April plummeted into the vat of mutagen after Baxter Stockman cut the rope. Donnie soared above her, miscalculating the jump to catch her and only brushing her fingers before she fell. She looked into his eyes as his expression morphed into horror when he realised he wasn't going to make it.
This can't be happening.
Her thoughts were stuck in a loop of denial as she splashed into the glowing liquid and it sucked her down like burning quicksand. Agony spiked through her as her bones crunched and broke apart, shifting and reforming, pulling and stretching her skin, reorganizing organs. Suddenly she realised she was free of her bonds and she flailed her limbs to propel herself upward, frantically trying to escape the pain.
Her hand managed to latch onto the edge and she hauled herself up, the thick sludge coating her and making her nearly slip and fall back in. On shaky hands and knees she crawled to safety, coughing up the slime she had swallowed and looking up. Leonardo stood in front of her, hand on the hilt of his katana still in it's sheath watching and waiting for her to react. She never expected to be the one on the receiving end of that focused look he got right before engaging the enemy.
Am I a monster now? Am I an enemy?
Her eyes darted to Donatello who looked at her with a stricken expression. "A-april?" He said uncertainly.
"I'm... okay. I think." She finally answered back, trying not to slump forward on her face. Her arms still felt like jelly. Everything felt different, as a matter of fact, her head pounded and the smells... Did this place stink so much before? She could smell the mutagen on her and in the vat, the sweat on Casey, gross! Once they were beside her she was also picking up an acrid scent from all three of them that set her teeth on edge but subsided slightly after she spoke and they relaxed visibly. Instinctively she knew that it was... fear? Huh? She shook her head and slid off the edge of the vat and onto the floor, immediately sinking back to her knees. The room wouldn't stop spinning.
"Don't worry April, I can change you back." Donnie said softly as he pulled out the injector with retromutagen he had brought along to administer to her father. The only one left.
Her father was still out there, they needed to go help him! She tried to stand up as he fiddled with it and stepped closer, lifting the injector to use it on her.
"No!" She raised a hand and pushed the injector away from her. "What about my dad?!"
"What about you?" Casey interjected and Donatello lowered his head as he looked at her apologetically.
What about me? I'm fine. She thought and then her eyes fell on her hand where she was still holding onto the injector. Her green three-fingered hand.
Back at the lair April sat in the bathroom and pointedly didn't look in the mirror. She was slowly building up her courage to do it. She looked down at her legs first and her hands, palms resting on her lap. During her transformation she had burst out of her clothes, boots included, and now only her black leggings remained and some tattered bits and pieces of shorts and t-shirt that hung off her. She also lost her headband somewhere, she was missing the comfortable weight of it on her head and pressing behind her ears.
She lifted a hand slowly to where it should be resting, ignoring the fact that it should have brushed the outer shell of her ear but didn't and touched only smooth skin. I'm bald. She said to herself and that single thought made her ridiculously upset.
She blinked her eyes quickly to try dash away the tears that were building up. "Of course you're bald. You're a turtle, turtles don't have hair. That would be weird." She said out loud, lecturing herself about how stupid it was to be so distraught about hair when your whole body had changed. "Hair is the least of your problems, April. You don't even have ears."
After a long chase and a messy fight trying to get the retromutagen to her dad they had failed, the vial crashing to the ground while she watched nearby, trying to rush to help. Her body had not been cooperating with her and they had convinced her to stay behind in the Shellraiser but she'd scurried out when she realised they were seriously outnumbered and needed help. Her centre of gravity was way off and her limbs didn't respond the way she was used to, still shaky and unsteady from the transformation so she couldn't really do anything other than watch as the vial smashed against a lamp post and the orange liquid splattered on the ground and dispersed, leaving nothing behind.
Raphael and Michelangelo had seen her when they returned to the vehicle to head back to the lair. Mikey looked oddly cheerful, holding her in a hug that lasted a bit too long and felt a bit too tight to be only about being happy they had another turtle in the team as he said. Raphael had been furious at first, shouting at Leo and Donnie about messing up their mission 'You had ONE job!' he'd yelled in their face.
Back in the Shellraiser he'd stared at her all the way to the lair. She kept catching him looking and he'd turn quickly away. She had wanted to call him out on it but she was too afraid of what he'd say to her, what he had seen that had shaken him up so much.
