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A month or so after the incident at the baseball stadium and the three day streak of teleporting madness, a group of humans approached the Mad Dogs.
Humans had never been a problem for them, mostly because no human could ever hope to keep up with them.
They had been built for war, specifically against humanity, weapons lovingly crafted with genocide in mind. They were stronger, faster, more deadly than anything the human race had ever seen.
So humans had never been a problem. Usually just seeing Raph would send them running scared. If it didn’t, then a good bonk on the head would be enough to knock them out. The Mad Dogs didn’t really squabble in human affairs, didn’t look for muggings to stop or jaywalkers to catch. They had bigger issues like rogue mutants and angry yokai and mystic shenanigans. Humans were humans and that was that.
But Raph was still wary and he stepped in front of his brothers when the five humans approached them on a rooftop across from one of their favorite pizza places. Two of them looked like soldiers, decked out in helmets and chest plates and big boots. And they had even bigger looking guns strapped on their backs. The sight of them made Raph’s throat close and his scales prickle; the possibility of guns was another reason he and his brothers tended to stay out of human problems.
The other three humans are wearing long black coats and black suits, admittedly looking pretty cool and mysterious. The one at the front with curly red hair took a step forward and Raph felt his brothers tense behind him. Raph curled his hands into fists.
“Please, we don’t mean any harm,” Said the one who’d moved, raising his hands to show he was unarmed. Raph just narrowed his eyes, “We just wanted to talk. You’re the ones who have been defending the city, right? Against the mutants and creatures like that teleporting armor?”
“You could say that,” Leo said with far too much cockiness and Raph rumbled out a low frequency warning to keep quiet.
The man smiled eagerly, “I knew it! We’ve seen you around a few times! You’re far more skilled than our soldiers have been. Thank you for protecting the city! You’re doing humanity a great service.”
Raph blinked. This was...not what he’d expected. He shot a quick glance over his shoulder at the other three, who looked equally confused by the enthusiasm.
“Look, it’s always great to meet a fan,” Leo slid up beside Raph, propping his arm casually on Raph’s elbow, hand dangling near the hilt of the ōdachi over his shoulder. His smile was easy, almost lazy, his eyes glittering in the neon lights of the city, “But it’s pizza night and we got places to be. So can we help you with something, or can we get to our dinner?”
“Oh, of course, I’m sorry to interrupt your evening. We can talk again when you have free time,” The man reached into his coat—causing another wave of tension—and produced a rectangle of cardboard, “My card; it has all my contact information. Please give me a call when you’re able to set up an appointment for us to talk! Ask for Chaplin; that’s me! We’d like to help however we can! Enjoy the rest of your night!”
He held the card out with a broad smile and, after a moment of hesitation, Raph gingerly took it from him. The man beamed, then turned on his heel and gestured to the other four humans. Within minutes, the group had descended the fire escape to street level and were climbing into a big, official looking white van parked on the side of the road. The man who’d spoken with them glanced up to the roof, saw them watching, winked with a little two finger salute, and climbed into the vehicle.
They watched in silence until the van pulled around a corner and out of sight.
“Okkkaaaaayyyyy,” Leo drawled, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, “That was weird, right?”
“I dunno,” Mikey was rocking on his heels, still buzzing with energy and distracted by the pizza shop beckoning them from across the street, “They seemed nice.”
“They had big, fuck-off guns, Miguel—”
“Language, Leo,” Raph grunted, frowning at the white card and its tiny black font, “Ehpff? What’s that?”
“It’s EPF, dear Raphala; Earth Protection Force,” Donnie said, thumbs flying over his phone, tech-bō tucked into his elbow, “A branch of the government apparently focused on protecting humanity from—and I quote—“supernatural and extraterrestrial threats”. Looks like they also research mystics and have worked with some yokai in the past too. Hm.”
“So they’re good guys?” Mikey asked, bouncing across the roof to peer over Donnie’s shoulder at the phone. Donnie’s battle shell extended a metal arm that pushed Mikey’s face away before retracting.
“The government? Good?” Leo was already looking bored of the conversation, hands behind his head and flicking the tails of his mask around, “That’d be a first.”
“They asked us for help though,” Raph murmured, looking up at his younger brothers, “And thanked us for protecting the city. Nobody’s done that before…”
The other three paused, Donnie even lowering his phone to look up at Raph. He could see it on their faces that they were thinking the same thing he was. New York largely ignored them, not out of malice but because New York was weird and just Like That. It was safer to keep your head down in a place like the Big Apple.
But Raph and his brothers had saved people before, rescued them from mutants going on a rampage or the occasional yokai who had an ax to grind. Not to mention the thing with the Shredder. They’d been spotted, they’d been seen. And while it was true that Baxter Stockboy’s little hate campaign had riled up a few people and tainted their reputation just a little bit, most people in New York seemed to know or at least understand that the four turtle brothers meant them no harm. It was very much a “you leave us alone, we’ll leave you alone” kind of deal. No one ever asked them for help. No one except maybe April called them for assistance.
No one had ever thanked them for everything they’d done.
“Can we talk about this laaaatttteeerrr?” Mikey whined suddenly, breaking the weighted silence. He slumped dramatically against Leo with a pathetic pout on his face, “Piizzzzzaaaaaaaaa!”
Raph huffed out a laugh and rolled his eyes, passing the card over to Donnie to hang onto. It was the beginning of Pizza Week and they had more important things to worry about. Like pizza. Seven whole days of pizza.
If the EPF and Chaplin were genuine, then it could all wait until later.
Two weeks after their initial contact, the Mad Dogs bumped into the EPF again.
They were chasing down a pack of something that was either mutated squirrels or some rambunctious fauna that had escaped the Hidden City. The brightly colored pests were wrecking havoc up and down the streets of New York, gnawing through lamp posts and car tires, scattering pedestrians, and robbing food trucks and food stands empty. They were fast, the size of bicycles, and had a bad habit of spitting something black and sticky-looking.
“Smashing like A BOSS!” Raph drove his fist into a line of the squirrel monsters, red energy coating his knuckles and giving the attack an extra wallop. The squirrel-things were sent flying, smacking into the walls and bouncing off the dumpsters of the alleyway. Raph grinned at the successful strike and then yelped when one of the monster squirrels leapt onto his head.
It shrieked at him, swiping at his face, and Raph flailed to try and get it off. He could feel its claws dig into his scales, scrabbling for purchase. In a fit of desperation, Raph let out a roar and flung himself against the nearest wall, bashing his head into the brick as hard as he could. There was a crunch of breaking bone and a scream from the monster squirrel. When Raph staggered back from the wall, his head throbbing and eyes watering, the monster’s limp body slid off his shoulders and crumpled to the ground.
Raph took a moment to recover and get his bearings, scanning the alley for his brothers.
They seemed to be holding their own well enough. Mikey was bouncing off the walls and fire escapes, Leo was knocking monster squirrels left and right, and Donnie had taken to the sky to pick off the enemy with...something that Raph hoped was the tranquilizer of his tech-bō. The monster squirrels were getting angrier, but their numbers were slowly dwindling. With any luck, they’d wrap this up in the next few minutes and get home in time for Mikey to make something excellent for dinner.
Head still smarting, Raph knocked his tonfas together and got ready to launch himself back into the fight.
So naturally that’s where things took a turn.
Raph saw Mikey turn to face a monster squirrel that was crouched on top of a dumpster, drawing his arm back to swing at it with his fiery weapon. The squirrel wasn’t going to wait for the blow, however, and puffed itself up. Then promptly spit in Mikey’s face.
The black, gooey, tar-like stuff plastered itself over Mikey’s eyes and snout and he let out a scream, flailing backwards and knocking into the wall. His kusari-fundō went wide, pinging off the walls and making Donnie swerve wildly in the air, before it ricocheted back and smacked Mikey in the head. Mikey tumbled head over heels, still screaming and flailing and covered in monster squirrel spit.
“Mikey!” Raph surged forward, kicking and punching any unfortunate squirrels out of his way until he crouched by his baby brother, “Mikey! Can you hear me!?”
“R-Raph!?” Mikey was clawing at his face, pulling at the black stuff, heels scrabbling on the alley floor, “I can’t—this stuff won’t come off! And my hands are stuck to it! I can’t see! I CAN’T SEE!”
“E-easy, Mikey! We’ll figure this out! Maybe Raph can—” Raph was interrupted by more monster squirrels pouncing on him, claws scratching at his shell and arms. One of them sunk its little rodent teeth into the meat of Raph’s shoulder and he shouted in pain, jerking back and trying to pull it off of him. He could hear Leo and Donnie shouting, but couldn’t make out what they were saying over the chittering in his ears and Mikey’s cries.
One of the monster squirrels spat against the side of his face and Raph lost half his vision as his eye was covered, his hearing smothered. He swatted it off his arm and it smashed into the brick wall. They were getting overwhelmed.
With a snarl, Raph rose to his feet and prepared to throw himself at the problem until it was in pieces. He’d smash these freaky squirrel things until they never showed their faces in New York again!
Somebody else got there first.
Soft pops echoed down the alleyway and the squirrels suddenly started dropping like flies. They keeled over exactly where they’d been standing, collapsing onto the ground in a pile of neon fur, and didn’t move. Raph watched in confusion and then startled badly when Donnie suddenly dropped down to land beside him, the rotors of his battle shell folding back up with a whir. Donnie was frowning up at the rooftops and Raph followed his gaze to see humans in dark clothing with long guns aiming into the alley. The sight made his stomach drop and Raph shifted to put himself over Mikey and in front of Donnie.
It was only seconds before the alleyway fell quiet again. Raph swallowed thickly, keeping an eye on the humans with the guns. Leo slunk out of the shadows of a dumpster, peering over the lid to see if the shooting had stopped and then scampering low to the ground to stand beside his brothers. Raph noticed some of the black goo stuck to Leo’s sword and shell, as well as a deep cut on Leo’s cheek that was oozing blood. Donnie was crouched over the still whimpering Mikey, murmuring softly to him.
“Hello!” Called a voice and someone appeared at the mouth of the alley. All four of them tensed, “Sorry to interrupt, I’m sure you could have handled those pests just fine, but it’s our fault they got out in the first place! Just trying to clean up!” Chaplin emerged from the shadows, an apologetic smile on his face. His smile faltered as he came closer, “Oh no, are you all right? Of course you’re not, you’ve been hurt. Let me help—”
“Don’t worry ‘bout it, Chappy,” Leo rested his ōdachi on his shoulder and Raph realized his brother’s hand was stuck to the hilt with more of that black gunk, “Appreciate the assist, but we got this! Just need a little soak in the tub and we’ll be right as rain~”
“Ah, actually, the adhesive qualities of that particular element mean it’s not water soluble,” Chaplin said with another apologetic smile.
“Whodawhatnow?” Raph asked, twitching his head because the muffled hearing in one ear was really starting to bother him.
“He means it doesn’t dissolve in water,” Donnie answered stiffly. He was helping Mikey to his feet, holding Mikey by the upper arms and keeping him steady, “So this stuff isn’t going to just wash off. I’m assuming it needs a certain reactive agent?” He directed this question at Chaplin, eyes narrowed.
“Yes, exactly! And let me just—Morgans! Hey, Morgans, could you—yes! Thank you!” Chaplin waved down one of the people Raph now recognized as soldiers who had climbed down from the rooftops. The soldier trotted over and swung a heavy looking pack off their back, setting on the ground with a thud and crouching to pull out a spray bottle and pass it to Chaplin.
“Here! This stuff will clear that goo off for you. Just spray it over the goop, let it sit for a few seconds, and then you should be able to start peeling it away from affected areas.” Chaplin held the spray bottle out with a smile.
Raph moved to take it but Leo scoffed, making Raph pause to glance at him. Leo was still poised as if everything was calm and casual as you please, but he had that glint in his eye he got whenever he was dealing with Big Mama. Something ruthless and distrusting.
“Yeah? You’re just gonna give that to us? What’s the catch?” Leo almost sounded like he was joking, cocking a brow at Chaplin like a dare.
Chaplin blinked, still holding out the spray bottle, “Catch? I...I’m sorry, I don’t…”
“Yeah, uh-huh. So, you give us that,” Leo waved his free hand at the bottle, “Then, what, we owe you a favor?”
“No…?” Chaplin sounded genuinely confused, “You need help and I’m able to offer it.” He frowned, tilting his head, “I...guess if I had an ulterior motive it...would be that you can...take care of yourselves? Faster? Or...um…”
“Leo…” Raph murmured, voice muffled from part of his mouth being held shut by the goo, “I think he actually just wants to help.” Leo shot Raph a look, eyes narrowed, and then glared at Chaplin again. He was making his suspicions abundantly clear.
“Not everyone is out to get us, Nardo. And if he does do something to betray us, I’ll make him regret he ever existed.” Donnie said in a tight voice. He was still holding onto poor Mikey, who was sniffling and shivering and looked absolutely awful with that gunk on his face and his hands stuck to it, “Besides that, Mikey needs help. And one should avoid looking the proverbial horse in its toothy maw.”
A particularly pitiful sound from Mikey seemed to finally break Leo’s resolve. His shoulders slumped and he dropped his ōdachi from his shoulder, “Sorry, Chaps, we just don’t have the best track record with strangers. No hard feelings?”
“None at all!” Chaplin beamed as Raph took the spray bottle from him, “I completely understand the hesitation! We have attempted to approach the other mutants in the city but they are, mm, rather hostile.” He cleared his throat, clapping his hands together, “I’ll leave you gentlemen to it, then! We’ll be taking care of things here, no need to worry. Give me a call if you have the time!”
Raph watched Chaplin walk away with a spring in his step. It was nice to have an ally, a real ally, that genuinely seemed to want the best for them.
As he turned to start using the spray on his brothers, Raph allowed himself a little bubble of happiness. Things had been kind of rough after the Shredder; their dad was pressing on them to be better ninjas, their rogues gallery was starting to kick up again, and a lot of new weirdos were showing their faces. Maybe a friend like Chaplin was just what they needed.
Time passed, as it was wont to do.
There were squabbles with mutants and yokai, arguments with each other, adventures with April.
They bumped into Chaplin some more, usually during or after a fight, and he was always helpful and kind and tried to stay out of their way. He never pushed them to have a conversation with him, but would politely indicate that he’d very much like to sit down and have a chat with them “at some point”. And Raph would tell himself that, yes, this time he would definitely have a talk with his brothers and they would call Chaplin together and set something up. Except he would inevitably get distracted and forget again until the next time and the cycle would repeat itself.
Then Mikey found what was left of Baron Draxum in an alleyway and that was a whole thing. Raph tried not to think too hard about it.
But maybe Mikey’s faith in others was the catalyst that had paved the way for everything else.
A lizard-y looking yokai with long, thin claws was terrorizing jewelry stores, slicing through glass displays like they were paper, snatching anything shiny, and then vanishing to the next target. While it was unusual for yokai to cause trouble outside the Hidden City, with the rise in mutants, some troublemakers had gotten a little too eager to ply their trade on the surface. Raph was more than happy to leave them a bad review. With his fists.
The Mad Dogs had managed to corner the yokai out back of its latest robbery location. The lizard was taller than Raph, thinner and faster and mean. It had swatted Donnie out of the air like an annoying fly, breaking the rotors of his battle shell (“Again!? Seriously!? I just repaired this!”) and slicing into the meat of Donnie’s thigh with those four inch long claws.
“All right, prepare to get SMASHED!” Raph shouted, knocking his tonfas together in a shower of red sparks, “Mikey, back me up!”
“I got your six!” Mikey called back, launching himself into the air and aiming his kusari-fundō in a wide swing.
The lizard hissed, trying to keep its eye on both of them. When Mikey’s weapon burst into flames, the yokai’s head snapped around to focus on Mikey, and Raph made his move. With a wordless battle cry, Raph threw himself at the yokai, arm coated in mystic power, and crashed his fist directly into the yokai’s snout. Its head snapped back with the force of the blow and it went flying, crashing across the pavement and crumpling into a wall across the back street.
Mikey cheered, landing beside Raph and raising a hand for a high-five, “That’s how we do it, baby! Nothin’ to it!”
“Haha, all right!” Raph returned the gesture, grinning and flushed with victory. He turned away, hurrying back to see how things were going with Leo and Donnie.
Donnie was still sitting on an overturned milk crate, grimacing as Leo hovered over him. Leo had tightened bandages over the cuts on Donnie’s leg, but there was a frown on his face that made the elation of winning dwindle in Raph’s chest.
“What’s wrong, Leo? Is Donnie okay?”
“It won’t stop bleeding,” Leo’s answer was clipped and abrupt and he kept one hand pressed over the bandages. There was already a red stain spreading beneath his palm, “They’re not super deep, maybe just need a couple of stitches, so they shouldn’t be bleeding this much…”
“Anyone sliced by my claws bleeds to death in less than an hour,” Hissed a voice from behind them and Raph spun around in time to see the yokai hauling itself up again. There was blood dripping from its nose and visible bruising beginning to spread over its brightly colored scales, but its vicious grin was wide and nasty, “That little turtle’s as good as dead!”
