They sat there a while longer, listening to birds neither of them could identify, watching the light spread across the landscape. David wasn't sure how long it had been before the door banged below them and he saw the top of Raph's head emerge from under the edge of the porch roof.
Raph strode a few paces out into the yard, then turned on his heel and looked directly at his brothers.
"What are you two knuckleheads doing up there?" he demanded. "We getting breakfast before it's time for lunch?"
"Excuse me," Mike said, without budging from his casual position, legs extended and ankles crossed. "It's David's first time voluntarily going outside. I think the phrase you're looking for is 'Congratulations.' Also, 'Wow, what a beautiful morning.'"
"Yeah, whatever," Raph said, with only a perfunctory look at the scenery, more a scan for danger than an appreciative gaze at the softly-lit rural scene. "Leo's gonna be pissed if we don't get moving."
"Since when do you care about that?" Mike said. "Pissing off Leo is like his favorite game," he added, leaning towards David as though this were confidential information.
"So I've been gathering," David replied.
"Don't make me come up there," Raph said, pointing a thick, threatening finger.
"Can he do that?" David asked.
"Oh yeah," Mike said. "Climbing up buildings is kinda what we do." With a theatrical grunt that clearly did not reflect the actual amount of effort it took for him to stand up, he got to his feet, extending a hand to David. "Come on, dude. The people are gonna riot if I don't cook their breakfast for them." He said this last in a tone loud enough to ensure Raphael could hear him.
Whatever Raphael replied was not loud enough for David to hear him, but the front door banged again, and David let Mike help him climb back in through the window, and then he shut the pane while Mike moved the chair and opened the door.
"Hey, everybody," Mike said loudly, pushing David ahead of him as they entered the kitchen. "It's David! We got his door unstuck. These old houses, amirite?"
David wasn't sure why Mike was covering for him, but he decided not to say anything.
"Let's get moving," Leo said. He had put a pan on the stove, and was standing near it as if to ensure it didn't wander off. "We're losing daylight."
"Chill, bro," Mike said, as he began efficiently cracking eggs into the pan. "You know the sun literally just came up, right? We have, like, eleven hours until it gets dark."
"And at the rate you're moving we're going to need all of them," Leo said in a soft tone, leaning uncomfortably close to Mike before walking away as though he hadn't just engaged in subtle intimidation tactics against his own brother.
Mike didn't seem to mind, and as he fried the omelettes he carefully guarded the kitchen against any intrusion of silence.
"So. D," he said. "I know you're not really cool with the whole outdoors thing yet, so I found you some shoes that will maybe fit -" He nodded to a pair of old-fashioned but indestructible-looking boots sitting by the back door. "- and also I'm bringing blankets so you don't have to sit on the ground."
"Thanks," David said, and he almost really meant it.
"Are you serious?" Raph said. "All that just so he don't have to touch the grass?"
"Yeah," Mike said, challenging anyone to question him again. "And all this just so you don't have to get your own bowl of cereal." He served the steaming omelettes with a professional flourish. "Aren't I just the nicest guy?"
David had to admit that Michelangelo had a way of making sure everyone's needs were taken care of. He even brought David a fork this time, and noticed right away when David didn't eat his omelette with sufficient gusto.
"Something wrong with it?" Mike asked. "You want ketchup?"
"No, it's okay," David said, putting his fork down. "It's just that I ate already. I can't eat too much at once."
Without discussion, the other three brothers divided the remains of David's omelette between them, by the simple expedient of grabbing as much of it as they could, eying each other suspiciously the whole time.
"I'm going to -" David started.
"You're going to nothing," Leonardo said, wiping flecks of omelette from his mouth with the back of his hand. "We're leaving right now."
"Put your shoes on," Mike said as he gathered up the plates, and he seemed to think there was nothing odd about referring to Casey's heirloom footwear as belonging to David.
David thought it was better not to argue.
He did, however, balk at the threshold, when Leonardo opened the kitchen door and gestured him out.
"He ain't gonna do it," Raph growled, as David backed up a step and eyed the world beyond the doorframe with the same mistrust as the day before.
"Rule-breaking badass with nothing to lose," Michelangelo said, as though this were a sentence that had any meaning to anyone other than himself and David.
Raph looked at him as though he had lost his mind. "Say what?"
David took a deep breath. "Right." And he strode out into the dusty yard.
His brothers followed. Or, rather, they accompanied him in their own unique styles. Leonardo led the four of them, insisting that they follow the exact path he had planned the day before. Michelangelo stuck close to David's side, encouraging him literally every step of the way. And Raphael circled, his hands on the daggers in his belt, daring anything to attack or impede them.
