Chapter Text
It starts with Draxum running his mouth.
Family game night tends to get rowdy, even more so recently: recovering from injuries sustained from the Krang invasion means that they’re all confined to the lair, some of them with limited screen time, and the cabin fever energy has to go somewhere . The board games and decks of cards are getting a hell of a workout, even with April supplementing their stash with some of her family’s favorites. Tonight sees them gathered around the kitchen table, with Splinter hovering to make snacks and tea - or at least, that’s his excuse. Leo is pretty certain it’s to keep an eye on all of them to make sure they don’t hurt themselves or try to leave, though he’s not about to call Splinter out on it.
He can’t really blame his dad for being cautious - they’re all still pretty banged up, after all. Donnie’s soft shell is bandaged and his seat cushioned with pillows; Mikey’s arms are wrapped to try to keep their trembling to a minimum; Raph still has one arm in a sling and bandages over one eye; and Leo himself is confined to a pillow-padded wheelchair, as trying to use crutches to get around with his mangled knee would put too much pressure on his cracked shell. For once, he’s not complaining; right now he’s just happy to be off both heavy painkillers and bed rest. They’re getting better, sure, but they’re still a mess.
Draxum had stopped by to check on their recovery, only to be roped into the game by Mikey’s puppy dog eyes routine, and is now seated at the table with them, acting as Mikey’s hands as Mikey leans against his shoulder and smiles happily. Draxum grumbles as he moves a yellow piece back to start. “That was hardly the most advantageous move available to you. Also, I believe you owe Michael an apology.”
“Sorry~” Leo singsongs, gleefully dropping the Sorry card in the discard pile and moving one of his blue pieces to where Mikey’s had been. Sure, he’d been targeting Draxum from the get-go, but only because Mikey was a pro at letting gaming slights roll off his back when he was in a good mood, whereas Draxum took every move against him as a personal affront. Even better, Mikey was more interested in playing to win tonight than getting Leo back, which left Draxum stewing in his unfulfilled gaming revenge plots. How could Leo not bully him a little?
(It’s probably a good thing Monopoly had been vetoed. Even Mikey couldn’t keep his cool in a round of Capitalism, The Game.)
Draxum grumbles again as a drawn eight leaves him in start, then grumbles louder as Donnie draws the necessary two and uses it to send a piece home, smirking at Draxum as he draws another card. Raph just offers him an easy smile. “Sorry, Barry. I can be Mikey’s hands next time if you want, and then you can take your revenge on Leo.”
“Hey, this is payback for dropping me off a roof and he knows it.”
“Will you ever let that go ?”
Splinter snickers as he puts the kettle on, and Leo grins. “Mmmmmmnah.” It had bothered Leo at the time - who is he kidding, it had scared the living hell out of him and been the source of his nightmares before much worse things had come along to take that honor - but he’s pretty much over it now. Being able to portal his way out of most height-based danger and knowing his family has his back had definitely helped, and loath as he is to admit it, Draxum turning over a new leaf had done the rest. That wasn’t going to stop him from holding it over Draxum’s head, though. Some things are too good to let go.
“We could put you two at another board to fight it out,” Donnie says thoughtfully, staring at the remaining deck in a way that means he’s counting cards, again , dammit Donnie they’d talked about this. “Normally we’d run multiple games anyway, but with Casey and April topside and Papa making snacks, this was the better strategy.”
Splinter, passing by the table, snags the deck and the discard pile with his tail, dropping them in his hands and shuffling them together before replacing them on the table. Donnie huffs in frustration, but says nothing as he catches Splinter’s sidelong glance, and Leo tries not to grin lest the tail of retribution come down on his head instead. Dad refereeing is always funny, even if it doesn’t always work in his favor.
Draxum raises an eyebrow as Raph makes his move, large fingers carefully counting a tiny piece twelve spaces around the board. “You did not know your other siblings, yet you still found a way to fill the gap they left. How intriguing.”
…their what ?
Raph’s piece drops on the board and rolls onto its side as all four of them gape at Draxum, wide-eyed and slackjawed. Draxum, for his part, simply rights the toppled red piece.
Leo is the first to find his voice, even if it’s barely above a whisper. “Our what ?”
“Your siblings.” Draxum says it simply, as though it had been an expected part of the conversation. “I’ve been thinking of them as of late. The invasion would likely have gone more smoothly for you if you’d had a larger force. O’Neil and Jones are formidable allies, but perhaps we should look into further-”
“ Draxum .” Splinter’s voice cuts across everything, but Leo can hear the tension in it. “What are you talking about?”
Draxum blinks, focusing on Splinter. “I had thought I’d told you. I had initially set six turtles for simultaneous mutation: you four-” His gaze flickers to Leo and his brothers, then back to Splinter. “-as well as a painted turtle and a yellow-bellied slider. Given that they were not in my lab when I sorted through it after the explosion and they didn’t resurface when you four did, I had surmised their mutation was unsuccessful.” Several seconds of shocked silence follow his words, and Draxum sees fit to fill them. “Have I never mentioned this to you?”
