Sorry, guys. It's proving really challenging to keep up with this one, but I don't plan on abandoning it. Promise :)

"I found her!"

His brothers were standing with their heads together in the pit when he burst into the lair. Splinter was nowhere in sight and neither were April and Casey. They must have gone home already, which then meant that Splinter was probably in the kitchen making tea, preparing to turn in for the night. Mikey hadn't realized it had gotten so late.

His brothers stopped talking all at once and looked up at him, narrowing their eyes with chastising glares.

Leo, placing superior, leader fists on his hips, stepped in front of the other two. "Mikey, I said ten minutes."

"We were about to charge the city looking for you," Raph said.

"Dudes, I'm fine," Mikey said, completely brushing off their folded arms and overbearing attitudes.

He jumped down on the cushioned bench, putting himself eye-level with Donnie and slightly above Raph and Leo, also with his hands on his hips, though not in the way Leo did it. "You're not going to believe this!"

"Are you listening?" Leo said. "You can't just disappear to the surface in the middle of the day without telling us."

"Someone could've seen your disgusting face." Raph stepped forward, placing a hand on Leo's shoulder to push him into the background. "They could've taken you to a government lab in the middle of the desert and sawed you open to pull out your intestines and dissolve them in acid."

Donnie grimaced and shifted. Leo rolled his eyes and patted Raph's shell.

"Thank you, Raph. The point is, Mike—"

"I get the point, Leo," Mikey said, bouncing on his toes. "But you're not gonna believe what I found!"

All three of his brothers groaned.

"If it's another 'cool-looking' bug, I swear …" Raph said.

"Mikey, we told you about trying to keep more pets," Leo added.

The youngest shook his head. "Not a pet—a woman!"

His three brothers blinked, all staring up at him with perfectly round eyes.

"You've got to be kidding me," Raph said.

"You guys, I found our mom!"

Leo dropped his head back with another groan. Raph buried his face in his palm and shook his head. Donnie just sighed, his shoulders sagging slowly. All reactions—if he was going to be honest with himself—Mikey was completely expecting.

"Please," Raph moaned. "Don't start with this again."

"I'm serious this time," he said, hopping back out of the pit and starting for his room. "It's really her! Come here, I'll show you."

Leo, Raph, and Donnie followed tiredly, shoulders sloping, feet dragging, all with familiar, exasperated looks on their faces. They did this quite often. Mikey wasn't hindered by it. But he did note when they stopped in his doorway to watch him toss pizza boxes and comics around his room and half-bury himself beneath his bed.

"Mikey, we talked about this," he heard Donnie say with strained patience. "We don't have a human mother. It's biologically impossible. We're turtles. We came from a turtle and hatched from eggs. Our only connection to the human race is Master Splinter."

Mikey wasn't listening. He wiggled out from beneath his bed and popped a pepperoni in his mouth that he peeled off of his chin. He peeked through his display of action figures, scratched the top of his head—now ignoring Leo's lecture on letting go of childhood fantasies—then realized he'd left it under his pillow.

He pounced on his bed, threw off the pile of stained, deflated pillows he slept on—every single one of which hit Raph in the face and earned him a growl—and picked up the book. He flipped to the page of the woman peeking over her baby's bed and crossed the room to shove the picture in his eldest brother's face, interrupting Leo's speech.

"Look! See? She looks exactly like that."

Leo touched a finger to the top of the book and pushed it down away from his face, his lips pressed in a straight, unconvinced line and his eyes gazing at his little brother flatly. He opened his mouth, but Raph got there first.

"That's great, Mike," said the turtle in red. "Did you find Uncle Sam too?"

"You don't even know who that is," Donnie mumbled under his breath.

Raph shot him a glare. "Shut up."

"You guys aren't listening," Mikey said, interrupting his brothers' banter. He hated it when they argued at all, what was more during a moment he was trying to make a point.

"We hear you, Mikey," Leo said. "It's just—"

"We don't know what simpler way to put it to get you to understand," Donnie whined.

"Guys, I'm telling you, this is our mom. Remember, D, when I told you this was what I thought she looked like when we were kids?"

"You still are a kid," Raph grumbled.

