It was Michelangelo that found Splinter. At first it looked as though he was asleep, and Mike wondered why he would lie down on the couch, notoriously filled with potato chips and farts, let alone fall sleep in his robe. But his eyes were open, his jaw slack and unaligned.
"Master Splinter?" Mike called. He jumped the steps down from the front door and was beside the couch, laying hand on shoulder. Not even a blink, a breath. He grabbed wrists, felt both sides of the neck through thinning fur. One hand was digging the shell cell out of his belt while the other grasped a cool claw, infusing it with heat.
"Guys, get back to the lair."
"What's wrong?"
"Splinter."
The three brothers made it home double time from Casey's. Their normally silent run now filled with heaving heavy breath as the sewer cement couldn't pass quickly enough beneath them. Leo was first through the door, finding Mike kneeling beside the couch, holding Sensei's hands and gasping watery sobs, still wearing his coat though it must have been seventy degrees in the lair.
Don was in next, and both Leo and Raph were pulling and shoving him to their father. He moved to their urging, not pushing off their sudden bossiness. The whole run home he had been dreading this moment, when he would be expected to conjure a miracle of a unspeakable magnitude. He knelt beside Mike and began the basic operational code he had prepared in transit. Check pulses, listen for breath, command brother to acquire diagnostic tools from lab, estimate temperature, weigh benefit analysis of CPR, they had been gone over an hour already...
"There's a thing on his foot." Mike was blubbering as Don tried to listen for any faint breath. He couldn't hear anything over the sounds of his brothers yelling, and the insistent bleeping of the alarm system. When had he put in a Splinter death alarm?
"Raph, secure the lair," Leo barked. "Mike, you remember how to turn that thing off? Go do it, and clear the lab. Donny, what do you need?"
"Uhh, stethoscope. And bring the telemetry machine. It's the box on the right wall shelf with a bunch of wires." Don gave up on trying to hear anything, and slid his arms under Splinter's back and knees, feeling the weight of familiar sinew and bone, now sagging and limp. Leo was closing and locking the door, Raph had evaporated, and over the bleating of his alarm system Don could hear the rummaging and crashing of Mike trying to find an off switch. "The computer should be on and have a message to mute. Click it." He slid Splinter onto the floor and hastily uncrossed his arms from how Mikey had laid them, beginning compressions.
Elbows locked. Mid sternal line. One to two inch compressions. Yes, the body was cooling. Yes, he was a little blue around the lips. But he simply could not make that cost benefit analysis about withholding any form of care from his own father. He was nearly eighteen, and an adult in many ways. But he could not accept a world without this man who had raised him. His family was small enough as it was.
The alarm turned off, and Leo and Mike returned with a profusion of boxes, arms overflowing with wires. Did his brothers really not know what was in his lab? Don opened his fathers robe wide, flicked out a blade from his belt, and began shaving off swaths of soft grey fur. Next he grabbed the monitor from Mike and tore open the electro-conversion pads. No one stopped him. No one even asked why. He placed a pad below the right shoulder, and the other across the left rib cage. The machine beeped as it read the electrical status of Splinter's heart.
The lair was finally silent.
UNSUITABLE RHYTHM. CONVERSION CANCELLED. The machine's message ran.
"What?" Don smoothed the pads down again, making sure they were flush against skin.
"What's wrong? Is it not going to work?" Mike asked, the tears at bay, his face wiped dry.
"It's a second hand machine, might not be reading correctly. I can override it. It's supposed to work if it doesn't sense a heartbeat... I need the sticky pads to hook up the rest of the monitor and see, they're in the left cabinet next to the... nevermind. If it says 'conversion ready' hit the big button and stand back." Don took a few giant steps up and over the couch and ran into his lab. It looked like a tornado had been through. He picked his way through the mess and to the med cart, pulling out a sheet of sticky foam pads from under a box of alcohol swabs. He glanced at the security monitor, still blinking, and took a moment to review the cameras. It would do them no good to all be standing around while the Foot were charging down the tunnels. Everything looked presently clear from the 23 cameras, and he checked the signaling report from whatever had tripped the alarm. It was a series of trips, and he watched the disjointed video his program strung together from 6 cameras. Then he rewound and watched again as a lone dark figure approached the lair from the west, later leaving with an armful. He rewound a third time to pause on a shot revealing a familiarly rounded back.