes tired and arms coming up to give herself a hug.

“I suppose I shouldn’t make Father even more disappointed, should I?” Karai replies, stalking back towards Mikey and deftly hopping over the turnstiles by his side. “Fine, I’ll stay. For now. I probably wouldn’t hear the end of it from Leo, anyway.”

He can’t help himself. His hug nearly bowls both of them over, and he nuzzles into her shoulder between her armor. Karai freezes, hesitant, then incrementally relaxes. She even attempts to pat his head. The awkwardness of it prompts a choked giggle from his chest. Mikey slowly pulls back and grins brightly up at her still uncertain and confused face.

“Thanks,” he whispers, wiping away the rest of his grateful tears. She hums, crossing her arms over her chest. The ensuing silence is stilted as Mikey tries to rein in the immense relief at convincing Karai to stay, neither speaking a word. If he wasn’t tired before, he’s definitely tired now. That emotional rollercoaster is one he doesn’t want to repeat any time soon.

“You seem to care about me much more than anyone would expect,” Karai suddenly announces, scrutinizing him heavily. “I would like to know why.”

“...how about a sleepover while we play 20 questions?” Mikey suggests. He may be tired, but staying up to get to know Karai better with the added benefit of keeping an eye on her so she doesn’t go back on her word sounds like the best thing in the world right now.

“I can agree to that. Although,” she pauses, looking slightly embarrassed. “I’ve, uh, never really had a ‘sleepover’ before.”

Mikey beams. As soon as he sets up the lounge for the most amazing pillow fort anyones ever seen, he’s going to give her the best sleepover experience in the world. He quickly gets to work and directs Karai to help in the construction. She doesn’t seem too thrilled, but as soon as it’s done Mikey can tell she’s as excited as he is to get inside.

Karai may be a super skilled ninja assassin, but she can’t hide from Dr. Feelings.

They crawl in and pass the night asking each other different questions. As it turns out, Karai has an obsession with trashy Hallmark movies. Who would’ve known?

Eventually the cozy atmosphere and Karai’s voice lulls him into laying down and clutching a pillow to his chest, a yawn splitting his face. Karai tapers off in her heated explanation of the dying art of rom-coms while Mikey fights to keep his eyes open.

It’s a losing battle, in the end. Mikey’s eyes flutter shut one final time, feeling Karai’s gaze roving over his face. A small, warm spark burns brightly in his chest at the feeling of a blanket being draped over his shoulder before he gives up the fight and falls asleep knowing Karai is safe and watching over him.

He rests peacefully in the knowledge he saved another member of his family from the long running tradition of self-destruction.

Chapter Text

“I still don’t see the point of this game. Where is the strategy? The tactics? The lesson?”

“It’s ‘go fish’, Karai. It’s not that deep,” Mikey says, grinning up at her as he pulls a card from the deck. “You play to have fun!”

Karai hums, glaring down at her hand. It had taken a while to get her to agree to learn his favorite card games, but now that he has her in the dojo, just the two of them, Mikey’s been enjoying every second. The others might argue that he’s been spending a little too much time with Karai for the past two weeks, but he sees it as making up for lost time.

Although, he can’t help but wonder if Gram-Gram might get a little jealous. They tried to spend as much time with her as they could, but things obviously got cut short. She wouldn’t mind that Mikey’s attached himself to this Karai so fast, right? He doesn’t think she would. Gram Gram is too kind for that.

Besides, he’s been having his work cut out for him trying to integrate Karai into the established family dynamic. Leonardo and Michelangelo were the easiest for her to get along with other than Mikey himself; the others, however, took a little convincing. Donatello’s mostly indifferent to her presence, but he can tell that he’s still getting used to seeing her based on his startled jumps when she comes around a corner. He hasn’t said or done anything outright hostile, however, so he’s pretty sure he’ll come around with time.

He’s not certain where Raphael stands on their sibling-hood, but at least he’s not actively trying to drive her off anymore. Any progress is good progress. After he had a talk with both of them about not making the other sibling bleed to death (that was backed by a very tired Splinter) things somewhat calmed between them.

“Do you have any kings?” Karai abruptly says. Mikey looks to his deck and then back up at her, shooting a smug smile.

“Go fish.”

She grumbles under her breath and swipes another card to add to her deck. Mikey smirks, rearranging his hand for optimum play-ability while humming a tiny tune under his breath as he prepares his next move.

It really is great to see Karai trying to act like a regular teenager. Well, as regular as they can be considering their whole situation. But if he’s learned anything it’s that she’s due for some normalcy in her life. Every little bit of history she drops about growing up under the Shredder’s influence makes him want to march up to the man and have words with him.

Who lets their twelve year old daughter go on an assassination mission right in the middle of enemy Yakuza territory? The Shredder, apparently.

The time he’s spending bonding with Karai makes him less annoyed about the fact he’s been banned from Donatello’s lab. That’s one of the main reasons he even proposed teaching her how to play these games, since all of the others decided to have a party in the lab without him. Mikey’s been begging to know why he can’t go inside for the past week, but no one’s slipping up, not even Michelangelo. It’s incredibly infuriating, but he’ll find out one way or another. He always does. Whatever it is, Donatello’s been giddy every time he teases Mikey about it.

“Do you have…any five’s?” Mikey asks. Karai throws up her arms and whips the card from her hand right into his face. He cackles and adds it to his growing collection beside him.

“I thought we agreed not to use your ‘mystic powers’ on friendly competition,” Karai spits.

“That’s not how that works. At least, I don’t think it is. I’ll totally have to ask Barry if that’s possible when I get back home.” Mikey makes a mental note of that, turning a bright smile onto her. “I just have better luck when it comes to cards.”

“I shouldn’t need luck in order to win something. It needs to be based on skill and cunning if it’s going to be a competition. How would you know who is truly the best if not for those things?”

“I don’t know, ‘cause I’m not trying to prove who’s the best. I already know I’m the bomb dot com. We’re having fun, that’s it. It’s like…” he trails off, bringing a hand to his chin. The idea pops into Mikey’s head with a snap of his fingers. “A friendly spar to pass the time! But without, y’know, all the violence.”

Unless he’s playing Monopoly with his brothers. Then things get very violent very fast due to a cheating Leo and the Cain instinct. No one’s been majorly hurt because of those nights. Yet.

“I see,” Karai says after a moment of thinking. Mikey’s not confident that she really does understand, but at least she’s trying. She’s been trying so hard to fit into their ragtag family and Mikey’s prouder than ever for it. It reminds him of all the things they had to teach Cassandra after her rebellion from the Foot Clan, and that transition went better than anyone could have expected.

Cass is still an agent of chaos on a good day and never afraid to go for the kill, but she knows when to lay off, now, too. Mikey attributes that to his influence.

The rest of the game goes predictably in Mikey’s favor. Karai grumbles about cheating that he hastily defends himself from, getting ready for another game. He shuffles the cards in all the cool ways he can think of, grinning back at her unamused face through flying cards. The corner of her lip twitches up the longer he goes on, though, so he knows he’s thoroughly cracked her shell.

A low rumble echoes throughout the dojo just as he’s about to start dealing. Both of them share a glance at the raised voices filtering in through the open door. It’s obviously coming from the lab, but listening closer he can tell by tone alone that whatever happened didn’t hurt anyone, at least.

Regardless, they all still sound panicked. Mikey’s face splits into a grin before he hops to his feet. He offers a hand to Karai who looks on in slight amusement.

“Wanna go see what Donatello blew up this time?” He asks with a wiggle of his brows. Karai snorts out a laugh, shaking her head.

“No thanks, I’d like to keep all my fingers intact. By the time you get back, however, I’ll have figured out how you keep winning this stupid game. You’ll be crushed in no time.” Her voice turns sickly sweet at the end, a sharp smile growing on her face. Mikey scoffs, stalking backwards out of the dojo with his hands cooly laced behind his back.

“You wish,” he taunts before spinning around and leaping through the doorway. Mikey skips down the steps, twirling his way towards the lab. The other’s have quieted down by now but he’s determined to see what had happened.

And if he gets a glimpse of whatever they’ve been hiding from him, that’ll be their fault for making him feel the need to check on them.

Making sure his steps are silent he creeps towards the door, pressing his head close to see if he can hear what they’re saying. It’s mostly Donatello’s voice that comes through but between the thick metal door and the slight electrical buzzing, all of it’s muffled. He presses closer, cheek squished against the door, then backs up with a sigh when he can’t figure out what he’s saying.

Pursing his lips he glares at the metal in front of him. It’s stupid that he’s been banned from the lab, he hasn’t even done anything to warrant it. And every time he tries to enter he immediately gets pushed out no matter how stealthy he tries to be. Mikey’s tried to figure out where all the cameras are in there so he can ‘disable’ (smash) them, because that has to be how Donatello catches him, but they’re always moved after he finds one.

He’s contemplating kicking down the door, damn the consequences, when his feet get enveloped by a static energy. Not thinking much he shakes out his legs, his first thought being they had fallen asleep after so long sitting in the dojo. The feeling, however, gets more intense the longer he stays by the door.

Mikey frowns, finally glancing down only to blink at the cold, pink cloud pouring out from under the door. He tilts his head and shuffles his feet through it, but other than the tiny pinpricks of static nothing more happens. It’s not like anything he’s seen before. Crouching, Mikey cautiously runs his fingers through it, coming back up with the same tingling. He stretches his fingers and it disperses just as quickly as it had come when he pulls it out of the mist.

More smoky-cloud pours out of the door and before he can attempt to move away it gets blown into his face. His mind panics for a moment, thinking it might be something like the mushrooms, but it merely tickles his nose. Mikey scrunches his beak, a sneeze attacking him and leaving a tangy and slightly tart taste in his mouth.

From his crouch he eyes the handle to the lab. Whatever the gas is doesn’t seem to do much, other than make his skin tickle. Maybe it was some kind of failed knock-out drug that Donatello had been trying to make. If it exploded, that would explain the rumbling they felt from the dojo. And if it did explode, he should make sure that everyone’s okay, right? That’s something he should be concerned about? Definitely not using it as an excuse to get into the lab?

Yeah, that sounds right.

Shooting to his feet he throws open the door, causing it to slam into the wall behind it. Mikey winces and mutters a small apology under his breath before confidently stepping into the lab. The door slams shut behind him, Mikey making a mental note to be more careful with it in the future. There’s only so much abuse one poor piece of metal can take. He opens his mouth to ask if everyone’s alright, only for the words to die in his throat at the sight in front of him.

A triangular portal floats in the middle of the room, showcasing a pink alien sky with the gas pouring out of the bottom. It coats the entirety of the floor up to his shins and as he keeps staring dumbly his body slowly adjusts to the feeling.

There’s a portal. A portal that’s right there, open, in the middle of the lab. The others whip around to him with wide eyes, a white tube sticking out of their mouths. Mikey opens his mouth once, then again, willing words to come to him past his suddenly dry throat, but nothing more than a croak of disbelief escapes. He turns shell-shocked eyes onto Donatello, hoping to get some answer on what is going on.

Donatello stares for a moment, blinking at him, and then he jumps into action. Panic is streaked across his face as he leaps forward and tries to drag him out of the lab by force. Mikey resists, rooting his feet to the floor and glancing between Donatello and the portal in confusion.

“No, you can’t be in here! I don’t have enough air filtration units and you’re going to pass out any second from the atmosphere–” he rambles. Mikey lets the words flow in one ear and out the other, not understanding what he’s talking about. Why would he need something to filter the air? The gas wasn’t actually poison, was it? “It’s going to burn your lungs and throat and…” Donatello trails, looking over him with cautious curiosity. “You’re not choking. Or wheezing.”

“Uh, I can if you want me to be? Should I be wheezing right now?” Mikey asks. His gaze flits between the portal and the others, catching on the way Michelangelo slumps into a chair, an odd white orb clutched in his arms.

“Yes, you most definitely should be.” Donatello abruptly stops trying to push him out and instead opts to pry open his mouth before Mikey can protest the rough treatment. “Hm, there doesn't appear to be any irritation or blisters forming in your throat. Are you hurting anywhere else? Lightheaded in any way?”

Mikey pushes him away from his face, smacking his lips as the sweet bitterness in his mouth grows stronger. “Nope, just tingly and cold. And my taste buds are really confused right now.”

“Fascinating,” Donatello breathes. His eyes glaze over and Mikey knows his thoughts are going a million miles an hour. “I guess an air filtration unit isn’t necessary for you. I’m still not recommending you breathe in too much of this atmosphere, though, just in case there are any long term effects.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Mikey chipperly replies, eyes being driven back towards the portal. He doesn't miss the way both Leonardo and Raphael stand defensively between him and the gateway, arms crossed with their cautious expressions. “Someone want to fill me in on what’s happening? Like what’s that stuff in your mouths? Or why there’s a portal?”

“Well, these devices are so we can breathe the atmosphere of Dimension X properly. You seem fine, but to us this could be very harmful,” Donatello starts, sharing a look between the two standing guard in front of the portal. “As for this, it, uh, was supposed to be a surprise?”

Mikey tilts his head. He glances at the shimmering portal in confusion. Yeah, he might be a little obsessed with jumping through portals lately, but he was under the impression the other’s didn’t approve of that behavior.

“So this is the reason I wasn’t allowed in the lab? You were…” Mikey trails off, sucking in a breath before turning wide, hopeful eyes to Donatello. “You’re trying to fix the machine?”

“Emphasis on ‘try’,” Raphael drawls. Donatello glares at his brother but he stands his ground. “What, it’s true, isn’t it? You tried opening a portal to Orange’s dimension and instead opened one straight into Kraang’s home turf. I’m not going to say ‘good job’”

Mikey whips back to Donatello. His mouth drops in shock, breath stuttering in the face of the other’s embarrassed expression. “You…what?”

“Look, I can tell that you’ve been improving lately.” He stops, rubbing nervously at his arm. “And I thought that, maybe, I could start fixing the device to try and get you home again. Not that you would be able to go through yet, but there’s a chance the people in your dimension might know how to help you better. I had enough evidence that said you wouldn’t immediately try to jump in again if I did, so I started working.”

Mikey’s heart warms and he can feel tears threatening to spill out of his eyes. The hope blinds him so strongly, eyes locked onto the other side of the portal, that he almost misses Donatello’s frustrated growl.

“But, as you can see, something is wrong with it and I don’t know what. I noticed that the algorithm got completely botched when it was destroyed and instead of opening into your dimension like it did before, it only leads to Dimension X. It’s most likely some kind of fail-safe the Kraang put in and I’ve been trying to rewrite the program with no results.”

Mikey blinks, breaking out of his trance with the portal to look over at Donatello’s pinched expression. His hope fades somewhat, but that warmth continues to grow. All of the frustration of being kept out of the lab melts into putty now that he knows what all the secrecy was for. Donatello was likely working tirelessly to keep this from him for as long as he could, and while Mikey held a twinge of annoyance that he didn’t tell him what he was up to, it immediately gets dispersed by the fuzzy feeling the gesture provides.

He wanted to surprise him by making a way back home. It might not have worked quite as he was hoping, but the thought behind it has Mikey’s ninpō flaring in his chest. Letting the feeling wash over him he sends Donatello a thankful, warm smile.

“That’s–” A sharp crackling interrupts his attempt to express his thankfulness, coming from the sphere clutched in Michelangelo’s hands.

“Turtles!” Mikey’s brow furrows at the unfamiliar, gruff voice, but it has Michelangelo bringing the ball up in front of him as a relieved smile streaks across his face.

“Leatherhead, he’s alive!”

“Shh, he’s saying something,” Raphael commands, and for once Michelangelo listens. Mikey approaches his alternate, eyes widening when the sphere lights up with tiny pinpricks of pink light.

“The Kraang–” More static, as everyone crowds around in an effort to hear. “–perfected the mutagen. They’re about to inva–” The voice gets cut off, but Mikey’s heard enough to piece it together.

His blood grows cold as he fills in the blanks of the obvious warning. The message starts to play again, on a loop, the words locking themselves into his mind. Mikey shifts on his feet, staring blankly at the pulsing pink orb in Michelangelo’s hands. It takes a moment to place the shaking in his arms but as soon as he realizes he brings them up to hug himself.

This is exactly what he’s been terrified of happening. The Kraang of this world may be a different caliber than his, but he knows there’s no messing around when it comes to them. If they’re ready to launch a full out invasion force then a new ticking time bomb is about to go off. Mikey harshly swallows down the fear threatening to overwhelm him, screwing his eyes shut and focusing on the warmth still flickering in his chest.

It’ll be okay. He has his ninpō, he has experience, and he knows roughly what to expect from an invasion. And, as he catches Raphael’s worried gaze, he has this family that’ll be by his side no matter what happens.

“Oh, no! They got him! He needs our help!” Michelangelo desperately cries. Mikey forces himself to focus on the moment. One of their friends obviously needs help, and he’s not going to let himself get into his head right now.

“He must be trapped in Dimension X. The signal had to have come through when the portal opened,” Donatello says. His eyes are sharp but Mikey can spot the worried tilt to his frown.

“So can the orb tell us where he is?” pleads Michelangelo.

“Maybe. If I can–”

“Where’s Leatherhead!” his alternate screams, voice rough. He smashes the orb against the ground with a glare, kicking it twice before being pulled off by Raphael. “Where is he!?”

The lights of the device flicker once, twice, and then fade entirely, machine sparking. Mikey thinks that he might have gone a little overboard with that but he can’t blame him too much. He wouldn’t be thinking too straight if Casey was in that kind of danger, either.

“Mikey! What the heck was that!?” Leonardo angrily points at his younger brother, silently ordering Raphael to set him back in the chair. Michelangelo pouts and he goes to stand beside him, placing an acknowledging hand on his shoulder. “Can you fix it, Don?”

“Yeah, but it might take a while,” Donatello grumbles, shooting a glare at Michelangelo. Mikey tightens his grip on his shoulder in solidarity. His alternate reaches up a slow hand to squeeze back, glancing up at him. Eyes glassy, Michelangelo’s lips purse as he glares back down at his lap while the others attempt to come up with some kind of plan.

Mikey doesn’t know why they’re even bothering. No plan is going to fix everything, there’s too many things they don’t know. No matter what they’ll never be prepared for what they’re going up against. They might have a better idea after telling them what he went through in his own world, but even then it’s not going to be the same.

Leatherhead is his own challenge, too. They’re best bet is to save him from whatever prison he’s being kept in first (if he’s still alive and whole, which for the sake of Michelangelo he’s going to keep his hopes up).

Mikey briefly tunes in to the other’s back and forth as they try to come up with a plan that will inevitably fail, instead turning back to Michelangelo. There’s a hard, unwavering expression on his face that Mikey knows all too well; he’s about to do something that no one is going to be happy with. And, based on the thing he’s staring at being the portal in front of them, Mikey knows exactly what it is.

He shakes Michelangelo’s shoulder, gaining his attention and wary gaze. His alternates eyes dart nervously between him, his brothers, and the portal, soundlessly asking if he’s going to try to stop him. Mikey takes one look at the portal, swallowing down the rising tepidness and fear to shoot Michelangelo a determined smirk.

It feels more like a mask than anything, but he needs to do it. This could be a chance to take down the Kraang invasion from the inside. The priority will be rescuing Leatherhead, of course, but if there’s an opening to cripple the Kraang? Mikey’s not going to hesitate to take it.

This world isn’t going to suffer. Not like his dimension did. And not like he still is.

Maybe Donatello should have stuck to his original idea and stopped messing around with portals.

Michelangelo deflates, obviously relieved that Mikey isn’t going to rat him out. That steely look is back in the next moment. Mikey nods at him, and Michelangelo decisively nods back. His alternate holds out his fist and he meets it in the middle. Both take one last look at the brothers still bickering, turned away from them and out of line with the portal, before launching into action.

Mikey latches onto Michelangelo’s hand as they run, squeezing tight. He gets a comforting squeeze back as he’s dragged along. The other’s shout their names, yelling at them to stop, yet neither of them look back.

Michelangelo crosses the barrier first.

“Booyakasha!”

Mikey, still connected and latching onto his alternates hand with a death grip, closes his eyes against the static shock washing over him.

“Cowabunga!”

His scales tingle passing through the portal, and he only gets a moment to open his eyes to a bright, pink sky filled with floating islands and odd colored vegetation before gravity pulls him into a free-fall. Mikey screams line up with Michelangelo’s as they plummet, still connected by their hands. He flails and attempts to drag his alternate towards him only to land right on top of him a few seconds later.

“Ompf!” Mikey groans, scrunching his eyes together against the plastron in his face. “That could have gone better.”

“Eh, I’ve had worse landings,” Michelangelo wheezes from under him. And, now that Mikey takes more than a second to think about it, he’s definitely had rougher landings, too. This probably isn’t even in the top 20. He hums his agreement, leveraging himself up on his elbows and slowly blinking his eyes open.

His breath catches at the sight in front of him, drawing Michelangelo’s attention as he, too, leverages his head back to take in the new dimension they’ve flung themselves into.

Everything burns his eyes a bright, violent shade of pink. Spiked floating gray islands litter the otherwise empty space, the occasional tiny metal ships dodging around them with ease. The overwhelming pink immediately gives Mikey a headache and brings back unpleasant memories, but with a deep breath and another look around to confirm that they’re still alone, he acknowledges and brushes past it to get to his feet.

“Whoa…” Michelangelo trails, hopping up to stare at the weirdness around them. Mikey merely nods beside him as he takes cautious steps towards the edge of the rocky platform they’ve found themselves on. “Everything’s all funky here. So cool.”

Scratching at his arms does nothing to ease the prickling sensation that this place causes on his scales. Like with the gas, a chillness settles over him but doesn’t seem to do more than make the air he’s breathing sharper. That sweet-tartness is overwhelming now, but Mikey hopes that it’ll get pushed to the back of his mind eventually.

“Hey, what’s that–” Michelangelo trips in his eagerness to get to whatever he sees, sending him straight off the edge. Mikey yelps, rushing to try and grab him before he falls but freezes as his alternate simply floats slowly away, screaming until he bumps into a floating piece of metal. He desperately grabs it, eyes blown wide. “–huh, it’s like the moon here. Wicked.”

“Shell yeah,” Mikey breathes, a wide grin stretching his face. He gleefully jumps off the platform and lands lightly on the top of the metal Michelangelo clutches. “This is so cool!”

“Totally, dude,” Michelangelo says. His alternate’s gaze shoots towards another platform of what looks like rock. Without further prompting he leaps at it, landing perfectly on his feet. Mikey laughs and pushes off towards him, doing a mini flip in the air. He rolls onto the platform, vibrating with excitement.

“I can finally live out all of our Jupiter Jim fantasies! Oh, Leo’s going to be so jealous when I rub it in his face. There’s not a psychopath involved this time either!”

Michelangelo giggles as they strut across the platform to find their next jump point. Suddenly he stops, expression troubled. Mikey follows his line of sight to the portal they had jumped through, sitting still in the air and buzzing with energy.

“Speaking of broski’s, is it weird that they haven’t come through yet?” he questions. Mikey’s brow furrows. It is odd that they didn’t immediately come rushing in, but he doesn’t want to look into a horse’s mouth for a gift. Or however that saying goes.

“Just means we get a head start before they decide to cramp our style, right?” He suggests with a knowing grin. “We can totally handle this by ourselves. They didn’t want to come, anyway, so it’s up to us to end this with all our awesomeness.”

Michelangelo’s expression brightens. “Yeah, you’re so right! And after this, they’ll trust us to handle all those big threats. This is gonna be great!” His alternate plants his hands on his hips, back straightening as he gazes stoically over the pink horizon. “Now, as the oldest, I’m obviously in charge. And I say our first order is to find a Kraang base and figure out where they’re keeping Leatherhead.”

Mikey nods along, stomach a bit queasy at the thought of being completely surrounded by Kraang in their own homeworld. He’s been making a lot of progress sorting through all of his thoughts and emotions regarding the aliens, but he hasn’t had an actual encounter with them since the incident with Slash and the Newtralizer. While he wants to have faith in his own abilities to (mostly) keep his composure, doubts wriggle around in his mind that he desperately tries to soothe as he listens to Michelangelo.

“But first, we have to go see what’s up with those crystals!” Mikey follows him eagerly, hoping to keep his mind off of Kraang. They stick close while they make their way towards the multicolored crystals hanging off the edge of one of the islands.

Immediately after landing on the cluster a small piece breaks off under Michelangelo’s foot. The crystals start to hum and glow ominously, and after exchanging a quick and curious look with Michelangelo they explode right from under them. Mikey yelps as they’re thrown back into open space, more shards breaking off. They scream in alarm, more explosions rocking them backwards until they plant their hands over each other's mouths. The last of the crystals immediately stop combusting as they slowly remove their hands.

Mikey grins and screeches at a pitch that would make Donnie’s head explode, watching in fascination when more crystal shards harmlessly break off. Michelangelo copies him and grabs the small shards as they float past, shoving them carefully into one of his packs. Since he doesn’t have any pockets himself Mikey decides to experiment. He grabs one of the shards and launches it into the side of a metal ball floating past, laughing when it explodes on impact.

So, gravity is all wack, the crystals are mini grenades, and loud sounds seem to affect the things around them. They’ll need to experiment more with the sounds (and wouldn’t Donnie be proud that he wants to do even more science) but he has a feeling that it’ll have more uses other than breaking crystals.

They keep idle chat while wandering through more of Dimension X, learning the rules and adapting when something new raises its head. Mikey discovers quickly that the cute little creatures on the rocky islands are definitely not the kind you can pet, but the theory of sounds being weapons of destruction is proven correct when Michelangelo defeats it with a loud shriek.

He’s not sure how long they’ve been hopping and floating, collecting things and fighting off the weird creatures they come across. Oddly enough, there’s been little to no sign of Kraang activity despite Dimension X being their homeworld. Some broken ships here, a skeleton or two there, but no active Kraang. It makes their goal of finding a Kraang hideout more difficult, but there’s a sense of relief Mikey can’t help but revel in the longer they’re left alone.

Eventually their stomachs start growling. Mikey frowns, knowing that they’ve had to have been in here for a while if they’re getting hungry. There’s no way to track the time in here, seeing as there’s no sun or moon or even stars, but it has to have been a couple of hours at least.

The giant eyeball in the sky blinks every so often, but Mikey can’t even begin to comprehend what that means in terms of time. All he knows is it’s yet another thing he’s been trying to ignore, being that it looks a little too similar to the one that was in the Technodrome.

The next problem they face is finding something edible. Mikey is hesitantly about to try a handful of dirt that looked promising when Michelangelo exclaims in delight behind him.

“Dude, these things taste like those shrimp flavored ramen packets!” Michelangelo waves him over and his alternate is squirting a greenish liquid into Mikey’s mouth before he can say anything. A liquid that came from some kind of worm's guts.

He starts to gag it out before the flavor sinks in, swallowing with wide eyes. “Whoa, it totally does.”

They agree from then on the worms will be their main snack while they continue their exploration of Dimension X.

Their next discovery is a complete accident. Mikey stretches one of the worms too far in his quest to stop the rumbling in his belly and that’s when they find out they can use them as grappling hooks, which makes traveling that much easier.

The further they leap and bound, the more things start to look civilized. More metal sheets come floating in the air, there’s new spiky metal balls that glow a soft pink, and giant structures become commonplace. They continue on, much more alert with each sign of Kraang they pass. Mikey’s entire body is buzzing with energy and he can feel his ninpō flaring just under his skin, waiting for the moment he needs it.

When they reach a large, dome-like structure, Mikey knows they’ve found it. Then, finally, Mikey sees his first Kraang, and it’s not pretty. A dozen Kraang robots mill about the perimeter of the base in patrol formation. More float around in little ships, flying and darting in and out of the dome as they please.

Overall, it doesn't look too promising. Mikey and Michelangelo may be ninjas, but both of their luck doesn’t favor them when it comes to stealth. Unless they want to try and beat back an entire base filled with Kraang, however, they’ll need to get in, get Leatherhead, and get out without being spotted. He has no doubt there are thousands more Kraang waiting inside the building ready to be deployed at the first sign of trouble, too.

“That’s probably where Leatherhead is,” Michelangelo whispers to him. Both crouch behind an outcropping of crystals, peaking between them at the bustling base. “All we have to do is go all ninja to get in there and we’re home free.”

Mikey shifts, flexing his hands as he takes a steadying breath. He knows that it’s unlikely he’ll lose control, but that doesn’t stop the anxiety rising while watching the Kraang go about their business. His ninpō is unusually twitchy, begging him to embrace it and go fight, fight, fight–

“We’ll need to watch those patrols and figure out when they’re away from the doors. You feel me?” Michelangelo asks. Mikey shakes himself off, mentally telling his ninpō to chill out and giving his alternate a nod. “When we see an opening, that’s when we strike.”

Turns out, waiting for an opening takes longer than they anticipated. Mikey slouches against the outcropping next to him with a yawn. There’s been three rotations of the guard, and Michelangelo insists they wait one more time to make sure the pattern is right despite his obviously drooping eyelids.

Finally, after the fourth and final rotation, his alternate signals him to move. Mikey lets out one more small yawn and follows right behind him as they swing their way to a smaller stone outcropping close to the base. They wait a minute more to make sure that the patrol is really gone. As soon as they leap over their small cover and run towards the base, however, Mikey knows something’s already gone wrong.

He gets proven right a moment later when two gigantic sentient rocks come to life and start throwing lava and ice haphazardly in their direction. Mikey attempts to use his ninpō to get some damage in, but whatever he manages to knock loose gets replaced as soon as he destroys it. The ground shakes with their retreat, the rock monsters still trying to attack them even as they swing and float further and further away. Mikey and his alternate collapse simultaneously on a different platform once the rumbling is far enough, panting hard.

“Wasn’t expecting those two to be there,” Michelangelo wheezes, sitting up with a wince and cradling his stomach when it growls. “Can’t do anything on an empty stomach, though. And I don’t know about you, but I could go for a power nap right about now.”

“Yep, a nappie sounds great,” Mikey says, laying on his shell and scrunching his eyes tight. He still doesn’t know how long they’ve actually been here but it feels like too long.

Shouldn’t the others have found them by now? Even if Mikey and Michelangelo had made extremely good time finding the Kraang base, the other turtles had to have been close behind them. Where were they?

Mikey tries to concentrate on finding a place to rest while Michelangelo goes hunting for more Wormps, as they’ve taken to calling them. He nearly collapses with relief when he finds a small cave on the side of one of the floating island rocks with nothing living inside of it. Calling out his discovery to Michelangelo he steps inside to the soft glow of multicolored crystals hanging from the ceiling. He sweeps up a dusty spot on the ground to get as clean of a space as he can. His alternate pops into the cave with a sound of approval and shoves two Wormps into his hands which he eagerly squeezes into his mouth.

With a mostly full stomach Mikey stretches out, reclining on the wall behind him in an attempt to get comfortable. Every time he moves there’s another little pebble digging into his scales and he scrunches his beak in discomfort. Well, it’s the best he’s going to get for now, so might as well suck it up and try to nap anyway–

Mikey squeaks, plopping boneless into Michelangelo’s lap and leaning securely on his plastron. There’s some more shuffling as he tries to figure out what’s going on and then the body behind him stills, arms wrapping tight around him to lock together.

Leaning his head against his alternates shoulder he furrows his brow. “You don’t have to, now you’re just uncomfortable.”

“Nah, little dude, can barely feel it on my shell,” Michelangelo assures, not even bothering to open his eyes. A soft smile spreads across his face the same time the arms around his plastron give a small squeeze. “‘Sides, don’t want you wandering off without me, yeah?”

Mikey huffs, but when it becomes clear Michelangelo is feeling the events of the day (has it been a day?) just as much as he is,he accepts the cuddles and relaxes into the hold. Michelangelo drops his chin onto Mikey’s head with a sigh and leans further on the wall behind him. They sit silently together to decompress from the last few hours in the relative safety of their cave.

“Do you…” Michelangelo whispers in the silence, hesitant. “Do you think they’re coming to find us?”

Mikey’s brow furrows. “Wha’dya mean?”

“Like, our bros. They are going to show up eventually, right? They won’t just leave us in here?” Michelangelo shifts behind him, letting out a shaky breath. “Why didn’t they come through?”

Mikey lightly smacks the other's arm. “Don’t be silly. I don’t know why they didn’t jump through right after us, but there has to be a reason for it. They’re probably figuring it out. We can hold down the fort until they get here, and then teach them all the awesome things we’ve learned. Show ‘em how it’s done, y’know.” He grips Michelangelo’s hand, weaving their fingers together.

Michelangelo grips him tighter. A small smile blossoms that he can feel on the top of his head. “Yeah, you’re right. We’ll show them how awesome we are.”

“Totally.”

His eyes slowly droop closed and he must have fallen asleep because when they open Michelangelo is no longer behind him but rather crouched a foot away and messing with something in front of him.

He nearly scares Michelangelo out of his shell as he peers over his shoulder to see what he’s doing. And then it’s Mikey’s turn to have a heart attack at the sight of the Kraang skull that Michelangelo’s painted with an oily purple substance that, when he asks, apparently came from the Wormps, too.

Michelangelo is quick to say that the purple stuff is not edible. It does, however, make for great warpaint. It also lets off a fruity scent that cloys the sweet-tartness of the atmosphere that’s branded on Mikey’s tongue at this point.

He quickly dips his fingers into the purple, grinning as he runs it down both sides of his beak to his chin then back up around the outside of his eyes. Dabbing up a little more he runs another line down the middle of his forehead to the very edge of his node, the fruity smell finally overpowering the air. Michelangelo offers to grab another Kraang skull so they could match to which Mikey hastily refuses. It might make him look like a badass but the thought of anything Kraang related, no matter how dead it may be, coming into contact with him makes his anxiety spike.

He doesn’t particularly like that his alternate is doing it in the first place yet he seems confident enough. Mikey’s not about to cramp his style, either.

Once fully painted and looking ready for war, they hastily crawl out of the Cavetm. Mikey squeezes some more green sludge into his mouth while taking in the surroundings. He notes that absolutely nothing seems to have changed, not even the tone of the pink sky, and wonders once again how long they’ve been in here.

“Alright, let’s get back to that base and figure out how to take out those rock dudes. Don’t worry Leatherhead, we’re coming for you!” Michelangelo cries, sauntering to the edge of the platform. Mikey follows behind at a slower pace and pulls out his phone from the top of his shell. He frowns as he turns on the screen only to find it display roughly the same time as when they first left. That can’t be right, but no matter how much he fiddles with it there’s no sign his phone is broken.

They go back to the base and once again wait for the right moment. Now that they know the rock guards will pop up, they’re going to be ready. Just like last time they try to maneuver their way past the rock monsters but have to retreat when a spurt of lava gets a little too close to splashing them. Mikey goads Michelangelo into an intense game of rock paper scissors (that he wins, obviously) while waiting for the next rotation, but their next attack doesn’t yield any results, either.

It’s only after their fourth attempt does Michealngelo plop back onto their designated platform with a defeated sigh. “I don’t know, dude. Those guys are tough. This might take more planning than I thought.”

“Yeah,” Mikey mumbles dejectedly, forcing back a yawn. “They seemed to slow down a little when they ran into each other, though. Think we could use that?”

“Probably,” Michelangelo says. He stretches out on their platform, groaning long and low before hopping up and offering a hand to Mikey. “C’mon, let’s go take another nap and figure out how to do this.”

Mikey quickly agrees and they make their way back to the CaveTm, snacking on more Wormps while they try to get comfortable in their hole. They cuddle together as much as they can, Mikey taking immense comfort in his alternate’s presence as he drifts off to sleep. Michelangelo is still snoring under him when he wakes next, and he lets him sleep as long as he can. They need as much strength as they can manage if they’re going to get past the rock monsters.

Their next attempts follow the exact same route as all the others. Mikey did manage to push the lava rock monster into the ice one, however, and they had almost made it. Had the monsters been held together just a few seconds longer, they would have been able to get past them. Maybe if they screamed at them? They hadn’t tried that yet, and almost everything here seemed to react to loud sounds in some way.

Whatever the case, it would have to wait until they ate and got more sleep. They once more head back to the Cavetm to sleep, blearily waking up, still without any clue how much time has passed, and stumbling out. A yawn splits Mikey’s face in two and then he gags in surprise when Michelangelo unceremoniously sprays Wormp guts into his mouth. He starts the impromptu chase to get revenge, giddily hopping around the surrounding islands until he catches up and tackles him to the ground.

“Aight, aight! I give! Uncle!” Michelangelo shrieks from where he’s pinned, arms wrenched around his shell. Mikey releases him with a smug smirk that his alternate immediately tries to physically wipe away, causing them to devolve into even more giggles. “Okay, since we’re already out let’s just get this mission rolling–”

A rumbling in the distance gains both of their attention before they can start their journey to the base. When he squints, Mikey catches sight of one of the tiny creatures that he learned not to touch awakening to attack something on its platform.

“So, that’s weird, right?” Mikey asks. Michelangelo confirms with a nod. They’ve never seen one of those things react to anything other than themselves. “We gonna go check it out?”

Michelangelo hums, tilting his head side to side as he looks between the commotion and the direction of the base, before letting out a defeated sigh. “I guess we should make sure whatever’s being attacked is okay. Y’know, since we’re heroes and all.”

Mikey grins and jumps off the platform, whipping out one of the Wormps to latch onto a rock and pull himself along. His alternate is right behind him as they make their way closer to see what poor soul is still learning the rules of Dimension X. The commotion grows, and both of them perk up at the echoing of the panicked shouts. They haven’t heard any other voices in this dimension that weren’t theirs.

When they crest the large mountainous rocks their curiosity flips into shock. Mikey’s eyes widen at the same time they start to fall towards the monster attacking Leonardo, Raphael, and Donatello, all of them scrambling. They flail everywhere while trying to escape the monster. As they sit at the top of the mountain in confusion, Mikey sees, in a strange twist of fate, that they’re making all of the worst decisions possible trying to defeat it.

Mikey shares an exasperated glance with his alternate. He returns it, shaking his head in disappointment. Michelangelo jumps off the top of the rocks and Mikey follows right on his tail. They land directly in front of the dumbstruck brothers and Mikey sends them a reassuring thumbs up and smile while Michelangelo faces the creature.

“Stay away from our brothers, brah!” Michelangelo shouts. Smirking, Mikey lets out his patented shriek, watching in delight as the monster shrinks back, roaring in dismay and retreating to where it came. “Back off, Rocktopus!”

Oh, Mikey likes that name. Why didn’t he think of that?

“What the–” Raphael starts, getting cut off when Mikey firmly grabs his arm and drags him towards the edge, Michelangelo doing the same to the others. They still have those dumb, confused expressions that he can’t help but giggle at.

“Let’s get somewhere a little safer,” Michelangelo says, voice turned serious while they drag the others behind them. It’s only a few short jumps and floats later (and wow, Raphael keeps stumbling and it’s taking all of Mikey’s composure to not make fun of him too much) until they’re back to their little island and the Cavetm.

As soon as they touch down Raphael rips himself out of his grip, but before Mikey can take offense the other is right in his face. Mikey squeaks as he grabs his arms and looks him over with a critical gaze, and as soon as he meets whatever criteria that he’s looking for he immediately switches gears onto Michelangelo. But not before giving him a small smack to the head, which rude. The only consolation is that Michelangelo gets the same treatment.

“You’re okay,” Donatello sighs out, leaning against his staff. “Holy sewer apples, thank god you’re both alright.”

Mikey flushes under the scrutiny they find themselves under, a small smile worming its way onto his face when Leonardo rubs at the top of both their heads. He lets out a deep breath of relief, looking between Mikey and Michelangelo. It makes the warmth inside glow and he strokes it along with his slowly quieting ninpō.

“We were worried about you two,” Leonardo says, getting pushed out of the way as Raphael continues his examinations of them both. Then, finally satisfied, he takes his place next to the leader with arms crossed but visibly more relaxed despite his deep glower.

“Well, what took you so long?” Michelangelo jabs. “We’ve been here forever!” Mikey frowns and rams his elbow into his alternate’s side, mentally telling him to tone it down. They were obviously freaking out about them a little bit, and while he understands on a visceral level the need to show family they’re capable of taking care of themselves right now isn’t the best time. He at least needs to wait a few minutes.

“What’re you talking about?” Raphael asks, eye ridge raised in confusion. “We went through the portal, like, less than a minute behind you.”

Mikey’s eyes blow wide. Less than a minute? If that’s the case, how long have they been jumping around Dimension X? A day? Two days? They’ve had to sleep in here 3 times, now, does that mean it could have been three days? He decides right then to not think about that weirdness too hard in an attempt to save his brain from melting.

