April is no stranger to other people's blood. She knows what it feels like on her skin, in her hair — she even knows how it tastes. The smell crawling up her nose and down her throat is darkly, slyly familiar: hello, April. Here I am. There's no getting away from me.

She remembers the face of every person she's killed, and she's willing to carry that as a fair trade for being the one to walk away. And she'll take the nightmares, the gut-punch that comes when she wakes up in the middle of the night, gasping and sweating and swinging an imagined knife toward an imaginary enemy. It's the price Splinter told her she would have to pay if she became part of this precarious, shadowed life, and she's paid it, time and again.

This blood is different. She didn't spill it; her tessen and her knife never touched the skin and muscle that have been so carelessly torn apart and left in a stinking alley. It's…tainted, in a way April can't articulate. The people she's killed may not have seen her coming, but they weren't hunted, and she didn't mock them by dragging it out. There's honor in that, something April will never admit that she's proud of.

She's never played with her enemies.

Her mind tries to put distance between her and the empty, ragged bodies in front of her. They're toys, April thinks. They're dummies. Whatever they are, they're not people anymore.

It doesn't work. She takes a step closer, and her dark-adjusted eyes pick out curly blonde hair, a butterfly tattoo left undisturbed, wide unblinking eyes. These are people, and they were slaughtered, and now their blood is soaking into the silk and leather of her armor.

April gags, the rich taste of blood high in her mouth, and spits to the side. "This is —" she says, and gags again. Usagi makes a sympathetic noise somewhere behind her, but when she straightens up, it's Raph's eyes that she searches out. "This is wrong," she finishes, and Raph nods once, his face half-revolted, half-furious.

"Wrong doesn't even come close," he says, breathing hard through his nose. With his shoulders up and his head lowered, he looks like a bull, seconds away from charging.

Yeah, not going down that road, April thinks. One Bull is enough, thank you very much. A thick belch of laughter tries to force its way up her throat, and she gags again choking it down. She can feel her disgust and panic waiting nearby for the chance to let loose, and she knows if she starts laughing she'll puke, and then she'll start crying, and then — then who knows?

Then I'll lose my goddamn mind. She reaches up to scrub her face, and stops at the last second when Raph cuts her a wide-eyed warning glance. "Oh," she says, and her voice echoes dully in her ears. "Yeah. That'd be bad. That'd be really bad." She squeezes her hands into fists, but the blood has already stiffened the leather, and the material is thick and tacky against her fingers.

There's so much blood. April didn't count the bodies, but there's enough blood for there to be five or six bodies — maybe more. Chewed-up, torn apart; if the light was better she'd be able to see grey tendons and red-stained bones where the bodies were opened from throat to belly.

There were teeth marks in some of the bodies. April shudders; the motion starts at her feet and works its way up through her legs and torso and finally ends in a twitchy, unsteady shake of her head.

She swallows down another laugh and clenches her fists tighter, until she can feel her fingernails cutting into her palm through the thin leather. Whatever happens next, she is not going to freak out in the middle of an alley. When she gets back to the lair, she can cry in the shower until the water goes cold, but she is keeping her shit together here and now.

"April?"

She looks up to find Raph staring at her through squinted eyes. He's not quite so ready to charge, but he's still ready to swing. His sai gleam white in the streetlight filtering down to them from half a block away. "Are you with us?"

The question is so un-Raph that April flounders for a reply. He doesn't even sound like himself; there's no belligerence, just something close to Leo's cool authority.

Now she does laugh, dry and unforced. "Yeah, I'm with you guys," she says. With every word, her voice sharpens, takes on a little more life. "Are you seriously trying to sound like Leo?"

"Well, it distracted you, right?" Raph says, his shoulders dropping, the squint shifting to a glare. "No one's freaking out on my watch." He spins his sai back into his belt and throws a quick glance back at Usagi. "You okay back there?"

"I am…as well as can be expected," Usagi says, with only a momentary hitch in his voice. More out of habit than anything else, April closes her eyes and pushes, but all she feels is a distant, ebbing warmth, and something that might be a flutter of unease. April doesn't know why she expected anything else, especially now. It was hard enough to tell what Usagi was thinking or feeling, even when April's empathy still effectively encompassed him. Everything is muted with Usagi to begin with, restrained and regulated. He sounds — he sounds like himself, perfectly controlled and unruffled.

