Raphael's hunch proves right.
Donatello isn't there for the final moment of persuasion, but when they take a formal family vote on which site they'd like to make into their new lair (Donnie keeping his hands firmly pressed to the floor until he's certain that Leonardo's raised arm is no casual stretch) the decision is universal.
"Yes!" Mikey crows, both fists raised in victory. "Fucking yes!" He leans over and claps Donnie hard across the shell. "Dude, this is gonna be so fucking sweet!"
"Michelangelo! Language!" Master Splinter's brow is furrowed but his whiskers twitch up the same way they do when he laughs. Mikey pulls back, still grinning, and doesn't even complain when Sensei sets him to the standard ten flips.
The new lair is bigger than their current home but not as open, a single, four-foot tall passageway connecting the skeletal remnants of a half-gutted pumping station with a 100 foot long section of two-track subway tunnel caved in at each end.
The pumping station, with its ready supply of fresh water, is certainly large enough to suit their needs on its own, but it was the subway tunnel and its potential as a training space that had been the definite deciding feature. It dates back almost a century, judging by the surviving electrical lines and the heavy iron ribs exposed by the crumbling stone and brick facade. The east end is completely blocked, but there are promising voids in the western rubble and a faint movement of air that hints at an even larger space beyond, maybe even a drivable connection to the surface. By Donatello's best reading of the few surviving records, the tunnel had been in the midst of being widened for a station platform when the west end collapsed. The damage had been significant but recoverable, but before workers could clear the obstruction there was a second, more catastrophic collapse further up the tunnel. Eight men had been trapped inside until, in desperation, they started digging sideways, finally emerging in the dark, wet bowels of the pumping station.
Corruption, financial ruin, and the eventual public buyout of the city's remaining private lines had prevented any further attempts to re-open the line. Donnie is thankful for whatever back-room mob deal lead to the original construction team hastily covering up their blunder in lieu of filing more official reports. He just wishes the escaping workers had thought to make the connecting passage just a little bit taller.
"It's like being in a freakin' hobbit hole," Raph complains on their first supply transfer, bent nearly double as he shuffles along with a crate of canned goods tucked under each arm. "Why we gotta camp out in the subway bit, anyway? Think I could cozy up easy enough in one of them big pipes with just a blanket at this point."
"Well it's dry, for one," Donnie explains. "I need the waterworks as clear of our stuff as possible so I can run wiring and make the repairs needed for it to be habitable. Or do you like sitting around in the darkhaving unknown liquids drip on you while you shit in a bucket because the toilets don't work?"
"Sounds like we're gonna be shittin' in a bucket for a while either way," comes the grumbled reply. "Unless I overlooked the rail-side powder room first time around."
"It's called a fixer-upper," calls Mikey from further ahead. "That's what makes it so great! Just focus on the potential, Raphie-boy. Poe-ten-chal!"
"I'll fix you up," Raph snarls. "See how much you like havin' to duck walk into the dojo every morning once you hit your final growth spurt. Or should I say if, short stuff?"
Mikey grins over his shoulder, teeth eerily white in the bobbing light of their headlamps. "Don't hate me 'cause my ass fits in off the rack Nike, brah."
"Knock it off, Mikey." One of Donnie's cameras spins to offer him an over-the shoulder view of Leo trudging along behind him, dragging a sledge packed high with the raw components of their new security grid. He's wearing the closed-in expression he puts on when he feels one of them rankling under his orders, but underneath the mask his eyes are bright and one corner of his mouth twitches upward traitorously. "It'll be cramped for a while, but we should be able to dig it out as big as we need it. Right, Donnie?"
Whatever his earlier reservations, now that a decision has been made Leonardo embraces it wholeheartedly as if it was his plan the entire time. Back at the old lair (or "home", as Donnie's brain refuses to stop calling it), he spends most his time hunched over Donnie's blueprints, peppering him with questions about surface access routes and flooding patterns while he examines each scribbled-in component of the ever growing schematic. After a while he starts adding his own notes on top of Donnie's near-illegible scrawls, carefully labeling each room and dotted-out excavation proposal with its designated primary purpose in neat block print. Dojo. Power room. Security. Weapons storage. Main access point. Emergency escape route one. Emergency escape route two. Alternate emergency escape route one. Infirmary.
