(putting these up top because I had them over on tumblr) Notes: SOOOO, ha, I'm a moron and misread the theme as City Nights and not City Lights... So here's a fic that takes place mostly at night and has one scene with lights... I'm going back to my corner now.
(Ps, I don't read IDW so when I first started reading fics I always head canoned him as black. And of course trans, mexican Angel is what I'm rocking with over here for no other reason than because I can.)
It didn't feel like he was being torn apart, it was more like he melted. Anything the Kraang didn't want they melted off, and any gaps they needed to fill they poured hot melted stuff in. He fell out of what he used to be and landed on his side, desperately avoiding what was left of his previous self still trussed up in his peripheral vision.
-:-
They became known as the Twilights. Which, Mikey thought with his new-found bitterness, was a stupid name. But they were stuck with it, because Woody spent too much time fighting Angel, insisting they call themselves the Justice Force. Meaning Angel would spend too much time fighting back that there was only three of them and that's no force. Mikey just didn't care.
He used too. He did. Back when he wasn't working three jobs, getting minimal sleep but still exerting maximum effort. He didn't have time for super powers and bringing down the Kraang, he had to pay rent and bills, but he still did it. He struggled to keep up the pace in fights that forced him to use powers he despised and making sure all the cash he'd earned cleaning other people's apartments didn't fall from his pockets.
He used to envy the frivolous spending of humans. Now he had to pick at pennies just so he can afford a warm jacket with zips on the pockets.
-:-
The first time he caught a glimpse of his new face in the glass of his cell he cried. He could see just enough of himself, the genetics passed to him from his father during their mutation. He could see hints of the old pet shop owner. And everything else was O'Neil.
They'd given up on April, but they had enough of her to work with. And the Kraang in Dimension X had passed on how well Mikey adapted there. So, they took him and moulded him into the weapon they sought after.
-:-
Mikey worked the graveyard shifts of a tacky fast food place in a Kraang heavy district of New York. He was there for a month before he 'convinced' the store manager he was good enough to train up to be a manager. Customers never yelled at him, everyone just seemed to work better when he was there. And he took it, with both hands and barely forced enthusiasm because a measly pay rise is still a pay rise. Sure it took extra hours to train up, and he had to go to other stores for assessing but Mikey learned not to look a gift horse in the mouth.
At the end of his graveyard shift he did rounds dropping off catalogues in people letter boxes. Which was easy, and a good way to keep track of the Kraang in the still dead hours of the morning.
And in the mid-afternoon till late, he'd clean apartments. Mostly empty ones, or ones where someone had died, or when he'd be slipped an unusually large wad of cash to make a problem go away. God bless New York.
And any time between that he'd either sleep or fight Kraang.
-:-
He was kept in a white room for a long time. Cold and hard, he slept on the floor even though the light blinded him through closed eyes. Occasionally they would put an animal in with him, reading both their brainwaves somehow through the walls.
Starved for attention as he was, he became great at connecting with the creatures and making them trust him. If he refused to try, they would both be electrocuted. It only took one animal to die for him to stop refusing and cooperate.
He got good enough at it he nearly escaped. In the seconds of time he had when they would come and remove the animal they'd given him. He had the whole building of Kraang under his mental thumb before he got too cocky and lost control over everyone. After that a device was strapped to his head and they moved him to the 'social cells'.
-:-
Woody had a way with words that he could make anyone swoon. Part of it was due to personality and overflowing charisma, the rest was the powers the Kraang gave him. It was not anywhere near the strength of Mikey's, but it was enough.
He scored them an apartment. A very tiny, very cheap one that didn't ask too many questions of three kids who apparently never existed. It reminded Mikey of the apartment from the movie Beaches, only it was smaller. There was no shower, only a bath in the kitchen they had to fill with a bucket from the kitchen sink. The kitchen used to have a door and they had no idea where that had gone. The only toilet was a communal one on the lower level. The lounge room doubled as a bedroom. The three of them slept on a queen mattress that was already there (and none of them could figure out how it got there considering the building had a tiny stair case and no elevator).
Their only neighbour was a little blind lady called Mrs Morrison, who was lovely in every way expect for her hearing. She could hear things so incredibly precisely from so far away that Angel proclaimed it had to be an effect left over from the whole city's mutation. As detached from any other human contact as they were, the three of them couldn't help fall head over heels with this well-meaning lady. She was the only reason they ate properly and bothered to go back to the apartment because they felt bad if they missed her curfews.