April still envies Usagi, whether or not he actually feels that way now.

And Raph is Raph, a hot pulse of anger and disgust flaring through his mind. April clings to the familiar sensation, lets it anchor her back in the alley. Raph is angry; Raph is always angry.

Right now, she should be angry too.

"What are we going to do?" she asks, when she's sure words will come out of her mouth and not that sick laughter. "With them?" She can't bring herself to say the bodies; they were people not too long ago, and, maybe foolishly, she wants to let them stay that way a little longer.

None of them talk about what could have done this. Why bother? They've found other corpses over the years, victims of crimes and battles that have nothing to do with them, but this isn't a robbery gone wrong or a grudge turning vicious. This is the Boar, welcoming them home.

Raph shrugs, not dismissively, but honestly confused. April pities him; Raph has a problem with murder at the best of times, and he can barely articulate why. This bloody, petty mess is so far beyond Raph's ability to talk about that April's surprised he hasn't started beating up the dumpsters, just to let some of his anger out. Instead, it keeps flaring in his head, like the beacon on a lighthouse.

"Leaving them for your police seems…disrespectful," Usagi says quietly. "And yet…there seems to be little else we can do."

April nods, meeting Usagi's eyes before looking back at Raph. He's still breathing hard, and now that the worst of her panic is safely under control — even though her pulse is still racing and her blood is hot with adrenaline — April can see just how close Raph is to losing it himself. The only reason why he hasn't is because she was going to, and without that —

"We should —" She closes her eyes as the idea forms, and another shudder wracks her. "We should cover them up, at least."

"What, so they're ready for their close-up?" Raph snaps. April opens her eyes to find him glaring at her, eyes bright in the darkness.

Oh, Raph, she thinks, her pity stronger now. She keeps her distance, and so does Usagi. "If we make it look like…" Her mouth resists finishing the sentence, because what's she about to suggest is a whole new betrayal of the people lying at her feet, but she pushes ahead, her voice scratching over the words. "They're too close to the lair," she says. "We have to make it look like they weren't killed here. When the police come…" No need to finish. Usagi's face twists, disgust and determination mingled, and he nods once in her direction. "We've got to move them, Raph," she adds gently.

A plan. Good. As long as she can focus on that, she can ignore the feathery beat of her pulse and the way her mouth is filled with too much saliva, and how dirty she feels, inside and out.

"We can't just play interior decorator! We should be —" Raph growls, a long, rough sound that makes the skin on April's back prickle. The cold air has chilled the blood on her pants to a stiff stain, and she tries to ignore it. "For all we know, whatever did this is still around!"

"I'm sure it is," April says. Raph looks at her, eyes wide, mouth curled in a snarl, and now it's April's turn to shrug. "They want to see what we do. How we react."

Usagi makes a soft, emphatic little noise, more eloquently contemptible than an hour of Raph swearing. "It is filth," he says. "If it had any honor, it would fight us openly."

April laughs with Raph, twin dry, nasty sounds in the cold alley. "Yeah," says April, thinking of Donnie's white, bewildered stare, and the gouges on Leo's arms. She thinks about falling, and not remembering hitting the ground. "I don't think the Boar knows much about honor."

She waits for something to happen — lightning to strike and blast her away, the ghostly green dogs to tumble off the roof, snapping and howling, or for Slash to creep out of the shadows with his mace on his shoulder.

No honor means I can't insult it, she thinks. Her panic tries to rise one last time — oh god there's blood on me oh the blood on me it's on me never going to wash out going to be on me forever — and she bites her tongue, a quick snap, to break the train of thought.

"Right," Raph says, a few long, silent moments later. "Let's get them…let's get them in better shape." He takes a careful step toward the closest body, his face screwed up in concentration.

April swallows again, resisting the urge to spit, and waits until the pain in her tongue disappears. Then she crouches down and slides her hands under a pair of unresisting arms. She tries not to look at its face as she lifts the body and drags it down the alley, toward the abandoned building next door, and doesn't think about how familiar this all is, the blood, the hiding, and the sick taste of her own fear, sliding down the back of her throat.

