Author's note: this story is entirely the work of the Terrapin Tarts RP team, made up of KameTerra, Winnychan, and DeeMG - check out their fanfics here at ! This is a one-shot that takes place sometime during or after Season 4 of the 2k3 toon.
SCRAPS
"No. No! I ain't doin' it!" Raphael paced toward the closed barn door, fists clenched. "Don't know what he's thinkin', but I'm not goin'!"
Donatello looked up from the junk he had strewn across the workbench near the old stove inside the barn. "It's not that big a deal, Raph ~"
"The hell it's not!" Raph raged. "He's only doin' it so he can rub it in our faces, Mr. Battle-Nexus-Champion! Prob'ly wants to take pictures of us, standin' next to that damn statue!"
"Surprised he didn't think of that last time," Don picked up an old appliance motor and peered into it appraisingly. "He had plenty of warning, but he never even asked me for a camera. Wonder why that is? He wouldn't normally miss a chance like that…oh, right, he probably didn't realize the statue was there already…" Satisfied with his totally bogus and uninteresting answer, Donatello began sorting through the tangled wires, motors, and plastic bits on the workbench, and ignored Raphael, who seethed in his general direction.
It didn't get the result he wanted, so Raph made sure to make a few more disgruntled noises in his throat as he paced.
He paced in a circle that was a little closer to the workbench, and made the noises again.
"Raph, are you getting sick?" Donatello flicked his eyes up, briefly, from the wrench he was carefully inserting into the cracked casing of the motor. "I can get you some of that medicinal tea Sensei likes to give us in the winter – "
"No!" Raphael actually jumped a little bit at the idea. He adjusted his pacing circle away from Don, and went on grumbling to himself.
"I'm surprised he hasn't insisted that we have some yet this winter," Don's eyes flicked toward the closed door, clearly thinking about the snow falling outside. "Maybe he's letting us make those decisions for ourselves, now that we're eighteen…?" and he wandered off into some kind of boring discussion with himself that Raphael knew he could safely ignore completely.
It was so unfair! Stuck in the barn with the most boring Turtle on the planet… well, maybe, except for Leo on a really bad day… and if he left the barn, he'd be at the mercy of the most insane Turtle on the planet, hands down!
Raphael stalked back and forth a few more times, muttering curse words, but the next time his gaze fell on his utterly unconcerned brother, all of the frustration inside of him suddenly found a different target. Goddammit, Don had no right looking so unfazed when Raph himself was practically working up a sweat just thinking about it!
"Jeezus, Don, that all you're gonna do is sit there? How the hell d'ya stand being so boring all the time?" He was uncomfortably aware that his tone bordered on petulant, but anything was worth getting Don up off his shell! And without thinking it through, he stomped up to his brother and seized the sizable object he held.
"HEY!" Don protested, but when he made a grab for it Raph was ready for him, and pulled it back out of reach. "Raphael, cut it out! What are you, five? I'm working on that!"
"A little too hard, if ya ask me—time ta take a break." With that he darted back to the barn door and slid it partway open, making it look easy in spite of how heavy and cumbersome it was.
"RAPHAEL!" Don yelled, on his feet now, "I'm warning you! Don't you—"
Raph ignored him, and lobbed the item out into the snow.
Just outside the barn door, Leonardo ducked in the nick of time, but he wasn't quick enough to avoid the hurtling figures that tumbled out of the barn door a split second later. The horizon tilted, and the air left his lungs in a whoosh at the sudden connection of his shell with the frozen ground. Leo scrabbled backward gracelessly, like a crab caught on land, trying to get clear of the tangle of green, red, and purple so he could recover his feet.
"Rrrrr, just what the hell is your problem! You thing you—nrff—can just take someone's stuuu-stuff like a half-wit bully?"
"Now this—oof!—is more like it! Always said you spend too much time thinkin'!"
Leonardo stood brushing snow off himself and regarding the squabbling pair from a safer distance. "Ahem. I was coming to tell you that Master Splinter is already preparing the ritual."
No response except for grunts and empty threats.
