It was patently against the rules that Sandro should be walking through the sewers while deleting duplicates of his pictures. The phone shed too much light on him and not enough on his surroundings. And while the sewers were unabashedly Turtle Turf, that didn't mean invaders, refugees, or adventurous kids didn't turn up on occasion. Sandro was a juvenile ninja belonging to a famous family of mafia-despised ninjas, and whenever he was out of the lair he was expected to be paying attention. He either needed to be relying purely on night vision, or using a flashlight, and he ought to have been alert.

Sandro's thumb paused over the one photo he'd gotten of Wild with her hoodie down. He smirked fondly, turned a corner, and crashed headlong into the unyielding wall of a seven-foot-six turtle, who'd apparently been standing there in pitch darkness with his arms crossed, waiting for exactly this to happen.

The first reflex Sandro's body made was to shut off the phone; It happened even before he even had time to recoil back from the collision. Fuck. Shit. he stood there in reeling silence for a moment, gaze still lowered such that he could only see his Donatello's feet and the butt of a Bo staff. Then he lifted his eyes up paneled armor to find the Purple Turtle's unamused expression. "Hi Uncle," he squeaked a greeting.

"Hello, Sandro," Donatello replied quietly. "We need to have a talk about this." No high-strung rant, lecture, or barrage of details followed.

Sandro's eyes widened and he shrank guiltily downward, a lump rising in his throat. The dripping silence was heartbreaking, because Donatello never took long conversational pauses, not unless he felt genuinely wounded or betrayed and had to slowly process through everything he wanted to say. "I'm sorry," Sandro breathed, and meant it.

A long silence. "What for?" the older turtle asked.

The possibilities came tumbling out of him, anything to make Donatello stop looking at him like that: "Lying about where I was. Going topside behind your back. Abusing my privilege to roam the sewers without oversight."

Donatello blew out a slow breath, and then leaned forward on his Bo as sternness edged his voice, but at least he was talking now: "I didn't hear anything about being sorry you've been repeatedly endangering your own life. "

Sandro winced. "Endangering my general safety quotient is not directly endangering my life," he argued feebly.

"I am sure you have been doing both. Your GPS is off as we speak."

"I haven't!" Sandro protested. "I mean, not recently...! Not for months!" Donatello had a way of searching his face, back and forth, gently. Like the reality was barricaded and required coaxing. "I haven't been going anywhere near the Foot, I swear it! I-I..." If anyone deserved—truly deserved—Sandro's honesty, then Donatello did. "I was hanging out with a friend."

Dontaello's facial expression didn't change. "If Casey or anyone else was taking you out, I'd know-"

"No, not a friend of the family. A friend I... A friend I made myself." And there it was, even though his uncle had unknowingly given him so many different ways to try and get out of saying it.

But Donatello reacted strangely to the news, appearing neither angry nor dumbfounded. Instead he flinched back almost as if he'd been struck, and then closed his eyes,leaned away from his Bo, and steadied himself with a deep breath. Sandro wasn't sure how to interpret that.

"Uncle? A-are you angry?"

"Of course I am angry," Donatello muttered. "Just... severely disarmed," he gestured, "that you actually did tell me the truth. Particularly when it seems you even tried lying to Michelangelo when given a similar opportunity." Mikey took that as a clue to lean out into the tunnel behind Donatello, and waved to indicate he'd been standing there the whole time. Sandro straightened on the realization that Donatello had already known about Wild, had been actively baiting him into lying.

He felt proud that he hadn't done it, suddenly. Intensely proud.

Still, Donatello turned a critical stare back down on Sandro as Michelangelo jogged up to join them. "But you still have been disappearing topside with a complete stranger, both at night and now in the middle of the day. I assume the latter was a bid to keep everyone in the dark as to your activities, as you disobeyed nearly every rule we've set out for your safety. Sandro. What do you think your mother will say?"

Sandro's face glazed up in panic."Whoa!" Michelangelo protested this line of conversation and threw himself over Donatello's side. "Donnie, you're interrogating wrong again! You have to ask questions before pose death threats, remember?!"

"I wasn't-" Donatello tried to interject, but Mikey had already stolen the conversation:

"How old is Le Tiny Chick? What is her name? Has she seen the BatDad Vine where he shouts 'who sent you' at the ladybug?!"

Sandro dazedly blinked between his two uncles, heart racing. Then he choked out the answers, information, the only tool he had by which he might get Donatello to calm down: "H-her name is Anastasia. She's thirteen, and her family just moved here from Gotham, so she laughed so hard when BatDad shouted at the ladybug that she fell over and couldn't breathe and almost required resuscitation."