With Donnie around, they'd know to the second how much time they have before the elevator reaches them. Right now, all Leo can do is make a best guess and hope it goes right past this floor.

Of course, that would involve good luck, and that's usually the one thing they don't have.

There's no cover. They have nowhere to go, and the yellow light of the hallway won't camouflage them. It's got to be the window.

"Mikey, move!" Leo doesn't wait for obedience; he grabs Mikey by the arm and yanks him down the hallway as the elevator clatters its way up the shaft. Once they reach the window, Mikey pulls out of Leo's grip and glares at him, chest heaving in short, angry exhales.

"We can't just leave them!" he hisses. "We have to —"

"We have to leave," Leo shoots back, with every ounce of authority he's got. His fingers scrabble for purchase at the window. Just as he's starting to think there's something at work, keeping the window stuck and them inside, the pane slides up and he shoves Mikey toward the fire escape and the icy air.

Behind him, the elevator stops. The sudden absence of sound leaves Leo's ears aching, but he throws himself at the window without looking back. With a little luck — just a little, not even a handful — he'll have disappeared up the fire escape before whoever's getting off the elevator sees him.

At most, he'll be a shadow, vanishing into deeper darkness.

He's halfway out the window, his mind already turning toward focusing Mikey past his anger and getting them to a safe distance when the the elevator gates crashes open, and a light footstep falls on the carpet.

Mikey's still on the fire escape, trying to peer into the hallway, and the two seconds it takes to shove him away means Leo's foot is still on the carpet, in plain view, for those two seconds. Long enough for any hope for luck to vanish completely.

The person behind them says, in a soft, horrified voice, "What have you done?"

Against every instinct and every hour of training, Leo drops back to his feet and turns around.

Angel — it can only be her, round-faced and painfully young — isn't staring at him. Her eyes are fixed the slow, golden spill leaking out of the broken door. She runs her hands through her hair, then clenches her fists. "What have you done?" she asks again. Her voice quavers. "Oh, no."

"You want to explain what this is?" Leo asks, knowing he's a special kind of ruthless for going after her when she's so obviously frightened. But she's not frightened of him, not yet, and he needs to get what information he can before she realizes what's happening, and gets scared of the six-foot turtle with the katana.

"Oh my god," Angel says, still not looking at him. "No, no, no. Get away from her!"

Leo freezes midstep, and drops his heel to the carpet. Angel's looking at him now, dark eyes blazing, and any fear has disappeared. She's furious.

"Leave her alone. Leave them all alone." She points back toward the window. "Get out."

"Hey, Angel, it's just us," says Mikey, crowding through the window and dropping lightly to the hallway floor. "I'm Mikey, and this is my bro, Leo. We just needed to talk to you for a couple seconds, that's all, we're not —"

"I don't care!" Angel yells. Her voice cracks. "You — just get out, you'll ruin everything!"

"Ruin what?" Leo skirts the edge of the spreading spill to take a step closer. Angel gives him another burning look, and her hands ball into fists. She's ready to fight him, turtle or not, katana or not. Leo softens his voice, and on a burst of intuition, sheathes his katana and holds his hands out. "You came to the lair, you brought a message. We want to know why." He feels Mikey nodding beside him, and doesn't have to look back to know Mikey's all wide-eyed innocence. "Can you tell us what's going on here?"

"Don't come any closer," Angel says. Her voice steadies, and now there's a heavy, dogged determination under her words. "You're tainted. You'll ruin everything."

"Tainted by what?" Leo asks. The honey-gone-wrong smell of the resin fills his nose and mouth. He ignores it, and focuses on keeping his own voice reasonable and calm.

Angel's eyes narrow, calculating, then a little of the tension in her shoulders fades. Leo takes another step closer, hands still held out, placating and empty. A gesture of trust. "It promised me, if I carried a message, we'd be safe. I did what it asked. This is supposed to be a safe place, but if the Boar gets in —" She shakes her head. "You need to go," she says, her gaze as pleading now as it was furious a few moments ago. "If you stay here, it'll know and come looking. Just go, please."

