Thought I'd mention that the song I wrote this fic to is Into Dust by Mazzy Star. It captures the mood of the fic well, I think.
In the sewers they took whatever form of entertainment they could get. They were well over ten years old before gender considerations had any impact on their choice of toy, reading material, movies, anything. No one ever got on Raph's case about the fact that his favorite stuffed toy for years had been a Raggedy Ann doll. It was clean and the rips in it had been easily mended and it was red. The fact that it was a girl's toy hadn't registered, or if it had, hadn't mattered.
With April in their lives, and later, Angel, they are subjected to yet more forms of feminine entertainment, especially on movie night. Every two months or so April's turn rolls around and they have to sit through a Jane Austen flick or something equally disgusting. (They know Casey's in love when he stops complaining as loudly about the movies on April's night.) She may love Rio Gato, but she loves Bridget Jones's Diary just as much. Before Angel comes along April takes her place as the only girl very seriously, and tries to educate them in the ways of femininity as best she can.
And so Raph knows how this is supposed to go. He's already developed feelings for a girl in his life. This girl is in some way forbidden him. In this case it's even got a bit of the Beauty and the Beast flavor to it. Next is the montage where it becomes clear that his feelings are impossible to ignore. He figures he's nearing the end of the montage (which is hell to live through, by the way) and so what is waiting for him now is The Crisis. Something will happen to put her in danger and then he will rescue her and she will realize that she has feelings for him as well. (If this is a bad movie, these feelings will in no way be apparent to the audience until this point.) She will either embrace these feelings or reject them, but either way there is usually a misunderstanding of some kind that forces them apart, but which ultimately leads to the realization that they need each other. Then the danger will reappear, bringing them together again, and once that is taken care of there will be, at maximum, five minutes of angst as the couple realizes that their love is impossible. Then a deus ex machina will appear to make it so that the star-crossed lovers can be together after all. Cue credits and sappy music.
It kills him that he will be stuck in the middle of a chick flick for the rest of his life.
After a while Casey starts to notice.
How the guy can be so damn clueless about some things and so sharp about others is a mystery to Raph, but one night after they've sated their bloodlust and are knocking back beers in celebration of a night where the butt-kicking had been mostly dealt from their side, Casey turns to him and mutters something.
"…huh?" Raph knows he sounds extra stupid, and blames it on the beer. Casey takes another swig; for courage, Raph thinks, and doesn't like the thought.
"Y'ever thought about… y'know, settling down? Having little mutant turtles and shit?"
Raph bares his teeth and his grip tightens around the bottle in his hand.
"Shaddap, Casey," he slurs, willing his friend to get the message and back off. But Casey's too drunk or too used to Raph's ways to be scared by his tone, and he keeps going like Raph hadn't said anything.
"Only I been thinking, you guys are, what, 21? And you ain't never had a girlfriend or nothing."
They're closer to 23, what with time-travel and so on, but Raph is more concerned with ending the conversation than correcting chronology.
"I'll kick your ass," he says a little too loudly. Casey snorts.
"Yeah, right." He takes another swig, and then adds in a mysterious mutter, "You better treat her right, or I'll kick your ass."
Raph sucks in a breath to speak, and then lets it out again, unused. He does this two or three times, and then finally just says, anger dissipated in the face of bewilderment, "Who?"
Casey toasts the night sky with his bottle. "Angel."
Raph stands up and takes a sharp step away from the ledge they'd been dangling their feet from, then pauses and takes another step back. He stares down at the ground for a long moment, and then chucks the bottle (still half full) down off the building, roaring in frustration as he does so. Casey watches its decent with interest, chuckling drunkenly when it smashes on the pavement below. Raph sits down again and opens another bottle, and Casey waits until he's drained most of it before he speaks again.
"I think she likes you, man."
Raph gets up again, tottering back across the rooftop to Casey's bag. He has a vague plan of either smashing the contents one by one against the wall, or smashing them across Casey's big head, but when he reaches the bag he just sits down again.
"Doesn't matter," he mutters. Casey scoots around until he's facing his friend.
"Why not? You like her, don't'cha? And all her other boyfriends have been total assholes."
"I am an asshole, asshole."
"Nah," Casey says, setting his bottle down and leaning his head back against the ledge. "Not like them."
Raph knows what he means, but best friend or not, Casey doesn't know everything about him, and so he stays silent, playing with the zipper on the golf ball compartment.
"You want I should put in a good word for you?" he offers after a while, and Raph finally lifts his head to pin Casey with a stare he normally reserved for Purple Dragons.
"You say one word to her I'll smash your teeth in."
Casey grunts. It's close enough to a yes that Raph looks back down at the golf bag.
"What's your problem, anyway? She ain't pretty enough for you or something?"
Raph throws the bottle in his hand at the wall, and it shatters spectacularly, the few mouthfuls of beer left in it spraying out in tiny droplets. He gets up with the intention of leaving, but Casey hooks his foot around his ankle and he smashes to the ground, prompting a wrestling match that Casey loses.
"Just shut up, okay?" Raph yells in his face. "You don't know shit!"
"What's there to know!" Casey yells back. "You like her, she likes you. What the hell else is there?"
The mantra comes to mind, but Raph is too drunk to try to explain it, so all he can do is yell again.
"You don't know shit!"
He slams Casey's shoulders down on the ground again, then sits back and breathes hard. Casey sits up, rubbing the back of his head, obviously waiting for Raph to elaborate. But he can't. So he just puts his head in his hands and wonders how on earth his friend can be so insightful and yet so thick.
He was five years old. Maybe six. It was hard to tell. It had definitely been five springs since their father had found them, and every spring when they had survived through another winter he told them their story. But this spring was different. This spring they had more than merely survived; this spring they had a home—a lair, as Mikey called it, and the name had stuck. They had gathered their meager possessions from the old Burrow and moved into their new home, Donnie helping their father make it more like what humans lived in. They had hot and cold running water now, and electricity. And today they were getting television.
Donnie had been working with Splinter on fixing the one they'd found in the dump, and today it was ready. Raph and his other two brothers were bouncing with excitement as Donnie and Splinter set up the machine, plugging it in and turning it on. At first there was only static, which was exciting enough that the three of them had leapt up and down, shouting incoherently, but then Splinter made an adjustment to the antennae and a picture had come on the screen, fuzzy but distinct. That picture had burned itself into young Raphie's mind, and even now, years later when they had eleventy-million TV's and it was actually boring to watch TV all the time, Raphael still pulled out that memory sometimes and looked at it, like an old postcard. It had been a long time before he even realized what he'd been seeing, and he could still picture the image with the filter of youth on it. During the hectic mess of April's wedding, during which he had actually seen the rare sight of wedding magazines strewn around the lair, he had pulled the picture out more and more such that it had begun to take on a different sheen, and then it was April's turn for movie night, and there it was.
The young actress smiled meaningfully but sadly at the man, whose dark eyes said he understood. Their connection was electric and palpable, their love easy to see. It was exactly like he remembered it. It was nothing like he remembered it. He left, not even bothering to make an excuse, and he'd felt not right in his own skin for days.
He would never have that.
This was what made the memory burn so strangely whenever he brought it out. He'd thought it was a wedding he'd seen, which he'd always known he would never have, and that hurt. But seeing the movie again, seeing Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck separated by a trick of birth and circumstance, made the hurt flare up. He would never get married, and he'd made his peace with that, but he would never even have a fling or a one night stand. He would have nothing, for the rest of his life, and it made him want to punch things until they stopped moving.