"What the hell just happened?" Raph demanded. He was following David, who was storming up the beach - not angry as he had been before, but with a sense of urgency.
"Donatello is still out there," David repeated. "I absorbed him, but only partially. All the parts of my turtle soul that I didn't accept re-embodied somewhere else."
"So…?" Raph said slowly. "If you didn't accept 'em, that means you don't want 'em, right?"
"Maybe," David said, without slowing his pace. "But I need to find out."
"And we're goin' where in such a hurry?" Raph asked.
"Just for a second, I think Donatello and I merged completely," David said. "And then, as I rejected all the parts I couldn't handle and threw them back out, I saw a…" He trailed off, seeming unsure how to continue.
"You had a vision?" Leo suggested.
"Something like that," David said. "Anyway, I think I know where he went."
"Mind fillin' us in?" Raph asked. He was beginning to struggle to keep up. His extra muscle mass bogged him down in the sand, without seeming to make it much easier to push off. His still-mostly-human pipsqueak brother was outdistancing him.
"It was dark," David said. "Enclosed. Maybe a cave." He pointed towards the rock outcropping that jutted into the sea ahead of them. "I have a feeling it's over there."
Raph let him go on ahead, and dropped back to talk to Leo. "Seems way more okay with all this spirit stuff all of a sudden," he said.
"I'd say that's a good thing," Leo replied.
Raph shook his head. "What'd we bring him here for? A crash course in meditation, or getting it through his skull that he's a Turtle?"
"Is there a difference?" Leo asked philosophically, and Raph considered throttling him. "This is his journey. How was he going to accept the missing piece of his spirit, if he didn't first accept that spirits exist?"
Well, that kind of made sense. These stepwise approaches always did, when Leo explained them, but they just never came naturally to Raph. He believed in doing things all at once.
The sand underfoot was turning rocky, and then it was just rock, as they came up the smooth lower slope of the cliff. David was standing at the peak of the gentle rise, his hands on his hips, glaring at the nearly-vertical upper part of the monolith.
"Well, crap," he said, as his brothers caught up to him.
Raph followed his gaze, and saw an opening some fifty feet up the side of the cliff. Automatically, his eyes trailed back down towards the ground, picking out handholds and treacherous spots as he scanned the rock wall.
"We can climb it," he said.
David looked at him sharply. "Are you crazy?" He pointed to a stretch where the cliff leaned outwards over the water. "We cannot climb that. We will fall and kill ourselves."
Raph mirrored David's gesture, but looked at Leo. "Leo, climb it."
Leo didn't move. "You don't give the orders here."
David looked back at Raph, waiting for his reaction to that, but Raph said nothing, and in a moment Leo smiled and began scaling the cliff with practiced ease.
"Okay," David said, when Leo had gotten about halfway up the wall, moving at a steady pace. "But I can't climb it."
Raph moved to the foot of the cliff, getting a good grip on the first handholds. "Get on."
"What?"
Raph jerked his head towards his shoulder. "Get on. I can carry you."
"You -"
"Dave, are we doin' this or not?" Raph snapped. "Just get on already."
"Don't call me Dave," Dave grumbled, as he wrapped himself around Raph's shell.
"Just don't fucking lean back," Raph said, and then he was lifting both of them up the wall and it felt amazing.
"I'm going to die I'm going to die I'm going to die," David kept repeating in his ear.
"Y'ain't gonna die," Raph said, reaching for the next handhold. "We're not high enough."
"I don't think you understand how gravity works."
"I will throw you off this cliff," Raph said, and David actually shut up for a minute while he navigated a difficult area of the rock face.
"Does that mean you love me?" David asked, as Raph pulled them over the edge of the cave entrance.
Raph pushed him into a wall, in the most affectionate way.
"How are you with darkness?" Leo asked, when Raph and David found him in the deep gloom just a few yards into the cave.
"Never tried it," David replied. He glanced into the pitch blackness that lay ahead of them. "Why is the astral plane so awful? Isn't it supposed to be all my favorite places? Or, you know, soft couches with angels feeding me grapes?"
"The astral plane is a place of intense struggle for all but the most enlightened," Leo said. Raph wondered which old master had supposedly said that.
"Great," David said. "Let's go, I guess."
They moved into the cave, Leo leading and Raph behind. David inched along between them, his sneakers scuffing against the smooth rock with every step.
"Can I just carry him again?" Raph asked. "We're never gonna get anywhere like this."
"Shut up, Raph," came David's voice from the blackness. "You think you can push people around just because you're stronger than them? Get over yourself."
"When have I ever pushed you around?" Raph demanded, deliberately ignoring the body slam of just moments ago. "I carried you up a cliff because you wanted to go. Sorry for trying to help."
"I didn't ask for your help," David snapped.
