#Yoshi walks | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

taizi · 1 year

Note

first of all your fic has me sobbing (i'm not exaggerating like i really am sobbing), second of all what was it that mikey said in his sleep though 👀

walk with open hands

Splinter goes from the rooftop battle to the lair in seconds and he’s staggered by the sudden shift. The calm and safety of his hidden underground home is disorienting. His heart is still racing with adrenaline. He curls forward and clutches his youngest child close to his chest and prepares himself for the next wave of danger. In that moment, Splinter would be willing to tear through Saki with his teeth.

A footfall in the doorway snatches Splinter’s attention. His gaze snaps that way and lands on Leonardo, who looks at him like he’s seen a ghost. It’s a look that makes Splinter’s fur stand on end. He’s never seen his eldest look so brittle and diminished, as if he’s buckling under the weight of the world.

And then Leonardo’s eyes dip lower, to the weight in Splinter’s arms, and fear chases everything else out of his expression like hounds running down a fox. Iron shoots through his spine and he crosses the room in two running leaps, already shouting behind him for his brothers.

Because Michelangelo is writhing like a creature possessed. His arms are a horror, green skin flaking away as gold eats its way up in jagged, crooked lines.

The boys come together like a well-oiled machine, scrambling desperately to help, every other thing they must be feeling shoved aside in favor of fear for their youngest.

Leonardo leans over the smallest of his siblings and soothes him in a shaking tone, wiping away his tears in such a clear echo of Shen that it seems impossible she didn’t raise him herself.

“Leonardo,” Splinter says, “qigong, now.”

His eldest hurries to obey. He’s clearly overwhelmed, clearly terrified, but the given task allows him a sense of purpose that clears the storm in his mind. His hands don’t shake or fumble, because he can’t afford them to.

It takes several long moments. Longer than it should. That golden light wants to keep living in Michelangelo, has found a place in his soul it doesn’t want to leave. Splinter pours as much of his qi into the healing hands as he possibly can, determined to chase it and all the pain out.

Finally, Michelangelo’s anguished thrashing tapers off. He heaves a great, shuddering breath, and all the tension in his body blows away with the exhale. Splinter sits back on his heels and feels about a hundred years old.

“Infirmary,” Donatello says at length, his voice low and blunt. It’s unclear who the order is for, but everyone moves at the same time. Splinter leans forward to lift Michelangelo back into his arms, and tries not to notice the way Raphael yanks his hand away before it comes into contact with his father’s.

The weight of one of his sons is a familiar thing to carry. Splinter has done this a thousand times before—the early mornings after movie nights, those accidental sleepovers when pre-teen plotting ran late—and he finds himself grateful that they’re still small enough that he can manage it.

They’re still so small. What has he been doing, leading them headlong into this war? The second he became aware of the Shredder in New York City, he should have bundled them all up and fled with them as far as he could.

Michelangelo is dwarfed by the infirmary bed and his eyes are half-lidded but he resists sleep with ferocious stubbornness. The same stubbornness that always managed to outlast his brothers’ difficult moods, that made him a force of nature in the dojo only when he wanted to be, that saved Splinter’s life on that rooftop moments ago. It takes all four of them to convince him to pry open his hands and release wakefulness and slide away through the darkness into healing sleep.

Then Donatello is all business, blinking past the wet sheen in his eyes and drawing the blanket away from his younger twin. He reaches for a pair of shears on a nearby work table and begins cutting through the pink jacket.

“Hey,” Raphael says without heat.

“It’s ruined anyway,” Donatello fires back. “And I want to look at his shoulder.”

Donatello has always put more stock in medicine than qigong, and it’s fair of him to be concerned about the source of all the blood staining the bright material a stomach-turning rust color. Leonardo leans in to help, eyes boring into Michelangelo’s pale, tear-stricken face as though committing the latest in a long line of personal failures to memory.

Splinter stands out of the way, hands folded in the sleeves of his ripped robe, watching the process from over their heads.

He has seen Michelangelo in this particular jacket three times now.

The first memory comes rushing back—the meadow in the shadow of the mountain, the little river spirit in an inexplicable pink hoodie—the way it trembled where it stood, as if it couldn’t feel the warmth of the sun, and how clearly Splinter could recognize pain when he saw it. And despite all of that, the spirit smiled at him. It offered apology, and thanks, and even love. It spoke with the simple integrity and powerful empathy characteristic in children. It was definitely, Splinter had realized with a sinking heart, someone’s baby.

He revisited the memory in a dream, not even a full decade later, and recognized that little river spirit instantly as his baby. Splinter sprang out of bed with all the strength and speed he possessed, sweeping down the tunnel into the room that functioned as a nursery. The turtles were too small for their own rooms and still preferred to slumber together in a pile, and Michelangelo was comfortably squished beneath Donatello, their little faces peaceful and untroubled.

Splinter sat beside their nest for the rest of the night, his heart pounding. Michelangelo was so tiny and fragile in his sleep, when his limitless energy and manic good cheer didn’t make him appear two times larger than life. Splinter couldn’t begin to imagine how he could have ended up in that meadow. He couldn’t summon any reasonable explanation why the precious child would cry and apologize so earnestly.

When Michelangelo got a little older, and he and his brothers were progressing effortlessly through their training, Raphael made the executive decision that the four of them should wear masks, like the heroes in their Saturday morning cartoons. Splinter obliged him, and took the boys into the side tunnel he used for storage, allowing them to pick from the fabrics he had available. Michelangelo went straight for a sunny orange color as if it had always been his. And in a way, Splinter thought, feeling both unrelentingly fond and quietly apprehensive, it always had been.

The second memory of the turtle in the pink jacket did not stand out the way the first and the last did. On an unremarkable afternoon, Splinter had happened upon a frenzied Michelangelo in the den, pacing in restless circles. It only struck Splinter as odd because his sons had left for April’s apartment not even twenty minutes ago. But when he made his presence known, Michelangelo had whipped around with a lethal speed that spoke more of hard-earned experience than it did of training, and his eyes were as wide as the moon.

It had been a long time since Splinter had worried about the troubling vision of his youngest in Japan. As a parent of four high-energy children, his mind was often occupied by a thousand things at once, each more pressing than the last, and distant memories of dreamlike encounters could not always be in his top ten priorities.

It was not the pink jacket that tugged at recollection that time. It was the way his sweet boy’s face had crumpled, the way he plucked at his sleeves and choked out, “I’m sorry, papa.”

“I should have been good. I’m really sorry.”

And suddenly, Splinter was terrified. Suddenly it felt as though they were on a one-way road and picking up speed, barreling towards an inevitable end. He held Michelangelo as tight as he dared and wanted more than anything to protect him from whatever was coming. All he could do was impress upon the child that he was good, that he was loved, that he never needed to apologize to Splinter—the simple act of existing was a gift Michelangelo had given his family that was impossible to repay, and they would be lost without him.

