After a while, David got his own fork and knife, and then he ate the pancakes.
They were actually really good.
"What were you doing this morning?" he asked, as Leonardo began to clear the table and clean up the dishes.
"Renshuu," Leonardo said. "Practicing."
"Practicing what?" David asked.
"Ninjutsu," Leonardo replied.
"You're serious," David said. Mike slid a bowl of cubed melon across the table, and David speared a piece with his fork. "You're really ninjas."
"Damn right we're really ninjas," Raphael said, and he speared a whole line of melon cubes with one of the three-pronged daggers he carried in his belt. David had noticed before that this seemed like an inconvenient and dangerous way of carrying such things, aside from the question of why Raph carried them at all.
"Raph, not at the table," Leo said.
"Whatever," Raph replied, reclining in his seat and eating the melon cubes shish-kebab style.
David stored this interesting exchange in the back of his mind.
"Yes, we're really ninjas," Leo said. "We've been training since we could walk."
"Uh-huh," David said. "And will you be ninja-ing some more after breakfast?"
"I'm going to go get some ingredients for the medicine," Mike said. "I need some other stuff anyway."
"I'll go with you," Raph said.
"No, you won't," Leo said. "You'll stay here and do the thing we talked about."
"I'll do it later," Raph said.
"You'll do it now," Leo replied quietly.
David couldn't believe how easy this was.
"Are you my sensei now?" Raph demanded. "You going to tell me what to do?"
"I'm your chunin," Leo said, placing another dish in the rack, "and yes I am."
David reached for another cube of melon, and noticed Mike was doing the same.
"Moka-moka su-su," Raph replied. David didn't understand the words, but the insolent tone was impossible to miss.
"Thirty flips."
"Like hell."
"Guys, seriously?" Mike interrupted. "Raph, just do the thing. It's what we came here for."
Raph grumbled something that David couldn't identify as any language, and the conversation seemed to be over.
"You want to come?" Mike asked, as he put the leftover melon back in the fridge.
Nobody answered, and David realized Mike was talking to him. "Me? Where are you going?"
"Just out in the woods," Mike said, straightening the weird utility belt the guys all wore.
"What?"
"To get the ingredients," Mike said. "You want to come?"
David didn't understand how Mike planned to find ingredients for anything out in the woods. Everything in his mom's kitchen came from the little grocery store down the block. Where it came from before that, he didn't know or care.
But more importantly, Mike had just invited him to go in the woods, a place he knew nothing about and could hardly even imagine. Wasn't it full of dangerous animals? Poisonous plants? Infectious diseases?
His trepidation must have been obvious.
"Well?" Raphael said savagely. "You said you wanted to go outside. Here's your chance."
"That's enough," Leonardo said in a thunderous tone.
"Is that it?" Mike asked, with genuine sympathy. "You're afraid to go outside?"
"I'm not afraid," David said, crossing his arms and looking resolutely at the cuffs of his pajamas.
"Have you ever been outside?" Leonardo asked. Damn, he was perceptive. "Other than last night?"
"… Only once," David admitted.
Leonardo turned the water off and came back to sit at the table. "When?"
David sighed. "I was five. My mom and I had to move. We walked a couple blocks, rode the subway, walked a couple blocks. That was it."
Leonardo nodded, almost as though he had already known. "That's why Splinter didn't know where you were. You moved."
"Why'd you have to move?" asked Michelangelo, who had also drifted back towards the table.
"Just a money thing," David said. "New York is expensive."
This, his brothers didn't seem to relate to at all.
"But… it was weird," David said, into the silence. "What I remember most is standing on the subway platform. It… it reminded me of something."
The others looked at each other for a long moment.
"Home," said Raphael.
David looked up from his sleeves. "What…?"
"We grew up on a subway platform," Raphael said. "Abandoned, sealed off from the tracks. Just had a back entrance to some service tunnels. But some of the signs and markings were still on the walls, and we could always hear the trains. You remember."
"I don't even know what you're saying," David replied. "What do you mean, you grew up on a subway platform?"
"We," Leonardo said, and that was all the answer he gave. "We have a lot to talk about - after we do our work." He met David's gaze. "You can do anything you want, today."
David didn't like the way Leonardo added that qualifier, but he took it - for now.
As promised, Mike went out through the kitchen door and headed towards the woods. Raph settled cross-legged on the floor in a corner of the living room. And Leonardo stayed in the kitchen, cleaning the dishes and then cleaning the swords he carried with some mysterious substance he kept in a jar.
"What's he doing?" David asked, referring to Raphael.
"Meditating," Leonardo replied.
"Why?"
Leo didn't answer.
"What are you doing?"
"Cleaning my swords."
"Why?"
Leonardo was silent long enough that David thought he wasn't going to answer that question either, but then he began speaking in a measured tone. "Ninjutsu is about more than fighting, David," he began. Again, that perceptiveness. "It's about stealth. Deception. Wilderness survival. And discipline. You have to take care of yourself, and you have to take care of your tools. As it is said, the ninja makes the weapon. But I wouldn't want to go into battle with a rusty blade."
"Okay, but why?" David said. "Why study any of that?"
"It's who we are," Leonardo said, and as he cleaned the blades until they gleamed, he told a long story of two young boys in Japan, and their training with a wise ninja master, and their competition for a girl.
And a pet rat.
"Are you telling me," David said, when Leonardo had concluded, "that your father used to be a normal rat, and in that state he managed to learn martial arts, and then he taught it to you just because it's family tradition?"
"Yes," Leonardo said, "yes, and not exactly."
David was more interested in the first two parts. "How many more prequels does this story have, and exactly how many ridiculous premises do they contain?"
"I don't know," Leonardo said. "You're not the only one searching for answers, David."
"What is the plan here?" David asked.
Leonardo gave his swords a final wipe, and slid them into the holsters he carried across his back. "Let me show you something, first."
Half an hour later, David was shirtless and facedown on the kitchen table. "Oh my god," he was saying. "I didn't know it was possible to feel this good."
"And that is a skill called shiatsu," Leonardo told him. After spending ten minutes coaxing David into this position, Leo had spent the next twenty working over every inch of his back, drawing sensations from the bony plating that David had never experienced before.
"How do you know how to do this?" David asked.
"Trial and error," Leonardo replied, continuing with the gentle pressure. "Learning what's good for Turtles."
"We're not turtles," David said.
"I have to ask," Leo said, without interrupting his ministrations. "How do you explain being able to hold your breath for half an hour?"
"What?" David blinked against the grain of the table. "I can't do that."
"No? Not when you're swimming?"
"I've never gone swimming," David said. "I've never been in anything deeper than a bathtub."
He really, really didn't like the pause that ensued.
"Like I told you," Leo said, "you can do anything you want today. But I know what you're doing tomorrow."