Raph snarled, baring his teeth, “Then we’ll just have to beat a cure outta ya’!”
The yokai laughed, lurching towards them with claws extended, “There is no cure! I’m going to bleed you all dry and eat whatever’s le—”
A huge black and white vehicle the size of a garbage truck barreled around the corner, charged down the back street, and plowed right into the gloating yokai. There was a sickening crunch and the lizard yokai went bouncing across the pavement, skidding and smashing into a power pole. The huge truck screeched to a halt after the hit and the side slid open, dispensing several armed soldiers. Raph tensed, ready for another fight, but the soldiers ignored them and bee-lined for the lizard yokai that was making feeble, pained noises in a crumpled heap.
“Are you four all right? That one’s a nasty piece of work,” Chaplin hopped out of the truck, wearing that same amiable smile, hands in his pockets as he approached them, “We usually apprehend him much faster than this, but he managed to give us the slip this time. Excellent work holding your own against him!”
“Hi Chaplin!” Mikey grinned, waving eagerly, and gave a delighted chirp when Chaplin waved back.
Raph shot a glance at Leo, who met his gaze. Raph could still see the hesitation in the set of Leo’s shoulders; they’d been burned so many times already. But if they didn’t trust someone, they’d never trust anyone. And they needed help.
“You said you guys have fought with that guy before?” Leo stayed crouched beside Donnie, who was starting to look a little pale.
“Yes, we have. He’s annoying, but nothing we can’t handle,” Chaplin’s gaze flicked from Leo, to the increasingly red bandage on Donnie’s thigh, “Oh no, did he…?”
“Yeah,” Leo’s face was hard, serious in a way he rarely was around others, “He got Donnie and whatever non-stop bleeding slime he’s got in his claws—”
“A-anticoagulant,” Donnie muttered, blinking dazedly and then shaking his head. The movement made him sway and Raph reached out to brace a hand on Donnie’s shoulder.
“Whatever,” Leo stressed through his teeth, “Donnie got hurt and we don’t have anything that can help him. Is there anything you can do?”
“Of course! We have an antidote for the venom! Come, bring him to the truck!” Chaplin gestured, spinning away in a flare of his black coat.
Leo stood, grabbing Donnie’s arm to pull him to his feet. Donnie lurched upright and staggered, blood spilling out from beneath the soaked bandage. Raph didn’t wait, just scooped Donnie up in his arms and hurried to the EPF truck. It was big enough for even him to fit inside, with bench seats and some probably fancy looking equipment. But Raph only had eyes for Chaplin, who was frantically digging through supplies. He looked more and more stressed with each passing second.
“Where is it!?” He shoved a bag aside and yanked a kit from under a bench seat, flicking it open and pawing through the contents, “It should be here! Protocol is to have it stocked when chasing this guy down so—who the hell supplied this truck!? We’re missing half of everything! Damn it!”
Mikey jumped at Chaplin’s shout. It was the first time any of them had heard him raise his voice. Chaplin ran a hand over his close-cropped red hair and turned to them with clear lines of distress on his face,
“I—I’m sorry, I don’t know—we’re supposed to have the antidotes stocked in here but I can’t find them. They’re supposed to be here!”
Donnie’s head lolled against Raph’s plastron, his eyes lidded, his breathing shallow. He was bleeding out so quickly, distressingly quickly. Raph could feel his little brother’s hot blood dripping over his fingers, pattering onto the clean, polished floor of the expensive looking truck. A whine tightened in Raph’s throat and he clutched Donnie closer, pressing his hand over the wound, trying to do anything to help.
“Then where do we get some!?” Leo snapped, losing his cool, “Donnie needs help now!”
“The base has some, I’ll take you!” Chaplin pushed past them, sticking his head out the side of the truck, “Hey! There’s an emergency! Code 20! Guard the subject until retrieval comes!” Then he closed the door and pressed a button against the wall, “Hank, Code 20! Double time!”
The truck rumbled and lurched and nearly knocked all of them to the floor. Raph stumbled to a bench and sat down heavily, pressing Donnie close as the truck picked up speed. Leo sat down next to him, raising a hand to rest his fingers lightly against the side of Donnie’s neck, feeling his pulse. Mikey scrambled up to perch on Raph’s shell, out of the way but determined not to be left out.
There was so much red.
“What’s his blood type?” Chaplin was braced against one of the storage racks, digging through it again. When no one answered, he looked over his shoulder at them, “You don’t know? Okay, okay, that’s okay, we can work with what we have.” He piled supplies into his arms and nearly fell when the truck careened around a corner. He managed to stay upright and made his way over to them, “Raph, I need you to move your hand for a moment—let me put this towel—okay, move your hand back and press hard.”
Donnie made a soft sound of discomfort when Raph clamped his hand tightly over the wound site, his snout wrinkling. Raph churred, trying to offer what little comfort he could, and Donnie pressed his temple against Raph’s plastron.
Things moved quickly after that.
Chaplin put a needle in Donnie’s arm and handed Mikey the medical bag it was attached to, telling him to keep it elevated.
Leo stumbled through his limited knowledge and their haphazard medical care, trying to remember everything that could be important. Raph tried to help, but he knew even less than Leo.
Then there was a big garage and they were passing a bunch of humans that Raph didn’t have the time nor energy to care about. Then a hallway and a white room that made Raph shiver. Then someone tried to take Donnie from him and Raph almost bit them, a warning growl coming out from between his clenched teeth. Leo had to coax him into putting Donnie down on the white sheets of the hospital-like bed.
And then they just had to wait.
It wasn’t a long wait, they were even allowed to sit in the room while the medical team administered the antidote and stitched up the cuts in Donnie’s leg. The rest of them had their blood type tested and Mikey was able to donate some to help speed along Donnie’s recovery. He got cookies and juice for his efforts and tried to share them with Leo and Raph until the staff took pity and gave the other two treats as well.
Raph nibbled on the edge of a chocolate chip cookie, staring at Donnie asleep in a hospital bed and wondering just how close they had come to losing him. If it hadn’t been for the EPF, would Donnie still be alive? The thought made the cookie taste like ash and he shoved the whole thing in his mouth, swallowing it whole so he didn’t have to taste it.
Mikey and Leo were trying to fill the uncomfortable silence with meaningless chatter. But their dialogue always faltered whenever a human drifted near them. It was nice of them to try. It was more than Raph could do; his voice felt as though it was stuck somewhere in his throat and he couldn’t shake it loose.
They just had to wait.
When Donnie finally stirred, the three of them swarmed the bed immediately. Mikey threw himself into Donnie’s lap, snuggling him hard, Leo grabbed Donnie’s hand without the IV in it, and Raph settled for resting his palm on Donnie’s head. He already felt warmer.
“And ow…” Donnie groaned, squinting against the lights in the room, “Wha’ happened…?” He blinked the haze from his eyes, squirming to sit up with Mikey still clinging to him, “Where are we!?”
“The EPF’s main building in New York,” Leo answered, leaning on the bed with a smile, “They kinda saved your turtle bacon, bro.”
“You have my blood in you now!” Mikey said into Donnie’s plastron and his voice dropped into a delighted whisper, “We’re blood brothers.” He rested his chin on Donnie’s chest, smiling up at him.
“We are already blood brothers, Micheal, our DNA shares an identical—” Donnie was interrupted by Mikey’s high pitched chirp. Donnie sighed and rubbed the top of Mikey’s head, “Yes, all right, we’re blood brothers.” Mikey let out another squeak, his little tail wiggling so hard it pattered against the lip of his shell.
Raph chuckled, unable to keep the smile from his face, “How’re you feelin’ Donnie? You okay?” He dropped his hand to rest against Donnie’s back, naked with his battle shell removed, his soft shell exposed to a foreign environment. Donnie leaned into his touch, pressing his spine into the curve of Raph’s palm.
“Mh, tired. And I have a headache. To be expected after a certain amount of blood loss,” Donnie sniffed, glancing around the room, “How long have we been here?”
“Coupla hours tops,” Leo got to his feet, stretching his arms over his head and rolling his shoulders, “We should probably get back before Dad notices how long we’ve been out.”
Donnie hummed in agreement and swung his legs over the edge of the bed, completely ignoring Mikey who was determined to remained koala’d against Donnie for as long as possible. Donnie had to brace himself on the headboard to pull himself to his feet, but he appeared steady enough and was already straightening his gear, casting a glance around for the remains of his ruined battle shell. Raph frowned, looking around as well. Where had it gotten to? He vaguely remembered the EPF taking it off of Donnie but then he couldn’t remember where they’d put it.
“Oh you’re awake! That was fast!” Chaplin bustled into the room, smiling and relieved, “Good to see you on your feet again, Donatello! Any lingering pain? Dizziness?”
“No, I’m fine,” Donnie replied stiffly, fingers flexing into fists at his sides, “Where did you put my battle—”
“Good! That’s good to hear! I wasn’t sure if we would need to do something different for the antivenom given your biology, but it looks like everything’s worked out!” Chaplin clapped his hands together, taking a deep breath, “Gave us all quite the scare, though, haha!”
“Yeah, thanks for the save, Chaps, we definitely owe you one!” Leo snapped his fingers, winked, and shot Chaplin a finger gun, “Put it on our tab, yeah? But we should probably get home. We’ve been gone a while.”
“Of course! Of course! I understand, I just have a quick question for you?” Chaplin’s voice lilted up in a hopeful question, his gaze darting to each of them in turn. He reminded Raph far too much of Mikey in that moment; asking a question he knew would get a negative answer, but hoping he’d hear something different anyway.
“Shoot your shot,” Leo replied, leaning on the bed frame next to him.
“Right, well, since you’re all here, I’d like to actually talk to you properly. This shouldn’t take long, it’s just a proposal,” With a clearing of his throat, Chaplin straightened up, tugging his long coat straight and his expression smoothing into something more serious and focus, “This is a formal invitation to join the Earth Protection Force.”
Raph stared. He stared at Chaplin for a full minute. Then he glanced at his brothers. Leo looked genuinely taken aback, any clapback he might have thrown out momentarily stunned out of him. Mikey was slowly sliding down Donnie’s front, twisting his head enough to look over his shoulder at Chaplin. Donnie’s face was blank but his eyes were sharp, glittering with that hunger for knowledge that Raph recognized all to well.
“What do you mean by join the EPF?” Raph asked, because someone had to say something.
“Exactly what it sounds like! You’d be a member of the EPF, professional agents that would be dispatched to handle any threats to the planet and the people living on it.” Chaplin’s smile peeked out again, tugging at the corner of his mouth, “You’re already doing so much to protect New York, the least we could do is give you something back for it.”
“Are you implying,” Donnie was squinting at Chaplin, “That this would be a paid position?”
“Paid!?” Mikey yelped, finally letting go of Donnie and jumping to his own feet, “Like with money!?”
Chaplin laughed, “Well of course! You’d be working with us! We’d be partners! And we could do more than just pay you. The EPF has been working with mutants since the outbreak began; we’ve set up housing for them, provided schooling and education, medical care—”
“School…” Donnie breathed and now there were stars in his eyes, an eager grin on his face.
“You want us,” Leo gestured to himself and then at the rest of them, “To work for the government?”
“Ya’ know we’re teenagers, right?” Raph huffed out a half-hearted laugh, “Don’t think we’re allowed to work. Or, uh, maybe not work for the government? Um…”
“Raphala, my dear brother, perhaps we shouldn’t, as they say, knock it before we try it,” Donnie’s tail was twitch-twitch-twitching in excitement, “This is a big opportunity! Do you know what kind of materials I could get my hands on working here!? Maybe even uranium—!”
“No uranium!” Raph put his hand on Donnie’s head to try and keep his brother from vibrating into the air.
“I can give you some pamphlets and things to look over if you don’t feel like making a decision now,” Chaplin reassured with a light laugh, “And I don’t want to keep you any longer if you have places to be. This is a standing offer, so take some time to think about it. Come, I’ll show you out.”
Raph ended up tucking Donnie under his arm and carrying him out, Donnie too lost in his fantasies of uranium funded projects to pay attention. Mikey and Leo were badgering Chaplin with questions rapid fire questions about what sort of work the EPF did, did they have a cooking program, who was in charge of the medical care, and so on and so forth. Raph tried to keep an eye on them, but he kept getting distracted by the hallways and the people in them.
None of the humans seemed at all bothered by four mutant turtles being in their midst. Several of them smiled or waved or even said hello. There were office-looking spaces and halls that disappeared deeper into the building, with navigation signs hung at crossroads to give directions. Raph skimmed one as they went past:
MAIN LOBBY →
HR / ACCOUNTING →
SECURITY ↑
HEAD OFFICES ↑
MEDICAL WING A ←
ACQUISITIONS←
LOADING DOCKS ←
GARAGE ←
BUILDING 2 ↑
That...seemed normal for an office?
Raph had no idea what an office was supposed to look like.
If they worked for the EPF, would they get an office? One of those little square ones with the walls you could peek over? With a desk you put family photos on and coffee mugs with silly jokes and a big calendar with dates circled and meetings penciled in? Would they have to wear a suit and tie?
Raph tried to picture himself sitting in an office, dressed up like Chaplin with a cool coat and black tie. It felt small. But also very grown up and responsible.
Did offices have pizza parties?
The touch of cool concrete beneath his feet brought him back down to earth. They’d left the building and were standing in the garage area, the smell of motor oil and exhaust as heavy here as it was out on the streets. Chaplin was handing over a folder of papers to Leo,
“Here’s the information. If you make a decision or have any questions, please give me a call. Or we’ll bump into each other again somehow, haha. You can take it from here, right?”
“Don’t worry about us, Chappy,” Leo tucked the folder under his arm, waving Chaplin off with an easy grin, “We’re old pros at this.”
“Thanks for helping Donnie!” Mikey gave Chaplin a quick hug, lifting the human a couple inches off the ground before he bounced away again.
Chaplin, looking startled by the sudden display of strength, tugged his coat straight and just offered a smile. He looked up at Raph, gave a little salute, and ducked back into the building. Donnie, still tucked under Raph’s arm, continued muttering about all of the things he could with uranium and didn’t seem to notice anything had changed.
“C’mon, let’s hit the rooftops. I’ll port us home from there,” Leo jerked a thumb over his shoulder and they traipsed out of the garage, making their way into the alleys and finally the roofs. They were outside the Mad Dogs’ usual haunt, several miles outside of it, lingering on the outskirts of where the dense city bled out into wider streets and more suburban life.
Leo sniffed as he surveyed the area, “Well, at least it’s not New Jersey.” He tossed the folder of documents to Mikey and drew his ōdachi, “All right, fam, let’s get back to our cozy den. I think we’ve earned some good ol’ R-n-R!”
Raph wanted to argue that they should really talk about Chaplin’s offer to join the EPF.
But it had been a very long day. He was tired and hungry, and Donnie was starting to squirm and snap his teeth in a way that suggested he was going to start biting soon.
The serious talks could wait until later.
“And he just asked you to join?” April sifted through the pile of papers with one hand, the other holding the smoothie Mikey had passed her.
Raph and his brothers were taking it easy after that scare with the lizard yokai and had been keeping to the lair for the last few days. Besides, things had been fairly quiet and New York could survive a little while without them. They deserved a break.
But that calm would only last for so long before their restless energy reared its head again. So before they all went stir crazy and exploded out onto the roof tops again, Raph took the initiative to call April. If anyone knew anything about getting jobs and all the paperwork that went with it, then it was April O’Neil.
(Raph had tried to bring it up to Splinter, but all it had gotten him was a “What do you need a job for? You are a teenager! Go run around and be free! If you need some money for snacks, go bother Purple to rob another billionaire or whatever he does that he thinks I don’t know about!” and a dismissive gesture. Raph had filed that little tidbit away for later and then went to call April.)
“Yeah, I think he’s been trying to talk to us about it for a while,” Leo was lazily raising the sheets of one of the packets, looking for all the world like he wasn’t paying attention even as his eyes skimmed the paragraphs of text, “Kinda had us cornered when he helped Donnie though.”
“Poor Chaplin! I think he actually had a whole speech and tour planned too!” Mikey cheerily pushed a smoothie toward Leo, who dropped the pages and scooped it up with a grin, “But he was real nice about it when he realized we wanted to leave. He’s a good guy!”
“And the opportunities, April!” Donnie gushed, gesturing wildly and nearly spilling his own smoothie over the entire tabletop, “The resources we could have access to! The science! The laboratories! The uranium!”
“You still ain’t gettin’ any uranium,” Raph said, squishing Donnie back down into his seat, “Donnie’s gotta point though—these guys have a lot to offer. And who knows what could be a bigger threat than ol’ Shred Head.”
“Then what’s making you hesitate?” April started leafing through one of the pamphlets, eyebrows raising as she took in its contents. Raph recognized it as the one about housing options, the different floor plans and options for accommodating various mutant types had stuck particularly well in his mind.
“I dunno, we’ve always kinda been free agents,” Leo hummed, using one finger to flick the papers away from himself, a smirk on his face, “Vigilantes, beholden to no one! Wild and carefree! Mysterious heroes of the night! The mutant turtle ninja guys!”
