A/N: Apologies for the long wait, and thank you for sticking with me!
This contains a lot of shippiness. A lot. And there's more to come soon, because there was so much shippiness that I had to break the chapter in half. Enjoy!
March 14th, 3:34am.
Did you think I had forgotten you, my lovely, my Karai?
The voice slides into her; not like ice, but like a cold, cold blade through her belly. She twitches, almost waking, shying away from the voice that fills her. She can taste it as it rises through her throat.
Time to wake, lovely one. You have slept, and now you must rise and play. I am come to the city.
So, it's beginning. If she's been left to sleep, which servants has the Boar sent out into the skies and streets? Which silent, grinning faces peer into windows, licking their lipless mouths as they watch families sleeping?
Wake up.
The voice takes hold of her spine, and it isn't gentle; Karai is allowed one shriek as she jolts awake, then the Boar takes control of her body once more, and she's left panting on a cool marble slab.
"My lovely," says the Boar, through her mouth. "Wake up, there is so much to do, so much to see. So much to taste."
Karai watches the ceiling. She can't blink unless the Boar allows her, and so her eyes prickle and burn and water as she stares.
"You failed me, Karai, you failed me, the brothers still walk and plan and they are not afraid." The last word scatters in her mouth, and her jaw wrenches to the side, muscles and tendons straining against the pressure. Her teeth catch her tongue and now the taste of her own blood fills her mouth.
So Leo is still alive. She can't take comfort in that, because even if he could he wouldn't rescue her now, but she takes —
She takes satisfaction.
The Boar feels it, and the wrench in her spine was nothing compared to what she feels now: a sudden, iron-flavored surge of pain that covers her from hips to shoulders. She tries to scream, but the Boar slams her mouth shut and the scream stays locked behind her teeth, vibrating through her as she simply endures the agony.
When the Boar releases her from its control, she opens her mouth to let the scream escape, but nothing comes out but a thin, shuddery rasp. The pain stays where it is, wrapped around her, piercing her.
"What —" she says, when she's found her voice again. "What do you want me to do? Find you a meal?" The Boar has always sent her out before, to harvest and prepare the table.
"Oh, my lovely, no, not tonight." The Boar smiles its mad, sweet smile down at her. "Not tonight, no, I have fed. Do you not see?"
No.
Karai tries not to look, but the Boar lifts her head for her.
This time, it lets her scream.
Waking up isn't too bad, just a stiff sore neck and a patch on his shoulder the gravel dug into his skin. Most practices leave him more beat up, but Raph could do without the gritty eyes and the sour, burned taste in the back of his throat.
He turns his head to the left, swallowing against the taste, and makes out Leo and Usagi's slumped shapes. A few feet away from them, he sees the dome of Mikey's head and an outflung arm. Everyone present and accounted for, and about as slow to get up as he is.
"That," says Mikey, voice muffled because he's still facedown in the gravel, "sucked balls, dudes. What happened?"
Raph grunts as he pushes himself up. Nothing's broken, barely anything's bruised, but there's a headache building in the very front of his brain that's shaping up to be a real asshole. "No clue," he says. "Leo? Any ideas?"
Leo's already on his feet, holding out one hand to pull Usagi up. "You came over that roof like you had something to say, Mikey," he says. When Mikey just groans and cradles his head, Leo sighs, a dry, ugly sound in the cold air. "Mikey, get with the program. What was it?"
Mikey groans again, but Raph doesn't miss how he peers through his fingers at Leo. Gauging how much more whining and dragging his feet that he can get away with, probably.
Dumbass, Raph thinks. He leans against the wall and tries to think past the headache.
"Mikey." The rising note in Leo's voice is a warning; it prickles the back of Raph's neck and down his arms. It says get serious, it says stop dragging your feet, it says do your job. The sound drives Raph nuts whenever he hears it, even if it's not coming in his direction, and this time is no different. He rolls his eyes, wincing when the headache stabs deep into his brain, and crosses his arms over his plastron.
