He was sleeping. And then, suddenly, a pillowcase was being jammed over his head.
"What should we grab?" hissed a voice.
"Grab everything," said another voice.
"Grab the cat?" That sounded like a third voice.
"I said everything."
He tried to fight, but the bodies connected to the voices held him down effortlessly. He tried to yell, but the oxygen mask muffled his shouts. He was pretty sure Snowflake tried to make a run for it, but an aborted yowl let him know she didn't make it.
Then he was being lifted - oxygen hose and IV lines and blankets and all - and he was too disoriented to tell where they were taking him.
Sound changed. The feel of the air changed. He had a distant memory of this, something that had only happened to him once, and he was terrified.
Then his abductors were putting him down on a hard surface, and crowding close around him. There were a couple of thumping noises, and the voice that the others seemed to listen to said, "Let's go."
Nothing happened. No one went anywhere. David tried to struggle, but someone pulled on the blanket just so and he was completely pinned.
"Did you seriously just kidnap your own brother?" said a voice David didn't recognize. "Dude, you are a total whackbag."
"Shut up and drive, Casey," said one of the first three voices. David was beginning to form a hypothesis about what had just happened, and he couldn't decide if it was better or worse than other possibilities.
"Where are we going again?"
"Mikey, don't you ever listen to the plan?"
David had the infuriating feeling that he was right, and that regardless of how his theory compared to competing alternatives, it was objectively awful.
"Why should I, when I have you here to remind me?"
A thwapping sound. "Listen up, shell-for-brains. Casey's got a place outside the city. That's where we're going."
"There are places outside the city?"
David lost it.
"HAVE ANY OF YOU EVER OPENED A GEOGRAPHY TEXTBOOK," he shouted from inside the pillowcase. "Snowflake, kill them. Kill them all."
Something feline rubbed against his legs.
"Oh, phew. For a second I thought she was going to do it."
"C'mere, furball." A hand swiped over the blankets, and Snowflake was lifted away. "What's wrong with her eyes? They supposed to look like that?"
A different kind of anger welled up in David. Nobody talked about his cat like that. "She's blind, okay?"
"What, seriously? You trained a blind cat to get stuff for you?"
"Yes, I did." David pulled against the folds of blankets that were binding his hands. "Now, will you let me go?"
"Sorry, no can do. We're off to - where're we off to, Casey?"
"Northampton!" Casey cheered. "Don't you listen to the plan?" Then there was a rumble and a jerk, and the world was moving.
David kicked out, as best he could, trying to find anything to brace himself against. He had just realized they were in some kind of van, like he had seen from the windows of his apartment, and he was not prepared for this.
"Whoa, dude. You okay?"
A hand came to steady his shoulder. "I - I've never been in a car before," David admitted.
"Hey, it's cool. Us neither. I mean, except for that time with April, when Raph got kidnapped by a street gang. That was awesome."
"That was not awesome, Mikey," reprimanded the authoritative voice - Leonardo, David had surmised by now. "Nothing about that was awesome."
"Wait, April?" It took David only a second to dredge the name from his memory. "Not April O'Neil?"
There was silence, and then the pillowcase lifted from his head. "You know April O'Neil?"
David blinked at the face in front of him. Raphael. "Sure. She taught me to code when I was eight."
Raphael studied him, possibly for signs of deception. "April met you when you were eight?"
"Yes. Is that important?"
Raphael stared at him a moment longer, before thumping back against the wall of the van. "Shit, guys. That explains why April wasn't scared of us." He ran a hand over his face. "Oh man. I think we really fucked up."
"No, but what's his excuse?" Mike asked, hooking a thumb towards the driver's seat.
"He's a whackbag, he don't need an excuse."
"Forget about that," Leonardo said. "Master Splinter must have found out where David was by talking to April. Why didn't he tell us?"
"My mom didn't tell me either," David said. They all looked at each other for a moment, and then he let his head fall back against the floor of the van. "Why do parents suck?"
"Hey, they're not that bad," said Casey. "One time my old man -"
"Shut up, Casey." Raphael kicked the back of the seat. "Can't you see we're having a moment here?"
"Oh, sorry," Casey said. "Just cuz three cool dudes never climbed in my window saying they were my brothers."
Raphael rolled to his feet to hang over Casey's shoulder. "Hey. You know you're an honorary Hamato."
"An honorary what?" said David.