-:-
It scared Mikey to his core when he was taken on his first 'field test'. They did something to the device on his head, it stopped the crushing feeling on his mind but he still couldn't reach the minds of any of his captors. He worried they were going to send him out into New York and do terrible things.
But it was worse.
He was in Dimension X.
They told him not to do anything stupid, they could find him and drag him back for punishment. But all he could focus on was getting the words "How long have I been here?"
Of course, he got no answer.
-:-
He bumped into April once when he was rushing to the fast food place. She didn't pay him much mind, not even apologising for walking into him
"No, Raph! I can't find him!" was all he heard her grunt into her phone as she stomped away.
Casey.
Mikey groaned and made a beeline for work, reaching out to Angel and Woody on the way.
"Guys, somethings happened to Casey."
"The kid with the hockey get up?"
"Yeah, I'm right around the corner from work. I'll lock myself in the office and see if I can find him. I need you two to look for me, please."
"Can do."
"Sure."
He ended up at work early, giving him plenty of time to sit in the office at the back of the shop and meditate. He wouldn't need much time, he'd tracked his family enough to have mastered pinpointing where they were in the city.
He found Casey in a minute. And it wasn't good.
"Woody, you're closest! I need the Silver Sentry, now."
"Got it, I'll get him back to the hospital."
"No, no hospital. We need the cryopod."
"Jesucristo, I'll head home and fire it up."
-:-
"I need the blue prints for those sleeper pods before we leave," Angel said. "With some modifications, they would make great healing tools. I just don't know where we're supposed to get parts for it?"
"The Kraang have labs all over New York," Mikey whispered, fiddling with the nuts of his head device. "We could make dozens."
-:-
"Who's the boy Woodrow brought home?" Mrs Morrison asked plainly before Mikey could even get to his door.
"A friend of mine. Why?"
"His heart wasn't beating when they got here."
"How-"
"I couldn't hear it."
"Mrs M, I say this with the upmost respect but that is freaky." Mikey stared at her, but she only smiled and turned back to her own apartment.
"Go, I'm sure your friend needs you."
He unlocked the door to his apartment, closing it again quickly. The cryopod sat in the corner of the room, lying parallel to the end of the bed. He got right up close to the egg-shaped machine, leaning over it. Glowing in neon pinks and blues were words in Kraang language Mikey could read but was too breathless to comprehend.
"The Purple Dragons are assholes," Angel growled, stepping out of the kitchen and coming close to Michelangelo, offering a hand on his lower back for support.
"Mrs M said his heart stopped." Mikey swallowed the lump in his throat. If it weren't for the fact he could see into Casey's mind and see the horror that happened to him and the pining to be home and held, he wouldn't have believed the swollen, still bloodstained boy was Casey Jones.
"Probably for about fifteen minutes, but Woody was doing compressions as he flew here. And you know the pod will have him fitter than before." Angel rested her head on Mikey's shoulder and started to rub circles on his back. "Only problem is he has a lot of broken bones and muscle tears. He needs to be in there for a while."
"His family are going to report him missing."
"I know. And your little splice sister came looking too." Angel moved away from Mikey and fiddled with the settings on the pod. "I may not be able to read people's minds, or any other psychic stuff you and April can do but I sure as hell know when it's happening, and she isn't good at it either. Her and your brothers are gonna draw too much attention to us if they come poking around, so I've set a barrier around the pod so only you can get into his head. But he can still reach out and hear us like Woody did, just not very far."
"Exactly how long is he going to be here?"
"Give the pod an hour to finish its immediate healing and run a diagnostic test. It'll let us know." Angel turned back and smiled. "So, how was work?"
-:-
He supposed, rather disinterestedly, that it made sense for the Kraang to experiment on multiple bloodlines and not just the O'Neil's. April's bloodline was just easier to control.
Because they messed up with Angel. The Acero family line had been mutilated and made to be one with the Kraang technology. After many generations, the physical tech embedded into them was bred out by the Kraang but their skills weren't. Angel could connect and control a computer like Mikey could a brain.
But the Kraang couldn't control her as easily as they could Mikey. No technology could break her. So, they kept her in pain. They infected one limb at a time with a parasite that ate her slowly but surely.
"I used to live in Detroit," she would say to fill in the silent moments in the social cells. Mikey found himself mesmerised by the calm, sleepy look on her face despite the sweat beading down her skin and the involuntary twitches of pain. "I'll have to take you guys to all my favourite places."
