I am so so stunned and grateful for the lovely comments and favourites and messages I've gotten about this fic. thank you so much, I'm so happy you guys are excited and seeing where you think the fic is going makes my day :D

next up: a turtle returns home.

Birth of Serpents
part 3

Casey Jones has seen a lot of weird shit in his life. Like, a lot of weird shit, and that was before his best friend was a giant turtle and the chick he was into turned out to be a psychic half-mutant alien who didn't get hockey, and who listened to crappy indie bands that ate organic and danced barefoot. He's from New York City, and lived through the Alien Apocalypse of 2013, and fought off a giant glass tank of human organs using just his bike and his extremely good looks — he has seen some shit.

This, though, pushes the shit-o-meter straight from holy crap awesome to what.

Slowly, he closes the curtains. Looks at the cloudy glass of water next to his bed, and the empty bag of cheese balls he ate the night before. Looks back at the curtains.

Opens the curtains again.

The snake is still there. Still coiled up, still with its face pressed all needy against the window. "Yeah," he says, couching his cellphone between his ear and his shoulder. "I'm pretty sure. So, whenever you wanna get the guys and get over here, that'd be great."

There's nothing fancy about Casey's apartment. It's on the edge of the East Village in a rent-controlled building where half the residents are waiting to die. The hallway smells like dust and old people. But the super's a nice guy, and when he sees April — and friend — he waves both girls up to the Jones apartment, on the fourth floor. Once April manages to sweet-talk her way past Casey's dad (good morning Mr. Jones, isn't it a great Saturday? We have a trig exam on Monday and Casey said we could come over and study— this way? Thank you!), she and Karai slide through the bedroom door with a skull carved into the wood to see Casey, in a t-shirt and ratty boxer shorts, slumped on his floor, encircled in a large coil of mutant snake.

The snake is asleep.

The snake also looks incredibly comfortable, the main head flopped gently in Casey's lap and the other two curled around his arms.

April stares. "Casey, you let it inside!?" she snaps, her hands rising as though not sure whether to defend herself or wring Casey's neck.

"He started whining," Casey hissed. "I didn't even know snakes could whine. So I opened the window to see if he could talk, and he just tackled me. And then he hugged me."

He says hugged like the concept mortally offends him: Casey Jones, professional badass, freelance vigilante, snake snuggler.

April shoots a careful look at the door, but Karai has already moved to block it. "Well," April says, rueful, but the humour falls flat even as the words hit the air. There's nothing funny about this; there never will be. "I think we've found Raph."

It takes a good ten minutes to get Casey up to speed, and into some pants. Through it, he watches Karai like she's about to knife him, and rests a hand protectively over the snake's biggest head. "Okay," he says slowly. "Raph, I get. The whole thing with the turtles— sucks, but I get it. What is she doing here?"

"She's on our side now, apparently," April replies, leaning against Casey's desk.

"Yeah, but — that's Karai."

"I know that's Karai. Leo busted her out, and now she's not with the Foot."

"And she's standing right here." Karai folds her arms. "Are we seriously going to have this conversation every time I meet one of your little friends, O'Neil?"

"Gee, I don't know," April snaps back. "Why don't we go see my dad after we're done here, how about that?"

Karai smiles, dripping insincerity. "Yeah, I'm not so big on reunions," she says. "Besides, he might call the Kraang to join the party."

April bolts upright as rage blossoms through her. "Say that again," she snarls, balling her hands into fists. Her tessen, tucked into her shorts, feels warm and ready to wipe that look off Karai's face. "Go ahead, Karai. Say it."

A flicker of movement at April's left and a flash of someone else's fury is all the warning she gets. Raph opens one acid-green eye, the snake's pupil split and narrow. Then he moves.

April doesn't know what she was expecting to happen. Splinter had told her, in heavy, weary words, what his sons had become, and what they had done. They had attacked and escaped, wild and untamed, but somehow April had still hoped. The turtles are her brothers in everything that matters, they protect her, they care about her, in their own ways. But Raph rises up, his eyes narrowed and hungry, and all of his teeth are bared as he coils away from Casey and towers above them all.

He doesn't recognise her.

"Oh crap," Casey says. Raph spins away from them and towards the windows. He slams himself against the glass once, twice, the panes ringing dully and shaking in the frames, but they don't break. Raph rears back, looking almost offended, before turning for the door.

Karai is in the way.

"Karai!" April yells. "Move!"