"Angel," says Mikey. "C'mon, just a couple minutes. Who told you to come to the lair?"

She gives him a look of pure teenage disdain. "The Bull?" she drawls. "It wanted me to talk to April O'Neil? Yeah?"

Apparently things aren't so urgent that a nineteen-year-old can't take the opportunity to let them know they're idiots. Leo relaxes a fraction. "And this —" He waves at the hallway, the broken door, the resin creeping slowly toward his feet. "—this is all part of your, what? Reward?"

"It promised to keep us safe if I carried the message," Angel says, like it's the most obvious thing in the world. Leo does not envy Milagros, not at all.

"And this is how you'll be safe?" Mikey asks. "All stuck in…honey, or whatever? Because that makes total sense."

Angel glares, brows drawn low over her eyes. "Like any of this does," she says, just this side of a snarl. "I did what I had to keep my gran safe. Now you have to go." She points toward the window.

"What about you?" When Angel meets his gaze, wary and alert, Leo lets his hands drop to his sides. They're running out of time and there are more important questions he should be asking, but the instinct to protect overrides them all. Angel is young, and she's no fighter, no matter how highly she thinks of herself. "You can come back to the lair with us."

Angel scoffs, brushing hair out of her eyes. "Yeah, no thanks. Like I said." She stabs a finger at Leo, then at Mikey. "Tainted. Your lair's got the Boar all over it, and so do you. That's why the Bull couldn't get in to talk to April." She draws herself up, then hooks a thumb back toward her door. "I'm all set. Why do you think the door was still open?"

Leo's skin crawls, and beside him, Mikey shifts a little closer. "You're going in there?" Mikey asks. "Into that stuff?"

Angel shrugs. "Yeah? Safest place in the city. Right now, at least." She hesitates, the last of her defensiveness falling away. Now she's just a kid, tired and scared. "It won't work for you guys. Sorry."

"Yeah," Leo says heavily. "We get it. Tainted." If it weren't for bad luck, we'd have no luck at all. "What does it do?"

Dark eyes meet his. For the first time since Angel got off the elevator, she smiles. It's a sad smile, one that she has no right to wear, and one Leo recognizes from his own family's faces. "It makes people forget," she says. "We'll just disappear till this is over." Now her smile turns sly and knowing. "Best we could hope for, with what's coming."

"What happens if —" Leo shakes his head. It's not worth asking. Donnie won't lose. He won't let himself. Leo has to keep faith in that.

Angel knows the rest of the question, even if Leo doesn't ask it. "Then we all go down together," she says, with another shrug, much more forced than the last. "Now go. And don't come back."

"What about Anna?" Mikey asks, nodding at the broken door. "I, uh —"

"She'll be fine," Angel interrupts. "As long as you leave." She stares at them, unmoving, unblinking, until Leo nods and pulls Mikey back toward the window. They've gotten nothing, no answers, and his whole self fights the idea of leaving Angel to that silent hallway.

"Go," Angel says again. "Just…go. Please."

Mikey protests when Leo hauls him toward the window, but there's no heat to it and he climbs onto the fire escape silently. At the last moment, Leo turns back to Angel, who regards him steadily.

"Will we forget?" he asks.

Angel considers this, then gives him another infuriating shrug. "No idea," she says. "Let me know when it's all over?"

That startles a laugh out of Leo. "Yeah," he says without looking back. "I'll do that." He slides the window shut behind him, and follows Mikey up the fire escape, trying not to imagine Angel stepping into the resin, and the golden layers closing over her head.

They're two blocks away before Leo realizes they never asked where Angel was coming from, and what she'd been doing. Too late now. Too late.

Donnie times his coffee consumption to a nicety; he's heading back to the kitchen to start another pot, tentatively confident in how the portal is progressing now that he has a known power source to use in his calculations, when Leo and Mikey swing back inside. They're wind-chilled, but his joke about how they should have dressed for their visit to the grannies evaporates from Donnie's mouth once he gets a good look at their faces.

Oh, no, he thinks, with no real alarm but a great deal of real resignation. Another disaster. His face must have shown it, because Leo holds up his hands, smiling tiredly.

