Seven
Raph's night has gone downhill amazingly fast. All he'd really wanted to do was go home, find out how the Yankee game ended, and go to bed. There was no way the Dodgers could have saved themselves in the ninth, but Raph had wanted to listen to the last half-inning, to see whether the Yanks completed the shutout.
"Drive slower!" he'd yelled at Casey, when it became clear that the trip was going to come to an end before the game did. But Casey had only laughed and floored it down the nearly-deserted Cross Bronx.
Instead, his evening has been full of brick walls. He's lost count of how many times he's seen one, and bounced off it, heading away in an equal and opposite direction, like that weirdly mesmerizing screensaver on Donnie's computer. (Well, no, he hasn't lost count. He's just pretending he has, because the number is depressing.)
Some of the walls are irritatingly far along their passages, lurking at the end like a dragon in a deep cave, like the light at the end of the tunnel that turns out, at the last second, to be an oncoming train. The passages lead him onward, luring him with promises of success, only to slam abruptly in his face.
So, while there's a lot of forward motion in his search pattern, the general trend is backwards.
And really, he's just freakin' tired of seeing brick walls. He can handle one, or even two. But seeing dozens of them is repetitive and infuriating and he doesn't think he can take it anymore.
He was pretty sure he had already seen this once tonight.
Back up.
Saturday night. Raph had been sitting on the roof of the farmhouse, looking at the bright curve of Scorpio above the red glow of Springfield, vaguely wishing he knew more about constellations.
After a while, he had given up on stargazing, climbed down to the lower part of the roof, and let himself in through the attic window.
Don had been there, standing over his bed, running his mask through his fingers. This wasn't especially odd, in itself, but Raph was pretty sure he had already seen that tableau, earlier in the evening.
"I thought you went to bed?" he said.
"I didn't," Don said shortly.
Something seemed off about Don's demeanor. "What's up?" Raph asked.
"Nothing." Don balled up his mask, abruptly, and threw it down onto the rest of his gear, where it was stacked on the floor at the foot of the bed. His bo was standing upright in the pile, balanced against the wall.
"Well," Raph said, "I thought I would hit the sack."
"How nice for you."
Raph guessed at the cause of Don's unusual grouchiness. "Couldn't fall asleep?"
"I don't want to talk about it!" Don kicked the bedframe with surprising force. The vibrations passed through the metal, into the wall, and jarred the bo from its position. It fell over with a noisy clatter.
"Talk about what?" Leo appeared at the top of the stairs, and paused at the end of the banister, surveying the scene. His eyes rested on Don. "I thought you went to bed?"
"Join the club!" Don shouted at him. He snatched up his bo and glared around the room, as though daring any of the inanimate objects there to ask him the same question.
Leo glanced at Raph, received only a shrug, and went to the wall by the closet door. "Should I assume that's what we're not talking about?" He unbuckled his sword belt and hung it carefully over a protruding nail, then unknotted his bandana and tucked it into the cross of the sheaths.
"Assume what you want," Don said. He propped the bo in its former place, pulled back the blankets on his cot, and threw himself down, turning his face to the wall.
Leo looked at Raph again, but Raph only shook his head, turning to his own bed. He stripped his gear quietly, automatically, dropping each piece to the floor and toeing it under the bed to join his sai.
He lay down. A minute later Leo turned off the light and slipped into his own cot.
"Good night," Leo said softly.
"'Night," Raph said.
Don didn't say anything.
He's worked his way nearly back to the first turnoff, to where he first left his brothers and headed off down that side tunnel. There's only one more passage left to try.
Raph lingers for a moment, trying to calculate the odds that, just around this next corner, there will be a brick wall.
On the one hand, he thinks the odds are extremely high that this passage, just like all the others, will be blocked.
On the other hand, it would be exactly his kind of luck, to discover that the very last tunnel he tried, the very first one he had passed, was the only unblocked tunnel, the only one that would take him home.
He stands there for a while, trying to figure out which hand will make him angrier.
In the end, he leaps around the corner, striking a scary pose, daring the long-gone construction workers to have put another wall in his path.
They have dared.