"All right, already," Mikey says, unfolding all six feet of him as he stands. He still has to glare up at Leo, but he's bulkier, and Raph knows that if Mikey decides to push back, Leo might not be able to move him. But it's too early for that, no one's really mad or fighting yet — just the headache, driving nails through Raph's skull, deeper and deeper. "There's some house down below. Before that flash, or whatever, I saw it light up like a Christmas tree. Like, it was all dark, and then it just lit up, all the windows, under the door, everything. And it was all that green light, too!"
"Where?" says Leo, his voice thin.
"About nine blocks west of here —" Mikey pauses, shrinking into himself a little. Raph knows why: Mikey went too far while he was scouting ahead. Never get out of sight, that's the rule. From the corner of his eye, he can see Leo drawing up, his shoulders tensing, ready to lay into Mikey — and then he sees Leo shove the urge to lecture away, and nod.
"Anything else? Noises, movement?" Leo asks.
Mikey shakes his head, just like Raph knew he would. Mikey's never what you'd call organized, but if there'd been any other clue, Mikey would've spit it out right away.
"Nothing, Leo. Just some old house, and then the light."
"And the smell," says Raph, before he knows he's talking. The others' gazes snap to him, and his headache gives him a bright little shock. He grits his teeth and folds his arms tighter, trying to ignore the cold seeping into his feet and up his legs.
"Smell?" says Leo, just as Mikey breaks in with "Ugh, like that smell at April's last week?"
Nobody talks. Usagi cocks his head, his nose wrinkled, but if he's got any questions, he doesn't say anything.
"Shit," says Raph. Mikey rubs his head, and Leo's shoulder tighten right back up.
"Raph, call Donnie. Tell him where we are and get the location of the nearest shelter. We'll check out the house, but we need to get warmed up first." When Raph doesn't move fast enough, his eyes narrow to slits. "Now, Raph."
He glares back, not missing how Usagi's head swivels like he's following a tennis match — he'd probably love tennis, because Usagi's that kind of asshole — and digs his phone out of his belt. The display says it's just after three-thirty. They weren't out for more than twenty minutes.
Donnie picks up halfway through the second ring. "What?" He sounds almost like himself, all snotty because Raph interrupted some great and vital experiment. If Raph's headache weren't pressing against his eyes, he'd smile. "Raph? What is it? Are you guys okay?"
"Yeah, we're fine," says Raph. "Look, we're at the corner of Jameson and Bleecker. Got something we want to check out. Where's the nearest shelter again?"
Three years ago, Leo got a bug up his ass about safe spaces, and they spent a summer running around setting up supply caches all over the city — boltholes for when things got too hot and they had to go to ground for a day or so before heading back to the lair. It won't be the Ritz — not even an Econo Lodge — but there'll water, blankets, a first aid kit, canned beans or whatever. Good place to warm up, cool down, hide out if something's looking for them.
Something's always looking for them.
"No dice, Raph," says Donnie, instantly. Probably didn't even have to check a map except the one in his head. "The nearest one got compromised about four months back. A couple Purple Dragons saw you and Mikey heading in. The next one's not for another sixteen blocks to the north." He pauses, then coughs. "Do you need help? I could —"
"Nope," Raph interrupts. "Don't even think about it. We're fine, we don't need your dumb ass here slowing us down."
Donnie huffs. Raph can almost feel his eyes rolling. "You sure about that, Raph? I mean, you never call unless you are in trouble, so —"
And there's the Donnie Raph knows and tolerates. "Goodbye, genius," he says, Donnie's annoyed squawk as he hangs up making him feel about eighty times better than when he woke up, even if it does make the headache go ice-pick sharp. That lasts until he realizes he didn't ask about Casey. He hasn't even thought about Casey since he opened his eyes.
With April around, Casey's in better shape than I am, he tells himself, swallowing hard as he turns back to Leo. "We're outta luck," he says, crossing the roof and keeping an eye on the buildings around them. Lots of places to hide. "Closest place is sixteen blocks north of here."
No unnecessary risks. That's the final rule. Whatever else is going on, they stop, they think things through. If they were fifteen again, they'd go leaping off without a plan, ready to hand out beatdowns to whatever they found. But they're older now, they've learned. Patience has kept them alive too many times to go shooting off now.