He needs to be focusing on things like taking out a Kraang army before they can invade and saving Michelangelo’s friend, which they really need to do.

“Obviously, time passes faster here than in our own dimension. There’s a temporal differential,” Donatello says.

“Oh, I love tempura,” his alternate groans in delight. He can’t help but nod in agreement. Tempura is the bomb, especially when Mikey makes it with his special blend of spices. Dad likes it a lot, too, always trying to persuade him to make it alongside their traditional miso soup. Maybe he could make it for Master Splinter one day to see what he thought of it.

“Whatever, that doesn’t matter,” Leonardo says, slicing a hand through the air. “What matters is you two jumped into a known hostile territory without a plan! Or letting any of us know about it! I’m not going to say I didn’t expect it from Orange but I thought you knew better, Mikey.”

“Am I supposed to just blow past that slander–”

“You guys were standing around doing nothing while Leatherhead was in danger! He still is in danger, and you guys can either come and help us or stay out of our way, capisce?” Michelangelo argues. The harsh tone takes the others completely off-guard if the way they all cautiously glance at each other is any indication.

“I think we should get moving. The longer we wait the more chance Leatherhead could get really hurt.” Not to mention the Kraang will have more time to catch them before they destroy their plans, but Mikey leaves that part out for now.

“Orange’s right. Let’s stock up on more bang rocks,” Michelangelo says. Neither of them wait for the other's acknowledgement before spinning around and launching themselves towards an outcropping of crystals.

“Wait, be careful!” Donatello shouts as they get closer. Raphael yells something similar but Mikey follows his alternate’s lead and ignores them. They obviously haven’t gotten the hang of this dimension yet. In this case, it’s probably better that they teach them by example.

Mikey and Michelangelo squeal simultaneously, grabbing the pieces of crystal as they break off. Once there’s a respectable amount in both of their arms they launch themselves back to the platform where the other’s silently stare. Michelangelo snorts at their dumbstruck faces, shoving a few crystals into each of their limp hands.

“How did you do that?” Leonardo asks, holding the crystal away from his body. Mikey grins at their obvious discomfort. It widens further as he starts throwing a crystal gently between his hands and Raphael looks like he wants nothing more than to smack it away from him.

“A lot of stuff here reacts to sounds,” Michelangelo says with a shrug.

Donatello shakes his head. Mikey wouldn’t be surprised if his entire world is being shifted upside down as he’s confronted by the fact that he’s not the smartest one in the group right now. If only he could humble his Donnie like this. The look on his face would be his phone wallpaper for the next year.

“What are we supposed to do with these?” Donatello hesitantly asks, a dazed look to his eyes.

Mikey smirks and throws his arm back, aiming towards one of the many pieces of floating metal. “Like this!” he exclaims. He lets the crystal fly and it hits the metal with a small explosion that has everyone but his alternate flinching.

“Okay, we need to hurry if we want to make it in time. Take these,” Michelangelo says once the others have seemed to get over their shock. He hands them Wormps they all cringe away from, and Mikey rolls his eyes. Raphael, Leonardo, and Donatello really need to learn to go with the flow and trust their judgment. Who wouldn’t trust a Michelangelo?

They quickly show them how to use the Wormps and then they’re leading the way towards the base. Michelangelo explains their plan of getting into the building to rescue Leatherhead while Mikey makes sure the coast is clear. He gets less than stellar reactions when he eats the green sludge of his Wormp and asks Michelangelo for another, but jokes on them. They’ll never know how good it actually tastes.

The Kraang base rapidly comes into view, and with it the curdling anxiety in his gut returns. It’s slightly better now that everyone is together, crouching around him as they survey the scene, but it still swirls. Mikey tunes out Michelangelo’s continued explanation on what they’re dealing with, focusing solely on the milling Kraang bots around the base and trying to pinpoint the best time to strike.

He blearily hears Michelangelo start to lay out the plan they had come up with, just about to get to how they’re going to deal with the rock monsters. He jerks back into focus as Leonardo obliviously speaks above Michelangelo’s plan.

“Alright, Donnie, go right! Raph, left! Let’s move!” the leader says and leaps off of their hiding place, straight into the line of fire to the rock monsters.

Mikey groans with Michelangelo as the monsters lock onto them. Both watch for a moment, sharing a disappointed and annoyed look. What will it take for them to leave behind their reasoning and listen to what Michelangelo is trying to warn them about? They’re the ones who have been in here longer, and yet Leonardo still assumes that he knows exactly what to do.

Which is a mindset that is about to get him killed. Heart pumping faster Mikey leaps from their hiding place, eyes locked onto the scrambling form of Leonardo under the descending foot of the ice-spewing monster. He easily brings his ninpō to the surface to lash out his chains. It wraps around Leonardo’s foot and he manages to whip him out of the way mere seconds before the rock monster would have killed him.

Mikey lands beside Leonardo’s sprawled body, body crouched and ninpō rippling on the surface at the monster's approach. The leader gasps out his gratitude but he doesn’t spare him a glance, glaring steely at the enemy in front of him. His markings glow brighter, just waiting for his signal to pounce and protect.

Unfortunately for his ninpō, this battle needs a different type of finesse.

Michelangelo comes leaping in with a battle cry, knocking the other monster off balance where it lurches towards Donatello and Raphael. He shrieks directly in its face and it immediately starts to destabilize, crumbling into tiny piles of shuttering rock until it’s completely still. Mikey smirks and lets out his own piercing squeal when his monster gets close, watching in triumph as it collapses with a billowing cloud of dust.

Mikey hops up to Michelangelo to offer a fist bump that is quickly reciprocated. The others stare on, having their own hushed side conversation that he doesn’t bother to listen to. Instead he squares up to the daunting base in front of them.

He swallows dryly in the shadow of the metal dome. All they need to do is get in, rescue Leatherhead, disrupt the Kraang's invasion plan, then get the shell out. His heart pumps faster and he subtly edges closer to Michelangelo. This will be the true test of his composure and he’s hoping beyond hope that he’s able to keep it together. He can’t mess up this mission, it’s way too important. The safety of the entire world is at stake and he’s not going to be the one to jeopardize it.

“Just a tip; in backwards crazy land, it might be a good idea to listen to the dudes who are backwards and crazy. Let’s move,” Michelangelo orders, slinking towards a vent-like entrance to the base just big enough to fit them if they crouch.

Mikey easily pops the cover off as Leonardo mumbles behind them, sneaking into the base even as his heart thuds faster. It takes all his concentration to keep his ninpō down so his markings don’t glow the further they crawl along the tunnel of pristine white. The last thing he needs is for him to give away their position so early. Michelangelo leads the way and Mikey keeps as close to him as possible, forcibly calming his breaths and making a point to keep his eyes on the back of his shell.

He wishes Raphael was the one following him, but instead it’s a twitchy Leonardo. Mikey knows the others will protect him like he does them, yet knowing Raphael’s presence is closest makes everything feel slightly better. He’s not sure if it’s a residual feeling from his own big brother back home or something completely different. Either way, he could use all the comfort he could get, especially when Michelangelo stops his advance to peer through a small opening in the wall.

Mikey sidles up beside him, throat working against the lump forming at the obvious lab in front of them. The rest of the turtles clamor around to take their own looks and he lets out a tiny sigh of relief when Raphael grips his shoulder to lean over his shell. He hesitates a moment before leaning into the weight, releasing more tension in his shoulders when Raphael applies some pressure back.

Oddly, right in the middle of the room sits a healthy looking oak tree, clearly one from Earth. Two Kraang bots circle the tree, typing on holo-screens while some kind of sizzling goo sits above it. Another Kraang observes with a sneer on a nearby screen.

“Initiate that which is called the mutagen transformation sequence,” one of the Kraang bots says. The voice prickles Mikey's skin even more than the atmosphere does, but other than a couple twitches from his fingers and the ever rising anxiety there’s no uncontrollable reaction. That’s a good sign, at least.

Mikey purses his lips, watching with bated breath as the sizzling goo from above drips onto the tree. In a flash of light the tree is gone and replaced with a funky looking crystal. The transformation prompts the two present Kraang to type furiously on their holos, the Kraang on the monitor giving a pleased smirk.

“That which is called mutagen transformation successful,” the other Kraang bot says, both of them making their way out of the room and the monitor filled with Kraang face abruptly going dark.

“That’s what Leatherhead meant when he said they perfected the mutagen,” Donatello whispers in an awed sense of horror that has goosebumps running through his scales. “I bet they’re going to use it to transform everything on Earth, including the people! Earth will be another version of Dimension X.”

Mikey feels himself pale. Flashes of slithering pink vines invading every crack in the cement, covering every little thing it can find. People stumbling around, no longer themselves as they obey orders given by a psychopathic race of aliens. All of their limbs crooked and broken, screams of pain and misery, the unsurety if any of them would be able to recover or if they would live the rest of their painfully short lives being mere puppets.

“So I’ll be a genius there, too?” Michelangelo’s absurd question startles a laugh out of Mikey, breaking him out of his spiral before he could fall too far into the memories. The look Donatello shoots at him is positively scathing.

“Yes, Mikey, thank you for finding the one mildly good thing among one billion screaming nightmares!” Donatello hisses.

Mikey takes a moment to recenter himself, using the anxiety and fear that’s nearly at a tipping point and directing it towards anger. “It’s what they tried to do in my world, too,” he grinds out. His teeth clench painfully as he keeps his eyes focused on the crystal floating in the middle of the room. “They can’t get to Earth with that stuff.”

“And they won’t,” Raphael reassures, moving his grip to squeeze at the nape of his neck. “We’re going to find Leatherhead, then we’ll kick Kraang butt so hard they won’t know how to recover.”

Mikey meets Raphael’s steely gaze. When he says it like that it sounds inevitable that they’ll win, but as much as he wants to believe him he knows it won’t be that simple. He really, really wants it to work like that. Without even seeing the true invasion force these Kraang carry, however, he knows that no matter what kind of chaos they make in Dimension X it won’t be enough to stop them forever.

Nothing short of complete and total annihilation would make them abandon their plans.

No one says anything more as they continue down the vents, various conversations filtering through the further along they crawl. Each grating Kraang voice makes his scales itch but he lets all of the memories they conjure up flow through his mind like water over stone. He can’t let it get to him. Even if his hands continue to shake and his head gets fuzzy Mikey isn’t going to let the others down.

A different, less robotic voice drifts through the vents and briefly catches his attention.

“What is the estimation on the Barbarians arrival?” the nasally voice says. Michelangelo suddenly picks up the pace with an excited murmur and Mikey strains his ears to catch what else is said.

“The one that is the remaining Kraang Barbarian will arrive at Base R53 in approximately four quadrants,” a normal sounding Kraang responds. The other voice hums in obvious delight.

“Excellent. Kraang will only have to deal with it for a short time before letting Barbarian play.” Mikey doesn’t manage to catch anything else as the conversation filters out. He’s not sure what exactly a Barbarian is, but whatever it is it sounds bad. Most likely some kind of weapon they’re planning to use during the invasion. Something he definitely doesn’t want to run into, that’s for sure.

There’s a clatter up ahead and then everyone is leaping out of the vent, followed closely by the quick sounds of combat. Mikey lunges out with them, ninpō at the ready for any threats. Thankfully, the others have swiftly taken care of the four Kraang bots that had been in the brightly lit hallway, their unconscious bodies strewn along the walls.

“Leatherhead!” Michelangelo exclaims, happily jumping up to a very large, very tired mutant alligator. Mikey’s sick and tired of every single person he meets being taller than him, but at this point he just accepts it with a blank stare. “Are you okay!? What can I–oof!”

Leatherhead promptly collapses on top of Michelangelo, letting out a deep rumble that sounds like pure exhaustion. He eyes the new mutant and their scarred and chipped scales as well as the scorched skin along his back and flanks. That tells Mikey all he needs to know about how the Kraang have been treating him. His fists clench, anger rising by the second as Leatherhead pries himself off the floor and steadies himself against the wall.

“Thank you, my friends. I feared you would never come,” he grates through a rough voice. Leatherhead gives the others warm gazes before landing on Mikey, his body tensing. He lets the very large mutant take him in, not making a move as he makes his own conclusions about his presence. Leatherheads' eyes catch on the scars running up his arms and then squarely land on his gray eye. It’s that that finally relaxes his stance. “Were you a prisoner as well, new friend?”

Mikey shakes his head, gripping his biceps tight. “No, I wasn’t. But I hate the Kr–Kraang just as much as everyone else here.”

Leatherhead hums and straightens, gaining more strength by the second. He nods and Mikey knows he can read between the lines as he eyes his scars one last time.

“Good. Any friend of the turtles is a friend of mine,” he states. Michelangelo pops up with a gasp from where he had been crushed. Shaking his head he still looks overjoyed to see Leatherhead in one piece, then squints at him hard.

“Dude, did you stop moisturizing or something? You look, like, a ton older,” Michelangelo says. Mikey tilts his head, realizing Leatherhead looks older than any other reptilian mutant he’s ever seen. Does that mean his scales will start to go gray as he ages, too? Maybe Leo did have a point in keeping to a strict skincare routine. He’ll have to ask Casey Jr. about it when he sees him.

“It’s the temporal differential, Mikey,” Donatello points out. He also studies the large mutant with a much more critical eye. He’s likely asking himself if that’s how they’ll look as they get older, too.

“Yes, I have been in this place for many decades now.” Mikey winces, already knowing that wasn’t a fun time. He doesn’t know how Leatherhead ended up in Dimension X in the first place but he has a feeling it definitely wasn’t his first choice. “When I discovered they had perfected the mutagen I knew I had to contact you. It is beneficial that you brought another friend to fight along with us, as their invasion begins now. Follow me.”

Mikey swallows, taking a second to calm the slight shakiness of his hands. Leatherhead takes off down the corridor and he doesn’t have a choice but to follow. He tries to stay as close to Raphael as he can while Leatherhead leads the way. Michelangelo falls back a little and gives him a little wink.

“Don’t worry, he’s not always like this. He’s just a little cranky,” his alternates says, picking up his pace again to be right on Leatherheads flank. Mikey appreciates the reassurance, but that wasn’t exactly why he’s so tightly wound at the moment.

Leatherhead could be a complete ass, but as long as he was willing to help stop the invasion Mikey wasn’t going to make a fuss about it.

They skid to a stop after rounding a corner, creeping up to an opening that drops down into a wide atrium. Mikey slithers up to Leatherheads side and peers down at the commotion below. His stomach drops as portals start appearing at an alarming rate, all of them displaying a view of different areas around NNY. More Kraang than he’s ever seen start marching in neat lines out of doorways opened below. They stop their marches right in front of the portals and wait for their orders.

“That’s a lot of portals. Why so many?” Leonardo urgently asks, voice lowered to a whisper. Mikey can’t take his eyes off of the Kraang no matter how much he wills himself to take stock of the others surrounding him.

It really is the beginning of the invasion.

“They’re going to invade any minute,” Mikey breathes. His whole body rocks with tremors as the reality of what’s waiting below continues to crash over him. It takes all of his will power to keep his hands somewhat steady while at the same time all of the worst case scenarios play on repeat in his head.

A heavy weight lands against his shell, startling him and momentarily stopping the tremors. Mikey glances up into Leatherhead's calm, concerned, and grim face with shallow breaths. He leans into the hand on his shell in an effort to ground himself in the moment. His expression is filled with a deep understanding of where Mikey’s thought process has strayed to, and against all odds it does bring a layer of calm.

“He is right, I fear it is only a matter of minutes until they converge on Earth,” he mutters, keeping his hand on Mikey’s shell while gesturing to the corridor the Kraang had emerged from. “That tunnel leads to a hive factory where the Kraang droids are manufactured. Their numbers are effectively limitless.”

Mikey shivers at his grim tone. The others look much the same, sharing increasingly panicked expressions trying to think of a way out of this that doesn’t end badly for everyone.

“So what can we do?” Donatello desperately whispers.

“We can go down fighting.” Mikey shifts on his feet, frowning at Leatherhead's dire tone. “I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees.”

He hates to admit it, but he’s not entirely wrong. Mikey knows he can take out a lot of these Kraang, especially with his ninpō at basically full power and the others can hold their own very well, too. That’ll only work for so long if there’s no end to the enemies they’d be facing, though. The only other way out other than fighting their best fight until they can’t anymore is–

“Well, I won’t. I’ve got knee pads,” Donatello snarks. “If we want to get out of this alive then we need to retreat.”

“No,” Mikey hisses before he can think better of it. The vitriol in his voice comes as a surprise but he keeps going, giving them all a pleading look. “We can’t let them start a full invasion. If they do, it’s basically game over.”

He can’t go through it again. Mikey’s not going to stand by while his family could make the greatest mistake of their lives, not when he can do something about it. Not when he can change their minds and get them to fight with everything they have.

“Orange is right. If it’s anything like his world's invasion, then we need to stop it now,” Michelangelo says. He exchanges a look with his brothers, getting grim but determined nods in return. “Here’s the plan, gang. Leo and Raph, you’re going to block that tunnel and keep as many Kraang from getting through as possible. Donnie and I will sabotage that portal generator.”

They all look slightly uncomfortable with taking orders from Michelangelo, but no one speaks up to offer something better. He turns to Mikey and Leatherhead, a wicked grin growing on his face.

“Orange and Leatherhead, I think you know what to do.”

Leatherhead rumbles dangerously in his throat. It travels into his body from the hand on his shell, and then he’s being lifted into the air and deposited lightly on Leatherhead’s rough shoulder. His ninpō sings to him, flashing his markings bright into the dark corridor they’re crouched inside.

A deadly grin spreads itself onto his face. Mikey’s third eyelid flips down as he shimmies excitedly on Leatherhead's shoulder.

“Crush some Kraang?” He whispers, getting an encouraging deep churr from the mutant below him. Everyone shoots knowing smirks their way. Michelangelo beams with sadistic glee.

“A lot!” Michelangelo exclaims, drawing his nunchaku. He turns towards their impending battlefield and points out a determined finger. “Let’s hit it!”

Leatherhead lets loose a deafening roar and then they’re leaping headfirst into a battalion of Kraang soldiers. The shockwaves of the landing reverberate through Mikey’s bones, and he takes a second to glare at the now panicked Kraang aiming weapons towards Leatherhead, ninpō flowing easily through his veins.

Jumping off the shoulder Mikey summons a glowing kusari fundo to wrap around the nearest grouping of Kraang, crushing them with the chain before they can react. He lets out a maniacal laugh that would make Donnie proud while whipping the now destroyed lump of Kraang bodies and robot shells into another oncoming squadron, bowling them over with the force. Mikey lands light on his feet, grinning as he spins the ball of incapacitated (or maybe dead, he can't really tell) Kraang into a group aiming their weapons at Leatherheads hide.

The large mutant finishes ripping apart the four Kraang robots in front of him with his bare hands, appreciatively eyeing the destructive force Mikey sent flying by. Leatherhead’s tail comes around to swipe more approaching Kraang off their feet and Mikey latches chains onto them. He slams them into the ground below where they explode into a heap of sparking robot bodies.

“Now that’s what I like to see,” Leatherhead growls in approval. He takes in the praise with glee, not wasting another moment before going right back to smashing Kraang into oblivion by Leatherheads’ side.

He can see why Michelangelo is such good friends with him. Leatherhead is an absolute beast.

Mikey’s having the time of his life. His ninpō flows through him like in strong waves, creating weapons and chains to his will as easy as breathing. It’s exhilarating. For just a moment, he can almost forget that he’s not fighting in his own dimension.

Leatherhead tanks through the hordes of Kraang surrounding them, and as the situation turns more chaotic and reckless Mikey finds himself flitting around, over, and under the larger mutant to take out the stragglers that he simply can’t handle. The way Leatherhead fights reminds him of Savage Raph in the best of ways. He adjusts his fighting to accommodate it and better protect him from the never-ending sea of Kraang.

Mikey uses the raised tail as a leverage point and bounces off it, cackling all the while. He catches a couple of Kraang robots making a break for one of the portals and immediately whips out his chains with a low growl. It slams through their chests, sending the pink bodies scrambling for cover. Mikey doesn’t let them get far and slams their robot husks into their organic bodies, grinning wider at the loud squish.

Wow, he’s really going to have to lock down the sadistic tendencies once this is all over. But, for now, he’s going to relish in the glee.

He sends a glance around the room to catch sight of how the others are faring. Donatello and Michelangelo hunch over the center console, the genius frantically swiping through holograms and alien lettering with an ever increasing sense of desperation. Michelangelo provides cover from the Kraang stupid enough to try and get close to them. Raphael and Leonardo hold their own by the only open door, beating back approaching Kraang while also making sure the ones already in the room don’t slip their attention.

Mikey relaxes a bit, reassured that everyone seems to be doing okay. But as Kraang keep coming and the battle goes on, he can see the way they’re tiring out, especially Leatherhead. He’s taken a near permanent spot on the large mutant's shoulders and back as more Kraang robots slip through his defenses, leaving it to Mikey to either crush them with his chains or fling them away to deal with later.

His anxiety slowly starts to leech back in as there’s no sign of the Kraang forces stopping. Mikey barely avoids dodging a blast aimed straight at his plastron, screaming an apology over the chaos when it hits Leatherheads back. The mutant merely roars his anger out and stomps fallen Kraang robots under his foot.

Mikey takes one more look around and purses his lips. The Kraang aren’t stopping. Leatherhead can’t go on forever, and neither can the others. He knows he can last a very long time in battle but it’s different when there’s no end in sight. Dread creeps up his spine when Leatherhead is forced to a knee and Mikey has to jump down and eliminate all of the Kraang trying to get the jump on him.

He quickly helps him back to his feet and then has to immediately turn and beat more Kraang robots away. Mikey’s heart quickens as more adrenaline floods his senses, calling upon his ninpō to destroy any enemy that gets too close.

Leatherhead snarls in pain against a shock prod jammed into his flank. Mikey leaps onto the offending robot and breaks the thin metal in two, jamming both ends straight through the most vulnerable part of the body. He pants and readies himself to keep fighting, keep protecting, he’s not going to let his family get hurt by the Kraang again he’s going to help stop it this time–

“Mikey got it! Time to go, now!” Donatello screams, echoing throughout the destruction. Mikey whirls around and follows the path Leatherhead forges towards the center console. All around the portals start to flicker out of existence as they battle their way towards the one doorway dutifully defended by Michelangelo and Donatello.

His spirit starts to lift the closer they get to the portal. The ripped apart and sparking bodies of the Kraang provide the tangible proof he needs that he had actually helped. And Mikey helped a lot. These Kraang are clearly not built to handle all of his razz-ma-tazz.

Leatherhead and Mikey are nearly on top of the other turtles when one of the large, hairy mechs comes vaulting from an opening in the quickly crumbling room. Mikey yelps as he’s pushed forward by a swipe of Leatherhead's tail into the waiting arms of Raphael. The large mutant is swiftly entangled in a game of strength, halting the bot's progress towards the portal.

“Go through without me,” he says, snarling as a fist gets swung into his snout. He doesn’t budge from his stance. “I’ll keep them busy.”

Oh, shell no. Mikey is not about to let someone else enact a suicidal plan of locking themselves in a different dimension in an attempt to save them. That’s not how he works, and as he looks to see what Michelangelo thinks of that plan Mikey can plainly see he agrees.

“Not this time, buddy!” Michelangelo exclaims. He leaps forward and delivers a solid kick to the bot’s head, making it stumble but not enough to topple it. Leatherhead looks back at his alternate with both gratitude and annoyance. Mikey doesn’t let him try to convince anyone to leave him behind, throwing out his ninpō and wrapping it gently yet securely around his body. Without any more thought he flings him through the portal.

The building is really starting to come down around them, now. Mikey lingers while Donatello hops through and heads to Leatherhead's dazed side, followed by Leonardo and Raphael who mouths ‘jump through now’ very harshly. He rolls his eyes, focusing back on Michelangelo a few paces away grabbing a large crystal. Mikey opens his mouth to ask why he wants it so bad but doesn’t get out more than a strangled yell as he’s bodily tackled through the portal by a flailing Michelangelo.

They land roughly on a gritted rooftop, rolling to a stop at Leatherheads feet. Mikey groans and takes in the smoggy air of NNY. He lets out a sigh as the sweet-tartness of the Kraang world finally starts to leave his tongue and the tingles on his scales peter out into blissful nothingness

He never thought he could miss NNY so much.

Michelangelo pushes him off of his plastron and leaves him lying on his shell, enveloping Leatherhead in a proper hug. The other mutant gently returns it and the crystal Michelangelo left on the ground is quickly snatched up by an offended Donatello. Scoffing (but nonetheless slightly jealous because Leatherhead looks like he gives great hugs), Mikey sits up and glances around to reassure himself that everyone made it out of the portal this time. His pounding heart relaxes and he watches closely as the other side of the portal continues to crumble and deteriorate by the second. Good riddance, really. Mikey’s face turns into a smile as the portal itself starts to fizz away into nothing but static.

He rolls to his feet, turning to properly regroup with the others, and then immediately freezes at the harsh screech that echoes from the other side of the portal. Mikey goes stock still. His ninpō shudders in his chest but nonetheless stands strong against the sound. That shriek is the only thing reverberating through his mind, eyes hazy and locked onto nothingness even as Raphael approaches.

His breathing picks up when he spins to the portal and he watches it completely evaporate. It still echoes around his ears, the scream of frustration and anger, but now he doesn’t know if it came from the well of his freshly dug up memories and nightmares or if it’s something real.

Mikey jolts out of his trance by a hand landing on his shoulder. Heart racing, he tries to figure out what had just happened. He looks up into Raphael's gruff yet still concerned expression with unfocused eyes. He knows the other is saying something, his mouth is moving, but none of it breaks through the fog clouding him. It bounces around in his mind even as he tries to rationalize himself out of his panic.

It’s just stress, nothing else, there’s no way that you heard that right there’s no way that it’s possible–

“Orange!” Raphael practically screams in his ear. Mikey leans away, grimacing. “What the heck is the matter with you right now?”

He swallows with a dry throat, glancing back to the space where the portal had closed. It had to have been his messed up mind playing tricks on him, right? There’s no way for them to get back to Earth without the key, and Dad had made sure, along with Draxum, that it would never see the light of day again.

“Just, uh,” Mikey starts, coughing to get rid of the threadiness of his voice. “Y’know, thinking ‘bout all that K–Kraang…stuff.”

Mikey winces at the unimpressed stare that earns him, but what would be the point in telling them that he thought he heard that monster when it was probably the stress of the situation finally getting to him. That’s all it was. Right?

“Somehow I don’t believe you,” Raphael says. Mikey twitches under his gaze, subtly trying to get out of his hold and cringing when it only tightens. “What’s really going on?”

“I…” Mikey swallows thickly, pursing his lips. He should be able to tell Raphael. He can’t keep it to himself in case the impossible comes true and it really is what he thinks it is. “I thought I heard…my Kraang.”

Raphael stiffens. “Are you sure?”

Shaking his head he shifts away from his grip. “No, I’m probably just hearing things, but I swear–”

Donatello clears his throat, gaining all their attention and Mikey breathes easier with Raphael’s eyes away from him. But that last look he gave him screams that he’s going to be forced to share that information with everyone at some point. At least it won’t be now. “That overload should have taken out their whole facility,” he states, a satisfied grin growing on his face. “It’ll take months for them to rebuild!”

It gets Mikey a little bit more lighthearted hearing that they did that much damage to the Kraang, but then Leonardo has to go and ruin it. “And how long is that for us with the time differential thing?”

“...a day? Maybe?”

Mikey swallows down his nervousness, unconsciously leaning back into Raphael. Thankfully he doesn’t push him off but rather lays his arm gently over his shoulders to keep him close.

They have roughly a day to prepare for the oncoming invasion, then. Not nearly enough time, but it’s more than what was afforded to them in his dimension. A day is basically an eternity in comparison.

“There’s a storm coming, then,” Leonardo says, looking out onto NNY. Everyone joins him on the roofs edge, serenely taking in the city that will likely never be the same after this. “Are we ready to fight?”

“You know it,” Mikey whispers as confidently as he can. The memories from the last invasion come flooding to him, even more vivid and horror filled than before. He steels himself to push them away and then pauses. They flow through his mind like molasses, slowing everything down.

His eyes slip shut as that day rushes over him in full; all the pain, terror, and uncertainty threatens to overwhelm him and he can feel his hands unconsciously tremor but he resolutely pushes forward. He needs to feel it. It’s his everlasting reminder on what will happen to his family of this dimension if the invasion isn’t stopped.

Mikey’s eyes fly open, glaring with determination into the horizon with family and friends alike standing strong and unmovable by his side. His ninpō flickers coolly under his skin, ready and eager to protect what’s his.

The real battle has yet to begin.

Chapter Text

His body jitters with unease as he paces the length of the alley. Mikey continues his trek from one side to the other, Raphael and Casey dividing their attention between his pacing and the graffiti along the wall. He buries the smidge of jealousy when Casey starts complimenting the artist knowing that it wasn’t Mikey.

He really should be grateful Casey agreed to be on a scouting team with him at all. The last Mikey had talked with him he was angry, scared, and panicking after his attempt at getting back home ended in utter disaster. By all means Casey should still be cold with him, but when they were laying out the situation, he jumped at the chance to be on Mikey and Raphael’s team.

Mikey had immediately apologized for how he had acted and for not calling to explain things, but Casey had simply brushed past it. He said, in his words–”It’s fine, dude. You were freaking out, I was freaking out, everything was out of whack that day!”

So, all in all, things between them were okay. Both of them seemed perfectly fine with pretending nothing had happened and Mikey could accept that. Especially if it meant he didn’t need to feel awkward around his friend.

He reaches the end of the alley and turns on his heel to head back towards the others. Mikey’s lip is bitten raw with how much he’s been worrying, but no one’s pointed it out to tell him to stop like Leo would have. Everyone else is just as stressed as he is preparing for the incoming invasion.

They’ve been taking shifts out in the city to watch out for portals, but so far no one has spotted anything. It both eases and raises Mikey's anxiety that nothing has happened yet. On one hand, they’re getting more time to prepare, but that means the Kraang have more time to build their forces too. They’re not sure what exactly will come through those portals, and while that’s usually the kind of fight Mikey jumps headfirst into, this is a completely different ball game.

Walking past where Casey and Raphael have delved into some sort of argument over proportions (Raphael is right, the head of the girl is way too big even if it’s a stylistic choice), Mikey flexes his hands to release some of the building tension.

His ninpō hums continuously in his chest, always at the ready. Mikey strokes it and the heat under his skin pulses with need. It wants to get out, to protect him and everyone else, but there’s nothing he can do right now. He needs to save as much strength as he can for when the action starts.

His brand of razz-ma-tazz is their best shot at fighting off the invasion, and they all know it.

Mikey had been surprised when Leonardo admitted that his ninpō and mystic powers were going to be their greatest asset, but he took that responsibility as best as he could. He had seen the others fight off the Kraang-bots and they could hold their own perfectly. Their battle in Dimension X proved that. But no one could deny that Mikey’s ninpō cut through the Kraang-bots like butter.

For once, he has the most experience and expertise going into a battle. That responsibility shakes Mikey to his very core. He has a new understanding of why Leo never wanted the leadership that was pushed onto him. It’s hard knowing everything could come down to your decisions.

He almost runs into the wall of the alley and has to quickly turn to start pacing the other way. Raphael and Casey have started another argument, something about April, that Mikey ignores. Gripping his arms in an attempt to give himself a self-soothing hug, one more thought bounces around in his head that he hasn’t been able to face yet.

That screech. His mind is telling him in no uncertain terms where he’s heard it before, but Mikey refuses to believe it. There’s no way he heard it right, no way that his mind isn’t simply being paranoid, no way that the one remaining monster that haunts him could have escaped the Prison Dimension–

“Hey, Orange, I know you’ll pick right,” Casey calls, breaking Mikey out of his spiraling thoughts. He shakes his head and stops his pacing, looking back at the two. Raphael scowls and Casey has his head held high with a pleased smirk. “Who do you think April would want to date more; a cool jock that has great hair, or a complete nerd who locks himself in a lab all day?”

“Don’t answer that,” Raphael snips, kicking Casey in the shin.

All of Mikey’s thoughts on the invasion grind to a halt as he squints at them, confused. “Since when does April like guys?”

Both of them blink. Casey opens his mouth looking ready to refute but quickly slams it shut with a troubled frown. Mikey raises an eyeridge at Raphael staring off into the void, seemingly awestruck. Did they really never think about that possibility? Sure, it could be different here, but his April wouldn’t be caught dead dating a man.

“I…actually don’t know,” Casey murmurs, brows furrowed. “I’ll have to ask her, I guess?”

“You’re debating between two guys April might date without even knowing if she likes guys?” Mikey feels a teasing grin grow on his face, frame relaxing at the familiar banter. “Seems pretty silly to me.”

“How have I never thought of that!?” Raphael exclaims. He buries his head into his hands and lets out a disbelieving chuckle. “That would explain so much. Especially how she acts around those two chuckleheads.”

“Around who?” Mikey tilts his head, trying to think of who April might hang around with that they could be talking about. He racks his memories but no one comes to mind. Maybe it’s some humans he doesn’t know about yet? Or they don’t exist in his dimension.

“Doesn’t matter, forget I said anything,” Casey hurriedly says, waving his hands to brush away the conversation. He still has a slightly glazed over look in his eye but Mikey doesn’t push it.

Raphael, however, continues to poke at whatever sore spot they must have touched as Mikey goes back to pacing. He would like to be able to go around the city to do a more thorough sweep for Kraang activity, but Leonardo insisted that they keep to their assigned areas.

Easy for him to say. He was back at the lair with pretty much everyone else trying to make a solid plan for something that can’t be planned for. It itches his skin knowing Mikey was probably being talked about right now in terms of battle plans.

He knows it makes sense, but why does it have to be him? Mikey thought he was ready to take more responsibility and fend for himself but now that he has it he’s terrified. But he can’t let the others down, either. He’s the best chance for success and he’s going to give it his all once the invasion starts but what if that’s not enough, what if he really did hear that shriek and it’s only a matter of time before they’re coming after him again–

Mikey startles at the soft barrier that he nearly runs into with his pacing. His brow furrows, knowing he still has a couple more steps until he reaches the end of the alley. There’s a wall of black fabric inches from his face and when he looks up he’s met with the unamused frown of the NYPD.

He stiffens when another officer steps around his partner, acutely aware of how he’s not wearing any sort of disguise right now. Mikey chances a glance back and Raphael is just as tense as him, Casey looking on with a suspicious glare and hockey stick at the ready. His ninpō thrums in his chest and he takes a small step away from the two officers simply glare at them.

That’s…weird, right? Unless they’re used to coming across two mutant turtle teens in alleys with their human friend in battle armor.

“Now, what do you three delinquents think you're doing?” Officer #1 asks, hands resting on his hips. Mikey cocks his head in confusion, Raphael and Casey coming close to hover over his shoulders. He catches Raphael’s eye and the way he fiddles with his sai makes clear that this interaction isn’t normal.

“Uh, what’s it to you? Don’t you have a donut shop to raid or something,” Casey snaps. There’s no reaction, faces slack. Mikey bristles as their blank gazes lock onto him with frightening intensity. His hands twitch, ninpō at the ready. Something’s definitely not right.

“You three are loitering. You’re coming with us,” the two officers say in unison. Officer #2 reaches out a hand to grab Mikey's arm that he quickly bats away. Taking a step back and summoning his kusari fundo, the officers continue their approach, his weapon a comforting weight in his hands. There’s no reaction to the weapon he pulled from thin air.

“This is wrong,” Mikey says while Raphael and Casey draw their weapons.

Officer #1 lunges for him. Mikey deftly hops over the grab and plants a foot on his back, sending him crashing to the alley floor. He lands near the wall of the alley, tensing when the fallen officer's head glitchs. It twitches uncontrollably and sparks come flying out of his mouth. He turns to Officer #2 with his weapon raised only to see him in the same predicament of his partner.

“Oh no,” Raphael groans, eyes wide. His hands latch onto his sai, knuckles white while looking between the malfunctioning officers. “They’re Kraang.”

No sooner than he says that all of their phones blare the emergency alarm. Mikey’s heart starts to race, his ninpō flaring brightly across his markings as the alarm keeps ringing. Sidling closer to Raphael his skin prickles right before a portal opens across the street. It’s quickly followed by another, then another, then another.

“You think they got to the lair!?” Casey screams over the machines that are pouring out of the portals, piloted by grinning Kraang.

Hearing muffled, Mikey takes a shaky breath while watching, frozen, as more Kraang-bots, ships, and mechs march out of portals. The small number of people that had been milling around hastily run to any shelter they can find as lasers and gun blasts echo along with their screams. Mikey barely acknowledges the warmth growing in his arms from his mystic powers flickering to life in the face of the chaos quickly falling across the city.

Mikey knows it’s not just this area. If there’s Kraang here, wreaking havoc as if they already own the place, then they have to be everywhere. And if it’s anything similar to what’s happening in front of them then they’re coming out in full force.

A woman darts across the opening of the alley, stumbling to her knees to avoid a blast that destroys the bricks on the edge of the building. The boy clutched in her arms screams out a wail that cuts through the panicked fog that had settled in Mikey’s mind. He doesn’t think twice, running to their aid and grasping the woman's arm to jerk her to her feet. She gasps, panicked, eyes darting to him before widening, clutching the kid closer to her chest.

“Please, you need to find somewhere safe, fast–”

“No! Get away from us!” she desperately screams, wrenching away from his grip. The boy in her arms peaks away from her and towards Mikey. He flinches away from the terror directed towards him, plain to see. The glow of his ninpō reflects back at him through the boy's wet eyes. “You monsters!”

“No, no, we’re not–” Mikey tries to say, cutting off as the woman swiftly turns and runs further down the street and into the chaos. “Wait, please–!”

“Forget it, Orange,” Raphael bites out, watching in contempt as the woman and child disappear into the quickly gathering smoke from the fires. Casey stands with them at the ready, keeping an eye on the Kraang troops still pouring out of portals and dispersing down the street. “Something happened at the lair and we need to get back, now.”

Mikey stares into the smoke where the woman and boy had run off, jumping at the blast of light that hits a small tree and turns it into a crystal. He clenches his hands to disperse the warmth growing in his palm but it comes away wet and sticky. Tilting his hand up Mikey thickly swallows at the blood covering his palm, slowly drying and turning tacky on his scales. He quickly wipes it on the bricks but the dried specks still remain.

She was bleeding. She had already gotten hurt. And the kid was terrified. They don’t have any idea what is going on. They don’t know how to protect themselves.

And the Kraang aren’t going to show mercy.

“Hey!” Raphael roughly grabs his shoulder, yanking him away from a laser that came a little too close for comfort. “We need to regroup with the others!”

Mikey shakes his head and pulls back. A stab of hurt appears on Raphael’s face before being replaced by a frustrated snarl. Straightening, Mikey feels the ninpō flowing freely through him, fixing his stern glare onto Raphael.

“They need me here!” Mikey argues. “Keeping the Kraang back was always going to be my job. They don’t know how to deal with me and the longer we wait the more portals will open!” He catches his breath and pushes back the warmth of tears gathering in his eyes. “It’s not going to happen like it did in my world, and I can make sure of that!”

Raphael’s face twists but Mikey refuses to back down. Casey jitters beside them, anxiously keeping watch and slowly herding them further into the alley out of sight.

“...fine, but we’re still going back to the lair. We’ll take the surface route just to cure your bloodlust.”

“Oo~, is Orange going to mess some stuff up?” Casey asks, giddily sliding his mask down. “‘Cause I totally want to start beating these guys into the ground for what they’re doing to our city.”

“I’m right there with you,” Mikey growls. Raphael rolls his shoulders and adjusts his grip on his sai, giving them both an assured nod.

Without any more debate they launch out of the alley and into the open street. Mikey summons his ninpō and whips out his kusari fundo to knock out Kraang-bots as they break into a sprint down the road. Their bodies slice apart under the heat of his weapons, drawing the attention of the other Kraang littering the streets. Casey joins in the destruction with a malicious cackle, chucking hockey puck bombs straight into clusters of robots.

Cars crash along the street and people run screaming in all directions. Mikey bounds ahead of their small group and leaps into the air, spinning as his weapons and chains flare out to wreak destruction on the larger, hairier mechs that had stepped into their path. The robots fall to the ground, eviscerated, and then Casey and Raphael catch up to continue their sprint.