It was disorienting. It was the first time he had walked outside in daylight without a hood pulled tight over his head, and the lack of a ceiling above him made him feel like he was going to either fall over or float off the ground. He found that despite being able to see the path in front of him, he could not judge the length of it. Everything seemed very close and very far away at the same time. The tall grass under his feet rippled in the wind, making the ground seem to move, unsettling his footing. His toes jammed against the thinly-padded inside of the boots, causing little spikes of pain. At least it was better than stepping directly on all those rough, pointy-looking plants.
Before he knew it, he was at the lake, and he was exhausted.
"You did awesome, bro," Mike was saying, as he hurriedly flapped open the blankets bundled in his arms, and helped David sit on them. "So good at this."
"Can I go home now?" David said, and he heard his own voice like the trees and the lake, close and far away at the same time.
"No," Leonardo said. He had remained standing, scanning the horizon for any signs of danger. "You're going swimming."
"I don't know how to swim," David said.
"You'll know what to do," Leonardo replied, and his calm tone conveyed either total confidence in David's ability, or alarming disinterest in whether his prediction turned out to be true.
"It is not remotely plausible that you can hold your breath for half an hour," David said.
Leonardo turned to Raph with that same unflappable calm. "Raphael, setsumei suru."
"You know -" Raph took his hands from the daggers, cracked his knuckles, and looked at the lake. "Just once in a while, I like your orders."
And with a whoop, he charged towards the water and dived in.
Nobody said anything until after the ripples died away, ricocheting off the sandy shoreline and crashing back into themselves until they evened out.
"That wasn't a very strategic admission, was it?" Leonardo commented to Mike.
"I don't know anything about strategy," Mike replied. "I'm just always big on sharing how we feel."
"I am hating everything about this," David said loudly, eliciting a sympathetic "mmm" from Mikey and absolutely no such response from Leonardo.
"I'm sure you're also going to hate taking your clothes off," Leonardo said instead.
"I am not taking my clothes off."
"You're not going swimming with them on."
"I'm not going swimming at all."
"Trust me," Leonardo said, which David really didn't. "You don't want to do this involuntarily."
"Shouldn't Raph have come up by now?" David asked. He wasn't really sure how long a person should be able to hold their breath, but it seemed as though far too many seconds had ticked by.
Leo and Mike just shrugged, and turned their eyes to the lake.
David counted at least four more minutes before Raphael came slogging up out of the water, looking delighted with the whole experience. "It sure ain't the East River," he said, as he came over and dripped on the blankets, probably on purpose.
"Are you implying you go swimming in the East River?" David asked.
Raph wiped the beaded water from one muscled arm, flicking it towards Michelangelo, definitely on purpose. "Yup."
David pulled his feet away from the growing wet spot. "Do you know what the pollution loads are in the East River?"
"Not a clue," Raph said, in a tone that strongly suggested he did not care to learn.
David opened his mouth to enlighten him anyway, but Leo smoothly spoke over him. "Raphael, would you like to peel David out of his clothes and throw him in the lake?"
"Sure would," Raphael replied, already moving to do exactly that. "Damn, Leo, you're really getting good at this leader thing all of a sudden."
As David shrank away from the oncoming indignity, Leonardo somehow restrained his musclebound brother with nothing more than a small gesture. "David, would you like Raphael to peel you out of your clothes and throw you in the lake?"
"Hell no!" David squeaked, an octave too high.
"Then I suggest you take care of it yourself," Leonardo said, and seemed to think that settled the argument.
David hugged himself protectively, as Raph watched him with a predatory stare, and Leo just plain watched him.
"Wow, super helpful," said Mike, who had been uncharacteristically quiet while this conversation went on. "Seriously, guys, could you back off like two inches?"
Leo and Raph exchanged a look, then silently withdrew to a spot on the lakeshore just out of earshot.
Michelangelo looked at David with an expression of earnest honesty. "I promise it's gonna be okay," he said.
"Is there any way I'm going to get out of this?" David asked.
"Absolutely none."
David closed his eyes, unbuttoned his pajama shirt, and shrugged out of it. He knew Michelangelo could see everything - his skinny arms, the track marks from his IV needles and insulin injections, the bony plating that crushed the air out of him. The pale yellow stripes that he'd actually kind of liked until he realized his brothers didn't have them. Leonardo had seen it all and hadn't said anything, but Mike wasn't as good at keeping his mouth shut.
"It's cool," Mike murmured.
Still without opening his eyes, wishing he were anywhere but here, David toed out of the borrowed boots and slid off his backwards pants, shifting to keep his tail hidden under himself. He hadn't been able to help noticing that his brothers had them too, but he was still more sensitive about that than about any other part of his hopelessly deformed body.
