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taizi · 1 year

Note

If you’re still taking prompts… disaster twins being disasters?

Casey can remember being this excited maybe once or twice before in his entire life, but that’s it. He doesn’t realize he’s bouncing in his seat until Michelangelo flops over him, arms folded around Casey’s shoulders and chin propped up on top of his head, grin present in the bright tone of his voice.

“We might be hyping this up too much,” the youngest Hamato—second-youngest, now, Casey reminds himself somewhat shyly—says good-naturedly. “It’s just a spar, CJ.”

“I know,” Casey says quickly, clamping his hands on his knees. He feels like a little kid again, being warned that if he can’t sit still he can’t stay in the dojo to watch training. That’s not anywhere near what Mikey said, but he’s not risking it! He refuses to miss this! “But it’s just—I haven’t seen sensei spar with anyone but Commander O’Neil in ages.”

He doesn’t say that Uncle Raph was killed when Casey was so young that he barely got to keep any memories of him. He definitely doesn’t say that when Uncle Tello died, sensei destroyed a string of Krang corps single-handedly, stumbled home half-dead, and then didn’t come out of the silent lab for three days. When he did finally emerge, some intrinsic, important part of him was gone for good.

By then, Master Michelangelo was too brittle for physical combat, pouring all of himself into the mystic arts instead. April was the only one left who was unafraid to drag Master Leonardo onto the mats, to bring some life back into him. And it was fun to watch, but it wasn’t those high-energy spars he could remember being awed by when he was a child, when all four of the turtles were together and the apocalypse seemed like something they might survive after all.

“I bet I whooped his butt, too,” April interjects loudly from the cozy-looking beanbag chair she dragged into the dojo. Leo shoots her a mock-offended look, hand over his heart, the whole nine yards.

He’s wearing a pair of bright pink cordless headphones, and his warm-up stretches have a lot more energetic bopping around than perhaps strictly necessary. Raph is smiling crookedly as he guides Leo through the forms, watching carefully for any sign of lingering tenderness or soreness and finding none. He’s probably as relieved as all the rest of their mismatched little clan that Leo has healed to this point—casts and leg brace finally discarded, energy ratcheted up to eleven.

Across the mat, Donnie is pretending to be buried in his phone, but he’s watching Leo as raptly as Raphael. If he thought for a second that Leo was nursing some hidden-away hurt, he would find a way to divert the match without anyone the wiser. And it would be something needlessly showy and stupid, too—Casey has the sudden vision of a lair-wide blackout. He pats the penlight clipped to his belt to make sure it’s there, just in case.

But Leo is in fine form, and Splinter steps onto the middle of the mat with a judicious air.

“Now I want a clean match, boys,” he orders, arms folded. “No shenanigans!”

“Aw, not even one?” Mikey pipes up.

The Hamato patriarch considers this carefully, then says, “I will allow ONE shenanigan!”

“Alright Michael!” Leo cheers. “Use those favorite son privileges for good!” He barely dodges the half-hearted strike from Splinter’s tail.

Then Raphael is placing his hands on Leo’s shoulders and giving him a friendly jostle, in the manner of ruffling a puppy’s ears to get it all riled up (a life-affirming maneuver that Casey only recently discovered for himself one early morning coffee run with Cass when they crossed paths with a nice lady and her wriggly baby pit bull) and Splinter is stepping back off the mat and Donnie is sliding his phone away.

“Let me know if you need me to go easy on you, little brother,” Donnie says magnanimously.

“You hatched four minutes before me,” Leo replies. His tone suggests this is an argument they’ve had at least one billion times.

“No one likes a sore loser, Nardo.”

April makes a coughing, cackling sound, and then shouts, “Someone get ready to do the heimlich! My man’s gonna choke on that hypocrisy!”

“APRIL, you were adopted and you can be replaced!” Donnie shouts back over everyone’s laughter. Casey feels like he’s sitting in the sun, surrounded on all sides by warmth and light. He was raised on the scraps of a ruined world, the scraps of love and joy that his family had left to offer him. They gave him everything they could, but he knew they were digging into the bottom of the well. Here, those things are a renewable resource. All the good just stretches and stretches and stretches forever.

Master Leonardo was not a bitter person. But he was very rarely a happy one. Uncle Tello and Rapha were gone and Master Michelangelo was aging rapidly before his eyes, three times as quickly as he should have. April and mom and all the faces that Casey saw everyday were weary and worn thin, constantly braced for the next horrible thing to come.

It heals something in Casey’s chest that he didn’t know was hurting to see them like this instead. A festering, years-old wound finally draining, finally given clean air and room to heal. April’s still heckling and Mikey is still draped over Casey, sturdy and boyish and the brightest thing for miles. Raphael is leaning against the wall, grinning, as eager to watch the show as everyone else. Splinter looks unrelentingly fond and also like he’s expecting this to be a trainwreck.

In the second before Splinter calls the beginning of the match, Donnie’s eyes narrow suspiciously and he says, “Wait, what are you listening to?”

A shit-eating grin stretches across Leo’s face, and in lieu of answering out loud, he lifts a hand and dramatically finger-spells K-A-R-M-A.

“Oooooooh,” Mikey and Raph and April all chorus delightedly.

