Okay, the time for jokes was over.
The parents would be home on Friday night, which meant that Sandro, Wildcard, and Donnie only had Wednesday and Thursday evening left to prepare for this massive confrontation that had been hanging over all their heads for nearly a month (or much longer, if one considered how Sandro had probably been dreading the possibility of it since the very day he'd first met her)—and Wednesday had already started! Gosh, it was starting to hit her just how little she could afford to mess this up for them; Plus Sandro had a lot of extra psychological baggage gunking up the passageways of his brain—he needed her to be there on the same page as him!
So when Sandro slipped during Ninjitsu practice and started cursing under his breadth, Wildcard didn't tease him. She flit out from under Leo's wing before Leo could even start admonishing that curse-word usage, and she leaned over and offered Sandro a hand up. The expression her brother turned up towards her might as well have said, "Oh hello Nice Version of Wildcard, I was wondering if you'd show up," but the implied sarcasm melted away and he took her hand. She pulled him to his feet.
"Thanks." He jostled her affectionately with his elbow. "Don't wear the full costume when you meet them, please."
"Wouldn't dream of it!" she agreed; Wildcard was still relieved Leo was letting her train in it at all. T'wasn't remotely Japanese, but it did a nice job keeping her the right temperature, and it mimicked the real conditions she might face in combat one day!
"Kinpōge-kun," her sensei called, but let Sandro off the hook for all those F-words he'd been tossing around a second ago.
Wildcard (and her father; she'd asked permission just that morning) agreed to have Donatello teach her Japanese, and hopefully also advanced mathematics once the time came. Donnie supplied her with the basic information her dad would require to enroll her in a homeschooling course on the topic and submit tests.
Honestly, who would pass up the opportunity to be tutored by Mamatello, especially knowing both how ingenious he was AND (almost more important) how well he'd succeeded at homeschooling Sandro? (Sometimes smart people had a difficult time breaking down concepts for students; Donnie must have had a lot of practice explaining things to Mikey his whole life. Tehe!)
Anyway! The three of them had much more urgent things than schoolwork to pin down right now, so academics got shuffled to the back burner while team Conversational Planning agreed to split up their time between physical fitness activities (to release stress) and practicing on that upcoming conversation. Wildcard kept her jokes to herself and filed them away in an elaborate mental planner labeled 'for later use.' She answered Donatello's conversational prompts to the best of her ability, and then asked questions that sometimes made him stare at her in disbelief that anyone could be so clueless. Sandro always grinned. Sandro totally knew her.
Despite the fact that Wild had lived and operated above ground among 'normal people' most of her life, it was in everybody's best interest that she ask dumb questions. Donatello's answers would serve as a clear-cut anchor for her to fall back on if she got nervous.
Wednesday evening progressed past lunch time, and Michelangelo put on some music and got them to shake off stress with some free-form dance! Truth be told, Wildcard thought she was going to be able to totally master the whole break-dancing thing. Whoop-whoop! But as for her singing? Well...
"You should give up," Sandro advised her. "You sound like a crow is being murdered right outside my eardrum."
Wildcard punched him for that and delighted in his loud 'Ow!' but, eh, it was totally true, so they both broke out laughing and she let him off the hook. She forgot to ask him if he even had eardrums. How did turtles hear, exactly?
Something interesting happened on Thursday. Michelangelo went out on patrol, and Leonardo stayed home. In retrospect, Leo had gone and worked out some schedule changes with Donatello after that big fight they'd had, so this sort of made sense! Suddenly: Leo had days off! But poor Blue Turtle didn't look like he had any idea whatsoever what to do with himself, and Donatello wasn't available because he busy training them.
Oh dear. Wild grinned at the irony. Until Donatello had free time to spend with him, it seemed these first few days of 'time off' should result in Leo doing exactly what nobody else really wanted him doing: Sequestering himself in the dojo and meditating the entire time.
But Leo surprised her. He came out of the dojo to listen to them work, and eventually he took a seat at the other end of the kitchen table. Wild leaned back to peer around Sandro's shell, and found her Sensei to be peening his katana with a sharpening steel. Shink. Shink. Sssshhink, went the sharpening steel.
