Chapter Seventeen:

Broken

{Leo}

Donnie and Casey looked like they had an…interesting time together. And by interesting, I mean that Donnie's probably already considered over three hundred ways to murder the hockey player. Well, at least everyone's in one piece.

I twirl the noodles around the plastic fork and take another bite. They're good—not as good as Master Splinter makes them, but good. Donnie's picking at his rice and passing me looks that I'm not quite sure how to interpret. He's most definitely still upset that I got to go with April—I still don't know why that happened—but he better not direct any of that anger towards me.

"So," April starts, noting the strange tension. "How was it, you two?"

"Pretty good." Casey shoves another spoonful of teriyaki in his mouth and pats Donnie on the shoulder—a gesture that makes my brother steam. "Got lots of stuff, had some fun, got into some trouble with the security guard—"

"What?" April's voice shrills with mine simultaneously.

"What the heck, Donnie?" I hiss, leaning into the table to glare at him. "I specifically told you to lay low! That's not laying low!"

"I didn't do anything!" He drops his fork on the tray and whips his dagger-like gaze towards Casey, whose indifference and casual demeanor just make my brother look even more wound up. "A-And we didn't get in trouble—he just asked us to leave. It wasn't a big deal."

My mouth opens to spit another lecture when Donnie sighs, leans back in his chair, and rubs his temples.

"Can we talk about something else, please? I'm getting a headache."

My glare narrows further and my shoulders set. "Fine. But don't think you're off the hook for an explanation later."

He scoffs. "Yeah, and I'm looking forward to the lecture that's sure to go along with it."

The attitude in his voice is really putting me off, but this isn't the time or the place. Both April and Casey are watching the two of us, so I simply clear my throat and avert my attention back to my food.

"There's a comic store here, right?" Changing the subject is best. I shove my mouth full of noodles and pay extra attention to April as she answers.

"Yeah, downstairs between the jewelry place and the pretzels. Why?"

I shrug. "I told Mikey I'd bring him something back… Is that okay?"

Her expression brightens considerably and she scoots forward. "No problem! It'll be good to bring him something—I know he was upset about not getting to go."

I nod and spin the fork through the noodles, scraping the tray. "Yeah…he was. But he told me which comic he was looking for—some kind of zombie robot series." A chuckle rumbles my throat. "He reads some weird stuff."

I catch Donnie blinking at me from across the table. He swallows awkwardly and sits up. "You talked to Mikey?"

"Well, yeah." I finish off my food, mouth filled to the brim. "Didn't you?"

His gaze drops to his plate while he picks at his meal. "No…no, not really."

"Well, we'll head over there and pick something out for him and Raph," April comments. "Like a peace offering of sorts."

An anxious flicker crosses my brain. For some reason, I don't think a "peace offering" is going to do us much good.

~T~

{Donnie}

The bus ride home wasn't nearly as exciting as the ride there. Maybe it was the long hours at the mall, maybe it was because Casey's an idiot and ruins everything—or maybe, most likely, it's the storm we're all sure to face upon arriving home. The wonder of finally being a part of the human world can only keep us on the high for so long before reality starts tugging us back down.

Or so Leo says.

But it is true that I'm feeling a sort of…apprehension. I know he is, too. After all, he's got Raph to deal with, and I don't envy him at all. But after hearing about Mikey earlier, it makes me feel a little guilty. Okay, really guilty. I know something's off, and I know I have to fix it, but in order to fix it, I have to face it, and I've never been too great at that.

This is why I prefer machines to living organisms, I think bitterly as we head back through the sewer tunnels. Machines don't have these emotional problems. I never have to apologize or muster up sympathy.

We reach the entrance and stand hesitantly outside. April pats her sides and offers a reassuring smile, even though her obvious concern for Casey, who's waiting across the tunnel, clouds her features.

"It'll take a while for everyone to get used to this," she affirms. "But I know you guys will work it out. You just need to…talk about it. You know, open up and stuff."

The plastic bags are weighing down my arms and beginning to cut off the circulation to my fingers.

"That's the hard part," Leo adds. "But thanks, April. Thanks for taking us out today."

Her smile is so pretty. "No problem! Let me know how everything goes, and maybe we can plan another outing."

Leo and I agree, sounding chipper even though we're dying on the inside. We wave her and Casey off and head on inside.

"Well," Leo starts awkwardly. "That was fun."

"Hmm." It was, in all honesty, but my brain is too full to sit here and reminisce about what happened an hour ago.

He lets out a breath and sways the shopping bags in his hands. "I'm gonna go put this stuff away…but April's right. We do need to talk this through."