Then he let Michelangelo go chasing after his brothers, and wondered if it would be enough.

The third memory—the rooftop. Coming up on the end of fate’s one-way road.

Splinter had raised his sons to trust their instincts. To put stock in the things their hearts told them. To listen to the voice in their minds when it urged them to move. It was an order of a magnitude more difficult for some of them than it was for others. Donatello and Leonardo had an inclination towards practicality and the arts they could study and practice. Raphael was too stubborn and righteous to do anything but the right thing, whatever the cost. But Michelangelo was a whirlwind of intuition. Michelangelo could breeze through life on a hunch if he wanted to.

And on the rooftop, he was a coiled spring, waiting, waiting, waiting for some cue from the universe. He was so hot to the touch he nearly burned, and his arms were glowing through the sleeves of that pink jacket, and his eyes were fixed without blinking on some point above and behind Splinter’s shoulder.

When the Shredder arrived, Michelangelo was ready. And now they’re here. They’ve crashed through the roadblock at the end of fate’s path and this is what comes after. This unmapped territory, unfamiliar ground.

“What the hell is that?” Raphael says sharply. There’s a small clock resting against Michelangelo’s plastron, glowing gold and putting out heat like a furnace.

“Don’t,” Leonardo says, throwing out an arm when Donatello’s hand drifts towards it. “Don’t touch it. Do you have something you can cut the chain with?”

A moment later, the chain around Michelangelo’s neck is broken, and Donatello is lifting the clock away at arm's length with the sort of exacting precision Splinter would attribute to a bomb disposal technician. The second it’s gone, Michelangelo stirs and starts to cry.

“Wait—don’t go,” he says, and his siblings all jump in surprise.

“It’s okay,” Leonardo starts, but Michelangelo won’t be comforted.

“I’ll get it right this time,” the child babbles, word salad. He still seems to be half-dreaming. “I’ll try again. Again. Again. Let me try again.”

“Hey hey,” Donnie says, touching his twin’s sweaty forehead with the calloused tips of his fingers, a gentle tap-tap-tap that is a secret code between just the two of them. “Angie, it’s all over, you don’t have to do anything.”

“I can fix it,” Michelangelo sobs, so much pain in every word that it wrenches at Splinter’s heart. “No one’ll know I’m gone. No one’ll miss me.”

Raphael’s eyes are bright and furious and wet. His fists would be curled into dangerous weapons, if both his hands weren’t already curled carefully around one of Michelangelo’s.

“We’d miss you,” Leonardo says, only barely above a whisper. The grief in his voice is old, but the fear is brand-new. He’d come dangerously close to losing something important, something he might not have survived losing. “We’d miss you every single second you weren’t here, Mikey. What would we do without you?”

Michelangelo sinks back into sleep, never fully awake to begin with. Raphael lowers his head onto the bed, on the pillow of one folded arm, and doesn’t let go of Michelangelo’s hand. The room is tense and silent, all of them waiting for something. Waiting for the thick, clouded atmosphere to break open and finally give into rain.

Splinter lays a hand on his eldest son’s shell, unsure if the touch will be welcome. Leonardo flinches and goes terribly still. Then his shoulders start shaking.

“We had a funeral,” Leonardo chokes out.

“You died,” Donatello bites out. He’s unwilling to leave his little brother’s side, but all of his menacing focus is pointed at Splinter like a knife.

Splinter had made that connection, somewhere in the quiet back of his brain—between the clock and the knowledge that Michelangelo’s best friend is a Timestress and those memories of Michelangelo that stand out in Splinter’s mind, that don’t quite fit in the chronological places they should, and the way his turtles look at him now. It still hurts to hear it.

“I’m sorry,” Splinter replies, his heart well on its way to breaking. He says it again, “Moushiwake arimasen deshita. The last thing I wanted was to leave you.”

They will certainly need to talk about it in depth at another time. Splinter, of all people, knows trauma when he sees it. But it isn’t a conversation they’re ready to have right now. They’re barely clinging to their composure as it is. Splinter will let them go at their own pace.

“Mikey thinks—” Leonardo starts, and can’t bring himself to finish.

“We let him think it,” Raphael says. “We all fell apart.”

“I’m not letting him go anywhere without me ever again,” Donatello says bitterly, sinking into a chair beside the bed. “I’m invoking grounding rights. The next time he goes on a time-traveling odyssey, he’ll have a chaperone.”

Leonardo is surprised into a smile. All isn’t lost. “Three chaperones,” he says.

“Five, once April and Casey hear about this,” Raphael adds, muffled because he refuses to lift his head.

“That is incorrect,” Splinter interjects. His sons look at him, conflicting expressions on their faces, and so he adds, “There will be six of us. We are a family, and wherever we must go next, we will go together.”

It’s too late now to sweep his children away to some safe, far-away place. They have friends and loyalties and memories tying them to this city. It is their home in a way it never quite managed to be Splinter’s. He missed the opportunity to be the best father to them that he could be. His life is a series of missed opportunities.

But he has been given, of all wonderful, impossible, undeserved gifts, a second chance.

“I won’t waste it,” Splinter says, gazing down at Michelangelo’s sleeping face. He still sees his baby sleeping there, untroubled and unburdened and full of light. “I won’t waste another second.”

#tmnt 2k12 #tmnt 2012 #teenage mutant ninja turtles #hamato yoshi #hamato michelangelo #ratdad #my writing #tmnt fic #walk with open hands #prompt #anonymous #anon im sorry this took forever ! ive been planning this little coda since u sent me that ask

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taizi · 1 year

Text

walk with open hands

tmnt 2k12 pairing: mikey & renet, mikey & splinter word count: 8k title borrowed from somewhere by run river north

read on ao3

Mikey’s nowhere near as smart as Donnie, he’s not a tactical genius like Leo, but he’s not an idiot, either. He’s seen enough Saturday night sci-fi to know the dangers of this wild, reckless, they’d-ground-you-for-three-years-if-they-knew idea.

When Renet—sweet, spirited, scatterbrained Renet—accidentally left one of her clocks behind, Mikey should have said something. He should have called out to her before she bounced back through that portal into Null Time.

He definitely shouldn’t have swept the clock off the table and into his belt without saying a word.

Raph is the only one in the room who catches the flicker of movement, because he’s standing at just the right distance, eyes pointed at just the right angle. He flicks a glance at Mikey, and… well, maybe this distance that’s grown between them since sensei died is a good thing, after all. A month ago, Raph would have read him like a book and called him out on whatever suspicious thing his expression gave away. This version of Raph looks at this version of Mikey for a few seconds and then looks away. Which is a good thing.