Donatello leaned forward and snapped his fingers in front of her face. Wild jumped (slightly ahead of the actual snap, too, which was dumb of her, but no one seemed to notice). Purple Turtle laughed at how severely she'd been startled. "She really does zone out staring at people," he remarked to Sandro, "it's not my imagination."
"Well you're all very attractive!" Wild protested, but then that was probably exactly the sort of thing she was practicing not to blurt out in a panic to April O'Neil. She slapped a hand over her face. "Oops."
"S'fine, I'll just elbow her," Sandro reflected dryly. "I seriously don't think she can help it. You should see how fixated she gets on shell patterns, she might as well be trying to solve a maze."
"I'm weeeirrddd," she moaned dramatically.
"Oh you are definitely weird, Crazy Pants," Sandro agreed with an affectionately patronizing tousle of her hair, and she scowled and stuck her tongue out at him.
"Perhaps I have a good sample question which a mother might ask," Leo broached, and both kids turned to look at him. "'Do either of you have any romantic feelings?'"
Sandro visibly gagged like he might as well have just thrown up in his mouth a little (Bwahaha!) but Wildcard demanded clarification: "Well are we counting my crush on Donnie?" Donatello looked down at her. She looked up at him, and affected a very slick smoothing of her hair. "What's cookin' good lookin'?"
Donatello slowly sank into the world's most understandable facepalm. Wildcard did an 'aw shucks' gesture with a closed fist. "I guess I need Mikey to teach me more moves," she lamented with an innocent smile Sandro's way.
"If I knock her lights out," Sandro queried as he stared lightning bolts through her, "Will the black eye heal in time?"'
"Well I'll tell you what: If anyone here's got a better idea what to do when someone's mom is asking if you've got the hots for her son," Wildcard snickered, "I'm all ears! Until then, my plan's to get Sandro to punch me in front of his parents; that should help clarify our relationship, right?"
Donatello's tremendously heavy sigh said enough to fill volumes, but the quiet way Sensei ducked his head and looked back down at his swords suggested he'd hidden an itty bitty little smile, so Wild felt mighty proud of herself for keeping up group morale. Even if she'd resorted to laughs.
Leo was meditating, so Wildcard took it upon herself to interrupt him. She hurried straight up to his shell, hauled herself up onto his shoulder, and waited to see if he'd throw her. He didn't. Perfect! Let it never be said Wildcard had failed to make a nuisance of herself to straight-laced people. She flopped there upon his shoulder and heaved a tremendous sigh.
"Are you nervous, then, Kinpōge-kun?" Blue Turtle asked after a long silence had past.
"Yup," she mumbled. "Sandro and Donnie are making lunch, by the way. They told me to tell you it would be ready in about ten minutes."
"Thank you. Would you please remove yourself from my person now?"
"Nope," she mumbled with a content shake of her head. "Not even for 'please.'"
He tried to simply shrug her off, but she held onto his neck. Of course it wouldn't be hard to remove her, but she had a feeling he'd simply give up and tolerate her negligible weight. Which it seemed he did. Until eventually he mentioned, "I am not Michelangelo," which made it clear he was not meditating anymore.
"Michelangelo's easy to love on," she yawned, in desperate need of lunch. "You're difficult."
"That is completely unnecessary and most likely-"
"Excuse me, but I find it very necessary to do unnecessary things. If I don't do them, they go undone. Besides, it's the first day you've been here since I've met you. When else am I supposed to annoy you? There are consequences if I do it during practice, ick, those are the worst."
Leonardo lifted a hand, grabbed her by the scruff of her outfit, swung her off his shell, and plopped her on the ground in front of him. His eyes opened. "Clearly someone requires instruction in śamatha to calm her thoughts."
Did that mean meditation? Wildcard could not think of anything less relaxing than being alone in her own head with lots of silence and thoughts, and she gave a tremendous roll of her eyes. "I'd probably find it more 'calming' to drink twenty shots of red-bull and then get in a high speed Formula One racing accid-"
"Seiza."
Doh, he was serious. Oh well. At least she had his attention.