“Leo’s right, the Mad Dogs,” Raph emphasized, shooting Leo a look, “Work alone—”
“Objectively, we do not.” Donnie muttered around his straw, “As we are a group of four—or five, depending on the accompaniment of our dear friend April—it is therefore impossible for us to, by the technical definition of the word, work alone.”
“Besides,” Mikey leaned against the table, chin in his hands as he beamed up at them, “Dad took us away from Barry so that we wouldn’t be weapons, right? I like Chaplin and everything he’s helped us with, but wouldn’t working for the government be kinda the opposite of what Dad wants for us?”
Raph blinked at his baby brother. Mikey had just put into words exactly the knot of trepidation that had been sitting uncomfortably in Raph’s stomach since Chaplin’s proposal. Splinter had stolen them from Baron Draxum because he had wanted them to be children, not warriors raised to destroy. Working for Chaplin would potentially be making them a gun for the EPF to point and shoot.
“Hm, what a bummer, hate to break the guy’s heart but I’m with Mikey on this one,” Leo straightened up in his seat, “Next time we see Chaplin, we’ll have to politely decline his invitation to become government stooges.”
“But uranium…” Donnie whined, trying to give them his biggest, saddest puppy dog eyes, a feat he had never excelled at, even when he was little.
“No uranium,” Raph repeated, scrubbing his palm over Donnie’s head.
“You never let me shine!” Cried Donnie, shoving Raph’s hand away and throwing himself dramatically across the table. Papers and pamphlets scattered everywhere, “My genius is being suppressed! Abused! A garden cannot grow unless it is nurtured, Raphael! Why would you seek to smother me so!?”
“If Don’s gonna start soquillerizing, I’m outie,” Leo laughed, sliding out of his seat, “I’m gonna skateboard. Where’s Shelldon? I need his help with a cool trick I thought of!”
“It’s soliloquy, you pea-brained dumb dumb!” Donnie hissed, narrowing his eyes at Leo, “And you are to leave Shelldon alone! He’s undergoing maintenance and a difficult system upgrade! He’s not feeling well and needs his rest!”
“Boooo,” Leo pouted, taking a drink of his smoothie. He eyed Donnie and a light turned on behind Leo’s eyes as a grin spread across his face, “Imma go bother him anyway.”
“Nardo, DO NOT!” Donnie screeched, launching himself over the table and scattering the papers everywhere. Leo cackled and scrambled out of the room, Donnie screaming after him. Mikey, caught up in the whirlwind of their energy, belted out a loud laugh and chased after them.
Raph snorted and looked at April, “You wanna grab the dance machine in the arcade before they do?”
“Oh hell yeah! I’m gonna beat your score this time, big guy!” April grinned, jumping to her feet and running after the rest of the family.
Raph stood but paused for a second as he glanced over the mess left behind on the kitchen table and floor, the scattered promises of the perfect home, of a sanctuary in the sun, of all their dreams coming true. It was tempting, the allure of a life they thought they could never have.
Leo’s indignant shriek echoed through the lair, followed closely by Donnie maniacal laughter.
Nah, Raph wouldn’t trade this for anything.
Chaplin caught up to them a few days later.
“Nice to see you four out and about!” He greeted them with his usual broad smile, despite being slightly red-faced and panting to catch his breath as he climbed over the edge of the roof, “Whew, you guys are fast! Wasn’t sure I’d—hoo...ha...haha—wasn’t sure I’d catch up to you! What’s the rush?”
“Pizza night, baby!” Mikey cheered, gesturing to the stack of boxes in Raph’s hands, “Hot, fresh, and beggin’ for eats!”
“In front of an all night marathon of Lou Jitsu’s greatest hits!” Leo added, “Hot Soup it up!”
“All within the world’s most optimized blanket fort, constructed for maximum comfort, airflow, space, and coziness!” Donnie finished with a dramatic flourish, spreading his arms and bending at the waist, “Our Friday evening is secured as The Best Friday Evening Ever!”
“Wow, sounds like a blast! I won’t keep you long then,” Chaplin chuckled, hands in the pockets of his long black coat, “Was just wondering if you’d given any thought to my proposal. I was expecting a call…?”
Raph ducked his head slowly behind the stack of pizza boxes so he didn’t have to look Chaplin in the eye. He may have forgotten they were going to talk to him. And also may have forgotten that they actually had the EPF’s phone number and could have called at any time.
“Ooouuuhhh I definitely did not forget you gave us a business card,” Leo had a grin in his voice and Raph groaned, rolling his eyes.
“Look, uh, Chaplin, sir,” Raph lowered the pizza boxes because if someone had to be mature about this, it sure as hell wasn’t going to be Leo, “We appreciate the offer, we really do. But, uh, we’re not, um...we don’t...really need a job? Or nothin’?”
“Mad Dogs roam free!” Mikey shouted, pumping his fist in the air. Leo hooted in agreement and traded a high-five with him.
“What my linguistically challenged brethren are attempting to say,” Donnie spoke over the back and forth Leo and Mikey had started up, typing away at his wrist tech without even sparing Chaplin a glance, “Is that while your offer of employment was both generous and enticing, we—as the unit identified as the Mad Dogs—function at a capacity that does not require additional management nor interference. And as...painful as it is to reject the opportunities your science might have provided, the four of us have come to the conclusion that we do not need nor want to be associated with a government body. In other words,” Donnie finally looked up, his face lit from beneath by his tech in a way that made him look ominous,
“Thanks but no thanks.”
Raph bit his lip, snaggletooth digging into his scales. He watched Chaplin’s smile tighten and then slowly fall. Chaplin let out a disappointed sigh, shoulders slumping for a moment. Then he appear to shake himself loose and straightened up, pasting that smile right back in place. Although now Raph could see how plastic it looked, like the way Donnie smiled when he was trying to he was trying to placate the rest of them and pretend to be in a good mood.
“That’s all right, I understand,” Chaplin said in a steady voice, that plastic smile firmly in place even if it didn’t reach his eyes. Raph actually felt kind of bad for the guy, “I do appreciate that you took the time to think about it. And please, if you ever need any help, the EPF’s door are always open to you. We’ll do whatever we can to assist you.”
“Thanks a bunch, Chappy,” Leo was leaning on Mikey, keeping Mikey’s head pushed into his shell and ignoring Mikey’s arms flapping and slapping at him, “We ‘ppreciate it! We’re just a buncha teens, right? Still in that whole “anti-government, stick-it-to-the-man” phase. Maybe when we’re older, yeah?”
Chaplin laughed, a little hollow, “Of course, of course, I get it! Please, go enjoy your pizza! The EPF will always be here if you need us!”
They called their goodbyes and left Chaplin standing on the roof alone. He smiled and waved at them as they leapt across the rooftops of New York, until they could no longer make him out in the dark. Raph felt bad about disappointing Chaplin, but it was for the best. They were heroes, not government attack dogs, and none of them liked the idea of being told what to do, especially when it came to defending their home.
The discontent lingered in the back of his mind until they got settled in the lair. Then there was movie marathons and pizza and squabbling brothers and play fighting to wash it all away. The four of them wrestled in Donnie’s (perfectly structured) blanket fort, shouted lines from their favorite movies, and ate that one slice of pizza too many.
It was creeping well into the daylight hours by the time things settled down.
They fell asleep with Lou Jitsu punching out bad buys in the background, well fed and tired and happy. Raph on his plastron, Mikey sprawled among the spikes of his shell, Donnie tucked under one arm and Leo beneath the other. The four of them in a turtle pile, warm and happy and as carefree and teenage mutant crime fighters could be.
It was the last time Raph felt that safe for a long while.
Raph wasn’t scared of bugs. In fact, he tended to like the little guys, thought they were pretty and weird, in their own way. Donnie hated spiders (even more now after Big Mama) and Mikey loathed ants, but Raph was never really bothered by any insects.
Until they ran into the mutant centipedes.
Nothing that big needed that many legs.
A fist cracking into the armored side of one of the centipedes sent the thing flying. Raph was already turning away before he saw where it went, gaze sweeping the area to take in the rest of the fight.
What had been a normal Tuesday afternoon had devolved into chaos when an entire office building had been driven out into the streets when the swarm of horse-sized centipedes had erupted from the walls. By pure luck, the Mad Dogs had been lounging on a rooftop nearby and, alerted by the sounds human terror, had charged in to the rescue.
The problem was that the office was cramped for space, the cubicle walls impeding their combat, their steps tangled with spilled pens and scattered office chairs, their jumps blocked by the hanging fluorescent lights. And there were a lot of centipedes climbing the walls and ceiling and getting underfoot, their legs skittering noisily over desks and computers, their pincers snapping and clacking. Raph had seen those same pincers crunch deep into one of the desks, leaving it cracked and dented. Pizza Supreme only knew what would happen if those jaws got a hold of them.
“This place is really crampin’ my style!” Mikey complained, skipping out reach of a lunging centipede and perching on top of a still standing cubicle wall, “There’s hardly any space to move!”
“Then you focus on keeping their attention while we pick them off,” Leo’s sword flashed in the overhead lights, slicing cleanly through the exposed underside of a centipede. A spray of orange goop followed the slash and Leo scrambled away from it with a screech of disgust, “Ewww! EW EW EW! Did it get on me!? Did I get any on me!? Ewwwww!”
“Focus, Leo!” Raph snapped, covering his fist in red light and swinging it down to crush the head of another centipede that had lunged at him from under a desk, “How many of these things do we gotta smash!?”
“This is an unusually high number of centipedes to be in one place,” Donnie shouted, his tech-bō flipping one of the bugs into the floor-to-ceiling windows with a sharp crack, “It must be a freshly hatched nest or something!”
“If these are the babies,” Mikey yelped as a centipede threw itself into the cubicle wall he’d been perched on, making it crumple. Mikey jumped into the air and clung to one of the light, drawing his legs back to aim a vicious kick at the attacking creature, “Then I’d hate to see their parents!”
Raph didn’t exactly see what happened. His attention was pulled away as he grabbed the end of one of the centipedes and whirled it around, throwing it at another group that was coming towards him. So he didn’t see it happen, but he heard it when Mikey screamed.
He spun back in time to see Mikey fall from the light fixture, crashing into the ruins of someone’s desk space. It looked like centipede had managed to clamp its pincers around Mikey’s calf and was thrashing around, even as Mikey kicked and struggled to get away. The rest of the bugs, seeing vulnerable prey, immediately changed direction and headed towards Mikey.
A roar tore out of Raph and he felt more than saw Donnie and Leo joining him in the charge to save their baby brother. He trampled several centipedes underfoot, grimacing at the crunch of their exoskeletons and the gush of their gooey innards. But there were more important things to worry about.
“Mikey!” Donnie got there first, bringing his bō down in a vicious arc to puncture the centipede’s head. Mikey cried out as his leg was jostled, and then again when Donnie crouched down to pry the pincers from the meat of Mikey’s calf. Raph and Leo stationed themselves to keep the rest of the bugs at bay, but not before Raph caught a glimpse of the wound.
The bite on Mikey’s leg was deep and slowly oozing blood. It already looked like it was inflamed and swelling. Mikey was sniffling miserably and Raph wanted nothing more than to scoop him up and take him home. But they had a job to do. And he was fine with punching mindless bugs until the deed was done.
At least, he was until he heard Donnie swear.
“Talk to me, Dee, what’s going on?” Leo was locked in stalemate with a centipede, his ōdachi braced against its pincers as he tried to push it back.
“Centipedes are venomous,” Donnie’s voice was tense and carried that breathless, frantic quality Raph rarely heard from him, “Normally they’re too small to do more than maybe cause some itching like a mosquito bite. But these ones…”
Raph couldn’t help himself; he whipped around to look at Mikey and his heart leapt to his throat. Mikey was pale and trembling, his chest heaving for air. The bite on his leg was discolored and angry. It looked awful.
“Mikey’s been poisoned!?” Leo kicked away the centipede he’d been struggling with and then swung his sword around to cut it in half, turning to his brothers before the pieces even hit the ground, “We gotta get him out of here! And find a cure or whatever!”
“But what about the bugs?” Raph knew Leo was right, getting Mikey healed was important, but…, “If we don’t get rid of them, they could get out and hurt people way more tha—AHHGG!”
The force of the centipede bite was crushing. Raph swore he could feel it grinding into the bones of his ankle as the stupid bug tightened its pincers into him. The pain flared and almost took Raph to his knees, but he staggered to keep his balance and let out a snarl, baring his fangs. His hand lashed out and closed around the midsection of the centipede, his grip squeezing with far more power than the centipede’s jaws. It writhed in his grasp for a second before its armor gave out with a wet crunch and it popped over his fingers. Its pincers loosened and he kicked it away with another growl. Already the bite was swelling and a sickly heat was pulsing from the wound.
“Weeeellll shit,” Leo hissed between his teeth, slashing down another centipede, “That’s two of us down.”
“I’m fine!” Raph argued back, steadfastly ignoring the fire slowly crawling up past his knee, “I can still fight!”
“You’re poisoned!” Leo shouted in return, frustration bubbling over his fear.
“Leo, we may have a problem…” Raph shot a glance at Donnie and his stomach dropped. Donnie was still on the floor next to Mikey (who was looking worse by the second), but he wasn’t looking at Mikey. Donnie was staring at his own hands, at his exposed fingers. At the cuts across the pads of his fingers.
Cuts that were beginning to look irritated and swollen.
Donnie had grabbed the centipede’s razor sharp pincers in order to pull them off of Mikey. They had cut his hands. He was poisoned too.
“No, no, Donnie, I’m gonna need your help with this one!” Leo’s voice cracked as he drove off another attacking bug and Raph could see the panic trying to claw its way into Leo’s mind.
He made to move forward, comfort Leo, reassure him. But a movement in the corner of his eye had him swinging back a fist to defend himself.
He wasn’t fast enough.
Whether it was the poison or his own careless distraction, Raph wasn’t fast enough to stop the jaws of another centipede from closing around his upper arm. He roared in pain and threw himself to the floor, crushing the bug beneath his weight. Unfortunately, once down, he struggled to find the strength to get back up.
The clammy heat smoldering from two points made his head feel hazy and his focus difficult. It started cinching tightly around his chest and a wheeze squeezed out his restricting lungs.
Barely a foot in front of him, Donnie was beginning to suffer too. He was doubled over, panting, his arms limp in his lap and sweat staining his mask. There was a haze beginning to cloud his eyes, the same one Raph was sure had started clinging to the edges of his own vision. Mikey was sprawled on the floor, not moving except for the shallow and rapid flutter of his chest.
With a laborious effort, Raph dragged his gaze up to look at Leo. Framed in a halo of Raph’s blurry vision, Leo looked fierce and terrified, a grimace of determined fear set on his face. Raph tried to say something, tried to offer help or encouragement, but his throat felt thick and tight and the only thing that came out was a reedy wheeze of hot air. It trembled out of him and the strength it took left his lungs squashed and shriveled.
Leo was fighting alone, desperately trying to protect the three of them from the centipedes that were now swarming in from all sides.
“L-Leo…” Donnie’s voice was a whisper among the clatter of mutant bugs and the song of Leo’s sword cutting them down, “Le...o...we need…”
“Save your strength, Dee!” Leo barked, “I’m getting you out of here!”
“Cure…” Donnie gasped, and Raph’s blurry vision saw Donnie finally collapse, falling to his side, “We…don’t hh...have...need h-help…”
“Where!?” Leo’s voice cracked and then he let out a scream of frustration as a centipede broke past his guard. It’s venomous jaws scraped down Leo’s arm, cutting through his glove and gouging a deep cut. It was only a matter of time now.
Raph would not allow it.
Summoning the dregs of his strength, Raph forced his body to move. To get up and protect.
He dragged his feet beneath him, every movement an exhausting burn that stole the breath from him. But he refused to slow down and pushed, pushed, pushed until he was on his feet, trembling but upright. His steps lurched and made the world sway and dip, but he forced himself to lumber over to Mikey and Donnie. They weighed nothing as he scooped them into his arms.
His mystic powers took a little longer than usual to spark to life. Red sputtered and flickered over his form, like a flame trying to catch, until they finally surged out in a shield. A glowing outline of Raph’s own form swelled around him and his brothers, keeping the bugs away for the moment. It couldn’t last, Raph could already feel the strain tearing at his mind and rapidly draining what little strength he had left.
“Leo,” He croaked, stretching out an arm to pull his last brother in. Leo went without a fight, bracing himself against the humming energy of Raph’s mystic outline, “...Chappy…”
Leo’s eyes widened and he gave a single determined nod. Raph was fading fast but he stubbornly refused to let himself go until he knew his family was safe. He focused all his energy into maintaining his mystic powers, heaving for breath that did not want to reach his lungs through his swollen throat. His vision was blurry, darkening, fading, but he still caught the flash of Leo’s ōdachi as it was raised and spun, the trail of blue sparks left in its wake a neon beacon.
Raph felt himself sinking, falling, a short drop. He crashed into a floor and the impact jarred him too much to hold on anymore. His mystics popped in a shower of sparkling red and he collapsed in a tangled heap beside his brothers.
Distantly, there was shouting, there was movement, there were people around them.