"Which means he'll be drawing the door any minute now." Leo folded his arms and eyed his brothers patiently.
The grappling continued as if he was not even there.
"So, children. Is this really the best time for a snow fight?"
"We're makin' time!" Raphael said from over one shoulder, gleeful at having turned the tables on Donatello already and pinning his shell to the snow. "QUALITY TIME with my family, see? It's - pluth!" He looked back at Don and got a handful of snow shoved in his face.
Donatello wriggled and twisted, and almost got free of Raphael's grip. "Quality...qua...barbarian!" he panted. The problem with shoving snow at his brother from that angle, he decided, was that gravity had no respect for the wronged party in the equation - the snow dropped off of Raphael and onto Donatello. "You're a...huh!...a bar...barbarian!"
Some of the snow wedged itself into the thin space between his upper plastron and his skin, and Raphael was too busy trying to maintain his grip on his slippery brother to deal with it. "Admit it! This's way more fun than those - " A snowball connected with the side of his head, and he rocked back, losing his hold on Donatello in the process. "Hey, back off, Leo!"
"Why? I thought you said this was 'quality time'," Leonardo smirked as he hefted another perfectly-formed snowball. "Spirits know I wouldn't want to miss an opportunity to bond with my siblings." There was the slightest emphasis on the word 'miss', and the snowball rolled across the back of his hand, around his wrist, and back into the hollow of his palm.
Donatello scrambled up and shook snow off, glaring at Raphael. "Honestly, Raph, what was that about? You know better than to yank something out of my hands! What if I had been working on something critical? What if I'd been working on something explosive?"
"Ya weren't," Raphael pointed out, squinting up at him. "An' I knew it. C'mon, Don, you didn't wanna work on that junk anyway. You weren't inventin' anything - you were just inventin' a reason not to hang out in the house with the Battle Nexus Doofus!"
"Well, maybe I DID want some peace and quiet!" Donatello launched back at him. "Forgive me for not being overjoyed when YOU showed up, stomping around and huffing like a constipated ogre!"
Raphael was up by then as well and brushing himself off, and he settled for shooting Don his best Death Look—he really had no good comeback for that one, anyway. He hadn't even been pretending to do something productive.
Leonardo just eyed them coolly. "I think you guys are looking at this all wrong," he stated finally, in that infuriatingly calm way of his.
Raph just snorted and looked away. He sure wasn't about to give Leo the satisfaction of asking, but he wasn't ready to head up to the house yet, either. Besides, he knew Don wouldn't be able to keep his big fat mouth shut.
"How so?" Don asked.
Raph snorted again, louder this time.
"Mike earned that title," Leonardo said, idly observing the snowball as he balanced it on his fingertip.
It wasn't the usual lumpy, lopsided snowball, of course. No. It was perfectly round, from what Raph could tell from the glance he sneaked, and smooth as marble. Raph wanted to knock it off his smug, fat finger.
"He won it, and he successfully defended it, in spite of everyone's doubts," Leo continued. Then suddenly he looked up, and locked into each of their eyes in turn. "Maybe, instead of thinking of yourselves, you should just be proud of your brother."
"He's proud enough of himself, isn't he?" Don grumbled, half under his breath but loud enough to carry. "Proud as he is, should be more than enough to make up for the rest of us."
This quiet outburst drew an aside glance from Raphael. He was surprised at the bitterness in his brother's tone.
"Be that as it may," Leonardo began, always one to take the high road.
"Don't talk like it doesn't annoy you too, when he goes on and on!"
"It can," Leo allowed, speaking slowly and with great patience, because it was Lecture Time. "At times. But I choose to see his boasting for what it really is..." And he was off!
Almost immediately, Raphael began tuning him out. He studied the snow for awhile, and then glanced over at Donatello again as a new thought occurred to him. When they had fought in the Battle Nexus, hadn't Don been eliminated first? It was something he hadn't thought about in a really long time.
He reasoned that it probably didn't matter. Don wasn't the type to be insecure about what anyone else thought of him. He had never given a damn about personal glory. Don was a logical guy - too logical, you'd think, for the Battle Nexus to be a sore spot.