“ No! ” Leo would be on his feet if his knee would allow it; as it is, he still leans forward abruptly, ignoring the painful protest in his shell at the sudden movement. “Are you serious? How could you not have-”
“There were others?” Splinter’s voice cuts through the conversation again, though this time it’s quiet, with a twist of pain Leo can feel in his gut. Oh, no, Dad-
He must not be the only one who feels it, as the table falls silent again, all eyes turning to Draxum, who looks…thoughtful? Sad? It’s something Leo can’t place.
He doesn’t often think about how much older Draxum is than the rest of the family, but in moments like this he can’t help but feel the chasm between them - when he tries to read Draxum and finds the book to be longer than he’d imagined and written in a language he doesn’t understand.
“As I said,” Draxum finally says after a silence that couldn’t have been more than a few moments but had still been entirely too long, “the other two were kept separately. You would not have been able to find them without knowing where to look.”
“But-”
Mikey abruptly steps away from Draxum and rushes to Splinter, wrapping his arms around their dad, cutting off his words and squeezing tight. Splinter stops short as Mikey presses his face into Splinter’s shoulder, finding a moment for both of them to simply breathe. “You’ve got us, Dad,” he says after a few seconds. “We’re not going anywhere.”
Splinter’s expression flickers, cycles through several before it settles, and suddenly Leo can’t read him either, a gulf of age and experience between his ability to understand people and his father, and fear settles along the broken lines of his shell. He knows their dad had had it rough for a while - knows it intellectually, even if he can’t relate to everything their dad went through, and he knows Splinter wouldn’t want him to understand it deep enough to resonate - but he’d only really come out of that slump over the past year or so. Is this enough to knock him back down? How long would it take to get him back this time? Could they even get him back? Leo needs to speak up, head this off before it can sink its claws into Splinter, find the right words, do something -
And then Splinter smiles, small but genuine, and gently pats the top of Mikey’s head. “My little Orange,” he says quietly, and Leo feels the chill in his shell subside when his father’s voice shows no trace of the pain it had held earlier. “Always so bright.” Another brief silence settles, then Splinter straightens up and taps Mikey’s head. “Be mindful of your arms! I will do the hugging for both of us.” Mikey looks up at that, smiling bright as the sun, and obligingly drops his arms, nuzzling his face into Splinter’s shoulder like a cat as Splinter pulls him in for a tight hug.
Thank Pizza Supreme for Mikey. None of the rest of them could’ve defused that situation the way he had, and Leo is pretty sure they all know it.
He feels the tension in his body unwind and he leans back into his pillows, easing up on the strain he’d put on his shell. Mikey had done his part; now it’s time for Leo to take over, in the only way he knows how. “Sooooo,” he says, drawing out the word and easily pulling the attention of the room back to himself, “I’m pretty sure it’s my turn, and-” He reaches for the top card of the draw deck, flipping it over to reveal a Sorry card and grinning like a shark. Sure, he’d had no idea that that was the next card, but nobody else needed to know that. Theatrics, baby. “Ooh, I can use this- wait, Barry, are all your pieces in start?”
“You know they are, as it was entirely your doing.” Draxum’s reply is dry as the desert, and Leo only grins wider.
“Okay then! Dee, I didn’t want to do this- wait, no, that’s a lie, I totally wanted to do this.” He knocks over the green piece poised to enter Donnie’s Home space and replaces it with another one of his blue pieces, singsong tone drawing his requisite nonapology out to three syllables. “So-o-rry~”
“Betrayed gasp! So it is to be war between us-”
And just like that, game night is back on track.
The night ends with a victory for Raph - evidently keeping his head down and going slow and steady while Leo, Donnie, and Draxum fought out a triple-faceted revenge war was the way to go - and with Draxum’s departure. The question of what happened to their siblings does not leave with him - it lingers in the lair in the days and weeks to come, in hushed talks between physical therapy sessions and overnight discussions in Donnie’s soundproofed lab, sliding into unrelated conversations and turning the talk towards a yellow-bellied slider and a painted turtle none of them had ever known.
“D’you think they’d be into art?” Mikey asks, perched on Raph’s shoulder in front of one of the freshly completed repairs to the lair. He shakes the spray paint can in his hand and presses the nozzle, allowing Raph’s good hand on his elbow to steady his wide strokes. “Maybe they’d be up for helping me paint!”
“Okay, but Raph’s helpin’ you paint right now,” Raph points out.
“Oh, yeah, but I mean like helping me plan stuff too. I love you, Raph, but you’re bad at color theory.”
To his credit, Raph waits until Mikey has finished his current paint stroke. “Yeah, but Raph’s real good at lots of things. Like this!” He releases Mikey’s elbow and digs his fingers into Mikey’s sides, tickling him relentlessly. Mikey shrieks, drops the paint can, and rolls off of Raph’s shoulder in an attempt to tickle Raph in turn. The mural goes ignored for another hour in favor of the tickle war, and then another day when Mikey’s hands need to rest after their tour of service in said battle.