Someone’s hand—a human hand—touched him. Raph didn’t have the energy to growl at them.
A familiar voice came from far away, “It’s okay, you’re going to be okay. We’ll make sure of it.”
And then it went dark.
A headache and a dry scraping in his throat roused Raph from the quiet darkness he’d been resting in.
He groaned and shifted, squinting his eyes open just enough to try and see. Bright lights pierced directly into his skull, spiking the headache and making his stomach lurch. There was a bruise-like pain in his arm and leg and what felt like a fuzzy static over his senses, cotton around the edges of his thoughts.
Raph carefully pushed himself to sit upright, breathing steadily though the throbbing pain in his head. Once the thudding had subsided into a distant ache, he peeled his eyes open and blinked at his first proper view of where he found himself.
It disoriented him at first, trying to understand what he was looking at. He was in a room inside a room; a transparent box, its sides back of glass or plastic, completely see-through. There was a heavy metal door against one wall and the ceiling of the box was a single panel of lit up squares, bleaching out the shadows. The box was sparsely decorated, with only the wide cot Raph had woken up on, a metal sink, and a metal toilet that provided absolutely no privacy.
Except…
Raph rubbed his eyes, trying to shake the fuzz from his head. Because the room looked duplicated and...and…
And there was more than his box.
There were three boxes—four with the one he was in—pressed together to make a bigger box. And that box was inside another room filled with people in white coats and computers and equipment and suddenly Raph was nervous.
Then he was scared.
Because he could see, in each of those other boxes, was one of his brothers.
“Guys!? Hey!” Raph lurched to his feet, wincing as his headache spiked a protest into his skull. He stumbled across his little box to slam his hands into one of the transparent walls, pressing his snout into it as if he could simply pass through it, “Donnie! Donnie, wake up!”
Donnie shifted on cot he was laying on, letting out a raspy groan. He rolled over, dragging his limbs around like they were limp noodles, and squinted at the room. Then his predicament seemed to register and he shot upright, clutching his head with a hiss.
“Donnie!” Raph called again, getting his brother’s attention, “Are you okay?”
“My head hurts,” Donnie complained as he stood up, “And my tech is gone. I’m very not okay. Where the hell are we?” He wrapped his arms around himself, hunching his shoulders and shuffling about the spot to survey his box.
“Nhhgg, I think we’re still at the EPF,” Leo’s voice groaned from the box kitty corner to Raph’s, “Dunno where else we’d be…” He levered himself up, glaring at the people in white coats who had started taking notice of their activity, “I don’t like this.”
“Raph don’t like it either,” Raph grumbled, shifting away from the wall he shared with Donnie’s box to frown at the humans gathering around, “Hey! What’s the big idea, huh? Let us outta here!”
“Raaapphhhhh,” Mikey mumbled and Raph ran over to the wall that separated them. Mikey was stirring on his own cot, blinking blearily against the bright lights, “Why’re you yelling…? S’too early for that…” He sat up, scrubbing at his face, and finally seemed to realize where he was, “Wha...wait...what? What’s going on!?”
The fear in Mikey’s voice made a protective fire flare in Raph’s chest. He snorted angrily, stomping around the perimeter of his box and glaring at the scientists—for they could be nothing else—lashing his tail, clenching and unclenching his fists. With each pace, he caught glimpses of his brothers. Donnie hissed at the scientists hovering around his box, baring his teeth at them and backing up to press himself against the wall he shared with Leo. Mikey was trying to talk to the scientists, getting angry and upset when none of them would answer him. Leo was all over the place, scratching the walls, trying to reach the ceiling, yanking at the sink.
Raph was just trying to decide where the best place to try and punch through the transparent walls would be, when a voice rang out clearly over the murmurs of the watching scientists,
“That’s enough. Everyone back to your stations.”
The white coats immediately scattered. Raph turned, peering through Mikey’s box to see two people in long black coats coming through a door. One of them was a stranger; a tall, broad-shouldered man with close cut dark hair and piercing eyes that made Raph think of a hawk. The other…
“Chaplin!” Mikey bounced over to the wall closest to the two men with a smile, “Hey! Hi! Can you let us out of here? I think there’s been a mistake or something.”
“No mistakes,” Chaplin said brightly, hands clasped behind his back, “We have you quarantined for your safety as well as ours. This is a rather unusual setup but we figured you’d be more, ah, comfortable if you could see each other when you woke up. Are you feeling all right? No lasting effects? Any nausea or pain?”
“Oh, ya know, headaches, disorientation, probably some dehydration,” Leo cocked his hip out, idly gesturing with one hand with a lazy smirk on his face, “We’ll be fine once we get some room service. Who’s your pal?”
The tall man’s gaze shot to Leo, “I am Agent Johnathan Bishop, Director of the Earth Protection Force.”
Mikey cocked his head, “I thought Chaplin was the boss…”
Bishop switched his intense stare to Mikey, who just blinked at him, “Doctor Chaplin is our liaison. As well as the Chief Scientist.”
Chaplin beamed at them, “Quick thinking to teleport yourselves directly into the EPF headquarters! Any longer and that venom could have started doing some serious damage. Although, haha, you nearly scared us half to death! It’s fascinating you were able to teleport in here at all, really. This building has protections that should have prevented mystical entry. Yours must work on a different wavelength or—”
“Chaplin.” Bishop said, flat, without intonation, but something about it made Raph bristle.
“Ah, sorry, sir.” Chaplin shrugged, “Just got a little excited.”
“Sssooooooooo, thanks for your help and all, but we need to be getting home now,” Leo smiled in a way that showed his teeth like it was a threat, “We’re busy turtles, full schedule, you know how it is.”
“I want my tech,” Donnie grumbled, scowling at Bishop and Chaplin.
“I’m afraid none of you are allowed to leave right now,” Bishop spoke with a flat, impartial chill, a cold indifference that immediately made Raph’s hackles raise.
“You can’t keep us here!” Raph snarled, slamming his hands into the wall of Mikey’s box.
Bishop merely blinked at him, “You are still recovering from the toxin that was in your system. We’re keeping you for observation at the moment. You’ll be accommodated as long as you behave.” Then he turned with a flare of his coat and walked away, back through the bulky double doors. Chaplin gave them all a cheery wave and disappeared after him.
Raph glared at the doors, a growl rumbling tightly in his chest, nails scratching at the plastic-y surface of the wall. Everything about this situation had him on edge.
“...they’re not going to let us go,” Mikey’s voice was so soft that Raph almost didn’t hear him. Mikey was still facing away from Raph, looking toward the double doors. His hands were resting lightly on the wall, each breath of his a shaky, trembling inhale.
“Fuck.” Leo hissed and, given the circumstances, Raph was willing to let this one slide.
Donnie skittered along the wall and sank down to sit on the floor, wedged into the corner where the four boxes met. He pulled his legs up to chest and folded his arms over his knees, burying his snout in them so he could glare at everything going on outside the boxes. After a second, Leo traipsed over and leaned into his own corner, angling himself so he could face Mikey and Raph, his head against the wall he shared with Donnie. Then Mikey plopped down with his shell thunking against the walls. He starred at the scientists with an eerie blankness, legs stretched out in front of him, hands loose in his lap, like a discarded doll.
Raph cast a glance at the people in the room and then lumbered over to their shared corner. He sat down heavily, keeping his spiky shell to the rest of the room, and rested his forehead between the walls. It was as close as they could get, separated by four walls. But they had this much, at least.
“I’m getting us out of here,” Raph growled, so low and angry that it might have been inaudible to the humans in the room. He felt the words thrum in his chest and clenched his fists, “Raph promises. I’ll make sure all of us get home.”
His brothers raised their heads to look at him. The absolute faith and trust in their eyes made him feel like he could take on the world
It was surprisingly easy to break out.
They had been trying to figure out the best time to execute their escape plan when all of the scientists just...left. The room emptied, the lights dimmed, and just like that, the four of them were left to their own devices. The lights in their boxes were turned off completely, the lights in the rest of the room lowered so the shadows were heavy and the glow from the computers lit more than the overheads.
The suspicion of being left alone had only lingered long enough for them to decide that everyone had just gone home for the day. Because that’s what humans with jobs did, right? At the end of the day, they left work and went home. Then they came back the next day. So they had plenty of time.
Too much to not waste a second of it.
Punching through the thick plastic of their boxes had been easy. Plowing through the wall beside the reinforced door to the room had been even easier. It was suspicious that the hallway immediately outside the room was empty, but Raph wasn’t going to say no to a gifted horse or whatever the saying was.
Donnie wanted to find their stuff, but Raph knew it was more important for them to get out. Yeah, losing their mystic weapons sucked, but stuff could be replaced. No one could replace Raph’s family.
One quick dash down the barren hallway, one shoulder through the door at the other end, and all four of them spilled out into another part of the EPF building. Raph barely had a chance to take in the polished white floor and cream-colored walls before he registered the humans standing in the hallway. Humans with guns.
Raph pounced on the nearest one, grabbed them, and threw them into another armed guard with a roar. That seemed to stir the rest into motion and they all started shouting and pointing their guns. There were only a handful of them, five now with the two that Raph had knocked out, and his brothers were quick to leap on them. The guards were easily overpowered.
Humans had never been a problem for them.
With the trouble out of the way, Raph took stock of their location. They were at the end of a hallway that went maybe ten yards before taking a sharp right. There were only two other doors in the hall, but when Raph shouldered them open, he only found what looked like an employee break room in one, and a bathroom in the other. No choice left to go.
They followed the linear path forward, falling into a familiar formation. Raph in the lead with Donnie, two heavy hitters ready to clear out any obstacle whether it required brains or brawn. Mikey in the middle, fast and sharp but still the baby brother, and Leo bringing up the rear to pick off any straggling threats or warn of any attacks from behind. Normally this formation meant that Leo could see all of them and redirect any attacks or even the brothers themselves with his portals. But they were without their mystic weapons, so they would have to make do.
“Does this seem too easy to you?” Leo suddenly asked as they shook off another tussle with a handful of guards. Not one of the guards had managed to fire their gun before being knocked unconscious, “Like, this is a government facility, right? I thought there’d be way more security than this.”
“Maybe they don’t have the funding,” Donnie mused, bending down to pick up one of the guns. He mechanically checked the ammo with an ease that Raph Did Not Like and then shouldered it to aim down the sight, “Budget cuts and that. They seemed very small time when I researched them before.”
Raph grabbed the barrel of the gun and yanked it out of Donnie’s hands with a frown, tossing it aside, “They still caught us and Raph’ll be happier when we’re out of here.” Then he growled, “Don’t.”
Donnie, who’d been about to pick up another gun, let out a sheepish chuckle and straightened up.
“Still…” Leo kicked one of the guards on the floor beside him. The uncomfortable look on his face was a lot like the one he’d gotten when they’d first met Big Mama, “I don’t like how easy it’s been so far. Feels off.”
“Stop saying that!” Mikey swatted at Leo’s arm, “You’re gonna jinx us!”
Maybe Leo did jinx them.
Or maybe their luck had just run out.
Because while they were kicking open doors to look for an exit, Donnie suddenly let out a cry and fell back from the door he’d thrown open. Raph whipped around to see Donnie tangled in net, thrashing and clawing at it, the gaps barely wide enough for him to get his fingers through. Rap leapt to his aid but something lashed around his ankles, snapping them together and dropping him to the floor with a heavy thud.
Chin smarting, Raph twisted around to find his legs wrapped in a thick metallic chord, two heavy weights clanking together as he wriggled to free himself. His tail lashed as he tried to pull his knees up, tried to reach the chord to pull himself free. No matter how much he strained, he couldn’t seem to snap it, and his mystic powers sputtered uselessly, refusing to help.
“Leo! Mikey! Run!” He shouted, giving up on freeing himself to flop onto his plastron and dig his fingers into the floor, “Get out of here!”
“We’re not leaving you!” Leo was already running to Donnie, who had started biting at the woven metal net, his snarls peaking into a panic.
“I got you!” Mikey skidded on his knees beside Raph, grabbing at the chord, “We’re getting out of here together! We’re gonna go home!”
He had enough time to give one fruitless tug before the guards swarmed the hallway.
They poured out of the doors, armed to the teeth with guns, nets, ropes, and riot shields. They blocked either end of the hall, trapping them, leaving no room for escape. They were surrounded.
To Raph’s horror, one of the guards slung a catch pole around Mikey’s neck and yanked it taut, pulling him away from Raph. Mikey choked, eyes bulging as his hands shot to his throat, trying to dig his fingers into the loop and loosen it. His feet kicked as he was hauled backwards until the guards could converge and pin him to the floor. Mikey wheezed, tears bubbling down his face as he pressed against the hard tile, coughing too much to even fight back.
“LET GO OF HIM!” Raph snarled, getting his hands underneath himself enough to push up off the floor, trying to get his knees beneath him as well.
He was so busy trying to get to Mikey that he didn’t notice the other guards until there was a loop around his neck and his face was being shoved into the floor. He roared, bucking his shell up and swinging his arms back to try and knock his attackers away. Multiple hands pressed down on his arms, trying to pin him down, and Raph surged against them, throwing his body up with enough force to scatter the humans and get onto his knees.
But he was off balance, losing his focus in a rage-induced panic, and the humans took advantage of that.
Another catch pole snagged his left wrist, yanking his arm out and making Raph tip over. He crashed into the floor again, knocking his head hard enough that stars erupted in his eyes. By the time he’d cleared them, the humans had captured his other wrist and had twisted both hands behind his back. His arms dug into the spikes of his own shell as his captors pressed the catch poles into him, keeping him down.
Raph snarled again, whipping his head around, eyes wildly searching for his brothers.
Mikey was swearing and struggling, his cheek mashed into the tile floor. Angry tears were pooling beneath his face but his eyes were on fire. There were so many humans piled on top of him that all Raph could see was his head.
Leo had been grabbed at some point. It looked like he’d tried to run or maybe put some distance between himself and their attackers. It hadn’t gotten him far, though. He was wrapped in a metal net, with only one arm free of its tangles, which he was using to make a right nuisance of himself. He swiped at anyone within range, snapping his teeth and thrashing his body. But the guards were converging on him and he wouldn’t be going anywhere anytime soon.
A shriek from Donnie snapped Raph’s attention and a growl vibrated in his chest, shivering through him as he tried to find some leverage. Donnie was also belly down on the floor and was trying to twist himself around enough to bite at the hands pressing into his shell. His mouth was full of the cables of the net he was still trapped in, fangs gnashing at the metal, his eyes wide and white and panicked.
“Stop!” A voice shouted from somewhere, coming closer, the person sounding breathless, “Stop it, don’t hurt them!”
Raph craned his neck around enough to see Chaplin running into their midst. He looked almost distressed, his hands out and patting the air like he was trying to soothe the uncontainable tension. When no one really answered him, Chaplin started pulling some of the guards off of Mikey and shoving them away.
“Get off, you’re going to hurt him! You don’t need to be so rough!” He yelled, shooing at some of the guards. Most of them were still crouched over Mikey, keeping him pinned, while the rest hovered in a loose semi-circle.
“Sir, our orders—” One of the guards began, only to be ignored completely as Chaplin swept over to Donnie.
“Stop pressing his shell like that!” He barked, “He’s a soft shell, you’re going to leave bruises! You lot are such a band of thugs sometimes, I swear…” Chaplin crouched in front of Donnie, who hissed wetly, spittle flying from between his jaws where it was wedged open with the net, “I can get that out of your mouth if you’ll let me.”
When Chaplin reached out, Donnie hissed louder and started to shake, beak peeling back to flash even more of his fangs. Chaplin’s hands hovered for a second before he sighed and pushed himself to his feet. His gaze swept over them and Raph glared, snorting through his nose, his jaw clenched. He wanted to shout, to snarl, to swear, to curse, he wanted to ask why, he wanted to beg for release. He wanted to scream.
But all the words were stuck in his throat like a wad of chewing gum. So he could only breathe heavily and grow and glare at Chaplin.
Chaplin sighed again, heavier, and rubbed a hand over his head, “All right, gentlemen, you know what to do. Just...do try to be gentler. They’re young and we don’t need any unnecessary violence.”
“Yessir,” Several of the guards snapped salutes.
And then they leveled their guns at Raph and his brothers.
Raph saw red, a monster of rage and fear surging beneath his skin.
And then he saw nothing at all.
The first thing Raph became aware of was the hurt.
His body hurt. Not in the way it did after a good workout or after a hard fight, that deep tissue muscle ache that came from pushing himself just a little too far. These were pinpoint pains, sharp and throbbing and digging into the unconscious haze he’d been suspended in.
Raph shifted uncomfortably, swimming through the molasses of his brain waking up as he tried to catalog what he was feeling. A bruise-like twinge in the crooks of his elbows, the dull sting on his shell that he knew came from missing or broken scutes, a bad taste in his mouth, a deeper pain that dug into the skin on his upper left arm. There was a pressure that wrapped tightly around his arms, his legs, his face, even his tail. His head hurt and an uncomfortable ache pulsed from—
Raph’s eyes shot open, panic roaring through his veins, obliterating the building rage in a white-out sweep.