-:-
"You two need to get out of this apartment!" Woody smiled his creepy puppet smile and pushed Angel and Mikey through the window onto the fire escape. "I don't care if you go stare at the stars of an hour, but you've spent all your free time for the last month and a half. This is the first night you've had off in a long time." Woody slammed the window closed and locked it.
"And if I see either of you try to get back in before I say so I'll kick the crap out of you. Love you, have fun!"
The tarp they appropriated as a curtain was pulled across the window and that was the end of that.
"So, what do you want to do?"
"I want to go to bed." Angel groaned and started hitting her head against the window. "But that idiota isn't going to budge is he?"
"No."
"Maldición, Woody!"
Mikey didn't want to go either, but that stubborn part of him knew he needed to. Casey had to be in the pod for an estimated two months and it was gruelling. Sure, it was a huge relief to see the swelling of his face go down and the pod's celebratory ding whenever a bone or muscle had been mended warmed his heart every time he heard it, but the missing person's posters scattered around the city made him feel sick. And he felt he was going to cry every time he caught Arnold Jones Snr doing an interview pleading for the return of his son. He was glad they couldn't afford a TV in the apartment so Casey wouldn't have to hear it.
"Come on, let's go look at the stars," Mikey said and offered Angel his hand.
"And just how are we going to do that?" Angel spat. "There's too much light pollution."
"We fly."
-:-
He had always dreamed of flying as a child. Partly because the sky seemed like such a liberating thing for a small boy trapped in the sewers, he fancied that touching the clouds was the freest he could possibly be.
But as he flew across the landscape of Dimension X, speeding and hoping against hope they didn't miss the portal bomb they set to get home, it wasn't all that freeing.
-:-
Neither Angel or Mikey had an issue breathing as the air got thinner the further they flew up. Eventually something in Angel's prosthetics started to beep and they stopped. Floating, they craned their necks all around and stared out in complete wonderment. Beneath them were the bright lights of the city, and above were the stars. Surrounded by infinity, free for the moment from everything below that sought to tie them down and batter them.
Mikey couldn't help but laugh till he cried. Angel stayed silent, but when he looked back down at her he could see her calm smile.
"Hey, I wanna try something."
"What?" Angel kept her eyes closed but Mikey could hear the hint of curiosity in her voice.
"Something I would have done before the Kraang." He took her hands and squeezed them. "Turn the anti-gravity in you limbs off and I'll let go. We can free fall."
He snorted when Angel snapped her head down so fast she just about broke her neck. "You can't be serious?"
"Come on!" He moved away from her and flipped in the air. "Ange, the stuff we've been through and done this is nothing. I just want to be reckless for ten seconds and not worry about aliens, bills, and how much food is being wasted."
He stayed out of her head as best he could. But she dragged her eyes across his pleading face and eventually said, "Fine, but only for ten seconds."
"Deal! Ok, on three. One. Two."
For the first time in three years, even though wind was brushing though hair he shouldn't have and the bare back he shouldn't have was being bitten with cold, he felt like he was finally gripping the turtle he used to be.
-:-
He'd given up putting up a fight. At some point, Mikey thought he wasn't even capable of feeling anything anymore. Maybe it was the device on his head doing that.
But he thought it was mostly just him. Because he was starting to get this way back in the white room.
Empty.
Dull.
Broken.
-:-
"I think we should get Casey out before he's completely healed," Mikey murmured. He watched the lights within the pod drag their way over Casey's body, making quick work of what few injuries he had left, with tired fascination.
"Why?" Woody called from the kitchen. "I thought you'd want him fit as anything."
"He went out on his own. My father told him to wait in the lair and he didn't. Maybe being a bit sore will teach him something, make him think a bit more before he acts."
"That doesn't sound like you." Mikey looked up to the kitchen doorway and blinked at the concerned expression Woody was sending his way. "What's wrong?"
"I'm not ready to go back," Mikey pressed his hand against the glass of the pod as if he could reach through and hold Casey's face. "I can see everything Casey's seen the last year. They're hurting and see me like this is only going to make it worse. And even with all of that, this idiot is still running around trying to get himself killed."
"But you know that's because he's hurting too right?" Woody had silently moved to stand next to Mikey, his expression soft and patient. "He's only sixteen. He's allowed to be an idiot. Just like me and you."
