come home again | sewer stories drabbles
Apr. 19th, 2026 04:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sidewaysTitle: Come Home Again
AO3: Link
Rating: G
Series: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT 2003)
Wordcount: 1,811
Summary: The brothers debrief following the assault by the Ultimate Drako that saw them scattered across the multiverse. Well. Mostly.
Remarks: Phew, running a bit behind on cross-posting, so let's start with the TMNT fics! I started this one a few years ago when I was just idly mucking around trying to get a feel for their voices, but I ended up liking it well enough to work on bringing it to a conclusion. SAINW is such an episode and I love characters not talking about things.
"Me first! Me first, me first, me first-" Mike's capering is better suited to a dancing monkey than a ninja turtle, but he ducks Raph's swipe effortlessly and scrambles over the back of the couch, popping up on the other side with a familiar crumpled magazine in one hand. "Okay, okay, so, picture this: Us. Spandex. Rad code-names." He flicks his wrist, snapping the comic against the air. "Super-powers."
"English," Raph insists.
"C’mon, dude, it’s not that hard. Read my beak. We - were - superheroes!" The comic does a little jig along the worn linen, guided by dexterous fingers. "And it was the whole package too. Superhero base, superhero computer, superhero buddies with the mayor, and did I mention the super-powers?"
“Only a hundred times in the last three minutes, ya bonehead.”
Leo can feel a smile spreading despite himself, the wild energy of Mikey’s glee as contagious as ever. There’s no small measure of relief in it too - for all their talk of suffering and retribution, all the Ultimate Drako seems to have managed is to make his brother’s day.
He rescues a teacup from the floor, cradling it gently in his hands long enough to confirm a few extra chips from the rim are the worst of it, before finding it a seat back on the restored coffee table. A tornado of magic appearing in the middle of the Lair means scattered papers, toppled trinkets, furniture shoved rudely out of place. It's so far from the first time that the pattern of clean-up is just another drill. The kata of putting a home back together, every time someone decides to toss their lives about like they're still nothing more than pet turtles in a jar.
Less practised is the need to put themselves back together. Leo doesn't really know what to do with it, this sense of dislocation; of looking at his brothers and knowing there's a week's worth of experiences inside each of them that none of the others share. Doesn't know if there's anything to do but patiently line it all up again, the same as the Lair.
“So when you say ‘us’...”
“I mean there were four of them, they called themselves the ‘Super-Turtles’, and they were trained by a rat. And one of them was definitely as big a nerd as Don.” The turtle in question just blinks at the finger that swings excitedly his way, apparently unsure what to do with this information.
In truth, Leo isn’t too certain himself. Different worlds he understands, at least as a general concept; strange otherworldly copies of their family are something else. “Raph,” he says, “did you-”
“Spend a couple’a days hanging out with a bunch of weirdo clones?” Raph cuts in. He props his hands on his hips, eyeballing Mike up and down like an engine that’s started coughing smoke. “Nope.”
Mike sighs, arms flopping limply over the back of the couch. “Not clones. Alternate dimension versions of us. Seriously, Raph, pick up a comic sometime.” He turns his palms up. "It's a totally legit thing. Like… quantum physics and stuff. Yarn theory."
Helplessly, Leo looks at Don, who's the only one of them with any hope of confirming whether this is a genuine proposition or complete gobbledegook. Donnie's staring down at the dented metal plate he's picked off the floor, though, and all he does is murmur, equally cryptically, "String."
"Yeah, well, my world followed regular physics," Raph says. "Which reminds me." He bends over, lazily telegraphing the movement so that Leo has his hand up well in time to catch the tape as it’s flung at his head. "Thanks for the friggin' heart attack, bro. Nearly cost me the race, jerking me around like that."
"Sorry," Leo says, and means it. The real payback lies less in the flimsy plastic in his hand, and more in the nauseating memory of watching his brother's eyes snap wide as his wheels skidded under him. One more mistake hanging over Leo's head, forming a third of the new heartbeat driving him through every frantic second to follow - please be okay, please be okay, please be okay. "I didn't really have control at that point - you were racing?"
