This tunnel is too close to the surface for Splinter's liking, close enough that a heavy truck rumbling overhead sends a shower of dust and crumbling brick down on his head, but with the heat leaking out from the tangle of steam pipes heating the buildings above it is warmer—if not drier—than their recently vacated home. And in these last dark days of the year, when thermodynamics and primordial instinct steal his children away from him one by one, warmth is everything.
Raphael's shoes have come untied again. Splinter adjusts Leonardo's slight weight across his back, tightening the sling so it does not budge as inch as he bends down to help Raphael—for what feels like the thousandth time this morning—secure the mismatched Reeboks more tightly to his feet.
As the smallest and most obedient of his children, Leonardo is always the first to succumb to hibernation's incessant pull. Michelangelo, with his chubby cheeks and penchant for layering as many clothing articles and accessories as he can get his hands on, is as of yet unfazed by the most recent dip in temperatures, as is Donatello. His brilliant, half-blind son is not as open to human fashion as his youngest brother, rejecting almost every proffered long-sleeved item out of hand due to some inscrutable but thoroughly unacceptable quality in texture or fit, but if past winters are any indication he will hibernate on his own pre-determined schedule regardless of temperature.
Raphael, unfortunately, is not so lucky.
"Why do I hafta... even wear shoes?" he scowls, eyelids heavy and mouth curled in frustration. He sways slightly; Splinter has to pause the shoe-tying for a moment to steady him, only to grunt as his son sags heavily against him. If they keep moving at a steady pace, he has four, maybe five more hours of wakefulness at best. "They jus' get... jus' get wet again an' I hate... I hate..."
"We must protect our feet, this close to the surface," Splinter explains. He finishes the bow with a double-knot and glares at it reproachfully. "There is broken glass, and needles, and other dangerous things dropped by the humans."
"Yeah, Raph." Michelangelo bounces tauntingly just outside of his brother's reach, tone airy and all-knowing. "Remember when you cut your foot and had to hop around with a stick fer weeks and weeks and—"
Raphael snaps his teeth threateningly, a display that would be more effective if it weren't for the multiple missing incisors. "I'll cut your foot, you—"
"Boys," says Splinter warningly. "Enough!"
Raphael lets out a high, pitiful whine, almost a sob. His body is at war with his will, and the inevitable end of the battle draws closer and closer. Splinter sighs. They are not yet halfway through their journey, and the length of this migration would be trying even under the best of circumstances. His joints pop as he stands. They should have left their fall encampment near Chinatown earlier, but the weather had been unseasonably warm and Splinter had fooled himself into thinking they could linger longer to take advantage of the good scavenging. If only...
Donatello—quiet for the length of this little drama, his hungry eyes glued to the thin slice of grey sky just visible through a storm drain—lets out a sudden yelp of excitement.
"Dad!" he says, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet, fingers clenched tight with excitement around the lip of the drain. "Dad Dad Dad! There's a ball!"
"Not so close," Splinter says automatically. Donatello takes an obedient half-step away from the drain, only to be shoved forward again as Michelangelo crowds close against him, neck straining to peer out at the street above.
"Where izzit?" he asks. "Close enough that we can reach?"
Donatello points. Not out across the street level. Up and up over the distant rooftops.
It always amazes him how the son who struggles to find his way in the dim closeness of unfamiliar passageways and has inconsolable tantrums over his inability to read even the simplest of picture books can pick out the smallest, most far-flung details of the world above. Splinter has to squint to make out what's drawn his sons' attentions.
At the far end of the square, just above the headache-inducing stack of lit signs selling everything from vehicles to some ominously bottled product described simply as "Essence of Womanhood", a white flagpole juts skyward. At the base of the pole, surrounded by a cluster of humans in work gear and safety harnesses, sits a large, glistening silver ball, its surface a patchwork of interconnected glass triangles and light bulbs that wink brightly despite the overcast day.
"Ah," he says. "The humans are preparing for New Year's Eve."
