My first foray into the fandom of the TMNT. This is just a bit of fun... probably more serious sounding than I mean it as comedy is hella hard to achieve. Set nebulously somewhere in the middle of season three, after brain worm territory and before the invasion of the triceratons.
Disclaimer: I do not own the characters portrayed in this story. They are the brain children of Eastman and Laird and the current money makers of Nickelodeon and Viacom.
A little after midnight the forest surrounding the Northampton farmhouse was dark and silent, apart from the noises from the normal nocturnal inhabitants, and the occasional whooping call from four very non-normal nocturnal inhabitants as they hunted their prey.
"You see anything?"
Michelangelo strengthened his grip on the branch of the tree he was supported in to lean over and look down at Raphael on the ground below. "Sir, Negatory, Sir. I believe the quarry is in the northern sector of the search grid, Sir. Two clicks of here as the crow flies, Sir" He grinned, flicking off a sloppy salute with his free hand, practically hearing Raph's teeth grinding from his position. A quick slide down the trunk brought him in to stick a landing beside his brother in a near perfect silent move. Okay, so some leaves rustled… and he broke a twig or two… and he didn't exactly mean to snap the branch.
Or disturb the squirrel.
Or the owl for that matter.
Oh wait. Cool. It was a bat.
Raph's hand came out of the darkness to bap him on the back of the head. "Take this seriously, Mikey! There's no way I'm letting blue team beat us at this."
"Blue team?" Raph realised his mistake an instant before Mikey opened his mouth. "Laaaame, Dude. D's not even mentioned and he's just as much a part as Leo. How about Purblue, or Blurple. Yeah Blurple team. Or Donardo, Leotello. BA Barracus team, and we'd be—"
Another smack, this one echoed a little despite the tree cover. "We're NOT being Rorange team Mikey, or Rikey, or Maph, or Redge, or AB Master, or anything else you've stuck together in that half a mind of yours."
Mikey faked a pout. "Oo, oo, we could be team Hot?" he suggested, "and Leo and D are team Cool."
Raph shrugged one shoulder, knowing that conceding defeat was sometimes the only way to win when it came to Mikey. It was the nearest to a consent that Mikey was going to get and he grinned as he flicked his brother's mask tail before darting away. "Come on, Bro. Right now we're team cold and getting colder."
"Yeah, right." Raph sighed, settling down into a quiet, sustainable lope through the underbrush. "Kinda wishing we'd never told you about turtle hunt, Mike."
"Aww, you say that now, but you don't mean it."
And Raph didn't. Not really. His smile was unseen in the dark but it was very much present.
Sensei's idea to have a vacation had come right out of the blue but none of the four brothers could deny it was much needed. A lingering lull in the activities of the Foot Clan and the Kraang combined with a mental and physical exhaustion that came from being on a knife edge for too long had prompted the suggestion one morning after practice. By that evening the four of them were piled in the back of the party wagon, All available space in the back taken up with junk food, sleeping bags, and for some inexplicable reason, Ice Cream Kitty. Casey Jones was at the wheel and April was riding shot gun with all the radio privileges that that entailed.
Splinter had decided to remain behind in the lair to meditate. The fridge was fully stocked with cheesicles, and the television free for daytime viewing.
Leonardo knew he wasn't fooling anyone.
So did Raphael.
That first night at the farm and most of the following morning they did little else other than sleep, waking at odd times to reheat frozen pizza and hope the smell enticed the rest of the family down before it cooled again. Once exhaustion and travel had been dutifully slept off, and the meagre supply of VHS tapes watched again, there was little else to do but venture into the great outdoors.
And that was when Turtle Hunt came back to bite Leo and Raph in the ass with a vengeance.
It had been fun at first. Raph and Leo had teamed up against Donatello and Mikey in order to teach them – a lesson – the rules. Once that was over, the true games began. After five games of being thoroughly trounced by Dr. Pranken-hunt, Raphael had made an executive decision to save his own ass by callously and viciously abandoning Leo to the wolves. A quick rearrangement of the teams and it was Mikey and Raph against Leo and Donnie.