"But we're older."
"Dude we're eighteen!" Woody laughed and elbowed Mikey in the side. "You sure do love exaggerating, don't you?"
-:-
Woody was only ever conscious on field tests. He was otherwise kept in a pod in cryo-sleep. Because there was nothing the Kraang could do to control him. He was too strong, his skin shining a metallic silver that couldn't be pierced when he reached full strength. The energy he projected from his hands and eyes melted even the hardest metal. He flew, and was capable at running at Mach speeds. Mikey wondered why they ever bothered with April when they had this kid at their disposal.
And then Mikey actually talked to him on their first field test. The guy was obnoxious as hell.
-:-
"Hey Mike, those guys at Angel's work are giving her a hard time again. Wanna go graffiti their cars?" Woody hovered over him with a wicked smile. Mikey just turned away and burrowed deeper into his blanket.
"Dude, I just got off a night shift. And they had the nerve to ask me to stay an extra five hours."
"So is that a yes?"
Mikey sighed. "Yeah."
"Good! Ange is still working so we'll have to leave widdle Casey on his own." Woody flew away from Mikey to pat the glass on the pod. "But he'll be fine. I think he's earned a sleep in."
"Please stop doing that," Mikey could only put half the venom he wanted into his words, crawling on the floor of his hoodie. "So who are we looking for?"
"That Mark loser and I think he's name's Dave?" Woody shrugged, settling his feet on the ground. "I heard them in the background calling her Jose and Juan among other things on the phone. I think they just came off night shift, so you wanna mess with their dreams and I'll handle the cars?"
"Done."
-:-
Field tests mostly consisted of finding a resource or creature and hauling it back to the Kraang base. Woody stayed on his best behaviour, because he was fast but not skilled. Mikey's head device was rigged to blow when given the order and so were the prosthetics they'd given Angel for the task.
"And I kind of like you guys. I don't really want you to go boom splat."
They learned to work together as a team. They built their resistance slowly. Planning exactly how they were going to escape down to the finest of details.
The Kraang had given up trying to track what they were saying. Thanks to Mikey's powers they managed to slip seamlessly between English, Japanese, and Spanish. The Kraang had enough issues with one language let alone three. And they had figured their system of 'one wrong move and boom' was fool proof.
"Demasiado malo para ellos," Angel grinned and chuckled. "No están tratando con tontos."
-:-
"Ahhhhh, tawagoto." Woody mumbled, dropping the take away food they'd brought home. He was the first to walk through the door and see the empty pod. "Yo, M-man! How didn't you know he wasn't here!"
"He's here! He's…" Mikey slapped his forehead and dragged his hand down his face. "He's with Mrs. Morrison."
"Glad to hear you're finally home. There's someone here who wants to speak to you." Mrs Morrison called from behind them. All three of them jumped at her tone, which wasn't angry but it was stern enough to make them feel about ten years old.
Casey was sitting on Mrs Morrison's plastic covered couch, cradling a mug of soup to his chest. He looked freshly showered and healthy, looking like a kid any nanna would be proud off in some nice pants and a knitted sweater.
"These are the people I was telling you about Arnold. They own the machine you woke up in."
"I know who they are."
Mikey kept himself as close to the door as possible, not sure how Casey would react. Woody quickly sat down in the armchair, trying to seem smaller. Angel just rushed over, parking herself on the coffee table and started to poke Casey in different places.
"How do you feel?"
"Sore."
"Good. That's what you get for being a dumbass." Angel slapped him lightly on the forehead. "What were you thinking taking on a gang of Purple Dragons?"
"I don't know."
"Angel," Mikey piped up with a terse tone. He couldn't stand the way Casey looked so uncomfortable and stripped off of all his usual bravado. "He just woke up, save the moral antagonising for later."
"Umm, so when do I get to go home?" Casey asked meekly.
"Let us have twenty four hours to just keep track how you're going." Mikey couldn't see it, but he knew Angel was wearing that calm, 'everything is going to be ok' smile of hers. "Sorry we weren't here when you woke up. The pod wasn't supposed to do that automatically."
Casey seemed to deflate at the news he couldn't go home, and Mikey couldn't handle it anymore.
"Come on!" he said putting a grin on his face that felt like it belonged, because he really was happy Casey was ok. "We have some perfectly good Chinese food on the floor in the hall going cold! Let's eat!
-:-
"They'll never love you like this."
"I know."