“I bet they’d have a great sense of humor,” Leo says in between Jupiter Jim movies the next weekend, lazily flicking a piece of popcorn at Donnie’s forehead. It’s an easy target and he still misses. Meh. “They gotta, right? It’s like, a requirement in this family.”
“Probably,” April says as Donnie wings a piece of popcorn back at Leo, hitting him square between the eyes. “Honestly, I’d settle for them having common sense . I’m gettin’ real tired of carrying that particular brain cell.”
“You would rather ‘go ape shitt,’ as it were?” Donnie does the finger quotes and everything.
“Been there, done that,” April says easily, digging a hand into Leo’s popcorn bowl. Leo huffs. Why’s everyone picking on him today? “Wouldn’t it be wild if y’all had sisters, though?”
“We already have a sister,” Leo says, graciously not whacking April’s hand as it retreats from his bowl clutching a fistful of popcorn. “And I don’t think anyone could replace her.”
“They wouldn’t be replacing me, you dingus!” And now April’s throwing popcorn at him too! Life is not fair . “You can have more than one!”
“Shushushushush!” Donnie flails a hand at them. “This is the best part!”
They shush obligingly - Donnie had chosen this movie as his pick for their marathon - and the question of sisters falls to the wayside for the next sixty minutes, and the next movie, and the one after that.
“I would love to have another scientific mind in the family,” Donnie declares two weeks later, sweeping his arms wide as several programs run on the screens behind him. “Imagine! A lab partner!”
“You? Sharing your lab? Yeah, right,” Leo snorts from the floor of that same lab, wrapping an ice pack around his knee. His shell had finally healed enough for him to graduate to crutches, and he is not about to backslide if he can help it. “You don’t share anything willingly, unless it’s Mikey asking.” Nevermind that Donnie is currently sharing space with the lot of them as they relax on blankets spread over available floor space at the back of the room. Lab sleepovers aren’t the most comfortable, but that doesn’t stop them from taking up space when Donnie refuses to stop working. It’s a compromise that usually ends in a turtle pile.
“Michael knows the correct way to ask.”
April leans in to Mikey. “Puppy dog eyes?”
“You know it,” Mikey confirms.
“Is anyone else picturing a turtle with Donnie’s brain and Mikey’s puppy eyes?” Casey says.
There’s a beat of silence - they’re definitely all picturing it now . Donnie is the first to break it, splitting the air with what could only be described as an evil cackle.
“Cursed image, CJ,” Leo says flatly. April nods in fervent agreement, Raph shakes his head as if to dislodge the image, and Mikey stares at the blanket beneath him, brow furrowed, obviously still considering it.
Casey gives a wide-eyed shrug before he returns to the task at hand: namely, wrapping Mikey’s hands. “It’s not like I know any more about them than you do.” He’d made it pretty clear when the subject had first come up: whatever siblings the Hamatos may have had in Draxum’s lab, they hadn’t ever come up in conversation in the future he’d known, never mind been present. One more thing cut off in the (currently averted) apocalypse.
“Still cursed.”
“ Anyway ,” Raph says, very pointedly, signaling a much-needed subject change. There’s a few beats of anticipatory silence - Raph probably hadn’t thought of a subject to change to so much as he wanted the cursed image out of everyone’s heads, which, fair. “Long as we’re talkin’ about what we’d want,” Raph finally picks up, “Raph would like a sparring partner just as strong as he is.” Leo swallows, trying so hard not to read several weeks’ worth of Raph being unwilling to get near any of his family - being afraid he’d hurt them, despite his system being entirely cleansed of Krang influence - into that statement. Raph is doing better, right? He’s not a good liar like Leo is- Leo would know -
“Don’t get me wrong, you guys are great, but it’d be nice to really go all out every once in a while,” Raph continues, and Leo breathes again. Okay. He’s okay. Good .
Raph’s expression softens a bit. “Either way, I think I’d just wanna meet them, y’know? No matter what they’re like, they’d still be family.”
Mikey places freshly-wrapped hands in his lap and leans against Raph, netting him a strong arm around his shoulders as Raph pulls him into a side hug. “Yeah, I know what you mean. I’d wanna meet them too.”
“Well in that case, I have good news for you, brethren.” Evidently the cackling only stops when there’s an announcement. That’s Donnie for you. He gestures at the monitors behind him, where the programs have stopped, displaying graphs and tables and percentages that Leo can’t even begin to parse. That’s fine - the overly long and wordy explanation should be coming in three, two, one-
“I have finished running the numbers, and there’s an eighty-seven-point-one-two percent chance our siblings are alive.”