Renet waves a cheerful goodbye to his brothers, blows an affectionate kiss to Mikey because they’re besties, and Mikey beams back at her like he didn’t just do something bad. The stolen device in Mikey’s belt feels white-hot, like it’s going to burn clear through the leather in a minute. There’s still time—there’s still a minute, then a few seconds, then an instant where he could say “hey, actually—”

He doesn’t. She leaves. His brothers drift away to their respective corners of the lair. Donnie half-heartedly scoots Mikey out of his lab. Mikey goes to his room, and closes the door, and leans back against it.

Then he slides all the way to the floor, bringing up his knees, and takes the clock out. In the shelter of his curled limbs, it glows a faint gold. It feels warm, like a friend. He winds its long chain around his finger idly.

“This is a stupid idea,” Mikey tells it in confidence.

The thing is. The thing is, Mikey’s scared. The lair—his home, his always-home—has become someplace unfamiliar and unsafe. His brothers are inching into strangers. Everything about Mikey’s life that made it warm and good must have belonged to sensei, because without him, it’s all different.

He found Leo crying in the dojo this morning. He didn’t mean to. He can’t get it out of his head. The sound of his big brother’s choked silence, the sight of his shaking shoulders and his hands pressed over his face like he could force all the anguish back down if he tried hard enough.

Raph is spending more and more time somewhere, anywhere else. Donnie keeps skipping meals, rarely leaving the lab unless Casey or April drag him out. And Leo is crying when there’s no one around to see.

If Mikey can fix it… if he can change things back… it would be worth all the trouble he’s going to get into for trying in the first place.

He closes his fingers around the clock. Welp. No time like the present.

“Hah,” he says to himself. He feels a little blurry and wet and wobbly, but he still musters up a smile. “I’ve already got the jokes! Let’s see if I’ve got the moves.”

This thing doesn’t exactly come with an instruction manual, but Mikey’s always been more of a hands-on learner. And Renet talks about her work all the time, in the off-handed, confident way any other master of their craft might.

Most of it, she said recently, like, ninety-nine point nine percent of it, is all heart. It’s magic, not science. Anyone halfway familiar with the mystic arts could probably puzzle it out!

He thinks he can see what she means now. With his eyes closed, and the room all still and silent around him, the clock’s quiet ticking takes on a different tone. Mikey can hear it in his mind, on that inner plane he glimpsed sometimes during meditation when he was a child, the one he became familiar with during his vision quest. His brothers’ qi signatures all live there, safe and tucked away and precious. Things make sense there, effortlessly, in a way Mikey has never been able to explain out loud.

The clock finds a little nook for itself in that plane and settles down and stretches out, like Icky when she’s getting comfy in a new bowl. It doesn’t actually speak or anything, because it’s a clock—but it’s alive in a different way, and radiates a sense of approval. Sort of like it’s saying Okay, yeah. You’ll do.

The faint warmth in Mikey’s hands burns a little hotter, building into a packed heat, and just when Mikey thinks he’s going to have to drop it, everything around him disappears.

“Remember boys!” Renet says, bubbly and excited, clapping her hands together. “Time marches on its stomach! Let’s go!”

Her voice comes out of nowhere. With a jolt, Mikey hops to his feet. He’s not in his bedroom anymore. He’s—back in the lab. They’re all back in the lab. Only there’s another version of himself standing across the room, sandwiched between his brothers, watching with wide eyes as Renet opens up a bright portal to the past.

He remembers this. This is one of the first trips they ever took with her, that time with the dinosaurs, when her scepter got lost in a lake and they were attacked by Utrom scientists and Raphael adopted baby Pepperoni. This happened barely a year ago.

It worked, Mikey thinks, too stunned to feel any particular way about it. And then year-ago-Raph turns his head and Mikey ducks behind a metal tool cabinet on pure reflex.

“What?” Leo says. He’s so bright and light on his feet. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen to them in the future. He’s still got some childhood left in his eyes.

“Thought I heard something,” Raph replies. He shrugs, unbothered. “Well, are we goin’ or what? Move it, Fearless, or I’ll move it for you.”

“That doesn’t make sen—hey, woah, don’t push me in!”

“I don’t get it,” the other Mikey pipes up. It’s so weird. Mikey remembers this exact conversation, and now he’s looking at it from the outside. The other Mikey looks up at Donnie and says, “How does time march on its stomach?”

“She meant ‘an army marches on its stomach’,” Donnie replies, tapping at his phone. “It’s an old proverb about the importance of being prepared.”

“How is that a proverb about that?” Other Mikey complains. “Smart people are just making this stuff up. Don’t even try to deny it Doctor Dee.”

Donnie laughs like it was surprised out of him. He glances away from his phone to tilt a crooked grin Other Mikey’s way. “If it’s a smart-people conspiracy, you must be in on it with me.”

They’re still ribbing each other as they follow their brothers through the magic window. They used to be best friends. It used to be so easy. Back then Mikey didn’t know to hang onto those little moments—he didn’t know they were something he could lose.

He stays where he is until the room is empty and the portal is closed. And then he lets out a big breath he didn’t realize he was holding, and throws both his hands in the air, and shouts, “YES!”

For the first time in weeks, he feels energized, like he grasped a livewire. Maybe there’s some electricity left in his veins after all. He looks down at the clock and feels good. Feels like he’s got a real shot at this.

The clock gives him its best impression of a smile. It seems to be asking Where to next?

Well, obviously, they’re going back to the worst night of Mikey’s entire life. Where else?

The worst night of Mikey’s entire life is one he can recall in perfect vivid detail, 4K resolution and surround sound, down to the tangy taste of metal in his mouth and the feeling of sweat and tacky blood cooling on his skin in the brisk night air.

He usually keeps that memory shut up in a box and shoved down in the back of his brain, because it’s safer than thinking about it constantly and hurting all the time, like his big brothers do.

The clock is hanging around his neck by its chain, so it doesn’t burn his hands, but his hands still get hot. He flaps them a bit, trying to cool them down, and that’s when he notices little streaks of gold that cut through the green skin on his palms and wrists.

Okay, well. That can’t be a good thing. He’ll circle back to it later.

Up ahead, he sees his dad. Mikey’s heart flies into his throat and stays there. It takes an impressive amount of self-control he didn’t even know he had not to immediately give himself away.

Splinter has discovered the two trails outside the Mutanimals’ place. They’re about to split up, and Leo doesn’t like it at all, but Splinter is adamant. The approaching sirens are swelling louder and louder and there isn’t time to argue.

Mikey watches from behind a crumbling wall of the destroyed hideout as the Other Mikey climbs into the Shellraiser with Donnie and Leatherhead, and then Leo reluctantly follows. The tail lights blaze through the dark and the tank roars away.

Mikey waits until Splinter’s group has gone about half a city block before he scrambles out of hiding and rushes after them. He only barely remembers to yank the clock from around his neck and cram it into his belt before his family—his past-family—is stopping in their tracks and staring at him.

