Nearly half an hour had passed, and Raphael was still raging and tearing against his chains. His hips and shoulders ached with every twist or pull, but he kept straining, kept pushing, kept feeling his flesh bruising more with every passing moment. The bed frame under him groaned slightly as he pulled at it, and he began to wonder if it was flimsy enough that he would be able to pull parts of it loose…
"Would you stop it?" Leo said at last, sounding both alarmed and exasperated. "You're just going to hurt yourself!"
"Stop pretending you care!" Raphael snarled.
Leo responded by clamping his hands on Raphael's chest, pushing him down into the mattress until he was unable to move. He tried to move, straining against Leo's strong hands, but the other Turtle was leaning his entire body into pushing on Raphael's torso. Between that and the chains immobilizing his arms and legs, the only part of Raphael that could move was his head and neck.
"I do care, you idiot!" Leo shouted directly into his face. "If I didn't care, I would have let you rot with the Foot Clan instead of bringing you here!"
"By kidnapping me?" Raphael shouted back, straining up towards Leo.
"It was the only way we could get you to listen!" Leo said angrily. "We tried! Donnie and I tried to talk to you before, but you tried to kill us for it! This was the only way we could make you pay attention to us!"
"I paid attention!" Raphael shouted. "I didn't wanna hear you!"
"Why not?"
Raphael gritted his teeth, and twisted his head away from Leo's penetrating brown eyes.
"Why not?" Leo repeated loudly, pressing down harder.
"You people make me confused!" Raphael erupted, his eyes blazing as he thrashed against Leo's hands. "You make me start thinkin' things I shouldn't!"
Leo didn't seem to know what to say in response to that. He blinked down at Raphael, the anger draining from his face to be replaced with confusion. Slowly he removed his hands from his brother's shoulders, watching for Raphael to start straining against his bonds again. When the other Turtle didn't move, he slowly sank down onto the edge of the bed.
"Like what?" Leo said quietly.
Raph shut his eyes tightly. He didn't want to have this conversation. He didn't want to think about the other Turtles — didn't want to think about what they should mean to him. Didn't want to think about what they had said, what they had been doing. Hell, he didn't want to think about what they fundamentally were — other mutant turtles, his brothers, who lived their whole lives far from the circles of the Foot Clan.
His brothers. Whom he should never have been separated from. And if he hadn't, he never would have been part of the Foot Clan… no, he didn't want to think about that. He didn't want to think about what his life with them would have been like… didn't want to think about what he wished they were to him.
A hollow ache formed in his chest, as fiercely as he tried to deny it was there. These people had kidnapped him. They were his enemies. The rat — their father — was the mortal enemy of his master. And yet — if things had been different, they would have been something else to him. Everything. It all formed into a thick, twisting muddle in his head, pulling at him until he felt like he was about to tear apart.
A strange sensation ran through him as that came to mind. Suddenly he had the feeling that if he looked too deeply in himself, he would find something painful, something that would tear him apart and leave him with nothing. He wanted to keep his face averted from that unseen thing for as long as possible… but when they were nearby, he could feel it rising inside him. He didn't want to look. He wanted things to stay the way they always had been. Safe and familiar.
"Look, we really didn't want things to be this way," Leo said quietly. "And we don't have much time to talk to you. Please, just listen to what we have to say. We want you to have a choice."
"You tie me up, and you say you want to give me a choice?" Raphael said. "Untie me, and maybe I'll listen."
A look of regret came over Leonardo's face. "If it were just us, I'd do that," he said quietly. "But I know if you decided to flee, you'd bring the Foot Clan back here. And not only are our other brothers here, but two humans who aren't a part of Oroku Saki's vendetta against us. I would risk my own life to make you listen to me, Raphael. But not theirs." He shifted on the bed, staring down at Raphael's face. "So I'm asking you to listen anyway. Just for a little while. Please."
It was on the tip of Raphael's tongue to refuse, to snarl that someone who had knocked him unconscious, kidnapped him and chained him up had no right to expect him to listen to anything. That for all his talk of not being Raphael's enemy, that was something only an enemy would do. He wanted to see Leo figuratively wither away under a rain of vitriol, being shown exactly how angry Raphael was.
But it was the quiet "please" that made him stop. It was a word he hadn't heard very often before — especially when someone wasn't begging for their life — and rarely aimed at him. He was a tool. A weapon. No one asked a sword to slay someone. No one cared about whether he wanted to do as he was told — there were only his orders to obey.
Leo must have seen the struggle in his eyes, because he repeated, "Please."
Raphael grunted, staring up at Leo with wary eyes.
The other Turtle seemed to take this as a tacit agreement. He rested his hands on his thighs and took a deep breath. "I don't really know where to start," he admitted with a hint of unhappiness. "Father — our father — knows more about this than I ever did."
"Then why ain't he talking to me?"
"He will — later," Leo said. "I—I don't really remember what happened before we mutated, but Father has told me all about what he saw and experienced. I know that there were four of us originally. Four brothers. We started out in a lab, but were stolen from it by Foot ninja, and our father tried to rescue us from them.
"In the process, we were doused by a mutagen that the Foot ninja also had stolen from the lab. But a stray cat got to you — it wanted to eat you alive. Father fought it hard in order to save you, even clawing out the cat's eye so it would let you go…"
A shiver ran through Raphael. Suddenly a brief, forgotten memory flashed through his mind — the memory of yellowed fangs against his tiny body and a pair of glaring slitted eyes. Fear. Blinding fear. And a large gray shape flying towards him, teeth gleaming in the faint light… it was only a shred of a memory, but it was enough.
He didn't know if Leonardo noticed his reaction, because the other Turtle continued speaking. "But… before Father could bring you back, the Foot ninja came back to get us. And… he had to pull the three of us — me, Donatello and Michelangelo — into the sewer to avoid them. You were… we didn't know where you were or what happened to you for so long, but now we know the Foot ninja must have—"
"They did," Raphael said stiffly. "They took me back with 'em, and I mutated."
Leo looked at him with sorrowful eyes. "Not a day went by when Father wouldn't mention you, or send us out to try to find you. You were constantly on his mind, and he never gave up hope that we would find you."
"Even though he's the one who left me behind?" Raphael asked acidly.
"He didn't want to!" Leo said passionately. "He wanted to save all four of us — and if the Foot ninja hadn't come just then, he would have brought you back to us." A wistful note crept into his voice, and he seemed to almost be talking to himself. "We all would have been back together, the way we were always meant to be."
Something in his voice struck a chord deep inside Raphael, and for a moment those forbidden thoughts came flooding back into his mind. About what it would be like to have his brothers, a family — about what his life would have been like if he had never been part of the Foot. Part of the thought was terrifying. He had never lived without the feeling of the Foot surrounding him, supporting him — it was everything he had wanted, striven for, everything that molded him into the warrior he now was. Being without the Foot was like stepping off the top of a building, with nothing but air under his feet.
But at the same time… he couldn't stop thinking about it.
"That isn't where you belong, Raphael," Leo said quietly. "Deep down you know it. You belong with us."
"This is not where you belong." Mother's voice echoed through his mind, clear as a bell.
Raphael closed his eyes and gritted his teeth, feeling unwanted thoughts swarming through his mind like hornets. He had always known where he belonged — where he felt safe — but the longer Leo talked, the more unstable he began to feel, as if the ground under his feet was dissolving.