Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

A delicate hitch of the breath, as if ice had crept down into Leonardo’s ribcage in jagged chunks like a glacier fissuring as it slid into the ocean.

A strangled noise filled with bone-crushing, earth-shattering rage with agony inlaid underneath slipped from the back of Raphael’s throat. Mangled and broken like a shattered bone.

Donatello remained carefully still from his end of the line, the silence feeling like it was bursts of static crawling up the back of his shell. The one who normally shattered the silence wasn’t here, he couldn’t reach him.

Michelangelo was missing.

Every passing second his brothers said nothing was another moment that Donatello felt dread slither in his gut as if it was sour milk. He struggled not to feel sick once again, breathing carefully through his nose- not realizing his lungs were burning from subconsciously holding his breath.

Finally, the silence that built up like a massive, jagged mountain range that shoved up between them broke, and for the first time in years, Donatello heard his immediate older brother’s voice. Though it did not bring him relief, it brought with it a strange sense of gravitas that left him feeling like his plastron was buckling under some sort of invisible pressure that was building up in his chest. It wasn’t a relief because it was wrong. It wasn’t Raphael who was supposed to break the awkwardness between them, it was supposed to be Mikey.

Michelangelo was missing.

“What the hell do you mean, Don? I thought he was with you?” Raphael seethed over the line.

Though the ice to Raphael’s flame was the oldest, butting in with his own gritted words of frosty ire. “-And what do you mean, Raphael? You were supposed to be with them.”

“Oh, don’t give me that shit, Fearless. You were the one that left first. You started it-“

Donatello felt like it was that moment in the kitchen all over again. With two brothers who were trying to rip each other apart no matter what the cost. He remembers that moment in a foggy sort of daze, and only then did he truly recognize that it had been Michelangelo to break it up. Logically Donatello had understood, but it didn’t sink into him now. The realization was something startling, and he wasn’t sure why.

The youngest of them had somehow known what would get through to all of them. Knew the instinct bred into them, born of thousands of sparring sessions together. He had known. Wasn’t Michelangelo supposed to be the unobservant one?

 The thought was startling, and it felt like Donatello was missing something…something important like he was close to a conclusion, but he couldn’t grasp it just yet. He hated the feeling. It went against Donatello’s very nature. He liked to have and to hold evidence that brought him to a conclusion, facts and data soothed him. The not knowing…it killed him. Then again, perhaps he should be kinder to himself, it was nearly impossible to have a coherent thought over the raised voices coming from the speaker of his phone. That and his frantic rabbit-paced heartbeat in his chest. All because…

Mikey was missing.

“We shouldn’t be arguing, not if Michelangelo is in trouble…when I last saw him, he was still staying in the Lair.” The moment the words escaped, the fact that the line went dead silent on both sides should have made him realize that he had opened the floodgates to hell.

There was a growl, and he was surprised that it came from Leo and not Raph. It was so uncharacteristic of the normally levelheaded leader, though…he hadn’t been that way for quite some time, had he? They had all changed…didn’t they? “You are implying that you haven’t spoken to him since then. How long ago was that?”

“Like you have room to talk.” Donatello scoffed, he was getting defensive, he knew it consciously, but he was never the type to just lose an argument. He could never just let something go. Donatello had to systematically destroy the opposition’s side with facts and logic. Even if the one on the other side were his brothers. “I’ve been…busy. It’s not like he ever called or messaged either, neither did you two.”

Though niggling in the back of his mind were the doubts, they crept in suddenly. Though Donatello realized they were always there, lurking under the surface like a creature in a dark bog. It didn’t rise to the occasion until the moment when everything was too much until he was frantically packing his belongings in a suitcase while talking to two brothers who felt like strangers instead of the comforting family that he had grown up with.

He couldn’t focus on that now.

Michelangelo was missing.

“It’s not the same! Okay- it’s different. I…” Raphael tried to protect his vulnerable underbelly and defend his actions.

Donatello wasn’t relenting, as he pinched the phone between his head and shoulder while shoving his books into his suitcase. In the background, he heard April doing much the same. She was disappointed with him, and could barely look at him. Ever since they left, she had been trying to urge him to go home, to check on his brothers. To bridge the gap.

He didn’t though…

Because normally it was Michelangelo who did that.

For years he had waited for that message to pop up, or for the call to come through. A ‘Hey bro, how is college treating ya? Got any good pizza places there?’ or a stupid cat meme that Michelangelo loved to send. Though he didn’t. So, he waited and waited.

He waited and the day never came to be.

Deep down, Donatello knows he is partially to blame. Perhaps not fully, as he does still hold accountability to the others, but he should have known, shouldn’t he? Michelangelo couldn’t be alone, that wasn’t in his nature. He was the sun, wanting to give life and vitality to plants under his care.

Though thankfully, Michelangelo was inevitable. The sun would always shine, no matter what landscape devoid of life it shone upon.

(He ignored the logic that not even the sun shone forever, that it was a star and stars succumbed to destroying themselves or imploding in a gravitational collapse. Michelangelo had to keep shining… because that is who he was.)

“You were supposed to stay with them- I trusted you all to stick together. To take care of each other—”

“What about you? Huh? What made you think that Don or Mike would be fine if you just up and left? What about me? You know I’m not a leader!”

“Michelangelo is missing.” Donatello heard his voice barely over the static in his head. “I tried reaching him on his T-Phone twenty-six times this morning, and all the calls went straight through to voicemail. The sixteen messages I sent are still as of now unread.” He hated how apathetic his voice sounded. As if he was simply stating simple facts that were fundamental and had no greater meaning or emotion to them other than that they were simply true. Though at the same time, the youngest of the three could not let even a single sliver of emotion past the dam he built up, or risk the collapse of his carefully cultivated subdued mask. He couldn’t be emotional, not right now. It wasn’t useful to the situation, he had to be more logical than that.  

So, like everything else, like all the other grief he had- he bottled up the panic currently racing through his veins. “I’m currently leaving, it will take me three days to get to the Lair. When will the rest of you be able to get there? We need to coordinate our search.”

“I’ll be there around the same time…I—was already taking a ship home already before…before…” Leonardo’s voice sounds a bit choked up, rougher in a way that couldn’t be chalked up to the old damage to his vocal cords. It was something deeper, something rawer and more vulnerable than old wounds.

Because Michelangelo Hamato was missing. The youngest brother, the sunlight in the storm clouds, the rainbow after the thunderstorm—he was gone.

None of them knew if the sun was still shining.

None of them knew if Mikey was alive.

--But Michelangelo had to be alive, he had to keep shining. Donatello felt it deep in his bones, felt it bubbling in his marrow, felt it roiling in his gut—Mikey had to be alive.

The broken family couldn’t take the loss of the sun too; if they did—they would grow even colder than their already icy exchanges, the icy whispered accusations. The blame they tossed at one another like sharp steel blades in the dark. It was better to blame each other than potentially take it upon themselves, to admit it might have been their fault that a star had died without them noticing—without them being any the wiser.  Donatello couldn’t admit it to himself, because if he did even think that it was his fault for even a moment—if he acknowledged the fact that he had never picked up the phone…then he’d spiral.

He couldn’t do that right now.

Not when his only younger brother was missing.

It didn’t feel real, it felt like it was all some strange sort of nightmare.

As he had been lost in his thoughts, he’d missed Leonardo and Raphael’s slowly rising voices.

“Why didn’t you stay? You were supposed to stay. You were supposed to take care of them—they needed you.” Leonardo’s anger, once again the liquid nitrogen to Raphael’s fire. When the two collided it was always something horrible. Donatello hadn’t been used to it in a while. When was the last time he’d heard his brothers argue?

Donatello remembered at the same time a migraine began to build behind his temples. The kitchen, right before Leonardo left them. Right before everything else fell apart and crumbled into dust.

“Stop…” Donatello whispered.

Raphael either didn’t hear him or didn’t care as his voice came sharply from across the phone. “Right back at it, nearly four years and you’re already back to throwing blame. You can’t admit you were wrong, can you? Perfect Fearless who can never do anything wrong—you left too. You left first, without saying a damn thing. You only left a fucking note and gave the bare minimum effort.” The fiery brother snapped back in response.

“Stop,” Donatello whispered hoarsely. This wasn’t helping, it was only breaking them apart again. Shattering already broken bonds.

Finally hearing him, Donatello’s immediate older brother turned on him next. His tone hissed with venom. “—and you. You have some fucking nerve. You left too—”

“We all left,” Donatello responded hoarsely. “Stop it. Just stop—this isn’t going to help if Mikey is d—”

“Don’t. Finish. That. Sentence.” Raphael snarled something feral.

There was a long bout of silence over the line. Raphael may have stopped Donatello from uttering the word verbally, but it was still on their minds anyway. What if Michelangelo…the youngest, the impending sun on the horizon… if he was gone? Forever?

It would be all their fault.

“Three days.” Donatello reiterated. “April and I will be there in three days.”

It wasn’t subtle, but it did go unspoken, instead, Donatello carried it in his tone.

‘Let sleeping dogs lie.’

They could rip out each other’s throats later, but right now they needed to be coordinated. They needed to find their brother.

-- because Michelangelo was missing.

There was a brief understanding that settled between all of them. Acknowledgment without saying anything, but the silence spoke volumes enough.

“Like I said…I was already on a ship back. I’ll be around three days as well.” Leonardo responded.

Raphael snarled, making a noise of annoyance. “I’ll have some trouble getting back over the border but…fuck it. Casey and I’ll find a way. Three days.”

Three days.

Seventy-two hours.

Four thousand three hundred and twenty minutes.

Two hundred fifty-nine thousand two hundred seconds.

It felt like forever and yet simultaneously like no time at all. Donatello felt the duality of time in that moment, not enough, and yet there was too much.

“I’ll meet you,” Donatello says, his voice coming out even-tempered despite everything. Somehow, he managed to keep tight enough control that his voice does not wobble, though his lips do purse in a tight line. “Stay in touch.”

Don’t leave again.

I need you.

Mikey needs you.

He needs us.

Those are the unspoken words he wants to say, but he doesn’t, because they had nonverbally all agreed for the moment to not rekindle the sparks that threatened to explode. It’s like they were in a room filled with toxic gas and all of them held a match, just waiting to see who would strike it against the stone first.

For Michelangelo’s sake, they remained at a standstill.

Just because it was calm did not mean things were at peace. There was too much hurt, too far of a gaping chasm between them.

“Yeah. I’ll be there.” Raphael says and hangs up without another word. His portion of the call disconnects and there is a space, leaving only Leonardo and Donatello on call with one another.

Donatello needed to triple-check. He had to make sure…He needed to know Leo was coming back. “You’re…” He couldn’t force the words out, as if the dam that all of his emotions had built up behind also clogged the words from escaping his throat.

Leonardo seemed to understand. Seemed to read the silence between his words, the hitch to his breath, the stammer on his tongue. “I’m coming back, Donnie.” He says simply.

He doesn’t apologize for leaving, he doesn’t offer any excuses or explanations, and his oldest brother is just as heavily reserved as ever.

It felt that without Michelangelo to act as a buffer between them, none of them knew how to interact with one another. Had it always been that way? Or had the years of being estranged from one another truly taken their toll?

“….Okay.” Donatello breathes. “Okay.” He repeats, a bit more firmly. More insistently. As if he’s trying to convince himself of the truth of the fact. Though Donatello had a difficult time believing in things he couldn’t see for himself, he was a man of science—not of faith.

Right now he had to have faith that his brothers were coming home.

That the sun was still shining somewhere in New York and hadn’t completely died out.

That there was still hope left to cross the chasms they had dug out with years of silence and neglect. Of the screamed words echoing from old fights and the faint pang of wistful longing and nostalgia for the way that things used to be, back when the world was still just the sewers, they called home, and they still had a full family.

Things had never been perfect, but things had surely been better than this. Yet those days are so faintly remembered they are like old blurry sepia-tone portraits with bleeding edges and water damage. It’s so hard to remember what the feeling of a whole and hale family used to feel like when they had been severed from one another for so long.

It’s as if they amputated themselves—Donatello was the head, the mind that tried to cut off connection as if it could think easier. Raphael the hands which were bruised and bloody from where they had broken and bled from wounded knuckles, crescent shapes dug into the palms from clenching into fists so tightly. Leonardo the legs, were rooted and grounded but when he moved it shook everything else. Normally so reliable and yet when he left only the hard ground was there to meet them. Then…Michelangelo…. The torso. The chest to which all the major organs were. The lungs to breathe, and the heart of it all.

They were disjointed now, hunks of useless flesh that had been cut apart in such a grim macabre fashion. It only made Donatello wonder if they would ever be something resembling something healthy again or if they stitched each other back together it would be like Frankenstein’s monster. Something ugly and horrific.

Only time will tell.

Three days.

Three days that felt so long but so short. Three days, three sunrises in which Donatello wasn’t sure the sun even still existed.

“I’m packed,” April said as she stopped by Donatello’s door. Her face set into a hard thin line, her blue eyes determined but also filled with a sense of faint urgency brought on by panic. Donatello felt it too, though he was muted. Still locked behind the dam. The water raged though, slamming against the barriers he’d erected to keep his composure. He needed to just keep his composure….

Donatello hadn’t realized he’d been clenching his T-Phone tightly in his hand, his arm trembling. “I’ll…Let you go, Leo. I need to get on the road.” He stated. Donatello’s voice didn’t even sound like his own. It felt as if he was a puppet or a mouthpiece for something else. Someone was moving their hand and Donatello’s mouth was moving along.

“Okay,” Leonardo repeated what Donatello had muttered earlier. Echoing Donatello’s uncertainty. Leonardo wasn’t supposed to sound uncertain though, he wasn’t supposed to act as if he was trying to convince himself that everything was fine. He’s supposed to be self-assured, he’s supposed to be the one giving orders and saying everything will be okay.

Though they don’t know that. They can’t possibly know that. They don’t know where Michelangelo is.

Michelangelo is missing.

Oh, Kami how Donatello hates those words together in that sentence, strung together in that way. Though it constantly repeats in his head like a broken record, no matter how hard he tries to stop it, he can’t. He wants to throw up again. He wants to wake up from this nightmare filled with strangers and cold spaces.

He hangs up the phone without another word, and even though the call is disconnected, Donatello can still practically feel Leonardo’s silence.

Three days.

Michelangelo is missing.

Chapter Text

Ever since Raphael heard the news, he doesn’t think he’s stopped clenching his jaw for a single moment. It’s like his mouth was trying to fill itself with the dust of his ground-down molars as he continued to grit his teeth together incessantly. The blame tasted like ash and cinders on his tongue, and he wasn’t quite sure how to get it from clogging the back of his throat. The mutant was still fuming from the conversation he and his brothers had earlier, his skin buzzing like a nest of hornets and his head clouded from the fog of his own making. It was like the taste of that bitter acidic smoke that clung to the roof of his mouth like a bitter aftertaste, something scorched, dead and awful. Bleached bones and sunbaked leather skin.

 Casey tried talking to him, broaching the subject a few times. With varied measures of success. Mostly, Raphael had been giving monosyllabic grunts, sometimes a clipped response. Usually, Raphael ignored Casey.

His mind was too focused on other things. Fixated on the memories of what he’d seen on the flickering motel TV; of the twisted broken asphalt from the sinkhole that had opened where his childhood home used to be.

No one could survive that.

He needed to believe that Mikey left too, like the rest of them. Though unfortunately Raphael knew better. He knew Michelangelo wouldn’t leave. Unlike them. Unlike him. Sentimental Michelangelo would have stayed. Raphael knew not even for a moment would his youngest brother’s mind even have touched upon the mere notion that he was just as free to abandon their childhood home as the rest of them were.

Mikey would have stayed.

Like a damn dog sitting on its haunches at the front door, waiting unblinkingly for someone to come back home. Tail wagging whenever it heard a noise, only for its ears to droop in disappointment when the door never opened.

No one ever came home.

It’s that thought alone that is killing him.

Michelangelo would have stayed…probably waiting…for them. For him. He would have waited, and he probably got killed for it.

They’d find a broken corpse underneath all the rubble, wouldn’t they? Just as shattered as the asphalt and concrete of their old home. Or maybe they wouldn’t even find that much, maybe pinned underneath tons of rubble, his shattered corpse would never be found. Always waiting for them, only to never ever have someone take him home.

Raphael clenched his hands around the wheel of the commandeered vehicle until his green knuckles went pale and his arms trembled. He and Casey had ditched his own vehicle since it would have been too difficult to get it back over the border. Despite what a prized possession it was for Raphael, he’d dropped it without a second thought, wanting to get home as fast as possible. (’Too little, too late.’ An angry voice hissed in the back of his mind that sounded a little bit like what he would imagine Mikey to sound like if his littlest brother ever spat something so venomous and hate filled.) Once he and Casey crossed the border on foot, they’d stolen a car and Raphael began to drive.

Before he loved driving without a destination, the act of just riding to ride was soothing in a way…

Now he just felt like a damned man heading for the gates of hell.

…Because Michelangelo was dead…wasn’t he?

Raphael wanted to hope, but the dread continued to mount, roiling and bubbling in his chest like an ache he wanted to rip out with his bare hands. He couldn’t, though. This kind of ache couldn’t be fixed like that. It could only be settled once he laid eyes on his brother…and accepted the truth one way or another.

Though Raphael felt deep down that Michelangelo was dead…

All because he would have been waiting.

It was tortuous, like the twist of a knife that managed to pierce his plastron and sink into his heart.

Waiting, waiting, waiting…

‘Too little, too late.’ The voice in the back of Raphael’s mind hissed once again. It made him want to dry heave because Michelangelo wasn’t the one who got angry, he wasn’t the one who was too stubborn to forgive, and he was never the one who hated anyone.