His breath stutter-stopped, heaving his chest, vision blurred and blinded by lights that were too bright. His brain was spinning because—because—
He hadn’t—
This didn’t happen. This wasn’t—
He couldn’t wrap his head around it.
His growl turned into a whine, long and painful and afraid. He tried to get up, lurched forward, only to be met with resistance, the pressure on his body digging deeper into his scales until he fell back. He’d barely moved. He couldn’t stand. He was on his knees, bent at the waist so he was low to the ground, his plastron laying parallel to it. His shoulders were sore but it was nothing next to that ache inside him, that uncomfortable, ugly sensation that made his stomach churn when he realized what it meant, what they’d done.
What they could be doing to his brothers.
The fury erupted full force.
Raph snarled, trying to open his mouth and call for his family. But the pressure just dug into his jaws, making him thrash and jerk his head. Chains rattled in his ears, so loud they almost drowned out someone’s voice.
“Calm down before you hurt yourself.”
Cold, calm, collected.
Raph snorted, shuddering, trying to focus through the racing in his head. His heart was pounding against his plastron, he swore he could feel it beating itself against the walls to be free. He swallowed, blinked, tried to breathe.
Slowly, the world settled into focus.
There was a pair of polished black shoes a foot away from from Raph’s snout.
He followed them up some pristine black pants before he had to tilt his head up. He couldn’t raise it far, something caught under his chin with a clang, jarring him and keeping him in place. But he was able to look up just enough to see Johnathan Bishop standing over him in his black coat, studying him with those sharp, unrelenting eyes.
Raph let out a warning growl.
Bishop just tilted his head ever so slightly, as if studying him.
That just made Raph angrier. He tried to lunge at the man, but found himself held back. There came that rattle of chains again, that squeeze of bindings on his body. They were tight around his shell and plastron, keeping his arms pinned to his side, more cinched around his legs to keep them folded underneath him so he was kneeling. His tail was straight out behind him, also held down to the floor. Worst of all was the muzzle strapped around his head, with something metallic between his teeth, biting into the corners of his mouth.
It was sick and humiliating and awful. Raph had never been so angry and horrified in his life.
Robbed of his voice and his movement, the only thing Raph could do was glare at Bishop. Glare at him and growl wordless promises of payback.
“You know,” Bishop suddenly spoke, his tone even and cold, “Animal born mutants rarely develop sentience. In fact the chances of happening are so astronomically low that it can be measured in decimal points. So I am curious, Raphael,” There was something mocking about the way Bishop said his name and Raph growled louder, “How it managed to happen not once, not twice, but four times. To four entirely different species of turtles—two of which are known to cannibalize the others.” Raph’s growl stuttered and Bishop raised an eyebrow, “Were you unaware of that fact? Alligator snapping turtles and spiny softshell turtles are known to eat smaller turtles. Like red-ear sliders. And ornate box turtles.”
Raph hissed and snarled, spittle flying past the open front of his muzzle. His spit didn’t even reach Bishop’s stupid polished shoes. Raph thrashed briefly against his bindings, only stopping to glare when Bishop crouched down to be more eye-level with him.
“Which begs the question as to why you haven’t. You four seem very close. In fact, it’s almost as if you were raised together,” Bishop continued and Raph felt a prickle of chilly apprehension in his stomach, a warning of something dangerous that he didn’t quite understand, “But the mutations affecting New York barely started a year ago. So...who made you? And for what purpose?”
The only answer Raph gave was to narrow his eyes and growl, long, low, and deep.
He wasn’t certain about what Bishop wanted, but questions like that would never lead anywhere good. Bishop was dangerous and every instinct Raph had was screaming at him to subdue the threat to his family.
Bishop only hummed and straightened up, turning and walking away. He brushed Raph off as easily as he could a speck of dust from his coat, and the sensation of being so readily dismissed momentarily jarred Raph from the red haze of rage and panic.
He breathed deeply and sneezed at the stench of ozone and chemicals. Properly centered and with a goal in mind, Raph refocused and looked around as much of the room as he could, searching for his brothers.
There weren’t any other mutant turtles in the room (that he could see), but there were plenty of humans. Most of them wore white coats and were bustling between tables heavy with science looking things and a bank of computers against a wall. It wasn’t a big room and on the wall directly across from him, Raph could see monitors with video feed. And though he wasn’t close enough to make out the details, he knew without a shadow of a doubt that those green shapes on the screens were his brothers. They were surrounded by shapes in white. Part of Raph dreaded to know what was happening, but another part desperately wanted to see.
The thing that gave Raph chills were the slots in the metal floor in front of him. Thick chains—ones he supposed that were the same as what was holding him down—were coiled harmlessly on the floor or trailing up from the slots to attach into the ceiling. There were more chains hanging down and it put Raph in mind of a castle dungeon.
Raph hated it.
He was scared and angry. He wanted to go home. He wanted his brothers.
He wondered if they would forgive him for leading them right into this trap. He’d leapt at the chance for help, and his brothers had jumped in after him, just as they always had.
All four of them had walked straight into the lion’s den on their own two feet and hadn’t even noticed when the jaws snapped shut.
A strained whine shook itself from Raph and his eyes burned. He desperately wanted to go back, to take back everything that had happened. To go back to a world where humans left them alone. Where things were fun and free and their biggest threat was the scattered remnants of the Foot Clan (and maybe Big Mama). He wanted to—these humans—his teeth ached and his claws itched and he wanted to—
The door opening jerked him from his spiraling thoughts.
“Oooooohh, another drab, gray room! What games are we gonna play in here? Spin the bottle?”
Leo was hauled into the room, staggering and unbalanced. His arms were bound behind his shell and there were thick leather and metal shackles on his legs; two on each leg below his knees, hooked together with heavy chains that limited his movement. An equally thick collar was around his neck, linked with three chains, each held tightly by a guard that was dragging him forward. Leo wore a smirk, casual as you please, his words mockingly jovially on his ever silver tongue.
“Also, uh, just thought you guys should know I am a minor—I mean, since we’re doing this whole masochism-bondage-thing. Which I also want to mention I didn’t consent to and I’m pretty sure I’m a top anyway, so—”
“Can someone please shut this thing up!?” One of the scientists that had followed Leo and the guards into the room shouted, gesturing angrily, “It’s been talking our ears off non-stop! Annoying little pest makes it hard to focus!”
Raph saw Leo’s confident grin falter and Raph’s stomach dropped when Bishop turned his attention to Leo. No, no, no, don’t look at his brother, keep your filthy humans eyes off his family!
“She does like to hear herself talk, doesn’t she,” Bishop’s clinical voice carried across the room as he stepped closer to Leo, who twitched, beak curling to show his teeth, “She also wants us to think she’s stupid. She’s a clever little creature.”
“Um, excuse me, my pronouns are he and him,” Leo sneered, leering at Bishop who didn’t even blink, “Dunno if you’re up with the times, bigot, but where I come from, we respec—”
“I think the feeder muzzle will suffice,” Bishop said, speaking over Leo, who sputtered angrily at him, “Unlike the snapper and the softshell, the red-eared slider is a rather common and...mundane species.”
Leo’s expression did something funny, crumpling in a way that suggested his feelings had been hurt while he struggled to maintain a composure of confidence and attitude. His mouth opened to retaliate—because Leo would always retaliate—only to snap his beak closed as more guards approached with what was clearly a muzzle.
“Hold her head back and get her mouth open.”
“Come on, open up.”
“You’re just making this harder than it needs to be.”
The amount of people swarming Leo and how low Raph was to the floor made it hard to see what was going on. But Raph still caught glimpses through the throng of bodies.
Guards grabbing Leo’s upper arms and holding him still, more of them gripping his head. Forcing Leo forward despite the way he twisted and bucked and tried to get away. Gloved fingers pinching his jaw, prying his mouth open while Leo scrambled and attempted to shake them off. Leo’s eyes, wide and white and full of panicked terror.
Then he was buried under humans in uniforms and Raph lost sight of him entirely.
Bishop stood by, watching the whole scene with an impassive coldness and his hands in his pockets. Raph hated him. In that instant, Raph wanted more than anything to get a reaction out of Bishop, to get the man to show any emotion at all. He wanted to see the same fear that had been on Leo’s face reflected on Bishop’s. He wanted it so bad it was like a physical burn, churning his lungs, super heating the air he huffed out through his snout. If he burned anymore he’d be breathing fire.
This place would burn.
Raph swore he’d burn this place to the ground and get his brothers out. No matter what it took.
Leo ended up chained to the floor on Raph’s left.
The chains coming from the slots were hooked to the straps on his legs and arms, and even his muzzle. They were looped through to a pulley system that yanked Leo to his knees and kept him there, panting heavily through his nose where it wasn’t covered. His muzzle was different than Raph’s was, a thick pad covered Leo’s mouth, muffling any sound he attempted to make, smothering him further.
Leo was leaning against the pull of the chains, letting them bear his weight as he tilted forward. His eyes were wide and unfocused, staring into some awful abyss. None of them had ever experienced being captured like this, not even when Draxum had snatched them from Big Mama’s train had they been subdued in such a way. It rendered them completely helpless. And Leo was starting to panic.
Not knowing what else to do, Raph rumbled out a shaky churr. It was hoarse and didn’t come out quite right, but the sentiment was there. Leo twitched and blinked rapidly and Raph churred again, trying to get his attention. When Leo finally looked around at him, Raph pressed against his restraints as much as he could, reaching towards Leo with everything he could muster. He couldn’t speak, but he tried to apologize anyway, with his expression, with the awkward clicks and sad whines.
I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I wasn’t strong enough, I couldn’t protect you, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry
There was a muffled grunt from Leo, a choked off hum that tried to be a returning churr. They leaned towards each other, straining against the chains. Raph wanted to believe if they just tried hard enough, pulled for long enough, they would snap their bindings and be free of this hell hole.
They both looked around at the sound of the door opening.
Raph didn’t think his heart could break anymore than it already had. He was wrong.
Because when he saw his littlest brother being dragged into the room, Raph felt shrapnel exploding into his chest from where his heart was supposed to be.
Mikey was barely on his feet, only kept upright by the guards with tight grips on his upper arms. His restraints were similar to Leo’s, though he lacked a collar, but his steps still staggered almost bonelessly. He looked on the verge of collapse, sobs shaking him from head to toe, his mouth pressed shut of his own volition as he desperately tried to keep his cries inside. It did nothing to stop the cascade of tears that ran down his face, leaving a trail over his plastron and across the room.
He didn’t fight back at all as the guards pressed him to kneel on the floor and began to hook him up with chains. But he flinched whenever one of them brushed against him and he kept his legs pressed tightly together. Raph realized that’s why Mikey had been having difficulty walking; he’d been keeping his thighs pressed together, knees knocking, inhibiting his own movements because—
Because the humans—
—they had—
—to his baby brother!
And they must have done it to Leo too because Bishop had said —
Something inside Raph felt like it crackled as ice flushed through his veins.
Where he’d expected anger, he only felt cold horror. His breath froze in his lungs, the shock at the realization of what had happened, what was continuing to happen, hitting him so hard it was like a physical blow. The weight of it was crushing. Raph felt himself bending under it, bowing under an immense pressure that was heavier than anything he had ever tried to shoulder. All the air had been sucked out of the room.
His brothers.
His precious little brothers, the brother Raph would have died to protect, and yet—
The tiniest peep broke through the ringing in Raph’s ears.
He twitched, shaking the frost from his insides, and took a shuddering breath. The tiny chirp came again, tentative and frightened, so small and quiet that Raph almost missed it.
I’m scared, I’m sad, help me, help, help, alone, I’m alone and I’m scared, help, someone help
A warm body brushed against Raph’s shoulder and he jerked a little, rattling the chains. He twisted his head as much as he was able to, peering from the corner of his eye to see what had touched him.
It was Mikey.
Whether it was because he hadn’t fought back or because he was the smallest or some other unknown reason, the guards hadn’t tightened Mikey’s chains to keep him in place. He was still bound, his arms behind his shell and his legs shackled, but they’d left leeway in his chains so Mikey had been able to scoot across the floor. He must have leaned against Raph, pulling back when Raph had startled, and was now looking up at him with a broken-hearted trust. Mikey still trusted him. For whatever god forsaken reason, Mikey still trusted Raph.
Tears welled in Raph’s eyes and he choked on the sob trying to escape his chest. He tried to churr, to comfort Mikey, but all that came out was a wobbling whine. Mikey peeped at him, watery and small, and tucked himself into Raph’s shoulder, shivering and hiding his face in the crook of Raph’s neck. Raph couldn’t stop his tears this time and they dampened his muzzle and dripped on the top of Mikey’s head when Raph tried to nuzzle him.
Raph shot a glance at Leo, blinking enough to clear the tears from his vision. Leo was watching them with a look of unabashed longing and Raph wished desperately that he could scoop his brothers into his arms and protect them from everything the world would ever throw at them. Raph would let the world burn to save his family, he was sure of that. But he also, at this moment, would tear himself apart and give himself over completely to the EPF if it meant sparing his little brothers from anymore pain and torment.
Their moment was interrupted when the door opened.
All three of them raised their heads. There was a fluttering moment of relief in Raph’s heart when he saw Donnie, but it was rapidly crushed under that same, awful frozen horror.
Donnie wasn’t moving.
He was completely limp and unresponsive, his body dead weight where it dangled between several guards. They were carrying him by his bound arms and legs, his neck bent and his head down, his bare shell to the room. The straps were tight on his limbs, there was a collar on him like Leo, and the straps of a muzzle around his head. His tail, shorter than Raph’s but still longer than Leo’s or Mikey’s, was pinned to his thigh in a way that looked highly uncomfortable.
The guards paused when they saw Mikey leaning against Raph, but when Mikey made no move towards them, they went to work. Donnie was set on the floor and the second the guards loosened their grip on him, he began to thrash and tried to wriggle away. Not unconscious, then.
Donnie was hissing and spitting, guttural snarls flying past his bared teeth as he tried to scoot across the floor away from the guards. They didn’t hesitate to pin him down, pressing against his shell until he shrieked and fell still again, breathing heavily. Donnie’s eyes were unfocused, nostrils flaring as he heaved for air while the guards went about hooking up the chains. When they started to pull tight, dragging Donnie upright, he gave a drawn-out whine and shook his head weakly.
“Let the soft shell stay loose,” Bishop was coming back and Raph hunkered protectively over Mikey, shifting himself the few, scant centimeters that he could, “The slider, too. But keep the snapper tight.”
The soldiers did as they were told, messing with a complicated looking remote control thing to change the tension of the chains. When Donnie realized he wasn’t being completely restrained, he threw himself forward and scrambled across the floor as quickly as he could. It was more thrashing his body across the metal and pushing himself along with his toes, but he didn’t quit until he’d wedged himself underneath Raph’s plastron. There wasn’t a lot of space between Raph and the floor, but if anyone was going to fit in there, Donnie would. And did. He wriggled his way into the slim gap as much as he could and then fell still with a final, threatening hiss.
Leo held completely still as the guards loosened his chains. Then he scooted across the floor in an awkward shuffle until he could tuck himself against Raph’s other shoulder. Leo pressed his head against Raph’s, the straps of their muzzles getting in each other’s way, but it was as close to a hug as they could get and Raph was grateful for it. Though he longed to wrap his arms around his brothers, he would take this small contact. It was better than nothing.
Bishop stood in front of them, looking down at them with the same chilly impassive expression he always wore. His voice was equally just as cold.
“Your previous containment,” He said, with a tone like he was lecturing a troop of soldiers, “Was a kindness and an exercise in trust. Since you have broken that trust, this is the consequence. Rest assured we don’t want to kill you and the less harm that comes to you, the better.” Leo snorted derisively and Bishop’s sharp gaze shot to him,
“Regardless of what you believe, the EPF is committed to protecting this planet by any means necessary. The four of you were given the opportunity to assist willingly,” At this, there was a noise of protest from Leo and a growling huff from Donnie, “And you rejected the offer. Any freedom of choice you had beforehand is now gone. You are property of the Earth Protection Force from now on.”
A keening wail of despair came from Mikey, so heartbreaking and lost that Raph’s eyes flooded with tears before he could even think about stopping them. Bishop didn’t so much as blink as Mikey hiccuped into a series of muffled sobs, breath hot on Raph’s neck.
“Allowing the four of you to be together like this is a privilege,” Bishop continued, raising his voice slightly to be heard over Mikey’s crying, “And it can be taken away. Any misbehavior, disobedience, or assaults on my people will see you all permanently separated into different cells. Any further problems,” Bishop’s voice was full of threat, the chill in his tone sharpening into a cutting blade of ice, “And I will make sure that none of you see each other ever again.”
It was a promise as much as it was a threat. The idea of being separated from his brothers, of not knowing where they were or what was happening to them, filled Raph with such a bone deep and wretched terror that he felt sick with it. His stomach heaved and he clenched his jaw around the metal in his mouth, his breath shaking as he tried to pull his family closer. He couldn’t lose them, he couldn’t! He’d do anything to keep them safe, and he’d do even more just to keep them in his sight.
