He'd had the same stupid crush on April they all had, and had probably gotten over it the fastest, because even at the time he knew it was shallow and juvenile. She was the first girl in their lives, and quite pretty to boot, so naturally he'd had a crush on her, but he'd figured after that he was set. Girls were no longer going to be a problem, because he'd gotten the silliness out of his system, like being immunized or something.

But Angel gets under his skin when she isn't even around. Mike's favorite video game for weeks is called Angel Sanctuary and every time he talks about it Raph twitches. It's ten times worse when she's actually there, Raph having developed a dizzying hyper-awareness of her that turns him into a mute idiot whose compass no longer points north but Angel-ward like some lovelorn puppy. It makes him sick.

He takes to avoiding her, made more difficult by the fact that somehow she is now everywhere. She comes over to the lair often, she lives in Casey's neighborhood, and he even runs into her sometimes on supply runs. It is nuts. It is driving him nuts. And soon the punching bag is no longer enough.

But somehow even taking down thirty Purple Dragons all by himself isn't worth seeing the disappointment in her eyes when she finds him, bloodied and hideous, in her bathroom, knowing he needs stitches and making due with butterfly strips. They stare at each other for a long moment, and then she sighs and closes the door behind her, sitting down on the toilet and looking out the window.

"Are you ever gonna stop?" she murmurs once, after he asks where the hydrogen peroxide is. He pours it over a deep cut, reveling evilly in the sting, and decides he can't pretend he hadn't heard her.

"No."

She sighs again, and looks back out the window. "That's what I thought."

It hit him during practice once, and Splinter snapped at him to concentrate, something that hadn't happened in years. Leo had gotten on his case about it afterwards and Raph had been in the middle of formulating a scathing response when the thought struck him that if these were the people he was going to give his utmost devotion and loyalty to for the rest of his life, then perhaps he ought to be a little more civil to them. So he had calmly responded and walked away, causing his brother more consternation and worry than if he'd just yelled back at him.

Raph feels that this is tremendously unfair.

This is as close as Angel can get: friend and ally and even sister. And close she gets. But there are so many reasons that Raph cannot date her that he recites them like a chant sometimes; closes his eyes and mumbles to himself like a crazy old hobo or a crazy old monk:

I can't abandon my family. His clan comes first, even before April and Casey, who are as much his brother and sister as anyone.

I can't die for her. Should the choice arise to save one of his brothers or her, he would choose the brother, and the worst part is he wouldn't even think about it.

I can't make her happy. His personality is completely unsuited to having a girlfriend. He's loud and uncouth and doesn't have much of a filter, he objectifies women, he drinks too much and he keeps too much to himself. And he knows it. Getting along with his brothers is a daily struggle, one he's come close to losing too many times to even think about trying to be that close with someone else.

I can't afford a girlfriend. Angel might not be exactly "high maintenance," but Raph knows he has absolutely nothing to offer her. His favorite activities are training, drinking, and beating up thugs, and while he does enjoy the occasional movie, anything else he might do with a girl would get boring pretty quickly and he knows he doesn't have the patience to pretend to be interested in something he's not.

About the only thing he can think of to do with a girl that wouldn't get old quick doesn't have a mantra, because he won't even let himself think about it enough to forbid himself from it.

So he only uses the mantra in emergencies. Mostly he just punches things and tries to think about something else.

When she hands him an apple he makes a face, and she lifts an eyebrow. He scuffs his toe on the floor, looking down.

"Ate some bad apples when I was a kid," he says. He doesn't say that for a week a bag of rotten apples were all the food Master Splinter could find, and they'd had to eat them, even though they were making them sick, because it was still better than starving.

She retracts the apple and nods.

"I know what you mean," she says, and he thinks she does.

It's hard sometimes.

It's hard when she sits down right next to him during movie night, shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee, and it's even harder when his brothers crowd onto the couch, turning it into one big press of bodies that is no doubt comforting and familial to everyone but him.

It's hard when he follows her (for her own safety) as she goes clubbing with her girlfriends, shedding layers as they dance and flirt and sweat.

It's really hard when she smiles at him, and pushes her hair back just so, her eyes peeking out at him from under her bangs which have inevitably fallen back across her face.

It's hard, but not as hard as when, after the movie, they stay up until 3 am talking, or when she says goodnight to her friends and joins him on the roof with coffee and quiet companionship. It's not as hard as when, after the hair has fallen across her face yet again, she makes a face, yanking at it and threatening to cut it all off and go bald like him.

It's hardest then, because it would be easier to ignore if it was nothing more than lust.