Despite the stressful night, David got up early. He was used to it. He looked out the window, and saw the sun rising on a world he'd never seen before.

Trees - an unbroken line of them, a crowd - in fiery colors, below a pink sky wider than he'd ever seen. Off to the left, a bright patch on the ground that it took him a moment to identify as water. More than a puddle – maybe a lake. There wasn't another building in sight. Nor could he see a road, a sidewalk, a car, a fire hydrant, a street light, a telephone pole, a stop sign. It was like waking up on another planet.

And below the window, in an open grassy area, his brothers were beating each other up.

It didn't surprise him in the least that they had already resorted to violence to deal with some problem. What did stand out to him was how skillfully they were beating each other up.

Not that he was remotely qualified to judge that kind of thing, but he could see the moves they were using were fast and precise and complex and strong. They sure looked like they knew what they were doing.

They looked like they did this often.

He turned away from the window to take stock of the room. It was warm and bright, the morning sun streaming in to light up a wooden floor. On its way it crossed over the colorful quilt that David had left rumpled on the bed, tangled with his own blankets from home. In a fold at the bottom of the covers, Snowflake was still asleep.

One wall of the room was taken up by the slatted accordion doors of a closet. Inside were stacks of cardboard boxes. David lifted the covers of the topmost ones, and found documents and photos - family records, he supposed. Potentially he could use them later to make someone's life a misery.

Putting that option in the back of his head, he turned to the other end of the room. A wooden desk was barren except for his baskets of medicines. These he searched carefully, satisfying himself that everything was accounted for. Then he checked his glucose and gave himself a dose of insulin.

Sitting next to the desk was a wooden chair. David wedged it under the doorknob. He wasn't sure that worked outside of the movies - certainly he doubted it would slow down his musclebound brothers - but he had to do something.

Then he returned to the window. Strange birds were calling, and his brothers were nowhere in sight.

He sat on the bed to consider his situation. He had few clues about where he was, other than that it definitely wasn't New York. He was outnumbered and hopelessly overpowered by three teenagers who had no compunctions about the use of force. He was in severe danger of having a medical emergency that no one here was equipped to deal with.

This morning, though, he felt pretty good. That was definitely a plus. He had his service cat, and he knew, without a doubt, that he was smarter than his abductors. He could hack the house and make them regret ever dragging him out of his own bed at home in Manhattan.

Of course, that would require him to leave this room.

The silence unsettled him. He knew that his brothers were stealthy, and that they didn't think it was unusual to climb through people's windows. They could be sneaking up on him right now, from any -

A knock at the door.

"Hey D?"

He didn't recall having given them permission to use that nickname. He decided not to answer.

Another knock. "Dude, are you awake?"

Snowflake lifted her head at the noise, then squirmed around, rolling onto her back and sticking her nose under a peak of the blanket. She didn't seem to feel this was worth getting up for.

"Well, I made breakfast." It sounded like Michelangelo. "You can join us, if you're awake. Or I can make you something later, if you're not. Or, you know, whatever. We can do what we want." A pause. "Don't tell Leo I said that. Uh. Okay. Bye."

He had been kidnapped by idiots.

And yet, as always, he was a hostage of his diabetes. His brothers didn't seem to understand this, but he had to eat, often and carefully, if he wanted to not have a seizure and die.

And they didn't want to be cured? He would always be sick, but they could really be normal, could have lives like everyone else. What was wrong with them, to say no to such an opportunity?

Well, he wasn't going to find out by hiding in Casey's grandma's room.

He was good at this. He understood people, and how to get them to do what he wanted. He had been practicing on his mom his whole life.

They were trapped in here with him.

He moved the chair, opened the door, and peered into the hallway.

He had never seen a hallway so long, and he almost fell over from the dizzying perspective. There were half a dozen doors, and a staircase leading up - he'd never been on a third floor - and, in the other direction, the wide staircase leading down towards the front door.

He didn't know the layout of the downstairs, but he could hear voices.

"Kare wa megasamete imasu ka?"

"Shirimasen. Kare wa nani mo iwanakatta."

Right. That was another disadvantage he was at.

He followed the voices as though he wasn't afraid of them.

The next thing he knew, there was a plate flying towards his face, until a hand - green like his own, but so much thicker - caught it inches from his nose.

"Mike." Leo arced the plate onto the table, somehow guiding David into a chair with the same motion.

"Sorry," Mike said. "Habit." He frisbeed a plate towards Raph, who caught it as though this were, in fact, a completely normal way of serving food. "You like pancakes, D?"

David looked at the fluffy stack on his plate. "Pancakes are okay," he said grudgingly.

Mike beamed as though this were the best compliment he had ever gotten, and carried the last two plates to the table, sliding one of them towards Leo.

"Where's Casey?" David asked.

"He went home," Raph said, digging into the pancakes with his bare hands.

"Home?" said David. He noticed there wasn't any alternative to bare hands - no one had put any silverware on the table - so he didn't touch his pancakes at all. "He went back to New York?"

Raph shrugged. "Guess so."

"Let me rephrase that," David said. "We're stranded here?"

"Is there a problem?" Leo asked. He had rolled up one pancake into a tube, but hadn't taken a bite yet.

"Is there a problem with the food?" Mike asked, concern furrowing his brow.

"Yes, there are problems!" Everyone was staring at him. Good. "We're in the middle of who-knows-where with no way of getting medical services if I need them. And silverware."

"Oh, right." Mike jumped up from the table, rummaged in a drawer, and brought back a spoon. "Here you go." As he sat down again, he said, "How's the medicine working?"

Sitting there with the spoon in his hand, all David could manage was: "What?"

"The medicine I gave you." Mike took a big bite of pancake and kept right on talking. "Is it helping?"

David took a slow breath. Weeks ago, Mike had given him a jar of yellowy-brown glop that he'd called medicine. David had been gradually emptying the stuff down the sink. This morning, while searching for his glucose meter, he'd pushed the jar aside without even thinking about it.

"Yes," he said, "but I've almost run out. How are we going to get back to New York to get more?"

"Oh, no problem," Mike said, with a huge grin. "I can find the ingredients here."

Shit.

"But meal planning," Mike went on, while Leo and Raph ate their pancakes as though all the problems had been thoroughly resolved. "What can you eat?"

"I don't eat meat," David said, because it was absolutely not in his interest to lie about this. "I don't eat fish. I do eat eggs. I do eat dairy, but not a lot because it upsets my stomach."

Mike nodded, though it wasn't clear if he was actually taking any of this in. "Okay. No problem. I can make -"

And then David wasn't taking in anything Mike said, because he had just spotted the phone on the wall.