“Oh, goddammit,” Donnie bites out, visibly preparing to fight for his life.

Then Splinter’s hands come down and the twins burst into movement. There are no weapons in their hands, it’s nowhere near as showy as their fight with the Krang had been, but it’s amazing in its own way.

They’re fast, much faster than the masters of Casey’s timeline because they’re so little in comparison, lean and lithe and all gremlin energy. The two of them move like they know each other as well as their own selves, the blocks and blows meeting as if they were choreographed well in advance, and every step is so quick and so clean that Casey can barely follow it. Five minutes in, Leo’s eyes glow white and then Donnie’s do, and Donnie barks out a surprised laugh.

Mikey yells, “No inside jokes that’s not fair!”

“It’s a nice break from that song. I've heard him humming it in the back of my brain all day,” Raph says ruefully, then quickly holds his hands up when Leo’s head whips around in his direction. “No offense! I like it! Just not—not 16 times in a row, big guy.”

Splinter steps in the instant Leo winces, having landed too heavily on his bad leg after a showy flip.

“Alright, silly melons, that’s enough. Match goes to neither of you because you play too much.”

Whatever complaint the twins might have made is entirely forgotten as they turn to face their dad blankly. Donnie says, “I’m sorry, did you just call us silly melons?”

“Melons are green, yes? And stupidly expensive at all times for no reason.” He pulls a paperback book out of the inner fold of his robe and thumbs through it. “Children like nicknames. The experts have said so.”

Looking torn between helpless confusion and hysterical laughter, Raph says, “What are you reading, pops?”

“Melons cost like $8 in Chinatown when they're in season, where the heck have you been shopping?” Mikey interjects loudly, shooting over the back of the couch like spending too much of the grocery fund on overpriced produce is the first and final straw.

“Seriously, Splints, what are you reading?” April asks, trying to get the book from him.

“Silly melons??” Donnie and Leo demand again. Training for the day is entirely derailed, though that might have been Splinter’s ploy in the first place.

Master Leonardo wasn’t a bitter person. Despite the weight of the world on his shoulders and all the losses he carried around in his heart, Casey’s memories of him are good and warm and only bittersweet because of those final moments, and because of how much Casey misses him every day. Still—even if he was careful not to let it show—Casey knows that Master Leonardo didn’t have a lot of opportunities for joy.

That’s the thing that’s taken the most getting used to here, Casey thinks, watching everyone. That’s the difference his family makes. This Leo doesn’t have to reach very far for a reason to smile.

He glances over his shoulder and his smile widens to include Casey, and Casey hurries off the sidelines to join the rest of them.

#rottmnt #rise of the teenage mutant ninja turtles #disaster twins #rise leo #casey jr #hamato leonardo #hamato donatello #ratdad #my writing #prompt #anonymous #tmnt fic #swiftie leon agenda continues #working title for this is 'flexing like a goddamn acrobat'#idk whats up with tmnt fics being the vehicle for me forcing my music tastes on my readers lately but it is what it is #this is so silly but i had fun writing it

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taizi · 10 months

Text

a minute from home

tmnt 2k12 pairing: don & mikey word count: 7k title borrowed from the view between villages by noah kahan

read on ao3

Once, when Donnie and Mikey were very very small, they went the wrong way.

The tunnel they lived in at the time was safe and clean, and conveniently located near thrift stores and food banks, but during heavy rains it tended to flood.

So Splinter would pack the few precious items he could not stand to lose into a rucksack and then bundle up his turtles and lead them away to a safer place to wait out the storm. They had a lot of little halfway homes like that before they finally settled in the abandoned subway station that would become their forever home.

At barely three years old, Michelangelo was very farsighted. The condition of his eyes made things right in front of him look blurry. Figuring out that it was actually a condition and not silly Angie being his silly self took a lot of trial and error on their poor father’s part. There was no conceivable way for Splinter to provide him with prescription lenses, but the frames that he stole from a corner store seemed to do the trick. Mikey would probably grow out of the condition eventually but when he was little he depended on his glasses.

And Donnie was supposed to be holding his hand.

Donnie only had one younger brother to look after—he couldn’t imagine being Leo and being responsible for three—but even just one was hard sometimes. Donnie’s brain liked to outrun him, darting away after a hundred things all at once, and sometimes he forgot what he was supposed to be doing.

So Mikey didn’t have anyone holding his hand, and he tripped over the uneven tunnel floor and fell right on his face, and his glasses broke with a crunch.

The tunnel was so noisy, rain thundering against the street above them, drainage tumbling through the grates and pipes, that Donnie was the only one close enough to hear the crunch. To him, it was the loudest thing in the whole world.

His little heart flew up into his throat and he let go of Splinter’s robe to run back to his baby brother. Mikey looked up at him, and his beak was all scraped and sure to bruise, and there was a tiny smear of blood on his lip—but after a dizzy second to sort himself out, he gave Donnie a big smile. He was always totally unruffled by things. Even now, Donnie was closer to crying than Mikey was.

“Up, Angie,” he said frantically, tugging on him. “You okay?”

“Up up,” Mikey parroted, the way he had a habit of doing. He let himself be bullied to his feet, tottering unsteadily for a moment until he could latch onto Donnie’s sweater. “Angie’s okay!”

