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It’s a long time before April leaves the scene, but it’s worth it to scoop up the first report on what exactly had gone down at Sacks Tower. Especially since she’s the one with the most information on the whole thing – despite her slight embellishment on who exactly had saved the day.
When she finally finds her way back to the partially collapsed lair, she’s grateful for the delay.
“Stay still!” Donnie is shouting, voice echoing through the tunnels. April wanders through the empty spaces, trying to follow the words bouncing off the walls. “This is delicate work, I can’t do it if you keep moving—”
“Just duct tape it like last time,” Raph’s gruff voice answers. There’s a high-pitched scoff that’s unmistakably Donnatello’s.
“Like last time? Last time you got a teensy little crack from hitting a wall too hard. This time you got crushed by a heavily-armoured human and then, you slammed into a vehicle at high speed, shell first!”
His voice gets steadily higher as he continues. Finally, April finds her way to a smaller room, away from the main area, and peeks around the door warily, wondering if she’ll be walking into a fight in progress.
All the turtles are there, and she thinks she sees Splinter sleeping on the floor amongst them, but he’s obscured by the literal pile of blankets thrown around, and over, the others. Mikey is the most buried, visible only as a green and orange head poking out of a floral pink blanket, face down and unconscious on a stack of comics. Leo sits by his side, shell resting against the lump that is his brother, visibly swaying and blinking heavily. Each time he seems to nod off, he jerks upright again and shakes himself, re-focusing on the two sitting on Splinter’s other side.
The turtles seem to have the same body language as humans, which is how April knows Donnie is just as tired as Leo, despite his loud complaints as he applies some sort of mixture to Raph’s shell. Raph, on the other hand, just looks angry and – embarrassed? “You were the one who threw me, numbskull,” he growls, then flinches as Donnie pinches his neck.
“I thought you were gonna land on it!” Donnie protests. “Why are you being like this? I know you hate getting patched up, but this is serious, Raph. If this crack is exacerbated, and there’s a very high probability it will without treatment, even by your regular exercises, or when we’re sparring! Oh, we’ll have to be careful, maybe you could work more on your throwing skills, I know Sensei wanted you to—”
“Donnie,” Raph interrupts. Donnie coughs.
“Uh. If it gets worse, it could seriously damage your spine, Raph. That’s some scary stuff.”
Now that April looks closer, she thinks the way Donnie’s hands shake minutely may be from more than exhaustion.
“Yeah, so I’ll be careful. Just hurry it up, okay?” Raph says. Donnie stills for a moment, then stands and plants himself in front of Raph. “Hey, what gives?”
“Why won’t you let me do this?” Donnie asks, clearly frustrated. “I know we haven’t had to use the shell resin before, but I promise the formula is sound, it’ll keep everything together and I added a compound that should stimulate growth in the—”
“I get it, Donnie,” Raph interrupts again. “If you say it’ll work, it’ll work. You’re not a genius for nothing.”
“Oh.” If his skin tone allowed it, April could imagine Donnie turning pink at the words. “Thanks, Raph.”
“That’s why you gotta give that brain of yours a rest, huh?” Raph reaches out and pokes Donnie in the forehead, between his glasses and his goggles. “Just tape me up and take a break, I’ll be fine.”
Finally, someone besides those two breaks into the conversation. “That’s what this is about?” Leo asks, voice thick with sleep. He rolls himself up onto his knees, already looking more alert. “Raph, Donnie’s right. You have a serious injury.”
“Yeah, well, I ain’t the one who lost all his blood today,” Raph shoots back stubbornly.
Still peeking around the corner at the scene, April winces. In the midst of everything else that’d happened, she’d forgotten that the turtles were technically only running on adrenaline. Suddenly Mikey’s unconscious state had taken on a sinister tone – he must have crashed after they’d gotten back, and combined with the blood loss…
“The less you struggle, the quicker Donnie can get it done,” Leo is saying, but Raph just crosses his arms and stares him down. Donnie looks between them hesitantly.
“It should only take ten minutes,” he offers. Raph shakes his head.
“You ain’t gonna last that long,” he says bluntly. “This’ll keep ‘til morning. Go, Donnie.”