“Michelangelo?” Splinter says. His voice is stern, but leaning towards surprise rather than anger. Mikey doesn’t want him to get angry, and he shuffles frantically through his brain for a good way to explain why he’s here instead of where he’s supposed to be. It takes an extra second, because now he’s full of a painful, complicated feeling that came from hearing his dad say his name.

“Um, uh, Renet showed up! Right there in my seat! You know how she portals in out of nowhere?” Mikey says quickly. Renet is always down for shenanigans, she’d back him up no questions asked if anyone tried to cross-check his story. Maybe less-so when she discovers that he stole from her, but frankly those are future problems for future Mikeys. “She said she wanted to help. And since she’s extra firepower, Leo sent me after you guys.”

He tries for a smile, but it feels tight and weird. He’s thrumming with nervous energy, but tonight of all nights, that isn’t so out of place. April’s fierce expression softens, and Raph and Casey both gravitate closer to him without seeming to realize they’ve done it.

Splinter pauses and studies Mikey for a moment that feels daring with all the flashing lights and police sirens approaching, probably only a few streets away by now. Then the old master sighs, and says, “Very well.” The steel in his brown eyes gentles. “Try not to run ahead, Michelangelo.”

“You betcha!” Mikey says, throwing in a salute for good measure. His family all huff out their own versions of tired amusement, and Splinter turns to lead the way forward.

Mikey is usually very proud of his ability to draw smiles out of dark and unhappy times, but he barely feels the warmth of the accomplishment now. His mind is racing.

When he lived this moment for real, he was on Coney Island with his twin and their big brother and his favorite alligator, dodging ballistic carousel missiles and doing his best not to get skewered by any of the grown-up mutants who hated his family so much they were willing to throw in with an actual comic book supervillain just to hurt them.

Mikey had been plenty occupied, and his worry for the rest of his clan was a quiet, simmering, back-of-the-mind thing. He was still stupid enough back then to believe that the good guys always win at the end of the story. Even when Bebop and Rocksteady took off, and April Facetimed Donnie with panic in her voice, and it was immediately clear their two groups had been split up on purpose—Mikey was worried, but he wasn’t afraid.

He should have been afraid.

To make up for it, he’s really scared now.

No one really talks about this night—not to Mikey, anyway. He overheard April telling Leo the details in a hoarse, grief-stricken voice, some early gray morning at the North Hampton farmhouse a few days after the funeral. That’s the only reason Mikey knows what to expect as they stop on top of a brownstone building, and Splinter points up at the roof of the Wolf Hotel, where he can sense the Shredder is lurking.

Okay, Mikey, he thinks, his heart in his throat. This is it. How are we feeling, clock?

The clock doesn’t answer, ticking quietly in the back of his mind. Mikey chooses to take that as a good sign.

As they’re racing up the stairs of the hotel, Mikey does a double-take around the seventh floor and clocks how April and Casey are both struggling to keep up. Well, of course they are. Mutagen aside, Mikey and his brothers have more than ten years of ninjutsu training under their belts. Their cardio is next-level.

It’s weird that no one else has offered to help his human siblings. Or—maybe someone did last time and Mikey’s presence here has messed things up. Okay! He’ll just fix it!

“Oh, whoops!” Mikey says, his voice bouncing around in the metal stairwell. He slides down the handrail back to the last landing and lands in a neat crouch. “Here, sis, hop on. Doesn’t make sense to start a boss battle with a status effect on one of our tanks!”

April blinks and then her face lights up with a smile. She accepts the offer of turtle-back ride cheerfully, winding her wiry-muscled arms around his shoulders without fuss. Casey says, “Um, what the hell? I call favoritism!”

“You didn’t already know April was my favorite?” Mikey asks judgmentally. April giggles beside his ear and Casey makes an offended squawking sound. Mikey can feel Splinter’s attention pointed towards him, so the second April is secure, he starts up the stairs again at full ninja-speed. He laps Raphael, who gives him a sidelong look that Mikey doesn’t have time to decipher.

Mikey catches up to Splinter and Slash by the next floor, and Splinter doesn’t scold him. He hears Raph say, “Here, idiot,” somewhere behind and below him, and presumably the angry-cat noise that follows is because Raph scooped Casey off his feet into a princess carry.

Good, Mikey thinks, optimism rising inside him like a little balloon. Now everyone will face the Shredder fighting-fit. By the time they spill out onto the rooftop, April is brimming with energy, and Casey and Raph are feeding off each other like a closed circuit of crazy, reckless, do-or-die team spirit, and Slash looks ready to kill for any single one of them.

When the Shredder arrives, twisted and ugly and barely even human anymore, Mikey hopes that he’s stacked the cards enough in their favor to make a difference.

Twenty minutes later, he watches the gauntlet punch through Splinter’s chest, and he realizes he didn’t make any difference at all.

It’s the worst night of his entire life, in 4k resolution and surround sound, and now he’ll get to relive it from this brand new angle, too.

Mikey fumbles for the clock. He tries to leave before Leo starts screaming, but he doesn’t quite make it.

The clock takes him back to the lair. It’s instantly familiar, instantly comforting, if not quite the same home Mikey left at the beginning of his trip. This lair looks the way it did before it was destroyed in the Kraang invasion, so he must have jumped even further into the past this time.

Mikey is pacing before he’s even aware he’s moving in the first place. His hands are still glowing and now they’re kind of sore, the kind of soreness that lingers like a footprint after muscle cramps. His whole body is trembling. On autopilot, he picks up a hoodie draped over the back of a chair and tugs it on with clumsy, mechanical yanks, but that doesn’t stop him from shaking.

His mind is busy and buzzing and he can’t think. He’s trying really really hard not to think, because if he does, he’ll think about—

“Michelangelo?”

Mikey’s head snaps up like a rubber band, so fast it hurts his neck. His father is standing in the doorway, whole and unharmed and strong. He tilts his head, taking in the probably dumb way Mikey is just standing there staring up at him.

He’s alive. In this moment, in this memory, he’s alive. But just a minute ago he was dying, he was choking on blood and then he was gone, and no matter how many times Mikey cried for him he didn’t come back.

Mikey’s chest feels like it’s closing around all his squishy insides like a fist. It’s really hard to breathe in a way that isn’t just desperate gulping gasps for air, so he holds his breath. It’s a good and useful thing that aquatic turtles can do it for a long time.

“I thought you and your brothers had left already,” the rat says mildly.

“We did? I mean, uh, yeah, we did,” Mikey says. He watches Splinter’s expression tighten in tiny inscrutable ways, and knows he didn’t do a very good job of sounding normal. So he clears his throat and finds a lopsided smile and tries again. “I just had to come back for something.”

“I see.”

Splinter regards him for a moment and then crosses that last handful of steps to meet him. Mikey plucks anxiously at the long sleeves of the oversized hoodie, double-checking that his glowing hands are covered.