But there it was, just the same. He thought about Don's pointless tinkering, and his fierce defense of it - couldn't get it out of his head. Maybe hiding out with his tools had nothing to do with being productive, in the same way that beating his fists bloody on a ninety pound bag wasn't necessarily about working out. It made more sense now.
Meanwhile, their big brother was still lecturing.
"Shove it up your ass, Leo!" Raph protested abruptly, coming back into the conversation without even bothering to orient himself with what Leo was still going on about. "We'll be in there when we feel like it!"
Leo scowled darkly. "Fine. But if you take too long and he sends me out here to collect you a second time, I'm going to be ticked." He put his shell to the rest of them and stalked back into the farmhouse.
Don had been silent all through Leo's lecture. Once he was gone, he cleared his throat and mumbled awkwardly, "Thanks, I guess."
"Don't mention it!" Raph punched the other turtle's arm. "So, when y'gonna feel like it? Cuz... I was thinking never. Never work for you?"
"What do you mean?" Don blinked.
"Let's geddoutta here!" Raph encouraged. "Split, vamoosh!"
"I think it's pronounced...nevermind," Donatello kicked at the snow. "We can't just run off, Raph. They're expecting us."
"So what?" Raphael countered. "It's not like they'll put the whole thing on hold just for us!" Another thought occurred to him. "And besides: if Leo has to come back looking for us, we'd better make it worth his while, eh? Maybe make ourselves hard to find? We can tell 'im it was a training exercise - "
"- he'll be torn between his training compulsion, and his Elder Brother tendencies of domination, and the resulting mental confusion should be enough to buy us some time to get away from either unwanted result," Donatello caught the thought and finished it, his eyes lighting up with some kind of strange glee.
"Exactly," Raphael grinned. "And if Leo catches us in time to get dragged off to that stupid party, we'll get there too late to be turtle-shaped props for our little brother's ego - what?" His smile fell away at the expression on Don's face.
"We can't do that to him, Raph."
"We're not doin' it to him! We're doin' it for ourselves! Donnie, I don't know about you, but if I gotta spend the night listening to him strut and preen and brag, I swear, I'm gonna feed that statue to him! And you will, too! You play all calm and Spock about it, but he's wearin' on your nerves, too, and I don't wanna watch you snap and try to kill him."
Don just stared down at the ground, neither giving an answer, or meeting Raph's eyes. He crouched, scooping up some snow and absently rounding it into a snowball, and Raph shifted his weight, growing more impatient with each passing moment.
"C'mon, Donnie," Raphael coaxed, trying one more time.
Don ignored him, standing up again and transferring the packed snow between his hands.
With a noise of frustration, Raph said, "Fuck it, then! Run along an' be part of the fan club. I'm gettin' outta here!" He wheeled and began striding off, but before he'd gone too far, a snowball pelted him in the back of the shell. He turned with a glower. "What the FUCK—"
"I have an idea." Don bent again and made another snowball, this time tossing it to Raph.
Raphael caught it, and stared at it blankly, but his posture eased as curiosity got the better of him. "This mean we ain't going back to the house?" he asked, both hopeful and bemused.
"Not just yet," Don replied, eyes sparkling. "This is perfect packing snow. It'd be a shame to let it go to waste. But we'll have to hurry…"
Sometime later, both turtles stepped back to admire their handiwork. It wasn't exactly Renaissance material, but it was the best they could do in short time, and with such…atypical material. Heh. Nothing like a snow turtle on a fine winter day…
"Think he'll get it?" Raph asked dubiously, squinting speculatively at their creation.
"Oh, he'll get it—the pose gives it away, if nothing else," Don answered. "Now for the finishing touches."
Meanwhile, Leo was getting fed up with waiting for them. He didn't understand why Splinter would coddle them like this! It did not help his case that, for once, Michelangelo was NOT voicing any impatience. The Playstation had been one of the first things he had unpacked, and now he was intensely fixated on some video game that involved shooting zombies... lots and lots of zombies.