There’s a moment of silence that stretches way too long for comfort as that proclamation sinks in. They’d all been thinking about it, but having a number attached hits different in a way that’s not settling well with Leo, but he can’t find the words for it-
It’s Mikey who finally breaks the silence. “Don’t tell Dad.”
The wrongness shifts into focus at his words. That’s it, isn’t it. That’s the reason for the looming dread gathering at the back of Leo’s mind.
“Not yet,” Mikey continues. “You saw how upset he was when we found out they existed at all - knowing Dad, he’s gonna be a lot worse if he thinks they’re alive and we can’t find them.”
Donnie’s snout scrunches. This is obviously not the reaction he was hoping for. “But-”
“No, Donnie, Mikey’s right.” Thoughts successfully sorted - or sorted well enough , in the same way that his room is cleaned well enough - Leo takes his turn to speak up. “This needs to be our secret. What Dad doesn’t know about the numbers won’t hurt him, and the last thing we want is for him to stop getting out of bed again.” The temperature in the lab drops when the words leave his mouth. He knew that would happen - he knew the harsh reality would hit his family a little too hard - but he also knows it had to be said, that they needed to hear it if only so everyone’s on the same page regarding the stakes -
Because nobody wants Dad to be like that again. The days when Splinter doesn’t leave his room, when the lights stay dark and the room is silent (or worse, purposefully muffled by a box fan), are much fewer and farther between, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t still happen - that they aren’t still closer than any of them would really like to think about.
That they could still come back if their dad is pushed hard enough in the wrong direction.
Mikey had averted the first bombshell, but the last thing they need is to risk making it worse again. They all need to know that, and sometimes that means putting it into very ugly words and letting that ice settle into everyone’s brains for a minute.
(The days when Leo wants to hide somewhere and force Raph to be the leader again are also getting to be fewer and farther between, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t still have his moments. This is definitely one of them.)
But the ice has done its job, and if there’s one thing Leo knows how to do, it’s warm up an audience.
(Or piss them off. Same difference, sometimes, but he’s really trying not to do that here.)
“Plus,” he says, “if we do find them, you get to say I Told You So.”
Donnie squints at him for a moment, then takes the statement like the peace offering it is. “You know I’m never going to let you hear the end of it.”
“Mm-hmm.” The room begins to thaw as Hamato Middle Child Nonsense begins in earnest.
“It’s going to have a full musical number.”
“Wouldn’t expect anything less.”
“And fireworks .” Donnie is really cooking now.
“ Classic Donton.” Leo leans back a bit, adjusting the ice pack on his knee and trying not to grin too widely as the rest of his siblings watch them like a tennis match. He’s melted the ice in the room, gotten everyone’s minds off the worst-case scenario, and thrown in a little entertainment. He may still have a hard time calling himself a good leader most days, but even Leo can recognize when he’s nailed it.
(And not, like, Netflix baking fail show with the world’s best host and the world’s worst cake nailed it ; like, nailed it -nailed it. Success.)
“What I don’t get,” Casey says, deftly turning the conversation himself, “is how you got to those numbers. What’s your methodology?”
Now Leo does let the wide grin split his face as the rest of the conversation falls apart. April sighs but still smiles, in that indulgent big sister way she has; Mikey leans back against Leo, pulls a paint marker out of the set he’d brought with him, and carefully sets about touching up the designs on Leo’s currently sidelined knee brace; Raph huffs and pulls out his phone, pulling up what Leo is fairly certain is Ghostbear fanfiction, but he’s in too good a mood to restart that particular bout of teasing; and Donnie launches into his methodology. Leo tunes out the subsequent infodump - he occasionally catches words like genetics and manufactured hardiness , and a detailed comparison of slider biologies has him sitting up slightly more, but most of the explanation is laden with terminology he just doesn’t know, and it’s easier to let it wash over him. If there’s something he needs to know, he’ll get it later from either a very impatient Donnie or a far more forgiving Casey.
(Casey had told him, on a night when neither of them could sleep, that he’d been a distraction point for his Uncle Tello for years - that his Sensei would often send him in with an innocuous question that would require a detailed answer, and Casey would sit and listen as Uncle Tello infodumped to a willing audience and his Sensei snuck around to shut down the program Uncle Tello was working on, or set up a cot in the lab, or otherwise accomplish something he’d never have been able to do if the softshell had been paying attention. Casey had been a distraction his uncle could never stay mad at, and had come out of it with a wide vocabulary and an impressive understanding of physics and the inner workings of Donnie’s technology. Uncle Tello may have been decades of experience and a bifurcated time branch away from Leo’s twin, but a Donnie is still a Donnie, and Casey has proven that he definitely knows how Donnies work.)
The infodump segues into a much larger project - one that Casey has evidently been helping with, if his participation in the conversation is anything to go by. Mikey moves on to painting daisies and starbursts on April’s bag. April opens up a Twitch stream on her phone with the volume down low, and Leo leans comfortably on her shoulder to watch some random streamer neither of them know clean up their Animal Crossing island. Raph starts to nod off, shakes himself awake when he nearly drops his phone, and rolls to his feet, crossing the lab and carrying Donnie back to the turtle pile.