"We're fine," he says. "Our visit was less productive than we hoped, that's all."

Mikey snorts and rubs his arms. "Dude, that is a major understatement." He blows out a long breath. "Anyone want the shower?" He doesn't wait for a reply before loping off in that direction, tugging off his wraps and pads as he goes and dropping them behind him. Donnie almost hollers after him to pick up his mess, but then Leo lays a heavy hand on his shoulder and draws his attention back.

"Got a minute?" Leo asks, eyes clear and guileless. Donnie knows better, and thinks about making up an excuse and hiding in the lab, but ends up nodding, his stomach knotting as Leo guides him back to the kitchen.

"You know, Leo," he says, after Leo nudges him toward a stool. "You've got to stop cornering everyone in the kitchen when you've got something you want to say. Bad associations."

Leo gives him a slight smile before moving toward the electric kettle. "Here I'm guaranteed a captive audience," he says, just like Donnie knew he would. He fills the kettle and sets it back on its stand with a muted click, then turns to Donnie. "At least while there's food around."

"You might want to back off, just so no one gets the wrong idea," Donnie says as the water starts to boil. The low rush is the only sound in the kitchen for a long few moments, while Leo watches him and he tries not to fidget.

He'd hoped to escape this talk, and let the tension between them fade away into nothing. There's no reason to talk it out; he was never angry at Leo to begin with, and Leo's got enough to worry about. Donnie doesn't want to be the one adding more weight to Leo's shell, when even one more worry seems like it'll make that slight hunch in Leo's shoulders permanent.

"I'm sorry," Leo says, so quietly the noise of the kettle nearly drowns it out. "I should have stopped you. I should have fixed what was happening with you and April, and — and I should have known better." He sighs, and rubs the back of his hand against his forehead in an already-familiar gesture. "Boar or not, I've got no excuse."

"As far as excuses go, mind control is a pretty good one, even for this family," Donnie says, trying to radiate something approximating unconcern. Maybe if he doesn't seem worried, Leo will let this go. "I'm not angry, Leo. No need to beat yourself up over this. I'm fine."

"You're always fine, Donnie," says Leo.

"And I've got work to do, so I should get back to that —"

"No." Leo's refusal is so soft, so easily spoken, that someone less used to the nuances of his voice would think it's not an order.

Donnie bristles, a spark of hot frustration igniting in his chest. "No? There's nothing to talk about, so me staying here is a waste of time. It's fine, Leo, it's all fine. Now, if you'll excuse me." He stands up, abandoning his empty mug on the table, and heads toward the door.

"Donnie. Sit down."

More than Splinter ever was, Leo's voice is the sound of ultimate authority in Donnie's life. Listening to that voice has saved his life more than a hundred times over the years; now it sends him back to his stool, ready to listen to whatever Leo has to say. He tries to crush his frustration, and just manages to keep it from showing in his voice. "All right," he says, trying to sound like he chose to come back on his own, "what is it?"

"You're always fine," Leo repeats, with new emphasis. He leans back against the kitchen counter and folds his arms over his plastron, watching Donnie with a cool, assessing gaze that somehow manages to convey love, too - an old, patient, clear-eyed love. "Never a problem, never anything that will bust up the family. Someone asks you to do something, you do it. You might yell and complain, but it's all noise." Leo smiles wryly, his eyes going far away for a brief moment. "Sound and fury, signifying nothing."

"If you're going to badly paraphrase Shakespeare," Donnie says, his voice gone reedy and his tongue thick in his mouth, "I'm not sticking around."

"The thing is, you never ask for anything." Leo's gaze sharpens again, still assessing, still affectionate. But there's something else, something dark and very, very sad, hiding behind Leo's eyes.

Donnie looks away, at anything but Leo: at the scratched tabletop, the old stove, the cracked ceiling and the floor tiles that need replacing, and the kettle that clicks off and lets the boiling water fade into silence. Raph was bad enough, dragging all of this into the light; Leo's aim is so much better.

"So when you didn't ask for help this time, I thought it was nothing new." Leo's eyelids flicker; shame and apology. "It was so easy for the Boar to — I'm ashamed. I should have known, I should have done something. But you never ask, and I assumed. I'm sorry, Donnie."

