Part 1 - Caged
"We fell asleep and began to dream when something broke the night/
Memories stirred inside of us, the struggle and the fight/
And we could feel the heat of a thousand voices telling us which way to go/
And we cried out is there no escape..."
-Drawn to the Rhythm (Sarah McLachlan)
Darkness was the ally of the ninja, the night his protector, clouds to cover the moon and stars so that he might move invisibly his ideal companion. But tonight these had all betrayed Raphael.
It had all started normally enough, if mutant ninja turtles roaming the city in search of stray canisters of mutagen could be considered normal. Donatello had been tracking a canister of mutagen, shouting badly timed instructions to Leonardo as usual. Leo had been grousing about it, as usual. Michelangelo had been not paying attention, as usual. Mikey's latest infatuation was with an aged Game Boy he'd found in the trash and somehow talked Donnie into repairing for him.
"Mikey, that Game Boy is older than you," had been Leo's remark about it.
Raph's most recent remark about it had been in the Shellraiser earlier this evening when Leo swung particularly wildly around the corner, sending the Game Boy sailing out of Mikey's hands and into the back of Raph's head.
"Mikey, that thing hits me again and I'll give it back to ya in several pieces!"
Mikey had proceeded to gather the Game Boy into his arms and speak words of comfort to it as though it was a child. Raph couldn't seem to remember now what those words had been. It didn't matter now.
The Shellraiser had come to an abrupt stop as Leo hit the brakes and shouted at Donnie in the back that he could not turn both left and right, and that the tracker better make up its mind or Leo would make its mind up for it. Donnie had explained the glitch.
Two canisters. Two different directions. Leo simmered down.
"Fine," Leo hissed through his teeth, putting a hand to his head in the way he always did when he was particularly annoyed by something he couldn't berate for being what it was, "Fine. We'll do this the hard way. Which one is closer?"
"I've got one pinned down to a five block radius. The other to about fifty feet, give or take."
"That doesn't..." Leo sighed in the long suffering way he had, "Never mind. Raph and Mikey, you take the closer one. Donnie and I will drive the Shellraiser around and try to pin down the other one."
"Uh, aren't you forgetting something?" Raph asked.
"Like what?" Leo snapped irritably.
"Like which fifty feet we're supposed to be lookin' in?" Raph replied coolly, not moving from his seat.
"Donnie, would you give Raph a location?" Leo requested, as usual annoyed by the fact that Raph had thought of something which he had forgotten.
For reasons Raph couldn't even begin to fathom, Leo had this odd notion that he was supposed to be perfect. Just because he was their leader, he was supposed to somehow have all the answers. Like Splinter putting him in charge of his brothers should have somehow granted him powers he hadn't had before. It was stupid, and Raph enjoyed telling him so as often as possible.
Raph didn't usually have a point when it came to giving people a hard time. But there was one with Leo. Pushing Leo's buttons wasn't just fun, it seemed to be about the only thing that kept Leo fired up. Whenever Raph got lax in his insubordination, Leo would get complacent and lazy in his leadership. It was like Leo needed someone to butt heads with to move forward. He needed somebody to push back in order to make any kind of progress.
It was never spoken of, but generally understood between them that, so long as Leo fought back when Raph bucked his authority, Raph would keep following him. The day Leo wasn't driven into a frenzy of leadership by Raph's attitude was the day they could go home and hang up their masks for good.
"C'mon Mikey, the Game Boy isn't gonna be any more stupid and broken in ten minutes than it is now," Raph said, dragging Mikey from the Shellraiser.
Mikey only stopped trying to fight his way back to his latest treasure when the Shellraiser drove off, careering wildly down the street and launching itself around a corner, where it disappeared from sight.
The sky was cloudy, and the air felt like rain. The part of Raph that was ninja as well as the part of him that was turtle was enjoying the weather, and he could tell Mikey liked it too. They didn't walk their search area so much as run and jump it. Raph and Mikey seldom walked anywhere when doing back flips off the safety railings of fire escapes was a possibility.
Neither of them were as focused as they might have been. It was a back alley after midnight, and the promise of rain was additional incentive for normal people to stay indoors. The only sounds of activity were a couple of rats fighting over some crumb they'd found beneath a dumpster. Otherwise, all was quiet, just as it should have been.
For just a moment, Raph let himself enjoy the feeling of being above ground. Though he and his brothers had been running across rooftops for awhile now, the novelty of it seemed unlikely to ever wear off. He liked living in the sewers, being above ground after dawn always made him feel uneasy. But he liked patrolling the city from above at night. There was a freedom to it that offered a thrill which was second to none. He loved the city. He loved its noise, and its lights, and the sound of it rumbling over his head as he fell asleep after a hard night's work. It was home.