Because it is a turtle pile now, everyone settling in to sleep to the sound of Donnie’s increasingly muffled protestations and the tinny phone-speaker giggles of an internet stranger reading off charmingly terrible fishing puns.
Before they sleep, Leo makes everyone swear to keep tonight’s conversation a secret from Splinter. Their own little pact, only to be broken if one of their lost siblings somehow turns up. It’s a long shot - Donnie’s numbers be damned - but Leo already knows how to plan for contingencies.
Everyone else falls asleep.
Leo does not.
The night passes slowly.
Conversely, the weeks afterwards pass quickly, almost faster than Leo can keep track of them.
Donnie’s shell heals enough for him to fully shed the bandages, and he finds himself another super soft hoodie to replace the one he says smells of antiseptic. (Leo steals it and squirrels it away for bad nights; it smells like laundry detergent and Donnie more than it does medical supplies, and it helps.) He tackles repairs to the lair, slowly but surely coming along, and beefs up the security system (even going so far as to swallow his pride and consult with Draxum about adding mystic wards and alerts), and occasionally has to be dragged to bed or turtle piles by Raph, but it’s still closer to a pre-Krang normal than he’s been in weeks, even if his shell is still a bit tender to the touch.
Raph’s eye still aches and blurs, but the cloudiness has started clearing up - much as Leo hates to admit it, the yokai-fabricated eye drops that Draxum picked up from the Hidden City have been a big factor in Raph’s recovery. He still has some trouble with depth perception, but the bandages are off about as often as they are on, and an improvement is an improvement.
Mikey’s hands have nearly stopped shaking entirely; Leo wants to credit the salve recipe Casey brought with him and claimed Master Michelangelo had used, but he knows Mikey’s new mystic training and increased level of control over his powers have had just as much to do with his recovery (Draxum again, ugh ). He still has wraps and braces for the particularly bad days, and he’s a lot more diligent about arm and wrist stretches than he’d ever been before, but Mikey is back to fancy cooking and fine lines in his sketchbook, and the smile on his face is just as wide as it’s ever been.
Leo gives his crutches quite a workout getting around the lair (and begrudgingly drags his wheelchair out of its cobweb-riddled corner when he takes a fall and his shell starts aching again, and that was a long and frustrating four days), but eventually his knee recovers to the point where he can walk with a heavy brace, and then a lighter one, all of them lovingly decorated by Mikey. He isn’t exactly back to skateboarding yet, but he’s able to amble around the lair and make grocery trips with April, and bad days only send him back to a heavier brace. It’s not perfect - and those same bad days wreck his patience with his recovery and leave him angry that it’s not - but it’s better. On good days, better is enough.
Eventually, better is enough for Leo to broach the idea of going back topside. Better is enough for Raph to agree, with some precautions, and for Splinter to carefully check their injuries over one last time before sending them off. Better sends them back to the rooftops, in an eyepatch and compression braces and a stripped-down lightweight battle shell and the ever-present knee brace. Better sees them back on patrol.
Of course, they’ve picked a night where literally nothing is happening .
April had warned them that this might happen - that repairs and rebuilding were still a long way from being completed and that meant that the city was either quiet or an entire mess, depending on the borough or the block. This end of Manhattan has proven to be mostly quiet, aside from one cat removed from a tree (courtesy of a ninpo-formed grabber on the end of Donnie’s tech-bo) and one mugging (which Raph had broken up by sneaking into the shadows, flicking the knife out of the mugger’s hands, and growling, “ Boo. ” The mugger had run one way, the victim another - uninjured and still clutching her purse - and Leo had called it a success). They’ve made their way back to a rooftop of a high-rise, perching on the edge and taking stock.
“Anything on the scanner, Donnie?” Leo asks for what feels like the millionth time.
“Negative. Even New York’s Finest are having a boring evening.” Donnie sighs and slumps as much as the lightweight battle shell will let him. “You know, Spider-Man never has these problems.”
“Nah, Spider-Man has other problems,” Mikey says evenly, finishing a wrist stretch and sliding his brace back on. “Like, all the time. It’s definitely a good thing we aren’t Spider-Man.”
“Yeah, and I don’t think Spider-Man could handle being us.” Leo smirks and offers Mikey a fistbump, which Mikey reciprocates and explodes, fingers waggling gleefully.
“You know,” Raph says, leaning in, then pauses. “Well, one, Spider-Man ain’t got nothing on the Mad Dogs. An’ two, if nothing’s happening, we could just go home for the night. Raph can’t vouch for Donnie, but Raph hasn’t used his screen time today, and we could go play Smash-”
Which is when the sound of glass shattering echoes through the street as a window smashes outwards, a barely-disguised ram yokai barreling through it, something small clutched to its chest. It stops, shaking glass out of its horns and fur, and then hoofs it up the street.
