This collision of Alternate Universes is entirely the fault of peechykeeny, who asked for it for a Secret Santa. I never would have come up with it otherwise, but now I'm actually really fond of it. It's going to be a lot of really silly, campy, historically inaccurate fun. With parasols and dirigibles.
London, 1900
August had always hated the dark. It was the dark that had birthed the nightmares of his childhood: visions of great monstrous creatures rising from the sea that still haunted him today. It was the dark that had taken his father from them all those years ago, in a half-remembered haze of smoke and screaming. His mother knew how much he hated it, and yet she always failed to remember the lamps until it was too late, lost in whatever experiment she was working on up in her tower. She could work by the light of a single candle until the sun came up without batting an eye - it was August who suffered as he stumbled up the stairs to her workshop, barking his shins on the turns. And suffer he must, for if he did not bring her down, she would never sleep. Not when she got like this.
At last, his outstretched hands encountered the smooth handle of the tower door, and he breathed a sigh of relief as he fumbled for the latch. "Mother?" he called softly, pushing the door open. "Mother, it's time to…"
His voice trailed off as his gaze swept the darkened room. Her candle burned low on her worktable at the far end of the room, but his mother was not in her usual place in front of it.
"Mother?" he called again, taking a step into the room and shuddering as the dark pressed in on him.
But his only answer was the rhythmic ticking of a clock.
August's brow furrowed as he tried to recall when she'd gotten a clock in here. Perhaps that explained her absence, if she'd actually found a way to keep track of time. Yet that did not explain why she had not passed him on the stairs. Their house was not so large that she could have come down to dinner and not encountered him.
He stilled, suddenly, as more ticks drifted through the room, pitched ever so slightly higher than the first set. He thought it some sort of echo at first, yet more and more ticking joined the chorus, until the sound crashed over him in a bedlam of noise. He pressed his hands to his ears, casting desperately about for some answer.
It came in the form of a woman's silhouette against the candle flame. Only the silhouette was… wrong.
"It is the one known as August O'Neil." The voice scraped from the woman's throat like old hinges and barbed wire. With the screech of twisting metal, a hand reached for him.
"No!" August cried out, staggering away from the woman's touch.
It was a mistake. The movement cast him directly into a sea of cold hands that locked around his limbs like shackles. He screamed, kicking out against them, but his boots rang out against his assailants like the hollow clang of a bucket. Bile rising in his throat, he stared at the faces of the women surrounding him as the ticking rose to a deafening climax. The little candleflame glinted off blank expressions of cold, shining metal.
They're… they're clockwork!
The candle guttered and died, plunging the tower into darkness.
August screamed again, writhing against the crushing iron hands that held him, but they had his legs now. Impervious to his struggles, they were moving, taking him somewhere, taking him away. "Let me go!" he bellowed, his throat cracking with the force of it. "Someone, help!"
There was a noise from the dark, like the washerwoman's stick striking a washtub, and the hands holding one of his legs fell away. More clanging, the sound of a chain snaking through the darkness, and August dropped to the ground.
"Sora!" A girl's voice called. "Get the Professor's notes!"
"Teach grandmother to suck eggs, Donna," a terse male voice replied. "What do you think I'm doing?"
"Ugh, Donna," came another, younger girl's voice. "You sound like Lea."
"I do not!" the first voice replied. There was another cacophany of banging and the sound of screeching metal, and a hand seized August's wrist. Rough, and cold, but not metal this time. "We need to go," the voice - Donna - whispered urgently. "Come on. Quickly. There shall be more of them soon."
August had no time to respond as he was yanked to his feet and towed in the wake of his unseen rescuer. "But-"
"No time," the boy, Sora, snapped. "Run now. Explanations later."
The house was dark. All the lights August had lit to push back the encroaching night had gone out. Even when his unseen benefactors dragged him out the door and into the street, the flickering of the gaslights ended at the foot of the lane The house sat in a sea of darkness.
They weren't stopping. Donna dragged him forward, making him stumble over the cobbles, until he realized where they were headed. "I am not going into the sewers."
"You don't have a choice," Sora snapped again, with an accompanying shove.
"Stop it!" Donna admonished. Her voice softening, she added, "I'm sorry, but we really don't have a choice. They rust down there; it's our best way of moving without getting caught."
Before he could protest again, that relentless hold on his wrist had dragged him down into the dank, dripping tunnel.
"It's okay," the little girl's voice offered helpfully. "You get used to the smell."
"Oh, dear," Donna sighed. "I really liked this frock, too. I wonder if-" her words broke off as a muffled clang rang out through the tunnel, followed by a string of pained cursing.
"Oooh, Donna, mind your head. The pipes are very low here."
"Why, thank you, Michelangela," came the acerbic reply. "That never WOULD HAVE OCCURRED TO ME."
"Don't take it out on Angie," Sora whispered sharply. "Now all of you be quiet. Unless you want to call those things down here."