"We've lost twenty minutes," says Leo. The cold warps his voice — or maybe the headache does that, and Raph needs to force himself to focus on Leo's voice to make any sense of what his brother's saying. "If something's going on, we might have missed it."
He's asking them a question. Raph meets Mikey's eyes, not caring that he's shutting out Usagi. For tonight, he's part of the team, but he's not one of them. There should be three answers, not just two.
"Donnie'd tell us to wait," says Mikey, quietly.
He'll never admit it, but Raph's glad someone else spoke for Donnie. Doesn't mean Mikey isn't right. If Donnie were there, he'd be arguing for heading to the shelter, gathering intel —
Or maybe not. Maybe Donnie'd be mad enough to take the risk. He's not here to say so, though.
"If it's the Boar," says Raph, and there's the taste again, sour and burned-out. He hates this, magic and monsters. They've had enough already. "He'd want to know."
Leo breathes in through his nose. His eyes shutter closed for a moment, then he opens them and nods at Raph. Together, they turn to the west.
Donnie glares at his phone for exactly three seconds — Raph doesn't deserve more than that at present — then pushes it away and turns back to his microscope. He wants to focus, so badly his fingers twitch with it, but his mind keeps wandering. Five minutes, ten at the most, and then his thoughts scatter, breaking like a dropped mirror. He can see pieces of the whole: fractured images of his brothers' faces, a courtyard, red hair on grey stone, blood, April's open, empty mouth, but nothing helpful.
But as long as he talked to Raph, he felt almost whole. It had been so easy to slip back into rhythm with Raph: insult, riposte, someone hanging up while the other person was still mid-word. So normal, everything organized and in its proper place. No mystery. No magic.
Research hasn't given him anything. Not because the tooth threw up some great magical defense when he tried to carve slivers from it, or vanished under his microscope. It yields bits of itself easily, and stays solid and strangely heavy whenever he touches it. As far as science is concerned, the tooth is just a carved piece of jade, without any life in it at all.
He turns the tooth over in his hands, careful of the still-sharp point. What had been the point of the warhounds? As somewhat literal shock troops, they had some effectiveness, but a good hit and they scattered. He remembers bits of them clinging to his bo, reeking as they melted away,
This offensive is the lowest common denominator — hurt his family and he'll crumble — and Donnie's ashamed, a deep, sick, rotted shame, that he fell for it.
It's too simple an attack. It's a feint, an opening move in a game Donnie doesn't know how to play. The shape of the board, the number of pieces, the end goal, none of it's clear. Whenever he thinks they've gotten somewhere — April finds a promising woodcut or scrap of Latin in some book she resurrected from the college library, a subtle vein gleams in the tooth when he increases the voltage surging through it — he feels something rising up to block him, some other will opposing his, sly and laughing. And then the woodcut is just a jumble of images, the Latin is a dirty joke, the gleam disappears.
The cynical, exhausted side of his personality — what other side does he have now, really? — whispers that it's possible these things made sense once, and then the Boar reached out its hand and poisoned them with a touch. Just beyond his lab, Donnie can sense borders shifting, angles drifting out of true, and he knows that one morning he'll wake up and see that the sun never rose and the constellations aren't any that he recognizes.
He punches his desk, hissing when his knuckles crack and the nerves in his hands go numb. Sensation comes back a second later, and the pain fades almost as quickly, but for an instant, Donnie feels nothing. Not hunger, which has been fighting a losing battle with exhaustion (which has been fighting a losing battle with caffeine), not worry, not the weight on his shoulders.
If the story is true, why was he chosen? He doesn't believe in myths. Sure, he believes in monsters, but that's because he's met them. He's fought them: the invaders with their shrieks and metal bodies, the black-clad, silent ninja, the humans who screamed when they saw his face, then turned on his family with knives and scalpels. Monsters don't live in fairy tales. They live over his head, and they rob convenience stores and beat their children and poison everything around them. Wars don't need to be fought because two gods got it into their heads to fight it out and crush the world under their feet. Donnie's seen war, every day since he was fifteen — if he's completely accurate, he's been trained for one since he could stand. War is boring, it's almost never fought for a good reason, and if it starts out honorably, it ends with kids being sent to die doing their parents' dirty work.