"You gonna be able to walk?" Mike asked, in that same, soft tone.
"Yeah," David said, and keeping his eyes on the ground, not accepting Mike's outstretched hand, he lifted himself to his feet and shuffled towards the water. "You're not going to let me drown?" he asked, as his brothers surrounded him, their silent strength reassuring and terrifying in almost equal measures.
"We're not going to let you drown," Leonardo said, and together they led him into the water.
His feet squished in mud that he couldn't see, and he was pretty sure there were fish down there, and the hard bodies of his brothers wouldn't let him back up, and then he was chest-deep in the lake and Michelangelo was whispering in his ear.
"Breathe. Don't panic. You were born for this."
And they held his hands, and pulled him down.
He didn't know how long he floated in the airless dark. Without sight, without the rhythm of breathing, time didn't seem to matter. A part of his brain that he hadn't known he had, that seemed to be in no hurry to go anywhere or do anything, took over his body, holding him safe in the void.
He would have expected a compulsion to tread water. He would have expected a desperation to get to the surface. Instead he just hung there, neutrally buoyant a few feet below the rippling line between lake and sky, and inhaling again seemed like something he could get around to whenever.
His lungs were still expressing total satisfaction with the situation when his arms lifted and he felt his brothers pulling him back up.
When they broke the surface, his feet automatically began to paddle, and it seemed to take no effort to hold himself at just the right depth. His brothers were watching him as he tried to process what had just happened.
"Can - Can we do that again?" he asked.
This time they pulled him horizontal, helping him swim through a shallower area of the lake, letting him take his time looking at the strange plants and the darting fish and the little animals that burrowed in the sand. They didn't take him up until he squeezed their hands. Instinct simply told him when to stick his nose above the surface and draw breath.
His brain didn't quite process exiting the water. The next thing he knew, he was sitting on the blankets in the warm sun, and there seemed to be no great urgency to put his clothes back on.
"How do you feel?" Michelangelo asked.
"I think I'm having an extreme reality crisis," David replied. "How was that possible?"
"You're a Turtle," Michelangelo said. Then he stretched out on his stomach, and soon they all did, and the comfortable sleepiness that came over them was an excellent way for David to avoid the question of what, exactly, he was.
They left him alone for most of the rest of the day, letting him process in his own time. In the evening, though, Leonardo knocked on David's bedroom door, and pushed it open without waiting for a response, and it quickly became apparent that Raphael and Michelangelo were standing right behind him.
"We showed you our world," Leonardo said, in a deferential tone markedly different from his usual authoritative cadences. "Will you show us yours?"
David, who was sitting on the bed, dressed in his pajamas again, but with one sleeve rolled up as he prepared for his bedtime routine, thought a minute, and then gestured them in.
They knelt on the floor in front of him, arranging themselves in a row without discussion.
"This is my CPAP machine," David began, laying a hand on the little black unit standing at the corner of the bed. "Continuous Positive Airway Pressure. I have trouble inflating my lungs when I'm lying down, so it helps me not stop breathing at night."
He moved his hand to the looping lines of the IV needles. "This is…" He hesitated. "Well, you don't want to know what this is. A lot of things that keep me alive."
He gestured to the basket at his side. "My glucose meter and insulin. I don't have enough of a hormone involved in the absorption of nutrients from food, so the sugars just accumulate in my blood and cause me to pass out. I have to check my blood glucose levels a couple of times a day and give myself more insulin so I don't die."
He fingered through the basket until he uncovered a fat syringe marked with a red band. "Diazepam. In case of life-threatening emergency."
He could see his brothers growing more and more upset as they finally grasped the magnitude of what a constant struggle it was for him to just keep body and soul together. "And what's that?" Michelangelo asked, pointing to the tall gooseneck lamp that stood over the bed.
"My spectrum lamp," David said. "I don't synthesize enough vitamin D, so I need additional UV exposure."
Leonardo looked truly distraught at all this information. "David," he said, "first, we are really sorry that you have to go through all of that. And second -" He spread his hands on the floor in front of him, and eased down into a prostrate posture. "Will you tutor us in English? Our vocabulary is… not as good as I thought."
David stared at him, not sure what to say. After a moment, Leonardo seemed to take this as a no, and sat back on his knees, looking uncomfortable. "You should rest," he said. "You'll need your energy tomorrow."
"Oh, god." David pulled Snowflake into his lap. "What are you making me do tomorrow?"
"Don't worry," Leonardo said. "You won't have to leave the house."