A/N: Written to accompany the cover picture, which was part of an angsty set. Borrowed some elements of headcanon from Flynne with Tyler :3
Virtues of a Rebel Leader: Family
The figures on the paper blurred.
It wasn't tears. It should have been. Twenty years ago she might have excused herself to fall into his arms for half an hour and sob; ten, and she would have taken a few minutes in grim silence, fighting the lump in her throat and blinking away moisture she knew she had no time for.
Now? April was just tired.
Her eyes were dry as exposed bone and pulsed in their sockets with a headache that had been rooted in her skull for so long, she'd forgotten what it felt like to be without one. She squeezed the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger, commanding her gaze back into focus with a warrior's effort until the lettering on the sheet before her once more became recognisable English.
And numbers. Numbers sitting beneath a thin title of 'Casualty Report'. The first section of the common document had once been a list of names, at her request. She was mother of the resistance and if she must command her children over the tops of the trenches, she would know the damage she had done. They would never be just numbers to her, not ever.
But a mother also had to be tough. Hard. April couldn't remember exactly when she had asked for the page order to be switched, but now numbers met her swimming vision first. The next page would list key personnel, providing visibility of any resulting skill gaps or lost knowledge. Then, finally, the detailed roster of the dead. April Jones would take stock of the personal loss later, but Commander Jones had to know the resource impact and she had to know it now.
She flipped the page. The numbers extended well into page two this time. April's stomach was a hollow pit and the document trembled in her hand; not grief, or shock, but muscle fatigue.
"Only three survivors from outpost seven?" The words were her own, but you could have fooled April. The voice sounded foreign and the lips she moved were rubber.
"Yes, ma'am."
"They were developing promising counter-legion tech there." Knowledge plucked from a head overloaded with such details, but April felt like she was watching a subroutine run, the code ticking away on screen without her input. "Did we manage to save any of it?"
"We searched, but the Foot razed it, ma'am. Nothing but scrap metal and torched circuit boards left."
"Tch. A set-back we can ill afford at this juncture, Commander."
April looked up from the casualty report, blearily taking in the faces around the scattered, map-laden chaos of the strategy table. There were not many. When the raids had first started five days ago, April had dispatched everyone she could afford to aid with defence and relocation efforts. Eight outposts compromised in all, most of them intel and R&D. That last cynical remark had come from the glass jar mounted aside Hun's blank, disinterested face. Beside her, Tyler bristled; playing messenger to so much bad news had worn his temper down to a fraying thread, and he spent far too much time in the presence of the worst role model for anger management he could possibly have latched onto for that to be a good thing. Before he could react in her stead, April simply leaned forward, locked her gaze with that single beady floating eye in the water behind the glass and said with inhuman levels of patience:
"Shit happens, Doctor Stockman."
"Oh, it does not simply 'happen'. Causation, my dear."
"Yes." April's voice was dull. "He is known as the Shredder."
Bubbles of activity rippled around the brain in the jar. "I'm talking about the leak! This could happen again. If all it takes is one loose-lipped captive to bring this resistance to its knees, we may as well give up the game right now."
April straightened, every segment of her spine crunching in protest. She couldn't remember when she had last moved away from this table. For all she knew, she had become a permanent fixture, hunched over charts and reports and blueprints and sputtering communications equipment. They were the lens through which she managed an entire war - and yet her world had shrunk to the suddenly claustrophobic confines of this room. Her heart fluttered desperately in its cage, and the voices that surged across the table - Tyler's fury and Baxter's criticism - dimmed to background noise beneath the threatening roar of exhaustion.
" - more could we possibly have done? Sometimes agents get captured and tortured, some break, some don't. We were unlucky this time -"
" - Unlucky?! Mathematics may be a foreign concept to you, but I would hope the Commander can at least calculate the scale of our losses. In R&D alone we took a hit somewhere in the region of thirty-eight percent on offensive weaponry, eighteen percent on vehicle development -"
" - And twenty-two percent total human losses, but what do those matter to you?"
"Cannon fodder is important, but only if it can't be turned against you. I have a nice little proposal lined up for the Commander to microchip her field agents. If they get captured, one flick of a button from the remote safety of headquarters will send a signal to the chip and …"
An explosion of bubbles erupted in the jar. The usually disengaged Hun smiled unpleasantly at the implications.
"Enough." April forcibly snapped her world back into focus. It felt a lot like trying to reset a broken bone. "They only managed to get the location of base eleven out of the captive -" his name was Henry Ackles and he was nineteen years old and he was going to propose to Gemma Benson before Christmas this year and now there isn't enough left of him to marry - "and found the others by breaking into the communication logs there. I traced the hack myself. The Foot simply saw an opportunity and they took it. Field agents are always at risk of capture, Doctor. That's a human vulnerability we have to accept."
"But if you would just let me -"
"My rebels are not your guinea pigs, Stockman." She didn't shout - she rarely did - but the look she shot the Doctor was one honed to a dagger point through years of command, brooking no argument in spite of the fatigue that fogged her once lively green eyes. "I've already made that perfectly clear."
Stockman's laugh was piteous. "Some things never change. Still trying to win wars with ethics, Ms O'Neil?"
"Jones. And if we can't win with ethics, we deserve to lose."
"Hmph. Well, tell me we are at least reviewing security in light of the breach."
