This takes place a day or so after "Vengeance is Mine."
Loss
The universe was mad at her, she was certain of it. April attempted vainly to blow the sodden fringe out of her eyes as she squelched her way down the hall and toed open the door to her room. She should have been snug in a nice dry cabin right now, but noooo, thanks to a certain hot-headed lunatic, she was trudging back through the rain from the school parking lot because nobody was answering their phones and she couldn't find her Metro Card.
Dumping her dripping bag in a heap on the floor, she let herself collapse across the bed, her whimper muffled by her pillows. Dad's probably still at therapy, and I guess the guys are off being ninja-y. Seriously, universe, for once, can't I catch a—
A soft sound out on the balcony broke into her thoughts, and she raised her head from the pillows with a small frown, waiting. But there was no inevitable tap on the window frame. No soft whisper of "April? You awake?" Her eyes narrowing, she drew her tessen and slipped off the bed to the floor, quietly eeling her way over to the window as her heart pounded in her chest. Slowly, she nudged the window open with the edge of her tessen, took a deep breath, and held it.
Another whisper of sound. There was definitely somebody out there.
No breaks for me today, huh? Well, at least the rain has stopped.
Steeling herself for one final moment, she launched herself to her feet and hurled the tessen in a single fluid move that would have made Splinter proud.
An instant later, a green hand plucked it out of the air.
"Wha- Leo?" Gaping, April shoved the window open and swung herself to the fire escape, irritation lancing through her as she planted her hands on her hips.
The turtle perched on the edge of her roof looked bemusedly from the tessen in his hand to the girl below him. "April? What are you doing here?"
She folded her arms. "I live here. Sheesh, Leo, I get that I've been shuffled around a lot over the last couple of months, but I'd think you'd remember that part."
"No," he said, and there was an edge in his voice to match herown. "I mean, I thought you were at that camp… thing."
"Year-end class-retreat-slash-teambuilding-exercise? We were, until a certain hockey nut got into a testosterone contest with the football team and decided to demo his explosive pucks. We all had to come home early after the mess hall caught fire." Her foot tapped impatiently. "Which begs the question - if you thought I wasn't going to be here, what are you doing here? I—"
It was then that she stopped looking and truly saw him. The weight that hung off him was practically tangible, bowing him over like a bow about to snap. The reason he'd come here was because it was the one place he'd expected to be alone.
But she'd be damned if she was going to leave him that way.
"Leo…" she clambered up to the roof next to him, and it was a measure of just how off the whole thing was that he didn't even reach out to help her. He just watched, silently handing her tessen back when she finally sat, panting, on the ledge next to him.
She took the weapon from him, the crease between her brows deepening as his fingers brushed hers. He was so cold. She wasn't even annoyed anymore – there was no room for anything in her now but worry. "Leo, what happened?"
He looked at her with eyes that were raw and red. Haunted. And then he opened his mouth and he told her.
He told her everything.
She listened as his words dropped into the night between them, and the more he spoke, the less important everything else became. The aborted trip, the walk through the rain, the damp from the ledge beneath her soaking through the denim to cling to her skin – none of that really mattered. Not in the face of this.
April stared down at her lap, her fingers knotting together as the horrible story just kept getting worse, a reflection of the twisting emotions inside her. Not long ago, she would have felt no qualms about declaring that she hated Karai. She still had nightmares about the smirk on the other girl's face as she'd delivered her into the cold metal hands of the Kraang while making her father dance like a puppet for her amusement.
And yet… She'd felt Karai's confusion on that rooftop. The girl who'd sat there pouring her heart out had felt like a completely different person that the one who had tried to kill her on multiple occasions. And April, more than anyone else in the world, knew the terror of plunging through freefall, helpless to stop yourself as that vat of churning green loomed closer and closer until it became the entire world, filling your lungs and stopping your heart in your chest. Nobody deserved that. No one.
…only April had climbed out unharmed. What happened to Karai, she couldn't even imagine. She must have been so scared. And the others…
Leo didn't have to tell her what he was thinking. She knew him well enough to be able to read it in every hunched, broken line of his body. Every beat of the heel that kicked against the wall as he talked screamed it as if he'd spoken it aloud.