Letting out all his breath in a relieved sigh, Donnie patted Mikey’s head the way Leo always did, and then looked for his glasses. When he found them, he tried not to let his face crumple the way it felt like his tummy was. The lenses were cracked and the pink plastic frame was in pieces.

Mikey’s glasses were important and off-limits when he and his brothers were playing or roughhousing or being mean and teasing each other. Now they were broken.

“I’m okay, Dee,” Mikey insisted, pulling on his sleeve. He repeated himself in simple Japanese, and then added, “Prommy.”

Naturally, the four turtle siblings, all of them toddlers between the ages of three and six, considered a promise to be every bit as serious and blinding as a blood oath. When Mikey said it, Donnie knew that Mikey was really actually okay, and his heart stopped thumping behind his shell so hard.

“Prom-ise,” Donnie corrected automatically. He put the pieces of the broken glasses in his pocket and detached Mikey’s fingers from his sweater so he could hold them instead. “Let’s go back to papa.”

Only it wasn’t as easy as that, Donnie would realize after a minute of careful, measured steps, because around the bend there were two tunnels ahead of them. Donnie lifted his snout and sniffed, but it was too wet for his family’s passing scents to really linger, and the wind and moving water had stirred up other pungent, distracting smells besides.

It didn’t occur to him to be frightened, not yet. He was a very smart four year old, and very sheltered on top of that, thanks to a parent hellbent on protecting him and his siblings from a world that would not understand or appreciate them. He had never met anything he needed to be afraid of.

Besides, Angie was right there, holding his hand and humming their favorite song.

In another universe, Donnie followed Splinter through the right tunnel with his little brother toddling neatly along behind him. Mikey didn’t fall and his glasses didn’t break and Donnie didn’t get lost. They made it to their storm-time lair safely and fell asleep in a turtle pile with Raphie and Leo, snug and warm and exactly where they belonged. Nothing changed them and they were never apart.

In this one, they went the wrong way.

When Raph was five years old, his little brothers disappeared in the middle of the night. It felt like they were gone for a billion years, but it was really only three months and two days. That’s ninety-one days. He knew because Leo carefully marked the squares on their waterlogged froggy calendar, a blue crayon frowny-face for each day that Splinter returned without them. It was a really long ninety-one days, though. He figured that was what a billion years must feel like.

“But where did they go?” Raph demanded.

The world wasn’t very big when he was little. There was their usual home, and the sometimes-homes they went to when the weather got noisy and the floors got wet, and the dark, cave-like tunnels in between. He didn’t understand why papa didn’t just go get his little brothers and bring them back, since there were only a few places they could be.

“They got lost,” Leo said in his quiet voice.

He didn’t use his loud voice very much anymore. Mikey was the best one at making him loud, at making Leo smile until his dimples popped out and run around all silly. That’s why Mikey needed to be here. Didn’t papa understand that?

Looking back as a teenager, Raphael understood the hell Splinter must have gone through. He couldn’t leave his two eldest by themselves for solid hours at a time to search for his youngest. It probably killed him to do it at all. And it definitely must have felt like he was failing Donnie and Mikey by not devoting all his time and energy solely to finding them. He kept searching for long after some parents would have given up.

But when Raph was five, he didn’t get it. He missed his little brothers so much it made feel sick and he wanted Loud Leo back and it was frustrating that he kept waking up and going to sleep and waking up without them. He felt angry all the time, stomping around the lair and slamming things and talking back instead of being good.

When twenty squares had been marked on their calendar—that’s two tens, a whole lot of days—Raph spotted a pile of the big kid books that Donnie loved. Sometimes the books were all wet when Splinter brought them home, and they had to sit in front of the fan for ages until the pages could be touched without tearing apart. The books ended up looking bloated and misshapen when they were dried, but they were Don’s treasures. He would read them out loud to his siblings if they asked nice, his lisping voice trudging steadily along, picking its way stubbornly through words he didn’t know. Papa seemed very surprised the first time he heard Donnie read—he was almost as good as Leo, who was two whole years older than him—and Splinter’s surprise made Raph feel proud. That was his smarty-pants little brother.

But on that day, seeing the books just made Raph angry. He kicked the whole stack until it collapsed in a messy pile that would have made Donnie cry, and that wasn’t enough, so he picked up one of the books and threw it as far as he could. He did it again, and again, until the books were scattered all around the room.

Leo watched him with wide eyes the whole time, but he didn’t shout at Raph to stop or go tattle on him to papa. He was Quiet Leo. He only got up when Raphie started crying and all he did was put his arms around Raph and squeeze him tight until he ran out of tears. Then he led Raph by the hand around the room and together they carefully picked the books back up and smoothed out the bent pages and stacked them neatly on the far side of the toy shelf.

It was so that Donnie would be happy when he finally came home. But also it was so that Raph wouldn’t have to see them all the time.

And then on day ninety-one, they didn’t mark another square on the calendar. They didn’t need to. The door burst open, and Splinter returned a lot of minutes before he said he would—the big hand on the clock had barely moved all the way from six to seven! And he was talking in lullaby-soft Japanese, too quiet to be for Raph and Leo all the way over in the kitchen, so he must have been talking to someone else.

