It had been three days.
The two brothers were waiting in the shadow of an overhang, waiting for a firefight to subside ahead of them before either sneaking past or—depending on what was left—mopping up the leftovers. The street gangs involved were Foot splinter factions, and looked to have a few properly costumed members and more than a few scrappy new recruits in civilian getup. What they were fighting over wasn't entirely clear, and it looked like a brawl had broken out over something trivial. Tensions were high these days; nothing unusual, just the normal sort of stuff turtles either dealt with or dodged on a regular day-to-day.
Mikey made sure his rifle was properly reloaded, and cleaned the barrel. Raphael took out a deck of cards. The two of them started playing rummy, listening to the little snaps of small improvised explosives, and the crack of gunfire. Just a road away, people were mostly going about their own business, if a little more tense and hunched up than usual. Stray bullets were an omnipresent threat in this city. Sometimes Mikey wondered if he ought to scrounge up a Kevlar helmet or something; he'd been skimmed across the shell by some random rifle shot from nowhere once, and it had been pretty terrifying.
While they were waiting, some chick started getting aggressively stalked by a band of guys. She turned into an alleyway and started to run towards the violence, likely willing to take the risk of it all to shake her pursuit. The sad thing was she'd made a bad pick of getaway route: that alleyway newly dead-ended in a crashed delivery truck. Which was on fire.
Dialog floated up to the two turtles. The dudes chasing the chick seemed to recognize her as a prostitute, and wanted free samples.
Raphael discarded, and lit up a cigarette. Mikey drew.
"Hazukashi garanai de, honey, you are just very beautiful!"
"She's fat and clean is what it is," another laughed. "Smell her hair. Momo to kurīmu!"
"She has the tattoo!" Legal sex workers always did, a brand on the back of the neck.
"Mochiron, watashi wa sudeni anata ni itta, I told you, she's from Gendai Madamu No's! Those girls are always clean. You need a health card just to get in."
And that was when the woman herself spoke, requesting with a dignity and calmness that would have put Hamato Leonardo to shame: "Watashi ni furenaide kudasai."
"Kanojo no koe o kiku! Listen to that Japanese! Like a cute little girl...! How old are you?"
They argued in (fairly sloppy) Japanese about whether she was thirty or twenty; either way the verdict was she must have received special linguistic training, which was apparently proof of something they'd both suspected and liked.
Mikey discarded. "Do you wanna something about that?" he casually prompted his pugnacious bro.
"What? Oh." He shrugged. "Eh. What's the point?" Raphael muttered. "Fifty crimes are goin' on in a three block radius, not even counting the gunfight."
"Bored?" Michelangelo shrugged. "Something to do?"
Raphael gave him a sidelong look. "Drawing attention to ourselves with hostile bogeys nearby? While we're supposed to be looking for our missing brother?"
"Man, stuff like this used to get you super pissed," Michelangelo teased over the sounds of increasingly aggressive 'flirting.' That poor whore probably wasn't getting out of the alleyway without dispensing samples.
"Still does. Humans are disgusting. More pissed I have to listen to people rutting than anything." Raphael blew out smoke. "Your draw."
"Remember back in the day? You went AWOL all the time to play vigilante. Splinter kept grounding you, Leo'd wait up all night...!"
"Yeah. Well, none of us are young or naive anymore. Can't fix a leaking faucet in a hurricane."
The whore was calmly explaining—in perfect Japanese—that she was under obligation not to take unchecked clientele because contracting a sexual disease would be cause for dismissal and she'd lose her job, residence, and healthcare. It was unlikely the boys harassing her cared about those sorts of things, but the unfazed way she spoke to them suggested she was older than them and might try using sheer force of grace to talk them down. And ya know what? They sorta took the bait, talking to her and promising her they were all 'clean.' She apologized to them, perfectly, saying that she could not take customers outside the brothel doors, not for any price, but explained that she could leave them with her card.
And getting a girl's phone number was almost good enough for some of them, but then one of the guys told her that this was fine, and that they just wouldn't pay her 'any price.' Doh.