Michelangelo squeaked a gasp and looked up to Donatello while still hugging to his arm. "Can we keep her...?!"

"How and when did you meet this girl, Sandro?" Donatello asked, abandoning any effort to dislodge Michelangelo so that he could redouble focus on the conversation instead.

"Three months ago." Just blurt it out, the way you once told Wildcard to. "I was pretending at being an adult and 'patrolling' Foot territory, exactly like I shouldn't have been. And I saw some Foot messing with some kids."

Donatello bristled but Mikey brightened up and seemed to find this story fantastic: "And you super-heroically rescued her!? O-M-G this story sounds familiar, Don!"

"Uh. Not exactly." Sandro blushed. "I screwed up really badly and ended up getting chased cross-city by Foot, one of whom was wearing a black-belt and carrying a katana, and another of whom was openly firing on me with a shotgun. I bumped into Wild—Anastasia—who had been out trying to determine where the sound of gunshots was coming from, and... she did the rescuing."

"A thirteen year old girl... took on on two Foot...?" Donatello asked slowly.

Sandro shifted uncomfortably. "She or I ought to have been seriously hurt," he admitted. "Between my clumsy escape and the shotgun, there was a lot of noise, and we didn't see her. She's a slum kid and carries knives for self defense, and she's got a mean throwing arm, and she nailed the first two in the back before they'd even known what had hit them. The third was just dumb luck and... then we were safe." He scuffed a foot. "I tried to get away, but she demanded an explanation for what had just happened and we started talking."

Michelangelo released Donatello and blinked several times. "Ohhh. So that's why she keeps calling you 'sweet damsel' on your chat logs." Sandro turned scarlet. "Hehe, that's cute...!"

Donatello frowned. "Your new friend is martially proficient and has very convenient timing, don't you think, Sandro?"

For a second Sandro wasn't certain what he was alluding to, but then he stiffened. "Your first instinct is to assume she's a spy?" Meekness departed his voice. "Why? Because I'm so unlikable I couldn't possibly make a friend of my own?"

"That's not what I said at all, Sandro," Donatello replied, growing cross with his testiness. "Don't glare at me like that. There are certain unfortunate truths about our lives which prioritize safety concerns over-"

"She had no idea I was even a mutant, much less a turtle! None of them saw my face!"

"Her knowledge base can be faked," Donatello retorted, now quite agitated. "Did she coincidentally happen to know just how to get you to talk to her? Make all the right guesses? I mean, come on, Sandro, think. Did anything stand out? The penultimate and most obvious play would be to 'innocently and unknowingly' offer pizza and sympathize about family and normality problems, but I assume even you would have seen through that."

Sandro's heart rate went berserk, and heat flushed up through him. "You—yer wrong," he growled. "She is my friend."

Donatello grimaced. "It's no good talking to you if you lock up like that," he scolded.

"No good talkin' ta me!?" Sandro all-but-shouted. "Clearly ya weren't always this cynical, because this wasn't yer reaction to meetin' my mother!"

That knocked his uncle off balance only an instant: "No one knew about us then, she was helpless and fainted, and we brought her back to our father to seek his advice. There is little enough similarity to your present situation, Sandro—"

"Then are ya sayin' kids are guilty until proven innocent all because yer famous? " Sandro sputtered. "I'm understandin' why celebrity kids are fucked up if that's their parents' logic-"

"Language, Sandro. She's a stranger whom we know nothing about-!"

"Whom you know nothin' about," every vowel had grown heavy, masticated, punctuated, "I know her!"

"You think you do, but presently you're too rash and emotional to hear a perfectly sane and level-headed discussion about the matter, so I'm not sure why I'm even bothering at lecturing you instead of getting your mother on the phone to do it for me!"

Sandro grit his beak at what was the absolutely worst possible thing to say (And Donatello ought to have known it but somehow never did). Then he spun about, fingers clenched into fists, body tense, trying to look anywhere but at his family, trying to cool down. Michelangelo tried to say something, but Donatello quieted him. Donatello waited. Donatello always waited. When Sandro clammed up and turned bitter and cold (only on the outside), Donatello would always let him stomp off to regather himself. Other people liked to pin him in place and keep talking.

Michelangelo watched for a moment, tilting his head to the side as he noticed Sandro's clenched fists were shaking he was so upset. Orange Turtle raised a brow and then looked worriedly up at his brother and whispered: "Donnie, did you notice he just...?" Sounded exactly like Raphie? But Michelangelo realized he couldn't say it so softly Sandro wouldn't overhear. And any talk of April, Raph or Sandro's hypothetical similarities to either parent, was not what Sandro presently needed, no matter how much the obvious tended to skip Don sometimes. "Nevermind. Don't threaten to call April, you promised!"