“Kraang has located the missing Turtle Who is Not Regular Turtle in Sector 7-2B–” a Kraang begins to say before Raphael drives his sai into its head. Mikey finishes the rest of that squadron, then has to leap back and change directions when a new portal opens in their path.

Mikey grounds himself in preparation to fight off the new wave of Kraang but is immediately pulled off course. Raphael drags him away by the arm and he’s about to tell him off, he feels fine and could totally take down whatever came through. Raphael points towards a taxi speeding down the road towards them before he can utter a word.

“That’s our ride!” he screams, gesturing towards the chains floating in his hands. Mikey lights up in understanding. “Get us on there.”

“Got it!” Mikey lashes a few of the chains towards the Kraang coming out of the portal to heed them off. Casey adds his puck bombs to slow them even more as Mikey focuses on the wildly careening taxi barrelling down the street.

He waits until it is just about to pass before whipping out a chain to attach to the bumper. Securing the link as much as he can and praying that NNY taxis are made sturdy Mikey grabs Raphael’s arm, who in turn grabs Casey around the middle.

“Hold on–!” Mikey starts to warn, not getting to finish as he’s jerked off his feet with a yelp. Raphael tightens his grip on his arm to the point of bruising, screaming while they’re dragged into the air after the taxi. They flail in a ball of screams until Mikey reorientated himself and yanks them towards the car.

The landing could have been better, and Casey is definitely going to have a massive bruise on his knees, but they make it onto the top of the taxi with the driver none the wiser. Mikey anchors them more securely to the roof as they speed along. Raphael has a death grip on his shoulder, never letting up even as the car swerves around corners at breakneck speed to avoid debris and lasers.

If anyone would be able to get through an alien invasion in a car, Mikey supposes it would be New York drivers.

They huddle together on the roof while Mikey sends errant chains out as they pass by Kraang hordes and marching robots. Slicing through their weaponry and metal as if it’s tissue there’s a pang of guilt that he isn’t doing more. It effectively feels like they're retreating, no matter how much he knows they need to regroup with the others.

The last time Mikey retreated from a Kraang invasion it was the beginning of his own personal hell.

People run aimlessly through the streets, multiple cars piling up around them with more injured trying to escape. Screams overlap the sounds of blaster fire and Mikey wants nothing more than to hop off the taxi to help. But every time he makes any sort of move as if to jump Raphael is pulling him closer, sending him a saddened look while firmly shaking his head. It tears up everything inside him to not stop and make sure those people are okay, but he knows Raphael is making the better call.

“These aliens are so going down,” Casey shouts over the chaos, voice rough. “Oh man, I really hope my Dad and sis are safe.”

“They’re smart, I’m sure they’re fine, Casey,” Raphael grunts. “As soon as we can we’ll go check up on them–”

Mikey feels that static roll over his skin again, and with wide eyes he wraps a chain around Raphael and Casey as a massive portal opens right in front of their path. The car swerves in a panic and starts to roll onto its side. Mikey quickly jumps off the roof and takes a screaming Raphael and Casey along to avoid being crushed.

As they’re flying in the air he has the errant thought that Casey doesn’t have a shell to brace for impact. On instinct Mikey grapples him closer to his chest and Raphael must have the same idea. Right before they hit the ground rolling, Casey gets enveloped front and back by their shells to take the brunt of the landing.

Mikey groans once they come to a stop, bouncing to his feet. He quickly looks over the others and lets out a small breath of relief to find them okay. Raphael looks a little dazed, a few scrapes covering his scales and Casey is blinking with wide eyes from the ground, still lying on top of Raphael’s plastron.

“Oh jeez, that coulda been…really bad,” Casey wheezes. That shoves Raphael out of his daze and he pushes Casey off of him so he stumbles into a stand. “Thanks, guys. Man, I would kill to have a shell.”

“Yeah, we saved your life, thank us later,” Raphael says. “We need to keep going.”

Mikey nods and then immediately has to pull Raphael out of the way of an errant laser blast. Without further discussion they continue on foot, brushing past Kraang and slicing, exploding, or stabbing through any that try to stop them.

Adrenaline racing, Mikey doesn’t realize he’s pulling ahead of them until Casey shouts to slow down. He whips the end of his kusari fundo through the hairy Kraang bot in front of him then turns around to see them hurrying to catch up. Casey pants in exertion and even Raphael looks more winded than usual.

Mikey’s a little out of breath, but nowhere near the state the other two are in. The knowledge that they’re going to be counting on him to keep up the assault smacks back into the forefront of his mind with a vengeance.

He knows he’s their greatest asset here, but how is he supposed to deal with…everything? The chaos around him is overwhelming. All of the fire, lasers, and the never ending Kraang coming through the portals is more than he’ll ever be able to handle by himself. And he knows he’s not alone and he doesn’t have to, but looking at the state of Casey and Raphael simply from running through the chaos, not even interacting with most of it, sends a sharp spike of panic into his gut.

Mikey doesn’t get more time to dwell on it. A rumble shakes the ground beneath them. Spinning around to face the nearest portal reveals two of the mechs the Newtralizer was trying to pilot, stepping towards them with weapons at the ready.

Raphael quickly grabs onto Mikey’s wrist and gives an impatient tug in the opposite direction. “C’mon, now!”

Mikey hesitates, taking in Raphael and Casey’s disheveled states and looking back at the mechs approaching. There’s another, harsher tug on his wrist that he pulls his arm out of. Raphael glares at him, panicked snarl on his face that he resolutely ignores, giving back his own hardened look.

“I got this! I’ll slow them down!” Mikey reassures, not giving them a chance to protest as he leaps towards the mechs towering above them. Raphael shouts his name while the weapons train their attention solely on him.

Ninpō fueling him Mikey jumps onto the wall of the nearest building, dodging blasts that create a crater where he last stood. Quickly pushing off to keep momentum he sends his chains to an anchor point on the main body of the mech, swinging around and around. They still try to shoot him but he dodges every single one and continues trying to trip them up.

Casey and Raphael are yelling at him from below, but they can be angry at him later. Mikey’s done what he wanted in buying them time to catch their breath and recover. Finishing his last swing, Mikey skids across the ground in front of Casey and Raphael and observes his handiwork.

His chains wrap around both of the mechs in a circular spiral, locking them together and binding both their legs and weapons. Mikey grips his end tighter, grunting as he pulls the chains taunt. The metal crunches like an aluminum can and the two mechs spark and twitch dangerously as they’re crushed together. He gives a harsh tug to the side, sending the now amalgamation of the two mechs into the building to the side and dissipating the chains once he’s sure they won’t be getting back up.

Mikey grins, turning back to Raphael and Casey’s wide eyes. They’re definitely standing a little straighter, now, and Casey doesn’t look like he’s about to fall over.

“You’re welcome,” Mikey says, doing a tiny bow. Raphael quickly shakes his head, his somewhat awestruck expression turning into annoyance.

“Okay you show off, enough with the dramatics,” he snaps back. Mikey can still hear the undertone of pride in his voice and it warms him from the inside. “Still have to get out of here.”

“That was so wicked!” Casey exclaims as they start running once again. “Those big robots didn’t stand a chance against you! No way these Kraang will be able to put you down, man!”

Mikey laughs, buoyed by their confidence in him. His worries about being able to handle everything slowly slips away in the face of the warmth seeping through his ninpō. They’re right, these Kraang stand no chance against him. They may have numbers on their side, but they’re always going to be outclassed by his mystic, razz-ma-tazz awesomeness.

He takes it upon himself to take the lead, clearing the way as much as possible for Raphael and Casey. The Kraang seem to be more wary when their group comes across their squadrons, not wasting time before aiming at Mikey and Mikey alone. It doesn't take much to realize they’ve clocked him as their biggest threat and are trying to concentrate their firepower. In the end it doesn’t matter, but it makes him worry about Raphael and Casey. They’re not being targeted, but if they stay with him they’re going to be in more danger than if they go off on their own.

Some Kraang bots manage to slip through his destruction but the two behind him take care of them easily enough. The most trouble he has leading them towards the lair is another mech appearing, but linking two chains around the legs and ripping in opposite directions quickly solves that problem.

At least most people seem to have gotten to some kind of shelter, now. There’s still plenty of screams but the majority of those who had been on the road have disappeared. Mikey’s choosing to believe they got somewhere safe, at least. He refuses to entertain the other option.

Mikey skids to an abrupt stop when they come upon a massive pile-up of cars crushed by another mech he takes care of. It falls right where they’re supposed to go and he winces in apology when the others catch up to him, Raphael sending him an exhausted stare.

“Oops?” he says with a shrug. Raphael huffs but otherwise doesn’t linger on it while Casey is looking for all the world like he’s going to try and get over the large roadblock, anyway.

“We’ll get to the roofs, find a way around,” Raphael orders, heading straight for the nearest fire escape.

They quickly scale the nearest intact building. Mikey tries his best not to look too closely at the new view he has on the destruction being wrought to the city, but his eyes are drawn to it anyway. Smoke stacks rise in plumes and Kraang ships both large and small flit through the air. Mechs lumber through the streets while more portals open up from what seems like every possible corner.

Mikey really hopes the others are alright. No one’s tried to get into contact with their group since the emergency alarm.

Another portal opens on the side of their roof and Mikey groans. “Why are they opening right in front of us!?” Honestly, they already have bad luck, they don’t need any more.

A large Kraang ship spills out of the portal and Mikey doesn’t hesitate to wrap a chain around one of its wings. The ship shoots off into the sky and he only gets a moment to reevaluate his choices. Rather than letting go Mikey tightens his grip as he’s yanked into the air and into the ships trail.

“I’ll find you later!” Mikey screams back to the yells of Raphael and Casey, pulling himself forward and onto the body of the ship with a solid ‘thunk’.

Holding on for dear life his screams drown into the wind rushing around him as the ship doesn’t slow down. Mikey tries to get to his feet but has to duck down against the body of the ship once again when it’s clear he’ll fly off. His plastron lays flat against the top of the ship, and he thinks he’s going to get his chance to strike when suddenly the ship slows. Readying himself he summons his kusari fundo and then has to grip onto the ship even tighter when it starts to barrel roll.

Well, looks like they know he’s there.

Mikey screams, grip slipping the longer they spin. In one last ditch attempt to stop the spinning he tries to attack regardless of the situation, but the only thing that accomplishes is making his other hand slip completely. He tumbles off the back of the ship and wildly whips around his kusari fundo, managing to hit something on the ship before he has to concentrate on not becoming a turtle-shaped splat in the middle of the street.

Quickly spinning in the air Mikey latches onto the closest thing he can with his chains, which turns out to be a satellite dish that does little to nothing to break his fall. At the very last second he retreats into his shell with a yelp. He gets one millisecond to brace for impact before slamming into the road below, rolling head over heels and scraping along the concrete until metal crumples around him.

Taking a moment to ground himself, Mikey slowly emerges from his shell, letting out a grunt as he pushes himself out from the large dent in the side of the car behind him. He takes a deep breath and shakes off any kind of scrapes he may have gotten from the impact, wincing at the cracks in the concrete from where he had rolled.

“That…could’ve gone better,” Mikey says to himself, looking around to see where he ended up. There’s no sign of Raphael or Casey anywhere, which is both a relief and worry.

He would love to keep an eye on them as much as he can in the chaos, especially since they have no idea how the others are doing, and he doesn’t want to be alone in this. Arguably, however, they’re going to be safer without him since he has a blaring Kraang target on his shell. They’ll have a much easier time getting to the lair without him.

Mikey knows there’s no way Raphael or Casey are going to leave him to get to the lair, though. Which means he needs to find them so they can continue getting back to the others as a team.

Summoning his chains he swings through the streets as fast as he can, stopping only to make sure the few people he sees still scrambling in the streets make it away from the majority of the danger. The Kraang bots and mechs below still shoot at him whenever he passes but it takes little effort to dodge the blasts. There’s a voice in his head that’s screaming at him to stop and take care of every Kraang he sees but he ignores it, even though that sounds like a good plan. He needs to get back to Raphael and Casey.

Mikey nearly misses his next swing at the sight of pink and fleshy forms ambling in the streets. Scrambling onto the edge of a roof he can feel himself pale as he watches the Kraangified wander without purpose. His heart pounds with the want to help but he has no idea how. Leo barely got through to Raph when he was controlled, and that’s because they were family. How was he supposed to help a bunch of strangers?

The short answer that he didn’t want to acknowledge was that he couldn’t, at least right now. Fighting them wouldn’t do any good, and ripping off the infection would probably hurt them even more. Mikey could try and herd them into a single place so they couldn’t hurt anyone else, but they could turn into a mob if he did that.

Unfortunately, the best thing he can do for them right now is leave them be. Mikey desperately wants to do something more but he can’t. With a heavy heart and one last glance to the wandering souls he sets off back towards where he left Raphael and Casey.

The sooner they stop this entire invasion, the sooner Mikey will be able to help those innocent people.

He coughs as he swings through the smoke, squinting his eyes until he gets to the other side and launches off another chain. He keeps waiting for more Kraang to appear and start shooting but the streets have started to become startlingly empty. Mikey’s gut churns in unease at the sense of calm that’s fallen over the city. He doesn’t get too long to dwell on it, Raphael’s distant shout drawing him to a halt.

“Raphael!? Casey!?” he shouts back, adjusting course until the shouts grow louder. The sound of regular gunfire makes him speed up, still yelling their names and getting increasingly worried when they stop shouting back.

Mikey flails in the air, dropping hard onto a rooftop when possibly the largest and weirdest mech so far towers above the surrounding buildings. He’s landed on the opposite side of the standoff the mech (that has the largest Kraang Mikey has ever seen squished into its rounded base) is having with a ring of military looking vehicles. The cars and trucks are all shooting at the Kraang who simply absorbs the barrage with an unimpressed look.

He watches from a distance, keeping his eyes out for where Raphael and Casey could be hiding. Mikey still can’t see them as his attention is brought back to the one-sided battle happening in the square.

“Prime shouldn’t have to deal with these pests,” the Kraang, Prime, apparently, says in the same nasally voice Mikey remembers hearing at Dimension X base. In the next second one of Prime’s arms turns into some kind of cannon and immediately blasts the surrounding vehicles and the armored people surrounding them.

Mikey stays hidden, watching anxiously as the cars retreat just as soon as they have appeared. He trains his gaze back onto Prime, watching for any kind of weak spot he could exploit. They’re definitely big, and he’d bet his entire allowance that Prime is the one in charge of this invasion. Nothing stands out to him as an obvious weakness, even as Prime turns to place a different portal device on the ground.

Yet even though there’s no obvious weak points, the mech they're housed in looks to be the same kind of metal that his ninpō has been cutting through as easily as paper. Sure, they may be a lot bigger than the others, but Mikey feels pretty confident that he’d win in a fight against them. And, if he can get the jump on Prime, there’s the chance he could stop this invasion at the source right here, right now.

Mikey takes a deep breath and moves to crouch on the roof's edge. He never takes his eyes off of Prime while gathering his ninpō and getting ready for the most powerful attack he can manage. Even his mystic responds to his efforts, humming in tandem with his ninpō beneath his skin. Mikey taps down on his mystic as much as he can, but it still adds the warmth and tingling sensation to his arms.

He wiggles in his crouch and stalks to the other edge of the roof, closer to where Prime is mumbling in aggravation to themselves. His hands spark with the need to summon his ninpō but he resists. Mikey needs to make this advantage count. He’ll be able to find Raphael and Casey later with hopefully good news about Prime’s fate.

Stopping at the corner Mikey readies himself for the final time. Prime is faced away from him. They’re not paying attention to anything other than the now sparking metal on the ground. It actually looks a little bit like another portal device–

An overturned car on the other side of the square screeches as it’s pushed off a truck. Mikey’s heart stops when Raphael and Casey scurry out of the opening, gaining Prime’s attention as they leave the device to aim their blaster at their retreating backs. The blaster charges up and Mikey slings out a chain towards their arms, yanking the shot wide and letting Raphael and Casey divert course to race towards the roof he stands on.

Prime snarls, burning yellow eyes locking onto Mikey’s position. He falters under their stare for a moment, chains flickering enough for Prime to pull their arm out of its coils. Raphael and Casey clang against the fire escape as they scale the building but Mikey only has eyes for Prime. He tenses, ready for the immediate counter attack. Mikey’s left reeling when Prime swings around and brings one of their massive legs down onto the device beside them.

Raphael’s hand lands on his shoulder and Mikey can feel the concerned stare boring into the side of his head. He ignores it just as he ignores Casey thanking him for the save. That foreboding feeling peaks when the device sparks for a moment and proceeds to grow into a large portal.

A shadow appears on the other side of the static. His surroundings fade to nothing as the figure behind the portal steps into the square.

His heart bangs against his chest in a hammering rhythm. Mikey knows he’s started to shake uncontrollably, and the muffled voices of Raphael and Casey trying to get him to leave barely penetrate beyond the repeated mantra of no, no, no–

Mystic power flares weakly against his entire being as his Kraang, the monster from all of his nightmares and the reason he’s even in this mess in the first place, takes a bored look around. Their gleaming metal tail flicks around lazily, metal mech slumped into themselves. Mikey’s breath picks up until he’s nearly hyperventilating, but he can’t tear his eyes away from them.

A sharp sting on his cheek whips his head to the side and abruptly his hearing goes from being muffled to being too loud.

“Orange, we’re changing the plan right now–”

“Holy shit what kind of Kraang is that–”

Mikey shakes his head and tries to move from his spot where he’s rooted to the ground but he can’t. Even as Raphael tries with all his might to pull him away from the disaster playing out in front of him his body is completely frozen.

“Barbarian!” Prime screeches, getting into the other’s space. Mikey’s Kraang (Barbarian? Is that what their actual name is? Mikey thought it would be something a little more demonic–) stares up at Prime, mouth twitching down in displeasure and eyes narrowing dangerously. With the two so close it’s clear that Barbarian looks even worse than the last time Mikey had seen them (he wasn’t supposed to see them ever again this can’t be happening), armor littered with gouges and scratches. Even a piece of their horn is missing from the top of their head.

“Yes, my dear Prime?” Barbarian asks in an exasperated drawl. The voice has Mikey devolving into shakes once more and Raphael and Casey tug on him harder. He doesn’t budge an inch.

“You miserable waste,” Prime snarls. They whip one of their arms up toward the roof. Casey and Raphael renew their efforts to move Mikey and screech in his ear. He doesn’t hear them. “Don’t just stand there! Complete the mission Prime has brought you out of exile for!”

As if having all the time in the world, Barbarian looks up at their roof with dull eyes. The toxic yellow sparks with malicious glee when they lock eyes with Mikey. His heartbeat nearly stops, their sharp mouth slowly ticks up into a cruel smirk.

Mikey’s brain turns fuzzy, nothing passing his mind as those eyes pierce him, long tail lashing in excitement. Barbarian clearly recognizes him, but there's a chance they don’t remember him, specifically. Leo was the one who trapped him back in the Prison Dimension, Raph was the one who was infected, and Donnie connected to the Technodrome. Maybe he faded to the background between everything his brothers did–

All of that hopeful thinking dissipates as that smirk widens. And he winks.

Chapter Text

Mikey’s sluggish mind is still trying to comprehend what’s happening as Barbarian rushes him. The crushing weight of their arm smacks straight into his plastron and then he’s flying through the air, ribs shrieking and being followed by Raphael and Casey’s shrill, fading screams

Wind rushes past for only a moment, and then metal claws are wrapping around him. A pained yell tears its way past Mikey’s lips as Barbarian slams him shell first into the street, cracking the concrete in two. Mikey struggles and whines when the claw constricts tighter. Barbarian grinds him further into the small crater with his entire weight, restricting Mikey’s breathing until only wispy gasps of air escape.

He stares straight into those wicked eyes, entire body shaking while trying his best to find any sort of wiggle room underneath them. Mikey’s mind runs blank with nothing but fear as a low chuckle rumbles through his bones, the vibrant glow of the singular red eye of the mech washing over them.

This can’t be real this can’t be real it can’t–

He gasps, kicking his legs desperately in the air as he’s lifted up only to be smacked straight back down into the crater. Barbarian grinds their foot against him and Mikey winces at the grating sensation on his shell. He’s fully hyperventilating now, gasping like a fish even while Barbarian continues his low rumblings of glee.

“No, no, you’re not–” Mikey sucks in a sharp breath at the tightening of claws, scrabbling at the metal to no avail. Sickly yellow pierce through mismatched brown and gray. “Leo got rid of you.”

Barbarian’s smirk quickly morphs into a snarl. Mikey gets a moment of freedom as the claws of the foot release him only to be replaced by their hands crushing grip. He struggles and kicks out but Barbarian doesn’t budge an inch, lifting him until Mikey’s less than a foot away from their sharp teeth.

“I can assure you, I am very much real. There is no getting rid of Kraang,” Barbarian spits, eyes roving over Mikey even as he desperately wiggles to escape his grip. “And while I hoped Prime needed my assistance dealing with that other pest…”

Mikey yelps as he is thrown into the air, trying to flip himself to do something, but gets whatever air he managed to gasp knocked out of him by the brunt of Barbarians tail. It wraps around him in a vice, pinning his arms to his sides. He’s quickly flipped to dangle upside down and brought back in front of a now sadistically pleased smile.

“You are going to be a very satisfying appetizer.”

The tail constricts further. Mikey whines, ribs and shell screaming. He swears he can hear them creaking under the pressure, and then it’s gone just as quickly. Taking deep gasps Mikey shakes under Barbarians sick smirk as the alien studies him further.

He knows he needs to do something, but his entire mind is drowning in paralyzing fear. Any thought of trying to wriggle away and escape is washed out as soon as it passes by. Memories of this face overlap the slightly rougher, paler version that stares him down now. All of the feelings from the Invasion increase tenfold under their watch, none of them pleasant. He can feel the mystic energy flowing through his veins, warming him down to his veins as it begs to come out.

Mikey’s not sure how long he’s stuck in his feelings of terror. He catches the way his spots and scars flicker in and out brightness on the scratched armor encircling him, glowing in a mismatched pattern.

His mind goes blank at the large metal claws that carefully pry his left eye wider. Mikey’s body freezes as he comes back to reality to face Barbarian's intent stare.

“Having trouble with mysticism, I see,” Barbarian hums. They let go of Mikey’s face, and he blearily clocks the wetness running down the corner of his eye ridge as blood. “One must be careful with it. I am not surprised your body couldn’t handle that kind of power. It is not designed for the weak.”

Barbarian straightens, whipping Mikey around to keep him dangling in their sights as they send a scowl out to the city being slowly destroyed around them. He blinks away as much of the fear as possible and he looks around, too, not exactly knowing what he’s looking for but knowing deep down that something is missing.

Mikey’s soul knows something isn’t right, something’s missing from this scenario, but he can’t figure it out through the terror flooding his every sense. No, wait, he’s alone, this monster has him trapped, but that’s not right that’s not how it’s supposed to be he shouldn’t be alone anymore–

“I wonder how such a thing as you ended up so far from your originating dimension. Especially since this one is even more pathetic. Really, it’s no wonder Prime chose this world to conquer. It would be painfully easy to do so. If it weren’t for you, they wouldn’t have needed my assistance at all.” Barbarian’s face shifts into a deeper scowl as a large mech passes by a connecting street. Under their breath, they say, “Prime would already have this world under their rule had they not strayed so far from our original design. I would have this world conquered in less than a quadrant.”

Mikey keeps struggling, only barely registering what Barbarian’s saying. He needs to get away, there’s no way he can do this by himself. It took all of their effort just to beat them back the first time and that, obviously, wasn’t enough.

“I suppose I should thank you.” Mikey freezes as he is shaken, confusion temporarily taking over the fear at Barbarians silky words. An even more sadistic smirk appears and Mikey’s heart skips a beat. “Without your meddling, Prime never would have contacted me. Now, I get the pleasure of ripping you apart piece by agonizing piece. And when I’ve had my fun, I’ll deliver your twitching remains to your ‘family’ and finish razing your world to the ground.”

Righteously hot fury seeps into Mikey’s chest at that thought. He growls, fear dissolving in the face of the threat. Barbarians smirk stretches into glee. No way was he letting this monster close to his family again. Not if he could help it.

“Oh, did I hit a nerve?” Barbarian lowly whispers, giving another constricting squeeze that has Mikey squeaking in pain. Their eyes turn manic the more Mikey squirms and whines. “I’m going to enjoy playing with you, little mouse. I’ll ensure our time together lasts.”

The blood is finally starting to rush to his head from being upside down for so long. Barbarian keeps up his grip, tightening his tail until Mikey can do nothing but gasp and let out breathy whines. His vision starts to go spotty, Barbarian’s downright gleeful sneer the only thing he’s able to see.

Panic rushes in as he kicks his feet in the hopes to dislodge the grip but nothing changes. Mikey tries even harder to take a breath, but between the pain, panic, and the increasing heaviness of his limbs, he can’t do much. The red glowing of the mech’s eye leeches into his fading sight, blocking out everything other than Barbarian.

Mikey’s eyes start to flutter shut no matter how much he orders them to stay open. His legs slow their kicking and thinking becomes more hazy. Just as his fear of passing out surpasses everything else, a small blast makes Barbarian lurch forward, shaking away the explosion that had hit the mech's head. They let out a low hiss and their grip on Mikey loosens enough to allow much needed air.

Once everything stops spinning, he opens his eyes and immediately wishes he could have passed out instead of facing the horror in front of him. Barbarian whips Mikey to hover over their shoulder as they glower at Raphael and Casey standing square in the middle of the street. Raphael looks more feral than he’s ever seen him while Casey readies another explosive hockey puck, eyes blazing beneath his mask.

“Really?” Barbarian drawls, eyeing the two in front of them as if offended. “If these are an example of this world's protectors, it’s a blight on our entire species that Prime hasn’t overtaken yet.”

“Let him go or else!” Raphael screams, readying his sai. Mikey barely catches the flash in his eyes and the shake of his limbs before it’s covered up by more rage.

“Yeah man, drop the turtle and no one gets hurt!” Casey yells.

Mikey’s stomach immediately sinks in the following moment of silence. He tries his best to squash the part of him that’s overjoyed to see them. They can’t be here. As much as he wants their help and is grateful they’ve come for him (he’s not actually alone–), the reality of the situation is much more dire.

Barbarian is nothing like the Kraang they’ve fought before. Mikey knows how different it is between this dimension and his own when it comes to how people take hits. If Barbarian wanted to, Raphael and Casey would be dead in an instant.

Paralyzing terror floods his system enough to unglue his tongue. “No, get out of here! Run, please!” he begs. He stares pleadingly at his friends, his family. They can’t be caught in the middle of this, not right now. They’ll be killed before they even know what’s going on.

“No way, Orange! We’re not just going to leave you with that…that freak!” Raphael screams.

“You don’t understand! Please, run, now–!”

“Ah, I see,” Barbarian says, turning their sadistic grin towards Mikey once again. They let out a singular cackle. “You all care for each other. How unfortunate, little mouse.”

“Raphie, please run!” Mikey’s voice cracks, and he’s not sure if it’s more blood or tears that run down his face. Raphael’s stance falters at his wet voice, eyes wide and meeting Mikey’s blurry, terrified gaze with one just as scared. “I can’t, not again!”

“I wonder what I should do with them?” Barbarian ponders. He swings Mikey around lazily, taking a singular step towards the others that makes his heart jackrabbit in his ribcage. “The human is worthless to the overall plans. Perhaps we could peel its skin then see how long it takes for its body to decompose while the brain is still aware?”

Complete fury starts to build, blistering heat seeping through Mikey’s limbs. Casey flinches and murmurs underneath his breath while stumbling a few steps back.

“I believe that sounds agreeable,” Barbarian says, eyes dark with devious plans. Mikey growls. His markings and scars flare ever brighter against the gleaming metal encircling him. “A small experiment we can come back to when you are lucid between our lessons.”

“Don’t you dare touch them!”

Barbarian cackles, giving Mikey a quick constriction that has him wincing before turning his sights onto Rapheal. Mikey’s breathing picks back up at the malicious gleam in Barbarians eyes after latching on to the red mask.

“It seems things keep getting better! We get to play with another puppet. You took my previous soldier away from me, after all.” Barbarian stares down Raphael, who stands as tall as he can against the unwavering sadistic energy. “Although, this one won’t be as resilient. It may not fully live through the process. I am rather looking forward to seeing you kill it when there’s no more use, so it’ll be a pity if it doesn’t catch. It’s always much more entertaining when there’s pieces of the former lifeform that survive until the end.”

Mikey see’s his Raph, kraangified and forced to do the bidding of this monster. They want to do that to Raphael. His vision turns red as blazing hot fire bursts into his veins, ninpō exploding out of him in a blinding wave and mystic energy held back just enough. A shout rips out of his throat, power reaching its crescendo and breaking Barbarians hold, sending them stumbling back and snarling.

He quickly flips over to land on his feet, new adrenaline and energy flowing through him. They’re not going to hurt his family like that again. His ninpō hums in decisive agreement while his mystic powers flow steady below the surface. Mikey lurches towards Raphael and Casey, whipping back around at Barbarians enraged cry and only just managing to whip out his glowing chains to redirect them into a building that promptly crumbles onto them.

“You guys need to get out of here, now,” he orders. His voice wavers, half of him wanting nothing more than to stay with his family to ensure their safety, but he knows that won’t work. Barbarian has to be focused on him and him alone if they want a chance to get out of this.

“You’re nuts if you think we’re going to let you be alone with that thing!” Raphael shouts right back, sprinting up and harshly tugging on his arm. He growls when Mikey refuses to budge. “Orange, it’s not happening!”

“It has to!” Mikey argues. He rips his arm out of his grip and turns towards the shifting rubble of the collapsed building with wide eyes. He’s running out of time. “They’re going to hurt you!”

“They want to hurt you more, dude!” Casey intejects, tensely fiddling with his hockey stick.

“They can hurt me! If they get to you, then–” Mikey cuts off at the enraged roar echoing through the block. The rubble of the collapsed building explodes outwards and Barbarian stands hunched in the debris, eyes furiously scanning the area.

There’s no more time. Despite his terror and the chill that runs through his spine when those toxic yellow eyes lock onto him, Mikey knows he can’t let them near his family. He might not be able to defeat Barbarian on his own, but he can make sure the others don’t have to deal with them. None of them would last more than a minute.

In the end, it’s an easy decision. Mikey quickly looks up at Raphael’s equally terrified and desperate expression and sends him a soft smile.

“I got this. Go, uh, go find the others and…and tell them I love them, just in case,” Mikey whispers. His ninpō warms him enough to fight off the debilitating guilt at Raphael’s slack face as he realizes he can’t stop him.

“Orange–!” Is the last, heart wrenching plea Raphael throws his way before Mikey whips around and sends himself flying towards Barbarian on his chains. He grits his teeth against the impact that travels through him as his feet connect with the metal arm brought up to protect the exposed portion of the mech. Launching off he has to duck a tail swipe mid-air, flipping over the appendage and throwing out a chain as far as it will go in the opposite direction of the others.

Mikey’s breath catches at the near miss of Barbarians claws trying to snatch his legs but gets them up at the last second. He pulls at his chains, sending him flying away from Raphael and Casey.

Trying his best to summon his inner annoying Leo, he turns mid-air and sends Barbarian a smile that’s meant to be cocky but he’s sure comes out as more of a half-crazed lip wobble.

“Going to have to try harder than that to catch this turtle!” Mikey throws over his shoulder. His voice cracks, but the taunt works like a charm. Barbarian launches at him with a shriek and Mikey quickly throws out another chain, ripping himself away from the claws aimed for his shell.

Good, they’re focused only on him. Raphael and Casey have been pushed to the back of their mind and with each new pull Mikey leads them farther and farther away. Contorting his body to move and stretch in ways he hasn’t had to think about with the villains in this dimension, one thought runs parallel to the fear that spikes with each close call.

What’s he supposed to do now?

He’s got what he wanted, the others are safe (for the moment), but he has no idea what else his ‘plan’ is supposed to be doing. Does he just keep dodging forever? That can’t work, Mikey will tire out before Barbarian loses their killing drive and then everything will be for nothing when they hunt the others down.

Their claws rip through the muscle of his calf on a particularly sloppy dodge. Mikey yelps and has to immediately yank himself towards the nearest roof to avoid another hit by the tail, stumbling on the landing and not getting a chance to orient himself as metal wraps around the injured leg.

Mikey throws out shaky, sparking chains towards Barbarian’s uncovered face but only succeeds in getting an ear splitting roar and being flung to the side. He braces himself as he crashes through a brick wall, wind knocked out of him as he lies in the rubble. Groaning, he tries to leverage himself up, cataloging as much of the aches and pains as he can just like Donnie taught him in order to gather himself. Everything aches, but his ribs and arms especially twinge. One bleary glance at his arms shows the scars glowing faintly, and looking deeper inside he feels his mystic energy begging to be let out.

And Mikey wants to do it. It worked for a bit last time, so it should again. But even the thought of leaving this world behind to deal with this invasion and not knowing for certain if it will get rid of Barbarian has him pushing it away.

No, he just has to keep them busy and make sure they’re only paying attention to him. Easy peasy.

Mikey rethinks his decision the second those talons pluck him from the rubble and hurl him into the brick building across the street. A pained yelp rips from him as the top right side of his shell creaks dangerously. Thankfully, the wall behind him merely cracks and doesn’t crumble, allowing him to perch in the crater it caused and send a glare to a pleased looking Barbarian.

He can’t keep going like this. There’s only so many hits he can take before things take a turn for the worst. Mikey needs something else.

“Are you rethinking your choices, mouse?” Barbarian asks, smirk growing. “Please, keep running. I’m enjoying your meaningless attempts at escape.”

Mikey’s eyes widen as an idea strikes him. His only other attempt to distract a villain with words was with Shredder, which didn’t end well, but he had no idea what to expect from him in this dimension. But he did know Barbarian, and they liked to talk.

“You, uh, seem a little too angry with me. I mean, we did kinda take away your family and now you’re alone which can be really scary and I guess I’m a little sorry about that but can you really blame us–”

“What are you blabbering about?” Barbarian snarls, eyes narrowed. But they’ve stopped their approach completely, tail flickering dangerously. Mikey swallows down the rest of his rambling and tries to get his thoughts in order. Getting them to talk is giving him a much needed break to physically recover and he needs them to keep going.

“Well, we took away your family, and your home. So you’re, um, probably angry about that cause you can’t talk to anyone anymore? But does that really mean you have to take it out on innocent worlds? Or somewhat innocent turtles?”

“...you’re even duller than I thought if that’s what you think is occurring,” Barbarian lowly growls. Their eye twitches and the stillness of their tail is the only warning Mikey gets that they’re about to pounce.

He launches out of the wall with wide eyes, cringing at the screeching sound of metal against brick as the crater he was perched in is gouged by claws. Mikey doesn’t take the time to stick around and immediately flies off on his chains again, Barbarian hot on his heels.

Swinging and dodging faster than his mind can keep up with Mikey finally notices the lack of other Kraang around. And the few he does see scatter as soon as he swings by or they get crushed underneath Barbarians heel. He nearly runs straight into a large walking mech dodging around a building, and one glance back shows Barbarian tearing through the metal like paper with no acknowledgment of the explosion or the other Kraang's screams. The only thing they have eyes for is Mikey.

He’s too slow to maneuver around the next swipe. Mikey panics as claws wrap completely around his right leg and jerk him to a stop, his hip screaming at the stretch. Barbarian yanks straight downwards and Mikey retreats all but the leg into his shell just before the impact into a taxi. The car alarm starts blaring in his ears while Barbarian wrenches him up by the leg and slams him, again, into the already warped metal.

Breathing fast and hip giving a particularly painful twinge, Mikey listens to his ninpō that’s started screaming at him. Power welling in his chest he lets it go with a cry and sees bright orange flames appear all around and on him. Barbarian grunts and the grip around his leg disappears, allowing Mikey to roll off the tazi and onto the ground.

Slowly he pokes his head out of his shell, eyes widening at the flames that continue to rage. A small, wonder-filled smile briefly steals over his face as Mikey realizes the flames are coming from him. They emanate from his shell and flow over his arms to create a small protective dome around him that Barbarian sneers at, pacing the length of it. Every time the claws try to breach the dome, the metal glows red hot and gets snatched back with a growl.

Okay, he had no idea he could do that. Not the best time to experiment with the limits of his ninpō, but Mikey has to admit that this power is particularly badass.

“This isn’t even your home world!” Barbarian snarls, once again trying to breach the edges of Mikey’s sparking fire-dome and having to retreat. “This dimension is weak, its inhabitants even weaker. It would be in your best interests to abandon them, yet you insist on drawing my ire in a flimsy attempt to protect these worthless planets.”

Mikey slowly gets to his hands and knees, fire still blazing but feeling his ninpō cooling down. He can’t keep this up for long, but as he glares up at Barbarian he takes the brief reprieve for what it is.

“This world is my home! And I’m not going to abandon my family, or let you hurt them!” Mikey stumbles to his feet, wincing as his right leg nearly collapses under him, hip feeling like it’s legitimately on fire.

“I see you have failed to learn my most important lesson. You should know by now that strength will always come out victorious over those that are weak. There’s no hope for you, little mouse. You can’t keep up this protection forever,” Barbarian says, voice low. “And when you fall, I’ll beat my lesson into you over and over again before your final end, just as I planned to do with the other pest. Where will your family be then? They’ll abandon you eventually, once it’s clear how weak you truly are.”

Catching his breath Mikey gathers as much courage as he can, flames flagging while his power slowly flickers. He glares resolutely into Barbarian’s harsh stare. Mikey swallows once, closing his eyes and trying to reach out to his family. Their ninpō is still missing in his chest but he does his best to imagine them there, knowing that they wouldn’t want him to give up. They’d be cheering him on. He needs to keep fighting for them. For his new family. For both of the places he calls home.

Straightening with new strength, Mikey stands tall even as his ninpō’s flames slowly dissipate around him.

“Yeah, I don’t have your strength. I know I can’t keep going forever. But my family will always be there, whether I’m weak or not, and nothing you do will ever change that.” Mikey breathes deep, clutching his plastron as the flames dwindle faster and his energy flags. “Your strength lost you everything. And now you’re alone, because you’ve pushed everything else away. You’re afraid of being seen as weak. I’m not.”

Barbarian’s eye twitches once before they devolve into maniacal laughter. They’re breathing turns erratic and their gaze is even more crazed when they finally lock back on to Mikey in his barely there dome of flickering flames.

“You truly know nothing!” they spit, coming as close to the small dome as they can handle and looming over Mikey. “I’ve been the arbiter of innumerous civilizations' downfalls. My reign has been longer than your race's mere existence!”

Mikey begs with his ninpō to keep the dome up just that little bit longer, preparing himself to start running as soon as it falls. He can barely keep his weight on his right leg but he’s hoping more adrenaline will fix that problem. His scars and spots flicker dangerously and he nearly has to crouch to keep in the protective cocoon he’s made around himself.

Spittle flies from Barbarians mouth as their breathing gets heavier in very real rage. “I don’t need an army, nor my Technodrome, to continue my conquests! My weakling brothers and sisters are the ones that held me back. They were the ones who made me weak. But now that they are gone, I alone am the strongest Kraang to walk this multiverse!”

Mikey’s eyes go wide. So, maybe Barbarian went a little more off the deep end stuck in the Prison Dimension than he already was. That’s not a great sign. And yet, Mikey still can’t keep his mouth shut.

“But didn’t Prime order you to be here?” he blurts. Barbarian’s entire body freezes. In the growing panic and fear, with his one source of protection finally flickering away, he stupidly keeps going. “If they control what you do, then how can you be the strongest?”

Barbarian stares into the distance for a moment and Mikey takes the distraction to slowly back away. Their pupils eventually snap to him, expression completely blank as Mikey stops his retreat. Their mech's eye glows red once, twice, before shining bright into a blood red halo, a crazed smile gracing their face.

Barbarian starts to chuckle, raising Mikey’s shoulders in defense and getting ready to bolt. “My, my, aren’t you just full of ideas,” they drawl, taking a lumbering step forward. “I’m glad I chose to play with you before orchestrating your poetic end. And it truly will be a glorious thing. Just imagine, mouse.” Their eyes never leave him as scenarios play through their mind. “You take away everything I have and trap me, alone, to languish in exile. Now, I will take away everything you have and destroy what’s left ofyour family, your worlds, right in front of you. Then, and only then, will you understand the fate you cursed me to that day.”