Oh but things would be so much easier if Michelangelo hated Raphael as much as Raphael hated himself in that moment. However, he couldn’t, because the youngest was probably dead and gone under the ruins of their childhood home.

The buzzing hornets get more vicious, and the blackened smoke turns to gummy tar that closes up his throat.

Waiting.

‘Too little, too late.’

-And Raphael can’t even argue with the nasty little voice.

Three days later and they finally see the sign.

WELCOME TO NEW YORK

THE EMPIRE STATE

He was home, and yet—

Raphael felt more like he was walking towards the guillotine. As if he was shuffling towards the gallows, waiting for the floor underneath him to drop as the bite of coarse rope in the shape of a noose went tight around his neck. He felt like the tar had dripped sluggishly into his lungs, like parasitic vines choking out an oak tree.

New York was dreary. Rain splashes in fat drops as the wipers tried and failed to keep up with the downpour. The screech as the wipers slid across the windshield made him grit his teeth. The world is a haze of red taillights and stationery traffic, all of it surrounded by a grey halo of wet misery. The traffic light ahead finally goes green, but the road is so packed that it goes nowhere. Other drivers press their horns, and the noise is even more grating than the squeak of the windshield wipers.

Through it all, there is one thought bubbling in his head.

The sun in New York is gone.

‘Too little. Too late.’

He turns on the radio, hoping to drown out the sounds of the wipers and car horns.

Of the sound of that nasty little voice.

…Because Mikey wouldn’t sound like that.

However, Michelangelo is likely dead, and he’s here… waiting. Just like he made Michelangelo do for years.

Raphael knew though… it was too little, too late.

The first time he had seen his brothers in years, and it was like looking at strangers. Of hollowed corpses with empty husks, blank eyes that stared through him rather than at him. They were silent for a long time, each of them just looking, taking in the differences. Of seeing the years of age and the way it settled into their bodies in ways they hadn’t seen because they hadn’t been there.

The rooftop they met up on is wet, but the hard rain had stopped an hour or so ago. Now it was only a light annoying drizzle with water droplets misting over them all and leaving the damp cool air to seep into their marrow. The atmosphere was about as cold as their gazes as they locked eyes on each other.

The silence between them is like a graveyard of scattered bleached bones, empty eye sockets, and accusatory stares of the vultures circling above.

They did not bury the hatchet.

Yet they did not pick it up either.

It was still lying there, and it was just a matter of who would pick it up first to wield it against the others.

The silence stretched too long, maybe it was the wariness of their eyes or the anxiousness in the set of his shoulders that gave him away, or maybe it was just April feeling what they felt with her freaky psychic abilities. However, she was the one to break the stalemate first by launching herself at Raphael and Casey and pulling them both into a tight hug.

“It’s so good to see you both again!” She was tense too. A bundle of nerves and tensed muscles as she clung onto them with a faint air of desperation. He could practically feel her mentally begging him not to fight.

—but fighting is the only thing Raph was good for.

He opened his mouth, and before he was even conscious of what he was saying, the words were already slipping from his tongue. “I would say the same, April.” His words, pointed and accusatory.

As April pulled away with a frown, Donatello spoke. “Yes, we would all prefer different circumstances. These are the circumstances we have though.” He remarked in that ever passive aggressive manner. Trying to get the back on track. It was the same casual sort of way he looked down on everyone else, it always raised Raphael’s hackles. He could feel the sneer wanting to pull at his lips.

April just shook her head and moved to Leonardo to pull him into a hug. The oldest brother returning it lightly with an awkward pat. “So…” he said as April pulled away. Ocean eyes landing on Donatello who pulled at the collar of his sweater. Raphael, if it had been years ago and their relationship wasn’t practically nonexistent, then he would have playfully ribbed Donatello about dressing like a stereotypical nerd. Instead he just swallowed the frustration that kept accumulating in the back of his throat, though it was futile. Like the windshield wipers and the rain earlier. It kept coming back, bubbling up— frothing. “We’ll need to coordinate our search.” Leonardo continues, and Raphael’s emerald eyes snap back to him.

“Already here and back to calling the shots like you never left?” He can’t help but to ask, and he finds some satisfaction in the way Leonardo recoils slightly. His fists closing and opening by his sides as if he wants to lash out.

Leonardo narrows his eyes. “You’re not helping.” He hisses. “Would it kill you to play nice for once. For Mikey’s sake?”

He feels the snarl finally find purchase on his lips, they peel away from his teeth in anger and he growls. Casey puts a hand on his shoulder. “Raph, man- come on.”

April sighs. “Everyone is stressed, but Mikey is counting on us.” She further iterates, and she holds up her hands like she is trying to pacify an angered animal. Raphael swallows back the rage once again, even when it tries to flare. Why was April playing mediator?

—Because Michelangelo wasn’t here to do it.

When did their family always need a referee on the sidelines to step in when things got too much? Well… if Raphael had theorize, despite that being Donnie’s thing— he’d guess that it was when the family stopped being a family.

Raphael lets out a small gust of air past his teeth, begrudgingly he settled back. He hadn’t realized when he had inclined himself ever so slightly forwards. Casey pats him on the shoulder once before letting go.

The hatchet is still in the middle of the brothers, gleaming and promising bloodshed. Though right now they have more important matters to focus their efforts towards than rehashing old arguments. Of ripping open old wounds over and over again just to see how they would bleed.

“We’ll need to be careful not to be seen because of the construction workers, on the way here I calculated the likelihood of which tunnels would still be standing after extrapolating data from the news reports and coverage. I then took that data and turned it into a three-dimensional model simulation of the—“ Donatello began to ramble, but the scientific infodump was not wanted or warranted at the moment when they still had Michelangelo to find among the rubble of their home.

He growled. “Donnie.”

Pausing midway through a word, his lips stumbled to a halt. He blinked before huffing in irritation. It was an old reaction on this new face. It’s strange watching this new strange version of his brother to react in an old familiar way. It was a limbo of ‘familiar enough’ to ‘unknown’ and it made Raphael grit his teeth. “We need to take the east tunnels.” The youngest brother (only because Mikey was gone, missing) finished pointedly, skipping over the explanation he already likely had planned out.

Taking over the leader position as if he never left, the oldest brother nodded. “Then we’ll go through that way to the Lair to begin our search.”

Leonardo’s eyes met his, and there was a wordless challenge there both in his expression and in his posture. Oh, how Raphael wanted to argue, because how dare Leonardo act as if he’s been here the whole time. How dare he pretend.

He opens his mouth, goes to lash out. To pick up the hatchet and to strike… but at the last second, he thinks of Michelangelo waiting and his eyes briefly close. “Fine.” He says instead, as he pulls away from that hatchet still unburied, the allure dangling in front of him. Though it is only the thought of the youngest brother that stays his hand.

When they make their way to the proper manhole, lifting it and sliding down into the darkness of the sewers is in that strange limbo category of ‘familiar but unfamiliar’. The way his body moves is on muscle memory, but they hadn’t been used in some time— like a machine covered in dust and parts rusting in orange and brown patches.

The sewers are the same patchwork of maze-like structures as they had always been. The smell is sour but in a way that feels like home, but an old version of it. One tinged with sepia tones like an old tattered photograph that is blurry and unfocused. No one speaks, instead following after Donatello as he leads with a flashlight and one hand on the wall, sliding across the old brick as if he is trying to familiarize himself with this ‘new yet old’ as well. Leonardo acts much like always, his eyes alert and his mind focused. Raphael remembers with envy and a tinge of loathing how he was always so unyielding. He always has to be so…

Perfect.

Yet Raphael watches the moment that Leonardo’s perfect expression finally shatters, and when his own eyes turn to the wreckage, he finds out why.

Everything is collapsed, their home, sunken into the ground. There is twisted wreckage where their childhood home used to be.

Everything runs cold, he trembles and from the first time it is not from rage. A black cloud descended over Raphael as his wide eyes took in the destruction, the utter erasure of the safe haven that had always been. Distantly he hears Casey take in a sharp inhale and mutter a curse under his breath, while April sobs through clenched teeth.

They carefully make their way through the rubble, and no matter the fact that no one speaks— it is obvious that they are looking for a spot of orange in the bleak grey of stone and twisted pipes. Water puddles in the floor from the hissing water spraying, and they slosh through it. It is the only sound along with their haggard breathing as they take in the broken past that lay open like oozing pus-filled infected wounds.

“I…” Donatello breaks the silence first, snaps Raphael out of his sheer and utter disbelief, the shock that made him feel like this was just a nightmare instead of reality. He knew it would be bad, but he never thought it would be this bad.

Clenching his hands in the bottom of his sweater, Donnie speaks again, voice raspy. As if it is a chore to force the words to be uttered. “I… am going to check my lab, see if anything is intact. At the very least the security systems would have recorded something, maybe.”

“What security systems, dude.” Casey asks, and his tone is serious. A rarity. Though Casey had always been the sort to wise up when things got too deep, always was the kind of person who could be relied on come hell or high water, and God this was both.

Donatello looked away. “Everything the security cameras record… had recorded…” he corrects himself. It is a stumble that normally Donatello wouldn’t make as meticulous as he was, always thinking and mulling over the words his big brain is going to use in order to get his words across the most eloquently. Even when angry Donatello still often had the wits about him to be cutting, which always infuriated Raphael when they were younger since one could never win an argument with his immediate younger brother. Yet here and now, he was fumbling with his words. Walking on eggshells. Donatello takes a breath through his teeth and continues. “It’s essentially like the black box in an airplane, it was designed to resist… well… a lot of force. Perhaps it recorded something of use.”

“Okay.” Leo began. “Be careful-”

Raphael couldn’t take it. He felt the venom build in his blood and a fire bloom in his belly. “Why are you focusing on your stupid tech when we need to search for Mikey!” He shouts, and it echoes in their hollow broken home, and… maybe it was broken before it had physically been so.

-and they are still pretending.

Too little, too late.

“Raph, we need to find out who caused the explosion and… if Michelangelo was-”

He cuts Donatello off. “Don’t.”

Leonardo’s face pinches, and he opens his mouth to probably chide Raphael. Leo never could leave well enough alone. He always had to push and push and push. It was never enough, nothing was ever enough.

Leonardo’s dark blue eyes look around, take in the sinking support pillars, the ruins around them that barely are even recognizable as their old home.

His breath hisses from between his lips, wordless. A promise, this wasn’t over, but he was letting it go.

April stands between all of them again, her hands up like she is trying to keep rabid animals from tearing each other apart. He hates it, the way she injects herself into the situation. It’s wrong.

Mikey would have effortlessly lighten the situation, but he wasn’t here.

He was probably dead under the rubble.

They split up, it’s as if they are all separate units. Donatello goes to find the black box or whatever in his lab, April goes to help. Leonardo goes to see the dojo to see if anything survived, and Raph and Casey search through the main areas of the Lair.

The living room, or what used to be left of it— they need to be careful. It’s mostly sunken in, a pit caved into the ground and into the lower tunnels below.

He looks at it, imagines the moments that had been before, and it’s a visceral shock that runs through his system like ice across his spine. Casey puts his hand on Raphael’s shoulder, and squeezes. It’s supposed to be comforting, but it feels far away. He can’t look away though, he can’t tear his gaze from the desolation in front of him.

Eventually Leonardo comes to stand beside he and Casey, while staring at the void below, of rushing water and broken concrete and twisted pipes. “The shrine…” he begins.

Raphael doesn’t want to hear it, doesn’t want to hear that the last thing of their father was gone too, missing along with their little brother.

Too little, too late.

“The tree kept the dojo from collapsing fully, the Shrine was empty… the frames left behind but the pictures taken.” He says. “He knew about it, he knew the Lair was going to… he made it out.”

Raphael wanted to point out the fact that just because the pictures were gone didn’t mean anything. In fact, it meant less than nothing. Though he couldn’t, because it would mean thinking of the alternative in which their youngest brother was…

In the rubble, broken corpse somewhere underneath where they could never find him.

Donatello and April eventually rejoin them. Donatello’s bag is heavy with what must be the black box. “It will take a while for me to decode the data—”

“Mikey doesn’t have a while.” He hisses.

April frowned. “He’s not here,” she says. “Neither is Ice Cream Kitty. I can’t sense their mental presence anywhere in the Lair. Maybe Donnie’s security cameras found out where he had gone or—” She doesn’t mention that another reason she might not be able to feel their mental presence would be because he’s already gone in a way far more permanent than him leaving.

Mikey wouldn’t leave.

Too little, too late.

There is silence between them all for a moment. No one knows what to say, no one knows what to do. Not even Leonardo, the perfect fearless leader- has a clue on how to proceed. Everything feels so daunting in that moment.

“We need to find him. If he made it out… he could be in the surrounding area.” He doesn’t know what possessed him to speak up, but he can’t be quiet any longer. He can’t stand everyone standing around staring at one another when Raphael’s youngest brother could be bleeding out somewhere— or already dead.

He expects his once, blue-masked brother to glare, to argue since Raphael is attempting to control the situation. Though he doesn’t… and oddly enough— that scares him more than Leonardo if he would be shouting. Raphael is familiar with the push-and-pull of arguing, like the crashing of the tides. Though this? This… silent acceptance? Listless dead eyes?

They stare at one another, and Leonardo just nods. “We’ll split up and look. Donatello, can you give us a list of the most stable tunnels to go through?”

Stilted, Donatello gives a jerky nod. Normally he would have already have the information pulled up, but they were so out of practice. Once unified, but now they were awkward and hobbling, they were missing a core piece of their team, their family- the same family that hadn’t been a family for a long time…

Raphael clenched his hands by his sides, balled them into tight fists until they trembled and his knuckles ached.

Once Donatello sends them the information, Raphael doesn’t wait around— he just leaves. He needs to find his little brother, he needs to.

He hears Leonardo speak at his retreating shell, telling him to call if he finds anything. He just gives a grunt and begins the trek through familiar but unfamiliar tunnels. Familiar in the way he’s walked them before, and unfamiliar in the way that settling down to read a book you haven’t touched in months and forgot what happened before. It’s like seeing a person you used to know, a best friend… a brother… and realizing you don’t know how much they have changed since the last time you saw them. The way age settled on someone’s face for years of their life you hadn’t been present to see.

He let his feet carry him, both unfocused and focused. His eyes searching and yet not searching.

Raphael stops briefly, he wants to scream, to roar and rage at the unfairness of it all. He wants to blame the universe for potentially taking his brother from him, for making him in this unsettling limbo of not knowing. Though he doesn’t, he just bows his head and puts his forehead against the damp brick wall. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, and his mind wanders.

‘You think you’re mad because you’ve taught yourself to think that you are, you feel like it’s a safer way to feel,” Michelangelo said smugly. “I know your secret now.’

“You were right, little brother.” He whispers hoarsely.

Because under the anger, there is something he doesn’t want to admit to.

Fear.

He’s afraid.

Afraid to find his brother, because it might be—

‘TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE.’

He takes another deep inhale to collect himself, pushes off of the wall, and continues walking.

Raphael Hamato doesn’t break down. He is reliable…

“I’m coming, Mike.”

Hours pass. His feet are aching, but he ignores the minor discomfort to check his T-Phone once again to see if any of his brothers had found anything yet. There are check-ins from Leo, Donnie, April, and Casey— his phone getting more use out of it than it had in years.

Though one was missing.

He bites the inside of his cheek, chews on it as he puts his T-Phone back. He continued to walk, because what else could he do?

He suddenly freezes. He feels it before he hears it.

The noise is small, weak, raspy. Though it is the same as it had been all those years ago, back when they were just tots piled on top of each other.

Whenever Michelangelo had a nightmare, was scared— he was always a cry baby so it happened often. It used to irritate him, but now— Raphael nearly let out a sob when he heard it. He never cried, yet in that moment he almost did.

The deep rumbling churr came out of his throat before his words could form, and frantically he ran.

Chirp.

He warned in return.

Chirp.

It was getting louder.

Chirp.

“Mikey!?” he screams. He gives more frantic warbles. ‘I’m here, you’re safe.’ He wasn’t too late.

Except he was.

God he was years too late.

When he saw Michelangelo, bloody and broken, he dropped to the ground. He was expecting bright blue round eyes, maybe him whining over a scraped knee. Michelangelo had loved to milk his injuries when he was younger, and always wanted attention.

Instead he was missing an arm, his blank white eyes half-lidded. Scars marring his form that Raphel hadn’t been around to see.

TOO LITTLE.

TOO LATE.

He’s afraid to touch him. Afraid to hurt him worse than he already is. He feels the tears dripping down his face, but his pride is shattered because Kami— he had failed.

He pulls the phone out of his pocket.

“I found him!”

His little brother went limp.

“Mikey— MIKEY! Stay with me! Come on! Get over here Donnie! He’s dying!” he screams.

Too little….

Too late.

Chapter Text

His tympanum rang, the sound drowning out everything else like the aftermath of an explosion in his head. Everything was muffled, as if his head was underwater.

All his life he had been stone. Like the sewers they lived in, the city they called home, all of it hard winding cities of cold stone. His own form had solidified to be the leader, the one that could be leaned upon without bending under the pressure of carrying the burdens of the Hamato name on his shoulders. He was hewn by the hard strikes of expectations and being the oldest. Like a smooth river stone tumbled under the waters, he’d been polished. His circumstances made him into something reliable, nearly perfect in execution.

“Help me staunch the blood flow! I need more pressure!” Purple, dim- panicked yet controlled. Eyes wide yet observant.