Leo jumped to his feet so fast he knocked his juice over and then Raph figured it out a second later. Bundled in the blanket in papa’s arms were their little brothers, their missing halves, safe and sound and finally back where they belonged.

“Tello, Angie,” Leo was saying, up on his tiptoes and tugging at the front of Splinter’s robes, reaching up as high as he could. His blue eyes were all wet, mouth wobbling. “Tello, Angie—are you okay? Are they okay, papa?”

“They are cold and hungry,” Splinter said gently. “Will their older brothers look after them while I heat water for a bath?”

It had been a billion years since Raphie wasn’t the littlest brother, but he hadn’t forgotten how to be bigger. When Splinter knelt to set the blanket on the floor, Raph reached right in and pulled Donnie into his arms. And then he sat down so he could hug Donnie all the way around, dragging him into his lap like a stuffed animal. Donnie didn’t hug back, but Raph didn’t care. Raph squeezed him tight enough for two turtles. For a hundred turtles. If he held on tight enough, Donnie wouldn’t ever get lost again.

Mikey’s eyes were squinted all the way shut, like the cat in their Wonderland coloring book. He didn’t even open them when he clicked wetly at Leo, an anxious-excited turtle sound that meant hello, here-I-am, hello. He should have opened his eyes, so he could tell how much Leo loved him and was happy to see him, but Leo didn’t mind. And he didn’t mind when Mikey just pressed his cold little face against Leo’s neck instead. Leo just put his cheek on the top of Mikey’s head and hummed turtle sounds back to him.

Donnie finally curled one hand into the front of Raph’s shirt and clung to it. When Raph looked down, he saw that it was because Donnie’s other hand was already holding something pink and plastic. It was so grimy and all twisted out of shape that it took Raph a minute to remember what it was.

“Are those Mikey’s glasses?” he asked. “Are they broken?”

His lip wobbling, Donnie nodded.

“That’s okay,” Raph rushed to say immediately, anything to keep him from crying. He knew that whatever happened must have been an accident, because Mikey was silly but harmless and Donnie was always careful not to break things unless he could rebuild them. “You did a good job keeping them safe.”

It must have been the right thing to say, since Don didn’t burst into tears. He felt big and strong when Donnie leaned his head on Raph’s shoulder. His big red eyes were drooping, like he was sleepy, but the set of his mouth was the very stubborn one Raph was familiar with from a million bedtimes.

Sure enough, he fought sleep tooth and nail, and he was still awake when papa came back. Splinter rubbed Raphael’s cheek with his thumb fondly before he lifted Donnie away. Donnie immediately stretched both of his arms out for Mikey, so Leo reluctantly let Splinter take him, too. Mikey still didn’t open his eyes, but he made a wide-awake chirp at Splinter and knew exactly where Splinter’s muzzle was when he reached up with his hands to pat it. Splinter nuzzled his tiny hands carefully, and then the top of Donnie’s head, holding them tight against his heart.

Raph and Leo followed Splinter so closely that they nearly stepped on his hem and his tail more than once. The big basin they used for bathing was full of steaming water and the shimmery rainbow sheen of soapy bubbles. Splinter lowered Donnie and Mikey in first, and then sighed when Raph and Leo splashed right in after them, but it wasn’t his exasperated-sigh, or even his you’re-about-to-be-in-trouble one. This one sounded the way his love-yous sounded, warm and laughing.

They ate ramen for supper, and Raph and Leo had extra noodles because Donnie and Mikey were supposed to only drink the broth. They got the last applesauce cups in the cooler, though, so it wound up being fair.

And when it was time to go to sleep, papa curled around them the way he used to do when they were babies, keeping the dark and the cold far away. Raphie asked him to leave the lamp on and retrieved a special Magic Tree House book from where he had been keeping it under his pillow. It was the one Donnie had been reading to them before that stormy night took him away.

He felt his brothers press in close around him. Leo was hugging Donnie against him the way he’d hugged Mikey earlier, and Mikey’s head was pillowed on Raph’s plastron, the tiny curve of his shell fitting in Raph’s arm perfectly. The tip of Splinter’s tail swept idly back and forth, creating a playful swooping shadow in the lantern light.

Raph felt funny, like he wanted to cry and laugh at the same time, but he took a deep breath and found the right spot on the page. He had been practicing.

“Annie knelt down and put her arms around Barry’s giant head,” Raph read carefully, tracing the way with his finger. “He licked her as she clutched him. “Tell him, Annie,” Jack urged her. Annie lifted Barry’s ear and whispered into it for a long time. Jack couldn’t hear all that she said, but he caught the words ‘love’ and ‘all my life’.”

He wasn’t as good at it as Donnie and Leo, but no one interrupted him once. Even Mikey laid still and listened without squirming or singing to himself.

Raph read for them until he couldn’t keep his eyes open anymore. When he woke up in the morning, Dogs in the Dead of Night had fallen shut in his hands, and his brothers had twisted and turned in their sleep, and Splinter was preparing breakfast across the room—but besides that, everything was exactly where Raphael had left it. Nothing else had gone missing in the dark.