"Can someone fill me in on something?" Wildcard asked of the turtle family as they ate their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches like proper ninjas. To her immense delight, they cut the crust off for her. Icky, icky crust had no place on a super yummy smooth sandwich. Mikey must have agreed, or Donnie wouldn't have intuitively served it to her this way! Wait a minute, was Leo eating natural peanut butter, with the oil and stuff that you had to stir? Ewwww, he was. Gross, that stuff was awful.
"Ask away," Donnie prompted.
"Oh, right! Why don't April and Raphael live here at home for most of the week?" She nommed her sandwich.
"Safety," Sandro answered. "Mom's the only member of our family who's visible in daylight. She's easy to find if our enemies want to try and take a stab at us. There's only so many routes from Manhattan Island to Jersey City and all of them involve crossing the Hudson, and they're all potentially death traps if we don't keep them under surveillance. So the commute to and from the island is kinda nerve wracking, and everyone's deployed on different jobs to make sure she isn't attacked."
"Oh I see."
"Originally, they did try going back and forward every day," Donatello supplied. "But that was rough. Much too rough on us, and much to rough on working parents. She's already inclined to pull all-nighters researching a difficult story. For the sake of our sanity—and the safety of the Holland Tunnel—we scaled back to just once a week. It was the best compromise we could find."
"So April's over there because she works there," Wildcard mused, "But why's Raphael?"
"He'd not leave her," Leo answered. "For a time we switched off with him, sharing the duty of protecting her, but there were a few close calls. One could say Raphael trusts no one else with her, but that would not be wholly accurate. More truthful would be to say that managing her safety in person prevents him from lashing out at anyone else when things heat up."
"Well, I guess that makes sense," she scratched at the back of her neck, "but it sounds like this is an arrangement that's easy to justify while your child is still in diapers, and doesn't really work years later when he's left wondering why you've basically abandoned him on the other side of a river."
"Wild," Sandro scolded.
"I guess I have no frame of reference," she admitted, looking down at her knees. "But it feels like the underlying assumptions of the entire thing should be put into question." That was fair enough, right?
"Well, not this weekend they shouldn't be," Donatello patted her head. "Let's take everything one rabbit hole at a time."
That made sense. She sidled closer in her chair to Sandro, to provide some physical contact, and he smiled to let her know he was made of sturdier stuff than she feared.
It was Friday evening, a few hours past sunset. Mikey had gone out to ascertain Wildcard's whereabouts and make sure she got safely into the sewers. The plan was for Sandro to speak with his mother soon.
The 'day' had started off normally for the turtles, who supervised April and Raphael's ritualized commute back to Jersey City. They'd intended to give the parents time to settle in, and Donatello would make sure April relaxed from work and was properly caffeinated while Sandro did Ninjitsu training with Raphael.
When the appointed hour came, Leonardo would challenge Raphael to a friendly spar, and Sandro and Donatello would talk to April in the lab, which was soundproofed up to a very large number of decibels. This way, if their conversation turned just a little heated, they could be absolutely sure Raphael wouldn't accidentally snowball it into anything bigger.
Sandro would simply explain to his mother that he'd met a friend topside, and request permission to introduce her to both of them. That was all! Easy. Assuming April didn't immediately balk or ask any particularly damning questions, it would be a quick conversation to pique his parents' curiousity, and April would be the one to tell Raphael of the development.
Wildcard would wait. If Donatello judged the timing right, they'd send Mikey out to fetch her and introduce her then and there that very night. If, however, the parents looked particularly drained or skeptical, Donatello would recommend they introduced her first thing the next day, and Wildcard would receive a text from one of the turtles that just said 'delay.'
So now all Wildcard had to do was wait. There were many things she could do to entertain herself while waiting for word from her turtles; she had plenty of options. Of course, anyone could deduce that the one thing Wildcard absolutely did not do was try to meditate. Pfft! Nope. Nadda.
She entertained herself with iPhone games, and tried to determine whether she could play Pokemon Go from underground (she could, remarkably). She sat on a rung of the manhole ladder and practiced with her deck of cards, absently started juggling knives, and then belatedly recalled that she really shouldn't be armed when she met Sandro's parents. Err, but it wasn't like she was going to walk through the slums without weapons. Maybe she should just stuff everything dangerous into a little cubby hole down in here in the sewers, and pick it all up again as she left?
The designated hour came.
And the designated hour went.