"Yeah, well maybe you should," Raph said, and was glad no one could see him sulking. Being strong was what he did. It wasn't about having power over his family. It was about being able to flatten anyone who so much as laid a finger on the people he loved. He wasn't good enough, wasn't himself enough, until he had the physical strength to stop anyone who might try to do his family harm.
"Knock it off, you two," Leo said. "David, are we going the right way? Do you sense him?"
"I think it's this way," David said, and Raph followed the sound of his shoes to the left.
The rough walls scraped his massive shoulders, and then they came out into a domed chamber, starkly lit by the sun streaming in through a crack in the ceiling.
Raph's hands went to his sai. He didn't know what to expect. The Donatello they had just encountered had been slow and gentle; the one he knew most recently from home was angry and violent. What had David absorbed? What was left?
He followed David closely, guarding him despite the fresh sting of his words. As they moved towards the center of the chamber, all seemed quiet.
"Donatello?" David called out. "Are you here?"
Silence. Dust motes floating in the air. And then, the bright sound of a rock falling over other rocks.
Raph turned instantly towards the sound, and Leo did likewise. David followed a moment later, his reflexes not honed through years of training.
"It's him," David said quietly. "He's afraid of us."
"How do you know?" Leo whispered back.
"I just know."
Another scrape of rock, and Raph picked him out: a figure in the dark, humanoid, but clearly Turtle. He was perched on a slope of loose stone - maybe the pulverized remains of what had fallen out of the ceiling - trying not to move and give away his position.
"I see 'im," he murmured. "What do you wanna do, Leo?"
"Call him," Leo said. "See if he'll come to you again."
Leaving his sai in his belt, Raph slowly raised his empty hands towards Donatello. He focused his thoughts, willing the lost spirit to come.
The shadowy figure shrank back.
Raph moved forward, edging sideways, trying not to look threatening.
"Raph -"
"Let me do this, Leo," he said through gritted teeth. Half hunched over, making himself look as small as possible, he moved one step at a time towards the cowering spirit.
It wasn't until he got close that he could see what Donatello was. He was barely mutant, with the flattened head and pronounced beak of a normal turtle. His hands and feet were well-formed, but he used them like an animal, shifting toward the wall on all fours and then pulling his limbs close to himself in an instinctively defensive gesture.
"Hey," Raph said softly. He leaned slowly into a seated position, the gravel crunching under his weight. "Is that you, Donnie? Do you know me?"
The spirit watched him, wide-eyed and uncomprehending.
"It's okay," Raph said. "We ain't gonna hurtcha."
He reached out a hand, and Donatello let him touch his beak, as he had in the warm sea.
"I miss you, buddy," Raph said. "You're hurting too, right? You and David gotta work this thing out." He stroked Donatello's cool, scaly skin with his calloused fingers. "Did you get a little bit of your connection back? Can you call him now?" His hand stilled on Donatello's beak. "Tell him to come."
They held each other's gaze. Then Donatello's beak slid across his palm as he turned to look towards the other half of his soul, and then David was coming towards them as if drawn by an invisible cord.
"He's okay," Raphael said, barely above a whisper, to both of them. "You're safe."
"How can this be any part of me?" David asked, as Donatello raised himself up on his forelimbs to look his human self in the eye. "I - I don't recognize this." He blinked at the reptilian face before him. "Who are you?"
"I don't think he can talk," Raph said.
"This isn't what I saw," David said. "This isn't what I was looking for." He took a step back. "I don't want this."
"He's not what he looks like," Raph said. "Let him show you."
David shook his head. "I don't know how."
"Hold out your hand."
Slowly, David lifted his hand, pale in the dim light, and let it hang there between them.
Donatello squinted at it with his wide-set eyes, and then pressed his beak into the soft palm.
David's head tilted back as something passed between them. "Where…? Oh. Oh. I understand. Yes." He stared, empty-gazed, at the ceiling. "No. I don't. I - I'm sorry."
Leo approached on silent feet, and stood at Raph's side as David and Donatello exchanged pieces of their soul.
"I will," David said. "And thank you."
Donatello slowly withdrew, while David remained motionless. With the angle his head was at, his hair fell nearly to his rear - and then it slid downwards, falling softly into the dust.
As Donatello pulled back, the shadows seemed to reach forward to envelop him. In a blink, he was gone.
And when David lowered his head, he was bald. It took Raph a minute longer to realize he had no eyebrows, and his ears and nose had been reduced to slits.
When David saw his brothers staring at him, his hand went to his scalp, and then he turned slowly to look at the shorn pile of hair. "The astral plane has weird metaphors," he said, and then added to the weirdness factor by twisting the hair into a bundle and putting it in his pocket.
"I'm beginning to understand," David said, and Raph sure hoped he was about to provide some exposition.