Donnie hitches his heavy toolbags further up his shoulders and ducks his head to avoid a low jut of stone. "We'll need to be careful around the caved-in areas until we've had a chance to shore everything up, but this part near the pump station is basically bedrock. We could dig hallways tall enough to do backflips down with no problem."
"And then, on to the main remodel!" Mikey chirps in the airy, too-bright tone of his favorite interior designers. "Just picture it, dudes. Five bedrooms! A guest bath! A tiny closet all of Raph's very own for him to go sulk in when he's been a naughty turtle!"
Raph kicks out at him but misses, stubbing his bare toes against an unseen hunk of rock. Leo laughs, a single, loud "Ha!" that echoes slightly down the empty passageway behind them.
Despite his own not-infrequent yearns for privacy, the idea of actual, distinct bedrooms still makes Donnie come up short. Over the years each of them in turn has lugged his bed off to some relatively shadowed corner in an attempt to establish a modicum of personal space, but they'd all eventually ended back in the same heavily postered alcove, the comforting habit of a lifetime sharing a sleeping space with three breathing bodies too difficult to break. He wonders what it will be like, alone for the first time in the dark.
"Woah there!" Donnie's so busy looking out for overhead obstacles that he doesn't notice the slick patch of calcite deposit until his feet are halfway out from under him. Leo appears just as suddenly out of the dark to catch him by his shell. "You alright?"
If Donatello tries hard enough, he can pretend that the jump in his heart rate is entirely the fault of his slip.
"Fine," he pants, curling his toes tight in his boots until the faint tingling sensation in his soles fades. "I'm fine."
It's better when he's driving the van.
It's not just the rumble of the engine beneath him, or the security of having one brother crammed into the passenger seat close enough to brush with his elbow while the other two hover at his shoulder, swaying and knocking against each other with every turn. It's the control, his hands on the wheel, his foot on the pedals, two and a half tons of steel and garish paint responding to every twitch and impulse as smooth as thought.
Even if his thoughts aren't always so smooth.
"Not so easy, is it?" Raph sneers after Donnie narrowly avoids busting a tail light on the corner of a dumpster backing out of an alley. Donnie cringes, the worn leather of the steering wheel creaking beneath his tight knuckles, but Raph throws back his head and lets out a breathy bark of laughter.
"Nobody's perfect!" Donnie shoots back, annoyed. "I'm getting better!"
"Sure are, Don," Raph says, teeth glittering around his toothpick. "Sure are."
Under the cover of dark they've finally started moving over their beds and other items too large to be hand-carried, Raph riding shotgun while Leo and Mikey race ahead underground to help unload. The van is too conspicuous and New York traffic too notorious to risk any daytime trips, so they cram each load as full as the can until the van sags low on its axels, the muffler scraping sparks against the pavement whenever the road bumps unexpectedly.
They're all uneasy about leaving Master Splinter alone for so long, but with four hands set to the task they manage to move the major bulk of their belongings pile in a single night. It's well past four in the morning when they all finally bundle into the van, exhausted and grime-streaked, the threat of their sensei's worried cluckings driving them home faster than the first grey tinges of dawn looming just beyond the horizon.
Donnie knows he should keep his eyes locked on the road ahead of them, but he can't help but obsessively scan each dark storefront and looming ally mouth for the glint of steel and the hollow glow of plastic masks. Surely the Foot are out there, eager and watching for the perfect moment to seek their revenge, but the drive back to the storm culvert is unnervingly uneventful. This late the streets are as empty as they ever get in the city, and with the interior lights off the turtles are invisible behind the patterned and tinted glass. The van draws a curious glance or two, but even at this hour there are enough cars with bigger rims and brighter paint jobs cruising neon up and down the streets that they merge seamlessly into the traffic, the guttural rumble of the van's souped-up engine swallowed by the smoky chorus of unmuffled exhausts and thumping bass lines.
"They're so close."