She doesn't. In Casey's small bedroom, there's barely space for anyone to move, and April watches, pinned against Casey's desk as Raph reels towards Karai. He lifts himself up, and April forces herself to watch as all three sets of jaws lunge for Karai's face.

Karai leans back an inch, her face cold and impassive. Then, she brings her knee up and slams it into Raph's body.

Raph falls back, throats hissing, and in the moment he takes to collect himself, April catches Casey's eye.

He nods.

Both of them lunge for Raph. April clings to his lashing, furious tail as Casey wrestles him down. The smaller heads snap and spit, flaring out until Karai seizes a hockey stick and shoves it into their mouths. She holds it firm as Raph bucks, his whole body trying to shake himself free. "Casey, do something!" April yelps, trying to straddle Raph as Casey clambers his way along Raph's body to his head.

"I'm trying!" he snaps. Raph rears up again as Casey locks his arms around Raph's head and drags his face up. Raph hisses again, a phlegmy sound bubbling in his throat, and Karai manages to yell out "Venom!" as Raph readies himself to spit.

Casey scowls, screwing up his face, and headbutts Raph at full force.

Raph sinks.

In the absolute quiet afterwards, Casey's Andrew W.K. poster slowly untacks itself from the wall and drifts down to the floor. April can hear her own heart pounding in her chest, and feel it in her throat. Karai doesn't move, and Casey talks very quietly as Raph stirs: "it's okay, buddy. It's okay."

And then someone pounds on the door.

Raph's head lifts up again, but Casey keeps a firm grip, running his thumbs along the ridges over Raph's eyes as he turns his head towards the door.

"Sorry, dad!" Casey hollers. "We knocked something over. It's— everything's good!"

Outside the room, Casey's dad grumbles something about keep the door unlocked when you've got girls over, and his footsteps shuffle down the hall. Casey lets out a long, slow breath of relief, colour hot and high in his cheeks. April can feel her own face burning in embarrassment, whereas Karai looks as sleek and as unruffled as she always does. April supposes that's natural: Karai's got too much blood on her hands to be worried about being caught in a boy's bedroom.

Moodily, Raph winds himself around Casey again, his head flopping in Casey's lap for five seconds before nudging insistently, demanding to be petted. "Okay," says Casey again, gently scritching along the scales that run along the snake's — Raph's — head. "So we take him back to the lair, get rat-dad to— what?" he asks, when Karai shifts.

"I'm not so sure putting them in the same room as my father is a good idea," she says, and April can feel the worry that leaks out of Karai for the moment before she slams her doors down on it. "He's food."

Something tightens in April's chest; anger, and grief, and a slick, hot urge to strangle something. She hadn't considered that, that there was a reason the Shredder had picked snakes as his next experiment. Turning the turtles into something that would hunt their sensei down is sick. "We don't have a choice," she says tightly. "We have to get the turtles below ground."

"Good idea," Karai says slowly, "but how do we get Sleeping Beauty there down to the sewers?"

April casts an awkward, uncomfortable look at the door to Casey's bedroom. "We could…" she begins, then trails off as soon as she sees Casey's face. Casey's dad is in the living room, blissfully unaware of the giant mutant in his home, and worse, his sister is watching her cartoons.

"No way. My dad's not seeing this," he says, cutting a hand through the air.

"Okay, so we can't use the front door." April pinches her nose. "We could take him down the fire escape? The alley's pretty empty during the day, right?"

"Yeah," Casey replies. His voice is still blown out and breathless. "Nobody goes down there while I'm here." There's a thin thread of bravado in Casey as he says that, but there's none of his usual preening; he's just stating the facts. He looks after his turf.

Karai peels herself off of the door. "Alright then. I'll go start the van." As she slinks over to the window, she grabs Casey's bedsheets and hauls them along with her, before dropping them on the floor. "You better wrap him up. Don't want to give people too much of a reason to look, do you?"

As the window shuts behind Karai with a snkt, April leans forward, fists her hands in her hair, and she lets out a long, frustrated growl.

"Red?" Casey asks softly — carefully. He has to be careful with April sometimes, like she's less his friend, and more his sister. When her dad was gone, Casey learned how to steer around certain topics; less stories about how his dad brought home tacos for dinner, more stories about how his dad once lost four teeth in a pro match. Things that weren't too close to home. And when April wanted to go see the zombie film fest instead of the Batman marathon he'd been waiting for months to see, Casey sucked it up. And you don't ask April if she's okay. Not about things like this. Because April will give the shitlook, and say I'm fine, okay?