He’s under the water. Looking up at the lights managing to peer through the waves at the surface. His body is moving on autopilot.

He’s under the river that made him, drowning in it.

…. and the river is filled with blooming red at their edges.

Being back around his brothers again was difficult. Especially when one of them was missing.

Leonardo knew they were slipping back into old habits. Of the anger, the blame, the arguments and the heated gazes. He could see they were spiraling, as they had been before. They were playing a dangerous game, and there was always the possibility for one of them to fold. If they did, however, that meant giving up— on Michelangelo.

They couldn’t.

So, Leonardo could see the way Donatello chafed and bristled upon Raphael’s words. He could see the way Raphael’s eyes regarded him with bitterness every time he gave an order, every time he spoke. Yet none were willing to fold, none were about to give up on Michelangelo. So Raphael bit his tongue for once in his life, and Donatello let his words evaporate as they all silently agreed to just continue to play along, to play this game of push and pull. To swallow venom and acid and focus on what really mattered, because they failed already and they could not afford to do it again.

Leonardo could see the game, knew they were all following it’s unspoken rules, but he was afraid to stop playing. To stop slipping into old habits might mean a tip of the scales, of one of them folding.

Michelangelo needed them.

So, they kept going around and around. Silent words unspoken, heated glances and coldness seeping into the words they did speak. It was all ill-fitting, disconcerting in the way it tugged in familiar ways. Taught at the skin and building in an itch under the surface.

One might think that a smooth river-stone is inoffensive. Designed to be perfect, tumbled by water and sanded down to a slick glossy finish. Yet it is still perhaps offensive in the way it’s blunt surface can strike and still hurt in the way sharp abrasive edges never could. Bones broke and shattered in a way that left shards out of alignment, ripping and tearing all over again because they never bother to be reset. Ground into dust, pelted with accusatory eyes, a thrown stone casted by a hypocrite.

He’s trying, but every time he speaks it is like he is striking himself against them. Raphael especially. Stone against stone, to see who’s will breaks first. They play by rules of the age old game in which they used to play even as children, in which Leonardo still was the leader and their group a unified team. Except they aren’t a team. They are a disjointed mass, the lack of unity, it is like a chasm- rifts between them that seemed too much to cross.

So, they remain. Separate entities, holding a façade of a coalition that is as shaky as the broken foundation of their childhood home.

When he had first seen it, it was like the breath had been driven from his lungs.

They had lost so much. Now their home…

Leonardo felt the grief and the blame build. Rising like a solid mass in the back of his throat, something he physically needed to swallow around. He was trembling, and he clenched his hands into fists beside him to try and hide it.

Where is Michelangelo?

“I’m not getting a pulse!”

Controlled panic broke out of it’s confines, he could hear the terror in his younger brother’s voice. The pressure of eyes and the sounds of harsh staggered breathing bleed slowly into his muffled hearing. He hadn’t realized it was his own breathing.

He settles his hands over his youngest dead brother. “I am not losing him.” He needs to be calm. He needs tranquillity. Because if he doesn’t, then Michelangelo would die.

He has to ignore the sharp hard lines of gangly limbs where there used to be youthful baby fat. He has to ignore the way pale waxy skin stretches over the sharp unpadded jagged edges of bone. He has to ignore the old scars, the ones that were too old. The one on his throat that passes uncomfortably close to the jugular, the ones across his face in the middle of his forehead— he has to force his eyes away. He needs to calm his breathing, and seeing the damage that his youngest, innocent and naïve little brother had obtained— damage that he could have prevented, should have.

He focuses. Searches for that tranquillity of the smooth surface of that river stone, imagines the pads of his fingers pinching it between them. Rolling it in the palms of his hands in his mind as physically his body goes through the motions of the healing hands mantra.

It’s like pouring water into a sieve. His energy flows, but it as if it is being rejected, sliding through without getting the chance to settle. Like oil across his skin.

It’s a void where the brightest light used to be— A yawning chasm of blackness that made him feel small and insignificant. Swallowed whole by the darkness. It just keeps consuming but the energy never fills that vast empty space of nothingness.

What have they done?

What has he done?

“Pulse!”

He is pulled from the mantra, weak- and yet he had barely made any difference in the gaping wounds despite all of the energy he had extended.

He’s moved out of the way so Donatello can work, hard green eyes of his immediate younger brother settle on his own as heavy calloused hands land heavily on his shoulders. He’s too empty to fight against being moved, his eyes both heavy and wide open. The squeeze the hands give on his shoulders as they keep him upright… It’s not forgiveness, but it’s an extension of equal guilt. Of shared blame.

“It’s gone.” He murmurs brokenly.

He’s not talking about their home, no— he’s talking about something more important. One of the things that made their home what it was. They lost the only light that could survive in this dark damp place so deep underground.

Perhaps he’d pray, to his father, to his ancestors… to gods he wasn’t sure were listening…

But he doubted any gods were this far down.

April sobs as she tries to help Donatello keep Mikey stable- silent tears trailing down her face that her blood covered hands don’t bother trying to wipe away, and Leo knows she feels it too— in her own way. That great yawning chasm to an open abyss that leads down into a murky depth that should never have been there. The sun was snuffed out, a higher being pinching primordial fingers around the burning star to suffocate out the flame.

—because it has to be some higher power that has done it.

(He can’t stand to believe that something he thought would never happen, could possibly happen…and it could be his fault…their fault.)

Raphael doesn’t ask for clarification. Even without a supernatural sense, he knows.

“What have we done?” Leo asks again, because he knows. He knows there was no higher power to blame, the blame is his… it’s theirs.

No one has an answer.

He was supposed to be the one with the answers, the plan.

He doesn’t. He can’t.

In the polished stone, a crack forms.

The sight of their home was bad, but the heart of it all— the image of the dojo was only worse. The tree that had been miraculously growing in their hostile sewer home since he could remember from his earliest memories was crushed. Broken dead branches underneath cold apathetic stone. The roots were unearthed, shriveled and wet with the smell of rot building at the base of it. The roots splayed outwards across the pool of water accumulating in the broken dojo like it was searching from the soil it had been ripped from.

They had split up to search, he couldn’t bear to look at their shattered twisted home any longer. Bile threatened to rise. He tried to center himself, Leo asked the memory of his father to give him strength.

He walked, footsteps light and silent as he wound the maze-like labyrinth of his childhood home. He remembers distantly as he passes, a little Michelangelo excitedly splashing in a puddle. He stops to watch as the phantom laughs and looks back with bright unburdened blue eyes. ‘Can’t catch me, Leo!’ The imagery taunted. Mikey was always so fast, he could have run further and faster than any of them.

His darker blue eyes widen and he exhales sharply, he is running after the little vision of a giggling Mikey as his feet splash against the water.

Just as he reaches out his hand towards his orange mask tails, they flit through his fingers like smoke weaving in between the outstretched sprawling branches of a tree. He is breathing hard, not from the running, but from the buckets of adrenaline being poured through his veins.

He needs to keep walking.

His hand slowly closes around empty air, and he swallows around the knot in his throat and feels it drop into the pit in his stomach. It makes his plastron feel hollow and caved in.

Slowly, Leonardo keeps walking.

He doesn’t look too closely at any other puddles after that.

The blue masked mutant’s mind echoes with ghostly little giggles and the pitter patter of little splashing feet.

They are in the back of the van now, Casey and Raphael had helped move him there, Donatello is furiously trying to keep Michelangelo stable who is too pale. Casey is driving, April’s eyes are wet and her light ginger hair hangs down to shield her face as she sits beside him. Raphael is haggard, he looks suddenly thirty years older. His shell is propped up against the doors of the van and his fingers are idly tracing Michelangelo’s face. His too gaunt, sharp, scarred face.

Leonardo can’t bring himself to touch him. He feels sick just from looking at him. Not from disgust, but from the sheer visceral self-loathing and horror that overrides every single one of his executive functions and makes him recoil. He stares blankly at Raphael instead, who… for once isn’t combative from his attention. He allows the staring.

Black fabric, it’s wrong. Mikey is the brightest color, the light in the world filled with deep rippling blues, burnt reds and low energy purples. He was supposed to be the antithesis, Leo realizes. The other side of the coin to what Leo represents. The oldest and the youngest. The most reserved and the most open. The cold and the warmth. The light and the dark.

Yet there was always light in the dark, and so too was there dark in the light?

He had let that darkness fester and grow, like rabid decay who’s dark sickly knotted fingers ruined everything it touched.

All because he had set into motion a series of events that had an irreversible impact on his youngest brother. He had been the coward the left first. Michelangelo, his baby brother— his sweet little otouto.

“-eo….LEO!”

Leonardo snapped to attention with a jerk of his head. Donatello is looking at him. His brown eyes are angry. (At him? He should be.)

“Yes… I… what, Donatello?” His eyes dart nervously to Michelangelo, worried that something has gone wrong and Donatello lost his pulse again. Leo didn’t have enough energy to bring him back twice. But thankfully Mikey’s plastron rises with shallow breath, but Leo is forced to look away when he notices the deep scoring cracks in the edge that make his throat feel tight and nausea build and churn in his stomach.

Donatello swallows thickly. The anger briefly wanes, but only because he’s busy checking Mikey’s vitals again. “We’re going to need a safe place, somewhere we can keep Mikey safe so he can heal— we need… we need a plan.”

There it was.

Stone was the foundation, wasn’t it? It is what everything else relied on to keep up the rest.

…But Leo was starting to doubt now that he was ever the foundation.

Though Raphael was looking at him as well, and for once the red coded brother wasn’t trying to talk over him. Wasn’t trying to butt in with his own opinions. He was waiting, and listening. Maybe it should have given him hope, this is what they were supposed to be, right? A team? He was the leader…

Though Leo didn’t feel much like a leader, he abandoned his family for so long… yet they still looked up to him when it mattered. Why? Was it because it was expected? Or because no one else could fill the role?

Maybe no one wanted that role.

“I…”

He mulls over his words. Just like the river that smooths the stones from tumbling them. Yet he can’t articulate anything. His eyes dart back over to Mikey, his eyes lingering on the bloodied stump of what should have been his arm, and he wants to scream. Instead nothing comes out, because he’s always failing his family, isn’t he? Always failing Mikey.

Before he can say anything, April does. “The farmhouse.” She says. “We should still have some supplies from when Leo was…” in his coma went left unsaid.

Leo lets out a long sigh of relief. “That… sounds like a good plan.” His gaze pivots back to Donatello. “Can you keep…” his voice gets a bit more hoarse. “—Keep him stable for the drive?”

Donatello’s eyes harden, and then gives a sharp nod. “Yeah, I’ll do my best.”

“We don’t need your best, Donnie. We need you to save him.” Raph insists.

“I’m not a miracle worker!” Donatello shouts sharply, and his bottom lip wobbles, and it reminds Leo painfully of the fact that without Mikey, Donatello is the youngest. “I’m trying, Raph. I can’t— make promises. Not ones that I don’t know if I can keep.”

Raphael seems like he might want to lash out, the way he is gritting his teeth and the way his hands ball into fists. He doesn’t. Instead he swallows audibly and forces his hands to unclench so he can gently touch Mikey’s face again. That sallow sunken in face that seems more akin to a stranger than their brother.

The hatchet isn’t picked up, but it’s metal gleams.

It’s not over by a long shot.

Leo sighs softly to himself and leans his shell against the side of the van as he closes his eyes, still drained from his earlier attempt to save Mikey. He doesn’t allow himself to sleep, though.

He doesn’t want to wake up to the potential possibility that Donatello is shouting that he lost Mikey’s pulse again.

So he stays alert, but lets his eyes rest as he tries to slow his breathing to reconnect with his energy.

The ride continues in silence. Like they have nothing to say that isn’t venom and spite, so nothing is said at all. Like they are strangers instead of a family.

Leo is starting to think…that’s all they ever were.

Ghosts haunting the same place.

—

Leo looks out at the sky, it’s cloudy. Wind makes the grass roll in the distance and makes the trees bend and sway as leaves get spun up in the current. He catches one between his fingertips and looks at it, bright brilliant orange with a yellow gradient at the bottom in color, it has five lobes reaching out like splayed fingers, different vein-like structures within the leaf. It’s curled at the edges, and it’s so delicate between his fingertips that it crunches and withers under his calloused fingers.

He lets it go as the wind picks up, and it whips it from his hand to billow it into the air. His eyes follow it for some time until it eventually lands in a distant puddle, floating on the surface, spinning among the other leaves that made it there.

Orange…

It’s a surprisingly delicate color, isn’t it?

The thought comes unbidden, as most do these days. As the hours get shorter and the darkness finds root faster, claws of winter slowly inching in as they talons dig and bite with a fierce coldness.

—and when the rot sets in, orange becomes dark oozing black.

Leo isn’t so sure he’s thinking about the leaf anymore.

River blue eyes flit over to the farmhouse.

Raphael hasn’t left Mikey’s side for a single moment, the youngest of the brothers is in the same bathtub that Leo himself had spent his own coma in. Raphael had been the one to donate blood when Donatello had been worried about Michelangelo losing too much, had been the one to hold the youngest brother’s only hand left and sit hunched over like a protective shield against the world. April told him he had been like that with Leo as well… he wasn’t sure what to feel.

He isn’t sure of much of anything, lately.

Leonardo had been so foolhardy, so eager to throw himself back into the familiar position of being the leader— but did he even deserve it?

Did he deserve to choose the fate of the family again, when his choice nearly killed his youngest brother?

He lets out a shaky exhale as he looks to the sky, the grey despondent curtain of bloated clouds making the entire area feel dreary.

The back door creaks open and he turns quickly, instincts bred into him by countless hours of always being aware of his surroundings.

April sighs quietly and pulls her jacket tighter around her. “Are you going to come in for dinner?”

He’s quiet for some time, he honestly hadn’t been planning on it. No one eats together anyways except April and Casey. Donatello is too busy in the barn, tinkering away with things that will ‘help’, and honestly Donatello was the only reason they didn’t have to bury their brother next to their father.

Instead of answering, he opts to ask his own question. “Any change?” He asks her.

April’s pale eyes squint a little and the muscle in her jaw twitches. Then she looks away, her lips pursing into a thin line. “No. Nothing. Just like the last two weeks. He’s stable… but… he’s not getting any better, but at least he’s not getting any worse.”

Silence stretches between him. If Mikey was there, Leo thinks that maybe he would have broken it with an optimistic chirped comment or maybe a stupid joke that he’d have to fight to keep a serious countenance through… but he’s not. Michelangelo is laying in the bathtub that had housed Leonardo for so long. It was wrong. Leo should be the one there, he had always been the first one into a mission, the last one out. All to make sure his brothers were safe…

Though Mikey… his youngest brother, his baby brother… he’d been the last one. The only one who stayed.

Leonardo had failed his job not only as a leader, but as a big brother because he was a coward.

The oldest Hamato brother turns and begins to walk away. “Make sure… Raphael and Donatello eat something.”

“And what about you?” The red headed woman called after him.

The mutant turtle just shook his head slightly. “Just… save some in the fridge, thanks April. There’s just… something I need to do.”

The woman frowns as she watches his retreating shell, but she doesn’t argue. Instead she just goes back into the farmhouse where it is warmer, the screen door shutting behind her.

Leonardo’s footsteps are quiet as he comes up to the familiar tree. The ground is different now, but before there had been recently upturned earth.

He drops to his knees.

“Otōsan…” he begins hoarsely, his voice cracking on the words. “Sensei… I…. Failed you. You trusted me to be the one to carry the Hamato legacy… but more than that, you trusted me with their safety.” His mouth suddenly feels dry as he prostrated himself in front of the very spot where Master Splinter, Hamato Yoshi was buried.

“I thought the worst was over when Shredder was defeated, I was wrong. I was selfish… I was…” his throat seized up and his eyes burn. He forced the tears away. He can’t cry.

“Chichi yo, kazoku ni taisuru watashi no subete no tsumi o o yuru shi kudasai.” He utters with a shaky exhale.

“I need you… to give me a sign, Father. I need you. Your wisdom, your guidance… please.” He breaks down into a barely there whisper.

As he keeps himself pressed against the damp muddy earth, only the wind howling and rustling the trees above respond to him. Leonardo’s hands clench sharply into the soil, he feels the wet clumps of dirt and chunks of grass slide between the grooves of his fingers.

He doesn’t know how long he’s there.

Suddenly there is a bang of the screen door at the farmhouse in the distance that makes Leonardo jolt to attention.

April is there, and his hand instinctively moves for his swords at the wild look in their eyes. Were they being attacked?

“Leo! He’s awake!”

Immediately every thought he had flees his mind as adrenaline fills him. He bolts to his feet and runs as hard as he can toward the farmhouse. “Go get Donnie!” He barks, April nods and heads toward the barn.

Behind them, a single sunset orange maple leaf spins slowly as it descends through the air, floating down to land on the grave of Hamato Yoshi.

Chapter Text

Michelangelo was five years old when he realized that not everyone had the ability to build a haven of their own design in their dreams.

Not everyone could control their dreams either, but every time the youngest of the four turtle brothers went to sleep; he knew he would dream. When he would dream, he always knew that’s what it was. When he knew he was in a dream, he began to do things he’d always wanted to do.

After two years, his mindscape had been built into a wonderland of whimsical nature with bright and obnoxious colors and physics-defying design. It was comfortable here, more comfortable than any of his hiding spots in their sewer home. The only thing that made him feel safer than his special mind place was being underneath a turtle pile with his brothers while his papa read them a story. However, as they grew older, those moments became fewer and far more in between. In fact, with how much Raph complained these days about doing something ‘baby-ish’ like cuddling, Donnie becoming more averse to touch, and Leo trying to impress father with his newfound maturity and suddenly becoming professional and detached after they started training—Michelangelo feared a turtle pile was nothing more than a distant memory.

