onward!
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The Other Side of the Wrong Door
Part 4: Day five.
The next time April wakes up, it's eight am.
Angel helps her to the bathroom to wash the Kraang off of her, which leaves Donnie and Casey sitting around like a pair of anxious dogs, tails thumping on the floor. Donnie should be working on the portal device now that April's awake, but somehow, Raph can forgive the delay – because he knows what happens when Donnie works on something when he's distracted, and it usually ends up in things exploding.
An hour later, April slips out of the bathroom, pink and clean and damp with a meek little smile on her face. "Hey, guys," she says. "Long time no see."
Nothing can stop Mikey, not even middle-age, because he slams April back two feet with the force of his hug. He only puts her down when she threatens to hurl all down his shell, and when Donnie starts squawking about pressure and ribs.
The lair is well-lit, for an underground bunker, and it's smaller than the lair Raph is used to, but everything just feels brighter, and warmer, even to Raph. So he can't imagine what April must be feeling – Donnie and Casey both are lit up like it's Christmas, Mikey hasn't stopped with the hugs, and even Leo's smiling at her, though it doesn't quite reach his eyes.
April corners him on it a few hours later. Angel has loaned her clothes – but Angel's a lot bigger, all muscle and thighs compared to April who was bird-like even before she spent half her life on gel-food. The t-shirt hangs off of her, belted with one of Donnie's spare masks, and the jeans are held up with one of Mikey's, a bright slash of orange at her waist. Leo is already wincing at the sight of her before April even speaks.
"You don't know if I'm the real one, do you?" she asks.
In the corner of Raph's eye, Leo shifts, guilty. Of course he doesn't. It's been years since the Kraang hauled April in – even April doesn't seem sure, now, in the face of someone else's doubt. Leo opens his mouth, then closes it without saying a thing. "Bullshit," Casey interjects, from the other side of the couch. "She's April."
"We don't know that for sure." Leo says, and Casey rolls his eyes.
"Guess I'll find out." April smiles weakly, trying for humour, but it falls flat. She lets it. If she's a failed copy, Raph figures, eventually something will slip. They haven't told her what happened to the other clones, yet. Raph doesn't think she's even asked. The thick wrap of guilt that blankets his brothers is covering horrors that, if this April is April, she's just not ready to hear. Maybe she won't ever be ready.
"Of course we know," Donnie says, glaring at Leo, and reaches over, taking her right arm in his left hand. He turns it over, and runs a finger parallel to a thin line on her forearm, almost invisible against her sunless skin. "See this?"
"Yeah, it's a scar," April answers.
Donnie nods. "When did you get it?"
"Uh. When I was sixteen."
"Right." Donnie's smiling, and now, so is Mikey. "How?"
April furrows her brow. "I threw my fan and missed catching it. My aunt dragged me to the ER for stitches– Donnie, why–"
"Right," he interrupts. "You got this three weeks after Master Splinter first gave you your weapon," he says softly. "Scars can't be cloned. They're not genetic, you can't– you can't fake them. This is yours. This is you, April."
"That's how we know that Raph's not a clone either. The crack in his shell," Mikey adds, as Donnie nods, and of course every damn person in the room gawks at the lightning-bolt in Raph's plastron, and the ragged snap over his shoulder. "He's had that ever since we were, like, babies – if the Kraang were gonna copy that, they'd have to cut it into him, but it's all old."
"It's worn," Donnie clarifies helpfully. "Worn down by fifteen years of Master Splinter throwing us around the dojo, for one. You can't fake that either. We lived a very specific life. So trust me, April. The only way you got that scar is because you sucked at boomeranging your tessen."
"I didn't suck," April shoots back. "I was a rookie. There's a difference."
"Aaand that's the other clue." Mikey grins. April snarks back, and Leo neatly slinks away. Raph catches Angel's eye, and she just shrugs back. Leo's gone off to sulk, or whatever, and there's nothing they can really do about it right now.
