Watching three people meditating was boring as hell. As darkness fell over the farm, Mike was already having trouble staying awake.
Focus, Mikey.
Splinter had lectured him often enough on his focus. He was constantly distracted by bright colors, moving objects, and the surreal ideas that floated endlessly through his own head. He also had a particular talent for falling asleep, even while on guard duty.
He couldn't afford that now. No one was here to back him up, and his brothers were counting on him.
He checked the incense compulsively, just for something to do. He patrolled the shadowy perimeters of the room, snapping out his nunchaku at random intervals, to prove to himself that he was alert and ready for anything. He moved back into the circle of light to check his brothers' pulses, and then looked out through the dark windows.
Again. Again. Again.
Just like training.
Boring.
"You are the best, Mikey," he said out loud, just to break the oppressive silence. "Your medicines are so good, you don't even need to be watching them. They are totally safe. Way to go, dude."
"You cannot rely only on your natural talent, Michelangelo," chided the Master Splinter in his head. "You must practice discipline."
Mike whined, but there was no one there to be swayed by it.
Well, there was Snowflake. The blind cat didn't seem to know or care that all the lights were off, and came padding down the stairs to investigate why her master and his companions were being so quiet. She efficiently located the only one who was in a normal state of consciousness, and butted her head against his leg.
"Hey, Snowflake," said Michelangelo, grateful to have someone to talk to. "Why is your name Snowflake? If I had a cat, I would name him Klunk."
Snowflake did not seem interested in this information, but that kind of reaction had never deterred Michelangelo.
"Are you hungry?" Mike asked. "What does D feed you?"
Snowflake meowed, which was not a very helpful answer.
"I'll find you something," Mike said. "Come on, kitty."
He hesitated in the kitchen doorway, but - surely it was fine to be just in the next room for a few minutes. His brothers were totally safe. David would want him to take care of the cat. Yeah. It was cool.
He hurried through warming some leftovers. It was easy to get lost in the rhythm of preparing a meal, and he had to keep reminding himself that he was in the middle of something else. But inexorably, his mind drifted.
David came into the kitchen with his medicine basket tucked under one arm. "My blood sugar is dropping," he announced. "What am I allowed to eat?"
"You want a peanut butter sandwich?" Mike asked. He'd been guarding the kitchen all morning, preventing Raph from filching any unapproved snacks. Mixing herbal medicines with the wrong foods was super, super dangerous. Mike couldn't remember how many times he had tried to explain this to his brother, but Raph never seemed to understand that something he couldn't punch could be dangerous. "I make a mean peanut butter sandwich."
"Is it possible to make a bad peanut butter sandwich?" David asked. He sank into a chair, sliding his basket across the table.
"Oh yeah," Mike said, already busying himself with the loaf of bread. "Takes a special kind of skill, but totally possible."
"Maybe make me a bad one, then," David said. "I don't know if I can handle a good one."
It was almost physically painful, but Mike made the simplest peanut butter sandwich he knew how, and brought it to the table. He settled in his own chair, leaning forward and looking at his brother with worry. "How do you know you gotta eat?" he asked.
"Um." David took a huge bite of the sandwich, apparently too hungry - or whatever exactly he was - to exercise more caution. "Test my glucose."
"Show me how?" Mike said. "I'm one of those people who's gotta see things."
David stuffed another quarter of the sandwich in his mouth, and fished around in the basket. "Glucose meter," he said, setting a palm-sized electronic device on the table. "Finger poker." Something like an odd-looking pen. "Test strips." A sheaf of little pieces of paper. "You poke your finger, put a little blood on the test strip, put it on the meter, and see what your glucose level is."
"Can you do it?" Mike asked. He could see the pieces, but he couldn't quite visualize how they went together.
"I'm not going to poke myself again," said David, "but you can. It won't do anything to you."
Mike looked at the finger poker warily.
"Oh, come on," said David. "Your brother carries swords around all the time, and somehow I think they're not just for show."
It was true that Mikey had a variety of sharp implements in his own belt at all times, and he knew how to use them. He just preferred not to use them on himself. As it dawned on him that David deliberately punctured himself multiple times a day, he realized that his brother was, in fact, a total badass.
He picked up the finger poker. "Where?" he asked.
"Anyplace that will make you bleed," David said.
Mike knew the answer to that one all too well. He'd never gleaned much from Splinter's anatomy lessons, but he had made himself and his brothers bleed often enough that he was exquisitely familiar with the location of every vein and artery in the mutant Turtle body.
He picked one, and struck.
"Wow," David said. "That… level of force probably wasn't necessary."
"Where do I put it?" Mike asked, balancing the quivering bead of blood on the pad of his finger.
"Here." David pushed one of the test strips towards him, tapping at the colored spot where the blood needed to go.
Mike smeared his blood on the paper, then put his finger in his mouth while David showed him how to insert the test strip into the glucose meter.
"You seriously do this every day?" he mumbled around his smarting digit.