Donatello glances over his shoulder to see Michelangelo with his nose pressed flush against the glass, staring at the little huddles of people walking up and down the icy March sidewalk while they wait for the light. Raphael is right behind him, his mouth thin. In the passenger seat, even Leonardo appears transfixed, passing headlights throwing his furrowed features in and out of shadow as he watches a man bent over the open window of a taxicab, gesticulating wildly as he argues with the driver, three women in matching coats laughing as they stumble drunkenly through the crosswalk, another woman and her dog standing silent and still on the street corner, the smoke from her cigarette curling like a sigil across the slowly graying sky.
Mikey looks back at him, blue eyes huge in the rearview mirror. "They look so different," he says. "From up here, I mean."
"Yeah," says Raph. "Not nearly as much leg."
"Yeah," Mikey echoes, shaking his head. "Too bad." Then, after a moment's pause: "When are we gonna tell April that we've moved?"
Raphael looks at Donatello. Donatello looks at Leonardo. Leonardo doesn't look away from the people on the sidewalk.
"Later," he says. "Once we're more established. It's for her safety as much as ours."
"You still don't trust her?"
Leo meets Donnie's eyes briefly in the rearview before turning in his seat to answer his youngest brother's question. "I trust family."
"She is family."
"Exactly. And right now, she's safer not knowing where we're going. The longer the Foot think we're not in contact with her, the better."
Donatello's hands flex on the steering wheel. Nobody mentions Vern or the Deal. Nobody has to ask how long until he can be fully trusted.
(He can't. He's not family. All Leonardo has to do is say the word and Donatello will—)
The light turns green. Donnie drives on.
Less than twelve hours later, the Foot finally come.
With his modifications to the sensor grid they get an extra 37 seconds' warning this time around.
In a way it's almost a relief to hear the alarms screaming, like the first burning lungful of air after a deep dive.
Mikey is the first to move, leap-frogging over last vestiges of equipment until he reaches Splinter's bedside. "Ding-dong, Avon calling!"
"Fuckin' finally," Raph grunts, sais glinting red in the flashing emergency light. "Was starting to think we wouldn't get a chance to say goodbye."
"Stick to the plan, Raphael," Leo grunts as he tosses chunks of concrete away from what used to be the weapons wall, re-opening the breach. Better an open doorway for their enemy to breeze through than risk the chaos of another pinpoint explosion. "How many, Donatello?"
Donnie's eyes dart across the monitors, collating the multiple camera feeds with the modem screech stream of audio signals being fed to him by his headset.
"Twelve at least. Fifteen, maybe twenty. Two teams like last time." Only half of them are masked, and there's no question that this time they won't be shooting tranquilizers. One passes so close to a camera that Donatello can pick out his features even with the grainy night vision. His throat convulses involuntarily. It looks like one of the technicians from Sacks' lab, the one who'd stood calmly by programming the autotransfuser while four men shocked him again and again under his armpits and throat until he'd lifted his arms into the needle-lined cuffs waiting for him. He can't be sure, though. So many humans just look the same.
"Any near the van?"
"Van's clear!" he shouts, flicking rapidly from one feed to the other. "Culvert exit is clear!"
"That's our cue, Sensei." With one fluid motion, Mikey slings their last bag of essential supplies over his shell and scoops Master Splinter into his arms. "Time to blow this popsicle stand!"
From the depths of his blankets, the old rat raises one wizened paw, stilling Michelangelo for just long enough for him to take a final, unblinking survey of the Lair. All of the graffiti has been whitewashed clean, the soft, colorful artifacts of their lives gone or heaped together like so much garbage, the concrete space once more the looming creature of shadow and exposed infrastructure they had discovered so many years ago.
Mikey shifts from one foot to the other. "Sensei?"
With a final, whiskery sigh, the old rat dips his head, raises it again. His eyes are hard and clear.
"Be careful, my sons."
"You too, Dad." There's the faintest of cracks in Leonardo's bedrock of a voice. Donatello ducks his head low between his shoulders, trying to shake off the shiver it sends down his shell. "See you at the rendezvous."