So, this was the next best thing. To sit upon his throne above the clouds with a tilted glimmering crown on his head. New friends showed up every day! A smaller version of himself had appeared one day, only a few inches in height, he was dressed in a funny costume that resembled his crayon drawing of what he wanted to be if he had superpowers like Crognard. They would fly together and play fun games that his brothers had less time for nowadays. Then came along another version who walked backward and made him laugh with the jokes he told in his funny-sounding voice.

“!kcud hguot yeltrut A ?llehs eltrut a htiw kcud a llac uoy od tahW”

His brothers didn’t like the joke when he repeated it to them when he was in the ‘awake world’ but that’s okay! They have different things they think are funny. It didn’t hurt his feelings.

(Reverse seemed a little upset, but he and Turflytle had managed to cheer him up by making him his own comedy show.)

Michelangelo loved being with his brothers in the awake world, but sometimes nothing could beat the joy of being with the other versions of himself in his head. It was like…a home away from home. Michelangelo never had to worry about trying to explain himself, because the other versions already knew him. They were him.

He could make a world where he didn’t have to hide for being different, where he could be himself in its most raw and unfiltered form.

It had always been that way, for Michelangelo. This was his happy place, and no matter what kind of storm winds howled outside, no matter how loud the thunder rumbled, or how bright the lightning flashed—it was here he was safe.

He had built the place painstakingly, using his visual library of things he had seen on TV and in old, faded magazines that Master Splinter had brought home from the dump. Wet and soggy with warped lettering and bleeding images, he would see pictures of bright and sunny places with palm trees and sandy shores.

It had started as a dream of the beach, of the sand between his turtle toes as he wiggled them in the warmth. He didn’t know what sand felt like; he only saw pictures or flickering images on the barely working TV that Donnie managed to keep running through his brainpower, some tools, and sheer force of will. Donatello explained what sand was. Something about particles, and minerals, he thinks the words coarse and ‘likely irritating’ were thrown in there too. Here though, the sand is soft, like his pillow after Leo fluffs up the raggedy cotton inside before he tucks him into bed.

The ocean around the island he made glimmers like a jewel and the gleam of the sun across the azure waves fills him with a sense of clarity. If only he could come here when he meditated, then he wouldn’t have a problem sitting still. Instead, he would be stuck in the dojo, listening to Donnie’s whistling breath through his nose from his allergies, the drip of water in the background, and the grumbling of Raph’s stomach.

Here, though- it was warm, and the ocean waves were a good noise. A noise he didn’t mind hearing.

Eventually, Michelangelo began to stretch out his limitations, only to find out there weren’t any here. He could build up as high as he could go, as far as his eyes could see. He could make anything he wanted; the only true limit was his imagination itself. He knew that would never be a problem, with the way his mind worked constantly to make new ideas to fill the place.

Sometimes, though—when he was tired of being above everything, tired of the improbable physics of floating islands and swirling hues of unnatural clouds—he came back down to where it all started. He would lay in the sand, the warmth of the sun on his skin allowing him to simply bask as the waves lulled him into a trance. He would sleep if one could fall asleep while dreaming.

He wished sometimes that he could show his brothers this place, he wanted them to feel the sun on their shells like he did. Sun that wasn’t filtered through the slots of the grate that dripped with runoff from the streets like their normal basking spot. Michelangelo wondered if they would like it here, if Leo would enjoy the peaceful atmosphere, if Donnie would try to find scientific inaccuracies in an improbable world if Raph would splash around in the ocean and feel any rage or irritation drain away with the moving of the tides.

More than anything else in the world, he just wished he could affect the world like he did his dreams. Even if only a little bit.

When he was in the awake world, things felt so overwhelming. Like there wasn’t enough room in his own sewer home…like there wasn’t even enough room in his own skin. The laws of the physical world felt like chains that kept him trapped.

He could feel the moments as the world around him began to lose color, and he sighed sadly as he took off his crown and rested it in the sand. “Until next time.” He told the beach, and he held up his hand. The ocean waved back a bit more choppily as if bidding him farewell.

It was time to wake up.

However as the world began to fade, he swore he felt someone looking at him. He turned to see a silhouette of someone he didn’t recognize…. which was impossible. Michelangelo knew everyone in his mind because he created them himself. When the other versions of himself appeared, he was never surprised, even if they appeared suddenly. It was as if he just unearthed something he knew was there all along.

Yet this figure felt like a stranger…and it made him scared.

His eyes opened before he could get a good look, and he stared at the very normal ceiling of his bedroom with a frown on his face.

Who was that?

Time seemed to pass by so slowly in the awake world. It felt like every second was an hour. Maybe that was why he talked so fast because he just thought faster.

Though if that were true, maybe he would have dodged the hit from his brother’s wooden practice sword when it clacked against his plastron. Instead, he had been mulling over the potential identity of the person he had seen in his mindscape. Nightmares and dreaming were vastly different. In a nightmare, he couldn’t control anything, though those happened very rarely. When dreaming he could control everything. He had never lost any control when dreaming, which made him a bit nervous. Was it a nightmare that bled over into his special world? Will that keep happening? Is he going to lose his safe place?

His shell hit the floor of the dojo before he could even wince at the kick to the back of his left ankle. Leonardo looked at him with a look of concern and minor annoyance, his childish pudgy face scrunching up in that way that made Michelangelo think of those mothers from those TV sitcoms who were constantly dealing with rambunctiously rowdy children who were one step away from stomping on their last nerve. He even had the eye twitch of irritation down. “You didn’t even try, Mikey. You need to pay attention. If I were an enemy, you’d be dead.”

The fallen turtle didn’t even have a chance to form a quip in return, his red-banded brother responding before he could. Funny, normally Michelangelo had no problem forming something witty to say without much thought. “Hey, don’t worry about it anyway, Leo. You know it always comes down to you and me!” Raph says from across the room as he ducks the jab of Donnie’s bo staff aimed directly for the middle of his forehead. He tucks into a roll before stabbing out with his practice sais to catch Donnie in the shoulder, who recoils and takes a few steps backwards. Michelangelo can see the moment that the genius brother’s eyes narrow and the moment he starts to try to formulate a plan to get back in the lead.

Though Raph unfortunately doesn’t let the burgeoning plan ever blossom, charging on to press his advantage. It’s not long before Donnie is on that floor too, winded from a blow that was bordering on excessive for training. “Raph, you didn’t have to hit me so hard. You could have cracked my plastron. In the sewers it’s easy like a wound like that to get infected, do you want me to get shell rot?”

“Quit whining, you’re just a sore loser!”

“Yame.” Immediately all the boys went into silence at the word. Michelangelo’s blue eyes darted up to look at who had spoken.

Master Splinter.

For some reason, there was an odd little buzz in the back of his head when he saw him. He felt a pit in his gut, like something was wrong like he was guilty for something…but Mikey couldn’t remember anything recently he’s done to get in trouble for.

The rat mutant didn’t even need to shout, a quiet stern word was all he needed to control the room. Michelangelo wondered if it was because he was their father, or if it was some je ne sais quoi that just made him have a presence no matter what volume he spoke. (Yeah, Donnie, suck it. He knew what that French saying meant.) “Michelangelo and Donatello, please go be seated. Raphael and Leonardo, prepare yourselves.”

Without a second thought, Michelangelo was already trudging to the corner away from the designated sparring area. Normally he would be a bit bitter at being bested, despite it happening every time he was pitted against his brothers. It was a necessary evil, after all, he had to show restraint. Just recently his father had mentioned it to him, just a couple of weeks ago now actually, he had pulled him aside to ask him to talk to him about that. In any case, normally he would be a little upset because he missed winning sometimes, but he didn’t want to be selfish.

Now, he hardly cared- thoughts still thoroughly absorbed in his dream dilemma. Sitting down in the traditional kneeling pose, he couldn’t stop thinking about what happened in his dream the night before. It’s not even like he could ask anyone their opinion on it. Leo was always too busy, Raph would no doubt call him crazy or weird and use it as ammunition to mock him, and Master Splinter would probably say he was being childish. Donatello he had talked to once about it, but he had just begin talking some long drawn out explanation of ‘lucid dreaming’ and said it was nothing to worry over since none of it was real.

It felt real, though.

Speak of the devil and he shall appear, his immediate older brother nudged his shoulder as he sat down as well beside him. “Hey, you haven’t been talking much today, and it looks like you’re frowning. You never frown. What’s wrong?” His purple-banded brother asked in a gentle whisper so as not to earn their father’s chastisement.

Michelangelo’s eyes widened a bit at the fact he was frowning of all things. He poked his face as if to confirm, and—Donnie was right! “Woah, I didn’t realize my face could even do that.” He joked; a bit louder than he should. He flinched underneath Master Splinter’s impassive stare as it turned onto him, and he gave a sheepish wave.

Thankfully, Leo at that moment had shifted his stance into an incorrect position which made their father turn back to the fight and give him a verbal correction on his form. Michelangelo may not be the smartest of the four brothers, but he knew that Leonardo never had a wrong form. He had trained for extra hours every day until it was all his body knew how to do when the swords went into his hands. Leonardo didn’t make mistakes like that anymore because he had rigidly and mercilessly beat out imperfections.

For whatever reason, Leo must have done it on purpose to get Michelangelo out of their father’s scrutiny. Maybe it had to do with whatever constipated-looking expression the eldest brother had on his face before when Michelangelo had dropped on his back in record time.

He was worried, Michelangelo realized abruptly.

About him.

Apparently, so was Donnie—and given the not-so-subtle glances Raph occasionally threw over his shoulder at him and Donnie, Raph must be to some extent too. Had he really acted so off that it had sent all his brothers into a tizzy?

Oops.

Donnie nudges him again with his elbow, and he turns to meet earnest brown eyes. “Are you okay? You really haven’t been acting like yourself today.”

Michelangelo smiles, it’s softer than his usual exuberant ones—but no less genuine. “I’m okay. I’m just…contm- uh, conti-“ It was obvious he knew the word he wanted to use but didn’t remember exactly what it was. He did that sometimes; Michelangelo had a lot of words always rattling around in his head. Though the others often were exasperated at the fact that he asked what certain words meant, and assumed he didn’t know any words longer than ‘totally’-- he knew them. He just didn’t always know what sounds they made when they were spoken out loud, because he’d only ever read them before. “It’s the word that means you’re thinking about something hard, dude.”

“Contemplating?” Donnie asked gently. “Don’t do too much of that, I could smell your brain smoking from over here.”

“Hardy har har, bro.” Michelangelo said flatly, though, at the familiar banter, he couldn’t stop himself. He gave a beaming grin, more akin to his regular smile. He noticed his purple-banded brother’s shoulders droop slightly. Relief. That must be it. He pushed the thoughts away and just continued to smile. He didn’t want to worry Donnie any more than he already had. “But…Yeah, that word.”

His immediate older brother snorted softly through his nose. “I’m surprised you even know what that word means.” Michelangelo didn’t take it as an insult, he knew his brother was more pleased than he let on by the fact. Donatello gave one of his rare head pats before turning back to watch their older brothers continue to spar.

Leonardo disarmed one of Raphael’s sais, and just as he went to go and whack his neck with the edge of his practice sword, Raph charged forward. This made Leo roll out of the way or be grappled by Raph, and everyone knew if you were grappled by Raphael then the fight was over. Not even Michelangelo, the slipperiest out of the lot of them—could manage to wiggle from the sai wielder’s insanely strong grip. He was easily the strongest out of the four of them, and Leo knew it.

However, Raphael knew that Leo would roll—because he knew that Leo knew that he was the strongest and didn’t want to be grappled by the red-banded brother (and didn’t that thought just give Michelangelo a headache?) So, the knee that Leonardo got to the face sent him flying back, which made Raph tackle him, and Splinter called the match with another ‘Yame’. With Raphael the victor. Albeit under less formal conditions than usual, Raph never stuck to sparring rules, he bit Mikey just last week, actually. Every time Splinter would chide him about honor and discipline, Raph would retort with some variation of ‘if it works, it works’.

Putting his hand up to his mouth as if to conceal a whisper, he dramatically stage-whispered to Donnie so that Leonardo would hear him. “So, what’s the current score?”

Donatello grinned at the mischievousness in his little brother’s blue eyes. “Seventy-two to seventy-four, in Raph’s favor.” Michelangelo watched as their eldest brother narrowed his eyes at them from across the room as they essentially rubbed salt in the wound of losing, and Raphael gave a hoot in laughter at his brother’s expense as the blue-banded turtle stood up.

Slapping him on the back of the shell, the red-banded turtle grinned. “Maybe better luck next time, Leo. Or maybe not given my track record. You know, of winning.”

“Don’t get too sure of yourself. Arrogance is a pitfall, you know.” Though Michelangelo could feel the hidden warmth behind his narrowed gaze and stiff posture. Leo was more amused by it than he was letting on.

Michelangelo also noticed his father smiling wryly at the scene, before calling them to do some cool down exercises after their sparring. With the light mood in the air, Michelangelo could almost forget his worries…

Almost.

Sitting at the top of his throne in his tower in the clouds, Michelangelo (or King Mikey as he called himself while in his dream space if only to help differentiate himself easier from the others) looked around. He had set up a tea party-like scenario as he did in the awake world, though instead of the cardboard boxes as tables and stained napkins as tablecloths with whatever begrudging brother he had conned into play tea party with him, it was instead a lavish affair with Reverse Michelangelo and Turtflytle across from him. The tables were ornate and like ones, he’d seen in a furniture catalog that he’d been peering through last week. A mutant turtle couldn’t afford to be picky with what they read, even if he did prefer comics. Besides, he learned that the more he looked at things, the more he could fit into his imaginary world.

The marble floors were shiny enough that he could see his reflection, and the chairs his guests were seated at were brightly colored with their names in front of them on the table similar to the wedding seating catalog he had read through once. (Really really couldn’t afford to be picky with reading material.)

The young turtle child steepled his hands in front of him, preparing himself to explain why he had brought them to him.

“Did you see anything weird recently, Reverse, Turtflytle?” King Mikey asked. He had brushed off his crown of sand not long ago after having fallen asleep, appearing on the beach he’d been at when he saw the mysterious figure before. However, when he was there, he’d seen nothing amiss—but something still felt… off. Not exactly wrong in the way that horror movies amped up creepy music to create a suspenseful ambiance that screamed: DANGER NEARBY. No, but still—there was a lingering sensation of not right, wrong, wrong, wrong.

So, he had left the beach quickly and went back up to the safety of his tower, and then had reached out to his other selves to see if they had seen anything. Three Mikeys were better than one, after all.

In a handstand and walking around, Reverse hummed for a moment and stuck out his tongue in concentration. “!llabddo na m’I, naem I .edud ,driew sa stnuoc tahw rof enilesab taerg a evah yllaer t’nod I ,niaga nehT ?os kniht t’nod I” Abruptly Reverse flopped onto the ground, which thankfully was actually a very nice and comfortable cushion despite the marble look of it.

“I kinda expected that, I mean… who are you if you don’t know yourself? What about you, Turtflytle?” King Mikey tipped his head to look over the little version of himself that sat in a flower chair.

Tutflytle pursed his lips. “Maybe? What exactly do you mean?”

King Mikey sighed. “So I was on my beach, in the Alone Zone.” None of the other Michelangelos could get to the beach except for him. He wasn’t sure why, as normally with a reach and a tug on their invisible connection he could teleport to the others or bring them to him. Almost like reeling in a fish on a line. It didn’t work on his beach, or his ‘Alone Zone’ as he called it. Maybe it was because he only sought it out when he just needed some peace and quiet, even from himself. “I was about to wake up when suddenly I saw something on the corner of the island. It looked like another one of us…” He gestured between the three of them. “—But I always know where you guys were, even before you guys technically existed here.”

“.ytilanosrep dna dnim ruoy fo strap suoirav fo snoitatsefinam tsuj er’ew ecniS” Reverse said with a surprising amount of insight as he folded his hands over the top of his upper plastron. “.uoy er’eW .su wenk uoy erofeb su wenk uoy esnes sekam tI”

“Well said, Reverse. Huh, I even surprise myself sometimes.” King Mikey said in response before shaking his head a bit as if to clear his muddled thoughts. “Anyways, yeah. This was…different though. I didn’t know who they were. No real connection like I have with you guys. Nada. Zip. Nothing but this eerie feeling that there should be something but there wasn’t.”

Turtflytle frowned a bit at that, and man no wonder his brothers had been worried about him if that was the face Michelangelo had been making earlier. The frown looked wrong on the normally carefree version of himself. “It wasn’t familiar at all…but felt like it should be…Are you sure? You know this is your mind…buzz buzz.” Ah man, Turtflytle only added buzz at the end of his words when he was excited or stressed and given the look on his face—he seemed the latter.

”.gnihtemos nees s’eh ebyam ,si eh llat dna gib woh htiW .regnA ebyam ro…su fo lla fo tuo tsom eht swonk eH .wonk dluow cihcysP ebyaM ?pleh emos rof srehto eht ksa dluohs ew ebyaM“

King Mikey snapped his fingers. “Hey, that’s a great idea! I don’t know about Anger though, since he usually hides a lot…but maybe Biggie knows something too. I know, I’ll just bring everyone here!”

Closing his eyes, King Mikey focuses on the threads that weave him and the other parts of himself into one united whole. He tugs briefly on them, not insistent but gently asking if they could meet up with him. When he feels no resistance, he begins the process of ‘reeling them in’ so to speak.