It would take a lot more days than just that one for him to stop being worried about it, though.

For pretty much as long as Leo could remember, Donnie and Mikey had always been on each other’s team first. They were the textbook example of a dynamic duo. It would be cute, if it wasn’t so annoying.

“Donnie,” Leo said in a level tone, reaching into the far corners of his body for patience, “I’m giving you the chance to tell me the truth before Splinter gets here. Where did you get this stuff?”

The ‘stuff’ in question was very clearly brand-new. Some of it was still in the box. It was equipment that Leonardo couldn’t make heads or tails of, and he refused to agree with Raph’s “mad scientist” moniker out loud just on principle, but sometimes he had to admit to himself that Raph might have a point. Donnie’s haul wouldn’t have looked out of place in an episode of Dexter’s Laboratory.

Donnie’s eyes narrowed, arms tightening around his oversized satchel. He sized Leo up for a solid ten seconds, visibly gauging how much he could get away with in the moment. And then, predictably, he glanced over at Mikey.

Mikey was sitting on the kitchen counter with a bowl of pineapple chunks in one hand, plastic Hello Kitty chopsticks in the other, swinging his feet and watching the scene play out with mild interest.

The youngest turtle tilted his head. Huffing out a displeased breath, Donnie faced Leo again.

“I found it,” he said grudgingly. He was only nine years old and not even the F.B.I. would be able to crack him. Leonardo was going to give it his best shot anyway.

“Where?” Leo stressed. “Dad doesn’t even like you going to the junkyard by yourself, and I know you didn’t ‘find’ this stuff in the garbage.”

“Humans throw away good stuff all the time,” Don said, sticking to his story. “Remember the fountain pen?”

“Oh my god, Dee,” Leo groaned.

“You mean the one you bring up every time you get in trouble for dumpster diving without permission?” Raph piped up from the peanut gallery. He was sprawled comfortably on the couch, magazine in hand, Spike a cozy little lump under his shirt. “That fountain pen?”

“I looked it up online and it retailed at over five thousand dollars,” Donnie went on doggedly.

“Okay, yes, people throw valuable things away,” Leo agreed, exasperated. “Did they throw away this stuff, though? Or did you break into a government building again, like you did when you decided you needed the—the what’s-it-called, accelerators.”

“Actuators,” Donnie corrected him. “And it wasn’t a government building, it was one of the labs at NYU.” Then, after a beat, “You can’t prove I did that.”

“Don, give me the bag.”

Donnie glanced toward Mikey again. Mikey clicked at him. It definitely didn’t sound like a ‘you should listen to your brother’ click.

Sensing where this was going a second too late, Leo made a grab for him, but Donnie moved at the same time. He sprinted into his lab at full ninja speed, stolen goods in tow, and the reinforced doors closed behind him with a decisive thud.

Raph howled with laughter in the living room. Leo let his forehead thunk against the lab doors and groaned.

The soft tap of a walking stick made him roll his head to the side without lifting it. Splinter’s whiskers twitched in amusement, even though his expression gave nothing away.

“I see that my second youngest has engaged us in yet another battle of wills. Is Donatello in immediate danger?”

“Only from himself,” Leo muttered. “And me, when I get my hands on him.”

“In that case, we can only wait him out,” Splinter said wisely, continuing on his way into the kitchen. “He will get hungry eventually.”

Mikey smiled sweetly at their father and offered him some pineapple. Splinter turned down the fruit, but rubbed the top of Mikey’s head affectionately, further proving Leo’s thesis that Michelangelo could do no wrong in the rat’s eyes. The kid literally just aided and abetted a repeat offender and he got head rubs. Donnie snuck aboveground for the third time that week—and it was only Tuesday—and he probably wouldn’t even get scolded.

It’s more complicated than that, Leo sometimes had to firmly remind himself. Donnie and Mikey survived without their family for three months when they were little more than babies—and in part, Splinter had solemnly informed Leo and Raph as they got older, they were only able to do so by venturing to the surface for food and clean water and warm things to nest in. Out of necessity, they acclimated to living between two worlds.

They didn’t have the deeply ingrained anxiety surrounding humans and human places that Leo had inherited from Splinter. They didn’t have the healthy disdain for people that Raph had, either. Leo was pretty sure they only stayed underground at all because they were fond of the lair and didn't want to give their dad and brothers heart attacks by springing an apartment on them.

He slunk down into the sunken living room and collapsed onto the sofa. Being the oldest was thankless and horrible and Leo wanted a new job. Raph nudged his knee with his foot.

“Don gave that fancy fountain pen to Splinter for his birthday,” the red-banded turtle reminded Leo. “He may be an evil genius, but he’s our evil genius. And Mikey would probably stop him before he did anything really bad.”

“Unless it was funny,” Mikey called over.

“Unless it was funny,” Raph conceded.

Leo buried his face in a cushion and groaned again. Sometimes this family could be so annoying. But somewhere in the back of his mind, a well-kept secret from everybody else—even himself some of the time—Leonardo was always a little bit relieved every time Donnie acted bratty and clung to his stupid treasures, every time Mikey started talking his family’s ears off about some comic book or new cartoon.