"Hamato." Michelangelo smiled at him. "It's your family name, bro."
"David Hamato…?" It sounded foreign.
"Hamato David," Leonardo corrected softly.
It would truly have been a touching scene, if the people who claimed to be his family hadn't just kidnapped him from his bed.
They loosened the blankets and helped him sit up, and he took stock of exactly what they had meant by everything.
They had left the furniture. The computer, with its rat's nest of cords, had stymied them, and they'd decided to abandon the books. But they'd taken his baskets of medicines, and the breathing machine, and the UV lamp, and they hadn't hurt Snowflake.
That was a big plus, as far as David was concerned.
A big minus was that they'd forgotten to grab any clothes from the closet, and so all he had was the pajamas he was wearing.
His brothers wouldn't explain where they were going or why. Instead, he got some bizarre - and, he suspected, greatly embellished - story about how Raph had met Casey, who previously had been an international hockey star, but who had given up his career on the ice to become a masked superhero. No one seemed to think that the part about why a grown man had agreed to help a teenager kidnap his own brother required any explanation.
It felt like a few hours before the van jounced up a final road and rolled to a stop.
"Well, we're here," said Casey. "Ain't it great?"
David craned his neck, but he couldn't see out the windshield. Not that it mattered. Wherever they were, he didn't want to be here.
Leonardo cracked open the back door of the van and peered out, then quickly withdrew. "Mikey," he said, "secure the perimeter. Raph, take David's things to his room."
"Where's his room?" Raph asked.
"He can use my grandma's room," Casey said. "Top of the stairs, first one on the left. I'll show you."
"What are you going to do?" Mike asked Leo.
"Safeguard the package," Leonardo replied, in a completely serious tone.
"Bro," Raph said, after a beat of silence, "you gotta stop saying things like that."
Instead of answering, Leo made a small hand signal. Mike took off, vanishing into the pre-dawn gloom, while Raph grabbed whatever wasn't physically connected to David and started towards what David presumed was a house.
"Can you move?" Leo asked, when they were alone.
David pushed the blankets away, tightened the mask against his face and made sure the IVs were secure. "Yeah. If you can carry my gear."
Without comment, Leo lifted the IV pole in one hand and the CPAP unit in the other, and waited for David to set the pace.
He scooched to the end of the van's deck, and peered outside, as Leo had done. A fat half-moon hung just above the horizon, partly veiled by low clouds, and aside from that he couldn't process what he was seeing in the weak light. It wasn't Manhattan, that was for sure.
He stretched one bare foot towards the ground, and jerked back when he felt something totally unfamiliar against his sensitive sole.
"What's the matter?" Leo asked in alarm.
"What is that?" David asked. He tried to remember what kinds of things typically covered the ground outside. "Is - Is that grass?"
"I guess?" Leo said. He seemed to want to treat the offending plant as a threat, and yet it was so obviously not.
"I - I don't like it." David pulled his knees to his chest. "Leo, I want to go home. This is crazy."
"Sorry," Leo said. Somehow, without getting the lines tangled, he climbed around David and dropped to the ground. "I can carry you. Climb on my back."
David couldn't believe he was doing this, but the next thing he knew, Leonardo was carrying him and his equipment across the dark grass and into a dilapidated house.
Mikey caught up to them as they crossed the porch. "Perimeter is secure," he reported, without making any comment on David's mode of transportation.
"I'm gonna run for some food," Casey said, as he passed them on the stairs to the second floor.
"Bring back some jerky!" yelled Raph, from what was presumably David's room.
"Can you get us some cereal?" Mikey asked. "The sugary kind?"
"What part of diabetic vegetarian do you all not understand?" David demanded.
"Uh," said Mikey. "The first part, and also the second part."
"Oh my god." David leaned his forehead against the knot in Leo's mask. "You're going to kill me."
"Casey, bring us fruits and vegetables," Leo ordered. "Raph, if you want meat, you can hunt for it."
"Are you kidding me?" David asked, but he couldn't get away from these people unless he wanted to tear out his lines, which he really didn't.
Leo carried him upstairs and put him in a freshly-made bed. "Welcome to having siblings," he said.
"This is not having siblings," David said, even as he compulsively checked his lines again. "This is criminal abduction of a minor."
Leonardo just smiled. "And what are you going to do about it?"
All he got in reply was a glare. Leonardo may have been a pretty crafty guy, but David had talents his brothers could only dream of.