Mikey tenses and calls on his ninpō to throw his chains but only manages a few links before Barbarian comes crashing into him. His plastron feels as though it nearly caves at the fist that’s pummeled into it and he goes flying through the street. Mikey grunts in pain when his shell slams into thin wood and he crashes straight through, rolling to a stop on cold, wet concrete.

Ears ringing, he tries to scramble to his feet, recognizing the sounds of lapping water while trying to get his legs back under him. Mikey shakes his head one last time and fully stands, expecting Barbarian to continue his beating any second. Instead, his blood freezes at the shocked cries of his name.

Leaning heavily on his left leg Mikey whips his head around to stare back at the wide eyes of Leonardo and Karai, both armed and dangerous as Shredder crouches not too far away. More of their rogue villains are strewn across the area, unconscious. He’s obviously interrupted their battle, and at the loud clicking of metal and the cackling quickly approaching he knows that it’s about to get a lot crazier for them.

Barbarian comes vaulting into the clearing, which Mikey now sees is some kind of small dock with various boxes and boat parts littered around. His heart lurches as they thunderously land between him and the others. Thankfully it seems they haven’t noticed them and starts towards Mikey once again.

Before the other two can try something stupid like he knows Leonardo is thinking about doing, Mikey rips his gaze away from Barbarian to send them a pleading look. “You guys need to run! Please!”

“What the–!?” Leonardo exclaims, cutting off as he has to quickly plaster himself and Karai to the ground to avoid Barbarians thrashing tail. Shredder, however, is not so lucky.

Yet like always, he won’t go down without taking something as penance. With a lump in his throat Mikey can only weakly cry out as, before he gets flung off the edge, Shredder snags Karai’s arm and drags her with him into the freezing water beyond the pier. It happens so fast that not even Leonardo could have held her back.

“Karai!” Mikey screams, his entire soul constricting as history once again repeats itself and Karai is being torn away from him. Leonardo matches him with his own panicked yell and lunges towards the edge of the pier, frantically scanning the water.

Barbarian stops in their pursuit and turns to glance at Leonardo, a victorious smirk stealing across their expression.

“Well, it seems that we’re in luck. This other pest will work nicely until I get my hands on the real one,” Barbarian says. “And I believe I’ve removed a member of your family ahead of schedule. One down, the rest of your miserable planets to go.” They turn fully away from Mikey and stalk towards Leonardo, who bares his teeth in an enraged snarl right at Barbarian. His katanas rise high, ready to fight as he shakes in complete rage.

Mikey’s not far behind him. Rage and sorrow overtake his thoughts as viscous fire pools in his veins and stings his scars. His mind races with the fact that Karai is gone, gone, gone, right after she finally came back and was part of a real family. And now Barbarian is trying to get Leonardo.

With a hoarse scream Mikey’s mystic feeds on his ninpō, causing his limbs to light up in pain and his scars to go supernova. He spreads out his power, the end of his chains latching onto a stray anchor, imbuing it with his ninpō and mystic powers combined before launching it towards Barbarian. The chain starts to wrap around their legs, momentarily making them hiss as they’re forced to stop, and continues to travel up their body.

There’s a wet squelch, Barbarian screeching at a volume that has his ninpō momentarily quivering, and Mikey’s forced to drop his power as his entire body becomes too hot. His eyelids flutter from pushing himself too far, but before his legs can completely turn against him Leonardo is there and quickly throws his arm around his shoulders.

“C’mon!” he urges over the continued shrieking of Barbarian. “We need to go before that thing recovers!”

‘Recovers’? Mikey blinks tiredly up at him as Leonardo pulls him along towards a tunnel sloping downwards into the ground, just big enough to fit the both of them. His scars ache and his body feels like he went a few rounds with a wildfire, but he gets a jolt of energy when the tone of Barbarians shrieks gets lower. Angrier. Painful.

Still being jostled against Leonardo, Mikey turns his head back towards Barbarian to see them hunching over. They claw at their flesh with abandon, spraying shimmering, pinkish-black blood all over the ground. Mikey can’t understand what’s going on (he’s never seen them actually bleed before–) until there’s another roar and squelch.

The anchor clangs against the ground, one of its sharp ends completely coated in blood and an inky, gel-like substance. They start to head into the tunnel when Barbarian turns towards them with a completely enraged snarl and Mikey gets a full view of what he’s done.

More blood runs through Barbarians claws as they clutch the right side of their face, glaring daggers at Mikey with infinite promises of endless pain. He swallows down his own horror when Barbarian lets out another roar of pain and anger, removing their hand to reveal a deep, profusely bleeding wound where their right eye used to be.

“You…” Barbarian seethes. Their eye flashes as a spurt of blood leaks from the wound and Mikey and Leonardo finally get encompassed into the shadows of the pipe.

He squints against the darkness and watches with wide eyes as in a blink Barbarian lunges at the opening of the pipe. Mikey uses what little strength he has left and rockets him and Leonardo forward, barely out of reach of the mech's claws gouging into the thick concrete. Leonardo pushes Mikey behind him on the floor, scooching away from the scrabbling fingers trying to snag anything they can.

Mikey takes in deep gasps as Barbarian scrapes against the pipe in one last grating drag before removing his arm completely. Leonardo tenses and grabs Mikey’s ankle, Barbarians bloody and malicious glare filling the entrance.

“Do you think you’ve done something grand?” they spit, tone scathing. “This won’t stop me, little mouse. I’ll find you wherever you go, and I won’t rest until everything you care about is dead and burning at your feet. You’ll be all alone, and there will be no one to blame but your own weak, pathetic self!”

Leonardo quickly stands and pulls Mikey to his feet, securing his arm around his shoulders and briskly dragging him further into the tunnel.

“You can’t hide forever,” is the last thing Barbarian whispers, a promise, and then they’re gone in a flash. Mikey closes his eyes as some tension bleeds out of his frame knowing that, if only for a moment, he’s safe. He leans deeper into Leonardo’s side and lets him take more weight, continuing into the darkness in silence.

Mikey takes the time to slowly stretch his arms, wincing at the hot pull of his scars. He can’t see in the shadows but he’s almost certain they’re bleeding again. There’s also the many, many bumps, cuts, and bruises that he’s carrying but all of that is made two times worse because of his mystic overexertion. Not to mention the top right of his shell is still throbbing something fierce and Mikey can only hope there isn’t some kind of fracture that he can’t feel right now.

“Are you okay?” Mikey hums noncommittal in response to the quiet question. Everything hurts, but he knows just from dealing with Leo’s injuries after the portal that it could be much worse. “That…that was your Kraang, wasn’t it?” Leonardo says softly, almost completely taking on Mikey’s weight. He closes his eyes and sighs before answering.

“Yeah, it was,” Mikey whispers. Leonardo takes a breath and quickly lets it out.

“Then things are going even worse than I thought,” he mutters under his breath. That sends alarm bells going in Mikey’s mind and he looks up into Leonardo’s grim expression. “The other Kraang found the lair. We…we had to split up and…and leave Sensei and Leatherhead to defend it. Karai and I went to distract the Foot bots we ran into while Mike and Donnie escaped to…somewhere. I hope. And Karai…” Leonardo sucks in a harsh breath to compose himself. “Do you know where Raph and Casey are?”

Mikey’s eyes start to fill with tears. They all knew the invasion was going to be bad, but everything is turning out absolutely catastrophic.

“No, I…” Mikey swallows, heart sinking while remembering Raphael’s desperate pleas to stay. “I had to get Barbarian, uh, my Kraang, away from them. They’re…they’re only here because of me and my stupid powers.”

Leonardo hums in acknowledgement, falling into silence with a strained expression. Mikey is trying not to let the guilt of bringing such a monster into this dimension consume him until Leonardo speaks up once more, voice firm.

“We need to rendezvous with the others. Nothing’s going to happen until we make sure everyone else is still standing.” Leonardo fishes in his pouch for his phone, typing a simple ‘one’ and ‘eight’ into a large group chat. A little bit of tension drains from them both at the quick response of ‘two’ from Donnie and ‘three’ from Michelangelo. They continue down the tunnel, each relaxing more as there’s a ‘four’ from April, ‘five’ from Raphael, and ‘six’ from Casey.

“Thank Pizza Supreme,” Mikey whispers to himself. Leonardo, however, is still staring down at his phone, eye ridge furrowing more the longer the chat is quiet.

“Master Splinter hasn’t answered yet,” he murmurs. They stop at a fork in the tunnel, Leonardo pursing his lips as he looks between the two paths and his phone. Mikey’s entire being buzzes with worry but deep down he knows he can’t do anything about it.

Splinter can take care of himself just fine. He’s a certified ninja master, and there’s no way he isn’t out looking for them right now. If Leatherhead is also with him, then that makes their odds even better. Maybe he just lost his phone? He’s never really seen Splinter use any kind of new technology other than the TV on rare occasions, so grabbing his phone would probably be the last thing on his mind if the lair was being attacked.

Leonardo swallows loudly before typing a quick message and pocketing his phone. “Alright, we’re all going to meet up at April’s and figure out what to do next. Hopefully Sensei will see the message and make his way there. Things have…definitely fallen through.”

Mikey nods beside him and can’t help but feel like that’s mostly his fault. They were preparing for their Kraang’s invasion, after all, not seriously thinking his Kraang would be showing up. It was the absolute worst case scenario that, because the universe probably has a bet against the Hamato name, came true.

Leonardo starts to lead the way down one of the paths while dragging Mikey’s exhausted form along. He knows that they’ll come out of this alright, they always do, and he’s hanging onto that hope as hard as he can.

Because the invasion is in full force.

They’re all split up and their plan had fallen to pieces before it had even begun.

Barbarian is out there, somewhere, and Mikey knows that he’ll have to face them again to protect everything he loves. They won’t quit until they get what they want. He inhales deep, squaring his jaw.

It’s a good thing that Mikey doesn’t really know when to quit, either.

Chapter Text

Michelangelo nearly bowls him over squealing his name as they step through the door to April’s apartment. Mikey immediately hisses at the squeeze of his ribs. His alternate is ripped away in the next moment and quickly replaced by Raphael’s searching hands on his plastron while Leonardo paces the apartment, making sure it’s secure.

“Such a dumb-ass,” Raphael mumbles to himself, moving on in his assessment and glaring down at the gash in his calf.

“Oh, sewer apples,” Donatello pipes in. His worried eyes pop over Raphael’s shoulder and Mikey gives him a tiny smile that has Donatello letting out a small breath of relief. “At least we’re all in one piece, I guess. Although I definitely don’t have salve for that.”

Mikey winces as Raphael grasps his arms and frowns at the bleeding scars. They thankfully haven’t grown any larger, but they sting something fierce and there’s no saving the compression wraps from the blood soaked into them. Michelangelo hisses in sympathy once he catches sight of them, peeling himself off the floor to gently massage his shoulders.

“Glad to see you alive, dude, but seriously–what the hell happened back there!?” Casey explodes, incredulous where he sits next to a frazzled looking April. “Who was that metal freak with the tail?”

Mikey swallows at Raphael’s hard stare. His mouth feels like cotton and he really doesn’t want to go over his history with Barbarian again. Thankfully, Leonardo gives him some mercy and draws everyone’s attention after peeking out the blinds into the destruction raging outside.

“Things have changed,” he begins, mouth set into a grim line. “I didn’t expect us to be ready for everything, but this is worse.” Mikey’s lip wobbles. “Not only do we have to account for our Kraang’s army, it looks like they brought in reinforcements from Orange’s dimension, and Karai is…gone.”

There’s silence as Leonardo trails off, the full implication of the situation falling heavy on their heads. They’re down a family member, all the plans about how the invasion could go have been thrown out the window, and now they’re facing a force that, even in Mikey’s own dimension, was virtually impossible to defeat.

The guilt is finally starting to creep onto him. Barbarian is here because of him and is only interested in seeing Mikey suffer. Which includes torturing his family. They stood a fighting chance with only this world’s Kraang, but with Barbarian their odds have plummeted almost to zero. Even if Mikey was at full strength and had control of his mystic powers, he doubted he’d be able to get rid of Barbarian for long. He thought he had locked them away for good before, but that was obviously only a temporary fix.

How was he supposed to save this world when it was actively working against him? There was nothing in this dimension that could help them win this.

Mikey knew his mood was plummeting by the second and evidently Raphael could see it as well. He gently leads Mikey to the couch where he’s softly pushed him down with Michelangelo acting as his cushion. The top of his shell gives a slight twinge at the impact but it’s made worth it when his alternate wraps his arms around him in a light embrace. He’ll act like Michelangelo’s personal teddy bear any day.

Taking deep breaths Mikey tries to do what his brothers say he does best; find the positives. Well, his family seems to be okay other than a couple bumps and bruises–

Oh, wait. Karai got taken away (again). Splinter and Leatherhead are still missing.

Okay, but at least they have a safe place to regroup.

A rumble shakes the apartment and flashes of pink light stream through the curtains, smaller explosions following them that has everyone tensing. So maybe not safe for long.

But he still has his ninpō, something that can never be taken away from him as long as he’s still breathing. It’s small and barely flickering after his mystic preyed upon it, but that spark of warmth is all he needs. And the longer he’s with his family, absorbing their care and reflecting it back, the stronger it’ll get.

Like Leo said that day, he needs to have hope that everything will end up okay.

“So…what now?” April hesitantly asks. She places a gentle hand on Mikey’s knee that immediately has a fuzzy sort of peace flowing through him. He unconsciously leans further back into Michelangelo at the touch. “How do we deal with this?”

“I’ll tell ya how we deal with it,” Raphael growls. “We go out there and make sure Barbarian can’t mess things up even more.”

That instantly has Mikey perking up to attention. “No way. You guys can’t get close to them, it’s not safe.”

“And it’s safe for you?” Donatello snips, gesturing to his many injuries and hunched frame. “Look at what happened when you fought them on your own! We’ve never seen you hurt like this, and I bet they have a lot more in store for you, specifically.”

“He’s right, Orange.” Mikey opens his mouth to argue with Leonardo but is silenced by his hand cutting through the air between them. “I know you're freaked out and Barbarian is something we don’t know how to fight, but we’re not going to be splitting up again.”

More arguments swell in his chest that he wants to let loose, but he ends up slumping back in defeat. As much as Mikey wants to drive in the point that he can at least take the blows Barbarian dishes out and they can’t, it wouldn’t make a difference. He’ll just have to make sure to be on his distracting A-game when they get back out there if he wants to keep his family safe.

“What about Sensei and Leatherhead? Are…are we going to go find them?” Michelangelo asks, voice meek. His arms give a slight squeeze around Mikey’s middle and he lays his hands against them to offer what comfort he can. It’s a question he wants answered, too.

Leonardo licks his lips and uncertainly looks back at his phone. “They, uh, haven’t replied yet. But as soon as we find them or they find us, we’re going to stick together.”

“That’s all good, but we have no idea how we’re going to fight this,” Raphael bluntly says, shoving Casey to the side and taking his place by Mikey’s side. “Orange’s Kraang is, um, intense, to say the least.”

“I think Orange can help with that.” Mikey stiffens when all eyes turn to him, looking for guidance at Leonardo’s prompting. “So, what do you think we should do? Something that doesn’t involve you going off on your own suicide mission,” Leonardo quickly adds.

Well, that ended Mikey’s line of thought pretty quickly. That’s really the only plan he’s got that he knows has a chance to work.

“I don’t know,” he whispers, eyes misty with frustrated and lost tears. “We barely beat him last time. And that was with our ninpō and powers and Leo almost didn’t make it out. I don’t–” he chokes back a sob, the entire situation weighing even more heavily on his shoulders now that it’s up to him to decide what to do. “They can’t get hurt by anything, nothing slows them down, and they’re never going to stop. Locking them in Dimension X could work, but with all those open portals they’d just keep coming back until…until–”

Michelangelo gives another gentle squeeze and leans his forehead into the back of Mikey’s head. The hand on his knee presses firmer into his scales and the forced peace just barely gets his tears to slow. Raphael carefully leans into Mikey’s shoulder to remind him of his presence, and he pushes back as much as he can before his scars start stinging a little too sharply.

“I…I really don’t see another way other than me fighting them by myself. And even then I don’t know if i’d be able to get them out of this dimension. There’s not really a way to legit beat them.”

“Then we’re going to have to come up with something out of this world,” Raphael immediately says. “‘Cause we’re not leaving you to fight that thing alone. Ever. Got it? I don’t care what you say about winning, we’re sticking together.”

“Yeah, what Raph said,” Michelangelo says, nodding against the back of his neck.

Mikey attempts to argue but gets nowhere when Donatello appears in his sight and clamps a hand over his mouth. “I get that you think we’re not capable, but let us decide how we die, alright?”

“Uh, is not dying still an option–”

“Shut up, Jones,” Donatello briskly says, kneeling in front of Mikey and slowly cleaning the gash on his calf with a damp rag he had snagged from the small kitchen. His lip starts to wobble even more at the action, tensing when it gets wrapped with bright white bandages. The tears finally slip out as Donatello moves to his hands and starts to clean them, too.

There’s so much love here. All directed towards him, unwavering in their belief. It’s not expected that he’s going to be left alone to deal with the biggest threat, but instead there’s a promise that they’re going to defeat it together, regardless of the danger. It pangs Mikey’s heart to think that they’d all be willing to face Barbarian, an unknown and deadly force, just for little ole’ him. Staring down death incarnate simply because they refuse to let him confront his biggest fears alone.

Mikey’s ninpō flares ever brighter as he absorbs the love and support from the family around him. It gives him enough energy to straighten out of his slump and start facing the insurmountable problem they need to solve.

Leonardo is staring at him with a furrowed brow, arms tightly crossed. He purses his lips and looks away from Mikey, deep in thought, before his eyes suddenly blow wide.

“Wait, didn’t you say that they ‘can’t get hurt by anything?’” Mikey nods, not seeing why Leonardo got stuck on that. “But you did hurt them. That anchor went right through their eye.”

“You swung an anchor at that thing!?” Raphael exclaims. Mikey blinks, shock rolling through him as he realizes that he really did do that. And that Barbarian is going to be bearing the scars of it.

But how? Nothing they did during his Invasion worked to even scratch Barbarians armor other than Leo’s sword. April had found some sort of chemical that eroded almost anything it came into contact with, but he doubted the anchor was coated in that kind of stuff. Why would a simple piece of metal suddenly be effective in hurting Barbarian? Was it his ninpō? His ninpō only managed to beat them back before, not actually injure them. It was a way to throw Barbarian around and create distance between them.

“Yeah, I did,” Mikey breathes in astonishment. “I did hurt them. I hurt them bad.”

“That’s a start!” Donatello smiles brightly, standing from his crouch to discard the now bloody rag and starts pacing in front of the couch. “Did you do something differently, or throw in a new technique?”

“Um,” Mikey scrunches his beak in concentration, thinking. Did he do something differently? He wanted to stop Barbarian from getting to Leonardo, needing with all his being to save him from their wrath and riding the wave of rage losing Karai had created. Doing all that he could to get Barbarian away–

The familiar exhaustion clinging to his bones gives Mikey the answer he’s looking for.

“My mystic powers!” Mikey exclaims, a bright smile crossing his face as it clicks. “I didn’t just use my ninpō on the anchor, I used mystic stuff, too! I haven’t done that with them before!”

“If that’s the case, then we have a good jumping off point for beating Barbarian,” Leonardo continues. His own expression turns much more hopeful at the news, nearly matching Mikey’s new energy. He can’t blame the leader, it’s the best info he’s managed to contribute that hasn’t been doom and gloom.

“In case we all forgot, that’s not a good thing,” Raphael counters. Mikey turns to frown at him but he continues on, pressing more insistently into their point of contact. “Orange can’t use his powers. Mystic stuff isn't an option unless we somehow all go nuts and let Orange try killing himself again.”

Mikey’s hope sours. The others all slump as well. Honestly, if it meant getting rid of Barbarian for good and saving his family, Mikey would do it in a heartbeat. He wouldn’t be happy about it, but if it ended with no one else having to suffer then he’d do what was needed.

Yeah, that’s what a bad-ass mystic warrior would do, right? Sacrifice themselves to get others to a happy ending? If Leo could try it, then surely Mikey could, too.

Although if it did happen, there’d be no second chances for Mikey. Either he did it and died trying, or he’d find a way to persevere. There was no other option. No different, slightly less bad-ass mystic warrior to save him from total doom.

“Not…necessarily,” Donatello says, tone cautious. Mikey blinks back up where he had been staring off into the distance thinking about how hemight need to die. Everyone waits to see where he was going with his train of thought only to be left in silence..

“What do you mean, Donnie?” April finally asks. Donatello straightens, blinking rapidly as if to clear his vision and diving for a bag that had been thrown to the side of the couch. “Donnie?”

“Great, the turtle’s finally lost it,” Casey mumbles, earning a harsh jab in the ribs from Raphael.

Mikey watches carefully as Donatello rips through the bag like a mad man, throwing out various bottles that shatter against the floor and walls. Leonardo has to dodge a particularly high throw and glowers at Donatello’s hunched shell. He has no idea what Donatello could possibly be looking for, but when he lets out a high pitched ‘yes!’ they give him their attention.

“This could be the answer to all of our problems,” Donatello says smugly. Everyone’s eyes go wide as he proudly displays the portal device he must have snagged from the lair before abandoning it.

“Dude, if you wanted to make a portal to Dimension X, there’s literally a hundred outside to choose from,” Michelangelo says. Mikey has to agree with him. Why Donatello thinks another portal will suddenly solve all their problems is lost on him. Unless he’s suggesting they run away. Which if he has anything to say about it will not be happening. Barbarian will follow him wherever he goes. Mikey knows they weren’t lying about that.

“You’re thinking too small, Micheal. If you can recall, my original purpose for this portal was to open a gateway to Orange’s dimension. I was missing a key element that made it open into Dimension X before, and I bet that key was some of his mystic energy.” Donatello fidgets with the device in his hands, rushing to elaborate. “It was too risky to ask Orange to provide what was needed before, so I tried to make due without it. But based on the circumstances now…”

Mikey is immediately nodding to what he’s suggesting. The chance to see his home again burns strong even knowing it won’t last long. At his enthusiastic agreement Donatello continues, but not before Raphael shoots Mikey a glance brimming with worry.

“We could open a portal to your dimension to act as a battery. You jump in, charge up on mystic power from the atmosphere, then get back before it starts to negatively affect you. It’ll provide enough mysticism for you to do damage against Barbarian. While you do that, we’ll make sure they don’t go anywhere or follow you through.”

“If he’s already going to be in his home dimension, wouldn’t it be easier to get his brothers for more back-up?” April cuts in. “They’re way more experienced with this magic stuff than we are. If they’re as strong as you, Orange, then we’ll stand a much better chance than if we do this on our own.”

While the thought appeals to everything Mikey’s been wanting for as long as he’s been stuck in this dimension, thinking about dragging his brothers back in to help clean up his mess is enough to have him shaking his head. He knows that their help would be massive and that they’d leap at the chance without question, but if they’re going to be opening a portal into his dimension then it can’t be left open for long.

As soon as Barbarian sees it, it’ll be a massive target. They may just abandon this world to get back there and Mikey wouldn’t even be able to follow them. Their goal will be that much closer to being attained the longer a portal stays open.

Not to mention he’d be leaving this part of his family behind to deal with their own invasion. There’s no way Mikey would do that to them. Before he even thinks about going back home for good, he needs to make sure this world doesn’t get overtaken by their own Kraang.

“While a good idea, the time that Orange stays in his dimension to power up has to be very limited. I’m talking seconds. Any longer and he could start deteriorating again. Not to mention the chance that Barbarian could slip into that dimension will grow exponentially the longer the portal stays active, and all of us need to stay here to make sure the battlefield stays clear for Orange.”

“So there’d be no time to get your brothers for help,” Raphael mumbles after Donatello’s rant. “That’s just great.”

“That’s okay,” Mikey says. “If this is the way I’ll be able to do some real damage to Barbarian, then we have to take it. It could be our only chance to save you guys and this world from what they want to do.”

“And what if Donnie can’t get the portal open to your dimension?” Leonardo asks, expression hard. “If we’re going to be on our own we need a different game plan. We can’t go into this blind.”

Mikey bites his lip in thought while Donatello mumbles something about how Leonardo always doubts his abilities. It’s a fair thing to bring up, however, and not just because the portal might not open to his dimension. If Mikey can’t defeat Barbarian–or at the very least hold him off until they figure something else out–then they’ll need something else. He knows that he’s going to be their ace, but there needs to be a failsafe.

“Didn’t you say that the crystal from Dimension X was super powerful, Dee?” Michelangelo interjects into the brooding silence. Donatello’s raised eyebrow is enough for his alternate to continue. “It looks a little bit like one of those exploding ones Orange and I used a bunch, just way bigger. If Barbarian is Kraang, and they came from Dimension X, does that mean getting it to explode on them could hurt them, too?”

“That’s…not a terrible idea,” Leonardo says. He shoots an approving nod towards Michelangelo and Mikey doesn’t even need to see his expression to know that his alternate is absolutely beaming. “If there’s even a chance of it working then it’s worth a shot.”

“One big problem with that; the crystal was left back in the lair, and there’s no way it’s safe to go there with all the Kraang around,” Donatello refutes, shaking the portal device in his hand. “If this doesn’t work I’m all for trying, but the risk of getting it right now isn’t worth it. Unless, of course, Orange is hiding a secret ability to make smaller, non-dimensional portals?”

Mikey shakes his head with a rueful smile at Donatello’s hopeful tone. “Nah, that’d be Leo. You’ll be the first to know if I ever figure it out, promise.”

“Hm, disappointing.”

“If it does get to the point of using the weird explode-y crystal you guys are talking about, what’s going to happen to the city?” Casey asks, brow furrowed. “Sounds like it’d be one hell of an explosion and there’s not really a way to check for people hiding out in the street or buildings.”

That’s a good point, but luckily Mikey can take a page out of his own Invasions handbook for that one.

“I’ll just throw him into a Dimension X portal with the crystal! Someone can make it go off and then we close the portal before the explosion gets to the city, easy peasy.” Mikey pauses and gives them all a hard stare, especially Leo. “But no one is allowed to hang back to make sure they stay in Dimension X, capiche?”

Mikey imbues a touch of Dr. Delicate Touch in his tone to make sure his point gets across, and by the way Leonardo hurriedly puts his hands up in surrender he knows he’s successful. He gives a precise nod and relaxes back into Michelangelo, placated that no one else in his family will be trying something self-sacrificial.

It’s different if Mikey needs to do it, but no one else is allowed to. Youngest sibling and mystic warrior rules.

“That kind of explosion could take out the other Kraang, too. It’ll be like killing two birds with one stone,” Raphael says.

“That analogy only works if one of those birds was an eagle and the other literal a dinosaur.”

“You’re the dinosaur, Donnie–”

“Stop it,” Leonardo tiredly says before Raphael and Donatello can continue. Mikey snorts at Raphael’s pouting face, sobering up as the leader turns to him. “This is your call, Orange. Do you want to go Donnie’s way with the portal or jump straight to trying to get the crystal? You’re going to be the one taking the point against Barbarian, so we’ll do whatever you decide.”

Going through the options quickly in his head, Mikey already knows his decision. They already know his mystic works against Barbarian, so it’s obviously better to keep going down that path no matter how dangerous it could be for him.

“Let's get that portal back home ready.” He gives Donatello the brightest, most encouraging smile he knows his own Donnie loves to see. “Once I'm charged up, Barbarian won’t know what to do with all this razz-ma-tazz. I’ll blind him even more with it!”

“Donnie, you heard him; get working on that portal and let us know when it’s almost ready. Orange needs to prepare for what’s coming as much as he can. Everyone else grab what you need and be ready to head out as soon as Donnie and Orange are good to go.” Leonardo nods to each of them, giving his dismissal and taking out his weapons to inspect for damage.

Mikey stays where he’s being trapped on the couch while April and Casey go check on her dad (...has he been there the whole time–?) in the bedroom. He feels a bit better knowing they have a solid plan as well as a backup, but things are still grim. His biggest worry is letting Barbarian near his family which, yes, is going to happen no matter what, but it churns Mikey’s gut just thinking about it.

Barbarian made a lot of promises in the time they were trying to beat him to a pulp, most of them about making his family suffer. Mikey doesn’t want Barbarian to get the chance to bring those heart wrenching fears back to life.

“Hey dude, I gotta make sure Ice Cream Kitty is going to be okay in her cooler while we go save the world or whatever,” Michelangelo says as he wiggles out from behind Mikey. He doesn’t leave without giving him one last gentle squeeze that Mikey quickly returns. Michelangelo’s whispered baby voice and the soft meows from Ice Cream Kitty flow out from the kitchen.

With his alternate leaving the room Mikey sinks into the cushions, closing his eyes and trying out those breathing techniques Dad and Draxum were teaching him. Leonardo did say that he should do whatever it takes to prepare himself for the plan. He’s not even close to mastering his abilities yet, but his Dads’ always insisted that proper relaxation and breathing was key to centering oneself. It was the same sort of technique that Lou Jitsu uses before the climax of all his battles, too, so that’s another point to the advice being legit.

Sure enough, Mikey finds himself falling into a haze, the world getting muffled. Each deep breath stokes the burning orange inside him, while each exhale calms. Slowly, the repetition sees it all flowing stronger and larger, keeping more shape and molding to what Mikey thinks he’ll need during the next showdown.

That’s to say it’s being grown as large as possible, because Mikey has no idea how this is going to go.

Something gently knocks into his side, and he breaks his concentration to look at the back of Raphael’s head as he turns away and leans his shell against his arm. Mikey immediately notices the tense posture, shoulders hiked up to his ears and arms held tightly across his chest. He leans into Raphael’s shell and nudges it for a reaction, frowning when all he gets is a small, displeased grunt.

“You okay?” Mikey hesitantly asks. He slowly leans to the side to rest his cheek against the back of Raphael’s head as he’s met with silence. “You can talk to me, y’know. If somethings bothering you–”

“Why did you agree,” Raphael hisses, low enough not to catch anyone else's attention. “This plan–the portal, using it as a battery–it’s going to get you killed.”

“I’ll be extra careful.”

“That’s not enough!” Raphael spits back. The sharp tone has Leonardo glancing over but whatever he sees on his brother's face is enough to have him swiftly go back to cleaning his katana. “I don’t care how careful you are, your dimension hurts you and if you leave us–!”

Raphael cuts himself off with a sharp inhale. Mikey closes his eyes against the misting of tears, nuzzling into the back of Raphael’s head. They take a shuddering breath as one, reveling in this last moment of peace before things get infinitely worse.

He wants to reassure Raphael that things will be fine, but at this point it feels too much like outright lying. Mikey’s never been good at lying. Raphael will know from a mile away and if things really do end up going sideways, he doesn’t want their last hushed conversation to end with a lie. That’s what Leo tried to do when he left them, saying everything would be alright. While he could be following in his footsteps soon, that’s the one thing he refuses to copy.

The silence stretches between them as Mikey flounders on what to say. Raphael fills in the gap for him, grabbing one of his hands tight. Mikey lets him even through the stinging pain.

“Promise me you won’t try to leave,” Raphael whispers, giving his hand a tighter squeeze. “I…I get that this is basically a war now, and things’ll happen that will really suck, but…” he swallows harshly. “Don’t leave on purpose. Please.”

Mikey lets out a long breath of air. He can promise him that, and in this moment it’ll be the truth, but if things don’t plan out like they’re hoping he’d be breaking it in a heartbeat. Protecting his family against the threat Mikey brought came first. Raphael can hate him later if it does end up happening.

“I won’t try to leave. I don’t want to, not if there’s another way. I promise,” Mikey whispers back. He returns the harsh grip on his hand as much as he can, relaxing when some of the tension in Raphael’s shoulder releases. There’s not enough comfort for him, though, so he lets go of his hand and instead wraps Raphael in a tight hug that he immediately accepts.

They stay like that, absorbing each other's comfort, until Donatello slowly approaches. Mikey stirs from the pleasant warmth radiating both through his ninpō and their physical connection as Raphael pulls away but continues to lean his shell against him. Donatello raises a skeptical eyebrow at them both that turns into a grimace when Raphael flips up a finger. Mikey giggles and nudges him but basks in Raphael’s refusal to be seen as ‘soft’ while he reaps the benefits.

“Very mature, Raph,” Donatello drones. He kneels in front of them, the device between his fidgeting fingers. “I think I’ve got the configurations down now. I won’t need a ton of juice, just enough to fill this little dial.”

Mikey nods in confirmation at the small dial that looks like a gas gauge slapped onto the device. It’s true that it doesn’t look like that much to fill, but consciously using his mystic powers still has his stomach tying in apprehension. He purses his lips and cautiously pokes first at his ninpō, which is burning much stronger than it was, then gives a tentative brush against the empty reserves of his mystic powers.

There’s a small pull at his ninpō, lurching in his chest. Mikey immediately stops his probing and lets out a shaky breath. Better to get it over with while in this relative peace than in the middle of battle.

“Okay,” Mikey whispers, straightening out and slowly breaking his contact with Raphael. “Okay, I got this.”

Raphael reaches out to touch his shoulder in reassurance but his hand is batted away by Donatello’s bō. “No touching. Mysticism and us don’t mix,” he says while waving his grayed fingertips.

At his unhappy grumble Mikey sends Raphael a hopefully comforting smile. Raphael shrugs off the obvious discomfort, nodding towards the device being placed in Mikey’s hands. Looks like they’re on the same page of getting this part over with quickly, at least.

Looking down at the device, it doesn’t look nearly as powerful as it really is. Such a small thing capable of bringing such destruction, and now it’s going to be their only way to get out of this. All of that responsibility being placed into a tiny, easy to break package that’s not even guaranteed to work. All he has to go on is the reassurances from his family that everything will work out okay.

Mikey’s done crazier things with less.

With one more deep breath he clutches the device closer, squeezing his eyes shut and reaching towards the empty pit of his mystic powers as fast as he can. There’s another harsh tug on his ninpō but he doesn’t let up. Slowly heat lights up through his veins, his ninpō flaring in a weak protest he does his best to ignore. Just as his scars start getting uncomfortably hot Donatello knocks his bō into the side of Mikey's foot.

“That’s good, that’s good!” he exclaims. Mikey quickly lets go of his concentration and molds himself back into Raphael’s side to peel his eyes open.

Sure enough, the little dial on the device that had been empty now ticks all the way to the top. A new, faint orange glow now filters through the seams of the metal, pleasantly warming his hands. He turns the device around to look for any cracks that show his mystic is too much, but other than what’s seeping through the seems it looks to be holding the new power just fine.

“Oh, I am so glad that it actually worked,” Donatello whispers while staring at the device still in Mikey’s hands. He quickly backtracks at Raphael’s indignant sputtering. “Not that I didn’t think it would! I had complete faith that it’d work! Ha-ah, ah…”

Mikey raises his eyes towards Donatello’s sheepish expression but brushes it off. It worked in the end, so half the uncertainty was already over. The drain on his ninpō pushes another small wave of aching into his bones, but he’ll be able to fight through it, at least. The only thing to test now would be seeing if it opens up to the right place.

“Orange, you alright?” Leonardo asks from the corner, sharp eyes roving over Mikey.

“A lil’ tired, but I’m fine,” Mikey says. A tiny serene bubble forms around them as they stare at the device in his hands. He absorbs as much of it as he can, because he has a sinking feeling–

“Times up guys, we gotta go!” Casey yells, bursting out of the bedroom with April in tow. Both wear tight and panicked expressions that have Mikey’s heart starting to race. Looks like their time of peace has finally run out.

“What happened,” Leonardo barks but nonetheless packs up what he needs and ushers everyone else to do the same.

“I caught a Kraang transmission through the old radio. Barbarian picked up waves of mysticism being used and now they’re on the hunt with Kraang Prime right towards us,” April explains while grabbing Michelangelo from the kitchen and pushing him out the door. “We have to get out of here before they show up.”

Raphael keeps a strong grip on Mikey’s bicep despite the stinging as they quickly file out of the apartment and rush towards the stairs. His hip aches down to the bone but he does his best not to limp and let that stop him. The device glows warm and with their battle quickly approaching Mikey has to desperately beat back the encroaching sense of terror. Facing Barbarian again is going to be hard, especially now that they have even more to be angry with him about, but it’s what he needs to do. And hopefully, he’ll be able to get a small recharge on his mystic before it even starts.

That’ll sure take Barbarian by surprise.

Leonardo leads the charge out onto the street, pausing only to make sure the coast is clear and then he’s sprinting onto the sidewalk. Raphael and Mikey take up the rear and follow closely, watching out for any stray beams or Kraang ships soaring overhead. He’s hoping Raphael is paying more attention than he is, because half of his mind is still locked onto the portal device in his hands.

Mikey’s thoughts race in an endless circle of worry, panic, and self-reassurances aimed towards himself. He’ll stick to the plan until it becomes obvious it won’t work, and then, and only then, will he start to improvise and possibly break his promise about leaving.

Everything flying through his mind grinds to an abrupt halt as Barbarian lurches around a corner ahead on all fours, nails screeching against the pavement as they skid to a stop. Slowly they straighten to their full height, surveying them with a fiery gaze before landing steadily on Mikey. Raphael tries to slide in front of him but Mikey makes sure he doesn’t break his line of sight.

They stop their attempt to escape that way and Leonardo slowly encourages them all to start backing away. Mikey knows it’s not going to do much, but maybe, at the very least, it’ll give him more than a second to get Barbarian away from everyone else.

“Now, now,” Barbarian drawls, matching every step they take back. “I insist you stay and enjoy the show.”

Mikey’s brow furrows in confusion, staring Barbarian down. He lowers himself into a position to intervene in the attack that has to be coming, but nothing does. They’re just following them, waiting, never taking their eyes off of Mikey and his family. Each silent second that goes by makes the tension in Mikey’s muscles grow further as he waits for something to happen.

Barbarian hums low in their throat, flexing and examining the claws on their hand. “You, little mouse, are the one who pushed the idea into reality. I’ll admit, it had been floating around for quite a while, but I never had the push to go through with it. Before, it would have been a waste of time, but now…” they trail, giving Mikey a sickly smirk. “Well, I can assure you this show will be absolutelyheart-wrenching.”

Whatever Barbarian is talking about sends a stone into Mikey’s stomach. He has no clue what kind of push he gave them for this ‘show’, but whatever it is can’t be good.

That line of thought gets pushed aside as Prime’s massive form steps around the other buildings, snarling at Barbarian. Everyone draws their weapons at Prime’s approach, turning their snarl into sadistic glee once they catch sight of Mikey and his family preparing for the inevitable fight. Barbarian is left to stalk slowly behind Prime’s footsteps while all the attention is drawn to their massive mech lumbering ever closer, eventually disappearing into the surrounding gloom and smoke.

“Finally,” Prime says, spittle flying. “The time has come for Kraang to rightfully rule this world, and you Turtles can never stop Kraang Prime.”

Mikey fitfully searches for whichever shadow Barbarian has slipped into behind the larger Kraang, but his attention keeps getting diverted back to Prime and their quick advance. Leonardo urges them to keep walking back but there’s only so long they’ll be able to keep distance between them before they’re forced to either attack or flee.

“The Turtle's resistance is futile. Even with the Turtle Who is Not The Regular Turtle, this world will fall beneath the might of Kraang Prime!”

Raphael’s grip on his arm tightens even more and Mikey’s grappled closer to him. He still can’t catch more than the bright red glint of Barbarian’s eye from where they flit around in Prime’s shadow.

He fiddles with the portal device in his hand, trying to catch Leonardo’s eye to ask silently if he should try and get a power up right now. The leader’s eyes are firmly locked on the scene in front of them, however, and as Mikey looks down to activate it because things are already getting too hectic, Prime starts gloating yet again.

“You Turtle’s have ruined too many plans of Kraang conquest, it is finally–”

An ungodly screech whips Mikey’s head away from the device back up towards Prime. Raphael flinches and drags him even further back. He feels his scales pale at the scene he’s met with.

Prime screeches yet again, scrabbling at the pointed claw of Barbarian sticking through the back of their armor and piercing straight into flesh. Barbarian’s tail whips excitedly behind them as they perch on the back of Primes mech.

“I believe you have forgotten our original value’s, dear Prime,” Barbarian hisses, twisting the claw further into Prime’s flesh. Everyone stands frozen, ground shaking as Prime falls to their knees. Blood spurts from the wound and Prime has yet to stop shrieking. It’s almost enough for Mikey to cover his ears. “Let me re-educate you.”

Leonardo finally shakes out of his stupor and ushers everyone to sprint in the opposite direction while the two beasts are distracted with each other. Mikey, however, is locked in place as everyone else tries to get him to leave.