Judging by the twin expressions of confusion, this does not clarify the situation at all. Splinter explains further.
"A human holiday. It happens while you sleep. The old year leaves and they welcome in the new one by counting backwards and dropping that ball from the sky."
Even more confusion. "Why would they do that?" asks Donatello. He looks back towards the ball, the lights within dimly flashing purple as the humans run it through what appears to be a series of electrical tests. "It's pretty. I wouldn't wanna drop it."
This, Splinter has no explanation for. "Humans are strange like that," he says. "Though once it is dropped, bits of paper fall from the sky, so perhaps the paper is stored inside somehow. Then they sing songs and make lots of noise with little horns they blow with their mouths. Some of them even kiss."
Donatello makes a face. Splinter expects a similar reaction from Michelangelo—of his children the most vocally fearful of some dreaded human disease known as "the cooties"—but instead the little turtle looks more intrigued than ever.
"What kind a songs?"
Splinter tilts his head back, thinking. He has only ever witnessed the celebration from below, scavenging dropped change and foodstuffs and other waylaid accouterments that fell through the grates. It was an excellent source for the little bottles he used to store his hand-ground medicinal tinctures. "One of them is about shoes," he says at length. A snatch of music comes back to him, so he hums it, low and throaty, adding in the few words he can remember. "They dance while they sing it, all in a line. Like this."
He shifts his weight back onto one foot, lifting the other and giving a little kick, then repeats the maneuver with the opposite footing.
This proves too much for Michelangelo, who slings one arm across Donatello's shoulders, the other Raphael's, and pulls them into an enthusiastic if ill-balanced chorus line, each kick punctuated by a piercingly off-pitch cry of "These shoes! Theeeese SHOES!"
"Stoppit!" Raphael whines. "Stoppit, Mikey!" His own shoes have already come untied again.
By the time Splinter has secured them with knots so tight they'll probably have to be cut off of his feet, Michelangelo and Donatello are deep into one of their rhyming word games, snickering together as each new variation of the lyrics becomes more outlandish and obscene. Donatello's sly whisper of "cheese poos!" into his brother's ear slit nearly has Michelangelo on his shell with laughter.
Another sound, further up the tunnel. Splinter snaps his head towards it, ears perked and body tense with adrenaline.
Footsteps. Two-footed, large and slow. The heavy thump of rubber boots and faint squawking of a walkie-talkie.
"Humans," he whispers, a word that instantly silences his children's mirth. They melt as one into the shadows, disappearing down a side passage with the swiftness of running water before dropping back down into the tunnels too wet and foul for most humans to enter.
Splinter curses quietly to himself, calculating the tangled distance through cold sewage this detour has forced onto their journey, what gear he can abandon if he is forced to take on the weight of another of his sons. Not the coal or candles or water, but the canned goods meant for his own consumption (the turtles have been fasting for a week in preparation for hibernating) might be safely recovered if he wraps them in plastic and stashes them above some overhanging pipes high above the water-line.
His stomach grumbles, but he ignores it. To keep his sons alive, he will do whatever needs to be done.
Many hours and many, many miles of tunnels later, Splinter grits his teeth and meditates—not for the first time in his hardship-strewn existence—on the nature of patience.
His sons, through coordinated whining, have over the course of their journey managed to wheedle more and more crumbs of information out of him about their latest glimpse of the human world. Why was the New Year's ball all covered in light bulbs? Did the light bulbs break when the humans dropped it? Light bulbs always broke when they dropped them. Where these special anti-drop light bulbs? Or were they meant to break and that's where all the tiny pieces of paper came from? Why did the humans wear sunglasses if it was night? And why did the sunglasses have numbers on them?
For once, it was Michelangelo who was the most incessant in his thirst for knowledge, a novelty that had made it easy for the rat to indulge him. Even if he had no satisfactory answer for where the humans would place the second sunglass eye-hole in the year 2011.