If only… if only… if only…
"Leo," she said, reaching for him.
And for the first time since he had taken her hand in the dark beneath the city so long ago, he recoiled from her, his arm coming up to block hers. "Don't," he said, his voice breaking. "April, please. Just… just don't."
It was the crack in his voice that did it. That broken little squeak that reminded her he was a year younger than she was. They were both still kids, for crying out loud – and so, for that matter, was Karai. And that, suddenly and unexpectedly, made her furious. April drew back her arm, watching almost detachedly as her tessen descended to whack him across the shoulder.
"Ow!" The exclamation burst from him in a yelp as he stared at her, eyes wide. "April, what the heck?"
"You think I don't understand?" She could feel the heat rising to her face, turning her the notorious O'Neil Red, and she was suddenly glad her dad wasn't home, because there was no way he'd miss this much yelling. "You think I don't know what it's like to watch someone you love change in front of your eyes and have no way to stop it? To beat yourself up over and over, thinking 'oh, if I'd just done this' or 'if I'd only moved that', maybe I wouldn't be alone tonight? Replaying it again and again in your head, trying to figure out the one thing you could have done differently to stop everything from going wrong?" He blocked her second swing at his shoulder, ready for it this time, but she didn't care. Actually hitting him wasn't the point anyway.
"Because I know, Leo." April's voice was shaking now. "I know exactly what it's like. How those feelings coat you like an oil slick until you feel like you're drowning. And I know what it's like to shut yourself off and try to deal with all that awfulness alone, and I am not going to let the same thing happen to you!" She punctuated each of those final words with a jab to the bridge of his shell with her tessen until massive fingers encircled her wrist and held it fast.
She'd only ever given him The Glare once before, when he was trying to stand between her and her father, but by gosh, he was getting it now. He stared back at her, dumbfounded, as her tirade wound down and left her nearly breathless, her hands clenched so tightly that her knuckles were white.
And as blue eyes stared into blue, she could see that he hadn't even considered the parallels. She watched realization dawn across his weary face, followed in rapid progression by anger, guilt, regret, and other things too complicated to name. Then, his expression was lost as he slumped toward her and his head came to rest against her shoulder.
April let out her breath in a long sigh as she wrapped an arm around his shell, resting her cheek against his head. She knew all too well how awful a burden he carried; she could at least try to make it a little lighter.
So, for a long while, they just sat there, watching the cars pass by below them as some of the dampness dried from her jeans. He was the only one of the turtles who ever did this with her – all of the others were too excited, or awkward, or uncertain in her presence, and couldn't help talking to fill the silence. Leo was the only one who was ever content just to sit and enjoy the quiet together.
Only when she felt some of the tension drain from the taut muscles beneath her hand did she venture to speak again.
"How's Sensei?"
Leo sighed. "Pretty bad. He doesn't want to see anyone right now, so we're all kind of steering clear of the dojo. He needs to meditate, I think, and he's messed up enough that he can't do that if we're around."
April winced. "Poor Sensei. But…Donnie can create another retromutagen, right?"
"He's on it," Leo said. "But he said that the mutagen smelled weird, and he wants a sample before he can risk making anything. That isn't even taking into account the fact that we have to collect enough mutagen to make the retromutagen to begin with, but going back to Stockman's lab is way too risky right now." A low groan escaped him and he buried his head against her. "It's just all gone so wrong."
April set her tessen on the ledge next to her so that she could rest her hand against his head. "Yeah, not gonna lie, you've had better rescues." She smiled a little as he let out a halfhearted, bitter laugh against her shoulder. "But you will figure this out, Leo. It's what you guys do. And whatever Donnie needs from me – blood, sweat, tears, whatever – it's yours. Whatever I can do, okay? I'm still not sure what this freaky thing in my head actually does, but it seems to do pretty good with Kraang stuff, so if you need me to be your mutant tracker—"
Her words faltered as Leo raised his head to look at her. His eyes may have been red still, and full of sorrow, and guilt, and regret, but that crushing despair was gone.
