Chapter Text
“Geez, Don.” Raph dodges a fist aimed at his skull, and swiftly retaliates with a punch of his own. “You trying to defuse that bomb or are you looking for its G-spot?”
“I’m working on it,” Donnie returns. He keeps his eyes trained on the intricate wiring in front of him, largely tuning out the chaos in his vicinity. “What’s the matter? Are the under-trained henchmen giving you a hard time?”
“Oh no, please, take your time.” Raph continues to parry with two of the masked fighters attempting to box him in. Donnie’s right about these guys’ skills. They’re slower than the Foot Clan’s least competent stooges, and their repertoire consists almost entirely of evasive maneuvers.
Still, it’s Raph’s familial duty to give his younger brother a hard time. “You know, it’s guys like you that give turtles a bad rap.”
“No rush, dudes!” Mikey calls out to them. “Not like anyone’s life depends on it… Oh, wait.”
“Then by all means, keep distracting me, because that helps me work faster,” Donnie says. “Oh, wait.”
The detonation device is nothing like Donnie’s ever seen before. But then, it isn’t his first time disabling delicate machinery that’s completely unfamiliar to him.
“The hostages are in the armored truck,” Leo informs them, disrupting their banter. He leaps over the unconscious body he’d just knocked out. “Donnie, how much time left?”
Donnie as glances the timer affixed to contraption’s casing. His breath hitches. “Four minutes and some change.”
“Hey, bozo. Didn’t you hear the guy?” Raph addresses the person who raised their arm, poised to attack Donnie’s unsuspecting carapace. “He don’t like being distracted.” Raph grabs the attacker’s wrist, holding it in place before smashing an elbow into their face.
Leo’s mind races. They need to get the civilians off the dock in case Donnie doesn’t defuse the bomb on time. Donnie’s broad estimate of the explosion radius meant that they had to plan for the worst-case scenario. “Everyone to the truck,” he orders. “We’re gonna have to carry those people out of here.”
“Leo, I can do this,” Donnie insists. “Give me one more minute.”
Leo shuts his eyes for a second, weighing their options. “Fine. But if we need more hands to get the civilians to safety, I’ll call you.”
“I’ll be there,” Donnie promises.
As Leo takes off, he calls over his shoulder, “If the clock’s still ticking with two minutes left, dump the bomb in the water and get out of there. You hear that? Two minutes.”
“Aye aye, captain!”
“Now’s our chance!” one of the enemy combatants yells.
“I wouldn’t be too sure about—” Raph’s eyes widen when he spots someone descend on Mikey, approaching him from a blind spot. “Mike, look out! On your left!” he booms. “Don’t get—” He’d meant to say sloppy, but a sharp burn below his jaw impedes him from finishing his thought.
“A gentleman would ask for a dance first,” Mikey tuts at his would-be attacker. He twirls his nunchaku and it hits his assailant on the side of their skull with a resounding thwack.
Raph’s vision fractures. The world around him blurs at the edges. Splits into kaleidoscope images.
His knees buckle under his weight. He commands his body to stabilize itself, but none of his limbs obey him. Hands grab the back of his calves and elbows hook below his armpits, lifting him off the ground. Right before he succumbs to darkness, he marvels at this newfound ability to defy gravity.
It takes Donnie a few seconds to recognize the lack of activity near him. “Raph?” He looks over his shoulder. “Raph?! Guys!” he yells. “Raph, he—” His eyes dart around the area. “I think they took him!”
“What?!” Leo whips around. He sees Donnie use the end of his bo to connect with an enemy’s jaw. No sight of Raph. “Donnie, nix the bomb now. Find Raph.”
“But I can—” Donnie starts.
“Now, Donatello,” Leo repeats authoritatively.
Donnie lets out a sharp exhale. With some effort, he lifts the problem he failed to solve and carries it to the edge of the dock. He deposits the device into the water, watching it sink past the surface for a second. He gives the rippling water one final glare before he sprints to the transit shed at the farthest end of the dock, hoping to find Raph at the other side of the building.
Mikey takes a step in the same direction, prompting Leo to bark, “Michelangelo, fall back. We don’t have time for this.”
“Raph needs us!” Mikey protests, shooting a longing glance at the empty space left by his brothers. “Donnie too!”