Now that April's back in action – kinda, Donnie keeps fussing and Casey keeps shading around and April keeps blowing them both off in favour of training with Mikey and Angel – Raph figures it's only a matter of days before Donnie figures out that Raph has places to be and futures to avoid. But he's a nice guy. He's a patient guy. What's two days when Donnie's spent the past two decades drowning in guilt? Donnie spent three weeks getting two hours of sleep a night after the Pulverizer got turned into goop, back then, and only stopped once his neck seized up from too many nights sleeping over his desk. So when this is April…
And Casey's no better.
In fact, now that April's back, and the Kraang are prowling the streets above, it seems like a lot of the fight has gone out of the little group. The only people who can go topside are Casey and Angel; the only person who's willing to go topside without beating everything down is Angel.
Considering the Kraang have had April as their guest for the past twenty years, it's weird, to Raph, that this New York looks almost the same as his New York. These are the Kraang who tried to run a full-scale invasion, and keep trying to piss mutagen from the top of very tall buildings onto the unsuspecting populace below. By now, Raph was kind of hoping that there might be a few more mutants walking around.
He asks Casey, and Casey looks to Mikey, and Mikey twists his mouth and says, "You'll find out in your time, I guess?"
Which is a bullshit excuse, and Raph tells him as much. "Look," Mikey says, over breakfast. "It's like in that show with the magic box and the time-dude. If you go back and change a tiny thing, it might change other stuff."
Raph can't exactly see a problem with that. "April's been in a tank for twenty years. If I go home and we can tear down the Kraang a little earlier because you guys tipped me off, where's the harm?" he asks. Mikey shrugs, and goes back to his breakfast and that– that really pisses Raph off.
So he goes to Leo. "Seriously," he says. "What's the problem?"
"Because if you do," Leo says, in that stuck-up tone of voice he always uses when he thinks he's the only one who might have thought of that particular idea. "they might get April another way. Or maybe the Foot will still be around. Or maybe–"
"Or maybe, maybe, we get April back, and then we ice the Foot and the Kraang and then we all live happily ever after, how about that?"
Leo turns to leave. He actually turns to leave.
"I can't have this conversation with you," he says.
"Why not?" Raph gets to his feet and folds his arms, because he's so done with Leonardo trying to be a martyr. He always does this, sulks away and acts like the world is on his shoulders and how nobody could possibly understand the pressure he's under – and then goes right along to someone else to whine. Sensei, usually, but Raph knows that April has gotten an earful on more than one occasion. Leo acts like he's sucking it up, when Raph, and Donnie – hell, even Mikey – could all give Leo a healthy tip or eight on what sucking it up actually means, and it's not Leo's poor me routine.
He wishes he was twenty-one already, so he could buy Angel a drink.
"Why not, Leo?" he says again, instead. Leo stops at the door. "Because I'm just a kid?"
"Yes."
"Oh, good, that was easy. 'Cause, see, here I was thinkin' it'd be that, or the fact I'm not your Raphael, or the fact you can't even stand to look at me because – and this is just a guess here, Leo, but I'm guessing that you've spent the last twenty years moping around, thinking that it's your fault I never came back. Yeah, I thought so," he adds, when Leo glares at him. "You know, I hope that Angel has a clue-by-four, 'cause you really need one."
Leo's shoulders pull back. "I said," he bites out. "that we're not having this conversation."
"And I say that we are. Because seriously. You know why I came here? I saw Mikey on the wrong end of a beat-down. You think you could have stopped me? Sensei couldn't have stopped me. So all your moping around and not talking to me–"
"Master Splinter died," Leo snaps, rounding on him, and Raph tenses instinctively. "You weren't here for that. You weren't here when we lost April, you didn't have to deal with Donnie freaking out for six whole months and Casey throwing himself at every guy in a suit just in case, and I quote, those alien bastards got new faces. You weren't here when sensei died, you weren't here when we found what was left of the Foot, you haven't had to deal with every new thing the Kraang threw at us, you're not the only thing we lost. So yes! I should have been able to stop you, and Casey, and April!"