Donnie's too busy running through the final lines of the termination program to watch them disappear into the tunnels, but his security feed gives him one last glimpse of Master Splinter's black eyes and raised fingers over the green curve of Mikey's shoulder before the camouflaged exit seals and locks into place.
Leo heaves an extra chunk of concrete in front of it for good measure. "Raphael—"
"That's the last of it!" The metal gas can Raph's been using to douse the remainder of their belongings thunks hollowly to the floor. "Stand back!"
There's an unmistakable snapping of flares, then a low whoosh as fire sweeps over the pile. A yellow glow fills his monitors. Donatello shifts slightly to block the glare, muscles straining with the effort not to look back. He checks his monitors every few seconds, following his brother's progress through the darkened tunnels. There's still no sign so far of human activity in the storm drains, but then again he hadn't had much time to install more than the most rudimentary of security sensors in their makeshift garage.
"Raphael, Leonardo, status."
Scrape of shell against brick as his brothers jams themselves into their designated position, braced with both feet against the immense iron conduit running immediately above the re-opened hole in the weapons wall.
"We're ready, Donnie."
He reaches up, yanks his microphone in place, and hits the speed dial for Mikey's phone.
"Y'ello!"
"Michelangelo, status."
"Buckled in and ready to boogie!" comes the slightly staticy reply. "Just say the word!"
"Storm drain and road are still clear," Donnie reports. "Hit it!"
"It's hit!" Mikey whoops, barely audible over the ear-splitting squeal of tires and startled rat. "Give 'em hell, dudes!"
That just leaves Donnie. His fingers race over the keyboard, keying in the final command sequence for full system self-destruct. He can't think about the full repercussions of what he's doing, the data he hadn't gotten the chance to back up that will now be lost forever.
The computer, unfailing and loyal to the last, prompts him for the kill switch's final authorization code. Warns him, in unflinching Courier New, of the finality of this particular course of action.
"Donatello..."
"Done!" he calls, jamming the execution key so hard it almost breaks. "It's—"
The monitors flicker, go dark for two, heart-wrenching seconds, and then blaze back to life with an angry flurry of beeps.
No.
No!
How could he be so—
"Donatello!" Leo's voice echoes around the empty Lair, crack deepening. "Now would be a good time to—"
"Hold on!" He scans the code frantically, searching for his error. It's something small, some misplaced keystroke or forgotten bracket. Something easily overlooked in the chaos of these last few days.
"Donatello!"
"Hold on!" His eyes burn with the strain of rapidly sifting through thousands and thousands of lines of code. He can feel his heart thumping all the way down to his fingertips. A monitor at the edge of his warped peripheral vision shows a cluster of Foot literally at their doorstep, the guided strike force pausing briefly to assess the unexpected gap in the rubble. The right flank soldier raises his hand, fingers flashing in a rapid, silent, silent signal, and the group adjusts their formation, preparing for the breach. "Hold on hold on hold—"
"Now, Don!" Raph roars. "Now now n—"
Donatello runs out of time. The first of the Foot soldiers burst through the gash in the weapons wall just as he spots the errant typo in his code, leaving him no choice but to slam his fists through the main control panels and rip blindly into every drive and circuit board his clawing fingers can reach. Fuck fuck fucking shit fuck fucking—!
The first line of Foot drop swiftly to their knees, guns raised and green laser sights glittering across the gathering smoke as they spray the Lair blindly with cover fire. More pour in behind them, too many to count, and that's when Leo and Raph kick out hard as they can against the ancient, two-foot thick pipe, grunting with the strain until their combined strength sheers through the rivets at each branch of the connecting joint. The pipe rips free with an angry groan, drowning the entryway with a high-power blast of water that sweeps all but a handful of Foot soldiers immediately off their feet.
They don't even get the chance to scream.
Donnie barely manages to leap out of the way of the rising crush of water. All of the nights he spent smearing caulk into every crack and crevice and coating the exposed limestone with his own special mixture of water-stop paint in a vain attempt to keep the lair as dry as possible finally pays off. Clogged with rubble and human bodies, the blast hole isn't big enough to drain away such a massive torrent of water. The lair begins to flood, the filthy water quickly swallowing the low platform where Sensei taught them their first kata.