"The alternative is death," David replied, and before Mikey could fully put that in context of what Master Splinter had always told them about their ninja training, the meter beeped and a squared-off number appeared on the screen. "5.7 millimoles," David said. "Congratulations. You have normal blood sugar."
"What was yours just now?" Mike asked.
"3.1," David said.
Mike didn't know what a millimole was, but he understood that the difference between three and five was usually not very important. "So then what?" he asked.
"So then I ate something," David said. He poked the last corner of sandwich into his mouth, and licked his fingers. "That was an excellent bad sandwich, by the way. And now I need to take insulin to help me digest it."
Mike decided not to ask questions about why eating a peanut butter sandwich caused David to have more tiny animals in his blood (maybe a millimole was a small burrowing mammal with a lot of legs), or what exactly insulin had to do with the whole process. He just watched closely as David filled a syringe from a small vial, and injected it into his arm.
"How do you know how much?" he asked.
David didn't acknowledge the question until he had emptied the needle, pulled it out of his skin, and carefully repackaged it. Then he dug a paper card out of the basket and put it on the table in front of Mikey.
Immediately, Mike's eyes crossed and his head swam. The card was covered in rows of neatly handwritten numbers.
"You have to start from the glucose reading," David said, pointing to the electronic meter to help prompt Mikey as to the meaning of that term, "then factor in a rough estimate of the sugar in what you just ate -" He traced his finger across the middle columns of the card. "- and then you dose that many units of insulin and hope it's about right."
"What if you give too much?" Mike asked.
"Hypoglycemia," David said.
"What if you give too little?"
"Hy-PER-glycemia."
Mike looked at his brother in horror. He didn't even want to know what those words meant.
Mike had thought that he and his bro were making a connection, but when David saw his reaction, he shut down. "If you didn't want this to be your problem," he said, sweeping up all his stuff and jamming it back in the basket, "you should have stayed out of my life. Thanks for the sandwich."
And without giving Mike a chance to say anything, he left the kitchen and stomped upstairs.
The kitchen. Nighttime. A contented cat washing her face on the counter.
"Oh shit," Mike said, and bolted for the living room.
He didn't know how much time had passed, but his brothers were still sitting, statue-like, in the glow of the incense. One of the sticks had burned out, and he replaced it with a fresh one.
Then he wiped his brow. "Okay, Mikey," he said. "You're fine. Nothing happened. You just gotta not zone out again."
A car crunched in the gravel driveway.
"Oh shit!" he yelped.
Then he was moving. Out went the incense - he was more afraid of the light being seen than of the lack of soothing aromas disrupting his brothers' journey on the astral plane. He made sure the front door was locked, then slipped out the kitchen door, aiming to circle around and sneak up on whoever had found their hiding place.
His well-worn nunchaku slid into his palms as he rounded the side of the farmhouse. He pressed back into a shadow, then leaned just far enough out to see who had driven up.
It was an old van. It looked familiar - doubly so. Mike was an intensely visual person, and he had noticed that Casey and April drove similar cars. In the dark, he couldn't tell which was sitting before him - or whether it was someone else's entirely.
He wanted to get closer, but he didn't want to give himself away. Was it too much to hope that the uninvited guest would just leave? It was super creepy, the way the van was just sitting there with its lights off.
Maybe he should attack. Attacking was always good. Unless the visitor was April or Casey. Then it would be super bad.
Maybe he could lure them away by circling behind the van and making bird calls. Would a creepy visitor follow bird calls in the middle of the night? He should have paid more attention when Master Splinter taught them how to manipulate the enemy's mind.
He hastily pulled himself back from that train of thought as the van door opened and someone began to climb out.
Even in the dark, it was unmistakably Casey Jones.
Mikey intercepted him on the porch steps. "Heyyyyy," he said to the man, who was totally startled by his sudden appearance. He wasn't a terrible ninja after all. "Great to see you again. Not really the best time, though."
"What's going on?" Casey asked. "Why're all the lights off?"
"About that," Mike said, as he propelled Casey off the porch and around towards the kitchen door. He couldn't let Casey go through the front door into the living room, where his brothers were sitting, drugged and unconscious. "Uh…"
"Did the power go down again?" Casey asked. "Damn squirrels are always nesting in the transformers."
"Yes," Mike said. "Yes, exactly that."
"Had about enough of blackouts last month," Casey said, referring to the massive power outage that had struck the Northeast six weeks earlier. "I've got some emergency lights in the attic," he said, as he strode through the back door into the kitchen. "I'll go get them." And he strode right on towards the living room.
"No!" Mike shouted. He jumped to block Casey's path, but he couldn't keep up with the tall human's stride. "Don't -"
But it was too late. Casey had entered the living room and hit the light switch by reflex, and the overhead fixture came on to reveal the three Turtles who had been sitting motionless in the dark.
"What the -" Casey started.
"I can explain," Mike said, ducking under Casey's arm, but the half-formed explanations that had begun convening in his mind immediately dispersed again when he saw that there were not three Turtles sitting motionless under the lights.
David had fallen over.
"Oh, shit," Mike said.