But here's the thing: Casey has known April for almost a year, now, and he's seen her lying to Irma enough to know when she'd be lying to him as well.

And here's the other thing: Casey has never met Karai face-to-face. All he's got are stories, mostly from Raph, that started up being like I would totally punch a girl and it would totally be her, twice, in the face and eventually became We gotta fix this somehow, I guess.

He's never really heard about April's side of things. April sides with the turtles, because that's what she does, but there are times when the turtles talk about poor Karai, brainwashed by her evil psycho fake-daddy, and shadows cloud April's face like a storm on the horizon.

"We need to get Raph home," April says, ignoring Casey's unasked question. Her voice is rough, and her hands are balled into fists, squeezed so tight that her knuckles are white. She breathes harshly, slowly, through her nose once, twice, three times. One of Raph's arm—head—things stirs, the tongue flickering gently along Casey's skin, then twists closer and curves around his wrist. "We need to get them all home."

"Yeah," Casey agrees, carefully peeling Raph away. "I know."

"Come on." She tosses him a handful of his bedsheets. "Karai's waiting for us."

The less Casey thinks about how they got Raph out of his apartment and back to the lair, the better, but it reminded him too much of hauling a body for comfort, like in the movies his dad watches sometimes. Casey Jones doesn't kill people, he just teaches them a lesson. Raph sulked the whole way down, and if he'd been able to speak Casey's pretty sure he knows what Raph would have been bitching about: it's cold or people will see us or Casey get off my ass.

Stretched out, Raph is as long as Casey is tall, and when they finally get him into the Shellraiser, he slides to the back of the truck and won't move again until Casey sits in Mikey's spot and lets Raph wind around his feet.

Karai cranes her neck from Leo's seat up front. "Hey there," she says, all smooth. "You two buckled up?"

Casey narrows his eyes at her and doesn't mention that the only seat in the whole damn truck that has a seatbelt is the jump-seat Donnie installed for April. "Yeah," he snaps. "We're good."

And if Raph is a clingy snuggler, he's also the actual worst to take on a road trip. He hisses at everything — when Karai stops at a red light, when they hit a pothole, when the whole truck jolts as Karai swings them back into the tunnels and onto the tracks. It takes everything Casey has to stop Raph from swinging himself up to the front of the truck when Karai hits the brakes a little too hard, and contents himself with the sympathetic look April shoots him from Donnie's station.

When Karai pulls up alongside the platform, nobody wants to ask the question that needs to be asked: how do they get Raph inside and, more importantly, how do they keep Raph in a big open space like the lair?

"What about Donnie's lab?" Casey asks. "We could keep Raph in there."

April shakes her head. "He keeps the garage door locked," she says. "If what Karai says is true and Splinter's… food, we can't let Raph near Master Splinter."

"So we go into the lab and open it." Karai folds her arms, leaning back against Leo's seat. "I can back the truck in and then we let Raph out into the lab."

"Works for me," Casey says, as April glares.

"Wait," she interrupts. "So we just leave Raph in the truck until we open the door?"

"I don't see you with any better ideas, Princess."

Casey has never seen April look more likely to stab something than he has at that moment, when April whips around, her eyes narrowed and her body arced ready to attack.

(Even at times like these, Casey Jones can appreciate that April at her most violent is April at her most hottest.)

"I said, don't call me that."

Karai doesn't even look bothered.

"We can't just leave Raph here!"

"Red, seriously, it's cool. Raph's gonna be okay, right buddy?" Casey runs his knuckles along Raph's head again. "We'll go out, talk to Splinter, and then we can get Raph here into the lab."

He watches until the tight line of April's spine eases into something a little calmer, less about to scratch Karai's eyes out. "Fine," April snaps, and slams her first against the door release. She stomps out onto the platform.

Karai reaches up and pinches her nose. "Close the door when you're done," she tosses over her shoulder. She doesn't even look at Casey as she leaves.

Casey has never had a dog.

He'd always imagined himself growing up to get a big jowly hound, more drool than dog, that he could take out to Central Park and wrestle in the dog parks and buy street meat for on the way home. And then he got Raph, who was kind of the same thing, except Raph also understood talk shit, get hit and did it on purpose just for the fun of a fight.