Raph was beginning to think he'd abandoned the short end of the stick for the shitty end.
Donatello had the patience of a saint. Raphael did not. Something which was ironic considering he was pretty sure there was a famous saint somewhere out there who also had his name.
Three days into the vacation and the shiny was beginning to wear off. Mikey kept messing with the game rules without telling them first, trying to make it bigger, bolder and all around more badass. And now, after half an hour of running in the middle of the night, Raphael's smile had relocated to warmer climates without him; turtle hunt now resembled the original game he and Leo had created years ago in the sewers about as much as he resembled a regular red-eared slider. He was so ready to call it a night, even if it did mean admitting defeat to Leo and Donnie.
They were no closer to finding either of the 'cool ranches' as Mikey had taken to calling them. Raph's feet were cold, he'd tripped over a tree root and got mud in places it was going to be seriously difficult to remove it from, his last nerve was hanging on by a spider thread – a spider thread, Mikey! -, and Michelangelo, completely unconcerned with his older brother's mental breakdown, was on his third round of 'songs that are from that which is known as Pocahontas'. How team cool whip hadn't found them yet, Raph didn't know. It wasn't like they were being, you know, stealthy or anything at this point.
"This is ridiculous!" he growled.
"~And you'll never hear the wolf cry to the blue corn moon, and whether you are green or copper skinned~."
"Mikey, if you don't shut up…"
"~You can own the earth and still, all you'll owwwwwn is earth until—~"
"Shhht." Raph held up a hand and Mikey quietened down immediately. He'd felt it too.
There was a rumbling in the ground underneath them somehow. Not a quake, this was caused by noise. Part of their turtle heritage meant that they were very susceptible to vibration, reading it like sound. Mikey pointed up and Raph nodded once, tersely. It was a matter of seconds for him to scramble to the top of the nearest tree, closely followed by Mikey. At the top of the tree canopy they had a full three hundred and sixty degree view of the heavens.
And the speeding meteor bearing down on a collision course from the stars.
It was dark and still in the forest; a strange, leaden hush unbroken by anything but the soft fall of leaves around him. Raph couldn't see the stars anymore, just the dark overshadow of tree branches and leaves. He was on the ground again somehow, lying on his back. The ache within him told him that it might not have been a completely voluntary action.
There was a ringing in his ears.
It took Raph far too long to realise it was his shell phone and longer still to remember that the presence of a ring tone meant someone was trying to contact him.
He fumbled for the phone, missing it in its usual place on his belt before finally finding it on the loamy ground to his right.
"…lo?"
"Raph. Are you and Mikey ok?"
"Cooleo?" Raph blinked a little. There was something wrong with that but for the life of him he didn't know what.
"Raph?" Leo's voice had changed, "what's wrong? Where's Mikey?"
Mikey? Raph frowned, for some reason he thought Mikey was painting. "… all the colours of the wind," he murmured.
"Raph!"
The phone slid from Raph's grip, Leo's voice fading into a jumble of static. He scrabbled his hand around aimlessly for a second before he realised the phone hadn't hit the floor but was now being held by Michelangelo. Mikey who was leaning over him, giving him a hard once over as he spoke. "Leo. Chillax, Brah. Yeah, Raph's fine. He forgot he wasn't a turtle dove and did a nosedive from a tree to avoid Armageddon… I'm good… I'm good… Nah, nothing vital. Came down on his shell, I think. Knocked the wind right out of him." Raph shook his head a little, his senses barrelling down on him with about as much force as the meteor they'd just narrowly avoided as Mikey laughed. "Yeah, all the colours of it. See you there, yeah, bye."
Oh no. Oh crap. Oh Shell. He'd said that out loud?
Well he wasn't living that one down in a hurry.