"Planet racing." No excitable jigging for Raph; any pleasure sincere enough for that is sincere enough to be embarrassed by, so it's arms folded across his chest and a disaffected shrug aimed at the room at large. "Figured I was better off getting on board than stayin' stuck being a turtle-shaped speed bump in the middle of the racetrack." He can't quite mask the glint in his eye, though, the satisfaction in his voice.
"That is so cool," Mike says, grinning. "Didja win?"
Raph spreads his arms, answer and deep offence rolled into one expansive gesture. "Bro."
The insult's forgiven in the next second, though, Mike's crow of delight finally drawing out Raph's own grin as their palms slap together.
"Racing," Leo says again, and shakes his head. The surge of relief rises again, and he almost doesn't know what to do with it. Turtle luck, Raph would say; only it's usually reserved for all the ways life doesn't want to work out in their favour. "Okay, well, that's a lot better than any of the ideas I was coming up with."
"Whaddaya mean, ideas," Raph says.
Leo ticks off them off in turn. "Pursuing someone, being pursued, outrunning an avalanche…"
Raph's angling a considering look at the mangled remains of their lawn chair, but that makes him pause, eye ridge raised. "Huh. You sayin’ you saw me out there?"
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Don look up sharply from the pit. The chair rattles as Raph gets his hands on it, trying to bend it back into a shape that can carry turtle weight again, and Leo moves closer to grab the other end, holding it steady.
"That was the whole point," Leo says, and it twists in his gut like the metal frame. He tries to smile through it, but he's no Michelangelo. “To give me just enough information to know you were in trouble, but not enough that I could do anything useful with it.” To use his family like they were disposable pieces on a game board. Like none of them even mattered, except for the fact that they mattered to him. His grip tightens. “It was all just him trying to get back at me. Over a stupid fight I didn't even choose.”
The chair's a lost cause, he can tell already. At least one permanent casualty from this whole mess. He dumps his half down again too hard, ignores the look Raph shoots him from the other side.
Mikey makes a face from the couch. "Not to kick a guy while he's, you know, five years old, but he kinda sucks at this whole revenge thing. I mean, if he and Drako wanted to punish us so badly, why didn't he just send us to the Triceraton arena? Or April's evil bug world. Or a world without pizza!”
“Easy,” Raph says. He gives the lawn chair a last once over, shaking his head, then tosses it aside, slapping his hands together loudly and dismissively as he saunters over. “Guy's all talk. Always has been. He took his best shot and he came up bust-" and he pins the look on Leo like the point of a shuriken this time, unavoidable, "same as he did the last two times.”
“Steeee-rike three, you're out,” Mike agrees sagely, and steeples his fingers in contemplation. “You kind of think he'd learn after a while, though. Maybe we should write to the Daimyo and suggest some serious homeschooling this time around. Or a Kill Bill marathon.”
“Lord Simul-whatever said the sceptre had a mind of its own, right? Didn’t like what those guys were trying to do." Raph curls a smile that's all teeth. "Sounds to me like the Ultimate Douchebag shoulda started with picking a weapon he could actually use.”
The core tenets of weapons mastery they had learned with Splinter's oversight hadn't exactly covered multidimensional time-warping devices with an opinion - but some rules had the sort of weight to them that just might carry across universes.
“Maybe the sceptre even went a step further than that,” Leo says slowly, trying the idea out. It’s marginally more reassuring than the notion of turtle luck, at least. “Tried to - give us a fair chance?"
“It would explain a lot.” Mikey pulls himself higher. “I mean, come on. Superheroes? Racing? It's like those places were made for us!”
Raph looks inordinately pleased with himself to have helped crack the mystery. “And I'm guessin’ you didn't just stumble on Usagi outta nowhere.”
“Uh, no, not exactly.” The smile shapes itself reluctantly, but it fits itself into place all the same. “I ended up in his world, actually.”