Not for the first time, Leo moved to the window and pulled the age-yellowed lace curtains aside to gaze out. He was straining to catch a glimpse of what his brothers might be doing out there, but the snow had begun to fall again and the porch was set at an angle that not exactly optimal for spying. After a minute he gave up and turned away just in time to catch sight of Splinter flashing him a look as he got up and moved towards the kitchen with his empty tea cup. It was a look that said: give it a rest.
Leo nearly followed him, because it seemed like a good opportunity to state his case again - an uncensored version this time, as Mike would not be in earshot. But then, in a timely reassertion of how NOT upset he was, Mike's fist shot up in the air as he shouted, "BAM, HEADSHOT! Do you see that bloody smear, Leo? That smear right there used to be a DUDE."
"Yeah. That's pretty awesome," Leo agreed, pointedly lackluster.
"Hell yeah! Eat lead, suckah! These brains are not on the menu!"
Leo sighed and dropped heavily into a chair in an effort not to start pacing the room.
A few extremely long minutes later, the door burst open. Leo rocketed to his feet and whirled to face his brothers, but the readied words died on his lips.
"April!" Mike crooned, pausing his game to turn around and beam at her.
"Hi guys!" she greeted them with cheer, cheeks rosy from the cold. She was carrying grocery bags, and Leo shot forward to help her with them as soon as his manners into gear.
"I thought you had some kind of appointment?" he wondered. "We weren't expecting you until tomorrow."
"My client canceled our two o'clock, so - here I am!"
"Yay!" Mike enthused, though his eyes were back on his game. "That means you can come with us to see the unveiling of my Battle Nexus statue!"
"Oh, ah," April faultered. She shot Leo a glance as if to say: crap, is that what we're doing? Apparently April had also endured her share of Battle Nexus stories. She plastered her smile back on and agreed, "Well that's... lucky! Ohh, and THAT helps explain the... ART going on outside!" She had been shrugging out of her coat, but now she pulled it back on and let in a cold gust of winter air as she stepped out onto the porch.
Curious, Leo left the grocery bags on the coffee table and trailed after her.
When he saw what was waiting outside, he shut the door hastily and stood on the porch next to April, staring in disbelief.
Raphael looked up from putting the finishing touches on the work he and Donatello had done, and grinned. "Whaddaya think?"
"What do I think?" Leonardo breathed, feeling anger start to spiral up in his throat. Shame, too, if he allowed himself to admit it - shame that his brothers could be so unfeelingly, unthinkingly cruel...! "I think you need to knock that down right this instant, before he sees it!"
"But we want him to see it," Don said, patting a last little bit of snow into place. "Why else would we put it right here?"
"Pretty good work, for bein' so fast," Raphael pointed at the details. "Look - we used that misting water bottle in the barn to get that to shine like that -"
"I said, knock it down!" Leonardo took one step down from the porch.
"No," Donatello surprised him by physically standing in his way. "No, we will not be knocking this down, Leo."
"He's had this comin' for a long time," Raphael added, standing next to his co-conspirator. "Besides, Leo, why are you so hot on protectin' his feelings? Or are you sayin' he can't take a joke from his bros?"
"It's disrespectful," Leo hissed, torn between the urge to shove his way through them to destroy the horrible thing they'd created, and the urge to simply retreat back into the house and refuse to deal with them any longer. "I cannot believe you two are so completely self-absorbed that you would break his heart by mocking something he worked so hard for -"
"He did not -"
"We've heard it all -"
Their raised voices were probably what drew Master Splinter out of the house at last. "My sons? What is going - ancestors!"
"Knock it down!" Leo got in one last plea before turning away from his brothers and ducking his head to his sensei. "Maybe...maybe we should go back inside and start the ritual?" he asked, a little too rapidly. "Mike's probably getting restless - "
The door opened one more time, and Leo's heart sank.
"Dudes? What's going on...?" Michelangelo blinked as he took in the situation. His expression went blank as he stared past his brothers to the snow sculpture in the yard.