"Or we could move on like nothing happened and let them get over it on their own," I suggest.

He frowns disapprovingly. "Donnie, come on—"

"I know, I know," I groan. "I was just kidding. We'll talk it through."

"Now?" he presses, but it's more of an order than a question. I glare back at him, but his expression holds firm. "Find Mikey." He sifts through his many bags until he finds the smallest one—bright red with the comic store's logo sprawled across it. "Give this to him. You know…break the ice and all that. It'll make him feel better."

I take the bag and stare at the comics inside. "Uh-huh. And you'll do…what, exactly?"

He shifts uncomfortably from one foot to the other and takes a slow breath. "I guess that means I'll go talk to Raph."

It shouldn't, but it makes me grin. With a snort, I drop Mikey's bag into one of my own and waltz to the lab. "Yeah, you have fun with that."

He doesn't move right away—most likely he's frozen to that spot out of fear. Raph's not exactly, um, easy to talk to. At least Mikey appreciates little things like comics and apologies. Heck, I could probably bake a cake and write "I'M SORRY" in huge, frosting letters and Mikey would forgive all my sins instantly. That's not a bad idea, either.

But all of my musings of apologies and cakes get shot out the proverbial window when I walk into my lab to find Mikey rummaging through the drawers along the back wall, loudly knocking over some wrenches in the process.

"Mikey?" My little brother jumps, bumping his head on the bottom shelf of the tool rack.

"Ah—Donnie!" He stumbles awkwardly into some semblance of a casual stance. "I, um—what're you, uh, what're you doing back here, bro?"

I eye him suspiciously as I set down my shopping bags. "This is my lab, Mikey. What're you doing here?"

He laughs sheepishly and rubs the back of his neck. "Oh, you know…stuff."

My suspicion sky-rockets as I walk over. "Stuff?"

"Yeah, just um…looking around." He taps his fingers on the back of his wrist in a nervous rhythm until I'm standing right in front of him, arms crossed expectantly.

"You know you're not supposed to be in here while I'm out," I remind sharply. "Or, you know, at all."

His smile dissipates, and those baby blue eyes drop to the floor. "…I know."

I watch him a moment longer while I try to decipher the scene before me. Why does he seem so…bothered? Upset? I mean, it's not uncommon to find him snooping around back here because he's Mikey. He gets into everything all the time, and there's really nothing to be done about it. But you'd think all of my lectures might have made some sort of impact on that thick skull of his.

Part of me wants to scold him; to remind him for the hundred billionth time that he can't be in my lab messing everything up. But the other part…well, I'm not sure. Something seems off.

"Mikey," I start, cautious. "Tell me what you were doing in here."

There's a long stretch of silence while my little brother fights to form a coherent sentence. He fidgets and squirms under my stern gaze, but finally, he realizes there's no way out of this. With a heavy sigh, he rubs his shoulder and keeps his eyes on his feet.

"I wanted… I wanted to find the retromutagen. You know…the one you and Leo used."

I blink. "What?"

"I just thought if I could—"

"Mikey, that stuff is dangerous!" I snap. "And even if you found it, what were you gonna do? Mutate yourself while we were gone?"

"Well I—"

"No, Mikey, I've told you countless times not to mess around with my stuff, alright? And it's not like I just say all that to be a buzz kill—I say it because it's true. My experiments are not toys or games for you to entertain yourself with! And the mutagen is completely out of the question! It's unstable and-and it wouldn't even work if you did find it!"

His eyes narrow slightly. "Why not?"

"Because," I growl, slamming my hand down on the desk. "I fixated the samples to our DNA—Leo's and mine. It was specifically tuned to match our genetic compositions! If you had used it while I was out, you could've gotten yourself hurt, or-or worse!"

"But I just—"

"No! There's no 'buts' about this! Stay out of my lab, and away from my experiments!"

Those blue orbs waver, wet now with tears he can't hold back. So he scrunches up his face and bolts out of the lab and doesn't stop until he gets to his room, where he slams the door shut loud enough to rattle the screwdrivers left out on my workbench.

I stand there and stare at the doorway. The anger remains—he shouldn't have been going through my stuff in the first place—but now the aching feeling is returning. The kind that tells me I'm wrong.

I hate that feeling.

With a heavy sigh, I move for the freezer in the back where the retromutagen is stashed. I can't have him finding it. He doesn't have the brain-power to actually heed my warning, and I know if he got ahold of any of it, he'd try to mutate himself—something that would most likely kill him.

So I make sure each sample is pushed as far back as possible, concealed by jars and boxes and locked with a combination. The cold plumes across my face as I work to hide every last drop of the retromutagen, and with it, I hide every last drop of my guilt.