“No, they don’t,” Leo reminds him archly. “They can take care of themselves. Those humans in there can’t.” He nods toward the truck. “Let’s go.”
Almost as soon as Donnie catches a glimpse of a red mask, he feels something puncture his neck. He crumples forward, plastron and beak landing gracelessly on the floor. He idly notes that he hadn’t even used his hands to break his fall.
Donnie figures he was injected with a sedative—one that worked with extreme efficiency. They even injected his throat first, relaxing the muscles there to prevent him from screaming.
Did they use carfentanyl on him? Or etorphine hydro… hypo…?
What was that word?
Donnie grasps at his fading consciousness, helpless as he feels it seep out of him. He can’t tell if he’s lost his vision or if his eyelids just slipped over his eyes.
Distantly, he hears a voice. “Coeus stock 8 is secure.” It sounds garbled. Almost like they’re underwater.
“That’s the one?” comes a disembodied answer. “You’re sure?”
“Unless they’ve swapped masks, I’m sure.”
“Good thing they come color-coded. And the second target practically delivered itself to us.”
A question attempts to assemble in Donnie’s brain, but he gives up on it midway.
Even with just five hostages, Leo and Mikey have to get creative. With the humans’ hands still bound, Leo and Mikey haul them over their shoulders and tuck them to their sides as they leap, dodge, and dash their way to safety.
They only stop when they’re a good distance away from the dock. They help loosen the knots around the hostages’ wrists so they can untie it for themselves. “You’re safe now,” Leo tells them, “but I’d keep running north if I were you.”
One by one, they scamper away. Mikey can’t tell if they’re running away from the bad guys at the dock or from Leo and Mikey themselves. “You’re welcome!” Mikey waves them goodbye anyway. None of them see it.
With the civilians out of harm’s way, Mikey and Leo head back to the pier to rendezvous with the rest of the team. “I didn’t hear a bomb go off,” Leo notes. “It’s been longer than four minutes.”
“Maybe Donnie detonated it after all,” Mikey guesses.
Leo frowns. “I told him to dump it in the ocean.”
The dock, as Leo and Mikey discover, is eerily empty. They find little evidence of the frantic skirmish that took place mere minutes ago.
“Did they just go home without us?” Mikey demands, annoyed. “Ugh, Raph’s gonna hold the remote-control hostage and make us watch those ugly MMA fighters again.”
“A bit soon for the hostage jokes, Mikey,” Leo chides mildly. He surveys the scene, triple-checking that it’s the same one he’d left his brothers at. It’s the same shed. The same truck. But there’s not a single body in sight—human or turtle.
The bomb is missing, too. There’s no sign of shrapnel or debris that a blast would’ve left behind. “Looks like Donnie did throw the bomb into the water,” Leo observes.
“And what, it was on silent mode?”
“Hmm. Yeah, it’s weird. It hardly made sound, if it made one at all.” Leo checks the ground and the facade of the shed. Both are dry. “No big splash, either. Either it didn’t explode or…”
“Or it was a dud. So we did all that for some amateur’s hack job,” Mikey gripes. “What a waste of a perfectly fine Tuesday evening.”
“It’s Wednesday.”
“No kidding? Aw, that’s even worse!”
Leo toys with the idea that it was never set to explode at all, but he doesn’t voice it. Doesn’t entertain the idea that someone managed to pull one over Donnie and the gadget he created to detect explosives.
Leo can’t run with that thought and spiral over what it could mean.
Mikey lets Leo brood for a bit. Leo’s gotta do what Leo’s gotta do and all that. In the meantime, Mikey does his own perfunctory inspection. Near the west corner of the shed, a flash of brown catches his eye. His throat bunches up. “Leo.”
A chill races down Leo’s spine, sparked by the graveness in Mikey’s voice. “What is it?” When Mikey doesn’t answer, Leo follows his youngest brother’s gaze. It takes him a second to figure out what Mikey’s looking at, but when he skims the floor near the side of the shed, he knows right away. “That’s.” He fails to finish his sentence.
“That’s Donnie’s bo.” It sounds so unreal when Mikey says it out loud. He feels like he’s narrating some alternate reality version of their lives. “He wouldn’t just leave his bo.” A laugh rips out him, sudden and forced. “Unless this one of his terrible pranks.”