Only now, deep, deep in the bowels of the city, deep enough that there's no deterring specter of human ears to call upon with reasonable authority as his son launches into a full-throated rendition of his new favorite tune, does Splinter recognize his son's curiosity as the deadly trap it was.
"Staaaaaaart spreading the oooooze!
Aayyee'm HEAVING todaaaaaaay!
Aayyee wanna PEE and FART innit!
New Yooork, Neeew Yooooooooork!"
Donatello, after joining in for the first dozen or so breathless, giggling choruses, has rather sensibly decided that enough is enough. His shoulders are hunched beneath his shell, and he flinches every time Splinter directs him left or right with a gentle brush of his tail, marching along with his eyes down and his hands clamped tightly over his ear slits.
Splinter would join him in trying to block out the din, but his arms are full of Raphael, eyes still struggling to stay open but limbs no longer cooperative. Would shush Michelangelo except that he suspects that the singing is keeping him going, keeping Donatello awake also, and they have not yet reached their winter sanctuary. For all its annoyance, Michelangelo's off-key bellowing serves a larger purpose.
"Theeeeese little cheeeese POOS!
Aaaaaare FLOATING awaaaaay!"
Ears flat against his skull, Splinter picks up the pace.
The sooner they reach their destination, the better.
The chamber is not as large as their summer home, maybe twenty feet across and half as many high in the middle, lower near the edges. It's really more of a juncture between two levels of pipework, with half a dozen small openings interspaced along the curved walls and a small dugout where the human workers who built these tunnels and the heating systems they service used to nap and cook their lunches over a small, huddled iron stove beneath a spare ventilation pipe.
Judging by the debris left behind when Splinter first found this place, no human has tread here in thirty years or so, which means that he's been able to fortify and stock it with supplies over the course of the year in preparation for their return. The sleeping nest is exactly as he left it, tucked in the darkest corner where it would appear little more than a pile of abandoned rags to any intruder. He sifts through the blankets, fluffing and checking for vermin, before tucking Leonardo and Raphael into their soft folds.
Donatello has begun to blink rapidly, a sign either that he is grossly over stimulated or fighting back his own urge to hibernate. Possibly both. It's not long before he climbs wordlessly into the nest, limbs curled up close and forehead pressed against the hard, cool touchstone of Raphael's shell.
Michelangelo, however, is far from ready for bed. While Splinter starts a small fire in the stove and unpacks, he races around and around the little space, leaping and climbing and humming the now thankfully wordless tune.
"Is New Year's tonight, Dad?"
"No, Michelangelo."
"When then? Soon?"
"I do not know. Possibly."
"Can we go and see it?"
"No, Michelangelo."
"Why not?"
"You will be sleeping, as you do every winter."
"I don' wanna sleep, I wanna see the ball drop!"
"You must sleep. It is in your nature."
"But I don' wanna!"
And on.
And on.
Eventually, he convinces Michelangelo that while he doesn't have to hibernate now, he does have to go to bed. If he wakes again in the morning, Splinter will tell him more about the strange human holidays that happen while they are dead to the world. Will tell him about Valentine's and St. Patrick's and the mysterious, mattress-related event known only as President's Day.
"Do they sing at that one, too?" Michelangelo asks, burrowing deeper beneath a moth-eaten quilt. Beside him, Donatello's mouth has gone slack and still, his slow breath whistling faintly between his teeth.
"Yes," Splinter lies. "The strangest of songs, with the silliest of dances. But I will only tell you more if you go to sleep."
At last, Michelangelo closes his eyes, though it is several minutes more before he stops squirming and slips into the first stages of slumber. With a sigh, Splinter slumps down next to the stove, rummaging for a tin of sardines before kicking off his sandals and stretching out his long toes to dry.
Another year, another successful migration. With any luck the return to their winter nest will flip the switch in Michelangelo's brain urging him to hibernate, and Splinter will not have to come up with any appropriately presidential show tunes.
Exhausted, back aching from the long walk on two feet, Splinter finishes his meager meal, sets the empty tin aside, and spends the next half hour carefully grooming. Only when he is clean does he join his sons in the nest, body curled protectively around them in the dark.