"Thanks, April," he said quietly.
"Any time," she answered, and smiled as his arm stole around her waist.
After another moment of silence, their heads resting together as they watched the river of traffic flow on below them, Leo asked, tentatively, "Did Casey really burn down your camp?"
"Only about half of it. He's got detention till he's, like, thirty, and last I heard, he was grounded so bad he'll be lucky if he ever sees the sun again."
"I don't know which worries me more – the fact that he did it, or the fact that I'm not even that surprised."
"Tell me about it," April snorted. "But hey, since my tutoring nights are free for the foreseeable future, why don't you guys come over for pizza? My treat. We can plan our next steps in Operation: Find Snake Girl. I promise I won't even make fun of you when you do the Captain thing."
Their heads still pressed together so she couldn't see his face, but she could feel him smile, even though he gave her no answer. He wasn't ready to say yes.
But he didn't say no, either.
For almost a week, she kept her distance from the lair. She'd refused to let Leo or the guys deal with the loss of their erstwhile sister alone, but Splinter… Splinter was different. Every time she looked at her tessen, she could hear his words echoing in her memory.
I had intended to one day pass this on to my daughter….
…I would like to think she would have turned out as well as you have, my child.
Splinter needed help, no doubt, but April was fairly certain that her presence around the lair would just be rubbing salt in the wound. A reminder of what had happened, taunting him with the fact that she'd emerged from the mutagen without a scratch on her.
But when she stumbled across the glowing canister near the swingset in the park on her way home, she was left with no choice. She couldn't just leave it there where kids could get hurt, and taking it home with her was out of the question - there was no way she was letting that stuff anywhere near her dad ever again. Gingerly tucking it into her bag, she steeled herself and slipped into the sewers.
The lair, when she entered, was quiet and full of ghosts. Rubbing her arms, April looked around the familiar room, her mind filling in the blanks where Karai would have been when they'd brought her home. Standing on the ledge, waiting for approval from her estranged father. Climbing the stairs to the dojo. Sitting with her…her brothers. For one fleeting moment, Splinter had finally regained a piece of what he'd lost, and April felt sick with the unfairness of it. Having Karai around – it would have been weird, she had to admit, and she wasn't sure just quite how she'd have dealt with that. It wasn't as if she liked the other girl. But Splinter deserved to have something go right after all he and his family had done. After how hard they had worked to do what was right and good. It just wasn't fair.
Shaking herself a little, April moved toward Donnie's lab. She didn't need to call out to know that the turtles were out. Even if the silence hadn't been a dead giveaway – the lair was never silent when Mikey was in residence – that burgeoning other sense told her so. Not that she could do anything useful with it yet, like using it to track the guys down when Splinter was putting her through stealth training or anything. She just… usually knew when they were nearby.
And when they weren't.
The combination lock on the door of the cabinet where Donnie stored his mutagen samples stymied her for a minute, though she understood the need for it given Mikey's tendency to taste anything that wasn't nailed down. After a moment, though, she gave a little smile, entered her birthdate, and placed the canister of mutagen securely on a shelf before locking the door once more.
She was nearly to the turnstiles when her steps slowed, and she paused with a hand on the crash bar. Glancing over her shoulder at the dojo, she worried her bottom lip a little as she thought. Then, with a soft sigh of defeat, she turned around and headed toward the kitchen.
When her dad had—had— changed, she'd forgotten to eat half the time, until her aunt brought her things and guilted her into finishing them. She knew just how easy it was to lose yourself in the face of all that sorrow. That, at least, was something she could fix.
April set the kettle on the stove to boil and rummaged through the fridge, humming thoughtfully as she rooted through the containers. Performing a careful stratigraphy as she dug deeper into the contents of the fridge, tossing out a container of spoiled milk and two distinctly furry apples as she did so and hoping that she wasn't ruining one of Donnie's science experiments in doing so, she finally settled on a container of rice bearing Murakami's logo.
It took two clouds of smoke and a great deal of coughing before she found the eggs that actually had egg inside them, but it wasn't long after that before she was arranging a bowl of rice and a small plate of omelette on a tray alongside a pot of tea and single chipped cup.