Why me? he thinks. The tooth, jade-green, smooth, silent, doubles in his vision. He's so tired, and he can't stop asking. Why me? I don't believe. And don't say it's because of that, because that's just a cop-out. Leo's the hero. Don't tell me he didn't want this. I'm not the one you want.
There's no answer. He didn't expect one, but it might have been nice to know someone was listening.
Donnie puts his head in his hands. Maybe he should forget making that new pot of coffee, and go to bed. Raph might have the right idea. Just for an hour, he could close his eyes and block out all the questions tumbling through his head.
Yeah. The second I lay down, I'll see…
He doesn't finish the thought. He can barely look at April, barely talk to her, even though she's been inches away this whole week, shimmering with life. The memory of her pulse leaping under his thumb isn't any comfort. It doesn't matter that it was a trick; he believed it, and that's why he can't talk to her.
The Boar was right about one thing: he doesn't have a plan for her dying first, because he's never going to let it happen. To any of them. He'd find a way to get them all out, or he'd stay behind to cut the wire himself, and that would be…not fine, because he doesn't want to die, not for a long time, but it would be…right. Appropriate, maybe.
What do you want from me? He grinds the heels of his hands against his eyes. I'm not the one you want. I don't even know what I'm supposed to do.
His throat tightens, a thick swell of frustration and weariness choking off his air. No one's listening, no one's there. Donnie's alone, fumbling in the dark for an answer, scratching in the dirt for some sign. He's just a few steps away from trying to read signs in tea leaves and then what? Tarot cards? Bird entrails? How desperate will he get to find just one answer?
Donnie feels his mind spiraling downward, his gut plummeting. Peace in the particulars isn't possible; there's no particular he wants to see, or feel, or think about. He just wants quiet, an answer, sleep. Something safe. He wants…
A warm hand covers the back of his neck. The knuckles are callused, but the palm is smooth and soft-skinned. Long fingers, short nails. The pinky is slightly crooked, so it's the left hand, the one with a dark freckle on the inside of the wrist. A strong hand, capable of so much violence, but it's gentle now, just resting on the back of his neck, not moving.
"Donnie," says April. "Please, get some sleep." She asks him like she already knows he'll say no, quietly, but there's a note of hope, deep under her words.
He sighs, the air shuddering out of him, and tells himself she's here for the work, not for him. April hasn't come to his room since that one night last week. She's slept in her little alcove instead, hidden behind curtains and blankets, and they've worked in near-silence, him with his microscope and scalpels and electrodes, her with dusty books the size of her torso. He watches her, when she's not looking. Same as always.
Maybe, if he had asked — but no. There's no time for that hypothesis.
"I've got work to do," Donnie says, straightening up. He waits for her hand to fall away from his neck, for her to sigh and walk away, but she lingers unexpectedly, her hand moving in slow circles.
It feels so good. The simplicity of her hand seems like the answer to everything. Warmth and quiet and peace.
"Just a couple hours," she bargains, not quite wheedling. "I'll wake you up when the guys get back from patrol."
Donnie quashes his disappointment — stupid, stupid, to be disappointed when he already knew there was no chance — and shakes his head. "How's Casey?" he asks, waiting for her to call out the clumsy misdirection.
But April hesitates, her hand going still. "He's asleep now," she answers, her voice careful, a little rough. "Out like a light. The fever's gone down. He'll be okay till Raph gets home and takes over nanny duty." Her hand starts to move again, stroking his skin like it's something precious.
It'd be easy to see how far his hypothesis can carry him. He could just say, I'll go to bed if you do too, and stay with me, and read her answer in the way her face moves in the split-second after he asks. One test, and he can put this experiment away.
"Come on, Donnie," says April. "It can wait for a couple hours. Please."