“Mikey…” Leo’s still processing the visual information before them.
“Like after that time I put lollipops all over his keyboard. Remember that?” Mikey’s mouth runs at superspeed, well ahead of his thoughts. “Remember how he snuck into my room that night to glue gun my stuff to the floor and walls? But it was pitch black, so he didn’t notice that I snuck a bunch of his tools all around my room.” He giggles, near hysterical. “I still dream of that face he made when he realized what he did.”
“Mikey, stop talking,” Leo snaps. “I can’t think.”
“Obviously,” says Mikey.
Leo turns to him. “What?”
“You said you can’t think. I’m agreeing with you,” Mikey clarifies. He swears he can hears his own pulse in his ears, roaring in defiance.
Leo watches his youngest brother’s smile settle into a jeer. Mikey has never resembled Raph more than he does right now. “What are you saying?” The warning tone in Leo’s question is as sharp as his katana.
“You should’ve let me go after them.”
“Are you blaming Donnie for—” For losing his bo? For losing a fight he shouldn’t have lost? For disappearing along with Raph? “—what happened here?”
Leo’s composure crumbling, and Mikey can’t bring himself to relent. “Donnie wasn’t the one who decided that we should abandon him and Raph.”
Leo straightens his spine. “We didn’t abandon them, Mikey. We did what we had to do. We couldn’t let those people die.”
“At the expense of our brothers?” Mikey shoots back. “Of my mate?”
Leo narrows his eyes. “Raph’s not the only one who—”
“And your mate too,” Mikey cuts him off. Leo probably thinks he’s overwrought because Raph is missing, as if he wouldn’t be equally upset if it were only Donnie or if Leo were in Raph’s place. He takes a shuddering breath as his eyes begin to well. “If we can’t even protect our family, what’s the point?”
“We do have each other’s backs,” Leo says. “That’s why I had Donnie go after Raph.”
“Yeah, great plan.” Mikey throws his hands up. “You sent the one kicking himself in the shell for not defusing the bomb like we all expected him to.”
Heat builds below Leo’s collar. “Donatello is a ninja,” he insists. “I trust him to carry out the mission and adapt to our circumstances.”
“Well, I’m a ninja too. I could’ve gone after them.” Mikey bites his lip, no longer able to hold his tears back.
“And with your emotionality, how sure are you that you would’ve been any help to them?” Leo challenges.
There it is, Mikey thinks. He laughs, and it sounds as disgusted as he feels. “Guess we’ll never know, Leonardo.”
Without another word, Mikey turns his back to Leo and wipes his face. He starts his search for Raph and Donnie, not waiting to wait and see if Leo had any other marching orders for him.
“Mikey. Mikey, come back!” Leo curses under his breath. Just what he needed. Mikey doing his best Raph impression at the worst possible time. “We have to find them!”
Leo takes a deep breath and lets it out through his mouth.
Mikey is on edge. Of course he would be. Two of his brothers—one of whom he shares his bed with—are now missing.
And Leo’s in the exact same predicament. Except in Leo’s case, he was also directly responsible for his mate’s situation. Whatever happened to Donnie, it was wholly because of Leo’s tactical blunder.
Leo shakes his head, ridding himself of those thoughts. He can run through the details of tonight’s incident at a later time. Right now, he has a job to do.
He squares his shoulders, preparing to search every inch of the dock and nearby areas for clues.
It might take all night. Multiple nights, most likely.
But he’ll do whatever it takes to find Raph and Donnie.
Raph wakes up to darkness.
The air around him seems to compress and expand in nauseating succession. As he regains his bearings, he senses cloth wrapped securely around the top of his head. It’s blocking his vision, though a bit of light filters through the material.
The next thing he notices is a distinct absence of sound and smell. At least, there’s nothing that comes close to the in-your-face sensory assault that he’d come to expect from New York City. There’s no pungent stench skulking in every corner, no cacophony of car honks and sirens and subway rumblings, no hint of mouthwatering temptations from street food carts.
He can only pinpoint a medicinal smell, like the room had been wiped down with isopropyl alcohol not too long ago.