Psychic pops up first and is immediately frowning. Likely due to knowing everything that goes on in the mind. “This is bad.”

“What’s bad? The fact that our last meal didn’t have enough worms?” Biggie asks as he shoves some algae and worms into his mouth.

“No, what’s bad is that we’ve got an intruder.”

“Intruder! I’ll crush them!” Anger shouts and cracks his knuckles, though with how big he was—the cracks of his knuckles sounded like bombs going off.

King Mikey was getting overwhelmed, as the various personalities began chattering among themselves worriedly at Psychic’s statement. “Guys…”

“—They are going to drink our brain like an algae smoothie through a straw. Slurp! Buzz Buzz!”

".emit eno taht hctaw ot moor gnivil eht ot tuo kcuns ew eivom rorroh eno taht ni ekil ,wonk uoY .seirf niarb ruo elihw selohrae ruo morf ruop lliw doolb dna tlem lliw seye ruo ro tahT"

“That’s not helping, ‘verse! BUZZ BUZZ!”

“GUYS!” King Mikey’s voice boomed so loud around the area that all the clouds nearby suddenly disappeared. There were only clear skies, colored with swirls of odd colors. Immediately he felt guilty, he hated using his power to quiet the others. They should be allowed to be as loud as they wanted, though with what was happening—he needed to get control back. “I know this is a bad sitch, dudes.” He stood up from his throne so he could hop down to be more on an even level with the rest of his personality parts. “This is scary, and I don’t like it any more than you do. I mean…you are me—so you know how I’m feeling about this. What we need to do is try and stay calm.”

“Calm, calm? How are we supposed to be calm? I don’t want to be calm when someone is ruining our safe space! How the heck can someone get in our mind anyway!? Why aren’t you angry about this!?” Anger shouted as he leaned down, his face blowing enough hot air on King Mikey so much that his crown nearly fell off his head. Reaching up, he put his hand on the other’s chin.

He leveled a look at the giant. “I am angry. I am you after all. I am just as upset as you are, and you know that. Right now, we can’t afford to be fighting each other, for me to fight myself. We need to be a united force if we want to find out what’s going on. I know you can’t calm down, dude. That’s not your schtick, but I at least need you to point your anger toward the problem and not the people trying to help.”

There was silence for a moment, each of the other Mikey variants waiting anxiously in anticipation of Anger’s reaction.

Though they shouldn’t have worried. If there was one thing that Michelangelo was good at, it was soothing anger—no matter if it was his hotheaded brother’s…or his own.

Anger sighed heavily, letting out a small growl. “Fine, we do this your way. Just point me to whatever needs to be smashed.”

Giving a bright smile, King Mikey patted Anger on the face gently before pulling away. “Right. So, has anyone else seen the stranger that I saw, or was that just me?” He asked.

“No. We know less than you, bro.” Psychic spoke as he approached. “I have a feeling it not only has to do with you being an amalgamation of the rest of us but also due to the fact that you can go places not even we can, despite being a part of you.” Man, Donatello would have an aneurysm if he knew that Mikey knew such vocabulary. It didn’t always come out though, because he had such a tough time with words when he was speaking. So many words to use and so little time to say something before the conversation changed. Here though, in his mindscape- he had no such limitations, as time went as fast or as slow as he wanted it to.

King Mikey’s eyes widened in recognition. “Ohhh… the Alone Zone, the beach. It totally has something to do with that place, doesn’t it?” He asked Psychic, who gave a nod, having come to the same conclusion—due to sharing a mind and thus a train of thought.

“I think so, dude! You made that place first, right? Well—maybe it’s like a landing zone for outside influences. Like… that one movie where they were in a waiting room at the doctor’s office.”

King Mikey hummed thoughtfully. “So, I have to go by myself and just wait for whoever it is to show up…that sounds…” Scary, horrible, lonely—

Turflytle sat on his left shoulder. “Not alone. We are you, so no matter where you go, we’re always with you. Fist bump?” It seemed Turflytle was in a calmer mood, given his lack of buzzing. As the tiny version of himself held out a fist, he carefully tapped it with a single finger.

“Right…I can do this. Just gotta figure out why someone would want to come into my brain out of all possible places…” He scrunched his face a bit. “Huh—that sounded like something Don or Leo would say.”

“What about Raph?” Turflytle asked.

Just as King Mikey was about to answer, Reverse did it for him. ”!siht od dna taht yas dluow eH“ Reverse then whacked King Mikey on the back of the head, making the crown cover his eye and a yelp come from his mouth.

“Hey! I am your king!” He laughed as he readjusted his crown, and the rest of them laughed along with him. He would much rather stay here in the safety of the tea party area/throne room…but he knew that something was off. Something like static crawled up his arms and if he had hair on the back of his neck, it would be raised. “I…I think someone is at the Alone Zone again.” He mutters, and he just feels the distant pull.

Turflytle and Reverse pull away from him. “Good luck, dude.”

“Don’t get eaten!” Biggie tells him.

Anger just cracked his neck like Raph did when he was raring to go for a fight. Psychic gave him a smile. “It’ll be okay, I don’t think they mean any harm. They need to stay out of our head though, I don’t like the feeling of them just wandering in here.”

".hcaer t'nac I hcti na ekil sleef ti ,oot eM" Reverse agreed with Psychic, before giving a salute and thumbs up to King Mikey.

Taking a deep breath, Michelangelo nodded to his other counterparts as he took off his crown. Creating a table, he set it down for when he came back. “Right…let’s just see what’s going on.”

Feeling out where he wanted to go, he sunk a hook into it—

Then he reeled himself in.

The beach of the Alone Zone was just as it always was, tranquil. Palm trees swayed in the breeze; the air smelled like that one coconut shampoo that Master Splinter had found one day while scavenging topside. Donatello told him that the beach would actually smell like salt and brine, though here in his mindscape, he could make anything he wanted.

The sand was as fluffy as the fur of his worn and stuffed teddy bear he slept with, and the color was just as white as the fluffing in it too. The waves that lapped at the shore were like a polished sapphire, and he knew from experience that the waters were the perfect temperature to swim.

It was always sunny, always bright, and always the same.

Except now, there was a person in the middle of it.

The figure was dressed in a dark black outfit with metal armor and fastenings. Their face was covered in a hood, casting their face into dark unnatural shadows underneath such a bright sun. They also wore a dark cloak which seemed to be an attempt to hide the fact that they were armed. One of Master Splinter’s first teachings was how to identify if someone was armed or not. They kept their hands concealed, though the sleeve of the left arm looked odd, almost like it was tied off at the end, Mikey couldn’t get a good look though because of the cloak.

‘The weapons aren’t real; the weapons can’t hurt me here…’ He tried to tell himself, as he swallowed thickly.

Michelangelo could feel his anxiety racket up quickly, as he stared at the intruder. Trying to channel his fearless brother, Leonardo, he stood up straighter and squared his shoulders. “Who are you, and why are you here? You’re not supposed to be here, this is my Alone Space.”

White eyes landed on him, and the figure took a step forward.

He took a step back.

“Who are you?” The turtle tot asks warily.

The dark figure looks at him for a long time, white eyes peering at him. He feels himself wanting to tremble, but he doesn’t. He’s being trained to be a ninja! He’s not a crybaby anymore, he can’t even remember the last time he ran to Leo over a bad dream. Mikey isn’t going to get scared over this. Here in his head, he’s king!

“I thought you were gone.” A voice eerily similar and different to his own spoke softly. “Dead.”

It feels like ice had been dumped down the back of his shell and Mikey squirms uncomfortably under the scrutiny of those hard white eyes. “What are you talking about?” He then takes a step back when the other dark figure takes a step forward.

“None of this is real, you know that, right?” The figure asks and crouches down, like Master Splinter sometimes does when he’s trying to comfort them by getting down on their level, except when this stranger does it, it’s not at all comforting. “You can’t keep hiding here, Hope.”

Michelangelo looks at the figure in front of him and clenches his fists beside him. “I’m not… ‘Hope’. My name is Hamato Michelangelo! And you’re somewhere you aren’t supposed to be, we don’t want you here! I don’t want you here, and it’s my head!”

The figure looks at him from where he’s knelt on the sand, and slowly he reaches up with his right hand, scarred and covered in bloody hand wraps like Raph when he busted his knuckles from punching something he shouldn’t. He pulls down the hood and…

It’s him.

It’s his own face staring back, with a black mask and scars everywhere. His eyes dart around and he can’t even begin to count them all. Despite the fact that he should be afraid of this dark, older version of himself so unlike every other version… he’s not.

How could he be?

He looks so sad. White empty eyes with a frown like the one Master Splinter sometimes wears when he looks at the picture on the mantel of Tang Shen and Miwa. Far away, like a burden deeply bore.

It scares him.

Because... how did he get like that?

“You can’t keep hiding here, Hope. It’s not real. Master Splinter died years ago… and… you’re not a child anymore. None of us are.” The older him whispers hoarsely. “They left us. We lost… we lost so much… we lost everything.” The older version of himself bows his head. “You can’t keep dreaming, you can’t keep ignoring the truth… you can’t ignore me. Because you’re not king here, Hope. I am.”

Michelangelo staggers back and falls into the sand, he crawls backward, the older version— the scarred version of him just watches impassively, and maybe with some measure of pity. Sand feels coarse instead of fluffy, just like Donatello told him all those years ago. It actually feels worse, feels like glass in his hands. The air smells like salt and brine, the smell triggers him to gasp for air like he’s drowning in it.

Wailing, not even bubbles escape. He has no air left. The water above is illuminated by what must be another burst of lightning dancing in the dark sky.

“No!” He screams as he holds his head between his hands, though his vision begins to flicker back and forth, his hands are covered with blood.

He’d been dying, drowning under the tides—now washed ashore, maggots were wriggling from his eye sockets.

He sobs harshly and wails as his hands fly up to his face to feel, but he only has one hand to do it with, the other one is gone.

“It’s over.” The scarred version is just his reflection… has been all along. The sky around them is dark and the temperature goes cold, sapphire waves turn pitch black as they churn against the shore restlessly. “You can’t hide in a fantasy anymore… you need to—“

“Wake up.”

“—pulse is through the roof-“ a voice says through the muddled mess that fills his head. Michelangelo feels a heavy pressure on one arm, more on his legs. There was an awful wrongness to his body, a missing piece where his previously dominant left hand used to be.

“Then fix it!” Another harsh voice shouts.

His throat is burning, and he doesn’t realize why until he realizes that wherever he is is being filled with deafening screeching coming from his own mouth. His body is spasming wildly, trying to buck out of the confines.

“Otōto! Please… please calm down, you’re safe.” Another voice tells him softly.

No, no, no….

Cold realization fills his gut. “LET GO OF ME!” He screams. Despite the cold, he feels a burst of heat rush to his one good arm as he wrenches it away from whatever is holding him down.

He can’t be captured again… by the Krang— poked and prodded and tested on over and over again. Why can’t he think straight? Why is everything so muddled?

“What did you do to me!?” He screams in accusation as his free hand goes to try and rip out the squirming maggots from his eye sockets. But then hand holds him down again, rough calloused ones— deep down he feels like he should remember these hands, shouldn’t he? No… he’s been alone for so long, he should be alone now. He doesn’t understand— he can’t understand. “STOP!” He screams.

“Fuck— Mike, we’re trying to help you, little brother! Calm down!”

“More shouting isn’t helping Raph!”

“Then what the shell are you doing to ‘help’, Leo!? Donnie, do something with that big brain of yours!”

“I’m trying! He’s not still enough for me to find a vein to administer a sedative, keep him down!”

“Shit, I’m trying! What does it look like I’m doing, shell-fer-brains, taking a nice relaxing nap? He’s stronger than he looks, okay?”

No… no….no…NO!

Those voices, those names— it was finally fully clicking.

His brothers… were back?

Three years… of nothing… only to come back now?

The vision of his father hadn’t lied, he should feel relief, right? He should feel safe. His brothers are touching him, trying to hold him down as his body seizes and thrashes with pain, but he doesn’t. He feels nothing except for years of bitterness, resentment, and anger to crawl out of his throat in the form of another scream that leaves his mouth tasting like soot and ash— because his core is burning. Everything is on fire.

He got what he wanted, didn’t he? The unobtainable stars twinkling apathetically in the background so far from his reach… and now their hands are on him, grounding…

But for some reason?

He feels not even the paltriest balm of relief.

He feels the maggots wriggling out of his eye sockets. He wails and begins thrashing anew. “Let GO of me!”

The threads in his chest getting tighter and tighter suddenly snap, and there is a sound like a detonation around him. He opens his wide white eyes to see figures go flying away in a rippling wave of invisible energy, porcelain shattering, wood splintering, and tiles exploding away from him like he was the source of some focused atomic blast.

He feels like he can’t breathe like there is debris crushing him all over again like he’s drowning all over again. His body feels too weak that all he does is slump against the shattered barrier of the tub he is laying in which is cracked and falling apart from the force of the earlier blast. There is a niggling in the back of his mind that tries to put together the connection of why this place seems familiar, but as full of cotton as his head is, he produces nothing but fleeting thoughts of familiarity without the connection ever fully settling in.

“What the fuck?” A harsh voice snaps… Raphael. Cut up by jagged splinters and shrapnel but surprisingly unharmed despite some bruising, he crawls back over to the tub. “Mike, come on, baby bro. You’re fine.” A voice so unused to comfort tries to keep him down. As Michelangelo’s hand rises to try and claw at his eyes again, Raphael’s hand comes up to settle in his own, taking it in a surprisingly gentle gesture. “Leo, Donnie, you okay?”

Donnie had been blown back into the wall by the foot of the tub, he shook his head a little disoriented, he had a small cut on his cheek but just like Raphael, he had no other damage done besides minor superficial injuries despite the state of the room. The toilet and sink were cracked water puddled in the floor, and the window of the room was shattered. Plaster was coming off the walls and everything was cast into disarray. Donatello takes a quick look at Michelangelo to decipher his current potential of possibly and literally exploding again, but luckily Michelangelo looks too drained to do much more than twitch and stay slumped where he is.

Donatello can figure out what happened later, right now his priority after checking on his youngest brother is to make sure their shelter isn’t in danger. So he quickly moves over to turn the water off with a twist of the shut-off valve. “Just wonderful-“ he says sarcastically.

Leo grunts from the hallway as he stands up and hobbles back over, looking sore, a bit bruised but again— surprisingly intact. The same could not be said about the door his shell had burst through, which was broken off the hinges. “I’m fine. Mikey?”

Raphael is keeping his one free hand down as Michelangelo tries again to squirm away. “I have to… get them out. Rip them out.”

Leonardo frowns softly, and he moves toward Michelangelo’s face as he crouches down. “What are you talking about, Mikey?”

“The maggots in my eyes!” The injured turtle brother snarls in retort.

The oldest brother swallows thickly, a hand carefully reaching up to Mikey’s bare face— almost as if he didn’t want to touch him. Was it disgust, Michelangelo wondered… he’s disgusted too. Finally, Leo’s hand gingerly comes down to wipe across his cheekbone tenderly with a brush of his thumb. “They aren’t maggots, Mikey… they are tears, Otōto.” He murmurs.

What?

As he slowly calms down, he doesn’t feel writhing maggots in his eye sockets like a washed-up corpse, instead, he feels hot salty tears dribbling down his face.

“You’re not supposed to… be here.” He manages to heave out even though it feels like his eyelids are made of lead. “None of you. You’re gone… all gone.” He whispered despondently. He couldn’t let this be another dream where everything was fine, where his family was whole again, he couldn’t bear it. “It’s not real. I know it’s not, just like last time. Like all the times before… you never come back!”

“Mike, we’re real, alright? I promise we’re real. You feel me right now, touching your hand?” He squeezed Michelangelo’s hand gingerly. “I ain’t going nowhere. You hear me, little brother? We’re back, and I’m not going anywhere ever again.”

Michelangelo lets out a long strangled trill in the back of his throat, on instinct. Because he knows it won’t be answered. He’ll wake back up to an empty dark lair—

Except immediately, he gets three responding choruses of warbles in return. Low and rumbling as the others move closer. Raphael leans closer to him to press their foreheads together. Michelangelo lets out another needy trill and gets a warble in return. His chest heaves with a sob.

“We’re here, Mikey. Just… stay calm, please. You’re really injured and…” Donatello’s voice sounds wobbly. Abruptly there is a sharp prick in his thigh and he looks down to see Donatello there and pushing the plunger down on a syringe, his mind flashes to Harpy and the injection she had jammed into his calf. He panics a little, but there is another chorus of gentle churring from above him, and he’s so tired.

The bitterness and resentment is swept away again temporarily as that long-needed relief finally arrives. That he wasn’t alone in the dark again.

It’s still there, still, a monster lurking under the murky water. For now, though, it’s not rising from the depths like a Kraken from the deep. Maybe it’s from the fact that he is surrounded on all sides by his brothers, or maybe it was from whatever he was injected with, Michelangelo can’t be bothered to care with the way his adrenaline from waking begins to abate, leaving his shaky and drained.

His eyes slip closed, his trill on every exhale being returned with a low churr from his brothers, and Michelangelo feels himself slip into another sleep.

Though this one was dark and dreamless.

—

The next time he wakes, he has no understanding of how much time passed. He’s somewhere soft… warm. He shifts a little as he struggles to get his eyes to open like his eyelids are curtains of lead.

He grunts a bit, his painfully dry mouth parts like he’s swallowed shards of glass and his tongue is sandpaper. He tries to move his fingers but finds a discordant sense of intrinsic wrongness on his left side.

Pressing the blade to his mauled flesh, he furiously begins to saw through his own flesh.