“Strength–”

Barbarian yanks their claw out of Prime’s flesh, releasing a fresh gush of blood and hopping off the mech. They stalk around Prime, blood dripping down their arm, and rip into the side of Prime’s mech while throwing the base of the body to the ground. Prime growls as their mech sparks, refusing to respond to commands. It leaves them stuck on their back, blood slowly pooling around them.

“–always–”

Barbarian stalks toward Prime’s face and the others dislodge Mikey from his position. Raphael drags him a couple steps but he still can’t stop watching.

Barbarian stares down at Prime with sadistic glee as they choke on their own blood, bubbling out of their mouth and turning what they’re trying to say into wet gibberish. Without further prompting Barbarian strikes another claw into their flesh. Nothing more than a thin, pained whine escapes through Prime’s teeth. They dig in the body of Prime for a moment, then with a splitting grin yank backwards with their prize. A weakly beating sack of shiny muscle sits in their bloody palm.

They lick their lips around a deranged cackle. Barbarian slowly takes a bite out of the now still organ, Prime’s complexion bleeding into a burnt gray and twitches dwindling to nothing. Barbarian smiles, manic as they dig their clawed feet into Prime’s cooling corpse.

Mikey finally turns and starts furiously sprinting away with his family surrounding him, portal device glowing hot and heavy in his hands.

“–prevails.”

Chapter Text

Mikey’s breathing falters, Barbarian’s joyous screech echoing as he’s dragged along by Raphael. He barely registers the other Kraang that had been lingering scrambling to any portal they can find, slamming them shut behind them even if there are still more soldiers panicking to get back to Dimension X.

They keep running as fast as they can, Leonardo shouting orders to keep moving and ‘make sure Orange doesn’t get picked off’. Mikey knows they won’t be able to run far before Barbarian catches them and that the only thing they’re doing is stalling for time. It also helps to have a bit of reprieve to catalog what had just happened.

Mikey should have expected something like this to happen. It was clear Barbarian cared about nothing except themselves and their need for retribution and revenge. Mikey probably didn’t make it any better by taunting about the control Prime had over them after they’re obvious contempt for the larger Kraang was made known. Along with their insistence of being the strongest, it really was only a matter of time before Barbarian fixed the slights Prime had done to them. Even without an army or a Technodrome, Barbarian was proving themselves to be superior to the Kraang originally invading this dimension.

Barbarian lets loose another manic cackle and Mikey glances back, meeting their wide, merry eye. Their smile turns patronizing as the mech lowers into a crouch.

Clutching the device tighter he barely gets to shout a warning before Barbarian is launching forwards. Mikey knocks into Raphael’s plastron and sends them hurtling to the side, rolling over each other. Barbarian lands in the middle of their group and sweeps their tail in a circle, sending everyone sprawling.

“I do hope that your plan wasn’t simply to retreat,” Barbarian says. Mikey quickly pushes himself to his feet and summons his ninpō into the form of his kusari-fundo. Raphael joins him, drawing his sai and snarling. “While the chase is fun, it will be for nothing in the end, mouse.”

Mikey looks over at the others, scrambling to get their weapons. His heart pangs as Casey grips his chest where Barbarian's tail hit him, April having to help him get oriented. They slowly come back together and place their backs to each other as they keep their eyes on Barbarian.

Barbarian opens their mouth to monologue more then stops, eye narrowing at the warm device clutched in Mikey’s hand. Their mouth stays open a moment longer then drops into something painfully neutral.

“I was pondering why you would risk using mysticism again knowing that I was on the hunt. A foolish tactic.” Mikey stiffens, as does Raphael. Barbarian takes a threatening step forward. “Your hope is blinding you. There will be no help coming for you in this world, nor another. The ones you care for will die, and with Prime out of my way I will be the one and only ruler of all Kraang.”

Mikey’s heart races faster. They can’t know about their plan so quickly, can they? Barbarian is just making up their own conclusions to scare them, that’s all.

He doesn’t want to admit that it’s somewhat working.

Drawing up his courage Mikey takes a step forward to meet their ire head on, ignoring Raphael’s hissed warning.

“I’m not going to let you,” he states, glaring up at them with as much power as he can muster. “Not here, or in my dimension. Both are under my protection.”

Barbarian’s lips twitch into a pleased, sadistic smile. “Then it is fortunate you were already going to suffer for your transgressions, isn’t it?”

There’s barely a shout of his name before Barbarian’s claws are latching onto him. He manages to brace himself just in time so the claws miss tearing into his scales, but as Mikey’s lifted from the ground and about to be thrown somewhere, his body goes slack and with it the portal device slips from his fingers.

Eyes wise, he tries to reach his arm through Barbarian’s grip to catch it. The claws merely intensify their strength and once again his ribs and the top of his shell scream. Panic starts to set in as their one hope for stopping them falls towards the concrete. Mikey’s stomach fills with dread as it inches closer to the concrete, only for it to drain out on a shaky exhale once Raphael lunges forward and catches it before it can shatter right along with all their hopes.

He doesn’t get a moment to acknowledge Raphael’s save. Mikey’s suddenly airborne and the next thing he knows is brick crumbling around him as he’s thrown through a building shell first, and oh there is definitely something wrong there. Even with his adrenaline pumping and ninpō warming his veins, that pain shines through clear as day as Mikey tries to stumble to his feet.

Coughing up dust, he dodges to the side on a pained yelp when Barbarian’s arm comes crashing through the hole he left in the building. Mikey whips out his arm and summons his kusari fundo, looping it around the forearm without thinking. He’s not sure what he was trying to accomplish with that move, but it sends him flying back out into open air as Barbarian snarls and yanks his arm back. Mikey hangs on tight, wincing at Barbarian’s loud shriek, and then summons more chains to wrap around the mech’s neck then all the way to the fleshy stomach, pinning the other arm to their side.

“Little nuisance!” Barbarian growls while Mikey is still trying to figure out what else he’s supposed to be doing.

He needs to get back to Raphael and the portal device, but it’s clear Barbarian isn’t going to give him even the slightest bit of wiggle room. They need to be distracted, and while he had agreed to the idea of the others running interference he doesn’t want it to have to call on them to do it. They could get hurt so easily, and if they get killed,that’s going to be on him.

Mikey reaches the arc of his swing and sends out another chain to latch onto a lamp post closer to Raphael standing in the alley. His face is warped in indecision, body tense with a sai in one hand and the portal device in the other. Tugging on his chain to launch Mikey over, he starts to conjure another to grab the device right from his hands, so he doesn’t have to draw them too close—

The air gets knocked out of him as Barbarian’s tail comes around to smack him away from his target. Mikey chokes on a gasp, all ninpō dissipating as his lungs work overtime. A small cut off scream manages to escape him as he’s punched down into the street.

His shell radiates an acute pain that he’s never really felt before, all stemming from above his right shoulder. Mikey attempts to curl into a ball but quickly recoils as that only makes it hurt more. If what he thinks is happening is happening, then he has a whole new appreciation for how brave a face Leo was able to have after being in the Prison Dimension.

Mikey renews his struggles to get out of the crater he’s made in the street. His ears pound with his fluttering heartbeat and there’s the sounds of Casey’s hockey buck bombs going off in quick succession, but all he can focus on is the pleased rumbling of Barbarian, shaking the ground with his approach.

Mikey only manages to roll onto his plastron and lever himself to his elbows as Barbarian’s sick grin appears in his sight. His scars and spots flicker as he tries to do something to get away from that gaze, but at the moment the aching pain of his shell above takes the majority of his focus. He does catch a couple of smaller explosions hitting Barbarian’s back, yet they do absolutely nothing, as if they’re nothing more than pebbles.

“Is this all you’re able to manage? Pathetic,” Barbarian spits, eyeing Mikey in distaste. His heart stops as they turn towards where the explosions have been coming from, eyes glimmering. The others freeze their assault under the sudden attention. “Which one would you prefer for me to crush first? Should we see if the blue one’s screams are the same cadence as the others’?”

“Don’t,” Mikey grinds out. In a new surge of angered, protective energy, he pushes himself to his feet, ignoring his shell as best he can. Barbarian glances towards him and Mikey stands taller, looking towards the other’s who whisper among themselves and are gesturing towards April. She appears just as stunned and scared as the rest of them, but there’s an uncertain panic when she hisses something back at the others.

Mikey manages to summon his ninpō again, one second away from latching onto Barbarian as he takes a step towards the other’s. Barbarian’s smirk widens and then abruptly falters, their feet doing nothing more than twitching. They growl and shake themselves off, attempting to move forward once again but their feet stay firmly planted. Mikey himself pauses in confusion. His brow furrows at others as they start circling around April, weapons at the ready and watching Barbarian warily while she stands in the middle, one hand to her temple and eyes squeezed tightly shut.

“What–” Mikey starts, cut off immediately by Barbarian’s angered screech. April quickly starts to pale and waver. He has no idea what’s going on, or why Barbarian and April seem to be in some sort of stalemate, but he doesn’t get a chance to figure it out. Raphael is suddenly at his side, shoving the portal device into his hands with a tight grip on his bicep.

“Orange, if you’re going to open that portal now would be a good time,” Raphael quickly says, dragging him further away from the standoff. “I don’t know how long April can keep them there.”

Mikey doesn't even know what April is doing. But, as her knees nearly give out and she turns a sickly color, he knows that Raphael’s right. Barbarian snarls their frustration and manages a turn to glare, body jittering as they try to break whatever kind of control April is putting on them.

Quickly dissipating his weapon Mikey stares at the device in his hand warily. The glowing pulses through the seams of the metal in a steady rhythm, calling to the deepest parts of himself. Raphael gently squeezes his bicep and he looks up into a determined, yet pinched, expression.

“Hey, you’ve got this. I’ll be right here,” he reassures. Mikey gives him a tight lipped nod and looks back down at what’s quite possibly their only hope.

He’ll be going back home again, but he really won’t be able to stay this time. Mikey hopes his brothers will understand why if he makes it out of this. A small part of him hopes they’ll be able to come to him, but while the idea is immensely comforting the thought of them having to face Barbarian again, too, with the rest of his family, is too much of a risk. Especially with Barbarian on a very personal quest for revenge.

Taking a breath he holds out the device, the increasingly aggravated hisses and snarls happening behind him saying that he’s quickly running out of time. His thumb hesitates over the button for only a moment, and then Mikey squares his shoulders and mashes it down. The device gets even hotter, slowly starting to violently vibrate in his hands. A second passes where nothing more happens, and Mikey’s stomach drops at the thought that it really wouldn’t work.

More seconds draw on. Barbarian is getting increasingly loud. Mikey’s just about to give up, call it a dud and decide to go to Plan B, when the device jerks out of his hands and hovers above the ground in front of them.

Raphael and Mikey take a quick step back as it releases a stream of golden sparks, glowing increasingly brighter and opening a large, pinkish-orange triangle. The image behind the static is indecipherable for a moment, but before Mikey’s heart can sink too far it flashes once and smoothes out, giving them a view of an empty shipping dock.

There’s no definite way to know that it worked from that. There’s probably thousands of different shipping docks in thousands of different dimensions, but Mikey doesn’t have time to dwell on it. With one more comforting look from Raphael and another aching screech from Barbarian, Mikey holds his breath and jumps.

There’s the shivering feeling of static through his bones, a sense of invasion through his mind, and then he’s stumbling onto hard ground. Mikey quickly blinks away the stars in his vision and goes to take a step forward then hesitates. He already knows that the portal worked (he can feel it with his very being), but Donatello’s warnings ring clear through his mind.

So, with his body getting a jolt from the cool night air of his home dimension and his soul starting to sing with the intake of mystic, he roots himself in front of the portal. Mikey can’t risk getting distracted with this, or running to far away.

Even if he feels his brother's ninpō suddenly trying to get to him. They’re so, so desperate. Mikey can nearly hear their choked voices. He knows they can sense the fear and panic he’s trying to tamp down, and it’s not helping his case. He hurriedly tries to reassure their panicked states that at the very least he’s not dying—it’s not like last time (for now). They resolutely don’t believe him, and push even harder to get any sort of information from him. Telling Mikey that they’ll find him. He wants nothing more than to go to them because he’s scared and his big brothers will have better ideas than him, but he knows he can’t.

Even as he can hear the city he grew up in thriving, beckoning him to go home, Mikey doesn’t move an inch.

First, he has more family, and his new home, that he needs to save.

Just as Mikey starts getting uncomfortably hot, a fever burning him from the inside out and his scars pulsing with power, he gives one last reassurance to his brothers that he’ll be okay and jumps back through the portal with eyes screwed shut. He’s hoping the portal has dried the pooling of tears by the time he pops out the other side.

As soon as he’s free of the portal Raphael is deactivating it and giving him an assessing once over. Mikey rolls his shoulders, wincing as the pain of his shell makes itself known once again. The pain has dulled and been imbued with a sparking warmth, but it’s still extremely uncomfortable. He only gives himself a moment to adjust to the influx of energy and power that’s giving him a much needed boost. The hollow sensation of his brother’s ninpō being cut off reverberates through Mikey’s soul.

They’ll understand once he gets the chance to explain it all to them. Mikey just needs to get through this, first.

Raphael opens his mouth to say something, but April’s cry of pain has both of them whipping around and drawing their weapons to the ready. Mikey’s heart beats steadier seeing that Barbarian is still a fair ways away from them, but starts to race again as April abruptly falls limp and pale into Casey waiting arms.

Barbarian takes a step back, body rolling out of the discomfort they had been feeling and zeroing in on April's still form being carried away by Casey.

“Clever little trick, but unsustainable,” Barbarian growls. Leonardo, Donatello, and Michelangelo raise their weapons in defense while Casey drags April out of sight and into a small alcove where he stays, hellbent on protecting her. Barbarian crouches to pounce, but this time Mikey is faster.

Drawing on his ninpō, he conjures large and heavy chains lined in his new pool of mystic energy, shooting them towards Barbarian’s arms. They wrap around and immediately the metal beneath glows a bright, angry red. Mikey tightens his grip, ignoring his shaking arms and brightly glowing, stinging scars. He pulls until their arms are wrenched behind their back and as they shriek their displeasure he yanks himself through the air feet first.

“Flip-o-rama!” Mikey grunts as his momentum crashes into Barbarian’s back, knocking them completely off balance and sending them crashing face first into the concrete.

Barbarian starts bucking immediately and Mikey doesn’t have enough of a grip to stay on his perch. Quickly he leaps off and rolls to the side while dodging a swipe of Barbarians claws, heart beating fast and adrenaline raging. Mikey flips further away, flipping over multiple lashes of their tail as Barbarian claws their way back upright, expression murderous and metal charred where his chains had latched onto them.

Panting, Mikey does a quick check on how his body is holding up. Even though he can feel the drain that using his mystic is taking it’s not affecting him as bad as last time. Whether that’s because he’s currently locked in a battle defending everything he loves or he’s getting the hang of this mystic stuff is up for debate. Mikey’s going to go with the latter so he can brag about his skills after Barbarian is gone.

Riding with the confidence that he might be more in control of his mystic than he thought, Mikey quickly glances towards the broken, jagged lamppost beside him. A smirk lights up his face as an idea pops into his head. Barbarian spits yet another insult and charges for him (he’s managed to get attention away from the others again, thank Pizza Supreme) and he’s more than ready to meet the attack.

With a quick step to the side he has the base of the pole in front of him and clamps both his hands around it. Mikey squeezes his eyes tightly shut and commands the pole to bend.

His scars burn something fierce and his entire body starts to shake, but when Barbarian lets out a painful shriek Mikey opens his eyes and it’s more than worth it. Finally, his mystic powers lets him have one big win as the jagged end of the light pole sticks through the left shoulder joint of Barbarian’s mech. He stumbles back from the pole, his joyful smile growing even as his body starts to flag under the strain he had just done.

“Miserable speck!” Barbarian screams, bringing up a claw and slicing through the base of the pole. Mikey’s smile stays put all the way until their eye flashes at him with more anger than he’s ever seen before, which is really saying something when that’s their base emotion. “You won’t be able to use your mysticism forever! Your pathetic flesh is already on the brink of collapse!”

“If that’s what it takes,” Mikey mumbles to himself, wincing as the pain from his shell, and everything else, starts to filter in as his mystic gets depleted.

Barbarian growls and makes to rip the piece of the light pole still impaling him out, pausing as a sewer lid clangs against the mech’s head. Mikey looks towards the cocky laughter of Michelangelo, grinning as his alternate gets ready to fling another grate at Barbarian’s head, Leonardo and Donatello starting to follow his lead.

“Don’t listen to them, Orange! You totally got this!” Michelangelo shouts in encouragement while flinging his grate. It bounces harmlessly off the neck of the mech and only earns a low, annoyed growl from Barbarian. Despite the very real possibility they’re about to die for that, Mikey’s spirits lift at the obvious show of faith they still have in him even with all of his stumbling.

“Useless drivel. I should kill all you pests now and be rid of your trivial annoyances,” Barbarian drawls. They reach up and grip the protruding piece of metal from their shoulder joint with a sharp hiss of displeasure. All the joy of having hurt Barbarian vanishes as it’s clear it’s going to take more finesse than that to really make a difference.

Barbarian lunges as if to make good on their threat and Mikey acts without thinking. He sees the momentary panic on their faces, the way Leonardo attempts to jump into the line of fire, hears the hoarse scream of Raphael behind him, and he listens to what his body is guiding him to do.

Mikey throws his hands out with a pained yell, scars flaring ever brighter and knees nearly collapsing. His eyes widen as a wall of shimmering golden light shoots up from the ground between Barbarian and the others. They whirl to the side to avoid running head first into it but their momentum is too much to stop. The impact nearly bowls Barbarian over and they snarl in frustration while spinning back to where Mikey sags in the onset of using that much mystic power..

Everything hurts. His head, his scars, his muscles, his bones, his shell. Running out of the boost his mystic influx had given him lets every ache return almost tenfold but Mikey knows he can’t stop. The battle isn’t going to be over until Barbarian is gone for good.

Raphael skids to a stop beside him. He’s saying something, but Mikey can’t hear it through the pounding in his ears as he stares down Barbarian as they stalk closer. Their wide, knowing smirk sends a pang of terror through him.

They already know Mikey won’t be able to keep up this back and forth of mystic attacks for long. He’s only made the jump once and is already getting drained of his mystic powers, how is he supposed to last doing this even more? He really doesn’t want to acknowledge it (just the thought brushing his mind nearly has him blanking in terror), it’s looking glaringly obvious he’s going to have to break his promise to Raphael.

Speaking of, the other is begrudgingly knocking his knuckle against his head to get his attention.

“Anyone in there!?” he screams. Mikey winces at the loud volume, but haltingly tears his eyes away from Barbarian to show that he’s listening. “I’m going to open the portal again, okay!? We’ll get their attention off you!”

Without waiting for an answer Raphael slams his thumb onto the button and throws the device behind them. Mikey turns around, fully intending on listening to him and hoping that getting more mystic will mask all of the hurts again.

He only gets a whisper of a glance of the shipping dock through the static. There’s a sudden, grinding pressure yanking him harshly to the ground shell first before he can even take a step forward. Raphael yells, harshly thrown into the street and away from the portal. Mikey looks up through pain filled tears at Barbarian’s sadistic smirk. The world moves in slow motion as their other clawed foot slams into his plastron.

Something cracks, breaks, and it takes Mikey a moment to place the choking, sobbing scream rattling through his ears as his own.

Mikey gasps desperately through the debilitating pain and turns his head towards the top right of his shell. His lip wobbles with his cries as the shattered remains of the lip of his shell lay in sad pieces underneath Barbarian’s claw. That same claw obscures the true state of the injury, and Mikey nearly screams himself hoarse when the grip tightens straight into the wound.

“Ah, such a lovely sound, little mouse,” Barbarian sneers, pushing down onto him further.

Mikey can hear the panicked and angered shouts of the others, as well as more clanging as they try their best to attack Barbarian. Their voices all mix together and he can’t tell if they’re trying to tell him something. Barbarian easily swipes their arm back and sends Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Donatello flying away. He can’t tell if Raphael was with them and Mikey’s desperate thoughts jump straight to the worst conclusion as the sound of him being smacked before Barbarian’s pounce replays in his mind.

The portal hums just behind his head, close enough to reflect the orange and pink light off of Barbarian’s armor. Everything within him urges Mikey to go through the portal but there’s no way he can get out of Barbarian’s grip, and the more he struggles the more the missing chip in his shell sceams.

Mikey finally slumps in exhaustion, panting and glaring up at Barbarian’s shark-toothed grin. He digs his nails into the metal claws around him. Heart pounding, the searing pain from his shell sending the clear message of what he needs to do. There’s no way he’s going to be able to do much with his shell like this and no way to cover it.

His entire body shakes, mind numbing. He doesn’t want to do this, he doesn’t want to die, not now, but there’s nowhere else to go. Nothing else to do if he wants to ensure the others can at the very least escape. Even if he’s burning with pain, adrenaline running low and ninpō briefly flaring to life in his chest, Mikey has to do it. He has to. If he doesn’t, if he just gives up here, there’s going to be a much worse fate waiting for everything and everyone he loves.

“Nothing to say? Have you finally realized the pointlessness of fighting for them?” Barbarian taunts. “You could never hope to defeat me on your own, mouse. This is how it was always meant to be. The strong always conquer the weak. Strength will win every–”

Mikey whines as the claws dig into his wound further.

“–single–”

Tears run freely down his face, blurring everything around him.

“–time.”

Mikey lets the monologue flow over him, trying (and failing) to find some sort of peace. Donatello was clear that anyone who touches him while in mystic overload gets affected, too, so if it happens with Barbarian it has to get rid of them. It’s not quite going to be the blazing, badass death he had envisioned for himself. No one is going to forgive him. But without the portal and all other reserves on empty, there’s no other choice.

He doesn’t want to do this.

Did Leo feel as terrified as he does now, backed into a corner by this monster? Knowing nothing else would keep the ones he loves safe?

Mikey squares his jaw and glares up at Barbarian. He’s not willing to let them revel in any more of his tears that have morphed pain to deep, agonizing sorrow.

“You’re wrong,” Mikey gasps, latching further to Barbarian’s claws around him. “Strength isn’t the most powerful thing. Strength can leave whenever. But hope–that’s what never, ever dies.”

Barbarian's claws dig deeper into the missing piece of his shell in indignation. Mikey panics at the thought that he might not get a chance to take Barbarian down as they might just kill him now, but the pressure lessens in the next second.

Well, it’s now or never. Taking one more deep breath and sending out an apology to his entire family, feeling a dull pang from his ninpō, he starts to gather every single drop of mystic he has left and then goes even further.

Mikey’s scars burn and glow brighter. He shoots a scathing, knowing glare up into Barbarian’s remaining eye. Steeling himself, he prepares to latch onto his ninpō and positively drain it to take down this monster, but pauses before he can go through with it. A brilliant flash of blue light sparks in the reflection in Barbarian’s armor, drawing his attention. It mixes with the orange and pink of the portal and grows steadily bigger.

His ninpō jumps excitedly towards the swirling colors, and Mikey has to quickly wrangle it back into place.

Barbarian sneers and raises one hand menacingly, ready to strike down a fist and surely give Mikey the beating of his life. Another flash of blue swirls in the reflection of the armor, gaining Barbarian’s attention. They glance toward it, smirk dropping.

A shiny, shimmering katana then flings itself out of the portal behind Mikey’s head and lodges into Barbarian’s remaining eye with a sickening ‘shurk’.

Mikey blinks dumbly in shock. Barbarian lets out an ear splitting shriek of pain, reeling back and scrabbling at their face much like they did with the anchor. He takes multiple gasping breaths and immediately grasps the edge of his shell wound as the claw is ripped from it. His hand gets cut by the sharp edge and his fingers spasm. All of the pain is sent spiraling to the back of his mind as a very familiar figure leaps from the portal behind him and straight over his head.

He stares, emotions overwhelming as Leo, his Leo, his amazing older brother stands steadfast above him. The amount of rage seeping through every pore of his body is more than Mikey’s ever seen. His eyes completely white and stripes glowing with urgency, Leo flicks his wrist and pops out of existence, swiftly reappearing gripping the katana in Barbarian’s eye. Leo twists the blade in further then cuts open a portal right back to Mikey before the claws can catch him.

Mikey’s ninpō flares desperately towards his brothers’ and he gets an all-encompassing, comforting wrap from the cool, electric blue. Then, summoned by his reaching, a blazing red flows over them the same moment Raph’s projection barrels through the portal. Mikey chokes on a reluctantly relieved sob at the sight. Raph lunges at Barbarian, still struggling with the katana in his eye, and sends the enlarged fist of his projection into their fleshy face to drive the blade in further. Raph lets out an angry shout as his projection is slashed through and he’s forced back, taking his place in front of Leo and Mikey.

The hit disorients Barbarian even further. Purple streaks join the conglomerate of warm, bustling energy and then Donnie is soaring through the portal on his battle shell, bō glowing with the purple outline of a massive hammer with a rocket. Donnie slams the sharper end into Barbarian’s side, the power sending them flying and crashing somewhere far in the distance.

Mikey shakes, star-struck in the crater. His body and mind are completely shell-shocked. A hand clasps tightly onto the one covering his shell wound. He’s not able to take his tear filled eyes off of Leo crouching next to him. He swallows down the sob that wants to be let out, grimacing but allowing his brother to cautiously draw the hand clutching his shell away.

Leo lets out a harsh, pained whistle. His eyes crinkle in worry as he looks over the rest of Mikey’s bruised and battered body. “Yikes, that’s gotta sting, Mikester. Trust me, I know the feeling.”

Mikey blinks up at him dumbly and finally takes a good look at the lip of his shell. A jagged, hand sized chunk has been completely torn off. He watches, blank, as Donnie pushes Leo to the side and flips his goggles down, letting out a quick burst of annoyed air that Mikey knows mean he’s too overwhelmed. His hands subtly shake where they hover over Mikey’s shell, then his head jerks to the side before quickly going back to the wound. Mikey follows where Donnie is studiously avoiding looking and quickly follows his lead at the sight of the crumbled shard of shell.

“While not ideal, FAB Medical Spray V32 will have to do for now,” Donnie announces. An arm of his battle shell emerges with a spray can, coating his slowly oozing shell. Mikey yelps at the cool sensation but Leo gently holds him in place, muttering reassurances and hushed, wet apologies until the metal arm retreats, leaving a shiny, bluish coating over the wound. “There, that should hold for at least 3 hours.”

Raph comes to kneel in front of him, hands hovering over his arms and giving him a wide eyed, concerned stare. He looks like there’s nothing more that he wants to do than envelop Mikey in his arms and it’s taking all of his willpower to hold back. Mikey doesn’t want him to hold back.

“What else did they do, huh, buddy? Anything else hurtin’ real bad?”

Everything hurts, but despite that Mikey shakes his head because their presence has finally tamped down the thing that had been hurting the most since the first day he’s been stuck in this dimension. The only thing missing is–

“Who hurt my little one like this!?” Dad's voice screeches. Mikey turns his head, tears flowing without interruption down his cheeks. Dad and April step out of the portal ready for battle. Mikey reaches out a shaking hand and Dad immediately skitters to him, gently grasping his hand between both of his own. “Michelangelo, where have you been!? Do you know how long and hard we searched only to find you had left our world completely?! Your old man can’t take stress like that anymore!”

April steps closer and her bat erupts into green flames when she finishes her assessment of Mikey, grip tightening on the handle. “Alright, who’re we giving an ass whoopin’ to?”

“About that–”

“Hey, hermanito, why’s your mask like that?” Leo interrupts Donnie, gesturing towards the orange pooled around his neck. He doesn’t let anyone comment on it further, not even Mikey, before he’s reaching towards him and neatly yanking it off. Mikey’s blinded for a moment as Leo places it over his eyes and adjusts it, tying it back with quick fingers. Mikey’s greeted by his warm smile, satisfied, once it’s back in pace. “Hey~, there’s the Mikey we know and love! Good as new.”

Mikey’s mind finally comprehends what’s happening and the dam crumbles to pieces. Letting out an ugly sob he launches into Leo’s chest, knocking him to the ground. He wraps his arms as tightly as they’ll go around his shell and buries his face in his neck, ignoring the flare of pain from his injuries.

“I missed you, I missed you, all–all of you, I didn’t–,” Mikey chokes out, sniveling. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to go away, but I couldn’t get back–”

“We really missed you too, big man,” Raph soothes, voice equally as wet as he snatches up everyone in his enveloping embrace. Mikey sinks into the warmth and comfort, letting the feeling of his brother's ninpō invade every corner that they had been absent from.

Everything starts aching even more as Mikey starts to crash in this false sense of safety. He knows there’s still a battle to be won, but at this moment he feels truly complete for the first time in a very, very long time. The little jagged edges of his soul that had been sanded by the family in this dimension are eroded to complete smoothness while in the arms of the people who raised him.

But, as with everything in their lives, this isn’t their happy ending yet. And as Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Donatello come skidding around the corner, stopping with wide eyes at the scene, Mikey’s reminded why he needs to keep fighting.

“Orange!” Raphael shouts, gaining the attention of everyone embracing Mikey. He’s quickly pushed behind them as they draw their weapons and face off with the others at the end of the alley.

There’s a pregnant pause, taking each other in, before Donnie finally speaks.“You posers are the alternate versions of us I’m assuming?” He doesn’t sound confrontational, but his bō isn’t lowered, either, markings flaring dangerously on his skin. Donnie doesn’t give them a chance to respond. “Yes, yes, I know I am correct. With that being the case, I have one glaringly important question–was it really so hard to make sure our brother stayed safe!?”

“You should know better than anyone that Orange doesn't listen.”

Mikey winces at Raphael’s snark and tries to squeeze past to get to the others, but the wall of bodies in front of him remains firm.

“While I would love to stay and chat,” Leo drawls, hands nervously adjusting the grip on his remaining katana. “We’ve got what we’ve come here for. Good job, team! Now let’s get out of this dumpster fire before big and ugly comes crawling back.”

Mikey’s heart lurches as he’s crowded back towards the portal. He locks eyes with Raphael’s panicked expression, as well as the other’s, but his voice is caught in his throat.

“That’s it? You’re not even going to help us deal with the problem that came from your dimension?” Leonardo argues, looking between all of them incredulously. Raph shuffles his feet, biting his lip as if to say something, but Donnie interjects before he can.

“Yep, that sounds right. I hope your deaths are swift and distracting! We’ll be sure to remember your sacrifice! You can paint them a mural once you’re better, right Micheal–?”

“You’re going to let us die!? Just like that!?”

“...I believe that is what I said? Am I not a genius in this dimension or do you have some kind of brain damage?”

“Stop it!” he shouts, cleaning his throat when it comes out thick with tears. Everyone turns to him in shock at the harsh tone. “They’ve taken really good care of me while I’ve been here, and I don’t want my family to fight! So no one is leaving until we’re done getting rid of the Kraang problem. Got it?”

He watches as his brothers all blink in slight admonishment at the tease of Dr. Delicate Touch. They share glances with each other, lowering their guarded postures while they evaluate the new members of their family. Because no matter how much they might fight it he is not going to allow them to be outcasted just because they’re from a different dimension. He’s not going to abandon them to face the wrath of Barbarian, either.

“Welp, if Mikey says so, then I’m not going to argue. I’ve learned my lesson with ‘Big Scary Barry’,” Leo finally concedes with a resolute clap. Mikey can see the way it covers the shaking of his hands, but he doesn’t point it out. A soft, knowing smirk gets thrown Mikey’s way that lifts any worry. If Leo is already giving in, as well as fighting back the terror Mikey knows he has to be feeling just for this, then the others will give in, too.

“This has been…lovely, really,” Donatello drawls, then flushes under the attention being thrown onto him. “But has everyone forgotten we are still in the middle of an alien invasion?”

As if on cue, Barbarian’s shriek echoes through the air. It still sounds far away, but Mikey has no doubt that they’re making their way back as they speak. He tenses and all of his injuries make themselves known again. His scars and shell, especially, give sharp protests at the thought of having to dive back into battle.

“Oh yeah, speaking of…” Leo twists his wrist and his other katana appears, dripping with Barbarian’s blood. His brother starts to gag, and the screeches in the distance harshly change pitch. “God, that was a mistake. This is so gross–”

“Stop flinging it everywhere!” Raph exclaims when Leo starts waving the sword around to get the blood and goop off.

“Well, did you wanna touch it?”

“Can’t you just teleport it off?” Donnie interjects, brow furrowed. “That’s your entire thing! And why does it matter if it’s clean or not right now!?”

A delighted laugh pops out of Mikey’s mouth hearing the familiar bickering, even as April smacks them to get them to stop. Dad looks like he’s about to have a stroke but Mikey revels in the feeling.

He glances back at a confused and slightly disturbed Raphael. The rest of them seem to share that sentiment, but that’s nothing new. He knows it takes a while to get used to this side of the family. But if they could accept Mikey, then they’ll have no problem adjusting to the chaos everyone brings.

Mikey absorbs all the warmth and comfort simply seeing his brothers gives and slinks past Raph to join the others with a bright grin. He knows that everyone is keeping a very close eye on him the further he walks but he would expect nothing less.

“So, uh, are we still going to try the first plan? Y’know, with my mystic mojo?” Mikey hesitantly asks Leonardo. It takes him a second to tear his perplexed gaze away from where Leo is now trying to torment Donnie with his goop-filled sword and down to Mikey.

“I…don’t know,” he answers.

“What’s this I hear about ‘mystic mojo?” Dad says, a lot closer than he should be. Leonardo jumps, as do the others, at Dad’s sudden appearance at his side. He gives Mikey a critical glance. “You should not be using any mystic, Orange, it is too dangerous for you!”

“But that’s the only way to hurt them!” Mikey whines back. “I was supposed to power up on it back home and then come back here to fight! Nothing else works!”

“How about you let us take over the fighting part? You’re pretty banged up. Just–stay here with Pops to make sure you’ll be alright,” Raph comments as comes to loom over them. Leonardo, Donatello, and Raphael shift uncomfortably, but Michelangelo beams at Raph with sparkling eyes.

“No,” Mikey refutes. “I’m not gonna sit back and watch you all fight! I’m going to make sure Barbarian goes away myself.”

“‘Barbarian’? What kind of stupid name is that?”

“Mikey, c’mon, just look at your shell!” Leo refutes, completely ignoring April's comment. “You’re sitting this one out. You’ve done enough for these chumps already, and I’m assuming ‘Barbarian’ has it out for you and me in particular?” Mikey keeps his mouth shut at that and glares at his brother's crossed arms. “Yeah, I’m not hearing a no.”

He starts to deflate, running out of steam to argue when it’s clear they’re not likely to budge. And then Raphael steps up behind him, quickly followed by the others and he straightens at their hard and determined stares. He looks on with wide eyes as they confront each other.

“If Orange wants to fight, then he’s going to fight,” Raphael says and leaves absolutely no room for argument. Leonardo nods in confirmation beside him and steps to Mikey’s side opposite his Dad.

“He knows what his limits are. If he says he can do it, he can do it. We trust him to hold his own and know when to stop. We won’t let anything more happen to him.”

“And with you dudes here, Barbarian doesn’t stand a chance if you’re as cool as Orange is!” Michelangelo adds.

Mikey melts under their unwavering support, and by the sharp gleam in Dad’s eye he knows they’ve won some brownie points with him. He nudges into Leonardo’s plastron in gratitude and ignores the way the scars on his arms sting with the contact.

“...fine, but none of us are going to like it,” Raph finally concedes, coincidentally looking away from where Michelangelo had him pinned with puppy dog eyes.

Mikey’s spirits lift as the rest of his family nod in agreement, simply waiting on Leo to uncross his arms and get the sour look off his face. Mikey winks at his alternate and they both come together to give him the biggest and most innocent look they can manage. One crack at a time, Leo’s stern expression falls, until he drops his arms in a pout and groans at the sky.

“Ugh, whatever! I give, alright!? Just get those big ‘ole eyes away from me!” Leo cries. Mikey laughs and goes to give Michelangelo a fist bump on instinct and immediately retracts it with a hiss.

All levity of the moment vanishes as everyone in his larger than life family converges on him, their worry nearly suffocating. Mikey tries to wave them off and say he’s fine, but a pointed look from Raphael has his mouth snapping shut on a grumble. It’s not fair that he can read Mikey so well now. Mikey’s supposed to be the one who’s great at reading people.

Granted, Raphael only seems to be good at it when it comes to him, but those details aren’t important. That’s still Mikey’s schtick.

Another of Barbarian’s enraged roars rips through their huddle, much closer than the last. Raph, Donnie, and Leo immediately push through them to the street and start scanning the area while Dad and April stay with him. Mikey shrugs off the discomfort and winces at the sharp tug to his shell, but pushes through it and starts towards the portal.

If he wants to get through this without passing out, then he’s going to need a big boost of mystic to block everything out. Only when he knows Barbarian is gone for good will he allow himself to collapse.

He quickly jumps through, letting the warmth and buzzing power of mysticism wash over him. Mikey stays in for as long as he can, the muffled sounds of his Dad having whispered conversation with Leonardo the only thing filtering through. Only when the heat gets to be barely too much and his scars start to burn does he hop back, energy coursing through him and putting a temporary balm on his aches and pains.

Everyone but Dad gives him a questioning look that he dispels with a sure nod. The mystic he has should last longer now that he knows what to expect. And, with his brothers finally here, Mikey’s not the last line of defense against Barbarian anymore.

Leonardo gestures for all of them to join Mikey’s brothers out in the street to prepare for whatever hell Barbarian plans on unleashing for Leo’s stunt. Mikey eagerly leaps forward to join them until his Dad’s hand gently grips him around the wrist. He pauses, gesturing for Raphael to keep going when he stops, too, and looks towards Dad’s pinched expression.

“Are you sure you want to continue?” Dad asks, voice hushed and eyeing Raphael where he lingers just far enough to be out of ear shot. “I can easily take you home, where it is safe. I’m sure the other turtles will understand. This does not have to be your battle. It seems you have already done plenty to keep them safe.”

“I gotta, Dad,” Mikey responds. He places his other hand lightly on top of the one on his wrist. “This is my home, and these guys are family, too. We don’t abandon family like that. Need to teach them that our family motto means something, right? That’s why you guys never gave up on me.”

Mikey softens to mush at the combination of pride and sorrow filling Dad’s eyes. He lets go of his wrist with a deep, steadying breath. “I sometimes forget how much you four have grown without me. Yes, let us remind that beast of the consequences of messing with the Hamato Clan.”

He smiles bright and jogs out to the others with his Dad right beside him, Raphael covering his back. Mikey skids to a stop near the group, something else occuring to him that he needs to say. He looks to Dad again, a bright grin plastered to his face as he absorbs the warmth being surrounded by his family brings.

“Oh, and I’d kinda turn into a pile of dust if I went back to our dimension right now. That’s also why I can’t leave.”

The barbed comments being flung by Leo, Raph, and Leonardo about how to go about the situation pause as everyone from his dimension whips around with wide eyes. Mikey stares back (a part of his brain still reeling that they’re actually here–) and when they don’t say anything he tilts his head and looks to Raphael. He doesn’t seem to know why they’re completely silent, either, given by the way he’s mildly glaring.

“Sorry, run that by us again?” Leo finally says, blinking out of the stupor. Mikey goes to do just that but Raphael slaps a hand across his mouth before he can say anything.

“I promise I’ll explain that problem later if we all survive, but can you come to an agreement on how we’re going to get out of this alive first!? I highly recommend going with Plan B,” Donatello screeches. Mikey wrinkles his snout at being silenced and promptly licks Raphael’s hand. He rips it off his face and shakes it out with a disgusted expression as Michelangelo giggles.

“We don’t need no plan,” Raph says flippantly. “They’re blind, aren’t they? They won’t stand a chance like that.”

“You paltry worms!”

Mikey tenses, hastily summoning his ninpō alongside his brothers. Everyone turns, battle ready, as Barbarian comes crashing into the end of the street, tripping over rubble and crushed cars. They pant heavily, the top part of their fleshy face completely covered in blood and mangled beyond recognition.

Yet, somehow, Barbarian manages to face them and sneer directly in their group's direction.

“All of you will kneel before my strength!” They screech, blood and spittle flying. Mikey feels his mystic itching beneath his skin but he holds back, waiting for one of his brothers to make a signal to attack.

“Good luck with that, man!” Michelangelo taunts. “What’re you going to do, play marco-polo? Hah!”