She breathed slowly and pulled off the tattered remains of her clothing, pausing when she was left only with her dark leggings. Only the legs were intact, the part around her waist had burst and now hung low from the top of her thighs where they disappeared under her shell.
Her shell.
She decided they were too damaged to wear and pulled them off trying to touch herself as little as possible in the process. She shivered at the thought and a sick feeling came over her when she brushed her fingers over that part of her anatomy, her lower plastron, as she felt the brush in a place that shouldn't exist. She jumped back at the feeling and her carapace tapped against the wall behind her making her flinch and shudder more violently.
It was like watching someone tap a backpack and suddenly feel that touch right on the skin of your back. It was all wrong, the feeling was all wrong. Her mind couldn't get around the fact that she was a different shape yet and it was making her stomach twist and lurch with every strange sensation that shouldn't be there.
Stop overreacting. This is only temporary. Donnie will fix it.
She walked up to the sink on unsteady feet and stood in front of the mirror breathing slowly before lifting her eyes and then froze. A turtle looked back at her. It was a lot more unsettling than she had expected. She couldn't recognize herself at all. It was all wrong. The turtle's face twisted into a frightening grimace and then blurred.
She woke up to frantic voices. Groaning, she opened her eyes and tried to pull away from their touches, turning over and getting on her hands and knees letting her head hang down with slow deliberate breaths to get a hold of herself.
They repeated her name worriedly but she couldn't answer, afraid that if she'd open her mouth she'd be sick all over the floor. When they asked her if she was okay she only managed to shake her head slightly before she could stop herself. Her skin felt cold and clammy and alien. With no clothes on she felt naked and exposed but constricted by her shell at the same time.
I can't breathe.
Someone put their hand gently on her carapace and rubbed in circles and she yelped and scrambled to the toilet, just managing to lift the seat before throwing up some of the dinner she'd had before the mission, laced with glowing green. Wonderful. She wrinkled her nose (snout?) at the smell. Someone touched her back, not her back, her carapace making her stomach lurch again.
"D-don't touch me." she whispered weakly and whoever it was drew their hand back. She swallowed and tried to speak more normally. At least her own voice was the same and it was a huge relief to hear it. "I'm okay, just go. I'll be right out."
She turned her head to watch Donatello's shuffling feet out of the corner of her eye beside her. His smell filled her nostrils and she tried to focus on it instead of the vomit even if it still had that unpleasant sour note of anxiety in it. She'd never noticed being able to smell him so well and from so far away. It was a familiar smell to her, well the fear part was new but Donnie was a smell she was used to even though she only remembered noticing it when she'd hugged him or they worked closely and it never was so strong. Must be a turtle thing. He smelled of motor oil, leather, coffee and... lavender? She'd never noticed that smell on him before. Heh, that was new. It kind of felt fitting with the whole purple turtle theme.
"Come on. Give her some space." Raph's gruff voice sounded from the door and he physically pulled his other brothers away, shoving them out of the bathroom to leave her kneeling on the floor. He gave her an odd, hurt look before walking out, partially closing the busted door they must have kicked in to get to her.
The living room was silent and empty when she walked out of the bathroom. She heard voices coming from the lab and started to make her way there slowly concentrating on the cold concrete floor freezing her bare feet instead of how oddly it felt to move around naked in her new body but as she neared the door she overheard part of the conversation and hesitated. They were talking about her.
"It's kind of weird, isn't it?" Leonardo spoke. "She looks like Mikey."
"She does NOT!" Donnie countered in an offended, high-pitched voice.
"She does too. She's small, has a rounded face, blue eyes and freckles. She looks just like him."
"I always told you guys I was the cute one."
She grimaced and turned away from the partially opened door. A new scent touched her nostrils and she inhaled it. It was mild and fragrant... it smelled like... spicy wood... She couldn't quite place it exactly.
"You don't look like Mikey." Raph's grouchy voice startled her and she turned to see he was halfway across the room from his bedroom watching her.
She did look like Mikey. Even she thought so herself. She had examined herself in the mirror again, slower this time and had stared into the eyes of the stranger looking back at her for a long time. She tried covering up her face with a towel leaving only her eyes to gaze into, trying to find something familiar and then it hit her why it wasn't working. She had no eyebrows or eyelashes. It was strange how much you rely on something like that to recognize a face.