Raph smacks the back of his hand against his plastron and, for once, Leo's inclined to let him. “Well, there you go. It stuck me and wonderboy where we'd do some good, and stuck you on a warrior’s retreat with the one guy who knows anything about this stuff. All part of the plan.” He jerks a thumb over his shoulder, head turning with it. “Hell, Donnie here probably ended up some place with a whole lot of tech and a problem just waiting for his big brain to come along and solve-”
Raph stops. The knot that had been gradually loosening in Leo’s belly goes suddenly tight again as all humour falls from his brother’s face in an instant, and he turns around to follow Raph’s gaze.
Donatello is a rigid statue in the pit. Unmoving, still staring down at Sewer Sweet Sewer clenched tight in his hands. Not joining the conversation; not chiming in with a dozen thoughtful theories about multiverses and magic tech, curious probing for more details about the other's experiences, dry anecdotes from his own.
The Ultimate Drako had shown Leo a dark lane, his brother running full-pelt down it, following a hazy shape ahead of him. He'd hoped it meant Donnie had found an ally too. That if Leo couldn't be there with them, or bring them to him, his brothers at least weren't alone; a small comfort to hold onto in the hectic days to follow.
“Don?” Leo says uneasily.
Don's plastron flexes on a jagged breath, and then he raises his head. The look in his eyes turns the knot in Leo's stomach to the bite of cold steel in a flash: raw grief vanishing the next second behind shutters drawn down so hard and fast it rings in Leo's ears like a porcelain cup going to pieces on the ground.
At least one casualty, Leo thinks numbly.
“Yep,” Don says, and his smile is bright and brittle. “That was pretty much it.”
◘◘◘
Title: Sewer Stories
AO3: Link
Rating: G
Series: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT 2003)
Wordcount: good question actually
Summary: Three more drabbles set in the TMNT 2003 universe, featuring Splinter grappling with his mutation, Don having a heart to heart with Sydney, and April realising why her new acquaintances are not simply the MNT.
Remarks: Sydney/Quarry is one of my favourites of the side characters and it is CRIMINAL they did not bring her back six more times.
Sonder
The old instincts do not go away overnight.
In later years he will gentle this story; place the moment of pity at first sighting, and cast the act of collecting and caching four turtles as a knowing kindness.
But on this morning, the first morning, he lies in his cramped burrow and hungers. Brief scavenging has eased nothing. Roaches and mice no longer satisfy. It seems that he could eat and eat and eat, and never fill the hollow at the centre of his new body.
The turtles have swelled as well. They cluster together beneath the burrow, licking at the slimy growths on the damp concrete, chewing at the scraps of his bedding that have fallen. He plucks the smallest from among them, sets it down amidst straw and paper, and runs sharp claws over the length of its body, investigating the puzzle of its shell.
The little creature squirms under his touch. Cries in a plaintive and reedy way. It twists to set its jaws to his flesh - not in defense, but simple animal need, mouthing at the warmth of him with tearful insistence.
It is hungry, he thinks. Just as I am hungry.
The first thought of his new existence has been to look at long grey digits raised before his eyes, tipped with familiar claws, and remember with strange clarity the shape and scent of the fingers that had slipped him slices of taro and shreds of chicken, the amused huskiness of the voice repeating a word and rewarding all obedient response. To understand, with stunning suddenness, what it is to be given a name, and what he has lost in losing the one who gave it.
This thought stuns him no less. It finds unshakeable purchase in the empty space inside him, a hunger of the mind as urgent as that of his body, translating instinct into intention, reactivity into revelation-
It lives, as I do. It wants, as I do. There is something inside of it, the very same as there is something inside of me.
Inside, there is... someone.
The other three look up, uncertain and curious at the sound of their companion’s whimpering. Not yet fearful of descending claws, of musky scents, of being bullied into a coffee can and buried for later.