He had vague, fuzzy memories of a Mikey who wouldn’t speak in human languages at all—of a Donnie that picked through toys and books listlessly, uninterested in everything he used to love—and he knew that the annoying versions of his brothers were the ones he wanted to keep.

April was having a really, really, really bad day when she first met the best friends she’d ever have. She was trudging home from the bus stop, all wet from a puddle a stupid car had splashed on her, damp bookbag full of homework she didn’t want to do and an essay she got a C on because English was stupid and literary analysis was stupid and the stupid green light at the end of the stupid dock was stupid.

It had nothing to do with tomorrow being Mother’s Day.

She was cutting through a side street to get back to her apartment faster when suddenly her foot caught on something hard and unforgiving and she pitched forward with a screech.

Her bag busted a seam when it fell, and books and folders scattered magnificently around the dirty alley, and April had just about had it.

She burst into tears.

Today was horrible and she hated her new school and she just wanted to be home with dad already even if their new place was stuffy and cramped and not as comfortable as the one they lived in with mom. Nothing was as comfortable as it was when mom was there.

April was crying so hard she didn’t hear it at first—a gentle rolling, rumbling noise, like a car engine, only it would have to be a really little car. It was so out of place that it distracted April from her tears. She looked around to find the source of it, rubbing her face dry with the inside of her shirt.

The first thing April saw was the manhole cover. It was lifted slightly instead of laying down flat, which must have been what she tripped over. The second thing she saw was the round blue eyes peering at her from the darkness underneath.

April was twelve years old and nothing surprised her for very long. She shoved the hood of her yellow jacket off her head and demanded, “What are you doing down there?”

The eyes blinked at her. Furiously, she said, “You made me fall!”

“He said he was sorry,” another voice said from directly behind her.

She turned to look and found a boy staring back at her. He was a few inches shorter than she was, and dressed in mismatched layers of clothes that all looked too big on his skinny body. He was wearing a floppy beanie and a purple mask and holding something big and square and wrapped in a tarp. It was so much to take in that it took April an additional second to register that his skin was green.

April was so taken-aback by the sudden appearance of a green boy that she completely missed the dull, near-silent sound of the manhole cover grating over concrete. She scrambled back when the green boy moved toward her, and then felt silly about it because he wasn’t moving towards her at all, he was carrying the thing he was holding over to the manhole.

“What is that?” she asked curiously.

“Microwave oven,” he said, holding it a little closer against his stomach like she was going to snatch it from him.

There was no danger of that. April tried moving her own microwave to a different counter once to make room for her dad’s new coffee maker and she barely made it two feet with that thing. And that was a normal microwave. This one looked like it belonged in a kitchen restaurant somewhere.

In fact… April squinted, and made out a sticker on the side that said “Property of Rupert’s Management.” He certainly wasn’t old enough to be the manager of anything. From the defensive way he was holding the appliance, April was pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to have it.

Two hands reached up out of the manhole, green and three-fingered just like the boy’s. He passed one end of his ill-gotten gains down to them, carefully lowering the whole heavy, bulky thing into the tunnel. It slipped and fell a few inches, and the boy snapped something in what sounded very much like fluent Japanese, and from underground where April couldn’t see, the owner of the blue eyes giggled.

After watching for a moment, it occurred to April that her stuff was still sitting around slowly getting soaked in the rain-wet alley. She made a fed-up noise under her breath and scuttled over on hands and knees to begin the annoying task of picking it all up. After a moment, she heard paper rustle somewhere to her left.

“The green light symbolizes Gatsby’s dreams for the future,” the boy said abruptly, “not just his love for Daisy. It gave him hope. People like to say the book is a condemnation of the American Dream, but really it’s just about wanting more than what you have, no matter how rich or poor you are.”

April sits up on her knees to find him reading her essay, flipping through the stapled pages with a halfway interested look on his face. He glances up at her, not quite making eye contact, and then down at his hands again.

“I like what you wrote,” he muttered. “I would have given this a B at least.”

It was the nicest thing anyone had said to her all day, and it crystallized in April’s memory as the exact moment she knew she was keeping this weird little microwave thief no matter what.

Sometimes Mikey got quiet. He didn’t mean to, he tried not to, but Donnie said it was okay if he didn’t want to talk the way people did. Mikey was a person, but he was a turtle, too. His siblings could understand him if they tried. Donnie would always understand him.

Papa thought that Mikey was too young to remember those months he and Donnie were alone, and for the most part he was right. Mikey’s memories of that time were all disjointed, hazy things. Mostly things he dreamed about.

But papa was wrong, too. There were some things Mikey kept.

When Leo turned sixteen, Splinter finally allowed her to lead her team on the surface. By then, they were all familiar with New York City—Mikey and Donnie dressed in their layers and ventured up whenever it suited them, and Leo had had to hunt them down and drag them home at least a thousand times, and even Raph could be coaxed into topside shenanigans if April promised there was junk food and horror movies on the other end.

They weren’t new to the world, but they were new to the criminal underside of it all. They could practice kata and spar with each other for hours in the dojo but it was much different fighting a stranger with a butterfly knife or brass knuckles who didn’t care about them at all.

