Disclaimer: The TMNT are the property of Mirage Studios. No copyright infringement is intended, and you can bet I'd be updating a lot faster if there were any profit being made.
Warnings: None for this chapter.
This was based on the au100 theme #96: would.
C&C always appreciated and adored. Thanks to everyone who has reviewed so far. You've been a great help.
The Real Meaning of Everything
The part that really cheesed Raphael off was that they'd been minding their own business.
Yeah, sometimes the weird and dangerous stuff they got caught up in was pretty much their own fault. They'd never been real good at minding their own business; even when they were kids they'd driven Splinter crazy, always trying to steal a glimpse at the world going on above them. The whole Shredder thing? They'd basically walked right into that, after all. Leo could have just given the damn sword back and left, but no.
Anyway, this time they hadn't gone looking for trouble, but that hadn't stopped it from finding them.
They'd been up at Casey's farmhouse, pulling themselves back together after the run-in with Saki aboard his spaceship. It was a warm night, and they were all kind of getting on each other's nerves (well, okay, he and Mike were getting on Leo and April's nerves) so Donnie and Casey decided to inflict a cookout on them.
"Cookout?" Raph said skeptically. "No one in this wacky family can cook anything edible with a fully stocked kitchen, and you want to haul us out into the woods and try to scorch meat with fire?"
"Yes, because I like this wacky family and I don't want April to start killing select members of it," Donatello said. "Suck it up. Meat yum. Fire pretty. Behave and I'll tell you where April's hiding the beer."
And people could say all they wanted about Raph's temper, but only an idiot argued with Donatello when he got that tone of voice. It was a tone that warned cross me on this and you'll never feel safe around modern technology again. Raph had a healthy respect for Don's ability to turn household items into instruments of revenge, so he caved.
"Fine," Raph said. "But if this turns into some kind of male-bonding 'share your feeeeeelings'," he waggled his hands in the air in a decidedly limp-wristed fashion, "kind of crap, I'm outta there."
"No one wants to share your feelings, Raph."
Anyway, it hadn't been that bad. Hot dogs roasted on sticks over the campfire, lemonade and soda, beans baked in a battered old pot suspended over the fire (which Raph had remarked, sotto voce to Don, could be fatal to them all if Casey were allowed to have any). April broke out marshmallows and Hershey bars after dinner ("No graham crackers," she'd said apologetically, but Mike had already shoved four marshmallows on a stick and half a chocolate bar down his throat). It had gotten dark eventually, and with only a sliver of a moon, everything beyond their fire was dim and shadowy.
In the dark, Raph hadn't noticed the woman approach at all. One second he'd been shouting encouragement at Mikey as his younger brother wrestled Donnie to the ground, convinced the braniac was hiding the last of the chocolate, the next moment a shadowy figure was standing behind his brothers. In the firelight he hadn't been able to see much, but it had been enough to recognize the outline of the double katana sheathed on the intruder's back.
"Guys!" The intruder hadn't made a move, standing still just outside the circle of firelight, but Raph wasn't in the habit of giving the benefit of the doubt to people who snuck up on them in the middle of the night. "Company!"
Mike and Don turned at his shout, and maybe it was because they were closer, or maybe just because Mikey's always had eyesight like a friggin' hawk, but they seem to recognize her.
"April?" Mike said, "do you have, like, an identical twin?" He stood slowly, hands moving into a defensive position. At his side, Don was doing the same.
Leaning past Casey, April licked her lips. "I have a sister named Robin. She's half a foot shorter than me and has brown curly hair."
Splinter stepped away from the fire and past Leonardo who very determinedly did not flinch or try to get between their father and the stranger. "Are you in need of assistance?"
Raph knew from experience that Splinter could talk a madman down from a ledge; hell, Raph had been that madman once or twice. So it wasn't a surprise when the stranger took a few careful steps forward into the light.
Up close, Raph saw, she really did look like April. Her hair was longer, and worn loose instead of tied back. She was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, an old leather jacket and boots that were battered and stained. The biggest difference though, was definitely the two katana worn across her back in the same way Leo wore his. She looked tired, too, in a way that their April never had. This woman looked exhausted and scared.
It was like the only thing keeping her on her feet was the fear that the ground would swallow her up.
"No," the other April said. Her voice was scratchy, like Don the morning after an all-nighter in the lab, and she crossed her arms across her chest. She sounded just like their April. "I'm just here to warn you."
"Are you from the future?" That was Don, of course. The idea hadn't even occurred to Raphael, and probably wouldn't have even if the other-April was wearing a silver jumpsuit and had a barcode tattooed onto her forehead. Raph just figured it was one of the many reassuring ways in which he would never understand the way his brother's mind worked.
Other-April seemed to think it was pretty typical too, because she huffed a little, kind of a breathless laugh, and said "No, Donnie. I'm from somewhere else."
Splinter seemed to make up his mind. "Take a seat by the fire, child. Michelangelo, move aside. Casey, have we any dinner left for our visitor?"
If Splinter said 'jump' no one asked 'how high' - you just jumped as best you could and hoped you didn't fall on your ass when you came back to earth. Mike shoved over so the other-April could sit beside him and Donnie (which made Raph's fingers twitch toward his sais and wish Master Splinter had seated her between him and Leo instead), Casey lunged for the cooler where a few hotdogs had survived the giant Hoover that passed for Michelangelo's stomach, and April stared across the fire at herself.
Raph settled back, reluctantly, and exchanged a long glance with Leo.