There’s a beat of silence, and then-
“That was not the kind of Smash Raph meant.”
“Oh yes finally ,” Donnie grins, hurling himself off the roof, then flailing in midair for a split second as the rotors that definitely aren’t in his stripped-down battleshell definitely don’t open. Mikey wraps a glowing chain around him before he can fall and swings him to the next rooftop.
Leo leaps over, landing at the same time as Donnie and flashing a wide grin at him. “Did you forget you don’t have anything in that battleshell, or did you really want to be Spider-Man?”
“Shut up , Nardo,” Donnie growls as Mikey and Raph join them and they take off across the rooftops, keeping pace with the fleeing yokai, albeit at a distance.
“Aw, I don’t mind being your web-slinger,” Mikey’s grin, a perfect match to Leo’s, falters a bit. “But that didn’t feel great. I don’t think this is a good Ninpo night for me, guys.”
“No worries, Mikey.” Raph offers him a smile. “We got your back.”
“Yeah! We can be on razzmatazz backup duty, though I think Donnie needs to remember how to use his Ninpo first.”
“I will defenestrate you, Nardo-”
“Gotta be inside for that first, Donton!” Leo flips to the next rooftop - it’s showing off, yeah, but his knee is doing fine and it feels great to be in pursuit of a bad guy again.
Speaking of: “Anyone got eyes on what Rambo here is carrying?”
“I’m on it.” Donnie may be mad at him, sure, but he’s still on board for the mission (and honestly he’s probably been about as stir-crazy as Leo these past few weeks). He flips his goggles down over his eyes and focuses on the ram, not missing a step. “Looks like a tube - probably a scroll? And-” He pauses, then takes a running leap and lands on Raph’s shell, grabbing a spike and leaning out for balance. Whatever the ram’s got, it’s got Donnie’s attention, if he’d rather put his full focus on investigation instead of keeping pace. “Guys,” he says after a few moments, “either this guy really likes pizza, or that scroll has the Hamato crest on it.”
Leo’s eyes snap wide, and he catches Mikey exchanging glances with Raph as Donnie flips his goggles back up. He’d thought that Dad would have all the Hamato scrolls - how did one wind up in lower Manhattan, of all places? They’ll need to go back and check where it had been stolen from, but that’s a later issue; for now, what they *really* need to do is catch that yokai before he loses it or hands it off. “Okay, guys, whatever he’s got, we need to get it back. Donnie, Raph, you take the right side of the street - Mikey and I will try to cut him off. We need to grab him before he gets to-”
“Uh, guys?” Mikey points, and Leo follows the line of his arm to see-
The Nexus Hotel.
Why does it have to be here? Why did they choose to patrol this part of town? “Well, maybe he’s not-”
“He is,” Donnie says flatly, as the ram books it down a side alley, towards what they all recognize is the hotel’s back entrance - the one that avoids the human patrons in favor of the yokai upper floors. Great. Awesome.
Leo heaves a sigh. They can’t exactly go home now - not when there’s a family scroll on the line. “Okay. Ninja in, get the scroll before it winds up in Big Mama’s hands, ninja out. Watch each other’s backs and be careful . Don’t make any of your injuries worse.”
“Same goes for you,” Raph says, and for once Leo doesn’t argue. He’d still like to be able to walk at the end of this; he’s not enough of a screw-up to mess with that .
They drop from the rooftop to the alleys below and head for the back entrance. It’s not nearly as subtle as Leo would like - not with all of them there, not with the path of destruction the ram left behind, and not with the hotel’s security in full swing - but it gets them in, through the back halls and into the service elevator, where they manage to lightly coerce (or fully Donnie threaten, depending on the definition you’re using) the yokai manning it to take them up to the floor the ram had gotten off at.
(Poor guy. He’s probably new on the payroll. He’s also probably not gonna be employed by Big Mama much longer, if he gives up hotel secrets that easily - Leo knows he sure wouldn’t want someone that spineless working for him.)
The elevator isn’t fast enough, or the ram is faster - either way, by the time they pile out of it into the hallway, the ram is already deep in conversation with Big Mama, holding the scroll out in one hoof.
Well, so much for subtlety.
“Selling something that doesn’t belong to you? Pretty sure that’s illegal,” he says brightly, walking up the hallway. He can see his brothers out of the corners of his eyes flanking him. He knows it’d be a pretty cool Big Damn Heroes moment, if it were possible to intimidate Big Mama at all . It gets the ram, though, as their eyes widen and they sidestep behind Big Mama - who, in her human form, is a head shorter than them, leaving their eyes and horns poking out over the top of her head. It’d be pretty funny, if any of this were funny right now.
“Oh hello, turtley-boos,” Big Mama greets them, waving her fingers daintily. “Funny thing about that: possession is nine tenths of the law, and the other tenth doesn’t quite apply in this specticular situation. And I must say I don’t quite remember inviting you all to sit in on my private business going-abouts. So do toddle off for Mama now, please and thank you - it would be a terrible shame to have to trouble my poor staff with the brafflebub of tossing you lot out.