"It's prioritised. I …" Uncertainty made her heart skip a beat. "It was an old encryption protocol, but solid enough. I'm surprised they cracked it." One of Donnie's, actually, as solid as they came, but nothing was impenetrable given enough time. Close to thirty years and the influx of Utrom slaves to work at the problem would probably do it. April scraped a hand across her face, daunted by the prospect of another night in the glare of her laptop with lines of code burning into her eyeballs. "I'm going to take a look at it now, see where else it's used. I'll have to update it, but … I'm no Donatello."
"No, you are not."
After all she'd been through, April thought she'd developed a hard shell of her own by now, but somehow that smarmy, flippant jibe was a knife jammed right into her gut. It carved open the way for a world of hurt to come flooding in - the five days of hell, the devastating losses, the burden of failure, the soul-wearying prospect of dragging this makeshift resistance up off its knees again before their enemies could take advantage of their weakness. The ghosts came, too, living and dead, the faces of friends and family who, even if they still lived, could no longer bear to be in the same room as one another. They would take her orders but they would not talk, they would not listen, they would not join her at this table and lend her their combined strength.
Tyler's mouth moved, forming around concerned words she could not hear. April fell away from the table and into the dark.
Warmth.
Warmth times three.
She didn't need to see them to know they were there. Which was a good thing; April's eyes were so thoroughly glued shut that, for the time being, she had zero inclination to open them. Her body was heavy, solid, safe. Breathing, just breathing. No thinking, no planning, no despair. She took the rare moment of peace to let herself just be.
The rhythm of her breathing must have changed, because the weight on her blanket-swaddled shoulder shifted slightly in response. Intuition told her it was Leo, from his silence and the solemn gravity he carried everywhere with him these days.
"What?" That low, grizzled hiss, fraught with sudden alarm, was Raphael. "What is it?"
"Nothing. Relax. She stirred, that's all."
A grumble, probably for the sake of grumbling. The calmer Leo was, the more irate Raph tended to get. As she pondered that strange inverse relationship, a third voice piped up from further back in the room, running with an undercurrent of desperate optimism she thought had been stamped out of Michelangelo long ago. "D'you think maybe she'll wake up soon?"
The childlike hope in his voice was more than she could take. April kept her eyes closed but allowed her lips to part, murmuring: "I'm awake -"
"April!" The familiar chorus, even minus one achingly absent voice, made her heart swell.
" - But I'm comfy and I'm not moving. Don't make me."
"We were kinda here to do the opposite, rebel leader," Mikey said, and she could feel his relieved smile from across the room.
"D'ya have any idea how worried we were? Ya just … collapsed! Tyler couldn't tell us when you'd last slept. " The near-accusation in Raph's words prompted her to prise open one eye, just enough to take in the scenery. The room was dark but for a single muted lamp beside the bed, its light carving out the silhouettes of turtles - Leonardo by her pillow, one hand at rest on her shoulder; Mikey lurking a little ways from the bed; and Raph, weighing down the foot of the mattress, his one good eye fixed intently on her. "Or ate or … anythin'. Every time he saw you, you were stuck in that war room. Ya can't work like that, April!"
"A lecture on self-care from Raphael." April smiled. "That's … wow. That's somethin'."
Chuckles from the other two overrode Raph's belligerently embarrassed snort, genuine at first, then ringing all too quickly with the awkwardness of friends who hadn't really been friends for far too long but remembered the pantomime anyway. Reality squeezed threateningly down on her cocoon of ambivalent safety, and she sighed.
"There wasn't much time for sleep. Probably isn't now, is there?" April unfurled her arms to push herself up, but Leo's hand became firmer on her shoulder. She stared up at his unseeing face. "I've been out for a while, I bet. They're going to need me …"
"Angel's holding the fort okay for now," Mikey said, his soft voice growing louder as he approached the bed - though the deliberate distance he kept from his brothers was tangible. "You're officially on downtime."
"April." Leo's soft, paternal tone gave her a sharp pang for the master from whom he had doubtless learned it. "No more attacks so far. No Foot contact. The resistance is lying low. Whatever you exhausted yourself doing during the raids, it worked. The rebels are safe, for now."
"Oh, and Stockman -" Raphael sneered the name, "- was goin' on about how there was no need to thank him for takin' care of some security thing you were worried about."
The knot of tension that had been tightening around her heart unravelled. April stopped resisting Leo's gentle pressure and allowed herself to sink back to the pillow, a wry smile curving her mouth. "Ah. So … you're my prison guards now, huh?"
"Nuh uh," Mikey murmured. "Just family."
Yes, you are.
April closed her eyes and fell into silence. It wasn't like the old days. Too many absent faces from this picture, for one. Mikey, too distant and detached from brothers who had rejected his every attempt to mend their broken bonds. Leo, cool and quiet and constantly tensed for a barrage of accusations that hadn't launched today; they were loaded and bristling, thick with vitriol, but miraculously held back by a Raphael exerting levels of self-control that made him occasionally squirm in discomfort at the foot of the bed. Neither of them would be here the next time April woke; she was safe, they'd confirmed it, and that would be all the time together they could bear without throwing punches.
She remembered fondly the easy, comfortable intimacy and companionship that had once enveloped the unusual brothers, following them everywhere, a living thing that sucked you into their world and made you irrevocably a part of it, one way or the other. Some components of that world were gone, maybe forever, but the rest … surely it could be saved. She clung to that hope every day.
After all, they were family. No matter their flaws and the rifts between them, April knew that when she really needed them, they would come.