Mikey’s stomach drops as low as Barbarian’s growl and a sick smirk crosses their face. Multiple clicks and hisses come from their armor and the sides of the mech fall to the ground, revealing the pink, flared gills. A wave of something that feels like static but distinctly wrong washes over him in a shiver. His brothers look equally as unnerved and April and Dad shift on their feet, but the feeling doesn’t fade.

The others give them wary looks as their ninpō constructs start pulsing, but otherwise don’t react to whatever’s happening. Mikey has the errant thought that Barbarian is trying to take their ninpō away again, but that doesn’t seem right. Last time it happened all at once and then it was over. This kind of static isn’t stopping.

It suddenly takes a sharp turn in intensity and Mikey startles when that wide, sharp smile is directed solely on him.

“Found you.”

Barbarian rockets forward, claws aimed straight for Mikey’s chest. Leo’s sword comes slashing through the air and a large portal appears, but with another sharp spike in the static Barbarian skirts around the portal. Raph’s construct grows to match the mech’s size and he launches a fist that Mikey quickly throws his own chains over to add an extra, fiery punch. When Barbarian dodges that, cutting through the projection like paper, Mikey knows something really isn’t right.

They’re supposed to be blind, how are they still dodging?

Raphael crashes into him and pulls Mikey away from the hit flying his way, and then they’re falling through one of Leo’s portals. He adjusts to the new surroundings and hops back up in an instant, but stalls heading back to the quickly escalating fight at Raphael’s pained groan.

“Ugh, portals suck,” he complains, shaking off the nausea from traveling via Leo’s portals for the first time. Mikey helps him back to his feet and can’t help but flounder at what to do.

He had been beginning to grow confident with how this fight would go knowing Barbarian would be blind, but that obviously isn’t slowing them in the slightest. The non-mystic members of the family scatter to the edges of the scuffle with no acknowledgement from Barbarian. Donnie and Raph quickly try to do a tag team with Barbarian between them, summoning their constructs and launching forwards. Barbarian easily swipes through the head of Raph’s projection and leaps up, planting a foot into his spiky shell and propelling him straight into Donnie’s attack.

Mikey winces as Raph flies into a building, Donnie yelping an apology before he darts away from Barbarian's lashing tail. Raphael finally gets onto steady feet just in time for Mikey to throw out his hands, creating a barrier between Donnie and the swiper of the tail that he’s not able to dodge. The reverberation of the hit shakes through his arms and he’s forced to drop the shield as soon as Donnie is out of range.

Barbarian laughs and starts bounding towards him, smacking Leo away from his attempted interception as soon as appears in their path. Mikey crouches, summoning his chains and wrapping around the attacking arm. He tightens the loop around the wrist and uses Barbarian’s momentum to swing them over his head and down the street. Raph’s projection flies past him to deliver another blow but Barbarian easily whacks him away. Leo barely manages to conjure a portal to prevent Raph from crashing through yet another building and deposits him on a nearby roof to catch his breath.

Mikey starts creating a mystic-infused construction to deal more damage, but Barbarian latches on to the chain connected to him. Yelping, Mikey is yanked off his feet and pulled straight into Barbarian’s path. A hand grabs his leg before he goes sailing, and one glance down shows Rapheal being dragged with him. They scream as they fly, and whenRaphael loses his grip Mikey’s heart stops. Raphael barely manages to catch himself on Barbarian’s horn, dangling and hanging on with white knuckles.

He’s too focused on the terror that seeing Raphael so close to Barbarian spreads to dodge the fist hurtling towards him. It crashes into his plastron, knocking the wind out of his lungs, and he rolls harshly over the concrete. His shell screams at the rough treatment but he ignores it, leaping up and desperately looking back at Raphael clinging to Barbarian's mechanical head.

Leo goes in for another attack that gets swiped away just as easily. He opens another portal to try again and gets the same result. Mikey watches with bated breath as Raphael is jostled around but never falls. Barbarian doesn’t acknowledge him dangling off the mech, leaping through the barrage of ninpō missiles Donnie sends their way.

“Let go, dude!” Michelangelo yells, pulling a hockey bomb from his pocket and throwing it towards April. She stands ready, bat glowing bright green with flames. “Now’s not the time for a piggy back ride!”

“You think I want to be up here!?” Raphael screeches back, drawing a sai and desperately trying to stab into Barbarian’s glowing red eye. It does nothing but scratch the surface.

Finally, Barbarian seems to recognize that they have an unintended passenger. With a low growl they slash widely towards their mech’s head, their claws just barely missing Raphael.

“Get off of me you wretched–!”

A green, fiery hockey puck bomb shoots straight into their mouth, cutting them off. “Oh yeah, check it!” April cheers over Barbarian’s sputters of smoke and hacking. Dad scrambles through and around Barbarian’s legs holding a line of thick metal wire in his mouth and darts away just as fast. As soon as he’s clear the wire’s pulled taut from the other end by Leonardo and Donatello, sending Barbarian stumbling to his knees.

The explosion knocks Raphael’s grip loose and he lets out a harsh shout as he plummets to the ground. A blue portal opens up beneath him before he falls too far and he’s spit out right next to Mikey, Leo following immediately after.

“You okay?” Mikey asks, relaxing at Raphael’s sure nod.

“Something’s up with them,” Leo announces, watching Barbarian rip through the wires around their legs and get back to their feet. “Y’know, other than being a sadistic, blind monster.”

“They can’t sense us!” Donatello yells from across the street, looking over Michelangelo’s shoulder as his alternate holds one of their T-phones in Barbarian’s direction. Dad, April, and Leonardo flank him and keep an eye on Barbarian’s recovery. “Those gills only pick up on mysticism! You’re the only things they can ‘see’!”

“Lies!” Barbarian screeches. They sweep towards Donatello and the others, aiming the point of their tail towards him. “All of it!”

They leap away from the strike, and Mikey’s eyes light up in understanding as they split and the tail only follows Dad and April. Donatello, Michelangelo, and Leonardo run silently in the other direction without any kind of consequence while April and Dad have to keep dodging over and under the tail.

Raph comes barreling down from the rooftops and grabs the tail during one of the strikes. The force sends him skidding across the ground but he stands strong and tightens his grip, yanking Barbarian forward. He keeps them in place as Donnie flies in with a cackling laugh. He conjures a ninpō powered broadsword and aims straight for their mangled eyes, sending them screeching across the street.

“Oh great, so now they’re really gunning for us,” Leo mutters. “Who knew being lame would be the advantage here.”

Raphael scowls at him and Leo flashes a strained smirk. Mikey ignores the need to reassure Leo that he’s doing great at not letting his fear take over, instead choosing to keep an eye on Barbarian bounding back to them.

It’s clear, now, that while they are capable of navigating the destruction and rubble that’s crackling or creaking, the silent cars and crumbled buildings send them tripping. The setback barely slows them, but the knowledge that Barbarian can’t sense the others makes a small, anxious knot release in Mikey’s chest. It’s not great that they’ll be focusing on attacking his mystic family, but at least he knows they won’t be killed from a single, too strong swipe. His brothers from this dimension aren’t that sturdy, and he’s grateful for any amount of protection they can get against Barbarian.

But, on the other hand, Mikey is known to be the mystic powerhouse. And by the way Barbarian keeps redirecting course directly towards him, his presence is probably the one that’s the easiest for them to find.

“Hey! It’s time for Plan B!” Leonardo yells over Barbarians growls, never taking his eye off their advance. Raph, April, and Dad move forward to meet them head on, stalling them and doing their best to keep them from advancing.

“What exactly is this ‘Plan B’? We were not informed that there was going to be something other than smashing!” Donnie complains, swooping down and yanking Donatello out of the way of a wayward piece of rubble thrown by Barbarian. Donatello hangs limply in his arms, screaming when Donnie flies down the street and drops him roughly near Leonardo.

“We can’t exactly get back to the lair right now, dude!” Michelangelo points out, grabbing another hockey puck bomb and launching it. The explosion takes them off guard just enough for April to land a smashing hit straight into the mech’s eye, shattering the glass and making the red glow disappear.

Mikey lights up, latching onto Leo’s arm. He looks down at him in surprise and whips between him and Barbarian. His brow furrows in concern at the sharp hit Raph takes to his plastron. It doesn’t knock Raph down for long, expression one of barely concealed fury when he gets back up. He pulls Leo’s arm again, gaining his attention and pushing down his own pang of worry for his biggest brother.

“You need to get them back to the lair!” Mikey says, dragging him towards Donatello. Raphael follows right beside him, never taking his eyes off the other’s that are only succeeding on annoying Barbarian even more. “He’ll get what we need to kick Barbarian’s butt out of here!”

Donatello perks up and appraises Leo, mouth turned down in distaste that he quickly shakes off when Mikey elbows him. “As long as it’s not like the last time we messed with that kind of mystic portal then it works for me.”

“What’s this about a last time–”

“I promise, Leo’s portals are completely safe!” Mikey pushes Leo forward. Leo doesn’t stop himself from stumbling and conveniently knocking an arm into Donatello’s shoulder, almost making him drop his T-Phone.

“Best portals around, listillo. Where we going? And let’s make it fast, yeah?” Leo drawls, raising a katana at the ready. He flinches at Barbarian’s roar, muscles unbearably tense. Mikey looks towards the others and his heart stutters seeing Dad cradling his left arm while jumping away from a kick.

“To our lair, we need to get the crystal and then find a portal that still opens into Dimension X.”

“Not very specific, but I’ve managed with worse,” Leo announces, slicing down and opening a swirling portal. He shoves Donatello through as he sputters, going to follow but pausing. One foot crosses the threshold of the portal while the rest of his body angles towards the fight that Barbarian is steadily making their way out of, whipping their head towards the open portal.

Mikey sees the indecision on his face clear as day. “It’ll be okay, Leo,” he assures, grabbing his hand to give a quick squeeze that’s returned tenfold. “Nothing will happen while you’re gone. I’ll make sure of it.”

“And what about you? I leave and you become their biggest target. At least with me here we can split up their hatred.”

“I’ll make sure the dumbass doesn’t do anything,” Raphael says, standing tall under Leo’s assessing look. “I’m used to it by now.”

“Oh, come on, I’m not that bad,” Mikey mutters. The challenging looks he gets from both of them cements a pout onto his face. He continues stewing in indignation (because he does use logic most of the time), only perking up when Raph goes flying over their head and slams into the building behind them. Mikey takes a step towards the crater to make sure he’s okay but Raph’s already shoving himself out and getting back to beating Barbarian, who’s getting much closer than is comfortable.

There’s another beat of silence, and Leo’s jaw relaxes. “I’ll remember that.”

With that Leo fully jumps into his portal, closing it behind him and leaving Mikey and Raphael to turn back to the battle. They see the end of Leonardo swinging down from a nearby building and redirecting a swipe heading straight for Donnie who’s fiddling with his gauntlet, battle shell smoking.

“Okay,” Mikey breathes out, bringing up his ninpō and weaving mystic energy into his chains. His scars warm and the weapon in his hand tingles, which Mikey is going to take as whatever he did worked. “Let’s do this.”

Raphael nods, drawing out his grapple and launching towards the same building Leonardo is crouched on, waiting for a moment of distraction to attack. Mikey takes the opposite approach, wrapping his mystic infused ninpō around Raph’s projected fist and using that anchor to launch himself without throwing off the aim of his punch.

The fiery fist hits the target and Barbarian stumbles back, tripping over a cable Michelangelo runs between their legs. Mikey follows through with the hit and brings about a searing lash of a mystic whip that sears across the already mangled flesh and scorches the surrounding metal. Barbarian’s scream has Mikey wincing and he barely avoids the claws that shoot towards him.

Raph’s projection suddenly envelops him and he’s pulled out of the way as Barbarian focuses their attention on him. Mikey shouts a quick thanks to Raph and continues avoiding the flurry of attacks. As he dodges and flips out of the way, his shell screams at him, the rest of his body also pleading that he slows down. But he can’t afford to do that, not until Leo and Donatello get back with Plan B.

Holding back his winces and painful whines, Mikey jumps over the strike of claws and lands on their forearm before they can pull away. Reaching deep within, mystic flames cover his feet and burn into the metal below him, his exhaustion growing. The idea works, though, and the armor warps beneath his feet enough that Barbarian rips the arm out from under him with an angered scream. Mikey flails, trying to right himself so as to not fall directly on his shell, but Donnie swoops in and catches him before he has to live with that pain.

“Thanks, Dee,” Mikey breathes, taking the moment of flight to center himself. Donnie only nods in response, both of them yelping as they’re forced to dive a little too low for comfort to avoid Barbarian’s tail. Mikey’s weight must throw him off balance and the next thing he knows is Donnie is wrapping himself around his shell to lessen the impact of the ground, rolling across the ground until they roughly hit a building.

The impact jostles every single injury he has and he can’t help the small hiss that escapes. Mikey’s eyes scrunch in pain. Donnie is quickly up and trying to drag him back to his feet, muttering curses under his breath.

They can only distract them for so long, and with how exhausted Mikey already is, he won’t be able to keep at this kind of strength. He can push his body and his mystic all he wants but the end of it is approaching very fast. Leo and Donatello really need to hurry up if Plan B is going to be something that actually happens.

“I can feel your body failing you, mouse,” Barbarian hisses, snarling straight at him where he sags against Donnie. Raph quickly comes to take advantage of the momentary loss of focus, but Barbarian knocks him to the side easily. “You’re running out of time.”

“Shut it, you freak!” Raphael yells from a roof above. Three flaming hockey puck bombs rain down onto them. Mikey winces at the sounds and feels his throat close up when Barbarian shakes it off as though it’s nothing more than stones. His face scrunches in pain as he attempts to take his weight back from Donnie and his hip spasms.

Barbarian growls and throws chunks of rubble towards where they heard Raphael’s voice, but he’s already back on street level with the rest of them before the rocks even leave their hand. April has to dodge a few stray chunks thrown her way and skids to a stop next to Raph, who’s pulling himself out of yet another crater made with his shell.

“Your pathetic ’hope’ will lead you nowhere except the deaths of everyone you love.” Barbarian takes a step forward and Donnie drags Mikey away, feet dragging on the concrete as he struggles to get them to cooperate.

They shouldn’t be taking this long to get the crystal. Are Leo and Donatello in trouble? Was it a mistake to send them away?

Donnie’s battle shell sparks dangerously as he attempts to get airborne again. Mikey gasps when they stumble back to the ground, shell bumping harshly against the edge of the metal. He gets a rushed stream of apologies while getting a grip on the pain, and then has to whip his hand out to send a stream of mystic fire that hits a pouncing Barbarian.

They shriek and crash into the wall beside them. Donnie hurriedly pulls them even further away as Mikey’s energy flags even more. With one quick poke to his mystic and ninpō, he knows that he could maybe manage one more trick before his mystic is depleted and he’ll have to resort to drawing on his ninpō. He doesn’t want to be forced to do that again, but if Leo and Donatello don’t get back soon–

A swirling blue portal opens right in front of where Barbarian is throwing off the rubble of the building, larger than the one Leo and Donatello left in. Mikey lets out a breath that the plan is actually coming together, and is gratefully dragged along to the huddle the others have created.

He turns drooping eyes towards the glow of the portal, waiting anxiously for Leo or Donatello to come tumbling through. Everyone reels back in shocked delight as instead of a turtle, the large, crocodilian form of Leatherhead comes barreling through the blue, slamming Barbarian back into the rubble and snapping his jaws onto the side of the mech. Barbarian bucks and rakes a claw down his scaly back, ripping it open, but Leatherhead refuses to let go, latching on tighter.

“Leatherhead!” Michelangelo calls out, pained as the large mutant gains even more claw marks along his back and sides. Leatherhead merely locks his jaw with an angered growl. Leonardo has to hold his alternate back from rushing forward, Raph helping when he almost breaks out of Leonardo’s grip.

Mikey’s heart pangs along with Michelangelo’s cries as Leatherhead refuses to let up on his assault. Barbarian screeches louder when he readjust and catches the edge of their gills in the bulk of his teeth, clamping down and rolling with the flesh in his mouth.

Leo and Donatello popping out of the portal, Splinter being held up by Donatello as Leo holds the crystal, draws his eyes away from the tussle between Barbarian and Leatherhead. A small knot releases in his chest seeing that Splinter is relatively okay, even if he clutches a red spot tight against his side. They hobble their way towards their huddle and Leo unceremoniously shoves the crystal into Donnie’s hands.

“Here, nerd stuff, figure this out and find us a portal to whatever Dimension X is,” Leo orders. Donnie stares, disturbed, at the savage attack being carried out by Leatherhead. “Oh, we picked up some stragglers on the way, and boy is Dundee over there out for blood.”

“Master Splinter!” Leonardo exclaims, abandoning any semblance of being stoic and launching himself at him. Michelangelo and Raphael follow suit, Mikey stumbling away from Donnie to join the impromptu hug.

“My boys,” Splinter breathes, bringing them all as close as he can. Dad grumbles off to the side and yelps when April pokes him with the edge of her bat with a warning glare. He takes a moment to scan all of the new faces from Mikey’s dimension then focuses back on those in his arms. “Thank goodness you’re alright.”

“Uh, yeah, about that, we’re not about to be in a second,” Raph announces in a strained voice. Mikey pulls away and watches, eyes wide and gut dropping as Barbarian roars and finally rips Leatherhead off of them. He struggles weakly in Barbarians grip, blood oozing from the deep gashes in his back. They throw him off to the side until he rolls to a stop and doesn’t move other than to take deep, halting breaths.

“No!” Michelangelo breaks away from the group, glaring fiercely up at Barbarian as they emerge from the rubble. Sleek blood drips from their right side and adds to the mess of their mangled flesh. “How could you!”

“Quite easily,” Barbarian shoots back, licking their lips and snarling. “That animal's flesh was very enjoyable to rip into. Almost as much as those fragile shells.”

Anger sparks sharply in Mikey’s chest at the callous words. Everyone else reacts the same, glaring daggers at Barbarian, not that he can see that. Heat burns inside him, and even though his stores are almost completely empty his mystic wants to come to the surface and doubly repay the pain he inflicted on Leatherhead.

“The nearest portal is only a block away, I suggest we hurry this along,” Donnie hisses lowly, gauntlet raised and crystal tucked under his other arm.

Barbarian freezes, and Mikey knows they heard that.

They straighten up with a low chuckle. “Still trying to play with portals, are we? Even after it’s never truly worked for any of you in the past? It appears you are running out of unique ideas.”

“Hey, if it works, why bother fixing it.” Leo shifts into a ready stance, everyone else following his example and getting ready to make a break for the portal to Dimension X. “Clearly you fall for the same trick every time. Maybe you’re running out of ideas.”

Mikey’s tackled to the ground before he can comprehend what happened, and quickly pushes up with a wince at the weight on top of him. Raphael hops off of him and yanks him back to his feet, any sense of gentleness gone as he drags him along the road to follow where Leo is frantically portaling away from Barbarian who is frothing at the mouth with anger.

“Nice going,” Raphael mutters sarcastically as they run, following the path they made down the street. “Make them even angrier and more homicidal. Barely know the guy and I am not surprised at all.”

Mikey doesn’t respond, more focused on keeping pace with the running and pushing all the hurt and aches deep down where he’ll be able to deal with them later. He’s putting his hope in Leo that he actually has a plan and is leading Barbarian towards their goal and isn’t simply panicking. Granted, he wouldn’t blame Leo if he was only panicking, but they can do that a different time.

Mikey tries to stop as Splinter and Michelangelo break off to go towards Leatherhead, but doesn’t get a chance to see what kind of state the large mutant has been left in. Raphael drags him around the corner and, thankfully, he spots a portal that leads to a bright pink, wispy atmosphere that he’d recognise anywhere.

That’s where they need Barbarian.

Without a word, Raph, Leo, and Donnie all switch gears from running for their lives to doing their best to corral Barbarian closer to the portal. Raphael stays by his side and Mikey anxiously watches the others subtly herd them around the street. He jerks forward, fully intending to get in and help (especially when Leo takes a hit that he walks away limping from), but Raphael grips his arm before he can get too far away.

Tugging on the hold, he squares his jaw and stares into Raphael’s pinched expression. “I need to help them,” he states as calmly as he can. Raphael scans his face, trying to find something, and even though he doesn’t seem to find it he lets him go anyway.

“I know, just…” They both flinch as Leonardo gets thrown into Raph, thankfully breaking his fall but sending them skidding harshly down the street. “Remember your promise, alright?”

Mikey swallows through a dry throat. He definitely doesn’t want Raphael to know how close he came to breaking that promise earlier, nor how he’s still willing to do it again. And he can’t lie to him, not at a moment like this where everything hands so precariously in the balance. Especially when he can shift that balance heavily in their favor.

Thankfully, he doesn’t have to try and lie his way out of it. Barbarian screeches and gains all of their attention as they claw through the bulk of Donnie’s battle shell. Mikey’s heart stops and he’s lurching towards them at the same time Leo screams in fear. Donnie drops the crystal and quickly scrambles across the ground, reassuring him that the claws didn’t get too far down, but he’s forced to abandon the faux shell in order to dodge the fierce stomp. Barbarian’s foot smashes the metal shell to bits, barely missing the crystal dropped next to it.

“Do you truly believe you can still win?” Barbarian chuckles, tail whipping as they very pointedly avoid stepping near the portal to Dimension X. “Even if you manage to send me away, I will ensure that at least one of you continues to suffer by my hand. There’s no escaping this fate.”

Mikey skids to a stop next to where Donnie scrambles further back, putting himself between his brother and the monster in front of them. Barbarian focuses solely on him as their grin grows, their blood dripping from between their teeth. He knows there’s nothing false about what they’re saying, but he’s going to make sure that the only one who suffers any more is him.

There’s no use in prolonging it. They’re going to try and try and try to get Barbarian through the portal and fail every single time until one of them is hurt beyond recovery. Then it’ll all be over. They’d lose.

Mikey’s not about to let that happen. May as well cut to the chase while he still has the chance. While his family is still whole. Still safe. And while he still has the ability to make a difference before crumbling to dust. What’s a little bit more pain to add to the mix, huh? It’s not like he’s not used to it at this point, as all his injuries pang to remind him.

Taking a deep breath, Mikey steps forward. He tries his best to hide his limp and stand strong as he inches closer to Barbarian, their sickly grin growing ever wider. The cautious voices of his family call his name but he ignores it. He reaches deep into himself, centering on all the energy–the mystic, his ninpō brushing against the still forms of his brothers’ until he reluctantly pulls away in one of the hardest acts he’s ever done–and gathers any of the courage he has left.

He’s in pain. He’s tired. His very being burns in overexertion and even his eyes struggle to be kept open. Fear overcomes every pore and invades his every sense.

He still doesn’t know if this will actually work.

But at his core, Mikey hates not getting what he wants. And what he wants is Barbarian gone, and his family safe.

Pushing everything else away, Mikey raises his arms, and let’s everything burn.

With a scream Mikey watches as columns of his mystic flames erupt out of the ground and converge towards the portal, trapping Barbarian in a hollow, searing tunnel. The only ways out are through Mikey or through Dimension X. They crouch down to avoid the flames dancing over their head and send a scathing snarl towards him.

His mystic runs dry almost immediately with the display, scars flaring brighter and arms turning into their own inferno. Mikey hesitates for only a moment, reaching to draw power from his ninpō as soon as he sees the tunnel of flames starting to flicker away. Muffled screams try to reach his ears through the roar but he doesn’t acknowledge them. His ninpō flickers as he draws on its stores, dragging his body down with it and his arms slowly start to flake away once again.

Welp, nothing new there. And the pain, every single debilitating drop of it, will all be worth it once Barbarian gets the ending they deserve.

Mikey pants, realizing he’s losing strength quickly and body positively burning with the mystic fire’s glow. Nevertheless he keeps up the flames, slowly bringing his screaming arms closer together to cage Barbarian in an ever tighter space. His entire being scorches but he can’t stop now, not when they’re so close.

His breathing stutters at their enraged snarl, but he keeps up his assault through the slicing, burning pain. The hole in his shell throbs with pins and needles, unbearable, but he pulls through and doesn’t allow himself to falter.

“You’re merely killing yourself, mouse,” Barbarian spits, flexing their claws. “Your power and will may be strong but your body is weak. Your body will not survive much longer.”

Mikey blocks out their words, focusing completely on his one goal. Barbarian needs to get into that portal if it’s the last thing he does. His skin starts to flake faster and despite his brothers’ energy swirling erratically around his ninpō, he can viscerally feel his own slowly fading under the need to keep his flames steady.

Blearily, he can hear his family hoarsely shouting over the roar of his mystic energy. Everything is garbled, but there’s the uneven pitch of panic, especially from his Dad, that rings clear. They’re all trying to get to him, and Mikey wants so badly to let them, but he can’t let up for even a second. As soon as he does, Barbarian would be free and they’d have to start over, fight harder than before, and Mikey wouldn’t be able to survive that. He’s not sure any of them would live through it.

Gritting his teeth, he takes an agonizing step forward, pushing the flames closer and closer, closing in on Barbarian. Skin ablaze, muscles shaking, and pained tears leaking down his cheeks, he has no room to concentrate on anything other than Barbarians crazed smirk and the fleeting sense of terror hiding behind his pain.

“Is this how you would prefer to die? For a ‘just’ cause? They’ll never forgive you,” they spit. The flames are finally getting to them, heating up the metal and making it clear there’s no brute forcing through them. Not if they want to get out unscathed, and Mikey sure as hell won’t let that happen.

“Maybe, but they’ll be alive,” Mikey chokes out through his tears. Every single part of him feels like a livewire about to explode. His brothers’ ninpō flutter frantically around his own as it grows smaller and smaller, feeding his mystic and the flames surrounding them while draining his very soul in the process. “That’s more than you’ll be able to say.”

“If that’s what you wish to believe.” Barbarian goes to launch himself forward but Mikey’s faster. He throws up a weaker, but still thick, wall of orange mist between them, stopping the attack before it can begin. It leaches more power from him and his muscles shake uncontrollably, skin nearly a pure, golden glow all the way to his elbows. “Your death will mean nothing.”

Everything hurts.

“You only delay the inevitable.”

His shell feels like it’s tearing off, starting right at the gaping wound being held together by Donnie’s experimental field medicine. Barbarian rakes their claws against the wall, creating a small tear. Mikey holds strong, pouring out more power that he doesn’t really have.

“They will forget your memory. All that will remain of you is a blank face of a useless martyr.”

Another flurry of swipes, the tears in the wall growing larger. Mikey falters, arms dropping and flames flickering for just a moment until he pushes even further. His ninpō barely survives, no bigger than the wick of a candle. Mikey gives all that he can. The wall nearly crumbles.

“I will always be here. Nothing you do will destroy how I’ll live on in their minds.”

He can’t feel his fingers. His eyes droop, pain crossing a threshold he didn’t know was possible.

Mikey’s really going to die here. More tears flood his eyes and a whispered apology to his family passes through his lips. He can’t let them out. His legs are on the edge of collapse, vision blurry from a mix of searing pain and watery tears, but he has to do this. For the world. For his world. For his family.

Managing one more deep breath, his lungs seize as he pushes himself past the limit.

Suddenly, a strong form drapes itself over his shell, pressing in tight and wrapping arms around his neck. There’s a low gasp and then a guttural scream in his ear, but it’s overshadowed by a new surge of energy leaching into his body. Mikey’s ninpō latches onto the source of power, even without knowing where it’s coming from, and that’s all he needs.

In a wave of his hands the wall is reinforced. Barbarian lets out a piercing shriek and goes ballistic, but his mystic holds strong. The arms around his neck lock tighter, hot breath washing over the back of his head in another choked yell. Mikey glares with all of the hatred in his body and shoves the barrier back until Barbarian is clawing for purchase to stay out of the portal. He keeps straining, and as only one clawed hand is left outside the portal, Mikey gathers his last bit of strength and throws all of his fire, mysticism, and righteous rage into propelling Barbarian into Dimension X.

Barbarian screams in outrage. The columns of fire immediately drop and Mikey allows himself to collapse under the weight draped across his shell. His ninpō flickers, barely hanging on and being almost entirely supported by his brother's protective energies holding him together.

He pries his eyes open, unaware when he had closed them. He watches, lethargic, as Donnie attaches a rocket construct to the crystal and launches it into the portal after Barbarian. Through blurry eyes, Mikey observes as Barbarian whips around in the lower gravity of Dimension X, frantically trying to gain their bearings. They lock onto the feeling of the portal, a smirk appearing on their face. Barbarian attempts to launch themselves back through, cackling all the while, only to collide directly with the crystal floating in their path.

The last thing he sees is a blinding flash, the portal snapping closed, and Barbarian’s anguished, stupefied expression. Then it’s quiet.

They did it. He did it.

Mikey can only focus on his pounding heartbeat and his harsh, wheezing gasps. He’s alive. They’re all alive, and they’re gone. Every single Kraang is gone for good.

The thing on top of him twitches, and panic weakly latches onto him as he registers the gray, wrinkled and stiff three fingered hands lying by his head. There’s a pained groan, more movement above him, and then a flutter of red fabric in the corner of his eye.

The adrenaline abruptly leaves every pore in his body and before he can truly grasp the thought of who’s on top of him everything is simply fire. He lets out a sob.

His shell is screaming, the missing chunk throbbing.

Every single scar burns and the skin of his hands and fingers are lost in a mess of red.

The gash on his calf oozes through the bandages, ripped back open at some point in the middle of battle.

His right hip aches all the way through the bone, becoming impossibly stiff.

If Mikey didn’t know any better, he’d say he wouldn’t be able to come back from all of this. As it is, it’s a miracle he’s still conscious. But even that is slowly fading away in the wake of peace overwhelming his senses.

The body on top of him is carefully pulled off, letting him breathe a bit easier. A mudded blob of panicked and concerned voices hover around him, and Mikey sluggishly blinks more tears away. He flinches at the gentle–so gentle–hand that lands on the base of his shell, another large one coming under him to slowly flip him up.

Mikey coughs, breath stuttering as the move jostles every ache and pain in his body. His eyes scrunch tight and he cradles his hands to his chest. There’s a shushing in Mikey’s ear as he whimpers at all the pain, and it’s just enough to get him to crack open his eyes.

He’s greeted by the pained, blurry forms of his family hovering above him, and oh–that’s Raph that is slowly bringing him into his arms. Eyelids fluttering, he filters through the forms and identifies most of his family surrounding him and another shrouded figure right beside him, unmoving. Mikey blinks furiously, trying his best to make out what’s happening, but then there’s a soft hand landing on his forehead.

Dad’s calm voice breaks through the fog of confusion and agonizing pain. There’s a strain to it, but the tone is comforting. Mikey breaks his gaze from the figure beside him (Raphael, it’s Raphael and oh no what happened to him–) and his eyes shift to land on a hazy middle distance.

All of the voices flood back in, and it’s too much. Mikey’s mind is completely overwhelmed, and the call of darkness is getting sweeter and sweeter, a break from hurting sounding like absolute heaven.

And, as he drifts off into a calmer, less painful place, at least he can be at peace that he did what was needed. His family is safe. Everything is safe. Kraang is finally, finally, gone for good.

Mikey hopes his family is proud of him.

Chapter Text

There’s a backdrop of pretty, swirling colors, and he really doesn’t want to leave this floaty place that he’s found himself in. Everything around him, within him, radiates peace. It’s nice. Better than whatever was happening before. Mikey knows it will fade the second he thinks about it too hard. There’s no aches, no pains, and no troubles. Nothing but calm and tranquility. His mind is stuffed with cotton and for once it doesn’t feel like a bad thing. Everything is quiet.

Mikey allows himself to drift further. Any sense of time and self is nonexistent.

He’s not sure how long he’s lost in this space, but slowly things start to trickle back. He tries to ignore it. Mikey’s not sure he wants to leave yet. Soft voices reach him through his willful prison, taunting him to let go and reach for their source. He won’t, not right now, but…

“He’s stable…–ergy will take time…can help replenish–”

The voice sounds purple, and crackly, but nevertheless it soothes him enough to fall back. That voice takes care of things, fixes things. They always do, even if it seems utterly impossible. Mikey doesn’t have to worry about anything with him around.

He slowly fades back to nothing. Mikey’s willing to float for a little longer. What would be the harm? It’s nice here, wherever ‘here’ happens to be. Then, an undetermined time later, another voice breaks through. The temptation to reach out wriggles along his consciousness, but he can’t justify leaving.

“–apple does go on pizza, lamer me…–your Michelangelo will agree…–smoothie was alive, I swear–”

Nonexistent lips try twitching into a smile at the blue, flowing words. His tone is relaxed, which means there’s no danger and he’s right by Mikey’s side. He’s got everything covered fine. There’s no need to panic, he’s not needed right now.

Mikey thinks about fighting against the static to get to the place that sounds more fun. Maybe he’s ready now? He knows it’ll hurt as soon as he tries to leave, but it’s sounding like it might be worth it. Before he can commit either way, the peace drags him down further and he only manages a few tugs towards the voice until he gives in and falls back. No use in pushing against it, not with how peaceful it is.

Next time. Next time, he’s going to try and get out no matter how hard he has to push. Mikey’s willing to sacrifice the peace to get to them. It only feels right, and the orange that hides even deeper inside him gives a bare flicker at the plan. The orange, the feeling of fun, of energy, wants the voices to stay and Mikey wholeheartedly agrees. This place is pretty loney, actually. He doesn’t want to be alone anymore.

It could be hours or mere seconds, but fate brings another voice through the floaty wall, louder and more commanding than the others.

“...gonna get better. You have to. No way you’re leavin’ Raph with those knuckleheads, especially since I have even more little brothers to look after now.”

There’s a pause. Mikey fights hard to get closer to that warm, red voice. The protector, who sounds so sad. He shouldn’t be sad, and Mikey knows he can fix that if he can just get to him. The floaty place whispers to him, trying to get him to stay, just a little longer. Part of him wants to listen and ignore everything else. A larger, glowing orange ball of sparks pushes against the peace, even when he starts to feel his physical body again and he doesn’t like all the aching that’s happening.

“You picked a good bunch though, Mikey. I swear they’ve been here just as much as we have. Little Red is trying to stay glued to your side. He should be bedridden, too, and it was hard to stop ‘em crawling back out. The other’s didn’t seem surprised.”

He pushes further, the warm, steady red becoming ever clearer. Mikey ignores the heaviness seeping into him the closer he gets to consciousness. His entire being pangs, but a welcome weight is settled across his lower plastron and legs. He uses the contact to pull himself further from the peace and slams back into the pain of his body all at once.

Oh, Pizza Supreme everything aches.

“Don’t blame him, though. Not like I’ve exactly been keen on leavin’ either.” Mikey tries his best to pry his eyes open when the red voice sighs. They’re nearly cemented shut, and he’s not sure he wants to know how long he's been out of it. “I also know that what you did was real stupid, and what he did was just as dumb. But…can’t help but be grateful to him. To all of them, for protecting you.”

Everything is so heavy. He’s starting to regret his decision to leave that place of before. But he pushes through and finally manages to crack an eye open. Immediately Mikey slams it back shut and scrunches his face with a stringy whine. Who thought hanging a heat lamp as bright as the sun straight over his head was a good idea?

The red sucks in a harsh breath, a large hand rubbing lightly on his calf. “Mikey?” He whispers, raspy.

Mikey scrunches his face and gives it one more try, peeling his eyes open. The lamp makes him blink furiously to get rid of the spots in his vision and he curses the person who did that. The hand on his calf gives a comforting squeeze, contrasting the pricking, itchy pain on his other leg.

Slowly, his sight clears and he's met with Raph’s wide eyed, hopeful stare. His head lays right on his stomach, staring up at Mikey in wonder. One of his arms drapes across his legs and acts as a living weighted blanket. Mikey takes a deep breath and pauses at the ache of his ribs. He exhales in little jolting shocks that jostles Raph’s head.

He finally focuses on his brother and swallows, licking his lips. Raph gives him a big, wet smile.

“Hey, big man. Welcome back to the land of the living.”

Mikey grunts, opening his mouth to croak, “R-raph…”

His brother's eyes fill with tears and Mikey blearily recognizes the swishing of Raph’s tail gently sweeping across the floor. Raph swallows down the obvious lump in his throat, lip trembling and not taking his gaze off of him.

“Yeah, that’s me. You’re big bro is here, and he ain’t ever–”

“Raph,” Mikey says again, much clearer but voice cracking with disuse. It kinda hurts to try and talk, but he needs Raph to know this. It’s too important. He needs to address what he’s said. “I’m…”

“You need something? Oh, shoot, I was supposed to get the others if you woke up–”

“I’m…not stupid.”

Raph frowns at him, and after a moment of simply staring, Mikey steadfast and Raph in surprise, Mikey cracks a small, joking smile. His brother blinks once, twice, and erupts into hysterical laughter. It rattles around in his head, causing a wince and a slight throb in his temples, but a heavy weight on his chest lightens and Mikey’s smile widens.

Just as Raph wipes the mix of joyful and relieved tears from his eyes, the door to the room (which looks like it might be some kind of makeshift med-bay?) bursts open and Leo and Donnie fight to get through the doorway first. They’re using every dirty trick in the book to get past each other, and it’s not until Dad skitters between their legs that they reach a truce.

Mikey blinks sluggishly as the other edge of the bed dips. Dad’s warm hand lands on his cheek and wipes gently under his eye, brushing over a bandage on his skin. His teary gaze doesn’t seem to know where on Mikey’s face to focus.

“Oh, my boy, I am very happy to see those eyes, even if they don’t look quite the same,” Dad sniffles. The sight of his tears brings some to Mikey’s own eyes. Dad isn’t supposed to be upset, either, and knowing that he’s the reason Dad’s so untethered sends a pang of sadness through him.

“Yes, even if Raphala was ordered to tell us when you awoke–” Donnie points a mean glare Raph’s way that his oldest brother simply rolls his eyes at, “–I am…relieved, to see you looking alive again.”

Donnie immediately goes to flit about the machines that Mikey just now notices surround him, bringing up a multitude of holograms filled with charts and numbers. He adjusts some kind of knob and the aching and stinging pain in his body starts to dull a little bit more. Mikey wouldn’t be able to tell what all those numbers meant even without all of his thoughts being diluted and fuzzy, but Donnie looks pleased enough with whatever he’s seeing. He flicks a bag filled with a glittery, teal substance hanging on an IV pole, and Mikey follows the tube coming off of it straight into his leg.

Brows furrowing, Mikey looks down at where an IV should be inserted and is met with both of his arms wrapped in an absurd amount of dressings. His hands aren’t even visible. He tries to wiggle his fingers and feels a dull pang, barely able to move through what basically amounts to two full arm casts.

“Don’t even try it, bro. Your arms are in time-out,” Leo explains after Mikey glares at where his hands are supposed to be.

That’s not fair. His arms don’t deserve to be in time-out. They didn’t do anything wrong.

“And there’s the painkillers talking.”

Mikey blinks lazily at Leo’s amused face where he leans over Raph’s shell. Oh, that’d explain why his body feels a little less like a smashed piñata and why everything’s fuzzy. At least he can still think somewhat clearly. Dad’s hand continues its soothing rub over his cheek and he immediately forgets the reason he was upset in the first place, leaning into the caress.

Yeah, that feels nice. Having his family around feels really good, too. But it still feels like something is missing.

“Well, the Aprils’, Casey, and Junior are out trying to find more supplies for us, but they’ll be back soon. Draxum is taking care of some things back home,” Donnie says, stopping his fiddling and leaning against the side of the bed where Dad is perched. That knowledge soothes a part of him, but there’s something more.

That something comes crashing through the doorway the very next second. The only thing that stops him from slamming straight into Mikey on the bed is a quick block from Raph’s arm.

“Orange! You’re finally awake!” Michelangelo exclaims, trying to climb over Raph’s arm to get to him but failing spectacularly. “Thank god, it’s been almost a week and I think I’m going insane–”

“Hey! Tone it down, Mike!” Leonardo hisses as he darts into the room and starts prying Michelangelo off Raph. He hangs on with a deathgrip and a chorus of whiny ‘no’s. Mikey smiles at all of them and watches with delayed amusement.

“I just wanna hug, I promise!” Michelangelo pouts. Leonardo finally pulls him off of Raph’s arm and drags him out of the room even though it’s clear neither of them really want to leave. “Why are you being so mean to me!?” He yells, going limp in Leonardo’s grip.

“I’m not being mean, we agreed on a schedule,” Leonardo recites. It’s not the first time and it won’t be the last time he has to remind him, then. “Let them have their chance, they haven’t seen him for a long time.”

“Neither have I!”