It’s not an idle threat, but they can’t stop for it either. “I would say ‘sorry, Big Mama,’ except I’m really not.” Leo shrugs and draws his swords. “That scroll is ours. Hand it over.”
The edges of Big Mama’s smile go rigid, in a subtle way Leo is pretty sure nobody else but him sees. It’s a push she didn’t like, and now things are about to escalate.
“I do believe I’ve already made my position crystally-clear,” she says through that same smile, snapping her fingers. A fraction of a second later, her cronies burst into the hallway between her and Leo, blocking the way and snarling. The owl and the fox he recognizes - the owl hits like a train and the fox’s teeth can be nasty , but they’re nothing he and his brothers can’t handle - and he saw them come out of doors that slammed open at Big Mama’s call. The third one - about his height and size, wearing armor and a hood and a white mask with a jagged red smile - seems to have appeared from nowhere . They’re ringing bells in his head, both of recognition and of alarm, but he can’t place them. He’s pretty sure he’s seen them around, but he definitely hasn’t fought them before. Great. Nothing like a new baddie to shake things up.
“Assistant, dear?” Big Mama’s voice lilts up as she turns away, speaking over her shoulder. In front of her, the ram has gotten the picture and is already halfway down the hall to her office.
The masked one tilts their head, a visible acknowledgement that they’re listening.
“Make sure the little turtley-boos are escorted from the premises, won’t you? Nobody interrupts Big Mama’s business tonight.”
The mask nods once, short and sharp. Big Mama heads down the hall.
“Oh no you don’t!” Mikey rushes forward, only to have the mask - Big Mama’s Assistant - immediately in front of him. He stops short with a yelp, and Donnie reaches forward, yanking Mikey behind him, taking his place with a nonchalance that belies how stupidly close that was to a collision and raising an eyebrow at the mask. “And what are you supposed to be?”
The Assistant says nothing - they flick their wrists and four blades slide out, two on each side, and that’s really cool, okay .
“ Wolverine ,” Mikey breathes, leaning around Donnie’s side.
“More like X-23, but still-” Donnie yelps and ducks backward as the Assistant takes a swipe at him with their new claws - he’s heard about these, they’re tekko-kagi, and they’d be a lot cooler if they weren’t currently trying to filet his brothers - nearly knocking into Mikey, who manages to stay on his feet and get out of the way.
“You heard Big Mama!” the fox yells, and he and the owl charge into the fray, heading straight for Mikey and Raph. Raph meets the owl head-on and Mikey dodges backwards, evading a wide swipe of the fox’s claws.
“Keep them busy!” If Leo can manage to make a portal, he can get into Big Mama’s office (or at least within throwing distance - is Big Mama’s office shielded from portals? He’s probably about to find that out the hard way, isn’t he), get the scroll back, and get out.
(If that scroll winds up being a mystic grocery list he is going to be so mad.)
The problem is that, while the Assistant is an unknown to them, evidently they know exactly what Leo is capable of, because they shake off Donnie and get right up in Leo’s face, and he can’t exactly throw a katana to get further down the hall when he needs them to block wrist blades and, you know, not die . They’re good - not enough to know what he’s doing before he does it, but more than good enough to match him blow for blow and throw in more than a few of their own - and it’s all Leo can do to keep the blades away from him-
And then Mikey knocks the blades away with his nunchaku, grinning at the Assistant’s unfeeling mask and giving Leo room to breathe, and suddenly things don’t feel quite so dire anymore. He presses the attack, falling in step with his brother, and gears up to hurl a sword down the hallway the second Mikey knocks the Assistant off-balance-
Only to be bodied by the fox and knocked head over shell. Donnie steps in as he gets to his feet, catching the fox with his bo, and hopefully nobody else noticed the tiny pause when Donnie expected something to come out of his stripped-down battleshell and it didn’t , because Leo sure noticed. Still, he turns and backs his twin up to cover for the misstep, and the fight goes on.
They’re in over their heads, Leo knows - any time they tangle with Big Mama, they’re in over their heads, because that’s what happens when you go after Little Miss Mob Boss and her package deal of goons - but it doesn’t feel quite as overwhelming this time. The flow of battle feels familiar, and he can feel himself shaking off the rust as he steps into the dance. He may not be trying to win so much as escape , but a fight is still a fight, and his brothers still have his back. Sure, they’re all moving a little slower on account of their injuries, and Donnie’s fighting a lot more defensively with only a light battle shell, but they’re holding their own pretty well in spite of it all. Leo spares a moment to be damn proud of his brothers-
Which is about when the Assistant gets in under his guard and deals a staggering kick to his bad knee.
He feels the pop more than he hears it - a brace can only help with so much against that kind of force - but he definitely hears the shriek that comes out of his mouth. Hopefully this is the kind of injury that feels worse than it is, because it feels really bad and he doesn’t want to be back on crutches again -
“LEO!”