"It's fine." Donnie sighs. "I swear, Leo, it's fine, just let it go." He shuts his eyes, longing for his lab, hearing Raph yell Nothing is broken! in his head. How many times is he going to have to go through this? Is it Mikey's turn next? Or maybe Sensei's? How many more times does this bruised spot on his soul have to be pressed before it's allowed to heal? "I've got work to do." He starts to rise, but Leo's quiet laugh makes him pause.

"You always do," says Leo, like he's just discovered something wonderful, his voice almost delighted. "You never stop. Always something else to fix." Leo lets his head fall back and laughs again, brighter this time, a sound Donnie hasn't heard since they were fifteen and all they had to worry about was morning training. "Of course," he says, once his laughter fades. "No wonder it's you, Donnie. I should have seen it before."

"I…" Donnie flounders for a response. "I…Leo, I have no idea what you're talking about."

"There's no one else who could be the Champion," Leo says, rubbing his forehead again, his laughter trailing off into a smile. "You're the only one who won't stop, Donnie. Not till the job's done."

Donnie tries to find an argument for that. Any of his brothers would have been a better choice, the way he sees it. Leo's the hero, born and made, ready to sacrifice everything for the right cause; Raph's anger would carry him through any obstacle and out the other side; Mikey is fearless, impossible to predict.

Him? He's just Donnie. Just a nerd, just someone who fixes things. Tenacity is great and all, but it's not heroic. No one ever tells stories about how the knight outlasted the dragon — there's always some great feat that wins the day.

"It should have been you," Donnie says, finally. "Maybe then the Bull would have had something to say. Maybe it would have helped."

He doesn't hear Leo move, but he feels Leo's hand on his shoulder, cool and solid. "I think," Leo says, like he's piecing together his reasons as he speaks, "the Bull knows what you're good at."

"What do you mean?" Donnie frowns up at Leo, fighting the childish impulse to just believe Leo, and follow his lead. But they're not kids anymore, and Leo can't fight this battle for him.

"You like impossible things." Donnie keeps frowning, and Leo just smiles, squeezing Donnie's shoulder. "Okay, maybe like is a strong word, but you want to prove them wrong. If someone tells you it can't be done, you grab — I don't know, a toaster and some superglue, and say wanna bet?"

There was that one time, though it was a microwave, not a toaster — but Leo keeps talking, and so Donnie keeps his peace, mesmerized by the simple confidence in Leo's voice.

"Look at the retromutagen — no one thought it could be done, the Kraang planned on there being no cure, and you did it. You saved April's dad, Timothy, Martin — you didn't care that it shouldn't have been possible, you just did it."

"It needed to be done," Donnie says. "Someone had to — and well, I thought —"

"And you did it," Leo says, with that tone again, the one that says of course, isn't it obvious? He even sounds pleased, like Donnie's a student who just grasped a tangled, occluded concept. "You always do. You don't stop until it's fixed. And you won't now. That's why it had to be you."

"You wouldn't quit either," Donnie chokes out. "None of you would."

Leo sighs. "We all…have breaking points, Donnie." He gives Donnie's shoulder one last squeeze, and then backs away. "You don't. You'll keep going until it's fixed."

"Or I'm dead," Donnie says, as harshly as he can. "That's always an option, Leo." A feeling he doesn't quite recognize — not fear or doubt, but something else entirely, too amorphous to name — fills his chest. "There aren't any stories about what happens to the Champions after."

Leo leans in close, the last of the city's scent and something sweet, like honey, clinging to him. "Then write one," he says, and there's no mistaking it for an order. He takes a deep breath. "If you go down, we all go down with you. You are not on your own in this. And you heard what April said — the Bull will come. When it's time."

Donnie nods, the look in Leo's eyes finally giving him a name for what's building inside him. It's a promise.

He won't stop.

"I'm glad someone has faith in the Bull," he says. "Takes a lot of pressure off me."

Leo's eyes gleam. "It's not the Bull I have faith in," he says.