Safe on a high catwalk, eyes protected from the smoke of the now-raging fire by his nictacting membranes, Donnie dares to look down.
The crashing, churning water almost looks like blood from up here, the foam peaks and dark valleys glittering red from the fire and still-flashing alarm. The burn pile is on relatively high ground, but by Donnie's calculations it should take less than five minutes for the rising tide to douse the base of the flames and reach what's left of his computer station. There's some consolation in knowing that at least part of his plan worked exactly as he'd conceived it, that the water will destroy what his faulty code could not. What isn't already burnt beyond informational value, the sewers will wash away. Same as it does the bodies of the drowning Foot soldiers.
"You okay?" Raph pants as he and Leo join him on the catwalk. Donnie's stomach churns, eyes still transfixed on the chaos and death below. He opens his mouth to answer.
Twin, deafening, blasts, not from below but from above. The catwalk twists beneath them, rusted, overstrained metal buckling under the shock wave. A calloused hand catches him, yanking him towards safety as twin waves of Foot reinforcements zip past them on rappel lines. One of the soldiers does an almost-comical double-take as he drops down into the flooding lair—obviously they weren't expecting the turtles to make their escape up towards street level—but it's too late for most of them to pull themselves back out of the flood.
Odd, Donatello thinks, head still ringing and feeling strangely disconnected from the rest of his body as he lashes out at the few soldiers who managed to drop onto the teetering catwalk. Most of the first wave are armed with automatic rifles, which they start firing immediately up into the pipeworks as soon as they find footing amid the rushing water, but the ones filling in behind them to form a wall between the turtles and what's left of the console room are all carrying the souped-up cattle prods and electrified harpoons they used to herd them back on the mountain. Looks like they've learned the value of keeping their distance in a fight, and the reek of ozone tells him that they've cranked the juice as high as it can go.
"Good for them," Leo says, once the last of the Foot has been knocked screaming over the hand railing. Donnie hadn't even realized he'd spoken the thought aloud. "Now climb."
Raph is already halfway up the thin metal ladder leading to the next catwalk high, high above, the fringe of his studded loincloth clinking softly as he climbs. Leo all but pushes Donnie up the first few rungs, barking orders until Donnie's hands and feet remember the correct combination of right left left right needed to haul him vertical. Gunshots ping off of the metal and stone around them, some burying themselves into the hard scutes of his shell with discordant thunks. Leo keeps shouting at him, urging his slowly numbing body to climb, climb, CLIMB, while below them the Foot shout their own orders among themselves, human voices clashing and swelling and bursting as the listing catwalk finally crumbles beneath them, crashing into the water below.
In the chaos of it all, he doesn't even hear the fateful shot.
Raph slips from the ladder with a yelp of surprise, tumbling backwards and out of Donnie's reach before the shots have finished echoing in his overloaded eardrums. He thinks he screams—he can't be sure, everything is so loud and bright and dark and smoke sour flame crackle flashing sloshing thrumming—, but before he can finish shaping his mouth around his name Raph catches himself one-handed on the next to last rung, feet scrambling to steady himself as his momentum swings him out and back in again, slamming shell-first against the stone wall with a sickening crack.
Donatello doesn't remember what the Foot soldier crows in triumph before the throwing star buries itself wetly in his throat. Doesn't remember throwing it (maybe Leonardo...?), doesn't remember flipping off one wall and another until he's level again with his brother, his bad shoulder screaming itself into silence as it takes Raphael's full weight while the rest of his limbs scrambled to pull them rung by rung up into the safety of tangled pipework.
He does remember Leonardo's hands, strangely disembodied as they reach out from the shadow-swallowed interior of a large, jutting pipe to grab him by the shoulder straps, but only later. Here, now, it goes like this: Raph falls, Donnie's lungs burn, up becomes down and down becomes up and he completely loses track of his position relative to the universe until Leo pulls them both over the mildewed lip of the pipe and they collapse in a heap of sweat-slick limbs, Raphael gasping faintly in pain.