With a sickening snap and a squelch, he frees himself from the rubble. He wants to lie there in shock at the feeling of being so off-balanced…

He cut off his own arm.

Sucking in a sharp inhale, he peers through barely open eyelids to the stump that’s propped up on his left. It’s wrapped in white bandages, there is a carefully organized pattern to it that he knows. It makes his eyes burn and his lips quiver on his shaky exhale.

He feels movement suddenly, and his eyes dart over in a raw feral panic to his right, though instead of it being an enemy, instead, lying with his chin propped on his plastron and sitting in a chair by his bedside is Raphael.

He is stricken suddenly. Michelangelo’s throat gets tight and it feels like he can’t breathe. He panics but furiously reminds himself to breathe, and he sucks in another sharp inhale.

White-covered eyes trace imperceptibly over the way three years have settled onto Raphael’s face. The way it has matured has gotten sharper in some areas and has softened in others. He’s not an angry teenager anymore, but Michelangelo isn’t sure who exactly he is anymore.

Maybe he never did.

There is a click and his head tips slightly to take in the door which opens softly, there is another familiar face. This one wasn’t one of his brothers, but instead a familiar shock of ginger hair, cut shorter, around her shoulders and with bangs. Blue eyes look at him, the light from the hall spilling into the darkened room.

He instinctively kept quiet, forcing his breathing to be slow and steady as he peered from under the bare minimum sliver of his eyelids just enough to check where her shadow was, but enough not to show that he was awake. An old trick he’d picked up…

Utilize every advantage, including that one of surprise.

“Mikey?” She asks softly. “I know you’re awake.”

He twitches a bit, of course, she could tell. His eyes slowly open and his white gaze stares at her from the shadow of the room.

April keeps her voice quiet as she carefully moves around Raphael to Michelangelo’s left side and she crouches down by the bed. Raphael must be extremely tired if he wasn’t waking up. Or maybe Michelangelo is so used to the quiet that even the smallest noise sounds like a gunshot going off. “Do you need anything?”

Does he need anything….

Does he need anything?

He feels the fingers of his only hand left clench up in the blanket covering him. “Anything I could have thought of, you’re three years too late to give, April.” He retorts sharply before he can curb his tongue. The old Mikey wouldn’t do that…

But he hasn’t been Mikey in a long time, these days, he sometimes doesn’t even feel like Michelangelo. How could he be, after everything had happened? After what he’s done.

April flinches away, a part of him all covered in dust and cobwebs that may be the empathy and compassion portion of him wants to feel guilty over it, but all he does is just narrow his gaze at her.

“Mikey…” she begins softly.

“Just go.” He hisses bitterly in a low tone. “It’s not like you ever visited before, I don’t know why you’re bothering now.”

A part of him a long time ago thought of April as his sister. He remembers learning to braid her hair, talking about her school life, watching movies together, and eating fun snacks— he’d show off his skateboard tricks and she was one of the few people who would openly laugh at his jokes, provided that it wasn’t an inappropriate time to laugh.

But she had also left for three years and hadn’t even thought of visiting.

“Mikey— that’s not fair.” April insists and she goes to put a hand towards him, towards his stump because there is nothing there except hollow air and bandages. He panics like a lame dog biting the hand reaching for its bum leg, and his hand launches out to grab her wrist.

“Don’t. Touch. Me.” He hissed. April looks startled.

Raphael finally jerks awake and blearily blinks those familiar emerald green eyes before settling on them both. “Mikey? April… what’s going on?”

April doesn’t say anything, is she expecting Michelangelo to suddenly crack a joke, to say ‘Just kidding!’ And laugh like an idiot?

He’s done playing the part of the fool, he hadn’t played it for years, and he won’t start up again now.

“She was just leaving,” Michelangelo said, his tone like ice as he let go of her wrist. He hadn’t hurt her, hadn’t even left a red mark. Just held her wrist tight enough that she wouldn’t have been able to wiggle free without actually fighting him, and he knew she wouldn’t be willing to fight him because he was poor pitiful injured Mikey.

Even though he was angry, even though he wanted to lash out, he didn’t want to hurt her… a part of him wished he did. Make them all hurt in the ways he’s been hurt.

-but the thought of any of them going through what he went through makes him feel like he wants to vomit. He can’t even stand the thought so he has to brush it away. Kami, his emotions are so jumbled, that he can’t even feel his rage right. Everything is like a Gordian knot, and he’s not sure what action he’s supposed to take to even begin unraveling it.

“Okay… I’m sorry, I just—“ April swallows thickly and steps away from his bed. “I’ll go.” She walks back towards the door, Michelangelo watches her go, and so too does Raphael. Though when his eyes flit over to his (younger) older brother, he grits his jaw.

“You should go too.” He doesn’t need the hovering, whatever Raphael thinks he can protect him from has already been done to him.

Raphael, still jumbled from sleep looks over at Michelangelo like he’d just told him something incomprehensible. “What?” The other mutant manages to stammer. “Mike you need someone in here-“

“No, you need to be in here.” He retorts icily, and he doesn’t dull the edges of his words at all. In fact, if anything, his next words go for the jugular. “Just like with Leo, dude— your guilt makes you putter around like some ghost haunting the place. You’re doing it to make yourself feel better, not because I need anything. Now… get out.”

Raphael stares at him like he’s grown a second head, and for a moment, Michelangelo wonders if maybe he has. He had been double mutated, after all, though he doesn’t feel any different (albeit with a missing arm) so he decides to assume he hadn’t suddenly morphed into a freak of nature (besides being a talking mutant turtle, but hey he was already used to that).

“Get. Out.” Michelangelo repeated.

He doesn’t know what he expects, maybe for Raphael to argue with him, to start a shouting match? Or maybe to try and guilt trip him.

Instead, he gets none of those things. Raphael just stands up from the chair beside his bedside and gives a little nod. “Okay, little brother… call if you need anything.”

Raphael listlessly waited for a few moments, as if hoping Michelangelo might suddenly change his mind. Just like with April, though, he doesn’t. The center of the other turtle’s brow ridges furrow as he slowly moves to walk towards the door.

Before he leaves, Michelangelo can’t help but shoot at his retreating shell. “I’m not.”

The other pauses and glances over his shoulder at the smaller injured turtle. “Not what, Mike?” He sounds a mix of worried, concerned, and guilty. Even after all this time, Michelangelo can still read him like an open book.

The bed-bound mutant just gives a hard look and doesn’t elaborate on what he meant. He lets the implications hang, all of them are sort of true, no matter which ones he came to.

Not going to call for help…

Not his baby brother…

Not his baby brother…

Raphael does that odd sort of hovering thing again at the doorway like he wants to wait for something more, but Michelangelo is already exhausted again and wants nothing to do with him.

The normally hotheaded brother sighed softly. “Goodnight, Mike.” He closes the door behind him softly, leaving Michelangelo alone in the dark again.

Flashes of memories of darkness and an oppressive wet cold sunk into his bones as he curled up in the bed, he couldn’t draw into his shell because of his injuries— so all he manages is a pitiful fetal position as he uses his right arm to cover his face.

The darkness grated on his senses. It was like a never-ending training session on his perception. The only difference was the accompanying loneliness along with it.

He hates himself for the terrified little chirp he lets out. He wants to be angry, not helpless… not afraid.

Maybe he hates himself more for the fact that when he sees the shadow under the door on the other side and hears the rustle as someone sits down and leans against it… he feels better.

He cries silently, wet tears trailing down the corners of his eyes as he listens for the movement at the door on the other side.

Michelangelo had waited in front of closed doors for so long…

It’s the least any of them could do.

Chapter Text

Michelangelo isn’t sure how long he’s been in this same room. While his head isn’t as filled with cotton as the first time he woke up, he never quite feels like he settles into his own body. Almost like a puppet had half of its strings cut and was hanging lopsidedly from the ceiling in macabre fashion, waiting for someone to come along and pick up the strings again. If only to flop about uselessly when strung up by the cross brace.

Sometimes he’ll go through periods of intense pain, beyond the usual of the ache in his throbbing stump and his battered body. It’s something deeper than that, it breathes in his bones and sings in his veins. It sings a song of wrath and war that makes him struggle in the blankets he’s wrapped in, and look around the room for the oppressive sense of dread that’s hiding in the corners of his vision. He thrashes and kicks the blankets off, writhes from the pounding in his ears and the flame under his skin. Like fire ants burrowing into his flesh. His muscles tense so harshly that it feels like they are trying to snap his bones from where they keep pulling, as if he had been condemned to dismemberment via being pulled apart. 

Nothing is ever there, hiding in the shadows, no physical manifestation of chains wrapped around his limbs to rip him apart like a sadistic child pulling off the wings and legs of a bug they found, none of it to satisfy his paranoia, but his blood still boils anyway, and his chest feels tight as if vines and bramble are there instead of flesh.

On nights like those, Michelangelo’s not coherent enough and strong enough to send Raphael away when he comes to sit by his bed. When he holds his hand. He hates himself for it when the pain passes, but in the moment, he would do anything to anchor himself among the waves of pain that threaten to drag him under.

This night is one of those, a bad night, or maybe a Bad Night because it deserves capital letters. Raphael is placing a wet cloth across his forehead. It’s something Leonardo normally would do, he shouldn’t expect it from him of all people, and he doesn’t. Michelangelo doesn’t expect it from any of them, doesn’t even bother considering that they would. But here the hotheaded brother is, tending to him like a mother over a sick child. Part of him wants to spit in his face and another part just wants to get closer. He can’t do either, though, thanks to the next wave of spasms. His heart pounds in his head like a drum of war, but his body can’t fight. His body is tensing and ripping itself apart one muscle fiber at a time.

Guilt must be a hell of a thing , he thinks bitterly to himself as Raphael puts a hand on his shoulder. 

Though he doesn’t have time to dwell on the fact as yet another full body spasm wracked through him. He grits his teeth and lets out a small grunt, trying to stifle his noises. He feels his jaw bloom with a deep ache as his teeth gnashed, he feels another jolt of arcing energy run rampant through his limbs. He even feels as if he could clench his hands, when he only has one. Despite being empty air, he feels the agony in his left arm like he’s sawing through the flesh all over again. He wants to scream, but he doesn’t know if it is pride or something else that makes him swallow back those noises. 

There is movement from the doorway as the immediate older brother ( youngest brother) enters the room quickly. “He’s still going through an episode?”

“Yeah, this one is lasting longer than the others.” Came the gruff response, but oddly gentle motions as hands move to catch the washcloth that had fallen from his forehead due to his spasming. “Can you do something ?”

“I’m still not sure what exactly this is.” The higher nasally tone retorted sharply. There was a small edge of panic to both voices, but not enough that might indicate this was a first time occurrence for either of them.

Michelangelo can’t really focus too much on the people speaking around him when he’s too busy feeling like his skin is going to start blackening into coal. He tries to breathe through it, but he can hardly control himself. Hardly feels coherent.

After some more jumbled conversation around him, there is movement and he forces opens his eyes. (He’s not sure when he closed them.) He sees Donatello coming towards him with a syringe and suddenly Raphael is holding him down by his shoulders. “It’s alright, Mike. Donnie has something that might help—“

He doesn’t hear it, because his breathing hitches in his chest for a different reason. 

Instead, it just feels like his insides are becoming molten liquid. As if he is a fly that had been bitten by a spider. He stumbles back and ends up tripping to land on his shell. He looks to see what she had stabbed him in the calf with. There, sticking out of the muscle was a partially pushed plunger of a syringe filled with familiar green liquid.

With fumbling hands, he reaches to pull it out. Blood wells up from the pinprick left behind, except it isn’t red. At least not completely. It nearly looks like sludge; the rain washes off the wound. Breathing heavily, he looks up toward the sky.

He needs to get up.

His throat seized and he makes a strangled noise through his teeth, his lips peel back and despite the pain, his foot slams into Donatello’s wrist who yelps and the syringe flies from his fingers. “Don’t… touch me!” He hissed. He thrashes again as his muscles clamp down and his head smacks against his pillow as he tries to shove Raphael off of him, but his muscles still weren’t wanting to cooperate.

He felt coals in his belly, a familiar rubber band in his chest being stretched and stretched. His chi was just as erratic as his muscles, and it felt like it was settling into his airways and writhing like snakes in his trachea. “Raph, back up—“ the warning from the genius brother comes too little too late. 

The door opens just in time for Leonardo to witness Raphael and Donatello being blown across the room as the building chi in Michelangelo’s chest finally snaps harshly and lashes out at everything around it. Luckily it’s not the sheer explosive concussive force as the first incident that left the bathroom in shambles. Still it makes Raphael grunt as his shell hits the chair beside the bed and he flips over it, hitting the floor. Donatello does similar, his own shell bouncing off the nearby desk before he falls forwards from the force of the reverberation as he hits his hands and knees. 

Michelangelo’s body, once thrashing, began to slow as the energy began to dissipate from his core, and he was able to gasp for breath once again. 

“Don-“ 

“I’m fine.” Donatello rubs his wrist which was a bit sore from the kick earlier. The syringe of sedatives is broken on the floor, useless now. Catching his breath as he stood up, he looked over to Leonardo pointedly. “You couldn’t have been here sooner?” 

The older brother squints his eyes a little but frowns in concern as enters the room. “No one got me, or told me Mikey was going through another episode— I realized because I sensed his chi.”

Also picking himself up off the floor, green eyes dark with circles underneath them burn as they look at his oldest brother. “Heh, just like you, huh Fearless? Only bother checking on things when you wan-“ 

“ Enough. ” A growled tone stopped all of their words as Michelangelo spoke up from the bed, still panting and shaking from the aftershocks of pain that flickered through his body. “Get out.”

Donatello comes closer to his bed, hand hovering as brown worried eyes take in his appearance. Michelangelo’s skin is sallow, there are heavy bruises under his eyes and still with trembling heaving breaths. “I need to check your vitals—“

“No, you need to get out . All of you.” He casts that blank white gaze across the entire room. “Go argue somewhere else.”

Donatello comes to the sickening realization that there is nothing where there used to be bright baby blue eyes. He had known logically, but suddenly the understanding of what it meant for Mikey… what it meant for them— made him feel like he wanted to be sick. 

It’s only that feeling that makes him relent, to step away from the bed even though he is concerned about dozens of things like his blood pressure, his oxygen levels, and everything else. He doesn’t want Mikey to lash out again like earlier with the syringe of sedatives, to exacerbate his stress levels right after such a taxing episode. He’ll come back later. 

Raphael looks at him like he wants to argue, to get Donatello to fix things. Though it’s not like Donatello has any true sense of how to fix…. this anyway. 

Leonardo, like a ghost, watches from the doorway. His brow ridge furrows softly in the center. Though he ultimately takes a step back into the light of the hallway.

Of course he was always the one to leave first. Michelangelo thinks bitterly.

When the brothers finally funnel out of the room, Michelangelo lets out a shaky relieved exhale. Everything hurts . He feels like he’s been running a marathon and like he got hit by a bus, all in one. It didn’t help that his eyes darted about the room, as if paranoid the shadows were going to come alive. 

He doesn’t get any sleep until the wispy fingers of sunshine begins reaching through the curtains covering the window. Until the early morning rays was highlighting the motes of dust swirling about the room.

He doesn’t know how long he was asleep that time, he didn’t even know he had fallen asleep. He’s been doing that lately, being dragged fitfully into unconsciousness without being able to fight it, sometimes unknowingly sucked into the void. Only waking up for brief intervals like now. 

He felt so groggy, as if his mind with muddled. Still better than the first time he woke up in…

There is a click as cold realization settles in of where he had woken up before he had been moved to seemingly one of the rooms.

He had been in the same bathtub that Leonardo had spent his coma in. 

Michelangelo gives a bitter jaded sneer at the irony, because he’d never been allowed in there before when Leonardo was hurt. He had been shoved to the sidelines so he didn’t screw anything up. Raphael had been hovering over Leonardo like some sort of hunched gargoyle, a sentinel who didn’t leave. Yet any time Michelangelo had come in, offered to watch him so he could go take care of himself, he got a ‘Go away, Mikey.’ Like he was nothing more than a nuisance.

He brushes off the memory, he’s just making himself angry again, and right now he has more than enough to deal with based on how his head throbs to the beat of his heart. He can feel it unpleasantly in his teeth. 

The door opens again, and Michelangelo’s hand twitches for a kunai that’s not there. When he sees it’s Donatello, his hand closes around the sheets.

He’s still just as tense before he had known who was entering the room. His eyes warily track his steps as he moves around. Bringing one of those portable blood pressure cuffs towards him.

“Not even going to say hello, dude?” Maybe if he was still fifteen, Michelangelo would be Mikey and he would say the words playfully with a lopsided little smile. He’s honestly not even sure why he tacked on that ‘dude’ on the end of his sentence, it had been a way to make him seem more friendly and laidback, was that even him anymore? Or just the remnants of old habits coming back? He hated it, hated that he was still settling into familiar patterns when all he wanted to do was set them all on fire. After all, he’s already been baptized in both water and fire on that night his home came down around him. What was another spark to ignite the awaiting gasoline.

No, instead his words come out like the feral hiss a snake gives a second before they lunge into a bite, to sink fangs and venom into the unlucky person who stepped too close. His tone screamed ‘Don’t tread on me’.

Though Donatello has never been good with tones. “Hello, good morning, Mikey. How are you feeling?”

Seriously? 

How was he feeling? That’s almost worst than April asking Michelangelo if he needed anything. Kami. 