The glare he sent Bishop was smeared with tears and hatred and desperation.
Bishop merely met the glare and had the audacity to twitch the corner of his mouth in a smirk,
“Welcome to the Earth Protection Force. I look forward to working with you.”
The scientists and soldiers left them alone for a while. The humans would watch them, make little notes, and then turn away again for a while. But no one tried to separate them and Raph tried to be grateful that small mercy.
Mikey cried into Raph’s neck until he couldn’t anymore. Then he just slumped against Raph, shivering on and off and sniffling. Leo was leaning on Raph’s other side, not as limp as Mikey, still tense and wound up. Donnie remained underneath Raph’s plastron, wedged as deep as he could get, and Raph could feel him shuddering. Everyone pretended they couldn’t hear Donnie’s muffled crying.
Raph let himself go slack against the restraints and winced at the bruising he’d dug into his limbs. His legs were falling asleep from being tucked under him and his neck and back were aching from trying to keep his head raised. So he let the tension in his body go, dropping his head to hang close to the floor, the chain on the back of his muzzle keeping his forehead from making contact. He was tired. He was so tired and so hurt and so afraid.
He tilted his head as much as he could, trying to look underneath himself and check on Donnie. It was hard, he didn’t have a lot of leeway, but he managed to spot the gleam of Donnie’s eyes watching him. Raph started up the best comforting churr he could manage, a low bass rumble below the frequency of human ears. He couldn’t hug his brothers, or even offer them words of comfort, but he could do this much, at least. And for what it was worth, it did seem to ease Donnie’s shivering, at least a little.
It was impossible to tell how much time passed.
Despite being the only one of them without a muzzle, Mikey never said a word. Though he did hum softly, barely louder than his own breathing—the themes from Lou Jitsu and Jupiter Jim movies, popular songs they had on repeat recently, commercial jingles, anything that crossed his mind.
Leo kept watching the rest of the room. He watched the humans more than the humans watched them.
Raph just rested. He would rest and store his energy for the right moment. Someone would slip up, or a kind scientist would see the error of their ways, or maybe Splinter and April would bust in to save them. Raph needed to be ready.
Everyone tensed when some soldiers and scientists approached them, Chaplin at their head.
The bright smile on Chaplin’s face ignited Raph’s anger all over again. He wanted that smile to be sinister and cruel and mean, he wanted it to twist Chaplin’s kindly features into a vicious sneer. It should have been a smile that told the truth about what lay beneath it. But it was the same, friendly smile Chaplin had worn every time he saw them. Raph hated him for that.
“Time for dinner!” Chaplin cheered, clapping his hands together, “You will be getting three meals per day and food will never be taken from you as a punishment. We don’t want to starve you! Sit them up, please.” He directed the last statement to the guards, who pulled out the remotes for the chains.
The CH-CHNK CH-CHNK CH-CHNK of the chains being pulled was loud when it was amplified four times. The sound dug into Raph’s ears and he winced as the chain on the back of his muzzle suddenly jerked taut and pulled his head up. With every clunk of the winding machine, the chains tightened to make him sit up on his knees, back straight, arms still pinned firmly to his sides by the thick straps.
Pins and needles erupted painfully down Raph’s spine as he was finally allowed to straight out after hours of having been bent double. It made him gasp with a relieved sort of pain, the stiffness in his legs flaring anew. He longed to be able to stretch out and work the kinks and cramps from his body.
The downside, of course, was that it meant his brothers were pulled away from him.
Mikey whimpered but didn’t fight the chains, even scooting away from Raph to keep them from pulling too tight. He didn’t look at the humans standing over them, trying to curl up and hide his face in his knees. But the chains yanked him straight, making him sit on his knees in a position similar to Raph. Though Mikey was still able to move his head without the restrictions of a muzzle. He took advantage of it but ducking partially into his shell, peering over the lip of his plastron at everyone else.
There was some resistance from Leo at first. He strained for a moment to remain next to Raph before the chains went taut and started dragging him across the floor. He went boneless then, just let the restraints pull him into place while he glowered at Chaplin.
Donnie did not go quietly.
When his shelter began to disappear, he squirmed and tried to press closer to Raph. When the chains started hauling him across the floor, away from Raph, away from his brothers, Donnie began to thrash around again. He bucked against the restraints, hissing and snarling and getting tangled in the chains. The guards bent down to unwind the chains and Donnie let out a wail that was equal parts rage and despair, a plea for them to just leave him alone. By the time he was on his knees like his brothers, he was panting for air, wheezing past the muzzle and shuddering hard enough to make the chains rattle.
“There we go now, it’s not that bad,” Chaplin was still smiling and Raph had never wanted to break someone’s jaw more than he did Chaplin’s, “I know you must be uncomfortable and frightened, but we’re not trying to hurt you! If you behave and cooperate, you might even get to eat an actual meal with your hands!”
Raph didn’t get that. How else were they supposed to eat dinner if not with their hands?
He suddenly had a horrible vision of being forced to bend over a bowl of dog food, eating out of it on his hands and knees like a pet. The image made his stomach twist and he shook it from his mind.
The truth turned out to be just as humiliating.
Mikey, Raph, and Donnie were all spoon fed a bland mush of something that felt like wet paper towel. Mikey was able to just eat it, though he made a face of disappointed disgust with every bite.
Raph and Donnie, on the other hand, had a laborious process where the guards used the metal bits of the muzzle to crank their mouths open, a scientist gingerly put a spoonful of the stuff in, and then the guards let their mouths close again so they could swallow. It was awful and degrading and a terribly slow process.
Donnie especially appeared to loathe the texture of the slop they were being fed. He’d tried to spit it out at first, retching the second it was in his mouth. But they’d cranked his jaws closed and he’d had no choice but to swallow it. When they gave him another spoonful, he swallowed it before they even had a chance to close the muzzle again. It had been a little bit funny to see the looks on the scientist’s faces when they realized what was going on.
Raph might be able to fit an entire pizza in his mouth, but he still had to chew it. Donnie could slorp a whole slice down without even tasting it if he wanted to. At least he’d found something to make this work for him.
The same could not be said of Leo.
One guard stood behind Leo and held his head tightly, which made Leo let out a low growl. Another guard unbuckled the straps keeping the front of the muzzle covered, skipping to the side when drool splattered out the front and onto the floor. Leo huffed out a weak laugh, wet and gargling. His mouth was forced open by a ring of metal wedged behind his teeth. Which meant he’d been drooling in his muzzle since they’d put it on him, barely able to swallow. Strings of saliva were still dripping out of his mouth, dribbling across his plastron and legs.
Chaplin tutted, sounding sympathetic as looked at Leo, “Honestly, the feeder mask? That’s just cruel. And stupid. There’s a high risk of choking with it!” Chaplin sighed heavily and waved at the hesitating staff, “Just feed him. We’ll deal with replacing the muzzle later—if it’s actually needed at all.”
The scientists glanced at one another, hesitating for only a moment longer. Then, to add to Raph’s ever growing list of nightmare fuel, they slid a tube into Leo’s mouth.
Leo gagged, tears springing into his eyes as the scientists gently tried to coax him into breathing through his nose and swallowing and all sorts of empty platitudes. Raph almost choked on his own food because he was so distracted by the amount of distress Leo was in and the awful, wet gagging noises his little brother was making.
When the humans got the tube situated where they wanted, with Leo’s head tilted back and held in place by the guard, the scientists started to pour little bits of food down the tube. Leo had no choice back to choke it down. Tears were spilling over the guard’s gloved hands as Leo shuddered and dry heaved against the intrusion. At one point the scientists had to pause their feeding because Leo began to hyperventilate, breathing ragged and raspy through his nose, his chest heaving as his eyes rolled, looking for an escape.
They found Raph and the two locked gazes.
Raph wasn’t sure what kind of expression he wore, wasn’t sure what Leo saw in his eyes. But whatever it was, it was enough for Leo to take deeper, slower breaths until he was in control again.
Mikey started crying again and Raph wondered just how many tears were still inside his baby brother. Was it possible that Mikey could cry out all his tears until he shriveled up into a raisin?
“There, there, Michelangelo, it’s all right,” Chaplin soothed gently, not touching Mikey but crouching down just out of Mikey’s range of motion, “I know this is a scary change for you all and things are different here, but you’ll get used to it in no time. Once you’ve all calmed down and had a chance to acclimate, maybe you’ll see how much good you’re helping us do!” His charming smile widened, so friendly and so full of awful lies, “You’re going to help us save lives, Michelangelo! So many people will be safe because of the work you’ll assist us with! And after all,” Chaplin rose to his feet, smoothing out his black coat and beaming around at all of them as if he were a teacher proud of his students,
“Isn’t saving people what being a hero is all about?”
The humans were “generous” enough to allow the brothers to sleep curled together in a pile on the floor.
They removed Leo’s muzzle and loosened all the chains, even Raph’s. Stretching his legs out made another painful wave of pins and needles surge through him, but it was worth it to be able to move.
The four of them met in the middle, scooting across the floor in a rather silly manner that might have had them laughing under different circumstances. But there were no smiles in this situation, just a desperate, aching need for closeness.
Mikey curled up as small as he could, pulling his legs into his shell a little. He let out a startled, watery little chirp when Donnie flopped nearly on top of him, chin resting on the curve of Mikey’s shell and giving one, luxurious stretch before drawing his knees up to his chest. Leo wrapped himself around the rest of Mikey, nuzzling his mask-free face into Donnie’s softshell, much to Donnie’s chagrin. Donnie’s tail twitched in its bindings, like it wanted to whap Leo on the face, and Leo hummed as he snuggled closer. Mikey peeped at him, shifting to rest his head in Leo’s lap and pushing his snout into Leo’s plastron.
Raph settled around all of them, curling around his brothers as much as he could, trying to shield them from everything else with his considerable bulk. He still couldn’t hold them, his arms still pinned, and laying on his side would probably make the arm underneath him fall asleep. But it was more than worth it to be able to press himself against all three of his little brothers, to try and project some semblance of safety into the nightmare they found themselves in. He churred a low, deep rumble, nuzzling as close as he was able, and tried to pretend they were home and safe.
The lights in the room were dimmed, deepening shadows, and the screens were turned off. Most of the scientists left, but a few of them remained. The soldiers stayed at their stations around the room. In the lower lighting, it was easier to see the red lights of security cameras peering at them from every direction. It made Raph’s scales prickle uncomfortably to know they were still being watched, regardless of what they did.
“...wanna go home…” Mikey whispered softly, his voice shaky and hoarse, smaller than Mikey had ever been. Mikey shouldn’t have sounded so small. Mikey was a firework, not meant to be contained.
“They’re probably listening,” Leo barely moved his mouth when he spoke, his voice a low hum that could have been mistaken for a churr, “Careful what you say.”
Mikey sniff miserably, hiding his face in Leo’s lap. Donnie huffed through his muzzle and squirmed a little until he could nose the back of Mikey’s head, snuffling at him. Mikey shivered in a little giggle at the aggressive sniffing and turned his head around fast enough to give Donnie a smooch on the end of Donnie’s snout. Donnie yanked his head back with an offended noise, settling himself back on Mikey’s shell as if he was dismissing the lot of them.
They all knew better.
All of them were scared. They had nothing to combat the fear with except each other. All the could do was laugh in the dark.
“We’ve been gone for a while,” Leo whispered, making Donnie shudder when his breath ghosted over Donnie’s shell, “Dad might’ve noticed. Apes definitely has. And she knows who we’ve been talking to.” His eyes glimmered in the low lighting, hopeful despite everything.
They’ll come for us, Leo’s gaze said. They’re going to come save us.
Raph believed him.
He had to.
He didn’t know what else to do.
The EPF separated them in the morning.
The soldiers didn’t even wait for them to wake up before the chains started to tighten and pull them apart.
Mikey chirped in alarm as he was pulled out of the warm embrace of his brothers, jarring Raph awake. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep, he’d wanted to stay awake and keep watch over them so they could be ready when the humans inevitably came back.
Their chains got tangled around one another and Leo gave the soldiers a smug look as they were forced to crouch down and fix the problem. Donnie was hissing at them the whole time, but he made no move to bite. Raph growled whenever one of the soldiers made Mikey flinch, glaring at them until everything was straightened out.
The chill that seeped into his scales without his brothers near him felt like frostbite.
“Good morning, turtles!” Chaplin appeared looking far too chipper, with Bishop at his side, “I hope you all slept well! We’re going to be doing some tests first thing this morning, and then you’ll have your breakfast.”
“Cooperation earns you privileges,” Bishop said coolly, not even bothering to look up from the tablet he was skimming, “And misbehavior will revoke them. You can make yourselves useful, or you can make yourselves miserable. The choice is yours.”
Chaplin’s smile turned tight but he didn’t deny anything that Bishop had said, “Right! We’ll start with the biopsies, I think. I’m very curious about what’s going on in that intelligent little head!” He was grinning eagerly at Donnie when he said this, and Donnie’s eyes widened in panic.
Raph didn’t know what a “biopsy” was, but it was scaring his brother so he didn’t like it on principle alone. He snarled a useless threat as the soldiers converged on Donnie, grabbing his chains and hoisting him to his feet. Donnie shook his head, trying to pull away, that keen of fear breaking Raph’s heart to hear.
“It’s gonna be okay, Dee!” Leo called, still miraculously free of a muzzle. He leaned against his restraints, pushing towards Donnie who looked back at him with hopeless terror, “Just—just do what they say, okay? It’s gonna be okay! We’ll be right here when you get back! Donnie! Donnie, it’s gonna be okay!”
It rang like an empty promise across the metal walls of the room.
Donnie was hauled away, tripping over his own feet as he tried to keep looking back over his shoulder at them. Then he was gone and Raph’s heart was pounding in his chest. He wanted to ask what a biopsy was but he was muzzled, and part of him almost didn’t want to know. The panic was starting to fog the edges of his thoughts again, one brother missing from his sight making him anxious and twitchy. The chains rattled as he flexed against his bindings, uncomfortable and restless.
“Anything you’d like to get started on in particular, Director?” Chaplin turned his charming smile to Bishop, “Before I start monopolizing the turtles?”
Bishop let out a low hum, finally looking up from his tablet. His sharp eyes danced over Mikey, then Raph, and settled on Leo. The two stared each other down, Leo with a sneer twisting his face to show his teeth in a very blatant threat. Bishop didn’t look bothered at all.
“I have an idea for both Leonardo and Donatello,” Bishop said slowly, “But the slider is the more expendable of the two, so we’ll start with her. Room five, please. And bring both a reptile veterinarian and a gynecologist; they’re being reassigned to Project Venus.”
Leo looked absolutely floored at the words that had just come from Bishop’s mouth. And while Raph didn’t recognize a lot of them, he sure as hell knew what “expendable” meant.
And his family was not expendable.
He snarled angrily, lurching against the restraints at Bishop as the soldiers grabbed Leo and began to take him out of the room. Bishop merely looked at Raph with that same, cold, unimpressed air about him. Then he turned away in whirl of his stupid black coat.
“And get that snapper under control, Chaplin,” Bishop called back as he followed the guards and Leo out, “He’s far too temperamental to be anything better than leverage as he is.”
Chaplin sighed, running a hand over his face as he looked at Mikey and Raph, “I don’t suppose you two will come quietly, will you?”
“Wh-what’re you doing with Leo and—and Donnie?” Mikey asked, his voice shaking even as he glared with all the hurt he could muster at the humans around them.
“Oh, they’re just going for some tests, that’s all,” Chaplin smiled gently, like he was trying to placate them, “Donatello is going for some scans and some brain biopsies and—”
“What’re they gonna do to my brother’s brain!?” Mikey cried, “Don’t hurt him! Please!”
“It’s okay, no one’s going to get hurt!” Chaplin raised his hands, trying to reassure, but Raph just growled at him, “A biopsy is a simple procedure and he won’t feel a thing! He might be a little dizzy afterward, but he’ll be fine, I assure you. We just want some brain tissue samples, it won’t even hurt him.”
“A-and Leo…?”
“Mmm, Project Venus is Bishop’s thing,” Chaplin shrugged apologetically, “I don’t actually know a lot about it since he’s the one heading it. Something to do with eugenics, I believe. That’s not really my thing; I have a much broader area of study. So!” He clapped his hands together, grinning at them with an eagerness Raph was coming to detest, “Let’s get you out of those stress positions and into some lab work, yes?”
Mikey got taken to a different room and Raph was left all alone to spiral in his own head. He struggled to keep himself out of that weird, savage state he slipped into when he was alone, teetering on the edge of the feral abyss.
Chaplin came back without Mikey and Raph wailed in heart-broken despair. He couldn’t stop the guilt and the notion that he would never see them again from swelling in his chest until it felt like he would drown in it. He would die without them. He couldn’t be Raphael without them. They needed to be together.
“Wow, you really don’t like be apart from them, do you?” Chaplin was a lot closer than Raph remembered him being, mere inches away from Raph’s snout, “An interesting reaction...maybe we should get a psychologist on board, see what they can make of you. All right, boys,” Chaplin spun a finger in the air, smiling as Raph sniffled pathetically, “Open him up.”