The worst thing about dogs, to Casey, though, is their eyes. When they look sad and make you feel guilty because you won't give them the last bite of your cheeseburger, or they shit in your shoe and they're so very sorry, and please don't go to work today, instead please won't you aggressively rub their belly until their foot starts to kick, because you are the greatest thing in the world to them.

Raph has not shit in Casey's shoe. Raph didn't even break Casey's window, and Casey has no food to be guilted out of. But when Casey tries to leave the Shellraiser, Raph slithers forward, his head dropped low. "Sorry, buddy," Casey says, hitting the door release with his fist, and the Shellraiser doors close on Raph with the biggest, saddest pair of murder-eyes Casey has ever seen.

By the time Casey has gotten away from the Shellraiser, feeling like crap, both Karai and April are stopped at the doors to the lab. For one brief moment, Casey wonders if this is his time to shine — of course he can open the door, ladies, because Casey Jones lets nothing stand in his way! — but when he gets to the lab doors and sees the heavy chain wrapped around the door handles, he changes his mind pretty quick.

"Miwa."

As one, the three of them turn around.

From the kitchen, Splinter starts to cross the lair, and Casey clues into it a second before April does: Splinter's leaning too heavily on that cane of his.

"Master Splinter." April covers her mouth with her hands. "Are you okay? What happened—?"

As soon as she finishes that last word, Karai shoves past her. "Father," she says, quiet and worried as she walks right into Splinter's personal space. She looks him up and down, and then her face pulls into a scowl. "You're hurt."

Splinter looks over their heads and to the locked door of Donnie's Nerd Kingdom. "Leonardo has returned home," he says.

The lab has always been one of April's safe spaces. When she couldn't study at home because of her aunt's sympathetic looks (April, honey, I— aliens? Maybe it would help to talk to someone about this), or when the lair was loud and overwhelming, Donnie would set her up with her own side of his desk, and they'd just work, quietly. Even the times when Donnie would sit in the corner playing with mutagen and she just wanted to nap, she'd come here, and Donnie would leave her be, the warm thrill in his mind wrapping around her like an old blanket.

The idea of Donnie's most sacred space being used as a prison for his brothers is wrong. Everything about it is wrong. As Raph coils out of the Shellraiser and into the lab, the fluorescent lights pick out a run of pale scales in the thick shape of a lighting bolt down his left flank. Slumped into a corner, Leo doesn't move but for the steady rise and fall of his breathing. The side of his head looks swollen and sore, a bruise forming from where Master Splinter must have struck the final blow with his cane.

Instead of approaching his brother, like April expected, Raph rears up and reels away, skimming across the floor until he cowers in the corner next to Timothy's tank.

Something is wrong.

April doesn't need her powers to know that, though she uses them anyway, tapping into the air and listening to everything she can't hear. The air is full of menace, and violence, and fright and fear. "Casey," she says, and he nods, stepping to her side as they watch how Raph trembles and shifts and starts to hiss, watching all of them with something vicious and untamed.

"Okay, it's okay, buddy, I'm not gonna hurt you," Casey says, soft and placating as he creeps closer, but it doesn't work: Raph continues to hiss and spit, venom bubbling a warning in his throat. The air thickens, darkens until every corner is filled with shadows, and even the frozen, miserable gaze from Timothy's tank begins to look baleful and malevolent.

Leo is still asleep, and April can't help herself, she reaches over, running her hand over the welt on Leo's face. Her brow knots, and the room twists further, something reaching out in the darkness towards Raph, towards her. "Casey," she says again, her voice catching. Casey straightens up and turns back towards her.

"C'mon, Red," Casey touches her arm gently. "We gotta go talk to Splinter."

In the kitchen, Splinter sits on a stool as Karai digs through the beaten old first aid kit that lives under the sink. It's a bad bite on his foot, the skin around each puncture wound puffy and weeping. Casey wonders if the snakes are poisonous. He looks over at Red, and just knows, in his gut, that she's got the same worries as him right now. If Splinter goes down to a snake bite, that's messed up, and he doesn't want to be around when the turtles get changed back when that news gets delivered: hey so Leo guess what you did while you were brainwashed and mutant-crazy.

"I can go topside," he offers, mentally calculating how much of his allowance he has left in his wallet. "If we need…anything."

Karai looks up, and Casey suddenly feels awkward under her gaze; after all the stories he's been told about Karai, he always expected to meet her in a fight, not chilling in the lair. "I think we're good. The bite was clean."