His lips peels back from his teeth at the same time the Velcro of the blood pressure cuff was opened with a ‘scrchh’. “I suppose you can say I’m all right — literally. Considering the fact that I have nothing left of the left arm.” The joke comes out in a growl, there is nothing playful in his voice even when he makes a play on words. It’s absolutely scathing, and even Donatello flinches at the sheer vitriol in his tone. “I thought you were supposed to be the smart one.” He snapped darkly.

…but that intelligence was never used to fix the things that matter, it had always been Michelangelo trying to do that. Why trust screwup Michelangelo with that? Why had it always been him when everyone else was always so focused on other things. Why had he always been the one forced to bail the water out of a sinking boat while no one else ever did anything to help him, even if he pleaded them to?

Brown eyes flicked up to his face, and there is another flinch. Michelangelo bets it’s from disgust, he knows how he must look. Like some mutilated monster of his former self. 

Poor little Michelangelo, oh what a pity . 

It made him want to growl, to snarl, it made him want to jut out his chin in defiance. 

Let them recoil in horror, let them quiver. He didn’t care. 

“I’m sorry, Mikey… I just— look, I’m going to check your vitals and then… after that I’ll get you to take some supplements and-“

Michelangelo scoffs, a growl reverberating in his throat and he feels like fire is trying to crawl from his belly to fill his mouth with ash, like he’s a dragon about to raze a village to nothing but ruin. “Don’t you dare come in here telling me what I’m going to do .” He snaps. 

The purple coded brother (Michelangelo sees the mask looped into one of his belt loops and it makes another burst of heat want to claw it’s way out of his mouth but he pushes it down, how dare Donatello make that mask an afterthought when it was given to him by Master Splinter.) meets his eyes. Empty white against amber brown. Before he wanted this… didn’t he? This attention is what he craved. Enough that he was sit in front of Donatello’s door for hours and listening to him tinker, waiting for the moment he would stop—

…But he never did.

Here he was now, giving him the thing he had begged for. Though it’s tainted, he thinks. Like a dehydrated man begging for water only to be given gasoline. 

“Mikey, we need to do what’s best for you. You need to heal—“ he speaks softly, like he’s just giving the facts. Like he always does. Detaching himself from the nitty gritty narrative to suit his academic mind. It’s always been easier for him to deal with that things, hadn’t it?

Michelangelo doesn’t want that. He’s not just another machine to fix, some lines of programming to alter, to pop some replacement parts back on only for him to boot up and go back to the old normal. He wants Donatello to see that, to make that coward stop hiding behind the facts. 

“Like I wanted to anyway!” He snarls in return as he sits up. Immediately he regrets it as the world spins around him and bile replaces the anger as the surge of pain everywhere makes him gag. Donatello rushes over to try and gently push him back down onto the bed, but he shoves him away. Donatello is surprised, given the way he staggers. “Get off of me!”

“Mikey! You’re going to hurt yourself worse. You can’t—“

“ Don’t TELL ME what I can’t do! ” He fires back. Even despite the pain his resentment festers even then. “You don’t have the right!”

“I care about you, Mikey!” Donatello retorts back, his own voice raising both in volume and up a couple octaves like it always did when the genius was in a situation that was rapidly bucking his control. 

Michelangelo laughs for the first time in a long time. It’s sharp like a blade, not the airy genuine laughter of amusement. He laughs until his lungs run out of breath and he’s sucking in another sharp inhale to howl with more laughter. He laughs until Donatello is looking at him with some measure of unease. 

Good.

“You care only when it’s convenient!” He shouts enough that it makes his voice break. He hates it. He realizes just how raw his throat feels, how dry and unwieldy his tongue is. “You care when it suits you! ”

There’s footsteps coming up the stairs and down the hall from outside the door, he can pinpoint them each as they are distinctive. Raphael must be out of practice, because his footsteps are loud and thudding when before he was just as good as the rest of them, and Leonardo always has that slight hitch from his old injury to his knee. 

The door swings open again just as he swings his own legs over the edge of the bed. “What gives you the right to come in whenever you want!?” He’d been knocking for so long. Begging to be let in, only to be rebuffed at every turn. Though when it came to him they came in whenever they pleased? 

“I’ve been taking care of myself!” He screams. “Just go back to wherever you’d all run off to, because I don’t want you! ” He finishes, and he pants heavily as he goes to get up, but he drops onto his knees. He feels so weak. No… he needs to get up. He needs to—

Arms catch him, and he’s too weak to do anything more than feebly squirm as his adrenaline wears off and he is put back inside bed. Though his left hand manages to get just enough momentum to swing—

Only to remember it’s not there anymore.

He lets out a howl of rage and grief. 

It drowns out the churring noise above him. His right hand whips out and he digs his nails into the wrist of whoever is trying to put him into bed. He doesn’t know who— his brain is shutting down. Wants him to fight even when he can’t. 

Even when he draws pinpricks of blood, the person doesn’t move away. “Get away from me!”

“Otōto…” 

He lets out a drawn out strangled noise in the back of his throat. Like a dying thing.

… But Hope was already dead, wasn’t he?

Could he die twice?

He’s pressed against a plastron, feels the sound of the strong heartbeat in his tympanum. Hears the humming… it’s a familiar song. It’s a familiar tune with it’s rise and falls, and his squirming stalls as he listens and remembers.

Remembering is a dangerous thing.

…but this memory is a soft one.

He’d had another nightmare, he and his brothers were small little things, still sleeping in a pile for warmth during the colder seasons. As his eyes open, he sees only the dark that makes him swallow back his whimpers. He doesn’t even remember his nightmare, it was inconsequential. Only the fact that he was still afraid when he woke up was relevant. His heart beat hammering away behind his plastron. Despite the way he was pinned under his brothers’ solid forms, he still felt scared.

Like something was going to hurt them—

Michelangelo didn’t want to wake his brothers up, Raphael kept complaining every time he did these days. While he knew (or at least hoped ) Raphael was only playing it up to come across as the cool older brother irritated with his little brother’s ’crybaby antics’… Michelangelo still didn’t want to be complained at by his hotheaded brother in the morning. That always meant he would take the brunt of Raphael’s temper for the rest of the day until eventually Michelangelo did something else to annoy him that took precedence.

Still, he was tired of being the ‘crybaby’. It was embarrassing, but he just… couldn’t stop it. The tears burned at his eyes and each inhale made his bottom lip quiver. 

So at the bottom of the pile, he swallowed back his scared little chirps and instead let tears pour silently down his chubby cheeks. 

Maybe if he could just stay quiet, he wouldn’t bother anyone. 

He doesn’t know how his father knew, maybe he was just coincidentally checking on them before he fell asleep himself. Maybe he just knew something was wrong… but suddenly, there was a hand gently resting on the top of his head and he saw the familiar cloth of his papa’s kimono and the smell of sage and sandalwood makes him let out a relived hiccup. With his papa here, he was okay… he was safe.

The gentle humming that he quietly did helped Michelangelo shake off the last clinging bits of anxiety from his nightmare, and he found himself feeling sleepy again. He doesn’t know if it was a tune his papa picked up from his own childhood, or if it was just something he came up with. He never did tell Michelangelo. Still, the rise and fall of the tune was steady and familiar in his low voice, kept soft as not to wake up his brothers. It matched the motions of his father gently stroking his head with the back of his hand.

“Don’t leave… papa.”

…and he didn’t. 

— But his papa was gone. Had been gone for a long time.

Just like everyone else. 

Alone .

It’s so dark here.

Hope scratches at the walls of the empty pit it’s been banished to, claws to try and get out until fingers bleed. Hope just wants to leave this place of darkness and misery, but that’s all there ever was anymore. Wonderlands of floating islands above the clouds and days of childish games were over. Dreams were dead, only nightmares lay in their wake as prowling demons with hook-like talons and eyes filled with an empty white stare. The demons walk on two legs and sound and look like himself, because he was the thing that his nightmares were showing. His descent into this dark place as such a foul thing.

Still the humming was enough to make his grip go slack on Leonardo’s wrist and for his shoulders to shake. 

He didn’t try to fight again, even though a part of him wanted to. Even though a part of him wanted all of them to hurt…though a long dormant part of himself was beginning to stir awake. Was feeling remorse over the little bruises he’d dug with his nails into his brother’s wrist. He still was torn between hate and love, this back and forth with his own emotions left him stricken and paralyzed. 

“I don’t want you here…” he attempts to say feebly, but he knows it’s a lie the moment it leaves his mouth. The arms around him stay steady, and he loathes them for that.

Michelangelo was a broken ugly thing, all black and festering like the rot on a carcass. He was a bloated dead thing that still drew breath. How they could stand to come back…despite the repulsive thing he’s become— he doesn’t know. Michelangelo doesn’t know why they are back. They’ll just all leave again.

…but deep deep down in a dark abyss is a broken little boy who wants to beg them just like he begged his father all those years ago. 

“Don’t…leave…” 

He despises himself for the way the hot tears spill down his face again, the way a hand comes from his peripheral to wipe them. He wants to lash out like a stray dog that’s been kicked too many times. A dog that used to wag its tail every time somebody passed it by, until eventually each shove, each hit, each snarled ‘stupid dog’ made it growl and bare its teeth… that bit whenever anyone else came close. Backed into a corner, backed up against a wall, no escape—

—but he’s so tired. 

So just for now, he lets himself slump and close his white eyes. There will be a time for it all later. 

He needs to regain his strength…

He needs….

To redeem himself, to the memory of his father. To repent for letting Scorpio destroy the place his papa worked so hard to build for them, a life and a home— a legacy. He’d broken and tarnished everything.

He still had a mission. 

For now, he’d let himself listen to Leonardo’s humming… deep down that hole inside of him, that dark pit of the shadows he never left— 

That child was listening, curled up down at the bottom.

Chapter Text

His routine was mostly as such.

Soup, water through a bendy straw, supplements and vitamins.

Blood pressure cuffs, changing his bandage around the mutilated remains of his stump (he hasn’t seen it yet, looked away—coward. Later he tells himself.) and painful small talk all the meanwhile with Donatello as he goes about doing such things. Rather, Donatello speaking and Michelangelo being quiet. Surely, he expected him to speak like before, to ramble about things that didn’t matter and to fill the space of the empty in-between with emptier words and long rambling sentences, but he had neither the energy nor the will to bother to humor him. He hasn’t bothered speaking often in years. Wouldn’t bother now for such a trivial reason as to soothe Donatello’s unease.

He should be uneasy. Besides…

They never listened to me before. A part of him thinks bitterly. Like when he had told them about the Krang, or Dimension X, or April’s mom…

Why start now?

Sleeping for days at a time—more Bad Nights, some less bad without the capital ‘b’, but never any good nights where he woke up refreshed. Though it’s not like Michelangelo had expected any okay nights let alone any good ones. No, the capital Bad Nights were the standard.

They had been standard for a long time.

Raphael would sit at his bedside on the Bad Nights, then Michelangelo would growl at him to leave. The red coded brother would slink away in the morning with surprisingly little argument. He’s pretty sure he heard him hovering outside his door and part of him should be happy. Another part feels like he’s still the one sitting at the door again instead of Raphael so can’t think about it too hard or else he feels like he can’t breathe.

He hates not being able to breathe.

Leonardo comes in on occasion, very rarely. He always enters on whisper quiet footsteps that maybe no one else would hear, but Michelangelo has long since started paying attention to his surroundings. Still, he knew he had entered but would pretend to be asleep. No doubt the blue coded brother knew he wasn’t really, just like April did. That sixth sense. Leonardo has always been attuned to that. He knew that Michelangelo knew too, probably.

Though neither of them said anything.

For some reason, he couldn’t help but be reminded of his father and the tea they shared, neither of them had said anything either.

Always later.

Until there’s not…

Today, Michelangelo woke up before the purple-coded brother opted to come into the spare bedroom of the farmhouse, the sun wasn’t up yet but he couldn’t glean what time it was exactly since there was no alarm clock in the room.

His eyes glance around the empty area, and slowly—ever so slowly, he begins to shift. He listens cautiously to the sound of movement, of someone coming down the hall to check on him.

No one does.

He lets out a sigh of (disappointment) relief and lets his feet touch the floor. He moves to settle his weight on them, and for the first time since…well…everything—he stands up on his own without his knees buckling underneath him.

Michelangelo is sore as he quietly limps around the room, back and forth he allows his motor functions to feel familiar again, the feeling of locomotion settling into him like something slotting back into place that had been missing. He swallows thickly as he feels the heat building behind his eyes, blinking the feeling away, the turtle focuses on pacing the length of the room. Each step feels like a small victory. He’s not exactly happy, but it’s something other than the constant sense of defeat he’s been battered with, and for now…that’s enough.

He’s off balance. Each step is haggard and off-kilter, but by the fourth circle he’d paced in the room, it’s better. Not by a lot, but it’s something.

Internally he chides himself for trying to be optimistic about something, about getting better—but another part tells him he has to. There’s no other option. It’s not optimism, it’s simply pragmatism. If he doesn’t get better, he’ll die.

It’s like the Harlem River all over again.

Sink or swim. Sink or swim. Sink or swim.

No…he closes his eyes and breathes in slowly. Reminds himself it doesn’t smell like brine. He’s not cold, he’s not drowning.

Still… it’s sink or swim.

Part of him just wants to sink, but he knows his task of repentance isn’t over yet. Therefore…

He keeps stiltedly hobbling across the carpet despite the ache in his body.

Michelangelo sits on the edge of the bed when he feels his legs start to tremble from fatigue. The mattress softly dips under his weight, and he flexes the fingers of his right hand.

Then he looks to his left.

It’s not there, but he can still feel the trembling of his fingers. It’s funny, isn’t it? It’s gone but he can still feel it. Just like every other part of himself he’s lost along the way. The ache never really disappears, over and over again it’s like he still feels the first cut into mutilated flesh and broken bone.

Raising his fingers, he brushes against the empty air. Reminds himself there is nothing. Then his hand travels up, fingertips trailing across the stump. It burns, brings more heat behind his eyes, but not from just the physical pain of the movement of his fingertips skittering across the coarse cotton bandage, but from something deeper.

Loss.

Knowing you’ll never have something again.

That sort of profound grief in knowing something is gone forever…

He thinks of his father and his innocence. He thinks of his trust and belief in everything turning out alright in the end. He thinks of his childhood home—

He thinks of Hope.

Michelangelo begins to unravel the bandage, slowly. His eyes don’t pull away as he looks as more and more of his pale green skin is exposed. It’s something he has to do. There, finally—he sees the scar. Donatello must have made the wound nice and neat. Idly he wonders to himself if Donatello had to cut off extra so he could pull the skin flaps together and stitch them closed. (It’s so much prettier than his stitches that he’d done on himself, but the wound looks so ugly still. So ugly in fact that he has to swallow the bile in the back of his throat.)

The door opens, and Michelangelo quickly pivots his body away from the door, instinctively raising his good arm to defend himself. To defend his wounded side.

It’s just Donatello carrying a tray. It startles him because it doesn’t make him feel any better knowing who walked through that door. He blinks owlishly at the fact Michelangelo is sitting on the edge of the bed instead of cocooning in the blankets in a half-comatose state. “You should be resting.”

“Blood flow from light exercise will help the body heal itself by helping to circulate oxygen and nutrients.” He retorted.

A part of him wants to give a bitter bark of laughter when Donatello looks even more surprised by his words. Of course, they think him to be poor dumb idiot Michelangelo who doesn’t know a word with more syllables than ‘dude’. It’s his fault, of course. He cultivated the image when it was obvious it was needed. Though he can’t say he wasn’t bitter that the notion had lasted three years without them being around. Like they expected him to stay the same. To still be familiar old Mikey when they returned.

He wonders if they were even planning on it… before everything else happened.

Michelangelo has to push the thought out of his mind because it makes his chest tight, and his chest being tight if the precursor to his throat closing up…. and that’s the inevitable point to where he’ll feel like he can’t breathe.

Donatello carefully walks forward like he’s talking to an animal that’s about to spook. “That’s…true. But you shouldn’t be pushing yourself, someone should be in here with you to make sure you don’t fall and hurt yourself worse, or have another episode—we still don’t know what triggers them…”

“I know my own limits.” He retorted icily. Because how dare he? Trying to slide back into old patterns like he had any right to, as if Michelangelo would allow him to just play the concerned big brother role again without any backlash when he’s been dealing with his own injuries for years without him.

The taller turtle gives a frown as he sets the tray down on the bedside table. Looks like Michelangelo gets something heavier today in the form of oatmeal, good- he was getting tired of soup.

“Mikey, that’s no-“

He interrupts, because this is going to dissolve into a lecture which he is going to lash out at, and it’s going to make Donatello give him those big brown hurt eyes like it was all his fault. He’s too tired to deal with that stare today, so he nips it at the bud.

Because he still has to play mediator in some regards, doesn’t he? Even if it’s just deflecting into safter topics instead of the massive writhing mass of pain that no one acknowledges. “Where’s my mask?”

“Oh—uh, I was planning on repairing it. It has a cut in the center, should be pretty easy to fix if I could get the right color match for thread and find the sewing machine…”

Michelangelo feels like he wants to be sick because that’s not the mask he was talking about. That was the mask of Mikey. That was the mask of a bright Hamato who wasn’t selfish, one who was kind, one who still had hope and hadn’t managed to get blood on his hands. It was for a dead boy who was never coming back. It was for the boy who drowned in the river that night, the rays of sunlight that were swallowed by dark murky waters.

“No, the black one.” He retorts sharply.

Donatello winces a bit like he wasn’t expecting it. Michelangelo doesn’t understand why it’s such a surprise, that was the mask he’d been wearing. Shouldn’t it be obvious that was his mask now? Not that bright sunshine orange that was tainted with blood?