If his father finds anything strange about it, he doesn’t say. He just reaches out and fixes the hood where it’s bunched up behind Mikey’s head, lightly tugs at the lines of the sweater so that they lay straight, then lets his hands rest there on Mikey’s shoulders.

It’s enough on its own to make Mikey’s eyes all wet.

“Were you cold, my son? The weather is changing. Perhaps you and your brothers shouldn’t leave without an extra layer until winter is past. You know how I worry.”

It’s such a dad thing to worry about. Leo makes sure they wake up and do chores and come home when they’re supposed to, and Raph guards against bad dreams and real dangers, and Donnie plays doctor and mediator and everything in between, and Mikey can’t do much so he can at least cover all the meals, but…

But no one worries about the weather when they go outside. No one worries about whether or not they get cold.

Without thinking, Mikey lunges forward and crashes into his father’s chest, using every ounce of his ninja strength in a desperate bid to hold onto him. Splinter doesn’t even stagger and his surprise only lasts a second or two. His hands land gently on Mikey’s carapace and the back of his head and he lets Mikey cling to him like they have all the time in the world.

But they don’t. It’s not fair.

If Mikey was better—if he was faster or stronger or braver or smarter—if he’d given Leo the clock instead, if he’d asked Donnie for help—

“I’m sorry,” he chokes out. “I’m sorry, papa.”

Splinter goes absolutely still. Then he firmly disentangles himself from Mikey’s octopus arms and kneels down in front of him so they’re almost eye-to-eye.

“You never need to apologize to me, Michelangelo,” he says with a seriousness that feels out-of-place in the moment. “Not ever. It is my pride and my privilege to be your father. All the sleepless nights and frustrations that come with raising four teenage boys, well—I would not trade a moment of it. Not for all the riches in the world.”

Mikey doesn’t know how that could be true. He doesn’t know how to have this conversation. He presses in until he can hide his face against the furred ruff of sensei’s neck and sensei lets him hide there.

It’s the safest Mikey’s felt in a million years and he doesn’t ever want to go anywhere else ever again.

“Besides,” Splinter says, his voice warm and rumbling beneath Mikey’s ear, “the good so far outweighs the bad that it really isn’t even worth talking about.”

The clock is getting hot against Mikey’s plastron, where it’s hidden beneath the hoodie. He leans away from sensei before he can feel the glow of it. He knows it’s time to leave now.

It’s just. He isn’t ready. He doesn’t know what to do. He needs help—he needs Donnie’s big brain and Raph’s bold, unflinching faith and Leo’s steady certainty—he needs Splinter to guide him, to tell him what to do.

He wants to warn him. He wants to tell sensei everything, he wants to say that one night they’ll be on the roof of a hotel downtown and they’ll think it’s all over, but it won’t be. The Shredder will attack Splinter from behind like a coward and Splinter will die and nothing will ever be the same again.

Mikey wants to say all of that. But the clock’s presence in his mind leans against that thought heavily, like a warning. Mikey knows, without knowing how he knows, that it’s a bad idea.

Splinter stands, folding his hands in his sleeves and regarding Mikey fondly. “Now,” he says, “go after your brothers. They’d be lost without you.”

His eyes crinkle with silent laughter. Mikey thinks that if he had any idea how completely wrong he was, that joke would be even funnier.

Still, Mikey smiles up at him, and forces his fingers to let go of his dad’s favorite maroon robe. He takes a few backwards steps and waves once. Splinter has a wrinkle on his forehead that looks like concern, and he lifts a hand—maybe to return the wave, maybe to call him back—

Mikey spins on his heel and runs out of the station as fast as he can.

He isn’t going after his brothers, not yet. He’ll catch up to them eventually—he always does. For now, the clock ticks patiently in his head, waiting for him to pick a door.

Mikey tries everything. He starts from a dozen different places, a dozen different ways, and he never manages to change the ending. Splinter dies, right in front of him, again and again and again and again.

Sometimes it happens from far away. Mikey gets cut down and kicked off the roof, and the only thing that saves his life is April’s telepathy, or Slash’s quick grab, or the chain of Mikey’s own kusarigama wrapped around the railing of the fire escape, and as he’s trying to pull himself back up his father’s body falls past him.

Sometimes it happens when Mikey is rushing in to help. He can’t watch Raphael get hurt without it stirring his heart into a frenzy, so when Raph piles in to hold the Shredder back, Mikey is always right beside him. And then he’s close enough that when Splinter is killed, the blood sprays onto Mikey's skin, warm and sticky and horrible.

He remembers a conversation he had with Renet once, when she told him, in an uncharacteristically grave tone, that ‘time protects itself.’

“It’s the whole paradox thing,” she’d told him earnestly. “Say you’re going to try to change the past. Whatever you’re going to do—whatever changes you try to make—according to the linear passage of time, you’d have done it already. So that future-you wouldn’t have any reason to time-travel in the first place. It’s pretty tricky like that.”

“So you’d have to change things in a way that doesn’t actually change things?” Mikey had asked her, uncomprehending. “That doesn’t make sense. Your job is way too hard. You should quit and come be a ninja with me.”

Renet laughed, all sweet and fizzy like a shaken-up can of soda, and changed the subject. Mikey only remembers that conversation because he remembers everything.

Now he wishes his past-self had asked her about two-hundred more questions. He wants more than anything to find Renet and beg for her help, but he doesn’t think the clock can take him into Null Time.

Time protects itself. It’s pulling them inexorably toward that fated outcome, and all of Mikey’s bouncing around and making a mess and watching his father die on some demented looped reel isn’t going to derail this steady onward march of things.

Still, he tries. He tries and tries and tries.

The last attempt is the most desperate. He lures his younger self away and knocks him out and takes his place outside the hideout. It’s not even that difficult to do in all the chaos of the fire and the building coming down. When Leo argues against Splinter sending him away, Mikey is right there with him, arguing the same thing.

“Please, sensei,” Mikey says plaintively, and it comes out of his mouth as this awful, wretched thing, and all his siblings react to it the same way. Their heads all turn in his direction like sniffer dogs trying to scent out what the hell could have made him sound like that.

He doesn’t look at any of them. He looks up at his dad and says, “I have a bad feeling, sensei. Please take Leo.”

Splinter tends to trust in Mikey’s intuition. He always talks about it like it’s more than just good luck and quick reflexes. Or maybe he’s just unwilling to argue with him when he looks ready to start bawling at any second. He nods Leo back toward the hotel group, and Casey parts from it to join the Coney Island party instead, and Mikey’s stomach does something dizzy and acrobatic beneath his shell.

Leo will be able to do this, Mikey thinks, lightheaded with relief as he stumbles into the Shellraiser, avoiding the pointed stare Donnie’s grilling into the side of his head. Leo can do anything.