Splinter removes his hand from the hinges of the shell; adjusts himself into a more accommodating curve, and carefully sweeps his tail around the squirming body, tucking it against his side. It kicks and cries, and he ignores it, lowering his head with a weary sigh and closing his eyes, attempting to grant his aching mind respite, however brief.
Soon enough, he will have to find food for five.
We, Monsters
Sydney refuses to come down to the sewers, though she's apologetic about the one-sided inconvenience. After the last few weeks, Don's too hungry for a little sunshine himself to mind.
“I keep telling them I don't remember anything,” he says. “It's - it's not a lie, really. I'm not sure you could even call them memories in the conventional sense. More like a compressed sensory packet. There's a lot of missing metadata.”
It's a clumsy analogy, ill-suited for this audience. April would understand, but he didn't ask April out here, because April is brilliant and wonderful and Don would never, ever want her to understand this. Also, because three weeks ago he tried to slam her into the ground and tear her throat out with his teeth.
Not that he remembers it that way, of course. Just the packet: anger pain impact anger bite bite kill bite KILL-
“It's not medically significant. I'm not showing signs of regression, or continuing memory loss, or anything like that.” He draws lines with his finger against the concrete balustrade. The anatomical outline of a brain, labels branching off. “It's just - all still in there. In its own way.”
“The feeling,” Sydney says, with shades of Quarry's deep-voiced gravitas, “of being a monster.”
She looks tired and thin, leaning on the edge of a New York rooftop in the wan autumn light, hair tucked beneath a moth-eaten beanie. The Foot had snatched people less likely to attract media attention, teary relatives, missing posters. It's been a challenging re-integration for many of them. Don feels guilty for not asking first. Is Katia still with the Professor's group? Does Razorfist still insist on that as his truer name? Has Sydney remembered her mother yet? Has she decided if she wants to?
A hand gently covers his fidgeting one. The warm brown tones of a normal human hand, resting on just-once mutated turtle skin. He'd fixed her, exactly how his brothers had fixed him: most of the way.
“Don,” she says. The lines around her eyes deepen when she smiles. It's still a little unfamiliar, but he likes that about it; smiling wasn't something Quarry had had the facial configuration to really pull off. “Talk to me.”
So he does.
Just a Number
“You're fifteen?” April says.
It's such a nothing question in the face of the complete rearrangement her reality has gone through in the last hour. Walk me through it one more time. You're ninjas? The very polite rat is your father? You've been living underneath New York City this entire time and no one ever noticed and now I'm going to have to spend the rest of my life wondering what else might be looking back at me from the other side of my bathroom drain?
Also, not to belabour a point, but - ninjas?
She really is working on not fighting what her eyes and ears are telling her, though, and the dual swords strapped to the back of the large humanoid reptile standing next to her haven't stopped being dual swords the last few times she snuck a glance at them. The empirical evidence is strong, and an April O'Neil who is not half-mad with fear and adrenaline is an April O’Neil who accepts rational conclusions - therefore, ninja mutant turtles it is.
This particular ninja mutant turtle's head turns towards her, and she marvels at how easy it is to read the awkward wariness on features that have so little in common with her own.
“Yes,” he says simply.
“Oh,” April says, and tries a smile, tucking loose hair behind one ear. Perhaps the dog years rule applies. They're much shorter than she'd realised while down on her knees in filthy sewer water, and certainly they're a little rowdy and she could have sworn she heard one of them complain about the threat of being grounded, but it's not as though high school sophomores of any species should be waving around ancient weapons and declaring eager readiness to launch corporate sabotage on megalomaniacal ex-bosses, so…
No. Surely not. Fifteen?
As if he can hear her thoughts, the turtle shoots her another little sideways glance, and shuffles on his feet, tightening the arms crossed over his chest and tilting his chin up.
“We'll be sixteen in four months,” he says, faintly defensive, his voice pitched a semitone lower than it had been before, and in that moment April knows dog years have nothing to do with it - can hear her own little sister like it was yesterday, I'm twelve and three-quarters, April, that means I'm PRACTICALLY thirteen - and with the addition of this one last piece of empirical certainty thinks, Ohhh no.