Sandro twitched. Donatello rounded on Michelangelo. "I absolutely did not. I told you I would not make that promise," the purple turtle growled. "And as much as I'd love not to worry her over trivial details, this is serious. She and Raphael—"

"No," Sandro begged, his voice strangled and raw, as he turned back to face his uncles. "Please. He doesn't listen, he'll never listen to anything I try to say. Please."

"You're grounded," Donatello told him, but seemed to hear his plea nevertheless. "Until you confess to them yourself, you're not leaving the lair. But I ask you, Sandro, what is it going to take to keep you from going topside again? Is being grounded enough, or do I have to child-proof the front door to keep you from breaking another promise to us? Maybe tie you down at night?"

Sandro shook his head: "What is it going to take to get you to let me see her?"

"That's not going to happen, Sandro. But you now have the option of coming clean with your parents in your own time and seeking their approval, which is the way you should have handled things from the beginning, honestly."

"Oh yeah, easy peasy," Sandro growled with seething hatred, "because you've certainly never sat at the kitchen table, hidin' in a book, while the sewer foundations rattle with hell's fury all 'cause I've tried to tell Raphael somethin' Raphael didn't want to hear."

It took at least sixty seconds for Sandro to register the shock which had dropped Donatello's shoulders and jaw, and rendered him mute.

Then the younger turtle recoiled, stung, panicked and regretting every word. No. Don't. I didn't mean that. You are always there for me. You are the only one who is always there for me. Why do I blurt this shit? Why would I say something like that...? This wasn't fair. Sandro had borderline eloquent vocabulary, as Wildcard kept reminding him, but he couldn't make it five seconds into a conversation about real topics with his own family. I didn't mean that. I didn't-

Michelangelo was leaning back from both of them, as it was as if a nuclear blast had just gone off, but now at the heartbroken expressions they both were wearing he realized they might need him. "Whoa," the orange turtle exclaimed, and then inched forward and reached out to both of them. Neither was particularly smart about resolving intense emotional fallout on their own. "Whoa, Sandro, we've been listening to Raphie bellow since we've been two. Maybe we got too used to it. W-we didn't mean to let you down. Really."

"No," Sandro mumbled vacantly. "It's not your fault. It's me. I... I can't do it," he laughed, bleakly, and the sound disturbed both of his uncles and pulled Donnie back to his senses, "I can't stay calm. I can't control what I say. All I can do is keep quiet. If I don't talk, I don't say stuff like this."

Mikey felt Donnie move, maybe to step forward, maybe to attempt a reassurance—

—but before anything could happen, Sandro suddenly dropped to his knees on the concrete. He didn't look at either of them, just folded his hands in his lap and lowered his head respectfully towards his eldest uncle, who was still gaping at him. He said: "Please, uncle, don't keep me parted from my best friend. She's crazy, juggles knives, and I pick on her for being short; but she never lets me feel sorry for myself. A-and if you make me talk to them..." his voice caught, and the next words fell on the breaths of sobs, "I'll lose her forever, and... I-I'm s-so af-fraid. I leave her side and go home every day, afraid I'll never see her again. And I'm s-so s-sorry I l-lied, but..."

Donatello cast his Bo aside and knelt, grabbing hold of the boy and dragging him into a painfully tight hug. Sandro cried out in surprise and then slumped into the hold and started quietly sobbing. Donatello supported the back of his head, and rocked him, and gently whispered hushes to him. Mikey waited a few seconds, on account of the fact that they were clearly having a moment, before he plopped himself down and hugged both of them, because they were both dummies who clearly needed all the help they could get.

Because Sandro was still clearly distressed, his uncles got him to sit down at the kitchen table and drink some water. Donatello stayed with him with a hand on his shell. Mikey fixed him up a bedtime snack of toaster strudel (that stuff was delicious, yo). And they were fortunate he was so tired afterwards that he didn't have the energy to get embarrassed. They put him to bed like he was a child half his age (and like Mikey still needed to be put to bed sometimes, hehe), and Donatello actually stayed seated on the edge of his bed with him until his breathing leveled out and it was clear he'd managed to fall asleep.

He did, however, steal Sandro's phone on the way out, which Mikey shot him a look for, and sat down at the kitchen table to review their message history. Fair enough, Mikey had already seen that. "He was smart enough to encrypt their pictures of each-other," Purple Turtle remarked. "I couldn't break into this if I tried."