Leo dies instead.

His body falls in place of Splinter’s, hitting the ground with a wet, meaty thud. Mikey can’t breathe even though he’s gasping and gasping in air, and his heart is beating hard enough that he can feel it in his eyes, a weird, off-kilter rhythm, and he’s shaking so bad that time shakes apart around him.

The clock takes him to a beautiful green field.

There’s a chuckling river, and a far-away rice paddy, and a very particular kind of early-morning sunshine you only find in the springtime. Everything is fresh and crisp and on just the right side of chilly. The air smells like smoke and fresh steamed rice and greenery.

He knows this place. This is where he and his brothers first met Miss Shen, what feels like a lifetime ago. Rural Japan, somewhere in the countryside, where the Hamato estate sprawls comfortably at the foot of the hills.

Mikey thinks he could sink into the rich earth like a plant. He could put roots down right in this exact spot and be happy forever. If he were a little plant, his arms wouldn’t hurt so much. He could just drink rain and sun and not worry about anything ever again.

“Oh, my,” someone says behind him. They approached without a sound, even though the wet grass should have given them away. “A visitor from the river.”

Mikey’s heart knows who it is before his brain catches up. He whirls around, almost stumbling, and finds himself looking up into the face that he’s seen in the photo on the shrine back home almost every day.

His father, tall and broad-shouldered and unburdened because he hasn’t lived through any of his horrors yet. Baffled by the strange creature he just encountered on his property, but not at all suspicious of it. Mikey goes through a weird internal struggle, because half of his entire body and soul wants to be soothed by his sensei’s presence. The other half isn’t quite sure that this is his sensei—not quite.

“Well, this isn’t the strangest dream I’ve ever had, to be honest,” the man says. His voice is instantly disarming. He’s smiling, as if talking turtles aren’t anything to write home about. “Are you a mountain spirit, little one?”

“Uh—um, yes,” Mikey says. He folds his hands, the way he’s seen Splinter do a thousand times, when he was explaining something tricky about morning training, or listening to his kids bicker at the breakfast table with limitless patience in his eyes. “I’m a, um, kappa spirit. I have a message for you. Listen up!”

Splinter—Hamato Yoshi, actually—a person who doesn’t know Mikey, who certainly doesn’t love him, who has no reason to hear him out—surprises him by kneeling properly and inclining his head. His human face isn’t familiar to Mikey at all, so maybe it always looks soft and fond like that.

“Please lend me your wisdom,” he says solemnly. There’s a pleasant lilt to his tone that might be playful.

“Right,” Mikey replies. “Sure.”

He fidgets for a second, probably ruining whatever credibility he had as a wise spirit of anything. There’s a sickly feeling in his stomach, like it’s flipping around in there. He’s a little dizzy. His hands hurt. He doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know why he ended up here. He went way too far.

He wants his dad. He wants his dad to be alive. But looking at the man in front of him now, he thinks he wants his dad to be happy. Even if that means he never loses Miss Shen and Miwa and he never leaves Japan. He’d be better off that way, wouldn’t he? Who would choose a half-life hidden underground over this beautiful rolling countryside? Who would choose an unwanted mutation and unasked for children over sunshine and freedom and everything that comes with being human and belonging somewhere?

Mikey’s hands shake. The clock’s presence in his mind tries to comfort in its simple, animal way, but it isn’t enough.

He never really thought about it before—that sensei might actually choose something else over his sons. Maybe Mikey and his siblings were always Splinter’s first priority just because his other first priorities were already gone. Maybe Splinter would be way better off if he never ever had a chance to be Splinter in the first place.

But. He has to go to New York. He has to go into that pet store. He has to bump into the ooze. He has to. Mikey can’t imagine a world where his brothers don’t exist. His mind stutters at the very threshold of that idea. It can’t go a step farther than that initial, frightening what if— before it recoils instantly.

Maybe Mikey is actually very selfish. Maybe his first priority is screwed up, too.

He thinks it might have been really stupid of him to try to fix anything after all.

“Spirit?” Yoshi asks politely. His brow has a wrinkle in the middle that Mikey would call worry, if this human had any reason to worry about him.

“Actually, I don’t have any wisdom,” Mikey says. “I’m the wrong turtle for that.” His eyes prickle. He refuses to cry.

“Okay,” Yoshi says carefully. “Your message, then?”

It sounds like they’re in the dojo, and he’s trying to coax stubborn Raphael into stumbling upon the answer to his own question. Guiding patiently, a hand outstretched, as steady as a stone. The foundation of Mikey’s whole world. It all shook apart without him.

At least Yoshi thinks this is a dream. Let him think that. He’ll forget all about it by tomorrow, so Mikey can tell him what he’s been aching to tell him ever since that very first second after he died.

“Um—I just wanted to—to say,” Mikey chokes out, hands curled into tight fists despite the gnawing pain. “That I’m sorry. For, um—for being noisy. For always interrupting you during lessons and goofing off and—and for all the times I didn’t listen. I should’ve been good. I’m really sorry.”

Yoshi half-rises, alarm pinching the corners of his mouth. His hands lift from his knees as though he’d catch this whole mess and hold it for Mikey if he knew how. He’s such a kind person, even for a complete stranger’s sake.

The clock starts to burn hot. Those golden cracks creep a little higher up Mikey’s arms. He knows he’s about to leave. He just doesn’t know where he’s going to wind up next, if he’ll get another chance after this. It’s getting harder to navigate.

“Spirit?” Yoshi is fully on his feet now. He seems to be holding himself back. Mikey can’t quite make him out through the haze of pain and magic. That doesn’t seem fair. “Are you—what is happening? Can I help you, little one?”

Mikey grins, even though it hurts, even though everything is heat and light and grief. Hamato Yoshi doesn’t know him, but Mikey still got to see his dad one more time. That’s worth smiling about.

“Nope,” he says, borrowing a brightness he doesn’t really feel. Speaking is a struggle, but these words are so monumentally important that Mikey fights for each one. “I made the mess so I’ll clean it up. Thanks, though. Thank you. For—all of it. For raising us and teaching us and—and caring about us every s-single day, even—even when we didn’t make it easy. Thank you, papa. Love you.”

Yoshi lurches forward just as the clock sweeps Mikey away.

He lands someplace dark. He lets out a strangled sound, the impossible white-hot pain in his arms punching the breath out of him.

A light comes on. It blinds him. A frantic voice spills out beside him, shouting his name, calling for help. Mikey knows the voice but he can’t place it. There’s a flash of blue somewhere above him that tugs at recognition but his brain is too full of fire to decipher pesky things like that. He can’t think. Everything hurts, everything burns.

Are we staying here? the clock seems to ask him, mildly interested in a polite way.

Do we have to? Mikey wonders drunkenly.