Rolling onto his side, Raph pushed himself up, allowing the slide of Mikey's arm under his own for assistance just this once - with some token grumbling of course. Once he was standing and Mikey had brushed the leaves, dirt, and what was hopefully not the remains of a dead mouse off his carapace, Mikey's hand came down on his shoulder. "You ok, Raph?" he asked, his tone serious for once. Raph brushed off the hand and the concern in his own patented manner. Once Mikey had recovered from the smack in the face and given Raph his phone back, they set off in the direction of the meteor.
About a mile away Leonardo and Donatello were doing a similar thing, minus the mouse.
They met up about half a mile south of the crash. Mikey, bored of Raph's embarrassed silence, and knowing from experience that it would manifest soon in a more non-silent, angry, probably painful way, made a beeline for Donatello to whisper in his ear. From the chuckles and glances in his direction, Raph could guess who was the subject and he flushed a little darker. Leo's hand came down firmly on his shoulder, concern evident in the action, which was at odds with the blazing grin on his face. "Hey, Pocahontas."
"Hey yourself, Quasimodo." Raph growled back, shoving Leo's hand off his shoulder.
Leo chuckled. "Mikey been giving you hell, I take it."
"Riding my bandana tails the whole way here." Raph said. He caught the faint look of something more serious and worried in Leo's face and held up a hand to forestall the question. "I'm okay," he said in a rare moment of candour, "I got surprised, fell out of a tree, dented the floor, and maybe," his flush darkened a little and averted his eyes, "my pride a little. But, no lasting damage… to me at least." At Leo's querying look he clarified. "There may or may not be dead rodent entrails somewhere on my back."
That got Leo's hand off his shoulder pretty quick. Raph would have been amused at the look of disgust and Leo's quick, not very covert wipe of his palm against his plastron, if he wasn't hyper aware of Mikey and Donatello approaching rapidly, wearing matching all-knowing and ever-evil grins. "Come on, let's go. We're burning moonlight here." He led the way, pretending not to hear the chuckles from behind him.
They triangulated the final resting position of the meteor by comparing their locations at the time of impact and implying from that. It wasn't actually a meteor but a meteorite Donatello corrected them, as meteors burnt up completely in the earth's atmosphere and "did you know that they can actually heat up so much on entry that they melt and form little indentations called regmaglypts.". Donatello took point on this, wittering away in excitement the whole time.
Raph was pretending not to listen but sometimes Wiki-Donnie could actually be endearingly interesting.
"See here," Donnie was pointing up. "It's clipped the trees here, heading in this direction." He took a step, still staring up, and stumbled a little over a sizable branch on the ground; the smell of pine sap from the broken end was strong in the air. Raph chuckled, sensing a moment to get a little of his own back on the teasing front. Before he could say anything though Donatello had scrambled for the tree, climbing it. Raph and Leo exchanged startled glances before following in silence, Mikey a split second behind. They caught up with Donnie at the top, staring intently out into the darkness. "It's big," he said. "Much bigger than a meteorite."
Raph felt a chill run down his spine. Leo beat him to the punch with the question. "How do you mean?"
"The size it would have to have been to break off that branch, it would have done some devastating damage to the ground. Most meteorites are tiny," he explained, eyes still on the far distance. "They come down at terminal velocity and leave, maybe at most, an indent. You get bigger ones that leave impact craters yes but not many. We'd have felt it, seen it. Whatever came down was large, and controlled." He pointed due north, at a patch of faint light in the distance, "And over there."
It took them half an hour to get there. Not because it was far away, but rather because the closer they got, the slower and stealthier their movements became. When the treeline finally faded away and left them with an unobstructed view of the thing, they were all silent. It was large, incandescent, and not natural.
Not natural at all.
Sitting in a sizable rut of land was a faintly purple-glowing craft of some kind.
They fell back into ninja training as one. Leo sending out a series of hand signals, which they scrambled to obey without a whisper of complaint. Raphael and Michelangelo circled around to approach the craft from the other side. In any other situation Leo would have shaken his head… seems threat of an alien invasion was about the only thing that got them to listen to him.
They approached slowly, two by two in formation.