They have dared extremely daringly, with triple-dogs and everything.
Aw, who was I kidding?
He estimates his anger at this development to be about a 7 on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being totally apathetic and 10 being "already killed the friggin' idiot who did that". Of course, this is the Raphael scale of anger, which is logarithmic and so escalates much faster than the normal scale, progressing from "moderately cheesed off" to "seriously considering homicide" in only one point.
He takes a breath, and slides back to a 6.8, safely below the threshold of "need to break something right now".
"But seriously," he says to the wall. "You're pissin' me off."
He gives himself a mental pat on the back, for talking through his feelings rather than expressing them by means of applying his fists to the object of his ire.
Now is the part where he walks away, like a mature, rational individual. Now is not the part where he -
"Fuck you and the furnace you were born in!"
- shouts obscenities at inanimate objects.
He turns away, with all the dignity he can muster, and stalks back to the main tunnel.
All right, so he is not a mature, rational individual. He probably never will be. But, on balance, he thinks he handled the problem rather well.
He now knows that the entire side tunnel, all the way up to the part that he isn't familiar with and really doesn't feel like exploring now, is a dead end, every single branch capped off with a wall. So, in one sense, he has saved his brothers a lot of marching around. At the same time, he hasn't learned anything useful.
It's all been a colossal waste of time.
Almost three hours, by his reckoning.
"Yo, guys," he calls, as he sloshes out of the enormous rat-trap - no offense to Master Splinter - that he's been wandering around in. "There's no -"
He pauses.
"Guys?"
Yeah, that's nice. Run off and ditch the guy who's been busting his butt to make your lives easier.
A flutter of white catches his attention. He crosses the tunnel, reaches up into the pipes, and plucks out the scrap of paper wedged between them.
"'Gone back to entry point, know we can get out there, see you at home. D + M.'"
He smacks his forehead. "They couldn'ta thoughta that before I took off?" He frowns at the note. "D and M, huh? What happened to L? You ditch him too, D and M?"
Something is showing faintly through the thin paper. He flips the scrap over.
A second later he bursts out laughing. "'Pointy end towards...' - good one, Mike!"
He wedges the scrap of paper back into the crack where he found it, in case "L" did get left behind somewhere, and this message is intended for him as well. Then he starts back towards the first manhole, trailing his laugh behind him.
The sound of merriment fades, and for a few minutes the junction is quiet and still. Then, with no apparent cause, the scrap of paper slips from its place between the pipes. It twirls down through the air like a leaf, and comes to rest on the surface of the water.
After a moment it sinks, and disintegrates into nothing.
Mike stops. "Here."
Leo glances swiftly around the tunnel, his trained mind rapidly sorting and processing everything he sees. There are no side passages here, only the way they have come from, and the way they are going. There are no signs of a fight, and no left-behind objects, nothing out-of-place in the quiet sewer.
"All right," Leo says. "And where were you when you didn't see him?"
"Here," Mike repeats, impatiently. "I told you, it was that fast." He holds up his empty palm, then folds it in a semblance of one of his sleight-of-hand tricks. "There, not there." When Leo looks at him doubtfully, he adds, "I'm serious, Leo. I was watching. He just disappeared."
"Okay," Leo says. "Calm down." Even as he says it, he sees that "calming down" is not something that is going to happen to Mike in the near future.
He looks around the tunnel again, and sees at least six places where a mutant turtle could easily hide, if he also happened to be a ninja. There might be other places that he isn't seeing. Certainly it wouldn't have been difficult for Donatello to hide in this tunnel, if he had wanted to do so. But Leo can't see why Don would have wanted to hide. If there was danger, he would have warned Mike. If his goal was to scare Mike, well... Don was not really given to spontaneous practical joking, and he certainly never carried a joke to the point of causing a brother genuine distress.
A point which Mike had obviously passed long ago.
"He said..." Mike jitters, glances over his shoulder, hops closer to his brother. "He said there might have been a chemical spill? And that's why everything was blocked up? Maybe..." He starts jigging awkwardly from foot to foot, like he's trying not to stand on the ground. "Maybe he stepped in something, and got, like, vaporized?"