Raph forces his shoulders to straighten in time with Leo's face dropping. "Huh." He swallows. "At least I know what's coming."
It shouldn't have been that easy to rile Leo up, and they both know it. Leo makes a rough sound in the back of his throat, dragging his left hand over the back of his head. "Raph– sorry. Sorry. I shouldn't have said any of that. No," He shakes his head when Raph tries to wave it off. "Forget what I said. We don't even know if you coming here has changed things."
"Yeah, sure," Raph says, though the fight barely feels started. He stamps it down in his gut and casts for something else to talk about; Leo's avoided him for far too long. "So how'd you meet Angel?" he asks.
Leo smiles faintly. "She's a friend of Casey's. We met her about a year or so after April– yeah. She's a good person."
"She's a good shot," Raph throws out.
"That too."
Raph fidgets, awkward. "You happy?"
It's not what Leo says, but how he says it. He says "yeah" with a slow sigh and a dippy half-smile. Raph makes a note to ask Casey, when he gets home, about any friends he has who might be a little cool with the whole green mutant thing. His next instinct is to ask about Splinter – or Karai – but something in Raph's gut tells him that he doesn't want to know.
So he asks anyway.
About Splinter, at least.
Leo swallows. "There's a reason we don't live back in the old lair," he replies after a pause. "Raph, you don't need to know these things."
"No, I do."
"Why?" Leo snaps. "Donnie's going to send you back home, so whatever you get told about our world doesn't even apply to your family. As far as they're concerned, you'll be gone for a couple of days, weeks max. But our Raph is gone and my family has had to deal with that for the past twenty years."
Raph knows, before he even opens his mouth, that his face is firmly set to not buying your shit, Leo: "Cause you did a hell of a job, right?"
Leo gapes. "What?"
"Sorry, did you want me to make a list of what the hell did you let happen here? So I was gone, and I bet that was terrible, 'cause I know how I'd feel if I lost one of my brothers. But I'm pretty sure they wouldn't melt down like this!"
Of course they wouldn't.
Raph wouldn't let it.
Raph wouldn't let Casey run off and do whatever dumbshit routine he tried to pull trying to get into April's pants. He wouldn't let Casey freak out afterwards when the Kraang took her away, and he sure as hell would not let Donnie spend twenty years burning bodies. "Because that's the thing, Leo. That's what I just don't get. 'Cause if your Donnie is anything like my Donnie, you know. And all of this Code Yellow crap – you just let him and Casey handle it alone? It shouldn't even matter if they say they'll do it, you should fix it anyway! That's your job, o fearless leader. You take out the trash, not let them hold a nice little funeral for it."
Leo's mouth twists. It's not a smile. "How'd you get your scar, Raph? Let me hear the story."
"I already told you, back when you found me the first time. I don't remember."
"And that's why I didn't cut you down."
"What," says Raph, and the muscles in his arms tense. "are you getting at?"
"I'm saying," Leo replies, and he makes sure to speak slowly, like Raph suddenly turned into Mikey or something. "that the only reason you're not in the trash right now is because you gave the right answer. Donnie? You know what he's like. Any other person took out a clone, he'd freak because what if she was the right one, Leo? How would you know?" he parrots. "But you said I don't remember. Not information not found, not I got it in a fight. You don't remember, because you've always had it."
"So you're just letting Donnie off a bunch of clones because it's the nice thing to do." Raph scoffs despite himself; his mouth is full of spit and he has to force himself to swallow it. "Yeah. Right. Gotcha. And Casey?"
Leo just looks at him.
Raph drags a hand over his face, frustrated. "Okay, fine. Leader's got his reasons, everybody else just shuts his cakehole and follows along, right?"
Leo says nothing, which is answer enough, Raph supposes. He makes another mental note; this time, to sock his Leo in the face twice when he gets home. "Fine," he says again. "So what now?"
Leo turns to leave, and this time, Raph follows. "We need to get you home."