When Raph and Mikey were about fifteen feet away there was a soft hiss and a door fell open. Of course, Raph figured, it would be on this side. His grip on his sais tightened and he held one arm out to keep Mikey slightly behind him. Two vaguely humanoid silhouettes appeared in the light from the door, one heavily supported by the other. They stumbled down, hitting the ground hard, on their knees. Beside him, Raph felt Mikey try to step forward, and grabbed hold of his shoulder, shaking his head. They watched in silence for a while as one of the figures, the smaller, slimmer of the two, struggled to pull the deadweight of its companion further from the ship.
It was hurt. They both were. The larger one more seriously. The wind blew through the leaf canopy, making a soft rustle, and the small figure jolted.
Scared too.
Scared could be deadly. Raph had been on the receiving end of many an opponent and he knew that scared reacted without thought; scared pulled triggers, waved swords, slashed knives.
Mikey took another step. Raph didn't catch it in time.
The smaller figure spun at the sound, hissing something in a tongue so foreign it was almost white noise. Its limbs were shaking, it probably wouldn't be conscious much longer. Raph grabbed Mikey by the back of the shell and hauled him back roughly, his eyes held fast by the creature as it hissed and spit at them. The language may have been foreign but the stance was unmistakable, fear posturing, it was making itself look bigger, puffing up to make them back off.
"Go get Donatello." He said, sliding his sais back into his belt slowly and holding up his hands to show they were empty.
"Raph?"
"Do it. It's not a threat. It's dying, Mikey." When Mikey didn't move, he gave him a little shove, "Now, Michelangelo!"
Mikey held his gaze for a moment before nodding and running back to Donnie and Leo.
Raph watched him go for a second before turning back to the creature, crouching protectively over its companion. "We're not going to hurt you," he said, his voice automatically softening to the tones he'd use with Spike and the hoard of pigeons he'd occasionally encounter on the rooptops. I can't believe I'm going to say this, he thought. "We come in peace." He took a slow step forward, standing still when the creature's hissing increased. "I can help," he insisted. "Or rather, my brother can. We won't hurt you, I promise."
He doubted it was the words, but rather something in his actions was having an effect, either that, he thought, or the shock of the crash was finally catching up to the figure. It slouched suddenly, the fight in its form almost visibly draining out of it. Raph took a few more steps, this time without any warning growl to prevent him.
Reaching the injured one on the floor, he hissed in sympathy; there was probably nothing that could be done for this one, he figured, watching the way the chest flailed with the creature's, alien's, struggle to breathe. Lit in the glow from the ship he could see there was something reptilian about it, the shape of the head perhaps, their skin there a dark red and scaled, fading to pink around the neck, and the eyes, intense, vibrant blue, brighter even than Leo's.
Raph blinked, his vision caught up in blue. Electric.
A voiced crackle of static dragged his attention away and back to the smaller figure. It was looking at him with similarly fascinating eyes, silver and liquid in the dark. Eyes that were on a level with him.
When had he knelt down by their side? He didn't remember.
The dying creature reached up to him, a five fingered hand, but thicker fingers, no nails, like his own. The eyes, blue, drowning him. He couldn't breathe.
No. It wasn't the eyes doing that, it was the mouth against his, stealing his air, forcing something back in its place. Something Raph didn't want. He fought, but the touch of a hand against the nape of his neck stilled him.
He heard one of his brothers shouting his name but his eyes were wide, shocked, filled with blue, his body held in place with nothing more than the gentle touch of hand and lips. Something clicked in his mind and he understood.
He accepted.
The creature's dying breath was a thank you against his skin as Raph fell to the side, his body gone boneless. More shouts, his brothers turning him over. The faint 'shink' of metal swords being drawn from their sheaths. Hissing and spitting from silver eyes behind him, supplication, apology, although his brothers couldn't understand it. He barely understood it himself. He stared up in faint surprise at the bright brown eyes of Donatello, his vision fading out finally as his body shut down, his eyes rolling up into his head.
He began to seize.