It's the please that makes him nod and stand up. His legs ache from being cramped under his desk for so long, and his shoulders won't quite straighten, but it's nothing a few hours of sleep won't cure. Given, of course, that he manages to get any sleep at all.
April smiles up at him, her arms folded under her breasts. "Not so hard, was it?" she says. "Come on, time to sleep. I promise it'll help."
Donnie smiles back without saying anything. She's alive. Alive and wrapped in an old t-shirt that's fraying at the hem and sweatpants that used to be Casey's. But alive, and smiling at him.
"Just a couple hours," he says, wanting to wrap himself in that smile and sleep for a week, whatever the consequences. "Then it's —"
"Then we talk," April interrupts. "Not research. We talk, about what you saw."
Donnie shakes his head. No one's asked, no matter how badly they want to know. The closest anyone's gotten is lingering over him as he works, with their hands on his shoulder or bumping their hand to his as they bring him coffee and sandwiches that he picks at. How could he possibly explain it? I saw you die for someone I don't know, Raph. I don't know where Leo or Mikey were, but they were gone.
You were fighting, but you had lost.
I wasn't there.
"I let you have a week, but the martyr act is getting old," April says. Her voice is soft, but there's an edge in her gaze, a subtle do not fight me on this warning that's so familiar Donnie can't help smiling. "You can keep hiding in here, not talking to anyone, but sooner or later your brothers are going to get tired of it. This story says you're the Champion, but we're in this with you. We can't afford to have secrets." The corner of her mouth quirks upward, not quite a smile, but she keeps talking before Donnie can question it. "So if you want to have that conversation with Raph, or Mikey —" Donnie grimaces on reflex, and April smiles — "fine, but at least I promise to be merciful."
"You?" Donnie says, feeling his own smile return to answer hers. "I didn't think you knew how." Teasing April is so familiar it could be a part of his body, one he knows as well as his shell or the heavy weight of his hands. He savors the echo of normalcy while it touches him.
April rolls her eyes, shakes her head. "Bed," she says, nudging him toward the door. "Want some tea, or toast? I was going to make some but — Donnie? What is it?"
Whether it's the new way the dim light hits her profile and turns her hair to ruddy gold that inspires him, or the realization that she's barely six inches away, Donnie doesn't know, and doesn't care. He watches as his hand rises, and as one finger brushes her bangs off her forehead. She stays very still, eyes huge and watchful. Donnie can only imagine what this looks like, after a week of no words and snatched glances. But April's always trusted him, even at his worst, her worst, and she trusts him now, enough to wait while he steadies himself with the smallest of touches.
Test the hypothesis, whispers an eager, thin voice in the back of his head. It sounds like he did at fifteen, like that eternally hopeful teenager is watching all of this from the dark spaces between his thoughts.
Why not? In for a penny, he agrees, pulse thundering, chasing away his exhaustion. Time's wasting. Why not be sure?
He reaches out and brushes his thumb against April's chin.
She doesn't move. She might even tilt her chin up to press into his touch.
In for a pound.
"Sleep well, April," he says, and kisses her forehead.
The sound April makes is hard to quantify; it might be a sigh, or a little hum of pleasure, the kind of sound Donnie imagines people make when they see the ocean for the first time. When he straightens, her eyes are closed. He wants to linger and watch her face, but he forces himself to step around her and head toward the door. The next step has always been hers to take.
Start walking. Don't get your hopes up. You're not that lucky.
"Donnie?"
His breath catches, but he doesn't turn around. He'll never know what her face looks like.
"Yeah?" he says, to the door.
Her hand touches his shoulder. Let her be quick, let her be kind, if she's going to leave. No more touches. He can't bear it.
"Want some company?"
Donnie frowns at the door, at his hand on the doorknob. "Thought you told me to go to bed," he says, trying for teasing to mask his confusion. What kind of question is that?
He jumps, a little, when the tips of April's fingers trace a line down his neck and over his shell.
"Donnie," she says, and it's all there in her voice, everything he's wanted to hear. But even when she says his name again, he's too afraid to turn around. He stays very still instead as her fingers follow the whorls on his shell.