"Ta-da!" Don stepped back and gestured at the sculpture. There was a wicked edge to his grin that exactly mirrored Raphael's, as they took in their brother's reaction.
The grins softened, faltered, and fell away, though, as Michelangelo went on looking at the 'art' wordlessly.
Leonardo gave both of them a hard look. His mouth thinned as he looked at the sculpture himself.
It was a near-lifesize snow-turtle - Michelangelo, if the hint of the orange mask meant anything. It was sculpted to wear a big, monstrous, ridiculous grin, above what Leo was surprised to recognize as a tuxedo. And as if that weren't enough, the snow-turtle was standing next to an equally-tall replica of the Battle Nexus trophy that Michelangelo had been given. A Battle Nexus Trophy that was sporting a bouquet of flowers, in a clear mockery of a wedding pose.
"Always said, if ya love it so much, why don't ya marry it?" Raphael tried. Leo was gratified to see that he wasn't able to convince himself of the juvenile humor, and actually looked uncomfortable and almost sick, as the cruelty of the mockery sank in. Beside him, Don looked at the ground rather than meet anyone's eyes.
Leonardo began to turn to suggest that they all go back inside, and that apologies could begin - when a green and orange blur streaked past his eyes and tackled Raph and Don to the ground together.
"Michelangelo!"
Leo rushed in, to try to separate them before anyone got hurt. In spite of years of training, they could still inflict damage on each other when lashing out wildly, in pain or confusion. But there was too much noise coming from the thrashing pile of turtles, and no one could hear him. He could hear curses, odd squawks of surprise or pain, and shouting.
He got all the way into the tangled mass of siblings, and actually had his hands on Michelangelo's shell, when he realized that the shouts were actually sounds of laughter.
It startled Leonardo so much that he stepped backward.
"You guys!" Michelangelo swarmed over his stunned brothers. "That's so cool!"
"Uh...it is?" Don blinked up at him, confused enough to stop defending himself. There was snow caked into the folds of his purple mask. Raphael looked at Don, his expression clearly saying 'what just happened here?' And Donatello's answering expression said, just as clearly, 'I have no idea.'
"It is!" Mike crowed. He leaped to his feet in one fluid move, and darted over to examine the snow sculpture more closely. "Look! You got the Battle Nexus trophy totally right! I never thought I'd see it again, after Karai's goons shot up the last Lair! It shines and everything..."
"Uh, yeah," Raphael clambered to his feet and pulled Don up bodily. "We, uh. We used the misting...thing...from the barn..."
"Too cool!" Michelangelo's eyes shone. He spun around. "April! You gotta take a picture of this!"
"I can't believe he got pictures of us standing next to that damn trophy after all," Raph said glumly, looking at the pictures on Don's laptop.
"I can't believe Leo hasn't been up here to rub our faces in it," Don answered, tabbing through the photos.
"Oh, he will be," Raphael threw himself onto the bed hard enough to make the frame creak. "Or he'll make us pay at practice tomorrow."
"That's definitely part of the plan," Leonardo said from the doorway, startling them both. He folded his arms and leaned on the frame. "What you did was thoughtless and cruel, and it's only because Michelangelo has such a generous nature that you didn't actually hurt him. It doesn't excuse the intent behind what you - hey!" He rocked forward into the room, spinning on one foot as he rubbed at the side of his head. Snow dribbled out between his fingers - the fragments of a snowball launched by someone with wonderful aim.
Michelangelo's laughter drifted down the hall. "Gotcha, dude! You have to be much faster, grasshopper, to beat the Battle Nexus Champion!" Cold air blew through the doorway as Mike took off from the open window, cackling madly.
Raphael rubbed at his mouth, trying unsuccessfully to hide the smile. "So, uh, Leo...what were ya sayin'? Something about Mike's 'generous nature' or what?"
Leo looked at the snow on his fingers. "You know what?" he said, voice half-strangled between the conflicting urges of 'leader' and 'beleaguered big brother'. "Never mind. Keep on doing what you were doing."
He started to leave the room, then stopped to look over his shoulder. "And the next time you want to make a snow turtle...let me know, okay?"