"Hey Mikey," Raph said, the next morning after practice. "Keep little brother busy for a while, okay?"
Mike raised a brow. "'Little brother'? So you're older than him?"
"Yeah!" Raph laughed. "He didn't even want to fight about it! What a chump!"
He hadn't been surprised that Don hadn't wanted to literally fight about it, but he had been surprised that Don hadn't tried to use the position of older-middle as a bargaining chip. He knew his brother's manipulative ways, and he would have been prepared to give up quite a bit for the privilege of being Donnie's onii-san. But Don had merely asked his opinion on the point, and accepted his answer without debate.
"Total sucker," Mike agreed, and then he jogged off to talk Donnie into doing something that would keep him away from the house for a couple of hours.
Raph went inside to get a few things from his pack, then took up a position on the porch swing to clean his sai and wait.
As he swung, polishing his beloved, hard-won weapons, he reflected on the past week. It had been jarring and lonely to not see Donnie - the one Raph had always known - hanging around in the corners, although given what Donnie had turned into lately, it was also kind of a relief. Equally bizarre was seeing Donnie, the essential spark of him, in the flesh, in the form of the Turtle formerly known as David. David was Donatello and he wasn't, tried to show the better aspects of who he could be and didn't always quite get there, became tired and frustrated and slid back to his surly, better-than-you ways.
It was too soon yet to say if he was really going to change, to say whether whoever he ended up being was going to fit comfortably into their family. And it wasn't just his personality: to Raph there had always been four of them, but Mike and Leo were having trouble adjusting to the mere presence of one more brother. It had been a challenge for everyone.
But in between dealing with all that emotional relationship crap, they'd been able to run in the woods, swim in the lake, spar in the open air, and eat as much as they wanted. On the whole, this time at the farm had been so good, Raph kind of wished Leo had given him credit for actually being in favor of the idea.
His sai were shined to perfection, and he was going over them again with a soft cloth just for the pleasure of handling the beautiful blades, when a van crunched up the gravel driveway. Raph heard it coming, of course, but didn't get up, preferring to let April find him lounging coolly in the porch swing.
"Hey, Raph," April called, as she climbed down from the driver's seat. "Are you going to help me with this suitcase? David's clothes weigh a ton."
Shaking his head at how dumb it was to wear clothes at all, Raph headed down the porch steps to grab the suitcase, which looked like it had just travelled there from the 1970s. Then he stuffed a bag of cat food under his arm and hefted a plastic bin in the crook of his elbow.
"Showoff," April said, and Raph just grinned. "So," she said, "where is David? I haven't seen him in ages."
"Sorry, April," Raph said. "He can't talk to you. He's on retreat."
April raised a brow. "On retreat?"
"Yeah," Raph said. "You know, isolation. Sacred withdrawal from the yada yada. Anyway, it's important that he don't see anybody."
"Well, okay," April said, though she sounded disappointed. "I guess I don't want to interfere with that. But tell him I'll see him when he gets home, okay?"
"Sure will," Raph said. "Thanks, April."
He watched her climb back into the van and pull out, and then he hauled the stuff into the house. It took only a second to dump the cat food in the kitchen (Snowflake appeared instantly to press her nose against the bag) and leave the suitcase and the bin around Don's bed upstairs. Then Raph went out looking for his brother.
He found him in the orchard, where Mike was explaining the use of throwing weapons by sniping reddening leaves off the gnarled trees. Donnie's attempts to do likewise were evidenced by the projectiles lying on the ground among the fallen fruit.
"Pick up your damn kunai," Raph snapped, swiping two out of the tall grass in one move, and brandishing them under Mike's snout. "What kind of ninja treats their weapons like that?" He shoved the blades into Mike's hand and turned to Don. "April just brought your suitcase. I put it upstairs."
Don's face lit up instantly. "April is here?"
"No, she left," Raph said.
Don's face fell again. "What? Why?"
"Cuz I told her to," Raph said. "What," he added, at Don's thunderous expression, "you wanted her to see you in your dirty pajamas?"
That instantly straightened Don out. "I guess not," he said. He looked down at himself, picking at the stained pajamas he'd been wearing for almost two weeks now. "I better go change," he said, and headed towards the house.
Raph followed him. "Why do you want to see April so bad anyway?" he asked. "I'm surprised your girlfriend lets you talk to other women."
"Would you lay off about my girlfriend?" Don snapped. "Why are you so hung up on this?"
"Are you kidding?" Raph said. "How'd you even get a girlfriend? Do you sleep with her?"
"No I don't sleep with her!" Don said, his voice rising an octave.
"Why the hell not?" Raph demanded.
Don stopped, glanced around, and then leaned close to Raph. "She doesn't know where Turtles keep their junk," he hissed.
Raph laughed uproariously, causing Don to resume stomping towards the house. Raph jogged to catch up to him. "You gotta tell her sometime, right?" he said.
"Raph, shut up," Don said, without looking at him.
Raph raised his voice instead. "Just tell her!" he said loudly. "Just take your clothes off, and tell her -" He made a lewd gesture towards his tail. "Here it is!"