Angel has monopolised April in the kitchen and is hacking off clumps of brittle, miserable hair to make April look a little less like she's homeless. Casey is, by definition, allergic to anything remotely feminine (on the surface, but Raph knows that Casey has sat through Tangled enough times with his little sister to quote the lantern scene by heart) and sits himself in front of the TV to watch the news, and Donnie is, frankly, terrified of Angel with a blade and so hibernates in his bedroom to work.
"Donnie?" Leo asks, rapping a knuckle against the door. "How's the portal coming?"
"Um," Donnie says, in a way that means no. "Well."
Leo shoots Raph a wary, weary look before hip-thumping Donnie's door open. "Raph needs to go home."
"Raph needs to come home." Donnie huffs at them as he turns around, dragging his hands over his head. "Sorry. It'll be done, there's just a few more things I need to figure out first – time-travel and dimensional physics, Godel's theorems took a few hours to get through and–" he cuts himself off before he even starts, a brittle smile crossing his face. He looks at Raph. "Sorry. English, right?"
Raph can't stop his eyebrow from jumping up his face. "I have managed to watch a couple of geek movies in my life," he says, defensively.
"Right," Donnie replies, his smile turning into something thin. "Sorry. But anyway. I looked at all the evidence – how you arrived, things that have happened, the things you said about your timeline and– well, there's two options. Option one, is you're a time-traveller. You stepped through that portal and ended up twenty years in the future."
"What's option two?" Raph asks, at the same time as Leo says, "what about the other theory?"
Donnie shifts. "It sounds like a bad sci-fi show, but… parallel universe? No, no, hear me out. Every decision we make – the big ones, mostly, but small ones too – they have the potential to make a whole new universe. Here," he says, changing track and grabbing a piece of paper, drawing a thick black line that ended in a fork. "See this?" he asked, pointing at the joint. "That's you, when you decided to jump through the portal. This line, here, is a line where – where, I don't know what, exactly, but you came back healthy and alive and life went on. This one, though…"
"Is our one, where our Raph never came back," Leo puts in.
Donnie nods, his shoulders sagging. "We never did find out where our Raph went." His smile, if possible, thins further. "Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you are our brother, you just got lost a little bit in time. Either way, we have to get you home."
Leo tugs the diagram – such as it is – away from Donnie and looks at it. "If we do that, doesn't that just delete this whole timeline?"
"Iiii'm not sure Back to the Future is a great example of quantum physics. Besides, if that was the case, the Kraang would have gone back in time and bought us before Master Splinter did, and sold us to Murakami for soup. Or just thrown us in the Hudson, so we wouldn't get in their way."
"Yeah, we would have mutated even worse if we'd gone in there." Raph folds his arms. "I have to go home," he points out, not unkindly, but not exactly soft, either. He has to go home, now, because these versions of his brothers are three green piles of a hot mess, and the thought of three turning into six is enough to make Raph's arms hurt with the need to tear into something, to rip it apart with his feet and his fists. If he can go home and somehow stop this future from ever existing, it needs to be done. "I mean, if I can stay and help a little longer, no problem, but I am going home."
Donnie nods. "You are, I promise. Soon." He taps his fingers against his mouth. "It's just unfortunately not that simple as stepping through the portal again."
"Why not?" Leo asks.
"Well, for a start, they've changed their codes, so I'm going to take a wild guess and say that they're aware that we've got a device. Which means that they know we've got access to the tunnel, which means that probably, they've been camping in there since at least the time we got April back, maybe even as far back as when Raph jumped into our world. We walk through there–"
"We walk straight into an ambush," Leo finishes. "Damn."
The room goes quiet. Leo cracks his knuckles against his chest, but doesn't say anything else, and Donnie is silent too.
It's always bad when Donnie's quiet. Donnie hums and talks and sings his way through his brain-problems, and sometimes he screams and rages and blows himself out. Donnie fights, in his own way – he can't throw a punch that Raph wouldn't catch, but Donnie can shriek and snarl until Raph admits he's wrong or goes away, and talk at a math problem until it cries for mercy. When Donnie's quiet, Raph realises, it's because he's beaten down.