This is my life. My decision. No one's going to make me feel bad for taking this chance—for being smart enough to figure this out, and brave enough to try. Mikey, Raph—even Splinter—they can protest and mope all they want. But this is who I am now, and so long as I can help it, I'm never going back.

~T~

{Raph}

I'm beating the crap out of the posts in the dojo when I hear Leo and Donnie get home. I ignore the sounds, ignore their voices, and focus all of my energy into my fists. It works for a while…until the door slides open.

I pretend he's not there. I don't know how long—five, maybe ten minutes. I just keep punching and kicking, drowning beneath his presence as he watches me in silence. Some vain part of me hopes that if I ignore him long enough, he'll take the hint and leave me alone.

But no. Of all the things Leo's good at, taking hints is not one of them.

"We need to talk, don't we?" he asks, leaning against the door frame. I land another punch on the wooden post and grimace as my knuckles crack beneath the force of the blow. Sweat slides down my face and my muscles tremble and burn, but it's not enough.

"Get out," I growl, refusing to look at him.

He watches me for a moment, silent, and I can feel the weight of his stare as he picks me apart. He knows me better than any of my brothers, and he knows exactly what's happening right now. So why the shell is he sticking around?

"We're going to have this fight anyway," he continues. "Might as well get it over with."

Another punch. Hips pivot, feet slide across the tatami mats, and I bring my leg up and around in a vicious kick, hitting the post so hard, it shakes. The pounding in my chest increases, drumming against each rib and resounding through my skull with the rush of hot blood. My mind teeters along the edge, threatening to tip into the black any second. The warm, familiar darkness where I don't have to think about anything, where my body moves beyond my command and I beat my problems into the ground.

"Raph, come on. At least look at me."

Harder, harder, harder. The skin around my knuckles breaks, stinging, burning, bleeding, but I don't stop. I just want it all to disappear, so when I come out from the black, there's only silence.

He sighs, and even as I keep my gaze from him, I pick up the subtle sounds of him taking one of the bokken from the metal rack on the wall. I stop after hitting the post with a palm-heel strike, and my eyes fixate on the beads of blood starting to smear across the back of my hand.

"Not the bokken," I growl. "If you wanna spar, you use your katanas."

His hesitation is practically tangible. I hear him slide the wooden practice sword back into the rack, and the familiar shing of his katanas being drawn from their place on the wall echoes like a whisper across the empty dojo.

I slip the sai from my belt, my back to him, and I grasp the hilts so tight that it hurts. It's times like these where I've found that one pain can distract me from another. If I could feel the physical ache deep enough, the emotional toil might be drowned out—and that's usually what happens. But I've been in here for over an hour, sweating and bleeding and bruising, and yet the horrible twisting in my gut is still there.

"It'd be easier for both of us if you just talked to me," he mutters from behind as he gets into position. "Beating the crap out of each other is getting kind of old."

Something inside my chest clenches, and a white-hot tear of pain surges through me. Before I know what I'm doing, I whirl around and charge him, and all the physical fatigue simply vanishes beneath the drumming throes of betrayal and hurt.

He blocks my first blow, and the clang of metal rings in my ears.

"If I just talked to you?" I shout, seething. I yank my weapons downward, hard enough to break his block, and then I twist over and knock him into the wall with a brutal kick. His back hits the wooden panels and he grunts, stunned by the force of it. But I can't hold back, not even if I wanted to, not even if I tried, because it's too much—all of this is too much—

He barely ducks in time to evade the fist I smash into the wall where his head just was. Dropping to the floor, he makes a sloppy roll to escape, but I'm faster, stronger, and so very, very angry. His ankle ends up in my fist, our proportions so vastly different than before, and with a grunt, I throw him clear across this side of the room. He yelps and manages to soften his landing by tumbling on his back, but he's still too jarred to move quick enough.

"I've tried to talk to you!" I swipe my blades through the air. "That's what we agreed on, right?" Again and again, my sai slice through nothingness, just barely evading his skin, scraping walls as he scrambles away from my raging form.

"Raph," he starts, the fear thick in his voice. "You need to calm down—"

"Don't tell me what to do!" I scream. The prongs of my blades catch one of his katanas mid-arc, and I rip the weapon out of his grasp with a sharp jerk. The sword clatters to the floor, useless without the hand of its owner.

One swipe of the legs and he's down, pinned by a hand that's now big enough to cover his whole chest. His breath comes rapid and shallow, and those blue eyes are wide with fear. There's blood trickling down his chin from the lip I busted, and the deep bruises stand out against his pale flesh.

