Slowly Vivid, Old Colors
Blindness had made it verydifficult for Leonardo to achieve a meditative trance, perhaps because there was no greater sense of isolation achieved by closing his eyes. He'd lost the habit of it altogether, years ago.
But some things were like riding bicycles, and Leonardo desperately needed to find some sense of inner peace to deal with their newborn's illness and put strange 'night terrors' out of mind. Still carrying her, he sank into squat with his heels together and his head lowered, and held himself immobile, balanced, and poised. He focused upon their breath and heartbeats, and let his senses bleed out and mix with his surroundings.
When the fever first started making a comeback, Leo needed to assume the medicine was leaving her system. He reached for the bottle of cold and flu remedy with no small trepidation, but, as it turned out, the dosage lines on the little medicine cup were demarcated by grooves instead of colored lines, and Leo could find them by touch. He carefully prepared half a minimum dose, and then fed her the way Michelangelo had done: droplet by droplet upon her tongue.
And the medicine did what it needed to do. It didn't poison her. It repressed her fever, it kept her little aches and pains sufficiently alleviated, and it was most likely also an expectorant, and therefore loosening up mucus so she could drool and cough it out with his assistance. The next time he offered her the bottle she managed to take it, and she opened her eyes and furrowed her brows up at him, seeming terribly perplexed with why everything was so very uncomfortable. She certainly did huff a lot about it.
Patience wasn't a virtue Leonardo had previously associated with babies, so he wondered if she might be staying 'calm' only because he appeared calm. She could clearly identify faces, so it was no huge stretch to speculate she knew the difference between stress and tranquility. If that was the case, then Leonardo's meditation was serving a previously unknown purpose: It was helping herrest while they waited this out.
With a renewed perspective on just how often she might be looking to him, Leo decided to smile at her more often. He also kept his face in easy view every time he changed her diapers, to make absolutely sure she never felt abandoned, not even for a moment.
He tried to think of something to do for her reddening skin. What he wouldn't give for even a tube of lip balm...
Wait! Leo felt about his things, looking for the rolled maintenance kit for his katana. From beside his peening steel and grit stone, he recovered a bottle of flaxseed oil, squeezed out a droplet onto his fingertips, and then dabbed it gently upon her lip and around the folds of her nostrils.
"Soko ni..." Much better. She huffed tolerably. He smiled. This would give her just a little protection against future sticky and caustic substances.
Michelangelo's written Japanese was very poor, and he knew next to no kanji, so he was thrown for a loop when he realized he'd just spotted a rough transliteration of 'baby,' ベビー, above a shop window. He redirected his motion and then hastily tried to get around the building before Raph caught an inkling of what he was doing.
Certain things hadn't made the switch back to English yet, and shop signs seemed both expensive to replace and a great way of drawing too much attention to oneself during widespread paramilitary and civil unrest. Not to mention kids as old as twenty had grown up without daring to speak anything but Japanese outside the house. Culture wars had consequences, man; this might never be fixed.
Mikey was the team's reigning champion lock-picker. Given that he also only had one hand to do it with, he was also the most creative lock-picker. No challengers! Sometimes he literally did even use chewing gum. Donnie would have been proud of his inner MacGyver!
"Mike," Raphael snarled warningly, at the exact second the lock gave way. Mikey pushed the door open and spun about to back up shell-first into the store. He raised his arms to placate the angry tiger who prowled slowly in after him.
Raphie read Japanese just fine; He'd analyzed Foot propaganda rags for almost two decades to mine info between the lines and triangulate troop movements and political maneuvers. Anybody who took one listen to Raph's guttural accent and pegged him for low-intelligence just hadn't seen what he could do with a sneaking suspicion and next to no info. (He took after April that way!)
"Don't hit me, bro! I know what I'm doing!" Mikey tried hard to appease.
Raphael sneered. "A baby store?" he growled, gesturing around at the little hole-in-the-wall establishment. "Ya gonna encourage dis?!"
"Bro, we need Leo back, but we need his head in the game!" Mikey hissed his reasoning. "He needs a clean conscience, dude!"
Raphael's nostrils flared, but he cracked his neck and remained where he was. "N' what's dat mean, 'xactly?"
"Just abandoning a sick baby ain't gonna fly!" Mikey was sure. "I'll get him to go with the hospital plan. We'll leave it in a carrier, in some cute onesie, with a name scribbled on the back." Raphael wasn't sure he bought that. "He's gotta be able to tell himself 'I did my best and this is the right thing to do.' You read?"
Raphael straightened and contemplated this. He eyed Mikey for a long moment before huffing, neither approving nor strictly disapproving, but at least acknowledging. "Hurry up," he growled, and turned about to leave and keep watch.
Mikey heaved a tremendous sigh, turned about, and was startled by the big, picture-heavy, 'All About Your Newborn!' books perched on top of the display tables.