"Ho, the honors there go to you, bro," Michelangelo teased, "You taught him right!" But then the orange turtle went to the chair just beside Donatello, and turned it clear about, and flopped onto it with his arms draped over the backboard. He gave a heavy sigh. "That hit me in the feels, back there. What are we gonna do?"

"About the girl," Donatello asked a little grimly, "or about how he's clearly terrified of his own parents?"

"That... that second one sounds like a doozy," Michelangelo admitted quietly. "I don't think we're solving that one in one brainstorming session, yo. Probably need Leo and to leave some super special tasty offerings at Master Splinter's shrine..."

Donatello sighed. "It's going to take some work just to notice when it's happening and keep it from getting any worse. Clearly Sandro needs some 'back-up,' but exactly how much interference is appropriate... I... I don't know exactly what to do. The idea of trying to tell April how to parent her own son, makes my skin crawl." What Sandro didn't know what that Leo and Raphael had gotten into an argument on the subject a very long time ago, a bad argument, and Leo had sworn off giving Raphael any advice in order to preserve household peace. In retrospect, that might have been a disservice; Leo had always been the first person to jump in and protect anyone from Raphael's attitude.

"I never thought Sandro had a temper," Mikey reflected. "He was always so mellow about criticism in the dojo, you know? But about last year he started shelling up all weird whenever anybody started really lecturing him, you noticed?" Donatello nodded. "That's what that was, wasn't it? He was getting mad without letting himself get mad. Like he just ate it, instead, or pretended it wasn't happening. Son-of-Raphael hit puberty and, like, didn't know what to do with The Beast Within. Or didn't like himself? Man, that's rough."

"A 'temper' is not entirely new. When he was very little, he would get wound up and exasperated sometimes and be unable to articulate," Donatello reminded him. "'Huffy,' April called it."

"I remember that!"

"I spanked him once, for throwing a fit while I was trying to clean sewage out of a cut on his foot. He looked at me like I was a traitor. I sat there for fifteen solid minutes afterwards, coaxing him to 'use his words.' Finally he took a big breath and shakily told me I'd used a Megatron band-aid and he needed a Winnie the Pooh one, because Megatron was a bad guy and couldn't make it feel better."

"Oh Mah Gawd..." This story was so cute.

"I told him that was very understandable, gave him two Poohs, and asked him if it canceled out the negative effects of the Megatron, to which he gave a very shaky 'Yeah' and smiled at me, and gave me the tightest hug in the world. And I remember feeling like the world's worst uncle, ever, who clearly had no right to be bandaging up four-year-olds. Read a lot of papers on the subject of child psychology afterwards, got an appreciation for how patient our father was..."

"Awww..." Of course Donatello demonstrated affection by becoming better informed. "Hey, I been thinking... Can you imagine what Rapphie would have been like if he didn't have anybody to bully, or Leo to argue with, or if, like, literally anybody had been able to keep him out of trouble? Like, anybody. Master Splinter had to try to keep tabs on four of us, and sometimes we even helped him, and now there's four adults to just one Sandro." Mikey was pleased Donatello seemed to reflect on that. "You ever think we kinda ganged up on him a bit, or smothered him?"

"Maybe just a bit," Donatello agreed, thinking of that flustered four-year-old who was at once so sensitive and so irate. "He's a good kid, that's more than we could say about 'Rapphie,' isn't it?" That did get a laugh out of Mike.

"Yeah, but ...Sandro's lonely, Don. He doesn't have any brothers. He doesn't even have anybody his size or smaller."

"I know," Donatello said quietly.

Michelangelo looked about, and then reached over and slid open a seldom-used Tupperware cupboard, and pulled out those binoculars he'd borrowed. (Aha! He'd remembered where they'd gone, finally!) Donnie scowled at him of course, but before he could muster a sufficient chastisement, Michelangelo put them safely back into the genius' hands. "I totally stalked them for days, just so you know."

"I gathered," Donatello muttered as he checked the gear to ensure it was unharmed. He wrinkled his nose. "Why is the SD card full?"

"I spent over a week sneaking into the stupidest places to keep an eye on him with your binoculars; I sure as heck wasn't going to forget to record them playing together! Gosh, bro, it's like you don't even know I know you. 'Always document everything; If there's no evidence, it doesn't exist; Backup in triplicate; Your Password can't be 'Password,' Mikey, Blah blah blah.'" Donnie gaped at him. Mikey grinned. "He picks on her so hard, its adorablez. Watch it. The power of curiousity compels you, Donatello...! See if you see what I saw...!"

And curiousity did have that sort of power on Donatello, actually.