Then he looked down, and spotted Mikey rooting around in the dumpster.
"Mikey, get out of there," Raph scolded, "You know there's no canister in there."
"No, but there is this," Mikey said, triumphantly holding up a stained pair of briefs, "I can add it to my collection of human underwear."
Raph shook his head, and decided not to comment on this particularly bizarre habit of Mikey's.
"C'mon," Raph said, "It's not here. Let's keep looking."
Donnie had said somewhere within fifty feet, but Raph was beginning to have his doubts. Fifty feet wasn't a very big search area, and mutagen canisters were usually a little hard to miss.
It turned out that the canister wasn't far. It had landed in the next alley over, and rolled so it was partially concealed under the bottom steps of a fire escape. Cautiously, fully cognizant of how dangerous mutagen could be, Mikey pulled the container out by one end, examined it, and dusted it off.
"Oh hey, it's in one piece," Mikey observed cheerfully.
Raph didn't answer, momentarily entranced by the sight of the mutagen. There was just something about it... Mikey referred to the canister which had poured ooze all over them as "Mom". The feeling Raph got looking at it... he could understand the sentiment. He'd never, ever say that out loud though.
He heard a quiet but sharp whistling near his head, and ducked belatedly. Something thunked into the brick wall behind him, but Raph ignored that and looked in the direction from which it had come. He could just make out the cold muzzle of a gun from the shadows, a silent form beyond it. Not Kraang. Not Foot Ninja. Not anything Raph recognized except the thing on the end of the gun. A silencer.
Mikey had his back to the danger. By unspoken agreement, Mikey had gone for the canister, and Raph had his back, and was watching the other end of the alley. As a defense mechanism, they almost invariably positioned themselves face to face or back to back, insuring that they functionally had no blind spot. Raph's brief lapse, his second of the night, could cost them their lives.
"Watch it!" Raph snarled, leaping down from his perch on a railing and landing right on top of Mikey, hitting his brother in the back of the shell and forcing him to the ground as the gun fired a second time.
Something hit him in the side of the head, bowling him over and sending him spinning, and Raph knew that the murkiness of the night had betrayed him, and he'd miscalculated the aim of the gun, which had been aiming slightly lower than he'd thought. Those same shadows that hid his form when he ducked into them had hidden the gunman when he and Mikey had entered the alley.
"Raph!" Mikey stayed down, but started to crawl towards where the impact had pitched Raph.
Pain sang through Raph's head, blood roared in his eardrums. He started to get to his feet, struggling against dizziness. Something hot and wet slithered its way under his mask and into his left eye. It burned like crazy, and trying to blink it out only made it worse.
As more shots winged through the air towards them, Mikey slammed into Raph, carrying them both to relative safety behind a dumpster, where they crouched, trembling slightly. The shots were getting louder, or it seemed that way to Raph, but he couldn't seem to find what that meant, if anything. He struggled to clear his head, and make a decision about that they should do.
"Take the canister and run," Raph said, "Take it to Leo."
Mikey began to object, "Me? You want me to-" but Raph interrupted him.
"I'm going to cover you, okay? Now, when I tell you, run. Okay? You understand? This canister has to go to Leo and Donnie. Whoever the guy shooting at us is, he can't have it. Got it?"
"Well yeah, but-"
"Go!" Raph shoved Mikey so hard that he tripped, nearly dropping the canister and breaking it.
Raph leaped on top of the dumpster they had been using as cover, launching a hail of shurikens into the shadows. The double report of multiple guns firing cracked through the air. Though Raph had identified one shooter, the darkness had concealed that there were more of them.
He contained a yelp as a lance of pain slashed across his left leg, the force of impact knocking him over, sending him off the dumpster and onto the ground with a crash. Raph made no attempt to keep track of Mikey, trusting that his brother would follow his instructions, regardless of what tried to stand in his way. Raph struggled to get his feet under him, nearly blinded by the blood running down his face.
It had been obvious from the moment he'd been hit -though Raph had actually sensed it at the sound of the first shot which had so narrowly missed him- that he would not be able to escape. His vision swam, and he'd only have slowed Mikey down if they'd both run together. Mikey would have turned back to help him, and both of them would have been caught. At least this way, Mikey and the canister of mutagen stayed out of the hands of these people, whoever they were. Leo probably would have objected to Raph's plan of tricking Mikey into ditching him, but it couldn't be helped.
Besides, Leo wasn't here, though Raph could sorely have used him right now.