"That has nothing to do with our mother, Mikey," Donnie said, his voice rising in pitch as it often did when he began to lose his cool. "That's a book—a fictional story some man wrote so that his kids could have another bedtime story to read. That woman doesn't exist. He made her up."

"Yes she does, I saw her. She had the hair and the face and she was wearing a blue dress …"

"Mikey …"

"And she was singing the song, Donnie. This song. Exactly the way you used to sing it."

"But …"

"It all makes sense, D. This has to be our mo—"

"Mikey, shut up!"

Mikey blinked as a bubble of excited air got stuck in his chest and then deflated. He gripped the book and brought it close to his chest to protect it, only vaguely aware that Leo and Raph were also gaping at Donnie with creases in their masks.

Donatello clutched at the strap running across his plastron, as visibly shocked by his own outburst as the rest of them were.

A couple of heartbeats passed and Mikey's purple-banded brother finally blinked over flushed cheeks. Donnie bowed his head to hide his face and hurried from the room without saying another word.

Leo frowned. His blue eyes glanced toward Mikey as though Donnie's sudden snap was somehow his own doing, then he exchanged a glance with Raph and followed their normally passive brother out of the room.

Mikey gripped the book tighter and turned his eyes on his only remaining brother. Raph always seemed to be the last one there.

"I thought he'd be excited," Mikey mumbled, shoulders sinking.

Raph hesitated, and Mikey noticed. He always noticed.

This wasn't the first time Donnie had ever snapped at one of them with surprising aggressiveness, and it was bound not to be the last. But, unlike Raph, Donnie picked his outbursts carefully. If he lost his patience or became truly angry, then it was for a reason. Emotionally, Donnie was very vulnerable and very open, and Raph, though he was the most temperamental of the four of them, didn't deal well with eruptions like these.

Raph didn't do emotional stuff. That was a known fact. He became easily uncomfortable around sensitivity—ironically enough—as though he was allergic to it. It always revealed the cracks in his bravado and made him fidgety and desperate to deny that he was at all sympathetic, though to this he often caved. Inside that shell of his, he was even mushier than the rest of them, which was why Mikey never minded that his red-banded brother was always the last one standing around.

"You know Donnie," Raph said, shrugging uncaringly though his voice was thin and uncertain. "He has a hard time believing stuff unless you can prove it with science and evidence and crap."

Mikey furrowed his brow as this sunk in, and then he immediately lit back up, as though there was a little person somewhere inside him whose job it was to flick the "it's okay" switch back on anytime it was pushed down.

He widened a smile on his brother. "So I just have to bring him to see her!"

Raph's eyes went wide. "That … That's not exactly what I—"

"Thanks, Raph!" Mikey said. He pecked his brother on the cheek and skipped from the room.

Of course. Why hadn't he thought of that himself? They'd need proof. He had to show them she was real. They weren't just going to take his word for it. They never did. And if he could convince Donnie, Leo and Raph would believe it too.

Mikey bounced across the lair toward Donnie's lab where the door had been left partially open. Leo was hunched over his elbows on the lab table, standing next to and looking toward Donnie who was leaning on the table too with his hands on either side of his head which shook in a denial kind of way.

Mikey paused at the door.

"There's just nothing left," Donnie was saying. "I've tried everything I can think of to explain to him, but he's not getting it."

The little turtle in orange frowned and found himself stepping to the side, suddenly wary of being spotted listening in on this conversation.

Leo's sigh was evident as it always was. "Well, Donnie, if you've done everything, maybe he just needs to figure this one out on his own." He shrugged. "Mike's just like that you know? Sometimes he has to experience things for himself before he gets it."

Donnie turned his head, regarding Leo with a glossy look of pain to eyes. "He's going to get hurt, Leo," he said quietly.

Mikey swallowed and bit the inside of his lip. He'd never heard such concern for him coming from Donnie's mouth like that, and he wasn't sure he liked it all that much either.

Leo reached up and patted Donnie's shell. "Well … If that happens, then we'll be here for him," he said, shrugging his shoulders though it looked as though it pained him to do so.

Donnie grimaced and Mikey could no longer look. He turned away with a fresh knot in his chest and walked heavily back toward his room.

His brothers didn't believe him, and they weren't going to.