Mikey was unsettled by it when his siblings gathered at the breakfast table nursing aches and bruises the morning after their first fight. Papa was unhappy, too, his tail lashing in agitation even while his face remained thoughtful and impassive. He listened to Leo explain so earnestly that if she had the power and the ability to help people, it meant she had the responsibility to.

It was hard to argue with that. Mikey busied himself with tying his sister’s blue mask tails up in a poofy bow the way she secretly liked a lot, waiting for papa’s inevitable sigh.

“You are burdened with wisdom beyond your years, Leona,” the rat finally said. He always took great care to say Leo’s chosen name properly, ever since the year before when she disclosed to her family that she was actually a girl. Even now, during this tense conversation, that acknowledgement made Leo sit a little bit taller. “I want you to promise me that you’ll be careful,” Splinter goes on. “With your brothers, and yourself.”

“Of course,” she was quick to agree. “I promise, dad.”

Only stupid Leo was a big fat liar, because the first chance she got to fling herself into danger, that’s what she did. And it was really annoying, and when Mikey was done being terrified, he was going to be very, very angry.

On this particular night, they had split up into two teams to cover as much ground as quickly as they could. The Purple Dragons’ den was somewhere along the waterline, and Leo wanted to find it. So Donnie and Raph were canvasing on the other side of the docks when the Purple Dragons found Mikey and his sister.

The odds were immediately bad, something like a dozen thugs against two ninja turtles. Even with their training, they were still only sixteen and thirteen years old. They had brushed up against violence before, but not the organized kind. Donnie’s voice got panicked in Mikey’s ear, guessing what his and Leo’s tense silence meant, and then Raph started cursing up a storm, and Mikey could tell from the way their breaths got fast and punchy over the comms that they were both sprinting to get there as fast as they could.

But Mikey didn’t think that was going to matter, because one of the men pulled a gun from his waistband. He was saying something but Mikey’s thoughts were all underwater. He was clutching his ‘chucks so hard he could feel the scores on the handles biting into his palms.

When the gun went off, he was pushed down, and his head knocked into a shipping crate hard enough that he saw stars behind his eyes. He had to blink a few times to find Leo. She was hovering above him, her carapace turned outwards toward the man with the gun. She was holding Mikey like she expected one of them was about to lose the other. She was bleeding. She looked afraid.

Mikey closed his eyes and let the quiet out.

It filled his whole body like the first gulp of hot chocolate on a blustery winter day. It made him remember being somewhere damp and dark, smaller than he was now and cornered by a bigger animal, Donnie’s wheezy, rattling breaths behind him and the weak press of his fever-hot hands on Mikey’s shell, but it wasn’t scary to remember that. It made everything very simple. He knew what to do.

“Mikey,” someone was saying. “Hey, Mikey. Angie.”

When he blinked his eyes open and looked up, the warehouse was empty. There were a few limp human bodies strewn within his line of sight, but when he turned to look for the rest of them, a hand caught his chin and held him still. He followed the hand back to Donnie, who was looking at Mikey the way he always did, like they were each other’s first and best and forever friend.

“There you are,” Donnie said, and smiled.

Mikey tried to smile back, but his mouth tasted like metal and salt, and his jaw was sore. When he touched his face, his fingers came away sticky and red. It was all down his chin and throat. He didn’t know how that got there. He looked up at Donnie again, and then past him, at where their brother and sister were hovering.

The second Mikey saw Leo, and the hastily-wrapped bandage on her arm, he remembered the obscene crack of the gun shooting her and he started to cry.

Leo practically trampled over Raph and Donnie in her rush to get her arms around Mikey. She didn’t care that he was all messy and ugly, she was pressing her beak to the top of his head, clicking and cooing the way she hadn’t since they were children.

Then Raph picked Mikey up and tucked Mikey’s head under his chin and they went to April’s apartment, which was twenty minutes closer to the docks than the lair. The trip across Manhattan was brighter and warmer than the winding subway tunnels home would have been. Someone must have called ahead to warn them, because April and her dad were worried but not horrified by the picture the turtles made on their fire escape.

April sat in the bathtub with Mikey, a tight enough fit that their knees and elbows knocked together. She used the handheld shower head to get all the blood off him. It ruined her pajamas but she didn’t care. She was his big sister, too. By the time Mikey was released, smelling like April’s mango body wash and wrapped in his favorite fluffy Hello Kitty blanket, Mr. O’Neil had finished stitching Leo’s arm and she was pacing in tight circles around the kitchen, lost in her own world.

“Okay, Fearless, he’s here,” Raph said, clearly fed up with her. “Go smother the kid and get it out of your system so we can eat already.”

Mikey was still mad at Leo. But he could save that for later. For now, he wanted to lean against her and feel the steady, reassuring marathon march of her heart, while his human family and turtle family piled into the living room with paper plates of greasy cheese pizza. Mr. O’Neil called Splinter way before he ordered the food, so papa would be there any minute. They didn’t turn the TV on, they just sat together and talked in low voices, until Raph said, “Where’d we leave off, Don?” and Donnie made an ‘oh yeah’ sort of noise and scrolled through his phone.

They’d been rereading one of their favorite books together to pass time during boring patrols and endless stakeouts. Donnie passed Raph his phone, because Raphie did it best.