No time to think, to regroup. Act, act.
The pipe is too dark and cramped for a visual examination. Donnie runs his hands mercilessly over his brother's body, feeling for the wound, and finds wet warmth gushing out of the tender, exposed flesh above his hip. His fingers quickly pinpoint two holes half a palms' breadth apart: a quick in and out, too shallow, he hopes, to graze anything vital.
"Here," he says, grabbing Leonardo's fluttering hands and pressing them tight to the wound. "Here."
"Is he dead?" Leo asks, wild and too close, his breath briefly fogging his glasses. "Donnie, is he dead?"
"I ain't fuckin' dead," Raph wheezes. "Shit, Leo, you—" The rest of whatever he was going to say evaporates as Donnie's still-searching touch moves up to his neck and down his arms, his right hand finding an unnatural bulge in the curve of Raphael's bicep.
"They got him in the arm, too," he says, forcing himself to ignore his brother's strained snarls of pain. Everywhere he touches feels slick, slick, slick. "I don't think it's broken, but I don't feel an exit."
"Those fuckers," Raph mumbles. "Those fuckin', motherfuckin'..."
Donatello keeps his grip tight against the leaking bullet wound as he fumbles one-handed with the purple cloth wrapped around his arm. It's a pitiful bandage, all things considered, but it's better than nothing. The clean gauze tucked away in his belt he hands over to Leonardo. "We need to get him out of here before shock sets in."
"You're telling me," Leo says as another burst of gunfire pings off of the metal mouth of the pipe. "Where does this pipe go?"
Donatello sweeps out blindly with one arm, remembers his goggles, and toggles quickly through the settings until the darkness snaps into focus. There's a thick, heavily-rusted grate that he'd probably need his welding tools to cut through, and beyond that a series of forks too narrow to get any of their shells through. "Nowhere we can follow."
"So much for plan B," Leo says. "How many more shuriken do you have on you? Think we have enough between us to clear us out some breathing room?"
Donatello switches to tactical vision, crawls back over the faintly twisting lump of Raphael, and peers over the lip back down into the lair. The still-crackling bonfire is a blind spot that blurs half of his display, but after a moment's adjustment he can make out the Foot soldiers struggling to close the feed valve for the gushing pipe while another sloshes through the now thigh-deep water, planting charges along all of the blocked up drainage points. Behind a shield of prod-wielding guards, three more are at work at the half-gutted computer, one keying in a long line of code into a sluggishly blinking monitor while another busily jams transfer cables into the back of the main console. Nobody is attempting to follow them upwards, and all of the soldiers firing up into the catwalks are braced as if they're holding a line.
Puzzled, he adjusts the zoom on his goggles until he can more or less read what the Foot soldier is typing. This guy knows his stuff; this is no 15 year old programming language, this is a cutting-edge tracer, dredging through the scattered remnants of his system for his hacking logs.
Donnie bites his tongue in frustration—so much for all the work he'd put into making the new lair look like it didn't exist—but the Foot soldier passes over his most recent files without a second's glance, digging deeper until all all-too-familiar ISP address flashes across the screen, along with the program he'd surreptitiously downloaded onto her phone to track her movements through the city.
"Oh fuck," he says, tongue thick. Stupid, stupid, he should have—
It's not them the Foot are after.
It's April.
April's knowledge, her father's knowledge. The boxes of files and notes she'd strapped onto the back of her bicycle before disappearing into the night, calling a promise to lay low until the situation was more stable. Why risk further casualties fighting mutated super-ninjas when everything they needed to recreate them was guarded by a 5'4" reporter with an all-too-breakable human neck? And if Raph bleeds out in the meantime, well that's just a bonus, isn't it?
"—nie? Do you hear me? What's—"
"I gotta go," he says. His legs tremble beneath him like two tightly coiled springs. "Leo, it's April, I gotta—"
"Go wh—hey!" Leo grabs him by the tech pack as he leaps, tries to pull him back, but he can't hold it and keep Donnie's hands away from the release buckles and the same time. In two clicks he's free.