“He’s literally been living here for months–”

“Guys, our dear Raphael is trying to escape!” Donatello screeches from somewhere else in the lair, obviously panicked.

Mikey giggles at them as they stumble out of the room and Leonardo pointedly closes the door behind them, cutting off Michelangelo’s protests. Leo, Raph, and Dad similarly look on in amusement. Donnie simply glares at the closed door with mild annoyance.

“Hm, funny,” Mikey mumbles, a smile plastered on his face and chest growing warm. It takes him a moment to recognize that it’s his ninpō that’s creating that feeling, but once it clicks he fully embraces it. A bit more clarity returns to his mind and he looks at the family surrounding him. That clarity also brings sharper pain but he’s willing to ignore that.

He squirms under the feeling of their eyes on him, not quite knowing what they want him to do. Should Mikey start telling stories of his time in a different dimension? Or maybe defend the others a little since it looks like they’re not completely meshing yet (at least in Donnie’s case)? How about an apology for disappearing for months and only showing back up when he’s in the middle of a life or death battle and almost dying right after they got reunited?

Yeah, that seems like the best option.

“I’m sorry,” he says, trying his best to sit up. His right hip sends a shot of pain down his leg and he’s immediately lowered back down by his Dad’s hand on his forehead.

“You don’t have anything you need to apologize for, Mikey.”

“No, I think he does,” Donnie cuts in, ignoring the unamused stare Raph gives him. “‘Cause what in the name of Archimedes were you thinking!? Why would you risk your life using mysticism like that, especially right after we got you back!”

Mikey shrinks back and Dad says his brother's name in warning but Donnie resolutely does not look at him. He only has eyes for Mikey, gaze glossy. “I just…I needed to save everyone, and that’s the only way that was kinda working. I didn’t want to do it–”

“Like Leo didn’t want to? He’s always been a bad influence.”

“Hey, I am an amazing influence.”

“Yeah? Where do you think Mikey got that whole ‘self-sacrifice’ idea from? I doubt he was randomly inspired and he has always tried to copy you more than anyone else, much to my chagrin.”

“No, I’m the oldest. I should have been keeping more of an eye on him. And I haven’t exactly been the best example when it comes to dangerous stuff, either.”

Mikey immediately opens his mouth to refute that, because this is so wrong, oh no, he didn’t mean for this to turn into a blame game–

“It is genetic, I am afraid,” Dad says. “The Hamato’s know nothing other than sacrifice when the odds look grim. If anything I should be blamed for not taking more care to keep you all away from it when I still had the chance.”

“Would you all just stop!?” Mikey finally snaps. It’s not quite as sharp as he was hoping for with his scratchy throat, but it got the point across, at least. His head is still spinning but he can’t let this go on. “No one should be blaming anyone but me. It was my decision, a choice that only I made. The others tried to talk me out of it. I still did it. So stop trying to blame yourselves for something you guys had no part in, alright? I’m my own person!”

There’s a small silence where they simply stare at him until they take an almost collective sigh in admonishment. Taking the chance for what it is, Mikey continues, trying to formulate through his still hazy mind everything that he’s been needing to say for a while.

“And…I do think I need to apologize for some other things,” he mumbles, glaring at Raph until his mouth snaps shut on an unhappy grumble. “It’s my fault I ended up in a different dimension in the first place. I don’t think I’d change what happened, because I got so much more family out of it, but I’m sorry I had to worry you guys so much. I never wanted that.”

“Once again, stop apologizing. If we can’t blame ourselves for how this whole thing started, we’ll be blaming those Foot Clan dorks. They got you all riled up. We took care of those two, so it’s water under the bridge for now,” Leo says, waving his hand dismissively.

Mikey frowns, thinking that over. While he supposes that it is true, those guys really sucked, none of it would have happened if he had been honest with his family about everything going on after the Invasion. Had he actually been open like Dr. Feelings was always preaching then maybe the Foot Clan wouldn’t have gotten under his skin like they did.

“They shouldn’t have, though,” Mikey points out. “I should have been able to keep my cool.”

“You were scared, and they were purposely making it worse. I don’t believe it’s worth thinking about too hard,” Donnie replies.

Mikey vehemently shakes his head at that, ignoring the dizziness the action brings. “It is worth thinking about. I…” he trails, swallowing around the lump in his throat.

He needs to be honest with them. About everything. About all of those feelings he bottled up during and after the invasion that led them to this outcome. Mikey already spilled his guts to Raphael, but the family in front of him are the ones who really need to hear it.

Despite that, he’s scared about what will happen after. He knows they won’t abandon him or think he’s weak for sharing, but there’s still that niggling of doubt that pokes through the cracks. It makes it incredibly hard to open his mouth and just be honest.

“I’m…not okay,” Mikey grunts out. It feels like pulling teeth, each word being dragged out of his mouth. It’s akin to torture to think about what he needs to talk about. Everyone around him immediately tenses and Donnie raises his holograms again until he shakes his head. “I don’t mean physically. Although, yeah, everything sucks in that department too. It’s my…mind that’s kinda screwy. And it has been for a while.”

“Why didn’t you tell us earlier, big man? You know we would have tried to help,” Raph asks quietly. The large hand on his leg gently rubs along his calf, soothing the bits of nerves floating around Mikey’s body. It helps get his thoughts together and the next words come slightly easier. The thoughts still feel like they're going to choke him when they come out, though.

“Yeah, I do. You guys are great like that. But…” Mikey bites his lip, unable to look at any of their concerned stares. It makes it less painful to get through this even if it’s a cowardly thing to do. “You were all dealing with stuff that was so much worse. The things going on in my head aren’t as important. Besides, it’s my job to be the emotional paddle. I thought I had it handled, and I learned the hard way that it was actually spiraling into something worse.”

“‘Aren’t as important’?” Dad whispers, obviously disturbed. “Orange, you and your feelings are as important as everyone else's. Where on Earth did you get the silly idea that we thought otherwise?”

“Bad brain juice, I guess,” Mikey mumbles. He looks back up and meets the soft eyes of his family, making the muscles that had been tense relax. Donnie looks to be lost in thought while Raph and Leo give him small, sad smiles.

“Well get it out of your head,” Leo says. “It’s not your ‘job’ to listen to us go off about our problems all the time. I thought that was something you liked to do and that’s why we kept doing it.”

“I do!” Mikey quickly confirms. The thought of his brothers never coming to him for advice again sends a pang of panic through him. “I do like it! Helping you guys makes me feel good, too.”

“We never really return the favor, though,” Raph sighs, running a tired hand over his face. “Never thought ‘bout it like that. We should have thought about it. Why didn’t we think about it?”

“Because we always thought you’d come to us if something was bothering you.” Donnie scratches irritably at the side of his neck, looking unbearably sad. “I never would have theorized that you’d be a dumb-dumb with your own emotions since you’ve always been so good at dealing with ours. Not that I feel any emotions, anyway.”

“Still lying to yourself?”

“Shut it before I make you, Leo.”

“Boys,” Dad warns, and they both back down with sharp glares sent each other's way. He turns back to Mikey and rubs at the top of his head. “I promise we will all do better to not burden you any more than you are willing, how does that sound?”

Mikey smiles, leaning into his Dad’s comforting hand. His heart starts to slow in his chest, happy that they had come to some sort of conclusion. “Yeah, that sounds good.”

“And in return,” Leo continues, reaching around Raph and tapping him lightly on the forehead to grab his attention. “You have to talk with us about what’s going on in that big head. No more of the ‘it’s my job’ stuff. This therapy schtick isn’t only about us, it’s about you, too. Capisce?”

“Caposh,” Mikey says slowly, and only after the others all give him expectant looks. It definitely won’t be easy for him after going so long keeping his innermost thoughts to himself, but he’s willing to try. The trial period is certainly going to be rough as everyone gets used to it. If it’s anything like speaking with Raphael, though, then it should move along eventually.

Mikey immediately reconsiders that statement. That talk felt like getting his face bashed in and then only getting a band-aid or two for the damage. It made the hurt visible to others, and it helped them to know when things could be too much, but it still stung. He definitely doesn’t want to go through it in that way again. It helped his relationship with Raphael and the others, but hopefully it won’t be like that when he feels the need to talk again.

A small silence descends as they bask in the promise made between them. Mikey closes his eyes to enjoy the space his family takes up, letting whatever drugs they have him on cloud his mind a little bit more. He drifts into the soft beeping and the sound of his family's steady breathing, all of it permeating through him. He jolts as a spitfire of warmth cascades through his chest. Eyes popping open in alarm, his heart starts to race with the errant thought that his mystic was trying to act up again, then immediately relaxes when his brothers’ ninpō quickly brushes against his own to calm it. The warmth recedes, and his pulse slows as he realizes it wasn’t anything serious.

Mikey blinks and purposefully reaches for his ninpō again. His eyes widen when it feels considerably stronger than it was even during the battle. It’s still weaker than before he traveled to a different dimension, but it’s the strongest it’s been since finding himself here.

He once again looks to his family who study him silently, waiting for him to say something. Mikey thinks back on everything he’s wanted to tell them about since being separated and one moment sticks out clear in his mind like a bright green ‘I told you so’.

Mikey lets out an amused huff. “Guess Grampa Saki was right about all that ‘talking’ stuff. Who knew that he actually had a good point?”

“...Saki as in Oroku Saki? Like, big Shredder guy?” Raph questions with furrowed brows. “When’d you ever talk to him? Thought he was ignoring us after we saved the world and his soul from total destruction?”

“I think he was, but there was this whole thing with mushrooms and hallucinations? Turns out if you scream his name in terror right before passing out he’ll answer the call!” Mikey explains happily. “He wasn’t super helpful, though, so I wouldn’t recommend it. Gram Gram is a lot better.”

“What have you and those abominations that share our names been doing that involved ‘mushrooms’ and ‘hallucinations’?” Donnie asks, rubbing his snout. “I thought this dimension was supposed to be toned down?”

“Haven’t you been talking with them while I’ve been down and out?” Mikey asks. It strikes him fully in that moment exactly why he’s stuck in a med-bay and his heart leaps into his throat as guilt slams into him. Why didn’t he ask about the others right when he woke up? He can blame it on the drugs, right? “Ohmigosh, are they okay!? I can’t believe I didn’t ask sooner, they got really hurt and–” his lip wobbles as the last thing he remembers was red fabric and gray, shriveled hands. “Where’s Raphael?!”

He shifts in the bed, hip and right arm screaming at him to sit still. Mikey casts a glance to the side and is met with a large packing of dressing where the top of his shell is supposed to be. It’s covered with a hard, plaster-like substance that doesn’t allow for much movement of his shoulder. A tiny green looping heart is drawn on that Mikey knows is his April’s doing.

“Relax hermanito,” Leo soothes. He pushes Mikey lightly back down where he had been attempting to sit up and go find the others himself, a possible broken or dislocated hip be damned. “The others are alright. Well, as alright as they can be.” He pauses, contemplative hand on his chin. “Will you take ‘they’re all alive’ for a hundred?”

“Leo, knock it off. You’re gonna give Mikey a heart attack,” Raph scolds. He’s not wrong. It’s great to know that they’re all still breathing but breathing doesn’t mean that they’re okay. He knows that Michelangelo and Leonardo are up and walking, but what about everyone else?

What about Donatello? Splinter? Leatherhead? And, he cannot emphasize this enough, Raphael?

“Leonardo and Michelangelo escaped with little more than a feeling of complete exhaustion, bumps, and bruises,” Donnie immediately starts to list off before Mikey’s panic can grow. He has a projected image on his gauntlet and his eyes are roving across the spreadsheets at lightning fast speed. “Donatello suffered a mild concussion but is otherwise fine. Master Splinter–”

“You mean Draxum’s new crush–”

“Master Splinter,” Donnie continues louder after Leo gets smacked in the head by Dad’s tail while Raph snickers. “Had to get exactly twelve stitches in the subcostal region and also suffered a concussion and is healing appropriately. The crocodile had much more grievous wounds. He’s currently in the Hidden City getting the appropriate treatment and he’s stable but has yet to wake from a medically induced coma.”

Mikey takes in all the information like a sponge, relaxing with every reassurance that his family and friends are at least on their way to healing. He can see why Donnie finds data collection comforting. The news about Leatherhead is disheartening, but he has hope that he’ll pull through. He may not have known him long, but his friend is tougher than almost anyone else Mikey knows.

“Raphael was a more difficult case,” Donnie says, swiping through more diagrams and eyes flitting over the information. “You were trying to take energy from a mystic source, which he doesn’t have and doesn’t exist in this dimension. So, what you essentially did was rip into his ‘soul’ in order to power your ninpō. In turn, it allowed your mystic powers to keep running. He struggled for a day or two regaining his energy and replenishing his lost ‘soul’, but he is making impeccable progress. It would help if he didn’t have to be barricaded in the dojo for his safety, but I suppose we can only ask for so much. That idiot basically has temporary narcolepsy and still insists he’s fine.”

He releases a small breath he didn’t know he was holding. Mikey may not completely understand what Donnie means by ‘soul’, but he does starkly remember how it felt.

The resource of his ninpō was depleting. He needed something more to keep going. That something came in the form of Raphael, and while the sounds had been muffled and disjointed at the time he remembers a hoarse scream echoing in his ears at the exact same time his ninpō got a boost in power. He’s not sure what or how he ‘drained’ Raphael, but he did, and the immediate guilt he feels lands solidly in his gut.

“None of that, Orange,” Dad says, directing his attention to him before Mikey can spiral further. “No one knew what would happen when that boy bravely did what was needed. It hurts to see the consequences, but we are grateful for his actions. You would have certainly been taken from us had he stood idle.”

“But he still got hurt because of me. Because I couldn’t handle it,” Mikey meekly whispers. “I never wanted anyone to get hurt. He could have died, Dad! And it would have been all my fault.”

“But he didn’t. And after talking with him and his family it is clear that they would not have changed a thing. You all care very deeply for each other, and for that I am eternally grateful.” Dad shivers, moving gently to sit closer to Mikey’s side. “I don’t want to imagine what could have happened had you landed in anyone else's clutches.”

Probably best not to mention he almost got kidnapped by this world's Shredder and Foot Clan, then. Although it could give the others brownie points to know he was rescued before that could happen. Mikey will shelve that story for now.

“We would have beat ‘em to the ground is what,” Raph says. He gives Mikey’s calf a lighthearted shake as his heart swells in affection when his other brothers nod in confirmation.

“Speaking of~” Leo drawls, pushing off of Raph and leaning casually on the railing of Mikey’s bed. “I think you need some more pain meds, don’t you? Yeah, you do, I’m right ‘cause I’m the medic here.”

Mikey’s brow furrows. He feels relatively fine for all the injuries he has, does he really need more meds? There were some needle-like pin pricks that had been coming through the fuzz for a bit but they were easy enough to ignore as long as he didn't move too much.

Oh, well. Doctor Leo’s orders, he supposes.

“Blue, what are you up to?”

“Don’t worry, papi. I’ve got this all under control. Don’t you trust me?” he asks Dad with a short, reassuring pat to the head that he immediately swats away. Leo turns the same nob Donnie did early, but much more harshly this time. A few seconds later a clear liquid mixes with the glittering teal drip of his IV.

His body starts to turn heavy in only a few moments. Mikey blinks rapidly, trying to focus on a single thought going through his head, but it all gets swept away just as fast as it appears. Raph and Leo are bickering about something, but Donnie quickly comes to Leo’s defense which is…worrying, but Mikey doesn’t dwell on it right now.

He can’t, not when everything suddenly feels so bubbly.

“Micheal, did you hear him?” Donnie’s stark voice suddenly comes through the glittering lights. Mikey lolls his head to the side and ends up smushed into Dad’s shoulder. The fur tickles his cheeks and he lets out a tiny giggle. “Leo asked you a question.”

“Hm?” Mikey hums. His eyes focus as much as they can on Leo in the corner of his swimming vision. His brother wears an easy going grin, and Mikey completely glazes over the sharp edge to the smile.

“I asked if you remember that time you came through a portal to the Crying Titan. Looked like you left in a hurry, too. How’d you manage to get back to this place?”

Oh, he remembered that. It really hurt. Felt like he was dying, actually. He technically was at the time. Luckily Donatello was there to save him. Mikey might have hurt him in the process, and he still feels a little guilty for that, but it stopped him from fading away into little pieces of turtle dust. Leo would want to know that, probably.

What was the question?

“‘Tello dragged m’back,” Mikey slurs. “It really hurt. Bad turtle dust.”

Leo’s smile grows taunt and slightly manic. Donnie slowly smirks and starts to stroll out the room without another word, a small gun shaped piece appearing out of the top of his battle shell. Mikey watches, floating in hazy happiness, as Leo saunters after him.

“Make sure you get a scare in for me,” Raph mumbles, but doesn’t rise from his seat. Leo sends him a jaunty pair of finger guns in response.

Huh, well that was weird. Whatever.

Dad shakes his head and tickles Mikey’s beak with his fur. It rattles a sneeze out of him that he simply laughs at, the dull ache in his ribs from the action barely noticeable. Dad’s soft hand comes up to lightly scratch at his scalp. He immediately melts into the touch, chest vibrating in contentment.

“I have not heard that sound since you were very small, Orange,” Dad says in reverence, continuing with the ministrations. The purring doesn’t stop, and another low grumble quickly joins his own and matches the lax feeling melting through his bones.

The word Orange rattles around in his head some more, and he hastily grabs the thought that flows through his head before it gets lost to the haze. He reels back from Dad’s shoulder just enough to angle his face up to meet his curious and amused gaze.

“Sorry for givin’ them that name,” he mumbles. Dad raises his eyebrow and Mikey blinks quickly, trying to keep a grasp on the thought that’s trying to fly away. Whatever medication Leo unloaded into his IV, it must have been in the stash of very good drugs. “Y’know. Orange. Th’as your name for me.”

Dad just smiles gently and cups his face, nuzzling into his forehead with a soft chuff.

“It is alright,” Dad says. He adjusts in the bed so Mikey lays more fully on his shoulder, swinging his arm carefully around him to avoid the multitude of bandages around the upper right part of his shell.

“We can share the name Michelangelo with the others. Heh, I’ll even let them have Orange. Do you want to know why?” Mikey nods his head and snuggles further into his Dad’s warmth, eyes slipping shut. “Because until the end of time, you will be my one and only little clementine.”

He chirps as the warm sensation of his ninpō floods through him. The buzzing purr in his chest continues and he relaxes even further into the deep pool of sweeping comfort.

“Can…can I be your little strawberry?”

An amused huff fans the top of his head. “Yes, Red, you can be my little strawberry.”

All of Mikey's thoughts slip into nothing at the sound of his Dad’s steady breathing, Raph’s tail thumping excitedly along the floor, and the stream of his ninpō swirling in contentment. There may also be a high pitched, muffled shriek that sounds suspiciously like Donatello, followed by the whooshing of flames. He’s too far gone to care about those kinds of details. It’s probably because of the drugs, anyway.

Chapter Text

The silence stretches, but Mikey refuses to back down. They’ve been stuck like this for an entire minute and neither of them is willing to give ground. Everything depends on this.

He narrows his eyes further. His opponent follows his example, still as a statue. Water starts gathering in Mikey’s eyes but he ignores it. There’s a pang of desperation when it’s clear the other’s eyes remain suspiciously dry.

Mikey’s going to win this. He has to.

“It’s not happening. Quit while you’re still ahead,” April hisses, still not breaking the stare. She adjusts her glasses and the glint of it off the heat lamp nearly makes Mikey’s eyes twitch shut. He holds strong.

“It’s going to happen ‘cause I said so,” Mikey fires back. Other April, who’s apparently going by O’Neil now, watches the showdown from the doorway with amusement and confusion both. Plastic bags hang from her arms as Mikey fights to keep his stare with who he thought was his savior.

April merely raises an eyebrow, shifting her weight to the other hip and not relenting in the slightest. Mikey can barely see her through the gathering tears and finally he has to blink. He immediately pouts in the face of his sister's victorious smirk as she breaks her stance and rummages around in her own bag hanging off her forearm.

“And you’re my little brother, therefore I get to boss you around all I want.” April slams a red gatorade on the tiny table by his bed followed by a packet of pudding littered with golden butterflies on the plastic package. “Which means the answer is still no.”

Mikey groans and throws his head back. Why must they torture him like this? He had finally napped away the excess amount of drugs Leo had given him for some reason and he wanted to move. He doesn’t care that his hip had actually been dislocated, he can deal with it. Going to where the others have been bunked up takes priority.

Junior appears at his other side with a grin, reaching over and twisting the cap off the gatorade. He sticks the straw in eagerly and holds it up to Mikey’s mouth. He grumbles, but nevertheless takes a sip through his still pouting mouth. It’s not fair they can bribe him with his favorite flavor.

“But I’m bored,” Mikey whines as soon as the straw is out of his mouth.

“You only just woke up, Orange,” O’Neil points out. She slings her bags onto a larger table across the room and starts to unpack a variety of gauze, bandages, and other dressings.

“And everyone had left me!”

“What am I, turtle soup?” April snips. Mikey shrinks back from her shrewd look with a panicked laugh.

“No no! I love that you’re here!” he quickly defends. Junior shoves the straw back into his face, likely a tactic to make sure he doesn’t put another foot into his mouth. He takes a deep sip before continuing. “But where’d all my bro’s go?”

“Sleeping, hopefully, but they’re probably just back home making sure things aren’t burning down,” Junior chimes in. He eagerly rips into the tiny packages of pudding and inhales an entire cup in one breath. Mikey wiggles in the bed, ignoring the sharp stabs of his injuries, and leans over to knock his forehead into Junior's shoulder.

He startles, blinking down at Mikey quickly before ripping open another packet and pulling a spoon out of one of his pockets. There’s a question somewhere on why he had a spoon in his flannel in the first place, but Mikey decides to let it slide as he gets fed the pudding one scoop at a time.

It’s already getting annoying that he can’t use his hands for anything, and he has barely been awake. Mikey understands he messed them up even more than before, but it’s annoying that he’ll have to ask for everything and anything he needs for the foreseeable future. No matter how willing everyone, especially Junior, is to help him as his hands and arms are confined to their stiff prisons.

Other than this one simple favor that, apparently, can’t be granted.

“You should be sleeping, too,” O’Neil points out while organizing the supplies they brought. “The more you rest the faster you’ll get better.”

“But I was just asleep! And I want to see the others!” Mikey whines. O’Neil gives him a sad smile and walks closer, hovering over Junior’s shoulder where he’s a little too focused on getting the perfect scoop of pudding to give to Mikey.

“And they want to see you too, but they’re all asleep for once and no one is willing to take that away from them. The only one who’s slept somewhat normally while you’ve been out is Raphael but, well, he couldn’t really help it.”

Mikey opens his mouth once again to argue his wants and nearly chokes when Junior shoves the spoon inside. He glares at him and gets a smile that’s a little too innocent in return while he swallows the pudding being force fed to him, apparently. Junior scoops up the last of the cup and Mikey finally sighs in defeat, accepting the last bite with a glum frown.

“Besides, you need to stay attached to the glowy juice, too,” April says and pokes the IV bag leading into his leg. The glittery teal sloshes within its confines, halfway drained. “You could rip it out if we try and move you anywhere.”

“I don’t even know what it is!” Mikey exclaims. He tries to wave his arms to make his point and winces at the pangs that shoot through them. Looks like the dramatics will be taking a bit of a backseat as well. He doesn’t know how he’s going to survive in these conditions.

“Leo didn’t tell you?” Junior pipes up, eyebrows shooting high to his forehead. Mikey despondently shakes his head and the other’s eyes sparkle in excitement. “That’s what’s going to help you get back home! Pa Draxum made it by taking a healing potion and mixing it with saline, polymyxin b, and his back-up store of diluted empyrean. It’ll fix your mystic in no time! Master Michelangelo used to use it after the bigger battles until it ran out and…” he trails, his excitement dimming into a smaller, sad smile. “Well, using that much mystic at once without those boosts definitely took its toll on him, physically and spiritually.”

“Yeah, I bet,” Mikey says quietly after a silent moment. He knows how willing his previous future self probably was to take on that burden, though. From the stories he’s heard from Junior, he was a force to be reckoned with against the Kraang. Master Michelangelo wouldn’t have cared about the price it took to keep the Kraang away from those he loved. Neither did Mikey.

“I’m…going to step out and call Casey, I think,” O’Neil announces softly into the much more somber atmosphere. She slinks out the door without a sound.

Junior blushes and rubs sheepishly at his neck. “Heh, sorry for bringing down the mood.”

“No problemo,” Mikey reassures, giving him a brighter smile. “But y’know, if you want to make it up to me you can help me get out–”

“Don’t try it,” April growls playfully and knocks her knuckles into his temples.

Mikey groans but doesn’t fight it. Figures it would be his sister that’s the one keeping an eye on him now. Not that he isn’t ecstatic to see her, but he’s not going to get anywhere with April in here. She's one of the few people that are immune to his puppy dog eyes. And once she has her mind made up nothing short of the end of the world would change it, and he would know.

He sighs and closes his eyes, pretending to doze as April and Junior carry on a soft conversation complaining about terrible turtle sleeping habits. It takes a herculean effort not to start snickering when April starts chewing Junior out on it, too, which he quickly blames on growing up in the apocalypse which…fair point. Until April claims bull and brings up two certain insomniac turtles he grew up with and he scrambles to defend them. It doesn’t work very well.

Mikey doesn’t realize he nearly falls back to sleep with the playful banter as his backdrop until he’s almost gone. There’s still quite a bit of painkillers swirling in his system that makes all his limbs numb as long as he doesn’t move them too much. The sensation allows him to drift off further than he means to, and he fights back a flinch when the door to his little room closes with a soft ‘click’.

Thinking the coast is clear Mikey lets out a short breath, peeling his eyes open and expecting to be met with an empty room. Instead, he’s nearly given a heart attack when he turns his head and Junior is sitting in his chair with an unnatural stillness, eyes boring holes into Mikey’s own. He squeaks and meets the stare head on, already pouting that he won’t be able to try and escape.

Junior blinks, gaze shooting to the door for a quick moment before landing back on Mikey. He’s resigned himself to actually falling asleep again just to pass the time until Junior squares his jaw and Mikey catches a familiar spark in his eye.

Leaning forward, Mikey gives Junior a mischievous grin. He recognizes that look. It’s the same look Leo gets when he thinks of doing something a little stupid. Mikey likes that look a lot.

“April shouldn’t be back for a bit,” Junior whispers, the ghost of a smirk crossing his face. “Think you’re up for a prison break?”

“Yes yes yes!” Mikey squeals quietly. He sits up with a wince, Casey helping him the rest of the way. His mouth stretches into an excited smile and he wiggles in his bed as Junior gets up and quickly skirts around the end of the bed, grabbing the IV pole holding the teal liquid and wheeling it toward him.

The sparkles catch his attention, and Mikey finds himself wondering how and when Barry figured this system out. He recalls his many rants that empyrean is both dangerous and extremely difficult to acquire safely. It’s why he was so enraged when Dad first destroyed his plans all those years ago and took them from his lab. Barry spent the next thirteen years re-perfecting and gathering the amount of empyrean he needed to get his mutagen right for the Oozequitos, and Mikey was subject to many of the pained and frustrated musing about it during his rehabilitation.

Mikey knows exactly what it means for Barry to be doing this. The subtle way to show he cares by using what could be the last bits of empyrean he has warms his heart to no end. He can’t wait until he sees Barry so he can really express his gratitude, likely to his begrudgement. Maybe he’ll even take up Barry’s offer on getting a real-life therapist to really bring it home.

He startles out of his thoughts as Junior slowly spins Mikey’s legs to hang off of the bed, very careful of the tube attached. Mikey bounces in place and beams a smile at Junior whose expression is twisted in thought.

“Alright, I think I got it,” he whispers, moving the IV pole closer. “You get on my back and you make sure the pole stays with us. Sound good?”

“Aye-aye, Cap’tn!” Mikey says. He scooches closer to the edge of the bed, ignoring the twinges of pain through his hip and the slight dizziness from the movement. Junior smirks and leans down enough for Mikey to wrap his legs as much around his waist as possible. He tries to squeeze enough that the other teen won’t have as much weight to hold up, but his hip won’t really allow it.

He’s about to lean forward and drape himself across his back but hesitates at the last second, casting a glance towards his right shoulder. Will his shell be okay to take the hit? It’s probably going to hurt like something else, even through the plaster.

Oh, well. It’ll be fine as long as he gets to see the others in the dojo.

Junior raises an eyebrow in question, and Mikey takes the leap. He leans forward and as soon as his plastron meets Junior’s back a sparkler shot of pain erupts in his shell. Whimpering he buries his face in a shoulder blade to ride it out, Junior’s whispered worries blurring together until it feels like he can take another breath.

“Fine, I’m okay,” Mikey grits out, breathing out deeply. He slowly adjusts his stiffly wrapped arms to rest more comfortably over Junior’s shoulders and leans further into the warmth.

“Yeah?” Junior asks. Mikey’s not sure he appreciates the tone of sarcasm underlying that word.

“If you don’t think I can handle it, why are you helping me break out,” Mikey mumbles. Junior stands up to his full height and he holds on tighter, adjusting to the change. His vision spins for a moment but he quickly shakes it out.

“Because if you’re anything like Master Michelangelo or Sensei, it’s easier to help you do the stupid things when you’re injured than let you do it by yourself. That way I can at least make sure you don’t hurt yourself more,” he answers simply. Mikey blinks, then gives a tiny chuckle.

He supposes that Junior is right in that regard. While all of them tend to be terrible patients, Mikey and Leo are always the worst of the worst. Raph usually waits until he’s almost better to start doing dumb things again, while Donnie knows the faster he gets better the faster the rest of them will leave him alone to be a hermit in his lab. Leo simply ignores the rules he knows best and Mikey pretends he’s not as hurt as he actually is. That little trick won’t exactly work this time.

“You ready?” Junior asks. Mikey nods, stomach lurching as Junior takes on his full weight and steps away from the bed. At the last second Mikey grabs the IV pole with his toes and makes sure it’ll follow.

Junior carefully opens the door, mindful of Mikey’s arms jutting straight out from his shoulders. He peeks around the dark corner and, not seeing anyone who would jeopardize their mission, creeps out of the room. His steps are nearly silent as they move down the hallway even with Mikey’s added weight. He finds himself impressed with the ninja-osity on display even though he really shouldn't be. If they were the ones to train Junior in the future then of course he’s a super ninja. It’d be weird if he wasn’t.

They continue on uninterrupted into the main living area and Mikey’s eyes widen at the damage. Chunks of the ceiling are missing and scattered around the floor, but it looks as though most of the bigger pieces have been removed. The entire section of what used to be Donatello’s lab is half crumbled away, the screens he can see inside eerily dark. Everything around them–all the cabinets, tables, chairs, and game stations–has dents and cracks on their surface.

All of the destruction brings back not great memories of the days after Shredder. Mikey purses his lips and chooses to shove his face back into Junior’s shoulder instead. He just wants to see the others right now, not think about all of the bad. He can do that later, either with his brothers or the therapist Draxum was insisting on.

Mikey feels them walk further into the room and take a few steps upwards. There’s the sound of the sliding door of the dojo opening, a step forward, and then the door closing behind them. He peeks his eyes out of the flannel and relaxes seeing the dojo looking mostly the same. There’s a few pieces of the wall that are cracked and the tree looks to have a few branches missing, but everything else seems to be fine. Mikey perks up more at the sight of the others sprawled into the corner behind the tree.

Donatello is the one who sits farthest away from the pile, yet it looks like Michelangelo is still being cushioned by his thighs. His laptop is clutched tight to his chest, head thrown back (why does it look like the tails of his mask are…burnt?) and snoring loudly in tempo with his alternate. Leonardo sits curled up tight on his side, leaning against Donatello’s bicep. He twitches and burrows further into his brother's warmth.

And then, right in front of Michelangelo and being hugged like a teddy bear, Raphael sleeps peacefully, drool pooling on the floor beneath him. Mikey leans further into Junior’s back to push him on and nearly loses grip on the IV pole trailing beside them.

It’s only as they get closer that Mikey notices what’s different. His heart sinks and he swallows thickly at the sight of Raphael’s extremely pale arms and the dark bags under his eyes. He’s breathing deeply and doesn’t seem to be in any pain, but the color of his arms worries him to no end. Instead of the deep forest it used to be, from the edge of his shoulder all the way down to his fingertips it’s a splotchy, bleached green that looks downright deathly.

Donnie said that Raphael was fine, didn’t he? Mikey didn’t end up doing something terrible, right?

He’s frozen as Junior lowers down to a crouch and deposits him right in front of Raphael, lowering the IV pole until the tube stops pulling. Mikey stares at Raphael’s face, then back up to Junior’s obliviously sweet smile, and only panics a little when Junior gives him a jaunty wave and rushes out of the dojo on swift feet. He…might not have thought this through all the way.

He continues staring at Raphael’s face and arms, guilt eating away at him in the silence interrupted by Donatello and Michelangelo’s snores. His arms twitch with the urge to reach out and snuggle into the pile, but he’s not sure how he’d do it. Or if Raphael would really welcome him there.

Which is stupid. He knows Raphael and the others love him just as much as he loves them. His bad brain juice is really flowing today, but he can’t help the thought that Raphael will hate him for what he did whether he meant to or not. But if Donatello didn’t care about his now permanently gray fingertips, why would Raphael care about having arms a couple shades lighter than the rest of his body?

What Mikey really wants is to throw it all away and get absorbed into the turtle pile, but it’s a little hard to maneuver into a comfortable spot with everything wrong with him. He can’t move his arms, his hip twinges at every shift of weight, and imagining the top of his shell on the concrete makes him shiver. He knows he isn’t exactly known for his plans, but maybe he should have thought about the specifics of this bit more than he did.

Thankfully, he doesn’t have to think about how to insert himself into the turtle pile any further. Raphael’s eyes snap open and his entire body tenses, obviously ready for a fight, before his sleep filled gaze clears and he focuses on Mikey’s wide eyed stare.

“Um, hi?” Mikey whispers. Raphael stares for a bit longer, blinking a few more times, and then he launches up and drags him into a crushing hug.

He yelps immediately despite his ninpō flaring inside his chest. The others slowly stir awake as Raphael quickly retreats and holds him at arm's length with a feather light touch, now overly cautious of where he’s hurting. His eyes are wide but are dragged down by the heavy bags underneath them.

“Orange, what the hell are you doing!?” Raphael yells under his breath. “Why aren’t you in bed!?”

Mikey softens at the blatant panic and concern in his voice, as well as the others quickly crowding around with similar exclamations. A serene smile melts onto his face, face-planting into Raphael’s plastron with a hum.

“Wanted to see you,” Mikey mumbles. Raphael stiffens for a moment, and he quickly adds on, “All of you.” That gets the reaction he wants and Raphael’s arms loops around the middle of his shell, avoiding all the aches he has.

“That doesn’t mean you drag yourself all the way here!” Donatello shrieks, jerking back as Leonardo’s hand slaps itself across his mouth.

“Sensei’s still sleeping!”

“Look at you! You must be feeling a ton better if you’re here!” Michelangelo exclaims and gets the same treatment as Donatello.

Mikey winces at that and burrows further into Raphael’s plastron, hooking his head over his shoulder to keep the others all in view. The arms around him subtly tighten and adjust the hold to get more comfortable with Mikey practically gluing himself to Raphael’s skin. His ninpō glows a smidge brighter and he feels a jolt of purple brush against it in question, but he hurriedly soothes any worries away.

The purple retreats a little further back, being quickly joined by an electric blue skirting around the edges.

“Yeah, about that,” Mikey begins. He does his best to ignore the exasperated look Leonardo’s giving him as well as the warning tapping of Raphael’s fingers on the back of his shell. “Junior kinda broke me out? I’m not supposed to be here but he wanted to be my accomplice and who was I to say no.”

“I don’t know why I expected anything less,” Donatello says, rolling his eyes.

Leonardo shakes his head and relaxes back into Donatello’s side with a small hum. “Either way, it really is good to see you awake.”

Mikey gives him a soft smile, opening his mouth to say ‘thanks’, then snaps his mouth back shut. He blinks as Michelangelo’s beaming face is suddenly in his entire line of sight, eyes bright. Raphael lets out a huff at him, his alternate’s arms coming around to gently lay over top of his bandaged ones.

“We got so worried, bro!” He exclaims. Michelangelo’s gaze bores into Mikey’s, relieved. “You were asleep for so long and everyone was saying you just needed to rest but then you wouldn’t wake up for anything and I made this super cool pizza–”

“Shut it, would you? I think he gets it,” Raphael snips and it has Michelangelo switching his grip to latch fully around his middle.

“Nuh uh. Orange is going to know about everything and anything that he’s missed, and you’ll be stuck in an Angelo sandwich to listen.”

“Don, get me my sai.”

“Relax, man,” Mikey interrupts, giggling even as Donatello sits back down from where he was starting to get up. “I’m sure everything that happened when I was asleep was pretty boring, anyway. But…” he slowly leans back from Raphael’s grip to look him in the eye. He needs to know. “What…what did I do to you?”

Raphael stiffens for a moment, eyes blowing wide. Michelangelo’s gaze bounces between the two of them and it has a pit forming in Mikey’s gut. The guilt starts to eat at him again and while he thinks he is doing a good job in hiding it it’s evidently not good enough. Whatever is showing on his face snaps Raphael out of his stupor and he sighs, looking off to the side with a frown.

“It’s not that important, alright?” he finally admits. But he’s not looking at him and Mikey can feel himself shrinking. “Nothing too bad happened and that’s that.”

“It’s not,” Mikey says. His eyes rest on the pale complexion of his arms and the splotchy, watercolor-esque color near Raphael’s shoulders. “I did something bad to you and I want…I need to hear from you what happened.”

He purses his lips, briefly glancing at Donatello and Leonardo who give him small nods. Mikey's eyes get suspiciously misty the longer it takes for Raphael to speak. Maybe he really did mess up badly.

“It, uh, hurt. A lot,” he says. His voice is stilted and he’s obviously uncomfortable, but he hasn’t pushed Mikey away. In fact, it looks like Raphael wants nothing more than to drag him closer but is studiously holding himself at arms length. “If what I felt was like whatever you were going though then man, I don’t know how you were still standing at the end.”

Mikey’s lip wobbles. He knows exactly how much pain he was in and to think that Raphael was sharing in that? It wasn’t something he’d ever wish on anyone else, but especially not his own brother.

“Sure, it kinda felt like I was dying–” Mikey stiffens and lets a few tears out while Raphael hurriedly continues. “–but all that’s gone now! I don’t have any pain. I’m more annoyed that I can’t stay awake for longer than four hours even if I’m not doing anything.”

“But…you’re arms,” he weakly protests, nodding to where they’re still loosely slung around him.

Raphael shakes his head. “They’re fine. Sore for a bit, but it just looks like I have some pretty badass stories to tell about them, now.”

A small breath Mikey didn’t know he was holding gets left out at that. He knows how frustrating it is to be without hands and arms, especially in their line of work, and if he had sentenced Raphael to that same fate he doesn’t know if he could truly forgive himself. He’d move on eventually, sure, but it would always live in the back of his mind every time he saw him.

“How come I don’t have any scars?” Michelangelo whines straight into Raphael’s ear. “I wanna look cool, too!”

Leonardo kicks his alternate in the side, shaking his head. “It’ll take a lot more than scars to make that happen.”

Mikey smiles and shifts slightly, wincing when his hip locks up. Raphael is immediately gathering him back into his arms. He shifts him around until his shell rests on his plastron and he faces the others who are softly bickering about the merits of having scars versus not. Donatello subtly moves the IV pole as close as he can while Raphael tips them onto their left sides to rest their heads on Donatello’s legs.

Without breaking his argument or eye contact with Leonardo, Michelangelo carefully lifts up Mikey and Raphael’s legs to slither under them like a makeshift blanket. He rests his head on Leonardo's crossed legs even though he’s clearly getting frustrated that their brother isn’t getting his point about cool scars.

He knew he was worrying for nothing. Even if his arms were just as messed up as Mikey's, Raphael probably wouldn’t have cared. He was right—he didn’t need to think too hard about it anymore.

Mikey settles into place and leans as much into Raphael as he can. His chest glows ever warmer and he closes his eyes to absorb all of it. The arms around him give a gentle, comforting squeeze. Mikey sighs in contentment, not bothering to open his eyes to see the look on anyone's face when Doantello calmly suggests he can conduct some of his more unethical experiments on Michelangelo to ‘give him the scars he wants so badly’.