For the final touch, she went to the freezer and opened the door, accepting the bit of frozen cheese that the mutant within helpfully held out to her with an eager 'mew'. Gingerly, April scratched behind Ice Cream Kitty's frozen ear, and was rewarded with a purr like bubbles blown in milk through a straw as the little cat rubbed her head against April's hand. Licking her sticky fingers clean as she shut the freezer and returned the counter, April set the cheesesicle on the tray and went to rinse off the rest of her hand.
As quietly as she could, she stole up the stairs toward the dojo, not even daring to breathe as she bent to set the tray down next to the door. Relief flooding through her, she straightened quickly and turned to go.
"I thought you might be avoiding us."
April winced and picked the tray up again before peeking around the doorframe. Splinter sat beneath the tree as he had on so many other occasions, outwardly as calm and implacable as ever, eyes closed in meditation, yet something about him seemed… off. Her sensei had always been a tower of strength; she had never thought she would ever see him looking so… so fragile.
"It's not that," she said, crossing the room slowly, still uncertain of her welcome. "I just… I thought you might need some time."
She knelt as she set the tray down before him, and when she glanced up again, his eyes caught hers and held them.
He knew. Of course he knew. She felt her cheeks growing red as she looked down at the tray she had prepared, suddenly feeling so stupid. On the periphery of her vision, she saw him glance at her offering for the first time, saw the twitch of his fingers as he realized what she had done.
"I don't want my being here to hurt you," she finished, laying the bitter kernel of truth out in the open.
Her words hung between them in the silence, until his quiet sigh swept them away. "At first, perhaps," he said, and there was a weariness in his voice that clawed at her heart. "But I have had much time to think. One of my children is lost to me again, and I do not know how long she will stay lost. But it occurs to me, I have no wish to lose another."
April flinched, closing her eyes against the stinging that pricked at them. "Sensei, I'm sorry," she said, and it was an effort to speak past the lump in her throat. "I'm sorry for what happened. And for avoiding you. And I'm sorry…"
She opened her eyes again, looking anywhere but at him, and her gaze drifted to the worn spot on the carpet where Splinter's students usually knelt in waiting. Where, she realized with dawning horror, Karai would have knelt for one bittersweet day. Karai. His true daughter. A real kunoichi.
"I'm sorry I can't… be more."
As soon as she said the words, she wished she could take them back. She could practically feel the weight of his gaze as he stared at her. Then, in a fluid motion, he rose to his feet.
"Wait here," he instructed, his voice pinning her to the spot as surely as if he'd chained her there. She waited, her hands clenched in her lap to stop them from trembling, as he vanished into his room.
When he returned a few moments later, it was to kneel beside her, on her side of the tray. This close, she could feel the reassuring warmth of him, which had been the bulwark of strength against which she had shored herself during those dark times she had been without her father. He reached out, and she blinked in surprise as he set a second cup on the tray in front of her. This one was smaller, finer, the reverence with which he treated it bestowing upon it an importance out of proportion with its size.
"There is something you must remember, April." Splinter picked up the teapot and swirled it once before pouring it into the little cup. "This family does not value you because you are a kunoichi. Or a mutant. Or human." He poured tea into the second cup, and set the pot carefully back onto the tray. "We value you because you are April O'Neil. And there is only one person in this world who can be that. Do you understand?"
With trembling hands, April reached out to cradle the small cup, letting the warmth of the ceramic sink into her chilled hands as she breathed deeply of the fragrant steam. And it was a much steadier breath she let out as she answered, "Hai, Sensei."
His hand, gentle and strong, drifted to rest against her shoulder, and at last she brought herself to glance up. The look he turned on her had pain in it still, but pain overlaid with gratitude and pride.
Once, he would have held her. Had held her, as she had wept into his robes over a father who was lost. But though it was still too soon to renew that level of familiarity between them, the touch on her shoulder was just as secure, just as solid, as his arms around her had once been. And as he lifted his own cup and they drank together, in that moment, it was enough.