Falling, falling. Donatello has half a moment for doubt, but he shoves it to one side, attention focused on angling his body through the narrow gap between two sprays of gunfire, catching hold of a low jut of pipe and swinging around it once, legs tucked close to his body, before releasing. He lands hard on the topmost strut of his monitor rig. Strong as he built it, it still collapses under his weight and momentum, toppling forward to crush the hapless Foot soldiers caught underneath.
Any second now Leo will come tumbling after him. "Keep pressure on the wound!" he shouts, and almost pays dearly for the momentary distraction as a Foot soldier levels an electric harpoon and fires. Donnie barely twists out of the way in time, but a shattered scream behind him tells him that another Foot soldier wasn't so lucky. Ignoring the man now pinned to the battle station, Donnie grabs hold of the faintly electrified tether, teeth biting his tongue bloody as the water intensifies the shock, and yanks as hard as he can. With a yelp of surprise, the man holding the harpoon falls into the still-rising flood, the gun slipping from his fingers as he disappears under the blood-black tide.
It's hard to keep track of his enemies with all of the splashing, the jumble crash of the water careening off every surface until it threatens to drown him. His goggles are off-line without the connection of his pack, but the pressure against his sockets helps him focus, gives his brain a fixed point he can use as reference. He does a quick headcount, and yes, they're all in the water. Now, now, it has to be—
Donnie's fingers are almost numb with adrenaline, but they manage to find the quick release for the metal tether at nearly the same moment that his other hand fumbles across the power switch for the electrical charge. He presses them both, catching the reel of still unfurling metal line before it can fall into the dark, churning water, and swings wide with the now-harmless gun, striking a rushing Foot soldier hard across the temple. The man drops bonelessly into the water, but not before Donnie relieves him of his cattle prod.
"Donnie, what the hell are you doing?! Get the fuck back up here!" Leo's using his commander voice again, or at least trying to. With the blood of one brother smeared thickly over his hands, it seems to lose much of its edge. Still, it's hard not to obey, not to answer as he's been conditioned to for so many years. He shakes his head roughly, teeth bared and mouth hot with copper, and focuses all his willpower on wrapping the cut end of the metal tether securely around the shaft of the cattle prod.
More Foot soldiers rush him, guns swinging up to aim at the soft flesh of his neck. He ducks low, careful not to accidentally waste the prod's charge on them, and sweeps out with one leg to knock one man into the other. Their guns continue to spit rounds as they fall, fingers tight around the triggers. A bullet ricochets off of his plastron, another grazes his cheek, a third and fourth hit yet another Foot soldier charging up behind him, blood bursting out of his chest like the petals of a chrysanthemum.
"Stay out of the water!" he shouts, leaping deftly over a final clump of still-armed Foot that stand between him and his goal. The rest won't stay down for long. Already he can see them struggling to pull themselves upright against the ever-increasing current, one reaching out to help his comrade pull free the harpoon pinning him to the computer while another reloads his rifle behind the meager cover of a hunk of rubble. He can only hope that Leo hears him over the pounding of the burst main and the deafening thump of Donnie's own heartbeat. "If it doesn't shut off, use one of the bokken to knock me loose!"
"DONNIE!" Leo's howl of horror is all too clear, all too familiar, but too late, too late. "Donnie, NO!"
The main junction box is waiting for him, open and exposed, an angry maw already sparking and spitting under the strained load. Donatello shifts his grip on the cattle prod, flipping it up over his shoulder like a spear, and feels every muscle along the long line from his raised palm down to his braced, booted feet lock into their singular, powerful purpose. White hot electricity arcs across the prod's pronged tip and down the metal tether, connecting him for a few moments more with the machine that was his shield, his window to an unfathomable world, a part of himself he could take apart and put back together even when the rest of him felt broken beyond repair.
Screaming. Above him. Behind him. Everywhere. Some of it human. Some of it not. Some of it his own.
He rams the cattle prod home.
There's a smell, or maybe a taste. Inside of his mouth, his nose, his eyes, his bones. Sour, burning, and bright.
He thinks about the candles they used to light, trying to keep monsters away.
Then he doesn't think about anything at all.