Raph’s mouth was forced open by his muzzle again. This time they held his mouth as wide open as they could, straining his jaw. Drool collected and oozed down his chin, his tongue suddenly uncomfortable in his mouth when he didn’t know what to do with it.
“Huh, no lure,” Chaplin had the audacity to reach into Raph’s mouth and grab his tongue, holding it in his hands and examining it like this was business as usual, “And yet still quite dexterous and definitely more pointed than a human’s.” The latex of his gloves tasted foul as he ran his hands all over the inside of Raph’s mouth. It was a position of vulnerability that Raph had never experienced and it was chilling him to the core.
The ease and casualness with which Chaplin handled Raph was sickeningly impersonal, as if Raph were just a mere animal being examined instead of a sentient teenager. He gagged horribly when Chaplin’s fingers prodded the back of Raph’s throat, and the metal of the muzzle keeping his mouth open creaked threateningly. Raph suddenly had a much deeper respect of Donnie’s aversion to certain foods.
“When you’re feeling more comfortable, I would love to do some strength tests!” Chaplin said excitedly as Raph was allowed to close his mouth finally. His throat was dry and his jaw ached and he wasn’t even given the chance to stretch it or try and ease the pain.
“Snapping turtles have an incredible bite force,” Chaplin was still talking and Raph dearly wished the man would stop sounding so enthusiastic, “I imagine yours must be a great deal stronger, given your size! Not to mention your muscle structure. How much can you lift? Surely moving a car must be easy, hm? OH! But eyewitnesses at the docks said they saw an entire cargo ship being hurled through the air! Was that you?”
Raph shook his head before he could stop to think about it. He froze when Chaplin’s eyes lit up.
“It was one of your brothers!? Amazing! Which one? Leonardo? Oh, Donatello and his tech, surely? ...Not little Michelangelo?” Even though Raph was certain he’d been holding perfectly still, Chaplin must have seen something, because his smile got even bigger, “Incredible! You four are amazing! I’m so excited to keep working with you! We’re going to do so much good together!”
No, Raph thought darkly, eyes narrowing as Chaplin continued to chatter on.
No, nothing good would come from EPF.
When they brought Donnie back, his head was wrapped in bandages and he wasn’t moving. Raph expected to see him jump to life like he had before when the soldier put him down to chain him up, but Donnie lay still. He looked like a boneless rag doll, dropped on the floor and discarded. Raph whined, leaning against his restraints until the guards finally loosened them on Chaplin’s command.
He scooted across the floor, dragging himself over to Donnie. His brother stank of chemicals and humans and blood. Raph rumbled a passing threat to any human within earshot and bent over Donnie, sniffing at him and nuzzling him, trying to tuck his brother close and shield him from the rest of the room. Whether it was all the jostling or Raph’s familiar scent, Donnie stirred with a muffled chirp of confusion. The usual headgear muzzle was missing, with only a simple strap and cage around Donnie’s snout to keep his teeth at bay.
Raph churred soothingly as Donnie blearily came back to himself, blinking and squinting in the lights.
“M’uh...Raph…?” Donnie sounded wrecked, his voice a hoarse whisper, his eyes bloodshot and red from tears, something thick and sloppy about the way he tried to form words, “Where…”
Raph hooked his chin over Donnie’s shoulder, as close to a hug as he could get with his arms pinned. He tried to offer comfort, tried to be the bastion of safety he’d always been for his brothers. He’d never felt so helpless.
“M’kay, Raphie,” Donnie mumbled, “Jus’...head hurts...nause—nausea…” He let out a groan, curling against Raph and shivering, “How’re...every’ne else?” When Raph couldn’t bring himself to make any kind of response, Donnie pulled back enough to squint around, “Wh...Leo? Mike? But...said they’d be here…” Donnie’s eyes filled with tears and he pressed himself into Raph’s plastron, shaking hard and hiccuping, “He said—Leo said…”
All Raph could do was sit there while Donnie cried.
He couldn’t even hug his brother.
It kept happening.
Of course it did. The EPF was just a march of misery, one thing after another, an endless line of teats and torments.
Raph didn’t know how many days it had been.
Why hadn’t Dad and April come for them?
Why hadn’t anyone come for them?
Where was the part where a kindly scientist or guard found they could no longer stand the evils that the EPF were doing, and heroically staged an escape to free them?
Where was the humanity in this place?
Because it sure as hell wasn’t with the humans.
Bishop took Leo and Donnie a lot. Sometimes they would be gone all day and when they came back, they looked sick and haunted. They always curled together and tried to hide underneath Raph, who did his best to protect them from prying eyes.
It was almost just as painful to watch Mikey crumble under the weight of Chaplin’s attention. Raph’s baby brother grew angrier with their situation as the days passed, breaking into furious tears as the faith and trust and hope and joy he’d held so dear was ripped from him again and again. Mikey had always been a display of fireworks to Raph, a never ending show of lights and color. But in the EPF, those fireworks were being coaxed into an inferno, a wildfire that was threatening to get out of control.
The day Mikey came back with a muzzle and blood smeared across the side of his face, Raph knew he’d failed his baby brother.
As for Raph himself, he rarely got to see outside the room.
The EPF didn’t trust him to behave outside his restraints, no matter how compliant he tried to be. But that didn’t stop them from sticking him with needles and wires and peeling scales from him and doing whatever they wanted.
More than anything, Raph desperately wanted to hold his brothers in his arms again. He missed hugs. He missed being warm and feeling safe.
He missed home.
Mikey didn’t come back one day.
Raph was beside himself. He cried and called for his baby brother until his voice gave out. Leo and Donnie picked up where he left off.
None of them slept that night. They sat up in shadows of the night shift, crying out for their missing sibling, despairing that they couldn’t reach him, that he wasn’t there. It was a lonely and frightened stretch of time, endless in its terror that they would never see their littlest brother ever again.
When Mikey was returned the next afternoon, his arms were wrapped in bandages and there were more on his head and legs. He smelt of medicine and, very faintly, of fire.
“Mystic powers,” He whispered to his brothers when they crowded him, rattling chains covering their voices, “They made me use them. I dunno how.” He looked at the wrappings on his legs, his arms still held behind his back despite the injuries,
“It hurt.”
Chaplin was very curious about their mystic powers.
Leo said they couldn’t use their mystics without their weapons. Chaplin laughed and told him not to doubt himself. Then he asked where Donnie’s mystic weapon was.
“Donnie doesn’t need mystic powers,” Leo spat while Donnie glowered at the floor, looking hurt, “He does the coolest stuff with his tech and it’s stuff none of us can do!”
“Hmm, does he not have mystic powers?” Chaplin wondered aloud, observing Donnie with a bright curiosity, “Or has he simply not activated them? How interesting! Once I isolate the strange wavelengths you four run on, maybe I can assist you with unlocking them!”
Raph didn’t like the sound of that. He didn’t like the sound of that at all.
Donnie was returned one night with bandages on his head again.
He threw up his dinner when it was fed to them.
The humans took Donnie away and neither Raph nor his brothers slept, waiting for him to come back. And he did come back, Chaplin had him returned in the early hours of the morning. He even apologized for the separation, with such a genuine sympathy in his voice that Raph wanted to punch Chaplin’s face until it was unrecognizable.
The lies that Chaplin had fed them, the false friendship, the betrayal of trust, those stung the worst.
Raph knew he wasn’t super smart, not as smart as Donnie for sure. But he’d thought he’d be able to see a threat coming before it ever had a chance to hurt his brothers. He’d thought he could stop it before they were ever struck too hard by a blow too heavy.
But Raph didn’t plan.
He’d never had a plan.
He had always charged in, fists flying, ready to take out the enemy before the enemy could lay a finger on them. And his brothers had always followed him, loyal almost to a fault, with so much faith in their eldest brother that they didn’t look before they leapt. They had always been so sure that either they would land on their feet, or Raph would be there to catch them.
But where were they supposed to go now? Who was supposed to catch them?
Raph couldn’t.
Maybe he never had been able to in the first place.
Time blurred.
Raph tried to think of a way out.
But even when they finally let him out of the room, let him walk on his own two feet, he was too afraid to act. He was too afraid of what might happen if he lashed out. He didn’t want to be separated from his brothers. He would break if he couldn’t be with them, he knew he would. He would shatter into a million pieces and Raph would be gone. And then there would be no one to save them.
Because no one else was coming.
April wasn’t coming. Splinter wasn’t coming.
No one was coming to save them.
Chaplin put Raph in a big machine carved with symbols. It hummed and sparked and it felt like it was pulling something from deep inside Raph to the surface.
It hurt. It hurt so bad.
Raph screamed. He screamed and screamed and screamed until he wasn’t sure if he was actually still screaming anymore.
Red light was ripping out of him, tearing through his scales, cracking through his flesh. It burned. It burned and hurt and it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Raph knew it wasn’t, even if he didn’t understand what was happening, he knew it wasn’t supposed to be like this.
They wrapped his bleeding arms and legs in bandages.
Raph let himself cry into Mikey’s lap that night, while his baby brother whispered that it was okay, it was okay, he knew it hurt, he’s sorry, it’s okay.
He felt weak and useless and pathetic.
“Then use Leonardo! Donatello has a brilliant mind! We could use that!”
Raph didn’t move, keeping his breathing deep and steady, pretending to be taking a nap as he listened to the argument between Chaplin and Bishop. He ached everywhere and didn’t feel much like moving anyway. He was alone; all of his brothers had been taken away for tests.
“Donatello will never cooperate with the EPF,” Bishop’s tone was clipped, as annoyed as he ever sounded, “None of them will, they made that perfectly clear. And Leonardo’s portals are more valuable than—”
“You can’t be serious, Bishop,” Chaplin sounded like he was pouting, “You haven’t even begun trials yet and you want to start with Donatello!? You’ve said yourself that Leonardo is expendable!”
Raph clenched his jaw behind the muzzle, biting back a growl.
“You can’t keep them all to yourself, Chaplin,” Bishop shot back, “Project Venus—”
“Won’t get far without my data!”
“Watch your tone.”
There was tense silence. The shuffling of other staff in the room was awkward and stilted.
“A compromise,” Bishop finally said in a terse voice, “I will start with Leonardo. The first batch will come from him as a control. The second batch will come from Donatello the week after. Then you can have them both back after their batches have been confirmed to have entered gestation in viable hosts.”
“Fine,” Chaplin said, “Please try not to break them; there’s still so much we can learn from them.”
“I promise nothing.”
A fire Raph had thought long extinguished sputtered deep inside him.
This was bad. This was very, very bad. He didn’t understand it, but he knew it was bad.
He would not let them break his brothers.
He would not let himself be broken.
Leo was hauled back into the room, stumbling on his feet. He looked dazed and far away, his breath hitching with shaky sobs as tears rolled down his face. He whimpered at the human hands on him, curling up to try and pull into his shell and crying out when the guards yanked his limbs straight to keep chaining him up.
The second they were left alone, Raph threw himself forward and Leo collapsed against him with a heaving sob. He wailed into Raph’s plastron, unable to speak, the agony of his cries almost too much to bear. It made Raph’s eyes burn with sympathetic tears. Donnie hesitantly scooted closer and draped himself over Leo’s shell.
It only seemed to make Leo cry harder.
He pulled his knees up to his chest, making himself as small as possible, and cried harder than Raph had ever seen him cry in his entire life.
Bishop had done something terrible to his brother. Raph didn’t need to know what it was, he only needed to know that it was Bishop who had done it.
They were going to pay.
Raphael was going to make the Earth Protection Force pay.
Mikey was always tired lately.
His arms and legs trembled and the fissures from whatever mystic testing Chaplin was doing didn’t fade anymore. They were golden cracks that glimmered like molten metal across Mikey’s scales. Sometimes they felt warm to the touch, warmer than Mikey himself.
All of them had similar injuries, jagged lances of color blooming across their scales. Leo’s and Donnie’s were the smallest, only peppering their fingers and the backs of their hands. Raph’s covered his feet and ankles, and the ones on his hands were starting to reach his wrists. Mikey’s were the worst by far. The cracks spread from the tips of Mikey’s fingers, narrowing and fading just before his elbows. The ones on his legs were halfway up his calves.
Despite the exhaustion that haunted him, despite the pain he was probably in, Mikey never stopped looking angry at the humans around them. He would glare at them, sometimes furious tears would run down his face when the emotion was too much. He didn’t shout or lunge at them, didn’t attack them or make any move against them. But the hatred and fury in his eyes was spoke volumes.
All of them were angry.
But no one, perhaps, was as angry as Michelangelo.
Bishop took Leo away one morning before they had even woken up.
They were disturbed from their slumber by Leo’s frightened chirps and the sensation of the chains pulling tight.
Horror flooded every inch of Raph that wasn’t crowded with hatred. This was it, this was the moment, he just knew it. He knew it deep down that this was when Bishop was going to do something to Leo that they would never be able to get Leo back from.
And once he was done with Leo, he would do the same to Donnie.
And there was nothing Raph could do to stop it.
He barely registered the bland slop they were fed for breakfast. He didn’t really feel the tug of the chains when the guards pulled him up off the floor. His head was spinning, desperately trying to put together pieces of a plan, trying to find a way to get to his brother. Because whatever was going on, he knew he couldn’t let it happen.
Raph was still dazedly trying to string two ideas together in a panic when he was herded out of the room.
The screams hit him first.
Leo was screaming.
Raph had never heard anything in the hallways outside the room. It had always been silent, except for footsteps and maybe some directions or idle chatter.
But he could hear Leo, muffled slightly by walls and distance. He could hear his little brother screaming and begging for his life.
“PLEASE NO! PLEASE DON’T DO THIS! I DON’T—I DON’T WANT—DON’T! NO! NO! NONONONO! HELP! PLEASE HELP! RAPHIE! DONNIE! ANYONE PLEASE!”
Something snapped.
Or maybe, more accurately, something opened.
If he thought back on it later (and he rarely would), Raph would say the moment felt very much like when he dove off the roof to catch Leo after Draxum had dropped him.
Something slid into place, like a key fitting perfectly into a lock. The key turned, it clicked, and a door burst open. The flood that the door had been holding back rushed in, a tidal wave that filled Raph from head to tail tip.
It made him feel alive.
Raph clenched his fists and red light erupted around his body, a shield in the shape of himself. The soldiers with him cried out, stumbling back and firing their guns. The darts bounced uselessly against Raph’s shield and he turned his furious gaze on them. He saw his glowing white eyes reflected in their black-out helmets.
The nature of their faceless uniforms made it easy for him to sweep them aside. They smashed into the wall and crumpled there in a heap.
There was no way to know what room Leo was in, but Raph marched straight towards it anyway. He didn’t know how he knew and it didn’t matter how he knew. Leo was there and Leo had called for him. That was the only important part, that was the only thing that mattered. His brother had called for help. Raph would always answer when his brothers called.
Raph ripped the door straight out of the wall with a snarl. The room beyond was small, with a lot of medical stuff, including a hospital bed with a weird contraption on its end. Leo was on the bed, his legs strapped into the contraption, hoisted up in the air and spread apart.
There were tools inside of Leo. Metal instruments, wet and gleaming and sick and wrong.
Blood was slicked across Leo’s thighs and the front of the hospital bed.
The roar that tore out of Raph nearly shook the room. The soldiers tried to shoot at him but he crushed them under his fists made of light. The scientists screamed but their voices were cut short when Raph smashed them into the floor
A sharp click drew his attention and Raph whipped his head around. Bishop was standing over Leo with a gun to his head. Not a tranquilizer gun like the guards had, an actual gun, the kind that shot bullets. The kind that would kill. Raph growled, low and angry.
“Drop it,” Bishop ordered, unflinching as Raph loomed over him, “The mystic shield. Drop it now.” When Raph bared his fangs, Bishop dug the gun into Leo’s temple, making Leo whimper, “We both know I can pull this trigger faster than you can get to me. You might kill me, but Leonardo will be dead too.”
Raph hissed through his teeth, tail lashing. He glared at Bishop, hating him. But Bishop had a gun.
He dropped his projection. It fizzled out in a cloud of red sparks, disappearing as quickly as it had appeared. Raph snorted bitterly, challenging, furious with himself for being caught. He felt a whisper of a thought that told him to wait, just hang on, a moment will come, there will be an opening. He can still free his family, just wait, just wait.
“Good,” Bishop said, “Now…”
The gun swung to point at Raph and fired.
It was one of the loudest noises Raph had ever heard.
The tranquilizers had always just popped, a sharp snap. The gun shattered the little room. The noise was enough to make his head ring and his vision spin.
Someone shouted, a noise of agony and anger. Was it him? It should be Raph, right? He’d just gotten shot and yet...and yet…
Raph blinked the stars from his eyes and looked down at himself. He expected to see a broken plastron and a fountain of blood. He saw instead black wrappings on his arms and legs, a black belt around his waist, and something glowing in the middle of his chest.
Confusion seeped through the rage as he reached up to touch the glowing circle (flower? Pie?). His attention was jerked back up by a furious hiss and a strangled cry.
Leo was standing.