Mikey did not come, and neither did any message show up on her phone. Something has happened, and Wildcard was hit by a deep certainty that it mustn't have been good.
But she didn't have anywhere else to be that night, and she wanted to know whether Sandro was okay, so she decided that she would wait however many hours it took in order to get an update. She didn't dare text her poor brother (heaven forbid anyone see him receive a text message before he'd told them about her; that could totally throw off his game ), and she certainly didn't dare calling any of his uncles, even just to remind them of her existence, because she figured the only way Mikey would have 'forgotten' about her was if he was busy with something alarming, and she didn't want to implicate anyone at what could well be the worst possible time!
Armed with so little knowledge of what was happening, she felt helpless. Her mind started to wander without her consent, brainstorming all sorts of crazy 'solutions.' It would have been hilariously out-of-the-box for her to call April right now and ask, "So, hey, how's your son doing? Is he dead?" Wildcard really could do that; she could deduce the woman's number just by looking at the rest of her family's numbers.
Oh-ho! No! No! Bad Wildcard! Put the phone down!
Okay, maybe meditation wasn't such a bad idea. It could distract her! Sure it didn't sound great to be left alone with her thoughts in her own head, but right now she was already left alone with her thoughts in her own head, and, uh, they were crazy thoughts! Leo had talked her through her first attempts at meditation, and honestly it hadn't been so bad, and maybe she could just try to recall his voice. He and Sandro both had very nice voices.
'The goal is not to empty your mind,' he had explained. 'Nor even to calm it just yet. Glimpse your thoughts as if just passing them, and do not let them carry you off. Visualize all of them, traveling around you, in and out, quick as the wind. Listen to your heartbeat—a sound that can be unsettling—to your breath, which will make you conscious of it—to the sounds of the water around us, which will make you annoyed of the dripping sound to our left. Do not linger too long on any one thing, but contemplate all of them. Back up from yourself to understand the whole of your energy and your context.'
'Is my energy supposed to be tingling like electricity and making me want to jump out of my skin?'
'Yours? Yes, I'd imagine so.' And that had been funny. 'But to calm your mind, you must confront the natural state of it: a state which is not calm.'
It wasn't bad, doing this. It wasn't great, either, but it wasn't bad. She was conscious of the adrenaline in her veins, and that her heart was pounding, and that it was all uncomfortable. But being intentionally self-aware and thinking of her sensei's lecture did give her something to do.
Of course she eventually ran out of lecture... And then after that she thought maybe she should get on the phone with her dad to calm her down.
"Kinpōge?"
Holy CRAP did Leo have magical stealth abilities. Wildcard nearly gave up the ghost just from the premonition that he was coming, and she definitely reacted to his arrival before he'd even spoken. Wildcard had a bad feeling she might not be able to hide her gift from Leo, not when he noticed so many other ridiculously hard-to-notice things. "S-sensei?" she blurted as she clambered to her feet, because 'sensei' was just how she was used to addressing him.
"The introduction will not be today," Leo said. "I will accompany you home."
"Did something happen with the commute?" she blurt, because hours of waiting alone underground for word of her friend and surrogate family had left her on the fritz.
"No, everyone made it home safely," he gestured for her to follow. "There is no danger. I might better have said 'I will walk you home.'"
"But then where's Mikey?" she pressed, following along after him. "Donnie was supposed to text me if it wasn't today!"
"It will not be tomorrow, either. Michelangelo's gentle touch is presently needed at home, and Donatello is hovering like an incensed wasp. It was best I come and get you myself, as my presence was least needed and most likely to spark ill result."
A fight must have broken out, and the truth of it was written in Leonardo's aloof body posture and deep frown. The next qeustion was whom had fought with whom? Had it been verbal or physical? Had Leo and Raphael fought? Donnie and April? "Is Sandro okay?" she demanded, because that was the most important part.
"Do not worry," he brushed aside with a hand.
"I'm already worried! Don't you realize I've been waiting for hours, knowing something was wrong!?"
"Yes, that is why I came in person instead of messaging you."
"Then tell me what happened!"
"It is best I do not."
Wildcard shoved him, even as she didn't move him at all. "Let me try again, in case you didn't hear me the first time: Is. Sandro. Okay."