Splinter comes to with a sudden start. It is always night in the sewers, but the low glow of embers on the grate tells him he hasn't slept more than a few hours. All is quiet but for the distant clank of a boiler and the even, synchronized breathing of his children, yet still his ragged ears tell him something is amiss. His hands move automatically to sweep across the hard lumps cocooned within the nest of torn blankets, counting.
One, two, three. An empty space where four should be.
There is no time for bipedalism. He darts around the shadowy circumference of the room on all fours, nose pressed hard against the stone. Michelangelo's scent is everywhere, but at the mouth of a side entrance pipe he catches a whiff of something fresher, tinged with musty wool and the grubby soap he'd used to scrub each squirming, scaled child clean of spattered sewer foulness before putting them to bed.
Half a moment spared to circle back to the nest, pulling and tucking until the cozy blankets appear little more than a pile of rags and ancient debris. He banks the meager fire with two quick kicks of ash, dousing the room in a thick camouflage of darkness, and darts back out into the tunnels, snout twitching frantically as he follows Michelangelo's wayward scent.
He doesn't have far to go. Farther than can be explained away by sleep-walking, with a few twists and turns that require tight, careful circling until he picks up the scent again, but not far enough that the panic Splinter first felt upon finding one of his sons missing has time to fester into gruesomely detailed dread. Michelangelo is slumped beneath the dim, guttering glow of an ancient utility light a few hundred yards from their hideaway, knees folded half beneath him and hands loose in his lap. Splinter is on him in an instant, snuffling and licking every exposed inch of green flesh.
"My son," he pants, pawing each limb for hidden injuries. "My son..."
Michelangelo whines faintly in protest as the rough tongue bath reaches his face, eyes fluttering as they struggle to open. Thick tear tracks criss-cross the grime coating his cheeks. His clothes are soaked through, his front and forearms splattered thickly with mud, as if he'd stumbled and tried to drag himself back to a standing position. Splinter slips one hand beneath his filthy sweatshirt, groping until he finds the edge of his shell and the soft sliver of un-scaled skin tucked beneath. Cool where hours earlier it had been warm, but not damp with illness. The dry, slow fading of a long winter's sleep.
"Daddy," he whimpers. "Daddy..."
The word cuts through him like a knife. He clutches Michelangelo closer. "Hush, my son. I am here."
Strong fingers bury themselves in his fur. Now that the worst of the fear has passed, Splinter recognizes this tunnel not as the passage back to the warm route they'd traveled before, but the one leading to the storm culvert that serves as a shortcut back to downtown, a route passable to the entire family in high summer but flooded with icy water as the city falls under winter's shadow.
A part of him is impressed that his son had remembered the way after nearly half a year. Another part of him shudders with renewed horror.
"Michelangelo," he asks, already knowing the answer, "where were you going?"
The small turtle shifts guiltily in his arms, but the movement is slowed, dulled. It won't be long now.
Fresh tears of frustration slip from the swollen, ice-blue eyes. Of all his sons, the vibrant, too-curious Michelangelo hates this limitation of their biology the most.
"I jus' wanneta..." A long, hitching breath. "Wanna ssssee th' new... neewwwaah..."
Splinter closes his eyes. Tight. Tighter.
He wants to give this to his son. This, and so many other impossible things. Wants to give him a life that he himself has never known, has only witnessed in glimpses through the bars of his cage, the same life the O'Neil child was given by her father before it all ended in flame.
Splinter sits in the damp, reeking tunnel, rocking, regretting, until the last of Michelangelo's fretful squirming stills, until his breathing stretches out into the shallow, measured cadence of hibernation.
As if waiting for a signal, the struggling utility light at last blinks out.
"Maybe next year," Splinter says, half to himself, half to the cold, too-quiet dark.
It doesn't happen all at once, their waking.