A hiss of wire caught his attention, and one of his arms. The loop of wire was attached to a pole being held by yet another person the shadows had hidden up to now. Raph snarled, swinging towards the offender, but a second wire found its way around his other wrist and pulled taut, hauling him backwards so suddenly he struggled for balance, inadvertently putting weight on his injured leg.
He shook his head, thunder in his ears, lightning spots in his vision.
Something whipped through the air and caught him in the neck, but it wasn't a bullet. It was a dart of some description. The world shortly began to go a little skewed and funny.
"The other one got away," one dark blur said to another.
"We'll have to make do with this one then," replied the other blur.
Raph would have fallen down at this point, but the wire and poles held him up. They were pulled tight, but it didn't really matter now. He pulled against them as best he could, which wasn't much. The owners of them heaved right back. Even if they'd let him go, he wouldn't have gotten very far, not with every bit of him slowly going numb. It was more a matter of stubbornness that kept him resisting.
"Oh man, he nailed Johnson!" shouted someone.
Breathing had become an unbearable chore in just the last few seconds. He wondered if maybe he ought to just stop. That might be easier. His lungs felt like they were made of stone.
Leo would come. Mikey would get him. And he would come. And he would... he'd make this alright. He'd stop them. He'd fix this. He'd... it would be okay.
"Not long now," said a cold, icy voice, "Not long now."
A terrible blackness seeped into all corners of Raph's vision, then thickly wormed its way into his mind. He was drowning in it. Disappearing beneath its dark waves. And then... nothing.
"He's out. Let's move, just in case the other one comes back with the rest of the pack."
"Leo, look out!" Donnie had shouted the warning at the same time as Leo noticed Mikey dashing out and standing in the road, waving a canister of mutagen over his head.
"Mikey, what are you doing!?" Leo exploded from the Shellraiser, "Are you trying to get-" he broke off, as sense of wrongness hitting him before he became aware of what it was that was wrong.
Then he knew. It was an absence.
"Mikey, where's Raph? Mikey, what's the matter? What happened?"
He realized as he approached that Mikey had been yelling all this time.
"-Bam! Guys! Guns! Pew pew! Blood! Shooty McShooterson!" Mikey wailed, more incoherently than usual, "And Raph, he, I... we... this!" he threw the canister at Leo as if it burned.
Leo almost fumbled the catch, not having expected this, momentarily baffled by Mikey's apparent panic. He'd caught on to some of what Mikey was telling him, but he was still playing catch up. His first thought was the Kraang, because they were the ones who usually did most of the shooting. But Mikey's wild eyes said that something must have occurred that was stranger, if not in general, than at least to Mikey. Bizarre as they were, the Kraang were in the realm of normalcy as far as enemies of the turtles were concerned. They tangled with the Kraang often. Mikey's report indicated that this was something other than the typical enemy the turtles faced.
"Mikey, calm down," Donnie had followed Leo out of the Shellraiser and now grabbed Mikey by the shoulder while Leo struggled to catch the badly aimed canister, "Take a breath and tell us what happened. Come on, use your words."
"They shot Raph!" Mikey screamed, bursting into tears suddenly, which came as something of a shock to both of his brothers, "I thought he was right behind me! But they shot him! They shot him! In the head, Donnie!" here Mikey grabbed Donnie by both shoulders and shook him so hard the air was knocked out of him, "In the head!"
"Whoa, whoa, back up. Who did what?" Donnie gasped weakly, trying to find the air Mikey had shaken out of him.
Leo was quicker on the uptake.
"Get in the Shellraiser," Leo snarled, clutching the canister tightly enough to crack it, "Now."
Mikey all but flung himself into the Shellraiser, with a still confused Donnie following him. Donnie was brilliant, but it took him a bit longer to process unexpected input than the rest of them. Leo was generally the first to put things together in a way that made sense, which was a large part of why they followed his lead, aside from the fact that Splinter had made him their leader.
But, though he drove the Shellraiser like he'd gone mad all the way back to where Mikey had left Raph, Leo wasn't fast enough. By the time the turtles arrived, the scene was devoid of activity, only evidence of the conflict remained. A handful of spent shell casings rolled around on the ground in the faint wind. A splash of blood marred the side of the dumpster Mikey and Raph had hidden behind. A spray of red on the ground. Two shurikens embedded in the wall over a pool of blood. That's all there was left.
Raph was gone.
Author's Note: This story is completely written. I will be uploading one chapter per day. It is potentially slightly AU, but not on purpose. It's set early in season 2. Though it is rated primarily for violence, this story also includes descriptions of animal neglect and abuse. Reader discretion is advised.
I wrote this for my entertainment, and I am publishing it here for yours. Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you enjoy reading this story as much as I enjoyed writing it.