Now, Mikey, Raphael, and Leonardo had sat on a rooftop listening to people getting molested, robbed at knife-point, or even murdered many times before. Many, and that was the sad part, because there was no exaggeration there. It chafed them all in different ways, but Mikey felt like watching Leo stare impassively off at nothing (while something horrible was happening!) almost hit harder than the actual crime... cause, deep down, Mikey had to believe it was a mask and that something of his brother's innate personality attributes were still in there, somewhere. Raph had always been an asshole, but Leo had once been... noble.
Their lives had been rough and they had to pick their battles, and Shredder and his men had taught them—early on—that their desire to help people could be easily exploited. The sooner they'd grown desensitized to things like this, the sooner the Foot had stopped baiting them out with public executions. And, like Raph had said: leaking faucets in hurricanes... drawing attention... all of it was true.
"You know, I miss it," Mikey confessed a little as he discarded. "I miss feeling like heroes. Back when we knew we were the good guys, and not just the 'counter-bad-guys' guys."
"Pfeh. Look around, Mikey, ain't any such thing as heroes. We killed the fuckin' Shredder, we didn't owe anyone more'n that. Sides," Raph flicked the butt of his cigarette away, "why do they need turtles? Where are the human heroes?"
Mikey knew the answer to that: "Working for April!"
"Hnh." Raphael gave him that. "Should be more'n that. People who just throw down their shit and go, 'I can't take this anymore. Somebody's gotta do somethin, and if no one will, then I will.'"
"Like Casey?" Mikey asked a little sadly.
Raphael didn't answer, quiet and staring at his cards as he took another drag.
Casey would have been the first person to rush in and bash open heads, come to think of it. Would he still be that way, now, if he were alive? Probably. He'd always been more of a doer than a philosophizer, and consequences had never much mattered to him! Heh. Poor Raph, Mikey shouldn't have mentioned Casey.
It turned out that the whore in the alleyway didn't have a weapon or a sneaky getaway plan. She didn't have an ace to play, or any heroes coming to her rescue, or scary consequences to threaten, or any leet combat skills. She was potentially facing down the entire end of her livelihood and joining the ranks of the destitute—all depending on how honest her rapists were being about their present state of health—and on top of that she was about to be gang-banged on the garbage-crusted floor of an alleyway without any of the usual rules, regulations, and bouncers which usually kept her safe, which would probably still be traumatic even though she was a prostitute. (Mikey didn't actually know how that worked, but Mikey also didn't have any prostitutes to question on the matter, and, to be honest, victims kinda all had the benefit of the doubt in his mind.)
And yet all of this she faced down with quiet decorum.
She didn't scream for help, start pleading, or anything. She lectured them softly and firmly, repeating that she would not consent to this and asking them to stop, even while the guys were talking to one another about who was going first, and how to get her clothing off (or whether just to cut it off). It was so weird that one kid even started slipping in a ton of honorifics and apologies and it became clear she'd made at least one of them feel incredibly guilty. Mikey had witnessed a lot of terrible things, a lot of really gruesome deaths, a lot of bloodcurdling screams, a lot of suicides, a lot of ghetto violence, and also some really bad 'public demonstrations.' The Foot liked to perform executions by beheading people in open plazas. Technically rape was illegal and punishable by death on every level of society, but who enforced that in the ghettos? Plus, forced marriages were handed out by government officials like paid holiday time had been in a previous era. Mikey had witnessed enough to grow desensitized to it all. But this, this was kinda new.
This was... brave. It hit Mikey somewhere, somewhere nostalgic that reminded him keenly of Leonardo (and of a baby girl who was about to grow up in this really shitty world). Something writhed in his belly, itched under his shell, fighting to tell him that the only reason he'd ever grown desensitized to any of this in the first place was because there had long been nothing he could do to help.
But... hadn't that changed? Wasn't there something he could to help, now? Now that the Foot didn't control everything?
Mikey didn't know anymore.
He stared unseeing at his cards.
"She's old," one guy snickered. "She's like your mom's age, ha!"