Of course not. We can go anywhere. Forward or back?

Mikey thinks the choice should maybe be a little bit harder than it actually is. He thinks, really, it comes down to a simple question—who do his brothers need more? Who can they really, really not live without?

So it’s actually pretty easy to decide.

This time, he lands on the roof of the hotel again, and his limbs all collapse underneath him instantly, folding like rice paper. It’s as good a spot as any—tucked away behind the wall of the rooftop exit door, out of sight.

Splinter is the only one who hears his clumsy arrival, head swiveling in his direction immediately, ears upright.

The rat glances toward Raph and April, clocking where they stand safely on the other side of the roof, before he approaches Mikey’s hiding place swiftly. He must think it’s a trap—a Foot soldier, or another one of Shredder’s mutant goons—and he isn’t going to let his guard down so easily, not with two of his children behind him.

But all of that super cool ninja master attitude flies out sensei’s expression the second he rounds the corner and lays eyes on Mikey’s sorry-looking self.

“What?” he says faintly, sounding like the breath was punched out of him. Then, “Michelangelo?”

“Hi, sensei,” Mikey manages. It’s only partly a wheeze.

He thinks he would really really love a hug right about now. But his hands hang limp at his sides. Every twitch of his fingers causes a fresh bolt of agony to sprint up his arms. He doesn’t know if he has the strength to move just yet. He doesn’t know if he wants to test it.

The clock is silent where it hangs against his plastron. Its tiny ticking-voice isn’t talking anymore. The seconds crawl, one after another, much slower than makes sense. Time is on his side, but he doesn’t have much of it.

Splinter is staring at him with an expression Mikey has never seen on him before. He looks horrified, fur bristling and whiskers slicked back, hands half-raised in an aborted reach. He’s frozen in place, as if he was carved from stone during an awful nightmare.

“What have you done?” Splinter whispers, a well of anguish in his voice. His eyes track the golden cracks in Mikey’s arms like they’re causing him physical pain. “What is this?”

“Fixing it,” Mikey asserts. He hopes he sounds strong and certain. He thinks maybe it came out all slurred and stupid actually.

He wobbles for a millisecond and that’s all it takes for Splinter to dive across the distance between them, wrapping his arms carefully around Mikey’s body.

Oh. Hug. Finally. Mikey sinks into it.

“Don’t be afraid, my son.” Splinter is the one who sounds afraid, and he also sounds like he’s doing his best not to sound afraid. He’s holding Mikey like he used to when Mikey was really small and easier to hold. “I will use the healing hands. You will be just fine. Stay here with me.”

“Mmhm,” Mikey says, forcing his eyes to stay open, staring hard at the rooftop parapet from over his father’s shoulder.

This is the only chance Mikey has. This brief window when all eyes have turned away. His family thinks they’ve won. The Shellraiser is approaching with a roar down at street level. Somewhere behind them, out of sight, April and Raphael are talking in hoarse, exhausted, tentatively relieved voices.

He knows that this is the moment everything goes wrong. In a handful of seconds, the Shredder is going to appear again, over the side of that parapet, and he’s going to tear a hole in Mikey’s family. He’s a monster made of hatred and cruelty and he doesn’t care that Splinter’s children still need him.

Mikey can’t understand it—that festering, resentful, black hole kind of a life. He can’t imagine not caring. Mikey cares so much that sometimes he feels like he’s going to break under the weight of it all. Sometimes he doesn’t know where the caring ends and the rest of himself begins. Even when it would be a whole lot easier not to. Even when it hurts. He just can’t help it.

He digs his ruined hands into Splinter’s robes, clutching tight. It hurts so much it almost doesn’t hurt at all, like his body isn’t able to keep processing the constant input and just gives up on the whole idea.

Any moment now. Any moment now.

April says, “Wait where is—”

And Raph calls out a frightened, “Dad?”

And Leo shouts from down on the street, because Leo is the one catches things right before they happen, before anyone else does, and that’s when the Shredder hauls his bulk back up onto the roof. That’s when he lifts his spiked gauntlet, arm drawn all the way back to deliver the killing blow.

That’s when Mikey moves.

He’s always been the fastest of the four. He always springs into motion before his brain has finished putting the whole picture together, because his sixth sense is a lot louder than logic, so he listens to it first.

And now he flings absolutely everything he has in his belt, every smoke bomb and flash grenade and firecracker and mean-spirited little toy Donnie helped him dream up in the lab, back when they still spent time together, and it creates a field of absolute chaos and zero visibility.

It gives him a chance to throw his body to the side, dragging his father with him. The Shredder still takes his shot, blindly. One of the claws of his gauntlet tears through Splinter’s sleeve and cuts into the meat of Mikey’s shoulder, but no one dies.

There’s blood and a torn sleeve left behind. Mikey’s siblings let out wounded cries. They must think that Mikey’s explosion was part of the Shredder’s attack. The sound draws even more tension into Splinter’s body, torn now between the danger Mikey is in and the danger everyone else is in, caught between his children.

He can’t go. He can’t go. This will only work if he stays. Mikey doesn’t think he’ll get another try.

April knocks the Shredder off the roof for a final time, and Casey is probably waiting on the street to crush his body in the garbage truck, and everything else is going to play out exactly the way it did before. Hopefully. Mikey doesn’t know. He’s not going to stick around to find out.

One more trip, he tells the clock. He’s delirious, maybe. He feels removed from his body, like everything going on with it is happening to someone else entirely. All that matters is his father, breathing, and Mikey’s grip on his robes, and their ticket home. I’m bringing a plus-one. Sorry we didn’t RSVP.

The clock laughs brightly. Mikey’s glad it has a sense of humor or this whole trip would have been a nightmare.

He wakes up somewhere else. Someone is screaming. Oh, wait, that’s him.

There are hands on him, trying to coax him from the tight ball he’s curled into.

People are talking all around him, a cacophony of voices, all of them precious and familiar. One stands out above the rest.

“Mikey—Mikey, hey, hey, it’s okay, you’re—you’re okay, you’re gonna be just fine.”

That’s Leo. Hot tears leak from the corners of Mikey’s eyes. Someone wipes them away before they get very far. Leo’s alive.

Leo’s voice is trembling, but he talks to Mikey anyway. He must be so confused but he’s following Splinter’s firm directions without hesitation, and soon their combined qi is rushing through Mikey’s meridians, flooding his lower dantian, healing and healing and healing him. It feels like his body is full of light and air and nothing hurts.

He almost doesn’t remember how it feels not to hurt.

Hands beneath his shoulders and knees lift him up, and he’s held against a warm, solid chest, and then placed down someplace soft. A bed, he thinks, and a moment later a blanket is drawn up over him as if to prove him right.

Mikey’s head flops to the side, hooded eyes struggling to track the movement.