Everyone was quiet while Casey put together a plate of food. Mike was staring unabashedly, and Don looked like he was about to explode if he wasn't allowed to ask some serious questions soon. He kept shooting glances from April to the other one to Splinter and back again. Raph spent a minute trying to catch his gaze and communicate that just because she looked like April didn't mean she was a good guy, but then Casey pushed the plate across the fire.
The other-April looked at it like she barely knew what it was at first. "I haven't had hot dogs in, well, it must be at least a year." She took a bite and chewed thoughtfully.
Splinter gave her a minute to chew and swallow. "What have you come to warn us about, child?"
"I suppose I am warning you about the future. I suppose I've even seen your future, in a way."
Man, Don looked like he was gonna bust something.
"I'm from another world. Another reality. Another timeline. And, in that reality, once upon a time, there was a man who found great power."
The other-April launched into her warning, which sounded more like a bedtime story to Raphael. Some evil guy who turned into a demon and conquered the world, but couldn't kill an enemy, so he destroyed everything his enemy had and stole his brother instead. Raph thought it sounded pretty stupid, actually, though Mike looked enthralled. Raph glanced around the fire, but Casey looked as confused as he did, and even April looked like she didn't quite understand what the point was. Don looked like he'd swallowed something seriously nasty. Leo and Splinter were both sitting still and silent, watching the other-April with thoughtful intensity.
"Cute story," Raphael said when she was finished. "But that doesn't tell us who you are or why you're here."
Leo gave him a sharp glare, but the other-April didn't seem offended. She shrugged with one shoulder and offered him a small smile. "I'm from the world-that-was. Where the Man Who Was a Demon and the second man made their bargain. I'm here because we can't stop him, but we can warn as many worlds as possible."
Didn't people have names in her world?
Leo leaned forward toward the fire. "Can we stop him?"
The look she gave Leo was kind of freaky, and made the skin on the back of Raph's neck crawl. "I don't know. If we knew who, or how, we'd have done it already."
Splinter stepped in. "How have you been able to venture into these many different worlds, child?"
Well, at least someone had realized that wandering from one reality to the other wasn't something you just woke up and decided to do one day. But the other-April's answer wasn't particularly helpful, in Raph's opinion. "The second man sent me," she said. "He sent many of us."
"How are you going to get back?" Donnie sounded like he was chewing on the kind of thoughts that'd give Raphael nightmares for a week.
"I'm not." She didn't sound worried about it at all. Like people got stranded in alternate dimensions all the time where she came from.
Their April spoke up for the first time in a while. "I'm sorry," she said.
"If the second guy can touch all this power, why doesn't he just make the demon dude stop?" Mike was using his marshmallow stick to poke at the logs in the fire, and Raph had to resist the urge to smack him and tell him to pay attention. "Why all the running and warning?"
"The Demon is evil." Other-April also seemed to think demons were pretty matter-of-fact, which was just one more reason why Raphael never wanted to visit her world. "And it's hard to touch evil without giving into it. He's tried and he nearly failed. The power is not a separate thing anymore. The Demon made it a part of himself. Touching it is like touching his soul."
Touching the evil guy's soul is bad. Got it.
"When he ripped open the scar on the second man's soul, what he really did was give the second man a direct path into his own mind, didn't he?" Donatello sounded thoughtful, and the way he was looking at the other-April while he waited for her answer made Raph suspect he already knew she'd agree with him. Donnie did that a lot, figured out the answers before he asked the questions.
Other-April seemed to know it too, because she just lifted one shoulder. "Basically." Apparently there had been a brainiac Donatello in her world, too.
Casey made a face. "That's stupid," he objected, and Raphael privately agreed.
The other-April opened her mouth to answer him, but Donatello beat her to it. "He probably didn't realize what he was doing. It seems more likely he thought that by opening that wound he could control the second man."
Raphael wondered briefly if he should point out that they were actually sitting there debating the motivations of a guy who turned himself into a demon, but Leonardo jumped into the conversation before he could. "How long do we have until he comes?"
"Couldn't tell you. Worlds fall quickly, but time is pretty relative." Like that made any kind of sense at all. She liked her lips. "Some worlds are spared him. He can only take worlds where some version of the second man exists."
Splinter twitched an ear, but otherwise didn't react. "This second man exists in our world, I assume, or you would not have taken the time to warn us."
For some reason, Raph got the feeling that she didn't want to answer that question. She was looking at the fire instead of them when she said, "yes" in a small voice.
Raph took it and ran. "Who is it?" he demanded, leaning closer to the fire. "If we off this second guy, can we stop this from happening?"
He could feel Leo's eyes boring into the side of his head, but no one said anything.
Other-April just shook her head slowly, back and forth, and for a second it was almost like she'd forgotten to stop. "I don't think so. There are worlds where he's died, but it doesn't stop anything. It's still a version of what he might have been."
So much for that bright idea then. Raph leaned back and let his breath out slowly.
"And that would be ungrateful of you, since he did all of this to save your life."
It took a second for that to sink in, for Raphael to go from 'what? Who did what?' to the sinking realization that in her world one of them had doomed them all.
Leo was either slightly slower on the uptake, or just determined to get clarification. Raph suspected the latter. Leo hated working on instinct when he didn't have to. "The brother that the Demon took was Raph, in your world?"
April and Casey were looking at him like he'd grown a second head, but Don and Mike were staring at him across the fire with the same expression he knew he must have had on his own face. We destroyed an entire world. More than one, if other-April was right. Somewhere out there, some other Turtle had a lot to answer for.
Not surprisingly, it was Leo who asked what they were all wondering. "Who was-" he turns away to face the other-April, but stops before he can finish asking.
She'd gone, vanished into thin air.
And the night suddenly seemed much darker than it was before.
To be continued in: The World That Was