AO3: Link
Rating: G
Series: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT 2003)
Wordcount: 1,811
Summary: The brothers debrief following the assault by the Ultimate Drako that saw them scattered across the multiverse. Well. Mostly.
Remarks: Phew, running a bit behind on cross-posting, so let's start with the TMNT fics! I started this one a few years ago when I was just idly mucking around trying to get a feel for their voices, but I ended up liking it well enough to work on bringing it to a conclusion. SAINW is such an episode and I love characters not talking about things.
"Me first! Me first, me first, me first-" Mike's capering is better suited to a dancing monkey than a ninja turtle, but he ducks Raph's swipe effortlessly and scrambles over the back of the couch, popping up on the other side with a familiar crumpled magazine in one hand. "Okay, okay, so, picture this: Us. Spandex. Rad code-names." He flicks his wrist, snapping the comic against the air. "Super-powers."
"English," Raph insists.
"C’mon, dude, it’s not that hard. Read my beak. We - were - superheroes!" The comic does a little jig along the worn linen, guided by dexterous fingers. "And it was the whole package too. Superhero base, superhero computer, superhero buddies with the mayor, and did I mention the super-powers?"
“Only a hundred times in the last three minutes, ya bonehead.”
Leo can feel a smile spreading despite himself, the wild energy of Mikey’s glee as contagious as ever. There’s no small measure of relief in it too - for all their talk of suffering and retribution, all the Ultimate Drako seems to have managed is to make his brother’s day.
He rescues a teacup from the floor, cradling it gently in his hands long enough to confirm a few extra chips from the rim are the worst of it, before finding it a seat back on the restored coffee table. A tornado of magic appearing in the middle of the Lair means scattered papers, toppled trinkets, furniture shoved rudely out of place. It's so far from the first time that the pattern of clean-up is just another drill. The kata of putting a home back together, every time someone decides to toss their lives about like they're still nothing more than pet turtles in a jar.
Less practised is the need to put themselves back together. Leo doesn't really know what to do with it, this sense of dislocation; of looking at his brothers and knowing there's a week's worth of experiences inside each of them that none of the others share. Doesn't know if there's anything to do but patiently line it all up again, the same as the Lair.
“So when you say ‘us’...”
“I mean there were four of them, they called themselves the ‘Super-Turtles’, and they were trained by a rat. And one of them was definitely as big a nerd as Don.” The turtle in question just blinks at the finger that swings excitedly his way, apparently unsure what to do with this information.
In truth, Leo isn’t too certain himself. Different worlds he understands, at least as a general concept; strange otherworldly copies of their family are something else. “Raph,” he says, “did you-”
“Spend a couple’a days hanging out with a bunch of weirdo clones?” Raph cuts in. He props his hands on his hips, eyeballing Mike up and down like an engine that’s started coughing smoke. “Nope.”
Mike sighs, arms flopping limply over the back of the couch. “Not clones. Alternate dimension versions of us. Seriously, Raph, pick up a comic sometime.” He turns his palms up. "It's a totally legit thing. Like… quantum physics and stuff. Yarn theory."
Helplessly, Leo looks at Don, who's the only one of them with any hope of confirming whether this is a genuine proposition or complete gobbledegook. Donnie's staring down at the dented metal plate he's picked off the floor, though, and all he does is murmur, equally cryptically, "String."
"Yeah, well, my world followed regular physics," Raph says. "Which reminds me." He bends over, lazily telegraphing the movement so that Leo has his hand up well in time to catch the tape as it’s flung at his head. "Thanks for the friggin' heart attack, bro. Nearly cost me the race, jerking me around like that."
"Sorry," Leo says, and means it. The real payback lies less in the flimsy plastic in his hand, and more in the nauseating memory of watching his brother's eyes snap wide as his wheels skidded under him. One more mistake hanging over Leo's head, forming a third of the new heartbeat driving him through every frantic second to follow - please be okay, please be okay, please be okay. "I didn't really have control at that point - you were racing?"