Careful fingers touch his face, turning it back onto the pillow properly, and Donnie’s voice says, “No, don’t. Don’t move around, Angie. All you need to do right now is rest.”

Mikey wants to believe him, but his twin sounds frightened and choked up, and it makes Mikey feel restless in turn. His whole body feels like one big overcooked noodle, but if Tello needs him, he will definitely figure out how to noodle his way up to help.

“Nuh-uh, none of that,” Raph interjects sharply. The mattress dips a little bit as he sits on the edge of it. “You even think about moving an inch and I’m breaking both your legs.” But he’s holding one of Mikey’s hands with both of his own, so he probably doesn’t mean it. His words come tripping out of his mouth in a nervous, fast-paced way that’s unlike himself, like he’s desperate to fill up the silence where Mikey’s chatter should be. “You have so much explaining to do, kid. Like—where’d you find this hoodie, anyway? I lost it years ago.”

“Jesus, Raph,” Leo says without heat. He leans in and presses his forehead against Mikey’s, the rarest of gestures. All of the fight goes out of Mikey like water down a drain. All his brothers are here and even if Mikey didn’t accomplish anything else, at least he didn’t lose them. Leo tells him, “Donnie’s right, Mikey. Just rest. There’s nothing to worry about. We’re all okay and we all love you so much.”

Then Splinter’s voice tells him, “Sleep, little one. All is well. I am here.”

Oh, then it must be true, Mikey thinks, and falls through velvet waves of darkness into deep, dreamless sleep.

Grounded doesn’t even begin to cover what Mikey is. It’ll be a cold day in hell before he’s allowed to leave the lair by himself ever again, but he still gets visitors.

“Aha!” Renet says brightly, scooping the clock off the nightstand. “Pesky little thing. Ooh, this one’s going to be nothing but trouble now.” She gives it a little warning shake. It sits quietly in her hand, ticking innocently away like there’s nothing special about it, thank you very much. “I think you might be a bad influence, Mike.”

Mikey fidgets, plucking at the bandages on his fingers restlessly. He’s given and received a lot of apologies in the last couple of days, but this is the one he’s been dreading the most.

“I’m really, really sorry, Nettie,” he tells her, staring at his blanket-covered knees. “I shouldn’t have taken it from you. I took advantage of you and—all you ever do is help us out, and I totally betrayed your trust, and—you’re my friend, but I still—”

“Mike,” she cuts him off, soft and oddly gentle. She puts her human hand over his three-fingered one and squeezes warmly. “I left it behind on purpose.”

He whips his head up to stare at her. She smiles back, her brown eyes all wet.

“I’m not allowed to tamper with the timeline,” she explains. “It’s dangerous even for a master Timester, and—well, you’ve seen how I tend to mess things up. It couldn’t be me. But I thought you might be able to figure something out.”

“I mess everything up, too,” Mikey says plainly. Unlike his calm, composed friend, he’s crying in earnest, and he can’t even lift his hands to wipe his face. He doesn’t understand this conversation. He was expecting her to yell at him. The absence of her well-deserved anger has him reeling. “I mean—out of all of my siblings—I’m the last one you should have trusted.”

“What are you talking about?” Renet laughs. “It had to be you. You were the one who took the chance. You were the one who tried.” She lets go of his hand but only so she can lean in and wrap her arms around him. He leans against her, buries his face in her shoulder, and she holds him while he shakes with sobs. “It was scary. It hurt. But you did it anyway. You were amazing.”

A quiet sound in the doorway has Mikey lifting his eyes, peeking past Renet’s curtain of hair. Splinter is standing there, a whole entire miracle in his second-favorite robe.

“Oops! Lecture time,” Renet says, peeling away from Mikey and abandoning him to his fate. “I’ll come by later, okay? It’s been real, baby seal!” She gives him the hang-loose gesture and bows sweetly to Splinter and then disappears in a neat little twirl of white and gold light, proving that she’s literally the coolest person Mikey knows.

“She’s a good friend to you,” Splinter says as he steps inside the lab. “She really believes in you.”

“Probably more than she should,” Mikey agrees, wiping his eyes.

“As much as you deserve,” his father counters neatly, settling in the chair beside the bed. “I’m glad to have you to myself for a moment. Your brothers have finally worried themselves to sleep.” He puts his hand in Mikey’s, because he’s not stupid, and he’s cottoned on to how desperate his children are for proof that he’s living and breathing. He’s much freer with his hugs than he used to be. “I am in a fair amount of trouble,” he admits after a minute.

“Huh?”

“Leo scolded me quite a bit,” Splinter says mildly. “It was rather vicious. He had a lot to say.”

“No he didn’t,” Mikey blurts, wide-eyed. “Leo?”

“He was right to. I put too much on his shoulders. I forget, sometimes, that he’s still a child.” Splinter looks very old all of a sudden, weary and worn out. But his eyes are the same warm brown they’ve always been, and after a moment he smiles. “I will endeavor to remember it from now on. Even if it means embarrassing him in front of his friends.”

Secretly, Mikey thinks Leo embarrasses himself enough as it is, but he keeps that to himself.

Splinter’s eyes fall on Mikey’s bandaged arms. His mouth thins into a severe line.

“We will need to discuss these choices you made. Risking yourself like you did, nearly breaking your brothers’ hearts, dabbling in dangerous mystic arts you don’t fully understand, all to bring a foolish old man back from the dead.” Mikey’s head sinks lower with each word, until he’s nearly tucked it all the way inside his shell. Splinter pauses, then adds, “You said some things in your sleep that concern me. We will address them as a family, when you’re well.”

Oh that’s just instant relief. Future problems for future Mikeys. In that case he hopes his arms take ages to heal. He doesn’t need hands to out-ninja his brothers any day.

He offers Splinter a bright smile, his usual get-out-of-jail-free card. The serious expression on Splinter’s face relents. He shifts in the chair so that it’s easier to bring his other arm up over Mikey’s pillow, stroking the dome of his head with the pad of his thumb, the way he did when all the turtles were very little and had trouble falling asleep.

“You know, I had a dream once, when I was a young man,” he says in a quiet, storyteller tone. “In the meadow behind my family’s estate, I met a river spirit. It was young and seemed to be in pain, but it smiled at me with such warmth, and thanked me for things I hadn’t done. I didn’t know what to make of it at the time, but I never forgot it.”

Mikey hums. Something about that dream feels familiar. Maybe he had one like it before.

His father’s hand on his forehead is a warm weight, infinitely soothing. Mikey’s eyelids are getting too heavy to keep open.

“I never forgot you,” Splinter says. “And I love you, too, Michelangelo.”

#tmnt 2012 #tmnt 2k12 #teenage mutant ninja turtles #hamato michelangelo #hamato yoshi #ratdad #party dude #my writing #tmnt fic #here it is. as promised. BETTER LATE THAN NEVER #walk with open hands

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