"When we fought in the sewer, do you remember what you said?" My knee jabs into his gut as I lean forward, and he grimaces. "You said you'd talk to me. That if I'd listen, you'd talk." The burning in my gut just gets worse. "Well I've been here to listen, so what the shell?!"

I can tell he's looking for a way out now. His breath comes in heavy and quick, pushing his chest up against my hand and pulling it back down while his brain scrambles for something solid. But he's weaker than he was before. Despite the obvious muscles contracting as he tries to push me off, he's different now, and he can't take that back. He's thinner, he weighs considerably less, and without that mutant DNA to aid his strength, he's at a loss against me.

"You're still keeping us in the dark—both you and Donnie! What, did you think we wouldn't notice that you turned human? Did you think you could just mutate, pack your things, and make a whole new life on the surface without us?"

"No!" he gasps, eyes wide at the accusation. "No, Raph—that's not what we wanted—"

"Then what do you want?" I'm seething, burning to the brim. My eyes are rimmed with tears I refuse to let fall. "You're just gonna be humans living in the sewer with some mutant brothers?"

He swallows, looking like he wants nothing more than to sink into the ground and disappear. "No…"

"You want to leave, don't you?" The words come out small and pained. "You and Donnie are gonna leave us behind."

"No!" he shouts, flustered. "I-I don't know what we wanted—I don't know what we were going to do! We just did it without thinking…"

You jumped and now you're drowning and you're taking everyone down with you.

"Without thinking?" I snarl. "Shut up, Leo! Donnie had to have been planning this for months, and you had to have known! I bet that's what all your secret 'meetings' were about. You two were talking behind our backs—"

"But I didn't know Donnie would actually find a way to change us!"

"But he did, and you went along with it! You're not a complete idiot, so don't sit there and act like you had no idea what was going on!"

His bottom lips quivers with the rest of him, but he's got nothing left to say. Because I'm right, and we all know it.

"You're selfish," I spit. "That's all you've ever been. Even when you give stuff up for us, it's all some twisted way of feeding that-that thing inside of you—that thing that makes you believe you're always needed, that you're so important or heroic or special, that we couldn't get anywhere without you. You do all these 'good' things so you can lie to yourself about how great you are, when all you've ever been and all you ever will be is an arrogant, self-entitled little prick!"

I didn't think those eyes could get any wider, but they do, until he's left gaping on the floor in a heap of bruises and cuts and pain. But I don't care. I hope he feels every second of it.

And looking down at him beneath my hand, seeing his face, his skin, his eyes and all the features that are him/aren't him, the well of anger bursts even further.
How could he do this? How could he change himself this way and not say anything? Did he think we wouldn't understand, that we'd get in the way? Did he truly believe he and Donnie were the only ones who maybe wanted something more out of life?

Selfish. That word repeats in my brain, over and over, growing in intensity as I study his human form and hate it, hate every inch of it because it isn't him, it isn't my brother—my brother wouldn't do this to us—

I say the words before I can think of what it might do to him. To us.

"I hate you."

And then I push off his chest, get up, and walk out of the room, leaving him alone and bleeding on the floor.

~T~

{Leo}

The world's just stopped. His footsteps recede, the dojo doors slide shut, and my heart slams into my ribs—but I feel none of this. Numb, I lay there, staring up at the place he just was, pinning me down, hurting me with his fists and then killing me with his words. I'm bleeding in more ways than one.

I hate you.

My mind burns, my body aches, and yet I feel nothing but those three daggers piercing my chest. I don't know how long I lay there before I'm able to drag myself off the rug. But I do, and slowly, I stumble to my room, aware of the blood dripping from me but completely numb. I shut myself in the dark, slide to the floor, aching, hurting, throbbing, but the cold settles in as my blood begins to chill. My heart beat pounds, but it's dull.

I hate you.

His eyes are like fire behind my own. There was nothing but pain in his gaze. Nothing but hurt and betrayal, and those three words, those blades that peeled my flesh back and cut up my insides, were heavy. Every syllable, weighed in truth, like stones dropping on my head.

I am selfish. This whole thing was all some stupid, incredibly selfish attempt to change who I was for a girl. I've torn my family apart for a girl.

My heart aches and tears and bleeds with every pump. Everything he said was right on the nail. Everything I am, everything I thought I knew, the things I believed I was and what I sacrificed…all of it was right.

I'm supposed to be the leader, the big brother, the protector. And yet I was none of these things when I made the decision to change. I only thought of myself, of the future I could have. I wanted to change my world…but now I think I've only broken it.