"Planet racing." No excitable jigging for Raph; any pleasure sincere enough for that is sincere enough to be embarrassed by, so it's arms folded across his chest and a disaffected shrug aimed at the room at large. "Figured I was better off getting on board than stayin' stuck being a turtle-shaped speed bump in the middle of the racetrack." He can't quite mask the glint in his eye, though, the satisfaction in his voice.
"That is so cool," Mike says, grinning. "Didja win?"
Raph spreads his arms, answer and deep offence rolled into one expansive gesture. "Bro."
The insult's forgiven in the next second, though, Mike's crow of delight finally drawing out Raph's own grin as their palms slap together.
"Racing," Leo says again, and shakes his head. The surge of relief rises again, and he almost doesn't know what to do with it. Turtle luck, Raph would say; only it's usually reserved for all the ways life doesn't want to work out in their favour. "Okay, well, that's a lot better than any of the ideas I was coming up with."
"Whaddaya mean, ideas," Raph says.
Leo ticks off them off in turn. "Pursuing someone, being pursued, outrunning an avalanche…"
Raph's angling a considering look at the mangled remains of their lawn chair, but that makes him pause, eye ridge raised. "Huh. You sayin’ you saw me out there?"
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Don look up sharply from the pit. The chair rattles as Raph gets his hands on it, trying to bend it back into a shape that can carry turtle weight again, and Leo moves closer to grab the other end, holding it steady.
"That was the whole point," Leo says, and it twists in his gut like the metal frame. He tries to smile through it, but he's no Michelangelo. “To give me just enough information to know you were in trouble, but not enough that I could do anything useful with it.” To use his family like they were disposable pieces on a game board. Like none of them even mattered, except for the fact that they mattered to him. His grip tightens. “It was all just him trying to get back at me. Over a stupid fight I didn't even choose.”
The chair's a lost cause, he can tell already. At least one permanent casualty from this whole mess. He dumps his half down again too hard, ignores the look Raph shoots him from the other side.
Mikey makes a face from the couch. "Not to kick a guy while he's, you know, five years old, but he kinda sucks at this whole revenge thing. I mean, if he and Drako wanted to punish us so badly, why didn't he just send us to the Triceraton arena? Or April's evil bug world. Or a world without pizza!”
“Easy,” Raph says. He gives the lawn chair a last once over, shaking his head, then tosses it aside, slapping his hands together loudly and dismissively as he saunters over. “Guy's all talk. Always has been. He took his best shot and he came up bust-" and he pins the look on Leo like the point of a shuriken this time, unavoidable, "same as he did the last two times.”
“Steeee-rike three, you're out,” Mike agrees sagely, and steeples his fingers in contemplation. “You kind of think he'd learn after a while, though. Maybe we should write to the Daimyo and suggest some serious homeschooling this time around. Or a Kill Bill marathon.”
“Lord Simul-whatever said the sceptre had a mind of its own, right? Didn’t like what those guys were trying to do." Raph curls a smile that's all teeth. "Sounds to me like the Ultimate Douchebag shoulda started with picking a weapon he could actually use.”
The core tenets of weapons mastery they had learned with Splinter's oversight hadn't exactly covered multidimensional time-warping devices with an opinion - but some rules had the sort of weight to them that just might carry across universes.
“Maybe the sceptre even went a step further than that,” Leo says slowly, trying the idea out. It’s marginally more reassuring than the notion of turtle luck, at least. “Tried to - give us a fair chance?"
“It would explain a lot.” Mikey pulls himself higher. “I mean, come on. Superheroes? Racing? It's like those places were made for us!”
Raph looks inordinately pleased with himself to have helped crack the mystery. “And I'm guessin’ you didn't just stumble on Usagi outta nowhere.”
“Uh, no, not exactly.” The smile shapes itself reluctantly, but it fits itself into place all the same. “I ended up in his world, actually.”