Donnie fidgets with one of the gadgets sticking out of the pack strapped to his shell. Leo looks him over and sighs.
“It’s alright, Donnie,” he says, “I’ll take care of this.”
Raph bristles. “If it’s such a problem to you—” he starts to snarl, but Leo cuts him off with an upheld hand.
“I’ll take care of you,” he corrects himself. Raph subsides, but his scowl remains. “Go make sure Mikey is warm enough, Donnie.”
Donnie fidgets again, still hesitating to leave Raph, but after another moment he scurries over to his unconscious brother, grabbing an unused blanket on the way and tucking it over Mikey’s shell. He yawns once, twice, and then slowly falls forward, draping himself over Mikey’s back. He’s asleep before Leo even says a word.
“Are you embarrassed about earlier?” Leo asks. He’s settled himself behind Raph, shell resin in one hand and the other resting on Raph’s shell, keeping him in place. Raph visibly fumes, but says nothing. “You thought we were all gonna bite the big one. We all did. If you hadn’t done the big emotional speech, I would’ve, so you shouldn’t—”
“You think I’m embarrassed about that?” Raph interrupts, turning around and knocking Leo’s hand away. “You think I’m embarrassed over telling my brothers I love them?”
Leo blinks at him for a second and frowns. “Well, yeah,” he says. “Are you not?”
“Typical,” Raph mutters. He looks away from Leo and adds, “Man, you really don’t get feelings, do you.”
“So you guys tell me,” Leo replies, with strained humour. “Raph, I just want to understand. If it’s not about that, then what? And I know you’re embarrassed about something. I get enough about feelings to get that.”
“You really don’t know?” Raph says. Leo gives an aborted shrug gesture that makes him look startlingly like Donnie. “C’mon, use that big leader brain of yours. As if you aren’t already figuring out ways to keep me benched from now until the end of time for the dumb stunt I pulled.”
“Stunt—? Okay, hitting that truck shell-first was dumb, but it’s not like I’d bench you over—”
“How about when I got hit on my own and wasn’t there when you guys were getting’ beaten to a pulp?” Raph bursts out with. He goes to stand up but gets yanked back down by Leo’s hand on his wrist. “Or when I couldn’t stop Shredder from busting my shell open? I couldn’t even get you out of those cages!”
He’s breathing heavily. Leo watches him with something like alarm.
“It took all four of us to take down Shredder,” he says, even and calm. “Working together. You were never supposed to defeat him alone, Raph, I know you know this.”
“I know I’m the one that’s supposed to win fights,” Raph insists. “You come up with the plans, and Donnie does his tech genius thing, and Mikey keeps us together, and I hit stuff. It’s what I’m good at, Leo. What am I supposed to—” His breath hitches. “What am I gonna do if I can’t do that?”
He goes to stand up again, but Leo’s grip on his wrist is iron. “You do whatever you want,” Leo says firmly. He lets go of Raph’s wrist to hold onto the back of his neck instead. “As if you have to do anything to be worth it to us. We’d love you even if you sat on the couch watching TV and eating all our food every day for the rest of our lives.”
Raph scoffs and looks away, but Leo drags his head back so they can lock eyes again. “Don’t do this, Raph, you know better. Do you stop caring about Donnie when he has a quiet day and can’t work on his tech?”
Raph’s eyes widen dramatically. “You crazy? Of course not, he can’t help it, and he doesn’t need to—” The message clearly sinks in mid-sentence. He stops talking and chuckles bitterly instead. “Ha. Nice work, Sensei Junior.”
“You believe it more if you get to it yourself,” Leo says. He brings his other hand up and plants it on Raph’s shoulder. “You can lose fights, Raph. That’s what we’re here for. Even if you lose the biggest fight of your life, you’re still our brother. You’re my little brother, and that’s worth everything.” He keeps his eyes locked on Raph’s for another few seconds, then leans forward presses the snub of his nose to Raph’s forehead, rubbing it back and forth a few times. It might be their version of a kiss – Raph certainly reacts like a teenage boy subjected to embarrassing sibling affection, screwing up his face and shoving Leo backwards. But not too far.
“Just put the resin on already,” Raph mutters, putting his back to Leo, who gives a pleased smile and obliges.