He staggers, and Donnie hurls himself into the space where Leo had just been, expression a mask of fury and bo swinging, his usual ninpo-powered mallet head replaced with the blade of a glaive. Forget sublethal measures; his twin is out for blood tonight-
He hears a crash , and there’s a hand on his arm tugging him out of the range of Donnie’s bo and gathering him up into strong arms - it’s Raph, having thrown the owl halfway down the hall, into the fox, and then into the wall , and wow , Leo goes down one knee and suddenly everyone’s powered by rage.
He can’t blame them: it isn’t that long ago that the family had nearly been down by one Leo-
He swallows hard and yanks his mind away from those thoughts and back into battle. Mikey has thrown himself into the battle against the Assistant, and while conserving his ninpo has left his chains out of the fray, his nunchaku are still plenty deadly, raining down short range blows in between Donnie’s swipes and thrusts with the glaive. The Assistant is giving as good as they’re getting, blocking and parrying with their tekko-kagi and yanking one of Mikey’s weapons straight out of his hands-
Until Mikey gets in a good blow upside their head with his remaining weapon and they stagger. Donnie steps into the opening with a downward swipe; the Assistant jerks back enough to keep their head intact but not enough to prevent Donnie from cleaving their belts and breastplate in two. Mikey steps in for the followthrough, another hard blow to the side of the Assistant’s head that knocks their mask clean off. Their broken breastplate falls away as they stagger backwards-
Revealing a plastron, with yellow stripes trailing away over the shoulders and hips.
Leo feels the air leave the room as his eyes travel to the Assistant’s uncovered face to see-
They’re a turtle. Dark green skin, yellow markings - whorls of color that stretch from temple to jaw and disappear into the cowl around their neck, and a glare that could strip paint-
But part of that glare is the same brown eyes they all have. Dad’s eyes.
One of their siblings is alive .
Donnie, with his usual social finesse, snaps the moment in half. “HA!” He points gleefully at the newly-revealed turtle. “I WAS RIGHT- ”
Which is about when the turtle- their sibling- Big Mama’s Assistant - recovers from the blow and snaps out a hand, clamping it around Donnie’s outstretched wrist and swinging him bodily into a still shellshocked Mikey. Inertia sends them slamming into Leo and Raph, and suddenly they’re flying in the opposite direction-
Because the owl has recovered, sprinted the length of the hall, and shoulder-tackled them out a window.
Just once, Leo would like to leave the Nexus Hotel via the doors. Is that really too much to ask?
For now, he swallows down the pain and the fear - he’s gonna start having nightmares about Draxum dropping him off this roof again if his knee even lets him sleep - frees one of his swords, and swings it in a wide circle, opening a portal under them that spits them out at street level.
He clenches his teeth on impact, and luckily the scream building in his throat only makes it out as a strained yelp. Raph immediately gathers him up in one arm and Mikey in the other. “Leo! Are you okay? C’mon, we gotta get you home-”
Leo is barely listening, focusing on literally anything but his knee in an attempt to keep the pain at bay, and his eyes land on Donnie. His twin has already gotten to his feet and is staring up at the broken window, goggles over his face and several ninpo lenses layered over his eyes - mystic binoculars , he’d said when he’d shown that particular trick off to Leo a few weeks ago. Leo follows his gaze up the building to see a tiny figure - green and yellow, with a black cowl, it’s them - standing in the hole where the window had been for a few seconds before disappearing back into the hotel.
“C’mon, Donnie, we gotta go.”
Raph’s voice snaps Leo back to reality, and Donnie disperses the ninpo lenses before turning and focusing on Leo’s knee for a few seconds. “Well, the good news is it doesn’t look to be broken. The bad news is, you’ll probably be on crutches again for a little while. I’ll need to run more scans back at the lair to be sure.” A beat. “Aaaaand we lost the scroll.”
Leo groans and goes limp in Raph’s grip. Great. Exactly what he didn’t want, on both counts. “Yaaaaaay.”
Mikey’s voice pipes up from Raph’s other side, uncertain but hopeful. “Guys? Was that- was Big Mama’s Assistant-”
“A yellow-bellied slider, from the looks of it,” Donnie says, flipping his goggles up to the top of his head, and suddenly all eyes are on him. “Gentlemen, I believe we’ve found one of our missing siblings.”
There’s a beat of New York Silence, interrupted by the ambient noises of traffic and passers-by and not really silent at all, as Leo turns that over in his head. “We gotta tell Dad,” he finally says. “He’s gonna want to know.”
“And Draxum,” Mikey adds.
Leo groans again. “Fine, and Draxum.”
“Before we do that, we gotta get your knee looked at,” Raph reminds them. “C’mon, let’s go home.”
No one argues, and Leo is left turning his thoughts over in his head as they disappear down a manhole and into the sewers below.