Cue dramatic comic panel angle...
Mikey bolted for the books, snatching one up and running a thumb through the table of contents. Colds, colds, colds, colds... Blah blah blah, consult your doctors—ha! Snerk! Haha!
Their little one was very weak.
By the time dawn was threatening on the horizon, she was as quiet as she'd been the night they'd found her. All the energy she'd amassed over the past two days looked utterly spent, and Leo even had to wake her up for mealtimes, stroking her face to send her hunting for that bottle tip. She'd taught him crucial information about what was 'normal' prior to taking ill, and now it all seemed up to him.
Leo channeled his thoughts away from morbid things, and away from the sleep-deprived dream and/or vision he'd endured.
An early, fast-moving set of footsteps surprised him, and he stood and drew his katana partway from its sheathe before concluding this was Michelangelo approaching, and that his breaths did not sound fearful.
"I got some stuff!" Orange gushed as he bounced into their shelter. "How is she?"
"Her fever has worsened," Leo admitted, sheathing the sword, "and I had to unpack the swaddling to cool her down a little. Where is Raphael?"
"Rooftop," Mikey waved. "I know how to make her presentable for the hospital! Please tell me we're going to take her?"
Leo stiffened. "I've decided against it."
"What?" Mikey stopped mid-motion. "Yo, she's sick! What are you thinking!?"
"She's been in the care of humans once before," Leo dismissed.
"That's why I said the hospital, dude!" Mikey fought back. "Holy shit, stop being selfish about this!"
"Selfish!? Do you not think I realize she might very well die in my arms?" Leo rounded on his brother with a sharp growl. "It's all I've had to think about all day! I am well aware! But in the age we live in, she is just as likely to die of neglect in an over-crowded and ill-sanitized inpatient room that hasn't been properly washed, renovated, or staffed in a decade! If she must die, let it not be unwanted or alone!"
Mikey cringed momentarily before bouncing back into Leonardo's personal space to reveal with this argument was really about. "Raph doesn't want her, Leo! At all! You're kinda abusing executive privilege over him right now, cause he still says no!"
"And what about you?" Leonardo pressed, sure his youngest brother still had a heart. "Do you not like her!?"
"Liking something is completely different from taking care of it!" Mikey snarled right in his face. "She's not some pet! She's not gonna be an adult by the end of the year! Meanwhile she's taking one of the world's best ninjas completely out of the game! The Foot should have lobbed babies at you a long time ago; She's been more effective at keeping you down than armies, missiles, and a gruesomely efficient blinding!"
"Michelangelo," Blue scowled in reproach.
"No! No, I'm fucking PISSED at you, bro!" Michelangelo detonated on him, startling the baby. "I don't like you screwing with us and what we have going on! I hate it! You want someone to need you this badly?! Don't you realize we both already need you!? Your brothersneed you! Your family needs you! Us!"
Leo flinched backwards, his eyes widening. Then the baby burst out sobbing, misusing energy she ought to have been conserving. Alarmed, Leo rapidly tried to recapture his balance, partition away his shock, and rock her. She wasn't entirely convinced by him, but quieted down to wrinkle her face at the universe.
"... But you know what?" Mikey unexpectedly continued, quietly. "I'm not gonna take it out on Chicken Nugget, and I'm also not gonna let you kill her." He set down the 'basket' he'd been carrying, and drew out something. "Hold this."
Leonardo winced at the barb but then blinked, lifting a hand an accepting a strange rubber implement that felt a bit like some kind of squeaky toy. "What is it?"
"A nasal syringe," Mikey growled as he opened up their first-aid kit and fished for a bottle. "The book said to drip saline solution into her nostrils to break up the mucus, and then use the syringe to suck it out. That way she's not constantly drowning herself while she's eating."
"Book?" Leo whispered. "Mikey, where did you go?"
"Just shut up and don't let Raph see any of this," Mikey whirled on him and stalked back over to prod forcefully at his plastron. "He only let me get away with going into the store because of the hospital plan, so I got her a carrier and an outfit, but then the book said she can't go above a hundred point four degrees and to use a rectal thermometer for accurate readings, so after I stopped laughing hysterically—"
Leo threw an arm around Michelangelo's bad shoulder, grabbed the lip of the shell, and dragged his littlest brother to his side, crushing him there and pressing their foreheads together. Michelangelo tensed up as if to push away, before partially collapsing into the embrace and shuddering violently. Leo cringed, confused by why his little brother seemed emotionally vulnerable. He threw an arm across the back of Mikey's neck and the lip of his shell, squeezing him as close as he could without turning to face him head on. The baby sputtered, flustered.
"Thank you," Leo murmured fiercely into him. "Thank you for not leaving me—or her—alone...!"
"Fuck you Leo," Mikey sniffled just as fiercely, glued to him with one hand curling reassuringly around one of the baby's arms. "You and Raph are the ones always trying to leave."