Raph's usual stomping down the stairs wakes Casey out of a fitful doze. He sits up, rubbing at his eyes and ready to bitch Raph out ten ways to Sunday for interrupting his beauty sleep, but he gets a good look at Raph's face and decides against it. Raph looks rough, like he's about twenty years older than when he left, his hands balled into massive fists.

Casey thinks, Jesus, it's gotta be Slash, and throws off his covers. He sees April stalk away toward the bathroom, moving all stiff like every joint hurts, and Usagi drifts off toward the kitchen, but all he really sees is Raph, green eyes hot enough to burn whatever they look at.

"You good?" Casey asks, low, when he gets close to Raph. They're alone in the common room now — the turtles are all in the kitchen, and Usagi's with them, and April's already disappeared down the hall — and he could hug Raph if he wanted to, but something tells him to keep some distance, at least till Raph talks and he can get a read on how bad this is.

If it was Slash, it's real bad.

Raph does something complicated with his head, like a nod and a shake and a twitch all at once, and gusts out a long sigh. "Yeah, I'm good," he says, and unclenches his fists. "Totally good. Peachy."

"Uh huh," Casey says. "And I'm totally convinced. What's goin' on?"

Raph glares, his lip peeling back from his teeth, but Casey just raises his eyebrows and waits. He figures it wasn't Slash, because April and Usagi walked back into the lair on their own, and Raph doesn't look like he's about to murder half the city. Still, better to wait it out and see.

"Had a little surprise waiting for us when we headed back," Raph says, stripping off his wraps. Casey's eyes track the jerky movements of Raph's fingers, and he doesn't clock right away that the wraps are brown-ish red with half-dried blood.

"Dude," he says, fear hitting him square in the chest. "What happened? Are you okay?" Now a whole pile of guilt joins the fear-party, because while Casey was sacked out on the couch, Raph was —

"I'm fine," Raph snaps, yanking off the last of his wraps and closing his fist around them. "I gotta talk to Leo."

"Raph. Seriously, man —"

"Do you ever shut up?" Without waiting for an answer — which, for the record, would be no — Raph grabs him by the neck and kisses him, hard and with too many teeth. Casey's too distracted by the kiss to finish his sentence when Raph finally lets him go. "I'll tell you everything later," he says. "But right now, I gotta talk to Leo, okay?"

Casey licks his lips, tasting Raph and cold wind, and nods. He can get the full rundown later, even if he'd rather get it out of Raph now and get started on making that pinched look disappear. "Fine, but you're gonna follow up, right? 'Cause I got needs and —"

"Oh my god," Raph says, with a truly epic eyeroll, but he's smiling and trying to hide it. "You're ridiculous."

"You love it," Casey shoots back, the guilt and fear rolling back a little, even if his worry stays right where it is. "Your room later?"

Raph nods, starts to turn away, then turns back with a thoughtful look that sits uneasily on his broad features. "You should go check on April. She's fine," he adds, when Casey stiffens. "She just might need to talk or something." Without another word, he heads heavy-footed for the kitchen, his fist still balled around his bloody wraps.

When Casey finds April, she's freshly showered, wrapped in an old towel, and scrubbing her arms over the sink.

He debates a wolf-whistle, because times may have changed but April still looks awesome. More importantly, it's one of the many things guaranteed to get April out of whatever funk she's in, because she'll be too busy yelling at him to be pissed off. Then he sees how red her arms are, scrubbed raw and getting rawer, and he nearly rips his bandages crossing the bathroom and yanking the soap out of her hand.

"Jesus Christ, April," he says. "What the hell happened out there?"

April whirls around, wet hair sticking to her face and neck, and oh, shit, her eyes are red and bloodshot, her face swollen from crying. "The Boar," she hisses through clenched teeth. "It fucking — it — shit, I can't even —" She plants her hands on Casey's chest and shoves him back.

All of Casey's alarms are going off, lights flashing and sirens blaring on the inside of his brain. Raph may deal with awful shit terribly in the moment, but he can lock it down fast and get over it — one big blow-up, and he's fine. April can't. She needs to let it loose right away. Give her a job and she's fine until it's over, but when all that anger or fear unknots, it's like Yellowstone blowing its top. Casey would know — he's the same damn way.