Don stopped. Something rose up in him, and then it came out.
"Raph, I'm not like you!" he said, in a burst of emotion. "I'm not okay with this whole nudist thing, and I can tell you right now I never will be. Maybe if I was built like -" He gestured at Raph's toned body. "- a Greek god, but I'm not. I'm disgusting. I - I feel like The Ugly Duckling meets The Trumpet of the Swan."
"Say what?" said Raph, who had been following the argument until Don suddenly started talking about birds.
"The Ugly Duckling," Don repeated. "It's a story in which a baby duck doesn't look like the others, and he's sad because he's hideously deformed. And then he finds out that he's not a duck, he's a swan. A totally normal swan." He turned and started walking again. "So I found out I'm not a human, I'm a Turtle. But I'm not a normal Turtle, I'm a skinny, ugly Turtle. Kind of like how Louis is a swan, but he's mute, and all his siblings make fun of him, so he runs away from home and learns to play the trumpet."
"You're making that up," Raph said.
"And then he asks his human friend to cut the webbing out of his foot so he can play the trumpet better," Don continued, as if Raph hadn't said anything. "I always really related to that part."
"I dunno where you're going with this," Raph said guardedly.
"What I'm saying," Don said, as he banged through the kitchen door, "is that I'm trying, Raph. I really am. But I'm never going to be a Turtle. Not the way you want me to be."
"What?" said Leo, who'd been standing by the sink, quietly drinking a glass of water.
"Once again, your perfectionism is screwing everything up," Raph summarized. He pushed Don towards the living room. "Go change your clothes. I'm gonna make lunch, and then we're gonna talk about this."
Don was much calmer after he had taken a shower and put on clean clothes, and Raph felt better after loading a huge stack of hamburgers onto a plate. Mike had churned out a platter of grilled vegetables on sticks, and then they all went out in the backyard to eat and talk.
"I think I understand what you're getting at," said Leo, before Don could say anything. Raph had filled him in a little on the conversation, and he had ruminated on it while the food cooked. Don made a noise of skepticism, and Leo held up a hand to stay his retort. "No, really. We have the same problem." He picked at his veggies-on-a-stick for a moment, gathering his thoughts. "We are American. We want to be American. Master Splinter wants us to be American too, to speak English and understand the culture, because it could help us when we run into a human. But he's Japanese. And he wants us to be Japanese too, at home. But we can't be, because we have to practice being American, and because at bottom, we're just not Japanese. We've never been to Japan." He watched some ants in the grass, his gaze distant. "We can't be who our father wants us to be. It's just not who we are." He looked up. "Knowing what that's like, Donnie, we're trying really hard to respect who you are. We understand you're not going to be like us. We just… we want you to know, and if we're going too far… gomen nasai."
"This is new to me," Don said, accepting Leo's effort to bridge the divide between them. "I haven't had to deal with biculturalism that way. I mean, I'm a New Yorker. My mom is a New Yorker. My grandparents are New Yorkers. We don't have -"
"Wait, what?" Mike interrupted.
Don frowned. "What what?"
"You have grandparents?" Mike said, his half-eaten burger dangling from his hand.
"Of course I have grandparents," Don said. "Where do you think my mom came from?"
"But, like, real live grandparents who know who you are?" Mike asked.
Don tilted his head. "They live in Brooklyn," he said. "I see them all the time."
"Donatello," Leo said slowly. "How many people know you exist?"
Don shrugged. "I'm not exactly an open secret, but my grandparents, and my team, and Aunt Terri and her family, and April, and now Casey, and -"
Leo held up a hand. "How many of them now know we exist?"
"All of them?" Don said.
Leo pressed the hand to his forehead. "Donatello," he said, "we've spent our entire lives making sure people don't know we exist. Do you understand how much danger you've put us in?"
"I don't," Don said. "Let's recap. My mom, took in a severely diabetic turtle-boy and basically adopted him. Her parents, cool with this. A group of her colleagues, studied and treated the turtle-boy without publishing his existence in every academic journal in the galaxy. Aunt Terri and her offspring, don't even seem to notice I'm green. April, had every incentive to spill my secret to the world, told no one but your father. Casey, total lunatic, no one would ever believe him." He looked around at his brothers, holding each of their gazes in turn. "Our parents' theory that any human who laid eyes on us would immediately want to dissect us is simply not supported by the evidence."
"What about our enemies?" Raph asked.
Leo sighed. "Stockman is understandably angry that we destroyed his lab. And the Purple Dragons aren't our enemies, exactly. They just have a problem with anyone who gets in their way, mutant or otherwise."
"What -" started Don, who hadn't yet heard about this aspect of his brothers' lives, but Leo cut him off.
"I don't know, guys," Leo said. "I don't think Master Splinter has been purposely deceiving us all these years. But I think he might have been… mistaken."
It seemed to physically pain him to admit that their master might have been wrong about something, and there was a moment of silence while they all absorbed the gravity of the situation.
"What are we going to do?" Mike asked in a small voice.
"I have an idea," Don said. "But it has to wait until we return to New York."