As with the blooming of spring, it comes in fits and starts. There are long, icy stretches where Splinter is half-convinced he will never hear their sweet, quarrelling voices again, that he will live the rest of days alone in the miserable roots of the city, drowned by stone and the memories of what once was. Then again there are days when the sun shines in brilliant gold slivers warm against his fur as he scavenges just below street level, nose catching the hint of something green in the air as he circles Central Park, and he returns to find the turtles have changed places in their nest, instincts responding to the same invisible signal that draws back the geese from their southerly adventures.
(Oh yes, Splinter knows about geese, though he has only ever glimpsed them from a distance. More familiar are the jewel-throated pigeons and opinionated seagulls that challenge him for the tastiest of the gutter scraps. But it is many years now since he knew nothing but the four walls of his laboratory cage, and he devours the contents of the tattered books and half-shredded magazines he finds with the hunger of one starved.)
Leonardo pulls himself from the tangle of his brothers during a brief thaw in early February, his limbs alarmingly thin and knobbly at the joints. It takes every ounce of strength Splinter has not to give in to the instinctual urge to stuff him with the densest offerings of his carefully hoarded larder, but over the years he has learned through heart-wrenching trial and error the distinctly reptilian peculiarities of their biology. Winter is far from over, and food now would only make his son ill. Make his guts churn and his metabolism spike and hover for long, anguished hours on the edge of fevered sleep, exhausted but unable to slip back into that still nonspace of winter stasis.
He does allow him a few slow, measured sips of water, and to brush his teeth and bathe (Leonardo has always been the most fastidious of his children). Leonardo is more coherent than he has been in previous mid-winter wakings, though his conversation is distinctly circular as Splinter wipes him down with a cool, damp cloth. With the small cooking fire extinguished completely and two tunnel coverings rolled back to allow a gentle cross breeze the temperature soon drops back down to an acceptably winterish chill. When Leonardo finally lies back down again, slipping back into stupor with the softest, sweetest of sighs, Splinter is all the lonelier for his too-brief company.
Raphael sits up occasionally but does not truly wake, brow furrowed and instinct darting his tongue towards the ice chips Splinter slips past his chapped lips even has his mind wanders unfollowable paths. Donatello is similarly restless, his hands pawing blindly at the sheets while his mouth twists numbly around low, animal noises. Only when Splinter rearranges the blankets, tucking his limbs tight against his shell and burying him beneath as many layers as he has to spare, does he lie still again. Splinter spends long hours watching him, fascinated by the alien half-circle of white nail growing from fingertips chewed bloody during warmer parts of the year.
Michelangelo—bright, boisterous, ebullient Michelangelo—sleeps as if dead.
It's difficult, at times, to remember that he isn't dead. That this unnatural stillness is in fact anything but. That it is as much in his nature as his unquenchable laugh, his sly mischief. That—if previous winters are to be judged by—Michelangelo will be the first of his brothers to rise again in full, rested and eager for a new adventure. But for now...
With a deep, bone-weary sigh, Splinter rests one hand atop the mound of blankets, fingers spread to catch the faintest rustle of movement as four small green bodies breathe with glacial slowness in, out, in, and out.
By late March, when winter's ice and snow has at last softened once more into rain, Splinter is ready.
Michelangelo, as always, is the first. He allows his son time orient himself, of course, spirit settling back into skin with a long, jaw-cracking yawn, but the moment those blue eyes look up at him with a clear spark of recognition, Splinter pounces.
"Quick, quick, my son!" He jams the hat low on Michelangelo's knobby green head. "It's almost here!"
Michelangelo lets out a grunt of surprise. "Dad?" The word is barely a croak. Hands still clumsy with sleep reach up to paw inquisitively at the crisp brim of the shiny paper top hat. "Wha's—?"
"No time to explain!" Glasses next. Without ears this is more difficult to manage—his own are perched rather precariously at the end of his nose—but the effect is priceless. "We have barely a minute left!"
Mikey blinks up at him owlishly through the zeroes of the glittering 2004. He opens his mouth, a thousand questions at the tip of his tongue as he cranes his head to take in the ring of candles circling their nest, only to have his eyes go wide with dumbstruck awe as he looks up and spots what's dangling at the top of the chamber.
