Here it is, the epic gift fic I wrote for my roomie. It took me a year to finish, and it's upwards of 25 chapters long....but it's a complete and utter Mary Sue. So, I'm going to re-work it, taking out the Mary Sue characters and leaving in the Turtley goodness! Here's the Prologue, which I actually didn't have to change at all. :)

Disclaimer: The Turtles are certainly not mine. (But damn, I wish I'd thought of it first.)

Part One: Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction

Prologue

~July 2006 – 3:18am~

"Ugh." Michelangelo leaned back in his chair and cracked his knuckles. In front of him, the cursor blinked, unstoppably, on the white expanse of his laptop screen. It was time to face facts—writer's block had claimed him again. "I don't know why the hell I said I could be done by June," he muttered, standing up and stretching with a sudden chorus of cracking joints. "Maybe it's time for a walk. Whaddya think, Klink?" The little orange kitten opened one eye to peer at him, then buried herself deeper under the blankets of Mike's empty bed. Mike scratched the kitten briefly between the ears and slipped out of the house with a stealth that, after practicing it all his life, was now as automatic as breathing.

The turtle stepped out onto the porch, touching the banister of the stairs lightly to get his bearings in the blackness. With the lights inside the house turned off, the grounds were a pitch-dark expanse opening in every direction around him, with only the moon and the hundreds of stars above him for guidance—one of the advantages of living on an old farm in the middle of the Massachusetts woods. As his eyes adjusted, he realized that there was a faint glow of artificial light from behind the house. The barn, he thought. Don's still working, too. I guess I shouldn't be surprised! He slipped out into the grass, damp from that afternoon's rain, and strolled out to the old barn to check up on his restless older brother.

He wasn't expecting to hear any signs of life, since Donatello had soundproofed the barn, but as he approached Michelangelo's instincts told him that something was wrong. He heard…water? Certainly not the creek that ran through their property, it sounded more like a watering can, a single stream….

Then he heard the distinct zzzzip! of a fly being done up. What the hell!? In the dim light from the high barn windows he could finally make out a figure, small and stocky, and clearly male. He registered a neatly pulled-back ponytail of dark hair and, of all things, a button-up shirt and tie. For a moment he hesitated, thrown off; this stranger looked too tidy and well kempt to be one of the homeless wanderers that sometimes strayed onto their property looking for shelter. And then the stranger, having finished his business, started to walk to the door of the barn.

Oh, hell no, he thought to himself. Images flashed through his mind of all the terrible things his oldest brother always predicted in lectures about keeping them hidden. Scientific experimentation, dissection…he leapt forward without another thought, counting on the darkness and the surprise attack to conceal his appearance from the stranger. He aimed a kick at the figure's retreating back, but just as he was about to land it, the man whipped around, and his foot skidded along something hard and rounded beneath the shirt. What the…? Before Mike could recover his balance, a hand struck his plastron and he stumbled back. A leg stuck out behind his own tripped him and sent him sprawling, but he reached out as he fell and grabbed the stranger's tie, pulling him along. There was a dull thud as Mike's carapace connected with the grass, and then a louder one as something hard hit his plastron. What is going on with this guy?

"What on Earth…. Mikey?"

For a moment, Michelangelo thought his brother had heard the commotion and come out of the barn to help him. Then he realized, with a sudden jolt, that it was the stranger, speaking with Donatello's voice. "Don…?"

The imposter got to his feet with a moan. "Oh, hell." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, pager-like device and pressed a few buttons on it. All at once the stranger disappeared, and in his place stood Donatello, missing his gear and mask, his stance tired. "It was a hologram," he said in a hushed voice, cutting off Mike's inevitable question.

Mike stared at him, his eyes wide and his mouth slightly open, still sprawled on the ground. "That's…that's incredible! Don! You're a genius!"

For a moment Don smiled warmly down at his brother; then he sighed, offering a hand to help him up. "Yes, well…you've caught me red-handed. Come on in the barn, I'll show you what I've been working on." Don's face hardened a little. "But you have to promise me you're not going to tell Leo. Or Sensei. Or Raph, for that matter."

Michelangelo returned his brother's serious look, considering. "So, I guess I also shouldn't tell them about how you just took a leak on Master Splinter's Morning Glories?"

"What? I didn't…. Oh, hell."

~10:21am~

"That's not where they usually are—they moved!"

"It's a creeper plant, Donnie. Of course they moved."

Raphael and Leonardo exchanged glances across the kitchen table as their brothers wandered down for breakfast. You know what they're talking about? asked Leo's raised eyebrow.

Not a clue, answered Raph's bemused smile over the top of his coffee.

"Maybe Sensei's training them to be ninjas," Mike suggested, with a wicked grin that his brothers could hear in his voice. "You know, the art of invisibility and all—"

"Bite me, Michelangelo."

"You'd better watch it the next time your bladder's full, or the flowers might bite you!"

Don strode into the room with a long-suffering sigh, his eyes half-closed in irritation and weariness. He headed straight for the coffeepot.

"Mornin'!" Mikey followed with a grin for his brothers, and headed straight for the fridge.

Leonardo took a sip of his tea. I don't think I want to know.

~Several months later – 4:41am~

"Aww, but I don't want to be Japanese."

Donatello frowned, looking up from his worktable as his younger brother preened in front of the mirror. "Mike, if we're going to use the Hamato name, we have to make the holograms fit it. And we have to at least resemble each other, if we're going to tell people we're brothers. It's risky enough to use our real names as it is—this isn't some fanfiction where you can look however you want and nobody notices."

"But—"

"Mikey," Don cut in forcefully. "Just imagine what would happen if we got caught. If someone figured it out. I mean, repercussions in the wider world aside, can you imagine just how badly Leo would mangle us both?"

Michelangelo paused, idly putting his holographic hair into a topknot and trying to ignore the sense of Don's argument. "I guess being Japanese is cool."

Donnie chuckled. "Mikey, sometimes I think you'll never catch up to your biological age."

Silence fell as Don slipped back into his work and Mike continued to examine his new holographic body. It was slightly taller and leaner than Don's holobody, at his own request; spending his whole life being shorter than the average human male had given him a longing to be lanky, even if it was just a projected image. I could do book tours, now, and signings! As long as it didn't get back to Leo, or Sensei. Or Raph, but it's so unlikely that he'd ever notice—

Then without warning the barn door creaked open and Raphael stumbled in, wearing the dangerous look of a sleeper disturbed.

"Hey Don, you ever gonna fix that water heater? It's rattling again, and it's driving me…what the hell?! YAAHHH!"

"OW! Raph, it's me, it's me!"

"Mikey? What the fuck is going on here?"

"Oh, hell."