Leo can't help looking down, and wondering if his feet feel like they're melting a little.
No. No, they do not. That's just sludge between your toes.
Mike sees his gesture, his expression, and it ratchets him into a higher level of terror. "Oh my God, Donnie got vaporized!"
"Donnie did not get vaporized!" Leo says with authority, as though his saying it will make it true. Somebody has to act like things will be okay, and right now he's the only one capable of it. Mike is on the verge of panic, of tears, of one of those explosive Mikey flip-outs that always either made everything ten times worse, or obliterated every obstacle in a fifty-meter radius.
Leo would really rather not deal with those things right now.
"He's okay," Leo says, and it sounds like an order. "We're going to find him."
Mike just looks at him helplessly.
That's the weird thing about Mike. He's a more-than-competent ninja, and he knows it, and he wears that confidence like armor. But sometimes his aura of power and invulnerability just vanishes, and he becomes completely dependent. Times like those, Leo has no choice but to carry his youngest brother, until he finds his feet again.
"Mike," Leo says seriously. "I need you to pull yourself together."
Mike lifts his shoulders, like he's trying, but Leo can tell there's no mental effort behind it. Mike has given up, poured himself into his leader's hands, entrusted himself totally to Leonardo's skill and determination.
Leo looks at Mike for a long minute, standing there, waiting to be told what to do.
"Come on," he sighs.
Mike sticks close behind him as he walks, and Leo knows that this must have been what Mike did to Donnie as well. There was no way Mike would have let Don out of his sight.
Vaporized...
Leo shivers, and watches his step.
He's so intent on watching the ground that he almost doesn't notice an archway to his left. "Wait a minute," he says, stopping suddenly. He expects Mike to bump into him, but it's pretty impossible for Mike to get any closer than he already is, so the actual collision is just a minor scrape of plastron against carapace, buffered by the soft leather of Leo's sword-sheaths. "Where does this go?"
Mike shrugs. Leo feels the rise and fall of his shoulders.
"I don't remember this being here when we came in," Leo says. They must be close to the first manhole now. Or did they miss it? Maybe they've overshot, started walking away from it in the opposite direction. "You said you couldn't get out, where we came in?"
Mike shakes his head.
Strange. Leo sweeps the passage with his gaze, but it's impossible to tell whether Donatello has been here. It's not easy to track in a sewer tunnel. If a passing person leaves footprints at all, they're hidden and quickly erased by the flowing water. Dropped objects can only be found by feel. Even Master Splinter, with his famous nose, has difficulty tracking in the sewers, where the running water and the overwhelming smell of damp refuse drown out everything else.
Leo tries to remember what street corner they entered the sewers at, what he knows about that section of the tunnels. Not much. It isn't a part of town they visit often.
Well, it looks like it runs down towards the Q, which intersects the Green line...
"All right," he says. "Let's try this way."
They pass through the arch, into a tunnel that looks much like the one they just left.
Leo watches where they're going, and Mike watches Leo, and neither of them sees the archway behind them draw closed, knitting itself together and melding with the rest of the wall, until it vanishes altogether.
Far below the city, the tall man smiles.
A vertical disc of water floats above his palm. In it, Leonardo walks through an unremarkable sewer tunnel. His brother clings to his back, following him as closely as possible.
The image moves, panning away from Leonardo, skimming over the ground he has just covered, flying back to where he turned from one tunnel into another.
In the disc, an arch. In the arch, darkness.
Circles within circles.
The man dips the staff in his other hand, and the doorway in the image seals itself, becoming again an ordinary wall. It does not exist. Just as it never existed.
The image stays focused there, on the changeless wall, but the man remains intent on watching it.
He is rewarded when Leonardo's other brother, the one who first separated himself from the group, passes in front of the wall. The water-mirror is silent, as always, but the Turtle looks like he is laughing.
He will not be laughing long.
The Turtle walks through the edge of the image, out of view, never noticing that he has passed the place where his brothers have turned aside from light and safety, and gone to their deaths in the cold blackness.
Now, it is the man's turn to laugh.
He does, loud and hard, and the echoes join with him, filling the deep tunnels with their mirthless peals.