Raph smacks the back of his hand against his plastron and, for once, Leo's inclined to let him. “Well, there you go. It stuck me and wonderboy where we'd do some good, and stuck you on a warrior’s retreat with the one guy who knows anything about this stuff. All part of the plan.” He jerks a thumb over his shoulder, head turning with it. “Hell, Donnie here probably ended up some place with a whole lot of tech and a problem just waiting for his big brain to come along and solve-”
Raph stops. The knot that had been gradually loosening in Leo’s belly goes suddenly tight again as all humour falls from his brother’s face in an instant, and he turns around to follow Raph’s gaze.
Donatello is a rigid statue in the pit. Unmoving, still staring down at Sewer Sweet Sewer clenched tight in his hands. Not joining the conversation; not chiming in with a dozen thoughtful theories about multiverses and magic tech, curious probing for more details about the other's experiences, dry anecdotes from his own.
The Ultimate Drako had shown Leo a dark lane, his brother running full-pelt down it, following a hazy shape ahead of him. He'd hoped it meant Donnie had found an ally too. That if Leo couldn't be there with them, or bring them to him, his brothers at least weren't alone; a small comfort to hold onto in the hectic days to follow.
“Don?” Leo says uneasily.
Don's plastron flexes on a jagged breath, and then he raises his head. The look in his eyes turns the knot in Leo's stomach to the bite of cold steel in a flash: raw grief vanishing the next second behind shutters drawn down so hard and fast it rings in Leo's ears like a porcelain cup going to pieces on the ground.
At least one casualty, Leo thinks numbly.
“Yep,” Don says, and his smile is bright and brittle. “That was pretty much it.”
◘◘◘
Title: Sewer Stories
AO3: Link
Rating: G
Series: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT 2003)
Wordcount: good question actually
Summary: Three more drabbles set in the TMNT 2003 universe, featuring Splinter grappling with his mutation, Don having a heart to heart with Sydney, and April realising why her new acquaintances are not simply the MNT.
Remarks: Sydney/Quarry is one of my favourites of the side characters and it is CRIMINAL they did not bring her back six more times.
Sonder
The old instincts do not go away overnight.
In later years he will gentle this story; place the moment of pity at first sighting, and cast the act of collecting and caching four turtles as a knowing kindness.
But on this morning, the first morning, he lies in his cramped burrow and hungers. Brief scavenging has eased nothing. Roaches and mice no longer satisfy. It seems that he could eat and eat and eat, and never fill the hollow at the centre of his new body.
The turtles have swelled as well. They cluster together beneath the burrow, licking at the slimy growths on the damp concrete, chewing at the scraps of his bedding that have fallen. He plucks the smallest from among them, sets it down amidst straw and paper, and runs sharp claws over the length of its body, investigating the puzzle of its shell.
The little creature squirms under his touch. Cries in a plaintive and reedy way. It twists to set its jaws to his flesh - not in defense, but simple animal need, mouthing at the warmth of him with tearful insistence.
It is hungry, he thinks. Just as I am hungry.
The first thought of his new existence has been to look at long grey digits raised before his eyes, tipped with familiar claws, and remember with strange clarity the shape and scent of the fingers that had slipped him slices of taro and shreds of chicken, the amused huskiness of the voice repeating a word and rewarding all obedient response. To understand, with stunning suddenness, what it is to be given a name, and what he has lost in losing the one who gave it.
This thought stuns him no less. It finds unshakeable purchase in the empty space inside him, a hunger of the mind as urgent as that of his body, translating instinct into intention, reactivity into revelation-
It lives, as I do. It wants, as I do. There is something inside of it, the very same as there is something inside of me.
Inside, there is... someone.
The other three look up, uncertain and curious at the sound of their companion’s whimpering. Not yet fearful of descending claws, of musky scents, of being bullied into a coffee can and buried for later.
Splinter removes his hand from the hinges of the shell; adjusts himself into a more accommodating curve, and carefully sweeps his tail around the squirming body, tucking it against his side. It kicks and cries, and he ignores it, lowering his head with a weary sigh and closing his eyes, attempting to grant his aching mind respite, however brief.