Instead of walking passed her to the lab he turned and walked in to the pit, sitting down on the bench. The scent faded slightly. It's Raph. He smells like leather, and... mahogany, like her dad's guitar.
"I didn't think you'd find being a turtle so awful that you'd barf." He grumbled at her but she could tell he was hiding his hurt.
She turned her head to the lab when she heard them laughing inside. She didn't want to know the reason. Making a decision she walked over to Raph and sat down carefully beside him leaving a bit of space between them. At least with Raph she didn't have to worry about him trying to touch or hug her, she didn't think she was ready for that yet even though she yearned to be comforted.
"It's not about that." She started slowly, unsure if she should continue. "I couldn't recognize myself in the mirror, not even a bit." She glanced at him to make sure he was listening. He was giving her that odd look again but at least she had his attention. She needed him to understand, she needed to talk about it to understand herself.
"Everything feels different. I feel... I feel like a ghost in someone else's body, moving it as if I'm pulling on the strings of a puppet." She lifted a trembling hand and watched its movement as the fingers opened and closed and then touched her plastron. "If everything about myself has changed so much that I can't tell it's me standing there, am I still the same person? Have I become someone else?"
Even without moving around she felt oddly detached from her body. There was a permanent crushing weight against her chest. Her plastron seemed like a tight corset that was squeezing the air from her lungs, not allowing her to inflate them properly. She couldn't stretch and take a deep breath. Well, she could... but it wasn't the same. Even something so simple as breathing felt vastly different to her now. It was very unsettling.
"So you don't hate being a turtle?" Raph asked and his voice sounded softer than usual, a little uncertain.
"I think it's more about my brain not getting the message that I'm a different shape now. It'll take some getting used to." She tried to make light of the situation but the thought that she wouldn't get used to it ever and would be feeling like this all the time was scaring her and making her voice tremble.
Bright green eyes darted between hers as they searched for something. After a moment he seemed satisfied and leaned back with a thoughtful hum without taking his eyes away from her. "You're still you. I can still see you and you're not completely changed. You still have what's in here." He pointed his chest with a thumb in the approximate location of his heart. "And here." He pointed to his head. "I'm- I mean, we're here for you, April. We'll get the mutagen that Donnie needs to make your cure in no time."
She shook her head and crossed her arms but they fit awkwardly over her plastron, the edges biting into the soft skin of her underarms. Her hands didn't fit in the nook on the inside of her elbows the way she was used to so she uncrossed them and let them fall to her sides, palms flat against the seat.
"My dad comes first, then we can think about my cure."
He searched her face again, "I thought you'd want to go back to being human as soon as possible. You're going to miss school and... friends... and you know... shopping or whatever human girl stuff you do."
April smiled slightly at his wording and snorted but didn't correct him. "I know, but I'm fine, my dad is the one who needs it more urgently. He's out there, mindless and alone living off dead rats and garbage. He could be captured or hurt while we wait for more retromutagen. The most that can happen to me is that I might fail some classes and have to retake them. It's nothing permanent that I can't fix later on."
She sighed heavily, trying to push against the crushing pressure caused by her plastron, fingering the edge as if she could loosen it. "I'll just have to take a crash course in 'how to mutant turtle 101', suck it up and get used to it. I figure I'm stuck here for a couple months at least." She glanced over to him and forced herself to smile through her discomfort. "I could really use some pointers from an expert." She said quietly, trying to keep her voice steady and failing.
A large hand covered hers and she was surprised to realise that it didn't feel strange at all. She recognized the warm weight that fell on the back of it and it suddenly lifted part of the weight in her chest, letting her take her first deep breath as a turtle. It was the only thing since her transformation that felt right other than her voice and it untied the knot in her stomach and soothed her fraying nerves.
"You've got this. I'm gonna help you, April. Everything's gonna be fine." He told her with a calm certainty reserved to dads or big brothers who comforted their sibling by placing their belief in them. She felt so relieved she thought she would cry but she only closed her eyes and lowered her head as she nodded gratefully and turned her hand to give his a squeeze.
She didn't let go when the others walked into the living room to talk to her and thankfully he didn't pull away even though she knew he must have been uncomfortable in front of his brothers. Donnie was giving him a dirty look and his eyes kept darting to their joined hands but after Leo nudged him and shook his head he stopped.
I've got this. I'm still April O'Niel on the inside no matter how different I look or feel and April O'Niel doesn't give up.