"Dad, izzat—?!"
Shining nearly as bright as the sun in the candlelight, the ball is a thing of broken mirrors and carefully salvaged aluminum foil, each piece cleaned and smoothed and molded layer by precious layer until it was roughly a foot and a half across. It dangles at the end of a long strand of battery-powered Christmas lights, filling the dreary concrete chamber with a thousand reflected points of light that drift and flutter in and out of existence as it spins. Michelangelo's mouth is a small, shocked O, the scales of his dark green skin glowing orange in the candlelight, his blue eyes freckled by shifting golden stars.
(He will remember him like this always, Splinter thinks. Always and forever.)
"Fifty seconds left!" he calls, making a show of checking the glowing blue display of his watch. "Forty-nine, forty-eight, forty-seven... Count with me, my son!"
Michelangelo mouths along in a belated daze through the rest of the forties, mumbles the thirties, voice growing clearer and more confident through the twenties until he's practically shouting as—
"Nineteen! Eighteen!"
—second by second, time marches onward—
"Seventeen! Sixteen!"
—bringing them closer and closer to the end of one thing, and the beginning of another.
"Fifteen! Fourteen!"
He had thought that the noise might awaken the rest of his sons, but there is no movement from the three bodies flanking them. A part of him is disappointed. Another part of him knows that it is good and right to share special moments alone with each of them, at times.
"Thirteen! Twelve! Eleven! TEN!"
With a flick of his tail, the string holding the glittering ball aloft is loosened. Michelangelo screams as it starts to descend.
"NINE! EIGHT! SEVEN!"
The motion of the ball is far from smooth, swaying back and forth on a lazy parabola as the anchoring rope slips through the grip of his tail. Michelangelo struggles to his feet, reaching up, up...
"SIX! FIVE!"
The long-dormant muscles of his legs tremble and give way, flopping him back on his shell. He barely seems to notice, his whole body quaking with excitement.
"FOUR! THREE!"
This next part is the trickiest of all. Timing is of the utmost essence. Splinter tenses in anticipation.
"TWO! OOOOONE!"
Ball swaying drunkenly around his head, Splinter yanks on the string tied to the paper bag right at the apex of the chamber. The bag rips, showering them in a rainbow burst of carefully-cut confetti, the work of many, many long nights alone except for a stack of magazines and too-small human scissors.
"HAPPY NEW YEAR!" he shouts, picking up his son and swinging him in a wide circle. "Happy New Year, Michelangelo!"
And now, the pièces de résistance. Splinter deftly reaches out with one foot and presses play on the beat-up, battery-powered stereo tucked surreptitiously between the blankets.
His own mother—soft, dimly remembered—never sang to him, never had the words for singing. Never knew of years, or winter cold, or the smell of spring outside of the laboratory where she and her mother and her mother's mother and her mother's mother's mother had been born. Had never had dreams for her son beyond the basest of desires to see him grow and perhaps, someday, have sons of his own.
Splinter sucks in a deep breath and bellows, loud and clear as he can:
"Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind?
Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and days of auld lang syne?
For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we'll take a cup of kindness yet,
for auld lang syne! "
The stereo's sound is tinny and full of ominous grinding. Splinter had accidentally destroyed half a dozen cassettes in his quest to repair its heavily-gummed spools. The song it plays doesn't at all match the tune of the original, but the style is close enough, slow and grand with occasional bright bursts of brass. Night Mood Jazz, according to the peeling, hand-written label.
It does not matter. By the beaming smile on Michelangelo's face, it is perfect.
"Dad?" he asks, dizzy and breathless from giggling as the two of them collapse back onto the nest. "Is it really a new year?"
Splinter pulls him close, hard green head tucked under long, graying muzzle for a very whiskery hug.
For the first time in months, he feels warm again.
"It is," he says. "My son... A very, very happy new year, at last."