Soon enough, he will have to find food for five.
We, Monsters
Sydney refuses to come down to the sewers, though she's apologetic about the one-sided inconvenience. After the last few weeks, Don's too hungry for a little sunshine himself to mind.
“I keep telling them I don't remember anything,” he says. “It's - it's not a lie, really. I'm not sure you could even call them memories in the conventional sense. More like a compressed sensory packet. There's a lot of missing metadata.”
It's a clumsy analogy, ill-suited for this audience. April would understand, but he didn't ask April out here, because April is brilliant and wonderful and Don would never, ever want her to understand this. Also, because three weeks ago he tried to slam her into the ground and tear her throat out with his teeth.
Not that he remembers it that way, of course. Just the packet: anger pain impact anger bite bite kill bite KILL-
“It's not medically significant. I'm not showing signs of regression, or continuing memory loss, or anything like that.” He draws lines with his finger against the concrete balustrade. The anatomical outline of a brain, labels branching off. “It's just - all still in there. In its own way.”
“The feeling,” Sydney says, with shades of Quarry's deep-voiced gravitas, “of being a monster.”
She looks tired and thin, leaning on the edge of a New York rooftop in the wan autumn light, hair tucked beneath a moth-eaten beanie. The Foot had snatched people less likely to attract media attention, teary relatives, missing posters. It's been a challenging re-integration for many of them. Don feels guilty for not asking first. Is Katia still with the Professor's group? Does Razorfist still insist on that as his truer name? Has Sydney remembered her mother yet? Has she decided if she wants to?
A hand gently covers his fidgeting one. The warm brown tones of a normal human hand, resting on just-once mutated turtle skin. He'd fixed her, exactly how his brothers had fixed him: most of the way.
“Don,” she says. The lines around her eyes deepen when she smiles. It's still a little unfamiliar, but he likes that about it; smiling wasn't something Quarry had had the facial configuration to really pull off. “Talk to me.”
So he does.
Just a Number
“You're fifteen?” April says.
It's such a nothing question in the face of the complete rearrangement her reality has gone through in the last hour. Walk me through it one more time. You're ninjas? The very polite rat is your father? You've been living underneath New York City this entire time and no one ever noticed and now I'm going to have to spend the rest of my life wondering what else might be looking back at me from the other side of my bathroom drain?
Also, not to belabour a point, but - ninjas?
She really is working on not fighting what her eyes and ears are telling her, though, and the dual swords strapped to the back of the large humanoid reptile standing next to her haven't stopped being dual swords the last few times she snuck a glance at them. The empirical evidence is strong, and an April O'Neil who is not half-mad with fear and adrenaline is an April O’Neil who accepts rational conclusions - therefore, ninja mutant turtles it is.
This particular ninja mutant turtle's head turns towards her, and she marvels at how easy it is to read the awkward wariness on features that have so little in common with her own.
“Yes,” he says simply.
“Oh,” April says, and tries a smile, tucking loose hair behind one ear. Perhaps the dog years rule applies. They're much shorter than she'd realised while down on her knees in filthy sewer water, and certainly they're a little rowdy and she could have sworn she heard one of them complain about the threat of being grounded, but it's not as though high school sophomores of any species should be waving around ancient weapons and declaring eager readiness to launch corporate sabotage on megalomaniacal ex-bosses, so…
No. Surely not. Fifteen?
As if he can hear her thoughts, the turtle shoots her another little sideways glance, and shuffles on his feet, tightening the arms crossed over his chest and tilting his chin up.
“We'll be sixteen in four months,” he says, faintly defensive, his voice pitched a semitone lower than it had been before, and in that moment April knows dog years have nothing to do with it - can hear her own little sister like it was yesterday, I'm twelve and three-quarters, April, that means I'm PRACTICALLY thirteen - and with the addition of this one last piece of empirical certainty thinks, Ohhh no.