That was enough to still August's protests. The thought of those awful, icy hands down here in the dank… His breath caught on a tremor as a wave of panic swept through him. Almost instantly, Donna's hand was around his again, leading him through the endless dark. So desperate was he for that lifeline that he didn't question why that hand felt so large. Or so wrong.
The light at the end of the tunnel couldn't have come soon enough. Nearly ready to weep with relief, August stumbled through the break in the crumbling brick wall into what appeared to be some sort of cellar, and he turned his face to the flickering electric light on the wall as though it were the sun. Behind him, he heard the sound of a large, metal door swinging into place, and the thunk of a bolt sliding home.
"Oh, my dress is positively ruined!" Donna's plaintive voice broke into his thoughts. August turned, his mouth open to thank his rescuers at last.
Only to have the sound turn to a scream in his throat. The creatures that stood before him, though they wore the dress of respectable young ladies, were an unnatural green, their hairless bodies covered in scales, and they had what appeared to be a shell deforming the lines of their backs. August stumbled back as a freakishly large, three-fingered hand reached for him.
A blow caught August in the gut, driving the wind from him, and he found himself sprawling at the feet of a young man. He, at least, appeared blessedly normal, though his features marked him as being from somewhere in the East.
"Sora!" Donna's voice emerged from the taller of the creatures.
"I'm not sorry," Sora said, glowering down at August. "He had no right. Ingrate."
The smaller sighed, picking up a hat from a stand near the door and passing it to Donna. "I really hate it when they yell like that," she said in Angie's voice. Glancing down at the smaller creature, Donna took the hat from her and settled it on her head, turning it so that a jaunty purple bow caught the light.
It was then that August caught sight of her eyes, and a thread of something strange wound through him. Her eyes were a soft, warm brown, and as she turned them upon him, he could see genuine hurt within them, and he felt suddenly ashamed. Then, her eyes widened as she got her first good look at him, and a slight flush rose incongruously to her green cheeks. She ducked her head, busying herself with brushing the grime from her dress and taking up the equally grimy and unusually long parasol leaning against the wall. There was a dent in the handle, and Donna frowned at it. "Bother. The shaft still isn't strong enough."
"Strong enough to take down most of those mechanicals," Angie crowed, grabbing up her own little parasol. "Did you see me?" She tugged on the handle, which slid free, revealing a length of chain. "I got two!"
"So you did, little sister." Sora stepped forward, and for the first time, August noticed the gleam of steel in his hand before he slid the sword he carried into a sheath, until it appeared no more than a simple walking stick. "Come on. We need to tell the others." He glanced over his shoulder at August, and his lip curled. "You too, ingrate."
Without waiting for an answer, Sora mounted the stairs, trailed by Angie at his heels. Donna lingered, one hand fidgeting with the fabric of her dress. "He should not have hit you," she said softly. "Only, he gets upset when people shout at us. Please…" Slowly, she held out her hand.
August stared at the three-fingered hand reaching out to him, the harsh electrical lighting picking out the detail of each pebbled scale. It was the hand of a monster. But, if he were to believe all his senses told him, it was also the hand that had saved him. He had no idea what was going on, and he was sick, and scared, but there was one hand out of all the others that had reached for him that night that had been gentle. That had led him out of the darkness. With a deep, uncertain breath, he reached out and took that hand, and let her pull him to his feet.
Silently, quickly, Donna led him through a series of twisting corridors. As they ascended out of the subterranean levels, the corridors became populated with people in uniform, though not a livery he recognized, and none of the soldiers seemed to be unsettled by the creature walking before him. Indeed, many of them gave her a respectful nod before going about their business. Questions filled his mouth, pressing against his teeth, and though he tried to bite them back, the pressure was almost overwhelming.
Until they emerged into a massive open room, and August's jaw dropped in shock. They stood in some sort of warehouse, dominated at one end by a lattice of scaffolding. In the midst of that warren of wood and metal stood the bottom half of the largest mechanical August had ever seen. If it were ever completed, it would be taller than his mother's tower. Taller, even, than the spire of Big Ben.
A man in uniform stood before the mechanical, his back to them as Sora and Angie approached. Angie, a little straw hat now on her head, gave up decorum and skipped the remaining few feet. "Father!" she cried.
The man turned, revealing the same Eastern features as Sora, and the light glinted off the braid of his uniform. He raised a brow, and Angie halted, immediately contrite. Her hands locked behind her back as she rocked on her heels. "I mean, Marshal Tang," she corrected herself.
Sora rested a hand on Angie's shoulder. "The Professor was already gone when we got there," he said. "But we recovered her notes. And…" he gestured toward August.
Donna nudged him forward gently, and August found himself the focus of a gaze that was at once full of compassion and hard as iron.
"Master O'Neil," the man said at last, the corner of his mouth lifting in a wry grin. "Welcome to the Shatterdome."
Note: Sora is the Rule 63 Karai AU in which Shen and Yotsuba's child was never taken by Shredder in the fire that killed Shen - Hamato Yotsuba escaped with him to New York, and he grew up alongside his turtle siblings.