"Hey," he says, reaching out only to get his hand slapped away. April slumps down over the sink, her scrubbed-raw hands clutching the porcelain until it creaks. The only sound in the room is the hard scrape of her breathing.

"Get out, Casey," April says. She swipes her hand under her nose and sniffs without looking up. "I'm fine."

"Do you know how sick I am of hearin' everyone in this family say they're fine?" Casey snaps. "How hard is it to say no, I'm not, I'm scared shitless?"

"Oh, that's rich," April snarls back, glaring at him through the wet tangles of her hair. "Coming from you, Casey Jones, mystical badass." She delivers that last line in her snottiest voice, loud enough for the echoes to fill the bathroom.

Casey keeps his cool for all of three seconds, then bursts out laughing. "Wow, awesome comeback," he says, wheezing. "Tenth grade called, it wants its insults back."

April pulls in a huge breath, no doubt ready to let him have it with all barrels, but Casey knows she's never been able to keep a straight face once he starts laughing. Already her mouth is twitching; she's trying like hell to hold on to being pissed at him, but he keeps laughing, and finally she gives in and laughs too, all quiet and watery.

When he creeps up and wraps an arm around her bare shoulders, she doesn't resist, but lets him tug her tight against his good side. After a moment, she leans her head on his shoulder, and sniffs again.

She's warm and steady, like she always has been, and for the long moment before April starts talking, Casey's beyond grateful that they still have this. Sure, he's got Raph now, and she and Donnie finally got their heads out of their asses, but before all that, there was April and Casey, dumb kids trying to live in two worlds. That foundation's going nowhere.

April rubs her arm and winces. "It wasn't the greatest night," she says.

Casey huffs. "Yeah, I'm gettin' that feeling." He tilts his head to try and look her in the eye, but only sees the curve of her cheek and the wet strands of her hair. "You want to talk about it?"

"Not really," April says. She sighs, and leans into him a little harder. Casey tightens his grip on her shoulder. "It killed seven people," she says. "We found them, right by the entrance to the lair. They were…it ripped them apart, and I — I got their blood on me. I can still feel it."

That only answers half of Casey's questions. He could try to ease the rest of it out of her, let her cry out the worst of it. Then April shudders, and Casey lets the questions go. Now the look on Raph's face makes sense, and Casey wants nothing more than to get his gear on and head topside, and beat the ever-loving shit out of the Boar and all its buddies.

And you'd last about five seconds, Jones, he tells himself. It's true, but it doesn't change how badly he wants to break something, just for the look on Raph's face and for the way April's shudder turns into a shiver that won't stop.

"I think it was eating them," she says, and starts to cry. It's a slow leak; Casey doubts she's got much left in her, but he turns her head into his chest and lets her cry into his shirt, and thinks about his bat coming down on Slash's face, and breaking his stick on Karai's back. He's never wanted to kill someone before, and the feeling is as jagged as a piece of broken glass, but just this once, he thinks he would, if he had the chance.

"You're gonna be okay," he says inanely, and kisses the top of her head. "You're April O'Neil, badass kunoichi and the terror of Biology 103. You're good, April, you're great."

She lets out another watery laugh and gives him a tight, awkward hug. "You're not bad either," she says, her voice all thick from her stuffed nose.

"I'm awesome," Casey says, on reflex, grinning at himself in the mirror when April laughs again.

The door to the bathroom opens with a rusty squeal from the hinges. Casey watches Donnie's reflection duck through the doorframe, his face all creasy, worry spilling out of him. He hesitates, watching Casey and April, but April doesn't wait. She gives Casey one last squeeze before she slides out of the circle of his arm and heads straight for Donnie.

Casey sidles past them, suppressing every comment that comes to mind — there are some moments even he knows not to ruin. He does look back before he lets the door close behind him, just in time to watch April wrap her arms around Donnie's neck, and Donnie to lean his head on April's. And he sees Donnie's hand rise, pausing only a little before cupping April's head and stroking her wet hair. They don't say anything, but Casey knows they don't need to. They never really have.

So he lets the door close, rubs at his bandages, and goes off in search of Raph. It's going to be a long night.