“For the hundredth time, she closed her eyes so she could see another room in her mind's eye,” Raph read into the companionable silence of the room, “one with a curtain full of stars, and a mattress surrounded by books that whispered their stories to her at night."

The quiet inside of Mikey was docile and passive now, a dangerous animal deep in hibernation. But it was still there. Maybe it always would be.

But Leo was hugging him like nothing about him had changed, and Raph was reading The Thief Lord the way he used to read Magic Tree House when they were little, and Donnie’s hand was wrapped around Mikey’s like a promise.

Mikey’s earliest memory was just that. It was Donnie holding his hand, walking next to him, all through the dark.

Once, when Donnie and Mikey were very very small, they went the wrong way.

Their turtle instincts kept them moving, kept them scrounging for survival. Maybe if they’d been human toddlers, they would have stayed put and made it easy for their father to track them down. Maybe they would have only been out there for a few days, a week at most. Or maybe they would have fallen into the deep run-off and drowned, or got eaten by subway rats, or died of exposure.

Donnie remembers more than he thinks anyone in his family is aware that he does. A true photographic memory has never been proven, but frankly that’s only one item in a long laundry list of reasons why any scientist worth their salt would love to get their hands on him. Don can recall everything he’s ever seen.

He’s done a lot of reading on childhood trauma and the way it can affect toddlers and even babies going forward. Three months in the grand scheme of things is not a remarkably long time, and they could have come out of that whole situation a lot worse than they did.

Mikey’s eyes weren’t irreparably damaged by the long stint he went without his glasses, by the grace of some imaginary god, but in part that’s because he learned to get around without his eyes at all. Donnie’s baby brother taught him how to echolocate, using their subvocal turtle noises to see in the dark the way their red-eared slider cousins use vibrations to see through murky water.

Nowadays it’s mostly a parlor trick they use to get the better of their big siblings.

Sometimes during morning training, after Leo had beaten Mikey and Raph had beaten Donnie, and Raph went on to be a really sore winner about beating Leo, Splinter would tap his walking stick and call Raph back onto the mat.

“Now you will spar against your younger brothers together,” the rat would say mildly, knowing exactly what he was doing. Raphael’s smug face would fall, and Leo would settle on the sidelines with her new bruises and a beaming smile on her face.

On their own, Mikey and Donnie were both talented ninjas who were easily distracted during practice and only trained as much as they were required to.

Together, they were monsters.

“Okay,” Raph said, lifting his hands warily, “let’s talk about this.”

Mikey winked at him and closed his eyes. Raphael swore. Leona smothered her laughter, but Donnie could still hear it, rising and filling the dojo in gentle waves.

Donatello remembers being lost. He remembers how the days blurred together, dark and frightening—the maze-like tunnels—crying and crying for Splinter before finally learning that no one would come when he cried. He remembers getting sick, a bad chest cold that was no match for his mutated DNA but gave him a rough time for the few days it managed to stick. He remembers the big ugly rats that stalked them to their makeshift nest, and the tiny curve of his little brother’s shell when Mikey went on all fours and bared his teeth and protected Donnie from the creatures that would hurt him the only way he could. He remembers the first time they crawled out of the sewers; how they didn’t want to break papa’s most important rule, but they were so hungry.

He remembers seeing the city lights for the first time, neon and eclectic and dizzying, the brightest things in the whole world. He remembers how fear began to fade and what was scary became normal and all he needed to feel safe was his little Angie beside him.

“Telloooo,” Leona calls from the den. “Get your shell in here or we’ll leave without you!”

“No you won’t, I have the keys!” Donnie calls back. He saves the design he’s working on, a wrist-mounted crossbow for Casey’s upcoming seventeenth birthday, and smiles to himself imagining the horrified look on Leo and April’s faces and the elated one on Casey’s when Don presents the gift. It’s going to be sweet chaos, and that he’s doing it all for a cute boy makes it even sweeter.

He steps out of his lab to find his siblings lingering by the turnstiles, waiting for him. Mikey is giving goodbye kisses to Klunk’s little orange face, acting every bit as though he’s going to be out of the country for a calendar year, instead of just, like, out for a few hours. Raph looks like he’s about three seconds from dragging their baby brother out of the lair by his mask tails. Leo has her hands on her hips, in full harried single-mom mode, even though Splinter is right there.

“Finally,” she says when she spots Donnie. “Ready to go?”

“Can I drive?” Mikey blurts before anyone else can say anything.

“What? Of course not,” Donnie refuses immediately, a scandalized look on his face. He smiles up at Splinter when he passes him, and leans into the one-armed hug the rat gives him in parting. The moment they’ve hopped the turnstiles and left the lights of the station behind, Donnie tosses Mikey the keys to the Shellraiser and says, “Go wild.”

Michelangelo whoops and takes off down the tracks. Raph barks out a surprised laugh, and Leo says, “Oh, hell no!” and the tunnels echo with the sounds of Donatello’s family, rowdy and reckless and irrepressible.

He and Mikey got lost when they were little, but they ended up right where they were supposed to be.

#tmnt 2k12 #teenage mutant ninja turtles #b team #hamato donatello #hamato michelangelo #hamato leonardo #hamato raphael #ratdad #my writing #tmnt fic

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