Michelangelo huffs out a ‘no way’ and they fall into a moment of silence. Mikey’s ninpō hums inside him and he has to reassure his other brothers that everything’s fine, the worrywarts.

“...do you think Sensei would like Draxum better if he had more scars?”

“Probably not, considering Master Splinter is straight,” Donatello grumbles to Michelangelo’s question. “Plus, I don’t really like picturing that image.”

“Is he? Have we ever asked?”

“You don’t just ask your parent what their sexuality is, Mike. That’s…rude, probably. He’s only ever talked about Tang Shen before anyway.” Mikey’s lips pull into an unconscious, mischievous smile at Leonardo’s words as he drifts further to sleep, Raphael’s deep breaths behind him showing that he’s already way ahead of him.

“Well, maybe I’ll ask him tomorrow. Get an actual answer before I start my matchmaking.”

Michelangelo sounds so determined. While Mikey had briefly entertained doing the same thing with Dad and Barry, there was simply too much animosity between them to ever realistically get to that point. It was frankly a miracle if they could speak two sentences to each other without it turning into an all out sparring match.

“You are not setting Sensei up with Draxum.” Leonardo sounds extremely tired as he says it, ending it with a sigh.

“Why not? He clearly likes Master Splinter. I know I wasn’t the only one who saw those heart eyes. And it’d be pretty cool having two dads like Orange does.”

“I’d personally appreciate it if you two could stop debating Sensei’s love life so we can actually get back to sleep.”

Both Michelangelo and Leonardo grumble at Donatello’s remark but quiet down nonetheless. Mikey lets out a huff of laughter and nearly finds himself chirping from delight. He checks on his ninpō one more time, soothing his missing brothers’ worries, and then relents to the warm dark pulling him down to sleep.

==========

”Hamato Michelangelo!”

Mikey’s eyes snap open at Draxum’s loud, booming voice throughout the dojo and he pops his head into his shell with a peep. The others surrounding him similarly startle awake and jostle him around, causing him to hiss in pain. Raphael’s arms sling tighter around his waist.

“Boy, you are in so much trouble.”

He pales at April’s tone, retracting his head even further. He’s in so much trouble, even if Junior is sputtering in a panic to try and explain.

“Trouble does not begin to cover it.”

Mikey would like to retract that previous statement upon hearing the low gravel of his Dad’s voice. He’s not just in trouble.

“Yes, I am inclined to agree.”

Master Splinter. Oh yeah, Mikey’s fully decided now. He’s completely and utterly screwed.

Chapter Text

Mikey shifts eagerly on his feet, grinning wide as everyone shuffles to their places. He’s been unanimously banned from participating (even though it was his idea, and definitely not Leo’s no matter how much he insisted it was), but he’s perfectly content sitting on the sidelines as a cheerleader for this momentous occasion.

“Welcome, one and all,” Mikey begins, eyeing everyone gathered in front of them. “To the first annual Lair Games Mash-up Supreme!”

Behind him the banner he forced Raphael to make unravels in all of its glory. Said turtle grumbles and takes his place beside him as the other official host of the event. Raphael had been less than enthused to also be benched, but that’s what he has to deal with when he can’t control staying awake. It’s been getting better, and Mikey’s got plenty of blackmail material from Michelangelo, Leo, and Donnie in the form of photos of him facedown in a bowl of salad, but it’s still too risky to do anything strenuous.

Instead, Raphael gets to help organize the Games with him. Truly no greater honor.

“Is that really the official name I have to put into my files?” Donnie whines. “It’ll mess up all of my systems!”

“What do you mean? That’s the best name!” Michelangelo exclaims from the other end of the line where he stands with Leo. He doesn’t seem at all phased by Leo leaning his entire weight into him by the arm carelessly thrown over his shoulder.

“No more changes, we all know the rules. Lair Games Mash-up Supreme will go down in turtle history.” Mikey ends with a sure nod, getting both groans and grins in return. “Anywho, I shall go over the rules for those of us who are new to this ritual. As always, there shall be no purposeful attempts to disqualify and/or harm any other teams. And no mystic weapons, ninpō included, for those that apply.”

Mikey pauses and half of the players nod seriously, while the others look at him in confusion. A small silence stretches.

“...That’s it?” Donatello asks, eyes wide. Mikey’s smile widens and he gives a chipper nod.

“Yep! Everything is on the table! Please, don’t hold back. That’s what makes it fun.” He giggles at the contemplative expression on Donatello’s face that swiftly turns mischievous as he sends a glare towards Casey. Casey remains oblivious to it, poking at the spikes on Raph’s elbow in fascination. Mikey can’t wait until Raph finally has enough of it, which will be soon if his twitching eye has anything to say about it.

“Everyone got your teammate?” Raphael barks from his side, arms tightly crossed. Ah, still a little grumpy about not being able to participate, then.

Mikey does a quick scan of the group, making sure no one switched partners when they weren’t paying attention. Michelangelo and Leo are stuck together like glue on the edge, right next to Donatello and Junior who stay a healthy yet awkward distance from each other. April rubs her hands together deviously at Leonardo’s side, and if Mikey didn’t know any better he’d say Leonardo is being extremely stoic about the situation (he caught the way April was whispering into his ear just before, no doubt threats about what would happen if he didn’t try his best to win. He’s been suspiciously silent after that). Casey continues poking at Raph until he picks him up around the middle and throws him onto his shell with a yelp, but both look more satisfied as Casey can poke to his heart's content without Raph feeling it as much. And finally, at the very end, O’Neil and Donnie stand with their heads close together, locked in a heated staring contest and exchanging harsh whispers.

Mikey isn’t sure what that’s all about, but neither Donnie nor O’Neil seem like they’re going to start fighting, so he’ll leave it alone. At least everyone showed up and there wasn’t too much grumbling about partners.

“Are you certain this is a good idea?” Splinter murmurs from his seiza. He’s tapping his claws rhythmically on the top of his thigh while Dad munches on popcorn beside him on a beanbag.

Barry hums from Splinter’s other side, mirroring the larger rats pose, and takes a sip of whatever mystic tea he’s stored in his thermos boasting ‘#1 Lunchlady’. “Of course. What better way for children to strengthen bonds than through trials of combat? Even the smallest of human children go through the grueling trials of ‘recess’, and it is much the same.”

“They will be perfectly fine. There have only been a few injuries in the past and nothing that kept them in the lair for long.” Dad shoves a large handful of popcorn into his mouth and loudly swallows. “Besides, it’s even better entertainment than my soaps!”

Shell yeah, it is. Mikey is going to be the best host the Lair Games Mash-up Supreme will ever see. No matter that both his arms rest in slings (orange and rainbow tie dye, respectively) and he’s still dragging around an IV pole attached to his leg.

He hoped that he would be in tip top shape by now, but Mikey’s always been a bit too optimistic when it comes to recovery time. It’s already been two weeks since he first woke up, and while he’s feeling leaps and bounds better than before there’s still apparently a long road until he’s back to one hundred percent. Or whatever his new one hundred percent ends up being.

Leo and Barry had made it very clear that when he got back to full health, things would likely still be different. They’re not sure if any of his nerves were affected by, in Barry’s words, his ‘egregious abuse of mysticism’. It could very well be he won’t be able to wield any physical weapons ever again. Even pencils, cooking utensils, and paintbrushes are a big maybe, but Mikey doesn’t deign to worry about it right now.

He’s awake, alive, and most of the pain is either gone or only there when he moves wrong. If anything like that happens, then his family would be there to get him through it, anyway. Mikey would much turn his full attention to the absolute chaos that’s about to unfold.

“WIth the rules now known, the first annual Lair Games Mash-up Supreme can officially begin!” Mikey announces with as much flourish and his slings allow. “First up in our sixteen events–capture the Ice Cream Kitty!”

“Wait, what?”

“First one to find Ice Cream Kitty’s cooler and bring it to me wins the first round! Ready set go!” Mikey quickly continues, ignoring Leonardo’s confusion.

Leonardo doesn’t have long to dwell in the confusion, though. In an instant April is grabbing onto his arm and dragging him stumbling into a run to a different section of the lair, shouting insults at the others all the way. Mikey grins, feeding off the pure joy pouring off of her as they get into the search.

Raph takes off just as fast in the opposite direction, Casey grabbing onto a shell spike with a squeal and then a cackle as they get to searching. Grabbing the IV pole and lowering it down to a better height, Mikey plops cross-legged onto the ‘stage’ and watches in growing amusement as Donatello and Junior quickly come up with a methodical plan and start searching the main space of the lair first, turning over every single nook and cranny.

“Hey!” O’Neil shouts, nose scrunched in frustration when Donnie grabs her by the scruff of the shirt like a kitten with a spider arm. “Put me down!”

“Well, if you insist on always being so catty…” Donnie trails, a pointed, mean smirk directed right at her while he kicks over various possible ‘hiding places’ and makes his way towards the kitchen.

O’Neil narrows her eyes. Her glare sears into the back of his head and, when he turns away to pull down his goggles to inspect the freezer, she delivers a swift kick towards his shoulder. Mikey and Raphael’s cackles overlap with Dad’s as Donnie yelps and drops her immediately. She wastes no more time and shoves an elbow into his plastron, making him wheeze, and then darts away towards the bedrooms.

“You’ll never find the freak of nature without my expertise!” Donnie shouts after her, yet still diligently follows on her heels.

“Still underestimating me?”

“Yes, as is logical.”

Mikey snickers at the sound of a slap and Donnie’s ‘offended gasp’ as they disappear from view. Raphael shakes his head in exasperation hovering above him, yet a barely there smirk adorns his slowly softening face.

He clears his throat to gain his attention and pats the space beside him, keeping an eye on Junior and Donatello’s slow progress through the main area of the lair. Junior already looks like he’s regretting going along with the slow and steady plan but by the way his eyes harden Mikey has a feeling he’d rather tough it out than say anything. At least for now. There were some after effects of having a future Leo as a teacher, and a short fuse of patience with long, seemingly pointless tasks was one of them.

Raphael slowly lowers himself to the floor and similarly watches the two comb through the lair. Splinter, Draxum, and Dad start up a small conversation about what sounds like old people things that quickly fade into the background. The distant crashes and arguing is much more appealing as a backdrop, and watching everyone dart back and forth between rooms and nearly bowling each other over is peak entertainment.

“Where’d the other two run off to?” Raphael asks through a yawn and furrowed brow. Mikey tilts his head at the question as he, too, realizes that he didn’t see where Leo and Michelangelo had disappeared to.

“I dunno,” Mikey mumbles. “Probably slipped through the cracks or something.”

Raphael hums, rolling his eyes as Donatello figures it necessary to turn over the newly replaced couch cushions. There’s a small lull where they simply listen to their family and friends bustling around and knocking over anything and everything trying to find the cooler.

“Who’re your bets on? I got ’em on Leonardo’s team,” Raphael says. He tilts slightly to the side, doing his best not to fall completely to the side onto Mikey’s still sore prosthetic for his shell.

It’s not ideal, but Barry insisted that the wound was too deep and would need something covering it when not sleeping. Unlike Raph’s shell wound, which went through a layer of thin keratin and sliced his shoulder pretty good, his chip hovered on the edge of the more sensitive parts of his carapace. Nothing that Donnie and Donatello weren’t up to the task of figuring out.

Donnie had been chastised for being disappointed that it was such an easy prosthetic to make. Donatello, following that lead, earned a smack upside the head for suggesting it would have been more interesting to try making a robotic arm, instead.

Either way, Mikey wasn’t too pressed about it. He was very adamant that the prosthetic was not going to be branded genius built, but otherwise he let the two geniuses go wild on the design. And while Splinter had to shoot down the idea of a mini flame throwing being embedded, he’d say it turned out rather nice.

It was nothing too flashy, yet. Mikey was touched when they gave it to him and told him it was compatible with all kinds of paint and could easily be cleaned with a specific solution. For the moment, it sat pressed into place as a warm, muted orange, small specks of glitter added to the gloss finish to sparkle in the lights. Not great for ninja-ing, but amazing for the pizzazz.

For now, it was perfect. He was a little bummed about the flamethrower being tossed, though (he could have made a killer creme brulee).

“Well?” Raphael prods again, jolting Mikey out of his thoughts.

“Oh, definitely Leo and Michelangelo, easy,” he responds. Raphael gives him an incredulous stare as thought he’s grown another shell. Mikey tilts his head at that reaction. What’s so weird about that?

“Maybe we need to check for brain damage again, ‘cause there’s no way those losers–”

“Give it here!” Leonardo screeches, tumbling out of the doorway to the lab attached to Raph’s arm, frantically kicking at the red cooler held high above his head. “We found it first!”

“But ‘ya didn’t keep it first!” Raph shouts back with a smirk. He catches Mikey’s eye and puffs out his chest in pride and pays for his lack of attention when April’s bat catches him right in the tail.

He yelps, dropping everything to cradle his tail as Leonardo takes the opportunity to snatch the cooler and make a break for the stage. Casey comes careening from out of nowhere with a ‘goongala!’ and trips him up with the end of his hockey stick. He manages not to completely faceplant, but to do so he has to let go of the cooler's handle and Casey immediately pulls it to his chest. In three more steps he’s slamming it in front of Mikey, out of breath and already getting ready to gloat.

Mikey merely raises an eyebrow, fighting down a smirk. “That's only a cooler. I’m not seeing an Ice Cream Kitty.”

“Behold!” Casey announces and flicks open the top, stepping back with a bow.

Raphael leans over Mikey's shoulder to take in the empty cooler filled with crushed ice and drippings of neapolitan ice cream.

“...yup, we’re beholding alright,” Raphael says, voice deceptively flat if not for the undercurrent of amusement.

Raph steps up to the cooler, dwarfing Casey’s form and shakes out the ice, getting progressively more panicked. The commotion catches the attention of all the other teams milling about the lair and they all gather to observe as Casey desperately shifts through the carnage. Mikey distractedly notes that Leo and Michelangelo are still strikingly absent.

“No, no, she has to be here,” Casey mumbles, eyes wide.

“Did you really think Dad wouldn’t have placed decoys around here?” Mikey asks haughtily, turning up his nose and gazing down at him over his beak. “What do you take us for?”

“While I appreciate your faith, son, I, uh…didn’t put out any other coolers,” Dad replies awkwardly. “She is supposed to be in there.”

Mikey panics for a moment, thinking something really went wrong and they’re going to have to explain why Ice Cream Kitty was a casualty of the Lair Games Mash-up Supreme to Michelangelo. Thankfully, before the task turns from finding a cooler to finding a puddle of melted remains of ice cream, a happy ‘meow’ erupts from above them.

Craning his head Mikey can’t help his glee seeing Michelangelo perched like a gargoyle on a pipe high in the ceiling, Ice Cream Kitty happily cradled in one arm. Leo lounges beside him, one foot swinging off while the other is looped loosely across his chest, leaning against the end of the pipe sloping to the ceiling. They wear matching looks of victory as Leo reaches over and scratches a finger under Ice Cream Kitty’s chin, smearing his finger that he sticks into his mouth and retracts with a satisfying pop.

“Well, it’s been fun watching you all run around, but I think it’s time we claim our first of many victories. Isn’t that right, chico?”

Michelangelo laughs, beaming from ear to ear. “Oh yeah, y’all have no idea the butt-whooping that’s coming.”

Ice Cream Kitty gives a satisfied meow, breaking the stunned silence, only for Donnie to start screeching.

“Cheating! I call cheating! You used portals!”

“Just say you’re jealous of our ninja skillz, Dee. Please, do me a favor, my ego could use a good polish.”

Leonardo scoffs at that and the resulting insulting look Leo shoots his way has Mikey and Raphael cackling until the room devolves into more arguing and petty accusations.

And this is only the first game. Things are no doubt about to ramp up from here.

==========

After nearly seven hours of straight competition, it’s finally come to this. As Mikey had suspected, Leo and Michelangelo took a swift lead but, surprisingly, Donnie and O’Neil had been giving them a run for their money.

It seems like their constant arguing and petty insults worked for them. Raphael had made a proud comment after game three, where O’Neil had nearly given Donnie a bloody nose, that they were going to kill each other before they got a single point. They had immediately proven it wrong when in the next game, through all of the insults, jabs, and verbal taunting, they had crushed all of the other teams and moved as a flawless duo.

No one missed the scathing looks Donatello was throwing towards Donnie, but he at least seemed pacified that O’Neil was dealing just as much verbal damage as Donnie was throwing out. There was also a smattering of surprise at the vitriol she would spew Donnie’s way but everyone, especially Raphael and April, took it with giddy stride.

Donatello and Junior had come in at very last, only two points to their name. They could have earned more, but in all of the games where they could have had an advantage Donatello had gotten preoccupied with sabotaging Casey and Raph, completely missing their window of opportunity. Junior was relatively gloomy about losing so thoroughly yet still managed to cheer on Leo and Michelangelo when it became clear there would be no winning for them.

On the other hand, Raph and Casey had done slightly better. They worked together as a good team with some smart plays (a highlight was Raph throwing Casey across the length of the lair when they ran out of watermelons, and the move won them that round), yet focused too much on brawn. They had no concrete strategy, and that was ultimately their downfall.

April and Leonardo came the closest to overturning the other two teams, but one fumble from Leonardo in the previous game of ‘ninja’ lost them everything. Raphael is never going to let him hear the end of it and neither will anyone else. The flush on Leonardo’s face when Splinter jokingly said he would be upping their balance training had Mikey devolving into a cackling mess. Even now, April was still chewing him out on the sidelines while the last two teams competed for the championship title.

Mikey watches on raptly as the two teams glare at each other from each end of the table, chewing mint gum vigorously. In front of them sits two different pitchers filled to the brim with orange juice. All they’re waiting for is the timer to go off to complete the final task.

The timer ticks down further and the tension grows thick.

“You two may have made it this far, but this is where it ends for you,” Donnie spits. Michelangelo meets his hard stare head on, sharp smirk on his face.

“In your dreams, my stomach and taste buds are made of steel.”

“He’s right, with all the stuff he eats he really should be dead by now,” Raphael adds.

The comment earns a pout from Michelangelo but Mikey has to agree. As the one who has been teaching him all there is to know about cooking a proper meal, some of his alternates’ ideas are particularly horrendous. He’ll have to get Michelangelo to try making some of them in the future, because while they sounded like inconceivable nightmares, Mikey is insatiably curious to know what exactly a ham roasted in guacamole and covered in sriracha tastes like.

“Here we go, guys,” Mikey says as the counter slowly ticks down. His eyes dart between the numbers and the tense forms of O’Neil and Leo getting ready for the showdown. “Five, four, three, two, one…chug!”

Immediately Leo swallows his piece of gum while O’Neil spits it at Donnie’s feet and they both reach their pitchers at the same time. Mikey whoops as they both start downing the juice as fast as they can, grimacing the entire time. Leo stops first after downing a third of the pitcher, gagging as he clutching it to his chest with wide eyes.

O’Neil, however, keeps going, albeit at a much slower pace. Donatello excitedly cheers her on even while her nose scrunches in disgust and it looks like it’s taking everything in her power not to stop. On her other side Donnie mutters threats and it quickly becomes a back and forth between Donatello and Donnie trading insults and compliments in equal measure.

Leo gets right back to it in a matter of seconds. From there, it’s only a few seconds before he’s slamming the empty pitcher back onto the table as O’Neil finishes the last gulp. Michelangelo erupts into a victory shout and slams into Leo’s side, both of them spinning and laughing even through Leo’s gagging.

“Can’t even drink things right,” Donnie mutters scathingly at O’Neil’s side as she attempts to scrub her tongue. She shoots him a murderous glare while he shoves her aside to take his place in front of the table instead. “Not to fear, I surely will bring us back to the brink of victory.”

“Psh, you don’t stand a chance against all of my supreme awesomeness,” Michelangelo says, setting up across from Donnie.

“Is that what we are calling ‘ineptitude’ in this dimension?”

“I don’t know what that means, so I can’t be insulted.”

Leo erupts into hysterical laughter as Raphael fills the pitchers once again. Mikey giggles at the long suffering pain on Donnie’s face. He definitely wasn’t expecting to have to face the combined forces of Leo and Michelangelo, and from the looks of it he’s already regretting all of the future interactions. Donnie’s really not going to like it once Mikey’s fully healed and can join in. He’s going to make it so much worse for him. They’ll be truly unstoppable.

“On your marks,” Mikey says. Donnie and Michelangelo square up against each other, neither breaking eye contact. Everyone, including their captive audience of Splinter, Dad, and Barry, hold their breath as the tension rises. A hush falls over the room, no one daring to come between the piece of history about to be made.

“Get set,” he continues. His alternate twitches ever closer to the pitcher, blowing a bubble of gum that pops directly in Donnie’s face. The scowl on Donnie’s face perfectly contrasts the mean smirk on Michelangelo’s.

“Chug!”

Both lunge towards their pitchers and almost faster than Mikey can comprehend, tilt their heads back and drain the juice straight into their throats. His jaw drops, and he barely manages to get through that shock before their hands come down, pitchers empty, at what looks to be the exact same time.

He zeroes in on the table. That’s the only chance he has of determining the true winner. Mikey ignores the exclamations of awe, surprise, and encouragement. There, at the last second, he catches which pitcher hits the table first.

Oh, this is gold.

“And the winner is–” Mikey can distinctly feel the harsh, laser eyed stare that Donnie gives him, and it’s about to get so much worse. “Michelangelo and Leo!”

“No!” Donnie immediately denies, and the only thing that prevents him from drawing a weapon on Mikey is April leaping onto his battle shell. “It’s rigged! Rigged I say!”

“Wow, can’t even drink things right,” O’Neil drawls sardonically from the side while Michelangelo and Leo do their victory dances. Raph, Casey, Junior, and Donatello go to congratulate them, and quickly also get entangled in their celebrations.

Mikey’s cheeks start to hurt with how much he’s smiling. Raphael shakes his head beside him, nudging him on the shoulder before he joins them and swiftly pulls Michelangelo into a noogie. Michelangelo laughs in delight, then laughs even harder when Leo goes to do the same to Raphael and nearly gets punched in the face. His ninpō sings in his chest. Mikey can confidently say that this new annual lair games tradition is a ringing success.

His attention gets pulled from the celebration that is quickly turning to an all-out wrestling match (complete with petty slaps and bandana pulling) by Donnie’s horrified gasp. Mikey merely raises an eyebrow as he gets dragged away by a deviously smirking O’Neil and April, pulling him towards a different part of the lair limp feet and all. He thinks he hears something about having a ‘gossip sesh’ and while Donnie weakly tries to pry his arms out of their hands, he does nothing concrete to get out of the fate the girls are lugging him towards. Which does make sense, as Donnie positively lives for drama.

Well, they all do, but Donnie and Leo have always taken the cake when it comes to spreading rumors, whether true or not. Not that he’s totally innocent either, but the amount of times Dr. Feelings has had to break up an argument that was based solely on made up gossip is too many for Mikey to count.

Barry and Splinter rise from their places and make their way towards the kitchen making quiet conversation. Dad lingers behind, looking like he’s debating following before wisely thinking better and going to try and break up the small mob that the celebration has formed. Mikey grins when he catches Barry’s eye and wiggles his eyebrows in a way he knows their pseudo-father figure will hate. Sure enough, the fur on his face darkens a shade and he hurriedly plucks the cup of tea out of Splinter's hands to busy himself with cleaning.

Mikey snickers. Looks like he isn’t quite done playing matchmaker yet. It will be a very large stretch, but if nothing else it will be a great opportunity to show Michelangelo his ways when it comes to romance. Plus, it’s always fun to see how far he can push Barry before he truly snaps.

The bright smile on his face dims as he moves his attention away from a flustered Barry and confused Splinter and towards Leonardo. He hasn’t made any move to go and join the others. Instead he stands to the side at a healthy distance and looks over everyone with a small, sad smile, arms crossed tightly over his chest to squeeze his biceps. Leonardo heaves a tiny sigh that has Mikey pulling a full blown frown.

Everyone’s supposed to be happy. Leonardo and April might not have won, but he looked like he was enjoying himself just a moment ago. What changed?

Mikey quickly hops off the stage, still careful to drag his IV pole with him and dodges around the mass of roughhousing that Dad seems to have given up trying to control. He stops by Leonardo’s side, glancing up at his glazed stare. Following his sight Mikey watches along with him and manages another small smile at seeing everyone getting along.

Leonardo, however, still has an aura of sadness that seems to physically press against Mikey’s consciousness despite the fun times happening.

“You okay?” Mikey asks softly. Leonardo jumps, gripping his biceps tighter and shooting a surprised glance his way. He makes sure to keep his expression as open and welcoming as possible.

Leonardo blinks, sighs, then darts back to the shouting and wrestling. “...Karai would’ve liked this, wouldn’t she?”

Mikey’s heart drops. He leans closer to him until their arms touch and relaxes when a small amount of tension releases from Leonardo’s form. That, at least, is a very valid reason for being bittersweet right now.

He can’t say for certain whether or not she would have meshed well with this many turtles around. Karai definitely would have been dominating the Lair Games Mash-up Supreme had she been competing, though. They had been working on her social skills, as well as other facets of life she missed out on because she was raised by a sociopath, but the one thing that reigned true was the fact that if she was challenged she’d try her damndest to come out on top. No matter how pointless or trivial she’d give her all.

Something she shared with Leonardo, who hates being the loser no matter the dimension.

Leonardo’s melancholy washes over him and dims his ninpō, but not enough that it truly ruins the mood. Does he wish Karai were here? More than anything. Does he still feel all of the guilt on his shoulders for being the reason she’s not with them? Absolutely, every single second of every single day. Leonardo, however, seems to be forgetting the most important thing.

“We’ll get her back,” Mikey announces. His tone brooks no argument, and he scowls at the suffering and slightly pitying look Leonardo gives him. “We will. All of us are going to make sure to look for her at every chance we can.”

“What if there’s nothing left of her to find?” Leonardo responds. His voice is quiet, pained, and Mikey won’t stand for that.

Karai’s not dead, and neither is Shredder. He doesn't have any concrete proof of this, but Mikey can feel it in his bones. It takes a lot more than some freezing water to take both of them out. Even if that means Karai is stuck as a prisoner somewhere, he knows she’s alive. There’s no if’s, and’s, or but’s about it. He refuses to believe anything else.

“She’s alive. We just have to find a trail. She’s probably recovering somewhere and can’t make her way back right now because of Shredder. We’ll get her back, you’ll see.”

Leonardo’s face softens but Mikey can tell he still doesn’t believe it. Well, that’s too bad, because he doesn’t get a choice about it. If he has to drag Leonardo kicking and screaming into search parties then that’s what he’s going to do, and he’s sure that everyone else will help him do it. Raphael may be a tough one to crack about it but even he isn’t fully immune to the Mikey charm yet.

Nevertheless, Mikey’s unwavering faith does unwind something in his stance. Leonardo gives him a grin and gently knocks a fist into his shoulder.

“Think I could get in on the planning for the next Lair Games Mash-up Supreme? I have some ideas that could work, but we might need a bigger space.”

Mikey matches his expression and bounces on the tips of his toes. “Oh yeah, we should make it a tradition! Each year someone new chooses and hosts The Games! That’s perfect! And, we can have it in our world next time, maybe even in the Hidden City to spice things up.”

Leonardo huffs a laugh. Mikey can confidently say that he’s at least taken his mind off of the bad thoughts for now. Not that they will ever really go away until they get Karai back, but they’ll deal with that after everyone’s fully recovered from the latest world ending disaster. Until then, they can think and ruminate on their guilt in their own time and not when everyone is supposed to be having a good time. That’s what Mikey’s planning on doing, at least.

”Incoming!”

Mikey immediately ducks at Leo’s warning, but Leonardo isn’t so lucky. A flying Donatello crashes into him and sends them both to the floor in a crumpled heap. Casey and Micehlangelo burst into laughter and Mikey joins them in hysterics while Raph hurries over and apologizes profusely for Leo’s stunt.

He goes on and on with ‘sorry’s and explanations about how Leo doesn’t think and forgot he wasn’t his Donnie, but Donatello obviously doesn’t care that much with his breathless, joyful laughter.

Mikey’s ninpō glows warm in his chest. The Lair Games Mash-up Supreme has been even more of a success than he could have dreamed.

==========

They’re all gathered in the dojo, and he can’t bring himself to tear away from Raphael’s side. Luckily, Raphael looks to be in the same boat as him. Any time Mikey steps a bit too far he closes the distance within the next second. It’s comforting to know he’s not the only one uncomfortable with what’s happening.

His eyes get dragged back to the orange and pink portal floating in the middle of the room every few seconds. The chatter of the room falls into background noise as the reality of the situation slowly falls onto his shoulders.

This is what he’s been dreaming about doing since he first realized he was trapped in a different dimension. The Lair Games Mash-up Supreme had buoyed the mood for the last week while he finished gaining enough mystic mojo back, finally getting rid of that stupid IV, and suddenly Mikey doesn't quite know what to do.

A month ago he wouldn’t even hesitate jumping in. He hadn’t hesitated. But now, even with everyone around him and the assurances from Donatello and Donnie that the connection between worlds was stable, it feels like all he’s doing is abandoning his new family.

He’s definitely not. Shell, they even have plans to bring the others sightseeing around the Hidden City in a few weeks once Mikey’s situated back in his original home. That doesn’t change the nagging of his ninpō that rebels against the very idea of leaving any of his family behind. He keeps having to repeat in his mind that he’s not leaving them, he’s just going back and forth between their worlds like traveling between divorced parents' houses.

Okay, not the best analogy, but he’s not exactly at the top of his mental game.

Mikey takes a deep breath and barely holds back from giving himself a self soothing hug. The slings had finally come off, but he’s still on specific instructions to limit the use of his hands. For once Mikey is actually taking those orders seriously as he knows he’ll be punished with the casts again if anyone catches him rebelling, and that’s the absolute last thing he wants.

“Alright, the settings are pre-programmed on both ends to always open in the same spot,” Donatello announces, tapping away on his T-phone. “We’re still working on a better way to communicate with phones between dimensions, but for now this will work just fine.”

“Not to worry, brethren. We (but mostly me) will solve the issue of cross-dimensional travel in no time. No applause needed,” Donnie tacks on. Donatello sends him a glare that Donnie either ignores or doesn’t register.

“Welp, back to my programming!” Dad exclaims, not waiting for more of a goodbye before he’s through the portal into the main room of their lair. “See you all later!”

Mikey swallows as he watches Dad scamper away towards the TV room through the portal. Raphael snorts a laugh beside him amid the confusion which breaks the others of their staring. Barry quickly follows him with a long-suffering sigh and only tosses a warm ‘farewell’ towards Master Splinter before he, too, is stepping through without turning back.

Junior, Casey, O’Neil, and April do a complicated four person hand shake, bidding their own farewells as Junior and April race each other into the portal and go tumbling into the lair.

It’s really happening, isn’t it? He’s really about to go home. Mikey has been in this world, with this family, for five months, and now faced with the reality of going back he’s terrified. What if the portal fails? What if the family of this world likes it better when it’s back to how it was before he came? What if–

“Hey,” Leonardo says as he appears on his other side, making Mikey jump. “It’s going to be fine. You’re all healed with the mystic stuff now, right?”

Oh, he thinks that’s what Mikey is worried about. The whole ‘dusting’ thing is actually the furthest thing from his mind, but he’ll gladly latch onto that excuse. Or not, as he’s been trying to be open with his thoughts despite the drawbacks of feeling like he’s being flayed from the inside out when he does.

Maybe he needs to apologize for those times Dr. Feelings was annoyingly persistent, if this is how it felt to be on the other end of it.

“Yeah, it’s just…” Mikey trails, watching Leo make some kind of horrendous pun and pouting when he only gets a small, unimpressed eyebrow raise from Master Splinter. “I don’t–I don’t want to leave you guys behind.”

“You’re not ‘leaving’ us anywhere. We’ll be jumping over in a few weeks, yeah?” Raphael tries to reassure, but he sounds just as shaky about the whole thing as Mikey himself.

“I can’t wait to see the Hidden City!” Michelangelo exclaims. He jumps over from where he had been needling Raph with questions alongside Casey, beaming all the while. “Especially whatever Witch Town is, that sounds so cool! And we can see if Leatherhead’s awake when we go!”

“I agree, Witch Town does sound interesting.” Donatello adds.

“And you dare to call yourself a scientist.”

He rolls his eyes at Donnie’s hiss. Mikey’s simply excited to be able to show them the in’s and out’s of the world he grew up in like they had done for him. There’s probably going to be an even steeper learning curve than what Mikey had to handle in this dimension, but he’s sure they’ll get the hang of everything eventually.

It’s the time in between that he’s more worried about.

“It’s been a trip, fam, but there’s a pot of tea and a skin care routine that’s calling my name,” Leo says and saunters through the portal. “Adios, nerds,” he shouts behind him while giving a flipping wave.

“And I have my sweet, sweet tech that’s been sorely missing me.” And with that, Donnie follows suit with merely a finite nod as his goodbye.

Master Splinter takes a deep breath that Mikey just knows means he’s judging the lack of manners. And possibly Dad’s parenting style, but Mikey has resolved not to touch that whole issue of Splinter’s with a ten foot pole. Too much drama and adult things that, frankly, he doesn’t think any of his Doctors would be able to properly deal with. He’ll nudge them to talk about their pasts a little more, but he’s not getting too involved. Despite what some others may think, he is able to learn when to leave the adults to their adulting problems.

That just leaves Mikey and Raph left to go through the portal. His big brother steps closer to the swirling colors, pausing just to the side to shoot Mikey a questioning glance. Red ninpō brushes against him to try and nudge him along, but with a soft push Raph’s energy backs off and he cautiously makes small talk with Splinter. He needs to do this properly. The only thing that’s stopping Mikey is the fact that he’s at a complete loss at where to begin.

“I–” he stutters, looking at all of the faces surrounding him in turn. The same faces that he once despised for reminding him of what he lost are now the ones that Mikey can’t bear the thought of losing. “You’ll for sure be there, right?”

“Of course! Why wouldn’t we?” Michelangelo says as though it's the easiest question in the world. And it really should be, but even the suggestion of getting separated from this family makes his very being waver right alongside his ninpō.

“What if the portal gets all funky or something and you guys end up lost like me? I…that can’t happen, right?” Mikey directs to Donatello. He gains an amused smile and shakes his head.

“As long as you still have your mystic, then that won’t happen. The device is intrinsically linked to your powers, so as long as you're still breathing there’s basically no way we know of to disrupt the signal.”

“That means you actually gotta stay in and rest, y’know.” Mikey sends a lighthearted glare Raphael’s way, but he only shrugs. “What’s that look for? It’s true, isn’t it? Your survival skills are terrible.”

“They’re not that bad,” Mikey mutters. He huffs at all the disbelieving looks, even from O’Neil and Casey as they make their way closer. “I’ll make sure I don’t do anything too bad if it means I get to see you guys again.”

They all get unbelievably soft expressions at that and he feels his face going red. Mikey scowls, hunching his shoulders and looking everywhere but at them. He’s trying to pour out his feelings, but if they’re all going to be like that he won’t be able to take it.

“You better,” Raphael says. Mikey blinks and glances up at the thick voice. He clears his throat and pointedly doesn’t look at him, pale arms tightly crossed against his chest. A small smile alights Mikey’s face and his jittering ninpō calms at the reassurance that, yeah, he will be missed here.

“Angelo, we better get goin’,” Raph interrupts before Mikey can rib the other for expressing actual feelings. “Leo will probably come and check what’s takin’ so long in a second.”

“Yeah, yeah…” Mikey trails. His feet stay firmly planted to the ground. He gets absorbed in the swirling colors of the portal. “Thank you for…everything.” His voice is merely a whisper, but the others hear the weight of it anyway.

“Couldn’t leave one of our own, could we?” Leonardo says just as softly.

“Yeah man, it’s been nice hanging out with someone who’s not as emotionally constipated as Raph.” Casey chimes in, squawking at the small punch O’Neil gives his arm. “What!?”

Mikey huffs a small laugh, nodding. Raphael lets out a grunt to his right, and when Mikey looks over his brow furrows at the pained twist to the other's mouth. He glares down at the floor with a vengeance, working his jaw in tight little circles.

Mikey purses his lips and tries to get into Raphael’s line of sight. “Uh, are you okay–”

A small ‘oof’ escapes him as he’s punched in the plastron, but just as quickly strong arms are enveloping him into a blistering hug. Mikey blinks, readjusting himself in Raphael’s firm, unwavering hold with a smile. The arms tighten even further yet still take care to avoid the tender parts around his prosthetic shell. Mikey sinks further into the hold, letting out all the breath in his lungs while his ninpō swirls in lazy contentment.

“Love you, too,” Mikey murmurs into Raphael’s shoulder. He gets a soft hum in response as more arms envelop them. The ninpō glows ever brighter, encouraged by the warm red energy hovering nearby in encouragement.

If this hug lasted forever, Mikey certainly wouldn’t complain. But unfortunately it has to end at some point. Raphael is the last one to let go and as he does he looks him over with an assessing gaze. Whatever he finds he approves of with a nod, hesitantly letting go. He nearly misses Splinter’s approach as he basks in the warmth.

A furry hand lands on his head, gently rubbing. Mikey leans into it and beams up at Splinter’s serene expression.

“It has been a pleasure to have you with us, Orange. I hope to see you again very soon.” Mikey nods excitedly and can’t help himself as he steals one more hug from him. He stiffens under his hold for only a moment and then gentle arms wrap loosely around his shell for a quick squeeze.

“I’ll make sure to be around,” Mikey promises. “I’m not going away any time soon.”

“Good.” Splinter has a small, secretive smirk forming as they separate. “And maybe you would do me the honor of leading a training session of your own design, hm? I’m sure the other boys could benefit from learning the way your world works.”

Smile widening, Mikey enthusiastically nods, much to the horror of the others. “That’s definitely something I’d be willing to cook up. I’d do Lou Jitsu proud.”

Raph lets out a startled laugh from beside the portal, and Mikey’s once again reminded that he needs to be going with him. He deflates a bit, but not as much as before. Being buffeted on the warmth of his family really did wonders for his mood.

“Well, I guess I need to get going,” he says, taking a lingering step towards the portal. The others follow his lead, walking with him until he’s stood side by side with Raph, who’s giving all the others a warm, grateful smile. “I’ll…see you guys in a couple weeks. And, and by then I’ll have even more of my razz-ma-tazz back and can show you all the stuff I’ve been telling you about and–”

“I think they get it,” Raph gently interrupts. A large hand lands on the left side of his shell, applying the barest bit of pressure towards the portal. “C’mon, you can make all your plans with ‘em once we get you comfy, yeah?”

Mikey nods slowly, reluctantly letting himself be dragged closer towards his first home, the one he’s been missing all this time and the one he is both desperate to return to and loath to actually be in. It’ll all be different now. His new family will be the ones a dimension away and he won’t have any confirmation on if they’re okay. The next few weeks are going to be so hard.

But, like Raph said, he can occupy himself with thinking up all the plans for the first day they come to visit. Which will hopefully be the first of many more days to come. The separation won’t be permanent, and it’s only with that reassurance that he finally allows one of his legs to take a backwards step through the portal after Raph.

“See you later, alligators,” Mikey says, blinking back the warmth of his eyes in vain. A tear slips down his cheek and he slowly leans further back into the staticky, fuzzy feeling of the portal.

“In a while, crocodile,” Michelangelo and Casey respond in kind, wiping away the wetness of their own eyes.

“We’ll be there soon,” Leonardo reassures with suspiciously fast blinks.

“It was really nice getting to know you. Make sure to text as soon as you can,” O’Neil says, leaning closer to Casey for comfort that he eagerly provides.

“Don’t even think about forgetting about us,” Donatello warns while fiddling with the bottom of his bō.

“Of course you’d say something lame,” Raphael snorts. A sharp smile overtakes his face and he stands taller, eyes shining with promise. “And if you do forget about us, I’ll make sure you get a pounding to remember. Healed or not.”

Mikey lets out a wet laugh and waves one final time. “I’m counting on it.”

The fuzz of the portal envelops him as the faces of his family disappear into colorful smears. He already misses them. But when the cold of the portal tries to envelop him, the blinding warmth of his ninpō beats it back. The swirling colors of his brothers’ ninpō slowly come back into focus and welcome him back with open and enthusiastic arms.

He thought he knew his family would always be there for him, but he never imagined the same would be true even in another dimension. It’s endlessly comforting to know that even worlds away, love always reigns true. His family will be willing and eager to lighten the load he carries. Mikey just has to look past himself and open the doors.

Letting the ones he loves take care of him isn’t as world ending as he thought.