"Damare, she's got an eel cave, she's good enough."
"Let's see that pretty face of yours, Ushi. Oh, don't be scared. Don't cry," one laughed condescendingly, even though no sobs were audible, which painted an incredibly vivid picture of quiet and helpless despair. "You're so strong, you can take it."
Do something, a tiny voice writhing inside begged. Please? I don't like this. I don't want to be like this anymore. I don't want to live like this anymore. I can hear what's happening down there, to a real person. Please?
Mikey reached hesitantly, slowly, and almostsubconsciously for his rifle...
Raphael vaulted out of the overhang, swung to the opposite roof, and surmounted it. Mikey scrambled after him, just a little slower because Raph had both hands. He reached the alleyway as Raphael slid into it, where a woman sat in neat Japanese seiza posture with her clothing peeled open and men holding her hair and head in place as another guy stood in front of her face with his trousers sagging to his knees. Raphael wall-jumped halfway down into the alleyway, and landed so hard on one of the guys shoulders with a downward kick that bones could be heard to crackle somewhere . The sai went straight down into the top of the other dude's head.
Caught-With-His-Pants-Down Guy stumbled backwards with an incredibly unmanly squeal of alarm, and turned about to run. Raphael drew the other sai and threw it so hard that all three prongs burst out the front of Trouser-Boy's chest.
Well. That was definitely a thematically appropriate upgrade to Raphael's technique for handling street crime. Mikey grinned, getting his rifle ready and looking around to make sure his bro was in the clear and nobody had overheard or was going to investigate.
The woman jumped slightly at all the violence and quickly wrapped her arms around herself to cover up her nudity, but, true to form, did not move from her location or start screaming. Raphael had to actually walk around her to go get his other sai back, and stepped down on the body to pull it free. And then, being the drama queen he was, Raph licked blood from the blade. Geeze! Seriously, bro, you don't know where that human's been! Gross! Stop mixing your timelines, dude, that was for back from when you were only scaring them straight, you don't even have an audience anymore!
Except for the half-naked woman who'd just gotten covered in human blood on all sides, and whose mascara had definitely not been waterproof. She was kinda old for a brothel girl, but it was only noticeable cause her makeup was messed up. And she just sat there, maybe in shock, staring up at the giant green mutant who had just murdered three people and was displaying shock-value psychopathic suggestions of cannibalism for no reason whatsoever (or possibly just because he still had way too much adrenaline in his veins to think straight; he'd sure lit out to kill those guys faster than Mikey had thought the situation warranted; maybe they'd said something that had triggered him?)
"Thank you."
Raphael glanced back the whore's way, displayed no expression at all for a moment aside from flared nostrils and generalized aggressive breathing. Then he cocked his head to the side incredulously. Cause, ya know, people didn't usually thank their rescuers, when their rescuers looked/behaved like Raphael. Running-and-screaming had been pretty standard even when the four of them had been five-foot-six and totally adorable.
"Do you intend I offer some form of payment?" she asked with brows furrowed thoughtfully.
Red looked her up and down. "Not interested, Babe," he made sure he was very clear, and then turned away with a rub of the back of his hand against his missing eye and a resumption of his cigarette.
Michelangelo nearly fell back laughing, and when Raphael swiftly climbed back up to the rooftop, Mikey gave his brother a hefty pat on the shell. "That!" Mikey wheezed through delighted, relieved, estatic giggles, "Is still the Raphael I remember! 'Knightwatcher!'"
Raphie growled, scowled, scoffed, but then maybe enjoyed the comment just a little. "Let's get the fuck out of here in case someone notices the bodies. Oh." He un-tucked his rummy hand from his belt and showed Mikey. "I won."
Mikey really did laugh that time, long and hard, leaning on his brother. Maybe Raphael wasn't a lost cause after all. Maybe there really was some good left in him; in all of them. Maybe the only question left was 'how to reach it? '
Maybe the world really could have 'good guys' again, soon.
[Author's Note]
"Let's see that pretty face of yours, Ushi."
牛 "ushi" (n): cow, cattle.