Which seems like the optimal time to announce her presence. April backtracks along the corridor and then walks back to the doorway, keeping her steps loud. She knocks on the metal next to the open doorframe and peeks her head around. “Guys?” she calls, as if she doesn’t know where they are.
Leo doesn’t look up from his careful work. Raph waves awkwardly. In a wild flurry of movement, Donnie tries to sit upright, but gets tangled in a blanket and flails in place, balanced precariously on Mikey’s shell. “April!” he squeaks right before he topples onto his side. “Are you okay? I didn’t get a chance to check you out after the battle. Check you over. Do a medical check.”
“Come back, blanket,” Mikey says, voice muffled and one hand reaching out from beneath his stack of comforters.
“I’m fine,” April says, but Donnie totters over and hovers his hands over her wrist hesitantly, so she offers it up anyway. He pulls back the dusty sleeve of her jacket and makes a weird clicking noise that might be some signal of sympathy or concern. “Just a sprain, right?”
“Probably,” he allows. “Those cuts look pretty nasty too. I could bandage them?”
She hadn’t even really noticed the cuts across her fingers – they aren’t deep, and they’ve already scabbed over. “It’s fine, Donnie, really,” she says. “I just came to check on you guys. After the whole… blood… thing.”
She might be a little concussed. She’s usually more eloquent.
“Thank you,” Raph says from the floor. He’s holding still for Leo, but he glares at Donnie like he’s going to carry his brother back to the blanket pile any second. “April’s tough, she’ll be fine. Go back to sleep, Donnie.”
“I’m fine too! I’m tough!” Donnie insists, and puffs out his chest. April holds back a laugh. For all his plastron vaguely resembles a chiseled chest, it doesn’t cover how weedy he is, compared to his brothers. It just reminds her again that the brothers are still teenagers, and they clearly have a hierarchy of older brothers and younger brothers, where Donnie falls solidly in the latter category. He really is just a kid. A kid who got most of his blood drained out of him today.
“It’s okay, Donnie,” she says. She peels his fingers off her arm and pats them before letting them drop. “I’m gonna go to a hospital after this. Just wanted to make sure you were alright.”
“Thanks, April,” Leo says, sincerely. He pats Raph’s shell gently and gets to his feet, Raph following quickly. “We just need some time to sleep it off. All of us,” he adds, looking at Raph and Donnie in equal measure. Raph throws his hands up and grumbles, but Donnie accepts it with good grace. “Check back in with us in a few days, alright?”
“Oh! I could get you a shell phone by then!” Donnie says, looking around for… something. “Once I find my equipment. We all have phones linked to each other, I’ve boosted the signals and wired up a network for constant communication – you’ll need one, if you stick around. Right?” he ends uncertainly, looking to Leo.
“Right,” Leo says firmly. He smiles warmly at April.
“I think I’m pretty stuck,” she agrees, feeling more relieved than the flippant remark would suggest. “But don’t work too hard, okay, Donnie? Get some rest.”
Donnie deflates slightly. “Yeah, sure,” he says. Raph rolls his eyes.
“So you’ll listen to her, but not me?” he hisses. Donnie shrugs helplessly.
“She’s the hogosha,” he whispers back.
“Why are we whispering,” Mikey moans from under his blankets.
April leaves them to their bickering, although not before Raph has thrown a hand-knitted blanket over Donnie and threatened to knock him out if he doesn’t go to sleep. It’s not the same kind of brotherly affection she’d surreptitiously seen Leo heap on Raph, but it warms her all the same, and she walks away smiling to herself.
She hasn’t had a family in so long. With her father dead, and no close relatives, and not even anyone she’d call a best friend, she’d forgotten what family was like. But this doesn’t feel like looking in from the outside – this feels like being offered a place in this weird little subterranean family. Like she’s suddenly gained four ridiculous little brothers, and the respect of their father, with nothing asked in exchange except that she keep them safe from everyone on the outside.
And even if it’s hard, she’s up to the challenge. Because she thinks now she can finally understand what people always say, about how they’d do anything for their family.
She takes one last look back along the dripping tunnelway that leads to the brothers. A faint laugh echoes along the way, and then comfortable silence.
Yeah, she’s starting to feel exactly the same way about her new family.