“It’s ah…with the rest of your gear you had been wearing at the time that…” Still, his older brother hadn’t changed, had he? None of them had, they were still pathetically skirting around the issues at hand and never talking about what mattered.

He speaks through gritted teeth and picks at the edge of the blanket idly. “You mean when the Lair got destroyed and I had to cut off my arm? Yeah, I was there.” He retorted in a clipped tone, and he thrives on the way it makes Donatello look away, the way it makes him recoil. “Those are the facts, right?”

“I suppose they are…” He murmurs quietly. “We should get your arm wrapped again. Since it looks like it is doing well, we can move to the elastic bandage, we’ll be shaping the…limb via more pressure distally so that way it can be conical to fit into a prosthetic…”

Michelangelo’s head snaps up, and his eyes narrow. “What?” He asks icily. “Who says I want a prosthetic?”

The older (younger) brother fights not to shrink under his gaze. Surely, it’s abnormal for such a glare to come from Mikey of all people… but Michelangelo hasn’t been Mikey in quite some time.

The genius brother clears his throat awkwardly. “I just… I can build you one. I’ve already been working on a prototype once your arm is ready—”

He stands up, it makes Donatello flinch back with how quickly the smaller turtle springs up with such an explosive force. “So, you just assumed that I’d want you to fix things. Isn’t that right?” He wants to scream, he doesn’t. Instead, his voice comes out flat and apathetic, with absolutely no inflection or tone to give away his inner thoughts. He’s not sure how he manages it, considering he feels like he is a hunk of molten red-hot metal that was just pulled out of the forge. “Don’t you dare do that. You don’t get to make choices for me.”

Maybe when he was fifteen, he’d ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’ at the idea of having a robotic limb. Maybe it would make him feel better, maybe he’d be rambling about different gadgets Donatello could implement into it, maybe a couple of ideas could be useful but most of them would be goofy just to get a smile from his older brother. It could have been a way for attention because Donatello pays attention to his machines more than anything, so surely if Michelangelo was even the slightest bit machine too, then he’d have his love, right?

Except he’s not fifteen. He’s twenty-seven now, counting the nearly two years in Dimension X. He’s not a child, he’s not bright-eyed Hope looking at the world like it was all something beautiful.

It was pain, it was too much pain.

“I’m not yours to fix.” He finishes.

Yes, he’s broken, but he isn’t Donatello’s responsibility, he’d shirked it the moment he left all those years ago with the memory of that placating half-hearted pat on the head lingering in his mind as the last bit of physical contact with his brothers for the rest of that year.

Donatello looks at him, really looks. Michelangelo looks back at him. His eyes sharp and flinty, cold, and detached with the wall of white between them.

“What happened to you?” He whispers softly, and sadly, Michelangelo thinks.

Sad for what reason? Because he wasn’t the person he remembered? Or for the guilt he felt at not being able to witness the change firsthand? “I thought you were the genius, why don’t you figure it out? It seems obvious from where I’m standing.” He shook the stub of his limb and ignored how he could feel the way his fingers wiggled when they weren’t even there in the first place.

The taller mutant swallowed thickly, and his arms glanced away at the movement of the amputated limb. Michelangelo feels angry by that for some reason.

Because the fact that he refuses to look means that he’s not listening, again. A nasty little voice in the back of his head remarks.

“It’s more than that.” Donatello moved to cross his arms over his plastron, the fabric of the flannel shirt he was wearing wrinkled with the movement and pulled taut over his shell. “Mikey…I cataloged your injuries. You’ve had…massive trauma. Some of the said traumas were years old. Your shell, the malnutrition… what happened?”

He clenches his only left hand and fights the urge to sneer. “I guess if you wanted to know, you would have been there, wouldn’t you?”

“I do care, Mikey.” He says, a certain desperation lacing his words. “I want to know—I just…what about Ice Cream Kitty, what happened to he—”

Donatello can’t finish because Michelangelo moves to slam him against the wall. He’d moved so fast that he hadn’t even registered he’d moved either. He can feel his chi blazing under his skin, pounding in his chest. Or maybe that was just still the leftover grief rearing up. Anger is an emotion that hides things after all. Donatello must either be very out of practice or hesitant to try and use force to de-escalate the situation, because he doesn’t try to get away, even with his forearm on his throat. “You don’t have the right.” He hissed. “Don’t say her name. Don’t you dare.”

It was Donatello’s fault; it was all Donatello’s fault she was dead. His stupid machines, he always cared more about them than anything else. It’s all his fault. (No that’s a lie, it’s Michelangelo’s fault too. Michelangelo ruins everything he touches. There’s that nasty word again. Fault. His fault…all his fault….all his fault….ALL HIS FAULT.)

The door swings open again, and there are blurs in his peripheral vision. He doesn’t look at them because he’s too focused on watching the way Donatello’s eyes widen when he gasps for air. Hands grab him by the shoulders and haul him back. “Hey…Hey! That’s enough! Let him go!”

He thinks he can’t breathe again when Donatello finally gasps in his own breath.

Flashes of water, of lightning above the waves. It’s so peaceful down here in the dark, why can’t he just let go?

“Hey… C’mon, little brother. Snap out of it….Case! Get Leo!” There’s a voice beside him, but everything is muffled. He tries to thrash away but arms pull him back, he doesn’t know when his knees hit the floor, but they do. The arms around him keep him locked in, and he’s crying. He doesn’t know when that happened, but hot wet tears are rolling down his face and he can’t breathe.

He hears a watery meow. It’s not there, it’s not. It echoes in his memories in a way that makes him let out a harsh cry, because it’s all his fault. She’s all alone.

He’s a monster.

“I left her. I left her…I left her. I left her.” His lips form the words, and he tries to move away again from the arms locking him in place, but he’s being rocked back and forth.

Eventually, once he gets talked down by Leonardo with Raphael’s arms keeping him steady, he feels empty. He just feels so disgusting. This ugly thing that they all continue to touch, they are just tainting themselves by being close to him. He doesn’t want them close. Michelangelo wants them to go away, he can’t stand it. He wants to rip off his skin, he wants to scream—but he doesn’t. He doesn’t have a voice to speak with. It’s gone, and he can’t do anything except stare off into space.

It feels like the water is still over his head. He’s gone…he never left. There’s ice forming inside the hollow cavity of his torso that used to house his heart. It’s all gone.

After putting Michelangelo back to bed, the group calls a meeting. No one says anything at first, and Donatello rubs his throat idly. It didn’t bruise, but there was still the phantom pressure on his windpipe. Honestly, it was remembering those broken wet gasps when Michelangelo buckled to the floor that was still running through his mind.

Raphael had his jaw set into a hard line; he hadn’t wanted to call Leo in that moment back in the room. Though he didn’t know what else to do. He could hold his little brother down when he thrashed, even if he hated listening to the hoarse sobs right in his ear. Then just… nothing.

It reminds him too much of Christmas, of waiting around by his bed right after Mikey had been moved from the bathroom to the bedroom. They hadn’t even known if he was going to survive the night, one of his ‘episodes’ had gotten bad. Real bad. Enough to where Leo had to use the healing mantra again, for what little help it did.

Leonardo was pensively sitting at the edge of the couch with his legs together and his mouth drawn into a tight line. “What happened in there, Donnie?” He asked. His tone wasn’t loud, but his expression was disappointed, that much was obvious. The entire situation just seemed like it was getting from bad to worse, but he had to remind himself that at least his Otōto was alive and seemed stable, at least currently. That was more than they had just weeks ago.

Donatello scrubbed a hand over his face tiredly. “I…pushed too hard, too fast. I thought…I thought I could get an explanation from him on what had happened. I mentioned Ice Cream Kitty and… well…you all saw the outcome of that.” He grimaces a little.

Spread out over one of the recliners is Casey, who’d filled out from his youth. His eyes are squinted a little. “So, is this how Mike is gonna be now? We gonna have to watch our backs?”

Leonardo swallowed; he already had an inkling of what his brother was going through. After all… he’s seen his own share of demons. His first instinct had been to withdraw when it happened, he assumed he was going to hurt his family.

He wouldn’t leave Mikey again. Wouldn’t let him leave either, because that is what got them into this mess in the first place. It’s what destroyed his baby brother.

“He’s still Mikey.” He responded. As if daring anyone to contradict him. When no one did and everyone stayed silent, he continued. “We just need to be careful about how we talk to him. Both for his sake and ours.”

Donatello sighed softly. “A list of…triggers. Yes, topics to avoid that might set him off. I…shouldn’t have asked anyway.” He admitted. He’d known what he’s had to do for a while now if he wanted to get answers, that black box still sitting in the barn—he just wanted to ignore it, pretend it didn’t exist.

He was a coward…he didn’t want to see firsthand what had happened to his brother. Maybe hearing it would be easier, like a blow softened. Mikey always did that, whenever they used to spar, he would always control the momentum of his nun chucks instinctively to soften his blows. It’s something they all did.

--And even if Donatello had been startled, Michelangelo had still done it then too when he’d pressed him up against the wall.

By the time Raphael had already come to pull Michelangelo off of him, the arm against his throat had lost its pressure.

He scrubs a hand over his face with a sigh. “The data from the Lair while we were gone… I’m going to finally unpack the data and comb through it.”

“Isn’t that a breach of privacy?” April remarked softly as she folded one leg over the other. “Mikey should tell us himself.”

“Oh to hell with ‘privacy’.” Raphael retorted. His face was pinched and his eyes squinted into little slits. Though his brow ridges were furrowed, little lines appeared between them. “Mikey’s…not Mikey right now. That’s our fault.” He was blunt about it, laying blame where he knew it belonged. Sure, they’d all been wallowing over the grief and guilt, but it was high time someone came out and said it. “He’s not going to tell us if we don’t— we’ll never know, and right now we need to know in order to help him.”

The blue-coded brother played with the scarf around his neck idly. He frowned as he mulled over everything. “Before I had come back to New York…I felt something. I wasn’t even meditating but I could still feel it so potently… like a light went missing suddenly. I knew it was Mikey, that’s why I’d… already been on the boat back.”

“You didn’t think to call us!?” Raphael snapped sharply as soon as he heard the admission. “We could have come back faster we could have—“

April huffed quietly. “Hey, it’s in the past. Regardless of what could have been done, we’re here now.”

There was another round of tense silence. Raphael wanted to say more, and felt the relentless sharp pressure of tectonic plates crushing his plastron, urging him just to give in and let the world feel his wrath.

—but the Hamato family’s world had always been one another. Their father had been the same gentle night he slipped into. Leonardo had been the oceans and the rivers, smooth flowing and reliable. Raphael had been the mountains and volcanic magma, hard and unyielding but fiery all the same. Donatello the innovator and the change had been that spark of brilliance, that electricity from the air. Michelangelo had been their sun; the light which nourished them. Which made life possible.

The story of life was interwoven with the presence of the sun. It’s been how it's always been.

Though their world was abandoned and the sun… it was gone.

None of them would ever forgive themselves. This wasn’t just something small, this was bigger than them.

--But Donatello was always ready to solve the big mysteries of the universe, especially if it meant helping his baby brother…

No matter how hard it was going to be.

He had his hands folded together in front of him, his elbows leaning against the metal table in the barn that acted as his makeshift desk. He remembers being here for so long, attempting to make medicine for Leo to just make him wake up faster, please. He was never successful, Leo woke up on his own time, at his own pace.

Just like Mikey.

[Data extraction…87%]

He closes his eyes and sighs heavily as the progress bar slowly inches its way toward the end point.

Donatello thinks of all the injuries he’s seen just outwardly on his youngest brother. The transhumeral amputation took him nine hours to clean up and close in a manner that wouldn’t leave his little brother with a gaping wound exposed to the world. He’d needed to pick out splintered bone fragments, smoothen the bone’s raw jagged edges, repair the bleeding, and knit back together muscle and skin. It was… probably one of the worst things Donatello has ever had to do.

The whole time he hadn’t known whether his only little brother would live or die. If his brother died, it would be his fault.

The wound had been done with a sawing motion by a weapon that wasn’t built for it in mind based on the mangled state of the wounds. Based on the angle of the wound, it had come from his right side…self-inflicted. Mikey’s kusarigama had been drenched in blood… it had been easy to tell what he had used.

God, he can’t imagine.

Trapped under that rubble in the destroyed remains of what was left of their childhood home, pinned in such a way that made the sacrifice of cutting off his arm the only choice left.

--and his brother wouldn’t talk about it.

“I guess if you wanted to know, you would have been there, wouldn’t you?” He hears Mikey’s voice sneer to him darkly, and he flinches at the memory of it. Begrudgingly, Donatello could understand- but he always cared, leaving wasn’t because he didn’t care… but he’d cared too much and he wasn’t sure what to do about it. He’d left in hopes that maybe he wouldn’t be so angry and jealous.

He never wanted this to happen.

--but it did.

The sunshine that they’d had since before they’d actually ever seen the sun was gone.

Donatello didn’t know how to fix it, he was supposed to be the one who fixed things…

His eyes glance over to the prototype prosthetic that way lying on the opposite workbench across from him. He had a precursory framework not yet made with the full tweaks in mind. He’d designed it in an attempt as…what…a peace offering? An attempt to smooth things over? A band-aid on the bullet wound that was Michelangelo’s trauma?

“I’m not yours to fix.” He lunges up to sweep it off his desk, everything clatters to the ground. Tools, bolts, screws, half mangled bits of circuitry that he had been soldering into something more complete. The prototype hits the wooden floor with a deafening clatter along with everything else, he’s breathing heavily, and his hands are clenched at his sides.

Michelangelo wasn’t something to fix…he wasn’t something. He was someone…and he’s been messing up every step of the way. Sure he’d kept his younger brother alive, but he shouldn’t have been in that situation anyway.

He never should have been alone…

How could he have made such a massively idiotic oversight?

Why didn’t he call?

The mutant flops back down in his chair as he looks at the discarded tools and the prototype on the floor with a blank look. At another time, it would have been Michelangelo knocking his things down or breaking things in his lab, and he’d be chasing after him with a lecture and an angry tone.

--But Michelangelo hasn’t broken anything in a long time…it’s been the older brothers who had done all the breaking.

“I’m not yours to fix.” No…no he wasn’t. Michelangelo had always been his own person, who had gone to the beat of his own drum. He had such a vivacious personality and a love of life, always taking joy in the small things and looking on the bright side. His optimism had constantly balanced out the rest of them, pragmatic, pessimistic, realists. When they had gone into his mind to stop the Neutrinos, they had seen a veritable wonderland…and Mikey’s core had been him when he was so little.

They had made snide jokes about it, about his level of maturity never going past age seven when they had seen him.

How he wished he’d never made a laugh at Raphael’s quip, because Mikey had something they’d never had…

Michelangelo Hamato had seen the beauty in everything.

Now…Donatello is sorely bereft, knowing that the spark was gone. Their light that had relied on for so long to keep reminding them that they were more than child soldiers in a war they had never asked for…in a war that had been brewing since the moment they began training as children—they weren’t just heroes. They weren’t just ninjas. They weren’t just mutants in a world where people hated others for anything different.

They were a family.

…And they’d spat in his face for everything he had done for them. All the times he made them laugh, each time he’d been there to make them smile, every single time he managed to break the tension with a well-timed joke…

Regret tasted like ash, Donnie thought to himself.

Donatello popped his fingers, and the crack of air escaping between his knuckles made him roll his neck next to do the same. He flinches a little when he feels the pull of tense muscles all the way down his spine. The genius hadn’t realized just how long he’d been sitting and waiting for the files to extract themselves so he could actually view them.

Three years was a lot of data to go over…

Even more just to unpack, both literally and metaphorically.

But he’d do it.

Even though he felt sick.

Even if he felt his fingers tap against the metal top of the table where his laptop was perched. The progress bar slowly ticks by as time loses its meaning.

He steeples his fingers together and rests his face against them, his thumbs propping up his chin and his fingers pressed to his forehead.

Michelangelo had a scar on his forehead, down were three long slashes that curled right above the edge of his lip. Whenever he’d sneered at Donatello earlier, it had pulled on it. It didn’t look as old as some of the other scars.

Burns, slashes, bullet grazes, they all had their share of different scars…before Leo had them all beat, with Raphael a close second in behind. Michelangelo had always had the least amount of scars painting his skin…

Because big brothers were supposed to look after little brothers. Supposed to keep them safe.

Now Mikey had the most. Now his body was a canvas of physical trauma. A large chip out of his upper plastron led into a wide slashing cut, one that passed too close to the carotid artery (he’s painfully aware of exactly how fast someone Mikey’s size and weight would bleed out from arterial spray. He wants to gag when his brain imagines the velocity and volume of the spray. Not his baby brother… Not his baby brother.)

That’s not even mentioning the horrible violent crack of his shell. It had to have happened early on, shells took a long time to heal— and doesn’t that just make him feel even worse? If he hadn’t left at all… he could have helped, maybe avoided Michelangelo getting the injury in the first place— but no, he’d gone to college when he could have just done it back at the Lair since it was online anyway.

Before he can spiral anymore, there is a ping that jerks him out of his current train of thought.

[Extraction Complete] comes the blinking letters, taunting him.

He doesn’t want to see it. He knows April is right, he should wait for Michelangelo to open up about what happened. April was studying to be a journalist, she knew the importance of stories…

But Donatello was a scientist, and he needed the facts. He needed to know if there were any clues about Michelangelo’s condition, both physically and mentally.

He moves to click on the file.

“I’m not yours to fix.”

But he was his brother, his only little brother, and he’d help him heal. He wasn’t broken… he was hurt.

There was nothing to fix.

Just injuries to mend.