The straps on the hospital bed were broken and the contraption was bent out of shape, the tools scattered across the floor. Leo was on his feet in front of it, those black wraps on his arms and legs, black belts across his chest and shell. His eyes were blazing white through his blue mask, that same glowing symbol was on his front, and his stripes were lit like neon beacons. He had a hand around Bishop’s throat, pinning the man up against the wall, fingers biting deep into Bishop’s neck.
Blood was splattered across the floor from the bed all the way to Bishop.
Bishop’s arm that had been holding the gun was missing.
“Get portal chopped, fuckhead.” Leo hissed between his teeth.
And he crushed Bishop throat in his hand.
The wet snap should have made Raph sick. But it just felt satisfying.
Leo dropped the body to the floor and stepped over it like it was nothing. Blood was still drying on his legs but he ignored it, moving over to a counter and yanking open a draw to pull out a couple of scalpels. He tore them from their sterile packaging and then spun them in his hands. Electric blue light flashed and suddenly he was holding twin katanas.
Raph cocked his head and felt that whisper trickle across his senses again. He reached past Leo, grabbed a couple of scissor-y looking tools, and his mystic energy rushed up his arms. Brilliant red surged across his vision and Raph adjusted his grip on his dual sai.
He looked up and met Leo’s gaze.
“Let’s go get Mikey and Donnie.”
Leo nodded and they stepped out of the room.
There were guards in the hallways but they could do nothing against Raph’s shield and Leo’s swords. All of them were cut down in seconds.
The door to the familiar, awful room was smashed in with a single swing of Raph’s fist. It crushed several humans underneath it as it hurtled across the room and crashed into the computers. The humans started screaming. Raph roared in reply, ripped one of the screens off the wall, and hurled it into the computers as well.
He sensed rather than saw Leo slicing his way to Mikey and—
Donnie wasn’t there.
Raph snatched one of the human scientists off the floor, lifting them high into the air as he drew his projection up to its full height. They kicked and wriggled, clawing at the red light, trying to escape.
“Where is he!?” Raph snarled, the glowing fangs of his project bared at the human, “Where’s Donnie!?”
“Ch-Chaplin!” The pathetic human squeaked, “Chaplin took her—him! Chaplin took him! I dunno where!”
Raph scowled and dropped the human. They fell and hit the floor with a crack of broken bones and a scream of pain. They weren’t dead. They should have been grateful.
He stomped across the room to where Leo was helping Mikey to his feet. Their eyes met and suddenly Raph knew that Leo knew what Raph was already going to say out loud. Mikey staggered into Leo and Raph leaned down to scoop his baby brother into his arms, pulling Mikey into his shield to keep him safe.
“I’ve got you, big man,” Raph rumbled, carefully draping Mikey over his shell so his hands could be free, “Now we’re gonna go get Donnie.”
“Then home?” Mikey asked tiredly, his arms trembling as he wrapped them around Raph’s neck.
“Then home,” Raph promised. He could feel the spark of something distant from Mikey, like a flame trying to catch. But he couldn’t stop to think on it, they needed to get to Donnie.
Just like with Leo, Raph knew exactly where his brother was.
Chaplin and some soldiers were dragging Donnie through the hallways, probably trying to escape with him. Donnie was on his last legs, barely keeping upright as he was pulled along. He turned his head to look at them before the humans even registered they were there.
Raph saw the instant that Donnie put together what the blood on Leo meant.
Then there was that familiar surge, that brilliant blaze of connection and unity and light. Donnie launched himself from the floor, dressed in black wrappings, his tech-bō literally constructing itself in his hands as he swung it in a dangerous arc. The crunch of broken bones was audible even when the guards screamed in pain and crumpled to the ground. Donnie was seething with fury, purple light pixelating from his form as he spun around, long violet mask tails whirling with him like ribbons. He smashed the end of his bō into the last soldier’s throat, instantly crushing it.
His battle shell, black metal that seemed impossibly dark, like a void to the eyes, clicked over his back as it formed in another cascade of violet light. The streaks of purple on his arms and legs pulsed blacklight violet, a glow that almost hurt to look at directly. He seemed like a predator as he stalked down the hall towards Chaplin, who was backing up slowly, his hands in the air.
“Look at you,” Chaplin breathed, eyes alight, his smile looking just a touch manic, “Look at you! You’re magnificent! I knew it! I knew you had so much potential! Just think of what we could do if you just worked with us! The people we could save!”
“Parasite!” Donnie hissed, flicking a blade from the end of his staff, “I’m going to gut you and turn you into a living battery, you wretched—”
“Donnie, wait!” Mikey’s voice cracked loudly in the white hall.
Donne froze, looking back over his shoulder with a glowing white eye. He radiated fury and murderous intent; Raph could feel the bloodlust simmering from Donnie like a heatwave, the danger of it flickering against the edge of Raph’s mind.
“Put me down, Raph,” Mikey murmured and Raph knelt, letting Mikey slide off his shell, feet catching on the floor. Raph’s tail curled around, giving Mikey a brace as his little brother caught himself.
Then, Mikey took a deep breath, straightened up, and walked forward on his own. As he stepped out of Raph’s shield, fire seemed to ripple from his body, light weaving around his arms and legs. Black wrappings covered the cracks in his limbs as a black belt cinched around his torso. Flames blazed behind him, leaving the long tails of his own bright orange mask, his markings glowing brightly along with eyes and the symbol on his chest. Mikey was a sun that washed out the white of walls, the warmest light in existence.
With a huff through his nose, Donnie shifted and stepped aside, moving back to stand by Raph and Leo. All three of them watched silently as Mikey approached Chaplin.
“Hi Chappy,” Mikey’s voice was light, a smile playing across his face as he stopped a foot or so away. His hands were at his sides, fingers trembling a bit, but otherwise at ease.
Chaplin smiled, a little warily, “Michelangelo! Don’t you understand? All I’ve ever tried to do was help you four! I know more about mystic powers and the genetics of mutants than any other human—”
“Please shut up,” Mikey said, still with that pleasant smile, and Chaplin’s mouth snapped shut, “Everything you’ve ever said was a lie. We trusted you. I trusted you. I thought you were a good person, Chaplin. I thought you wanted to help us protect people and be heroes. But you lied.” There was an edge in Mikey’s voice that Raph had never heard before, something dark and vicious and hurting so deeply that it was a bottomless well of pain.
“I didn’t lie!” Chaplin tried to argue, somehow still smiling despite the threats standing in front of him, “I just—”
“I said shut up,” There was a nunchaku in Mikey’s hand, the chain the same molten gold of the cracks in his arms, “You lied and you hurt my brothers. You hurt me. I’m never going to forgive you. Not ever. I hope you rot. I hope you’re miserable.”
“Are you going to kill me?” Chaplin grinned, something wild in his eyes, “Are you going to be the weapons I know you are?”
Mikey sighed, his pleasant smile gone, now something sad and almost disappointed on his face. He idly spun his nunchaku and it ignited, flames spitting from its golden chain.
“Yeah, Chappy. I’m going to kill you. And then we’re going to go home.”
Part of Raph wanted to stop his baby brother from taking a life. Mikey didn’t need to carry that kind of burden. But if he stopped Mikey, if he let Donnie or Leo kill Chaplin instead, Mikey might never be able to put the unease inside himself to rest. Raph could feel that as well as he had felt Donnie urge to kill.
Mikey deserved to be the one to kill Chaplin.
A single swing of his nunchaku broke Chaplin’s legs, sending him crashing to the floor with a shriek of pain. His screaming didn’t stop as mystic fire began to chew through his clothing, then his flesh. It crawled up his shattered legs and consumed his torso.
They watched until he stopped screaming.
Then they walked away.
The Earth Protection Force buildings burned.
They watched briefly from the shadows, no longer glowing now that their job was done, as the entire complex crumbled beneath itself. Mystic flames could not be put out with simple water. No one could stop the blaze from spreading.
It would burn until it scorched and deadened the earth upon which the EPF buildings had once stood. Only then would its raging hunger be quenched. Only then would it finally sputter out and fade into smoke with the coming dawn, not even leaving ashes in its wake.
The four of them would be long gone before that.
They left before the stars had begun to disappear from the sky.
The sewers had never felt safer.
The ambient dripping, the damp, the cold stone beneath their feet, the worn paths they knew so well.
Leo stubbornly led the group, red flaking from his scales with every step. He moved stiffly, but refused to be carried. He kept hold of a katana in one hand, the other trailing over the sewer walls, fingers bumping and dipping along cracks and grooves as if to keep himself grounded.
Donnie followed behind him, the steady rhythm of his tech-bō clinking against the ground as he leaned on it filling the silence between them. His battle shell looked so heavy, the weight of it dragging on his shoulders. But, like Leo, he was too stubborn to do anything about it. The pressure was a familiar comfort. No one could blame him for clinging to it.
Puttering along behind Donnie, was Mikey. His steps faltered every now and again, his eyes lidded and tired. Raph longed to scoop him up and just carry him home. But he didn’t want to smother Mikey, not unless Mikey asked for it.
Raph himself trailed at the back of the group. He was tired down to his bones but kept putting one foot in front of the other. His tail dragged on the floor, adding a faint scrape to the sounds around them. He just wanted to be home. He just wanted to be safe.
They all kind of picked up the pace when they realized how close to the lair they were.
And if they fell through the hidden entrance together, gasping like they’d been drowning, desperate to inhale the scents of home, then no one saw it but them.
Somehow, they dragged themselves a few steps farther, and collapsed to the floor in a pile, pressing against each other because they could not bear to be apart. Raph wanted to say something, to say they had done it, to say that they were home and they were safe now.
But all he managed to do was start crying.
“Who’s there!? How’d you get in here!? I’ll—”
Raph looked up through teary eyes and saw April O’Neil. The bat in her hand fell to the floor with a clatter, her eyes wide in shock.
“Guys...is this a trick…?” Her voice shook, “S-Splints! SPLINTER! SPLINTER THEY’RE HOME! THEY CAME BACK!”
April dove across the room and Raph opened his arm to catch her. She was grabbing at all of them, cupping their faces, touching their shells, tears splattering each of them as she whipped around to look at them. Mikey peeped at her and burst into his own tears, clutching at April’s jacket, while Leo and Donnie jockeyed for position on her shoulder, bashing their heads together even as they sobbed.
“April!? What is all this racket!? Who came...back…”
Raph barely caught a glimpse of his father before Splinter was tackling them all. For someone so small, he still had that Lou Jitsu force behind him and he knocked them all to the floor with a cry,
“MY BOYS! MY SONS!”
They were home.
They were safe.
They were together.
Nothing was going to pull them apart again.
“We looked for you! We looked everywhere for you!”
“I went to Big Mama. I am not ashamed to say I begged for her help. We made a deal—”
“Dad, you didn’t—!”
“She rescinded it when she found out who had taken you. Canceled the deal completely and apologized. She said there was nothing she could do.”
“We were gonna break in—”
“You were going to break in until I convinced you not to!”
“We just needed help, needed a plan.”
“No one wanted to help us against the EPF.”
“Blue...this blood….why...how did…oh. Oh, my poor boy. My son, it is all right. Everything is fine now. Shhhh, it’s all right, it’s all right…”
“We need to call Draxum.”
“What!? Why do we need that old goat!?”
“The EPF did...something…”
“Oh my god…your arms…”
“It’s on all of us. Mikey’s is the worst.”
“Dad, I know you hate him, but…”
“Very well, we will call Draxum.”
“The scars will never fade, but you will all heal in time. Your mystic powers are fine, though I would recommend not using them for a while.”
“What about what happened when we escaped?”
“That I don’t know. You may have to speak to the ra—to Lou. I don’t recognize this symbol at all.”
“...Barry?”
“Yes, Michelangelo?”
“Did you look for us?”
“…yes. If I had been stronger perhaps the EPF...I am sorry I could not save you.”
“You did WHAT!?”
"I dunno, we...glowed? And the Hamato crest—"
"Oh that's what that was...!"
"...the crest appeared. Right here. On all of us."
"What does it mean?"
"Well...there is a legend..."
"Hey, Raphie...?"
"Hm, yeah?"
"We're...we're okay? Right? We're safe now? Right?"
"Yeah, big man, we're safe. And Raph ain't gonna let anything happen to none of you ever again."
"I'm not gonna let anything happen to you either."
The night was still, quiet except for the sounds of insects and animals rustling in the brush. The shadows were heavy outside the city, dark and deep and soothing in a way. The stars were more visible, though the light pollution still bleached out most of them.
Todd let them camp on his property whenever they wanted. He gave them free reign of the forest around his puppy sanctuary, and passed them lemonade whenever he saw them. But for the most part he left them to their own devices.
Sometimes the city was too much. Sometimes it was too crowded, too full of humans, too noisy and overwhelming. They had grown up in New York, it would always be their home, but it wasn’t exactly a space that let them breathe. Sometimes they just needed to get away for a while. They just needed somewhere to hide from the lights and sirens and the people.
“Do you ever feel bad about it?” Mikey asked out of nowhere, curled up in his camper chair with his hoodie pulled over his legs. His eyes reflected the campfire, a hazy orange glow dancing in their depths.
“Mm, ‘bout killing them?” Leo jabbed a stick into the fire, stirring the embers. A cloud of sparks spat into the air, sputtering fireflies against the dark sky.
“Yeah,” Mikey hummed into his knees. His fingers plucked idly at his sleeve of his hoodie.
“I thought I would feel bad,” Raph said, tucking his blanket around himself to better cover his tail against the chill of the night, “But...I don’t really. I kinda don’t feel anything about it.” He frowned, “Is that bad?”
“Maybe,” Donnie was so wrapped in his own blankets only his eyes were visible, “We might still be processing the event. Maybe one day we will regret it.”
“Do you regret it?” Leo peered around at Donnie who just blinked at him.
“I haven’t decided yet,” It was a very Donatello answer and Raph snorted. Donnie’s eyes narrowed at him in a scowl, “They forced our hand. If we didn’t stop them, they would have kept coming after us. At least, Bishop would.”
“I’m...sad? That it happened?” Leo ventured, tilting his head as he looked into the fire, poking it more with his smoldering stick, “I wish...I didn’t like that I had to do it. But I dunno...if I regret doing it. I can’t...tell.”
“Me either,” Mikey admitted, hugging his legs and rocking in his chair, “I don’t really like that I dunno how I feel about it. Or—or that I don’t feel like anything about it. I feel like I’m supposed to feel something.”
The crackling of the campfire filled the quiet between them. Raph watched the flames dance and felt about how empty and cold he’d felt as they’d watched the EPF buildings burn to the ground. It hadn’t been satisfaction or a sense of completeness, it hadn’t really felt like anything. It had just...been something that needed to be done.
“I think we might all be a little fucked up,” Leo said with a crooked grin. There was something a little desperate around the edges of it.
“Oh shit, you think?” Donnie rolled his eyes, “That was sarcasm, in case that wasn’t clear.”
“Maybe we should get therapy? That’s what traumatized people do, right?” Raph scrunched his brow up, “Wait, are we traumatized?”
Leo barked out a somewhat bitter laugh, “We are traumatized as fuck, Raphie.”
“Language.” Raph grunted automatically.
“Where do we even go for a therapist?” Mikey asked no one in particular, raising his head up from his knees.
Donnie’s eyes had narrowed again, this time with some uncomfortable disquiet, “Are we actually considering this therapist idea?”
“Does the Hidden City have therapists? Hey Mikey,” Raph leaned over and poked Mikey, who squawked at him and batted his hand away, “Ask Barry if the HC has therapists.”
“Why do I gotta ask?” Mikey whined, fully emerging from his hoodie with a pout, “You can text him too!”
“Yeah, but you’re his faaaaaavoriiittteeee~” Leo grinned, lifting his stick to wave the burning end in Mikey’s direction.
“Don’t let papa hear you say that,” Donnie warned, wriggling his snout free of the blankets and reaching for his thermos. Leo immediately dropped the stick into the fire and snatched the thermos out of Donnie’s reach, “Nardo don’t…”
Leo grinned and twisted the lid.
“I swear to Schrodinger’s possibly dead cat, Nardo, do not test me…!”
Leo popped the lid off and sniffed the contents. He beamed over the lip of the thermos and made a show of bringing it up to his mouth.
“LEONARDO!” Donnie erupted from his blanket nest with a flash of teeth and a shriek that scattered the wildlife. Leo screamed in delight and jumped away, somehow without spilling a single drop from the thermos and managing to get the lid back on at the same time.
Mikey started laughing while Donnie chased Leo around their campsite and into the trees. Raph heaved out a sigh as the two of them flashed in and out of the dark, never straying too far, always within the light of the fire. Their laughter and voices were loud in the night.
Raph would probably have to reign them in at some point, settle them all down to get ready for bed. Somehow he’d wrangle his three little brothers and wrestle them into the tent, where they would inevitably spend another hour or so whispering and poking and giggling at each other until one of them fell asleep first. The others would follow shortly after, the night falling still and quiet once more.
And Raph would always be the last one awake, listening to his brothers breathe. He would feel their warmth beside him and the edges of their dreams in his mind, and know they were safe. They were here, together, and they were safe.
They would be together forever and nothing would separate them ever again.