I'll be in my lab, Raph's heard, way too many times to count over the years.
"Hey," Raph says. "Either way, we gotta do something."
"Yeah." Donnie taps his fingers against his mouth. "The problem is, do what? We got April out, sure, but they're going to come after her. And that's not to mention all of the clones they probably still have."
Raph shudders. Donnie doesn't.
Almost a week old, now, his Leo's voice comes back to him, warm and sly: "Last Raph standing?"
No, Raph thinks, his mouth curving into a vicious smile. Not last Raph standing. Last Kraang standing.
He has an idea.
One of the things he's learned though, is that he can't just throw his idea out there yet. He has to let it percolate, a little, and more importantly he needs to wait for the right moment. Some parts of it are unlikely to go down well. Some parts of it are less ninja, more Michael Bay.
The next day, Raph takes up a pew in the living room while April spars gently with Mikey – just little basic kata to get her strength back. If she's throwing a little more weight behind her punches than she should, then Mikey isn't saying anything.
Leo's meditating in front of the tokonoma they have in a little alcove, the scent of incense nostalgic and kind. Casey is watching the hockey, and Donnie's sitting a little way apart from them, computer in his lap and acting like he doesn't care about sports.
(Donnie likes to play the smart-ass, all books and science.
His screensaver is the Baltimore Oriole, trussed up, stuffed and ready to be eaten.)
"Jones," Angel says, striding up to the couch. Wordless, Casey reaches up with his hand splayed for the hairbrush; Angel slaps it into his palm and vaults the couch, landing neatly between Casey's knees. "You pull it, I break something of yours."
"Whatever," Casey teases, whapping the back of her head with the brush before taking a chunk of hair in hand. "Shut up and watch the game. Watch your Devils get wrecked."
The TV flickers in time with April's furious yell in the training area. Casey leans his head back. "HEY RED. SOME OF US ARE TRYING TO WATCH THE TV. QUIT WITH THE VOODOO."
Donnie looks up, his brow knotted in concern. "The what?" He sits up straighter, his head snapping around to watch April. "April?"
April ignores him. Mikey ducks her punch and throws her across the room to land gently in a pile of soft cushions. Donnie glances at the light, pulls his Math Face for a second, and then gets to his feet. "April, you didn't tell me it was worse. How often does this happen?"
April shrugs, her mouth like a lock, and goes back to her fight. Donnie looks to Casey, who looks back and shrugs too. "April–" he tries again. "Maybe one of us should take a look at yo–"
"I don't need it."
"But April, this could–"
"I said, 'back off'."
Donnie backs off. He practically jumps.
"Did you think they just kept me in a tank all this time?" April snaps, and slams her fist against Mikey's hand. "They made me work. They ran tests. So things changed."
Nobody asks what kind of tests; Raph swallows down his own questions the way he can see all of his brothers do. They can all guess – based on the tank they hauled her out of, the way the Kraang are just one or two miles over the moral event horizon, and the brain toothpick April narrowly avoided when she was sixteen.
Casey looks like he's either going to punch someone or hurl – or both. Everyone else looks a different shade of pissed, from the way Angel's mouth presses together to the ice-cold looks of murder on his three brothers.
Raph, though?
Raph's got an idea. Another one – yeah, even he's surprised, he tells the snotty versions of his brothers in his head. And he's the only one who can come up with something like this. Donnie fights dirty, sometimes, but not this dirty. Mikey? Nah. And Leo's too honourable for something like this, no matter how many times Master Splinter tries to drill it into him that they are ninja, not samurai. You stab the guy in the back, not let him take a fair shot.
Raph's the one who always has to come up with the really dirty ideas. Let's throw Chris Bradford off a roof, Leo!
Let's betray Karai, Leo!
Let's use April for bait, Leo.
I think one more chapter and an epilogue will do it! thank you again, so much, for reading!