"The plan is canceled for the weekend," Leonardo not-answered, still walking, still ignoring her frustration. "We will message you on Monday to confirm whether you should arrive at the regular—"
"You don't get to do that!" she hissed, planting herself right where she was and glaring after him. "You don't get to ignore me and act like I didn't speak. I'm not one of your brothers, I won't roll my eyes and mutter a resigned, 'That's Leo,' and settle for that. Whatever insular, repressed, emotionally stunted thing you've become over the past few decades might look justifiable to them because they've been through the monotonous boredom of watching it worsen year by year, but here on the outside you're just a damaged, arrogant, inconsiderate prick who can't answer simple questions!"
He paused and turned to looked at her like so much falling snow: gentle, cold, impassive, unreachable, mute.
The future fused into a single image, and long before she had any sense of herself, Wildcard had pulled out a knife, and thrown it at him. She knew her throw was solid, and knew it was strong, and knew it was sudden, because she had been powerful enough to kill highly trained men and dislodge weapons from their hands without even thinking about it.
But this was Leo. He literally raised a hand and caught the knife midair, inches in front of his face, one-handed, without twitching. She might as well have gently tossed him a paper airplane his way, had he not been required to move so suddenly.
So Wildcard grabbed another knife, and another, and then the world was a rush of blue and gray. CRASH. Stars swam. Everything smelled terrible. She blinked slowly through grime. Her left cheek felt hot, which she assumed meant it had been scraped. She was face-down beside the sewer with an arm wrenched at a painful angle behind her back, and a very large, very fast, and very deadly turtle crouched over her.
The reality of her utter inability to move—her inability to change the future in any way from this point forward—was so perversely quiet. It echoed around and inside her and made her insane.
"Drop, Kinpōge."
Kinpōge. Kinpōge hadn't even been aware she'd still been holding a knife, namely because there'd been nothing she could have done with it. She dropped it from her fingertips, just as she'd been told, and it pattered to the ground with a few tinkling clatters. Leo let go of her almost immediately, but Wildcard stayed where she'd been planted, curled up, and sank her face into her arms.
She felt like a grenade that couldn't explode. She wanted to burst into glitter and become little more than debris scattered everywhere. She felt like a crazy person, and that was probably because she was a crazy person. She was 75% sure just thrown knives she couldn't ever unthrow.
Then massive, three-fingered hands interrupted her malaise, scooping under her back, shoulders, and arms to pull her upright. Leo sat her there before himself, but she didn't want to-
"Look at me," her sensei commanded very seriously, and then pulled her face up and cradled it. His thumbs cleared debris from her scraped and pounding cheek. She sank from his scrutiny, feeling pitiful, breathing fast. He shook his head, and in a flustered and raised tone of voice accused: "There was nothing in you—nothing—which believed that would work. There was nothing in you which wanted it to work." His glare met her eyes and he gave her a little shake. "Yet you attacked someone. Why?"
She took in a shaky breath. "It made you react," she realized sadly. "It was the only thing I could do to get you to react."
"And you think having your face smashed into the world's least sanitary concrete is somehow an improvement on receiving no reaction!?" he demanded. "That submitting to a violent, spur-of-the-moment impulse is somehow validated by having successfully provoked me?!"
She nodded feebly, not that it made any sense.
Her sensei seemed to stare at her a long moment, or to search her face. Then his eyelids fluttered rapidly and he took a deep breath and lifted his head. A moment later, he knelt down in front of her upon the filthy ground, and he pulled her to her knees as well.
"Sandro is not entirely 'okay,'" Leonardo told her as he leaned back and settled his hands upon his lap. "Neither is he in any danger. I would surmise he is extremely angry, among a long listing of other and more complex emotions. Physically, he will recover, but if I could bring you to him now to balm his wounded spirit, I would.'
Wildcard peered wide-eyed up at him, trying to understand where this had all come from, or why it had been so hard to say. Maybe there was only one possible question to ask him. "Where were you when this shit hit the fan?"
Leo flinched almost imperceptibly, but she was right there watching his face, so she caught it. "Absent," he admitted, turning his gaze to the side. "I thought I saw some suspicious activity near the river as the commute reached its conclusion, so I remained outside for a single hour to investigate..."