"Yeah, but like," Casey says, then stops. They're in the sewers. No matter how much Mikey always yells about NEW YORK TUNNELS, YO, Casey knows that it's not exactly something they're proud of, that they have to hide away underground dodging turds on their way home. Sometimes, when it rains, and the river gets heavy, there are sandbags around the tire pool just in case, and nobody talks about the last time a hurricane rained itself out over Manhattan. It's dirty, and it stinks, but it's all they've got.

Casey has to be careful. He's just not always good at being careful.

"I think Casey just means, in case we run out," April fills in, leaning against the fridge. Casey feels a rush of gratitude in his chest, but April isn't looking at him. Instead, her arms are folded and she's looking straight at Karai. "Better safe than sorry."

There's a weight behind that last sentence that doesn't sit right.

Splinter doesn't say anything for a long moment, his hand drifting to his long beard, before he makes a soft mm in his chest, and nods. "Very well then."

"Master Splinter," April says, hesitating before she goes all-in with, "what happened out there? Did Leo really—?"

"Leonardo is home," Splinter says. "That is all that matters."

"Dude," Casey says, the full implication hitting him. "Did you lay him out? That's—! …sucks," he adds, changing tack as soon as April and Karai both turn their shitlooks on him and oh shit, if Red's wasn't scary enough, Karai literally looks ready to murder him.

Splinter gets to his feet, testing his weight on his bound foot. "How is Raphael?"

"Asleep. He's in the lab, with Leo," April replies. "I think they're both asleep, I can't— hear anything else." Casey frowns, glancing over at her, but again April isn't looking at him. He'd expected April to say how she sensed Leo and Raph, with that weird Kraang thing she has. As he watches her, April's eyes flick to Karai for half a second, and then Casey gets it.

"I can go take a look," he offers, gallantly.

"No." Splinter shakes his head. "Let them rest. We must find the others."

Casey keeps his mouth shut instead of asking where do we start?. Leo came home himself, and Raph came to Casey's. But Donnie didn't go to April's, and Mikey didn't go to Murakami's. The news is full of reports of weird snake sightings, but nobody's reported a capture. He glances at April, casually rubbing her temple under her hair, and waits until he catches her eye.

She nods once.

"'Kay, so," Casey says, "why don't I just. Wait here, huh? How's that sound?"

"You're seriously telling me that there's some creep called The Rat King?" Karai says, like she's trying not to laugh. April bites the inside of her cheek.

"That's what I'm telling you," she says. "He's dead now. And Casey, no. Come on, it'll be fine."

What's left of the Rat King's lair is made up of trashed cables and cages, smashed bricks, and hundreds upon thousands of scuffling, squeaking rats. From where they're standing up on a high bridge, the rats look like a seething, swarming mass, an ocean of fur and disease. Then, like a whale breaking the surface of the sea, a great mouth opens, is filled with unsuspecting, curious rats, and then slams shut.

Casey makes a noise in his throat like he's about to hurl.

The snake burps. One rat makes a desperate, daring escape from its jaws, and then is snatched back by both of the snake's smaller heads. As the rat screams, both heads tug and tear at it, until in a wet shower of blood, the rat is torn apart, and then devoured.

("Your dad's a therapist, right, Red?"

"Psychologist, and come on, Casey, quit goofing around. We need to get Mikey home."

"Yeah, great idea," Casey hisses, "except he's kind of busy right now." )

Mikey looks a little longer than Raph does, from this distance. Longer and heavier, though that might be the ball of rats in his gut. He burps again, then sinks back down beneath the wave of rats.

April rubs at her temple again. Her own emotions are dammed behind a high wall, frothing and boiling and ready to burst. Casey is buffering her, with his reluctance to be where they are coupled with the always barely-leashed bloodlust, his needle-prick of embarrassment and the ice-drop of fear at so many rats. Then there's Karai, and the mess that she is, and then, twisted and familiar all at the same time, a bright sweep of a long, languid, contented laziness. "It's okay," April says after a moment. "I think— I think he's just tired."

"Food coma?" Casey asks, then snorts.

Karai looks at where the snake is sprawled out, content and fat and paying no attention to the writhing mass slowly making its way down its gullet. "He's asleep?" she asks.

April nods.

Karai claps her hands against her thighs. "Then we drag him back," she says, jumping down and wading through the rats.

tbc.