But then, floating right above that is a faint whiff of something far less sharp. It makes Raph think of freshly watered plants, engine oil, and overly sweet fruit juice. The smells shouldn’t work together, but when they come together on his brother’s skin, they manage to produce something comforting.
“Don?” Raph hisses.
There’s no response besides light, even breathing.
Raph’s first instinct is to move towards the source of the sound, but metallic impediments bind him to his chair. He continues to struggle, biceps and forearms bunching against his restraints.
“Donnie?” he tries again.
Images wrack him without mercy or rationale. In his head, he sees Donnie flat on his plastron, carapace cracked in several pieces on the floor.
“Donnie!”
In his attempt to break free, Raph barely feels the metal cutting into his wrists and ankles. He doesn’t have time to care whether he’s chafing his skin down to the bone.
When he hears Donnie’s voice, his whole body sags in momentary relief, but the rush of trepidation is quick to bounce back. “Don, talk to me!”
Donnie slurs wordlessly, slow to regain lucidity. A voice drags him out of the sluggish fog that’s lingering in his brain. He instinctively wants to respond to that voice, if only his mouth would cooperate with him.
Donnie lifts his head, testing its weight like it’s a foreign object newly attached to his neck. The word “Raph?” tumbles past his lips before he even remembers its meaning.
“Donnie! I’m here!” Raph wrestles with his chair, growling at its refusal to budge. “You alright? They hurt you?”
“I’m… blindfolded,” Donnie answers sluggishly. “I believe… I may be… shackled… to a chair… of sorts.”
Raph nearly laughs. Of course Donnie felt the need to qualify that they were likely not sitting on any regular chair. Raph is about to comment on Donnie’s Donnie-ness when he hears clipped footsteps coming from a seemingly short distance. “You hear that?”
“You mean that isn’t the pounding in my head?” Donnie mutters.
The door opens before Raph can answer. The footsteps grow loud, echoing in the room.
“Who the hell are you? Bunch’a cowards,” Raph spits. He senses one—no, two people stopping right in front of him. “Let us go and give us a real fight.”
“Look at that,” one of them says. Their nasal voice grates on Raph’s nerves. “These turtles have teeth.”
“Do we need to report that?” asks a second voice. This one is quieter, almost grave in comparison.
“What for?” the first person scoffs. “There’s enough to do without adding tooth extraction to the list.”
“Suit yourself. It’s your finger that’ll get chewed off when you’re collecting the saliva samples.”
“Saliva samples?” Donnie echoes, bewildered.
A new voice cuts in. It’s deep. Gravelly. “Here’s what’s going to happen. One of you will be taken out of this room, and the other one will remain here. Then, you two will switch. You’ll take turns staying here and going to the testing area.”
“Testing area?” Raph demands.
“No one will get hurt if you both cooperate,” the serious one adds.
“Cooperate how?” Donnie prods. “What do you want us to do?”
“We want you to do what we ask,” is the unhelpful answer. “We can get what we need without anyone getting hurt.”
“What does that mean?” presses Donnie.
“What she means is,” another pipes up, “every false move out of one of you, and your brother pays for it ten times over.”
Donnie frowns. If their captors know that he and Raph are brothers, he had to wonder what else they knew about them.
“We’re going to watch your every move,” Deep Voice says. “Your actions will tell us just how much you value your brother’s life.”
“Or how little,” adds Nasal Voice.
“You lay one fucking finger on him, you’ll regret it,” Raph promises through bared teeth.
“It’s obvious which one is Atlas stock.”
Raph doesn’t quite understand anything what Nasal Voice meant, but there was no mistaking their mocking delivery.
“I’m glad you reptiles understand the concept of consequences,” Deep Voice says.
The shackles around Donnie’s hands feet make simultaneous clicking sounds as they snap open. At the same time, hands circle both of his arms. The tip of a needle presses against his nape. He recognizes the warning right away: they have the means to subdue him if need be.
“Stand up,” Serious Voice commands Donnie. “Take it slow if you have to, but the drugs should have mostly worn off by now.”
Donnie shakily gets to his feet. Panic causes him to blurt, “You’re separating us?”
“What’s going on?” Raph demands.
“You’ll only be separated for a few hours,” Serious Voice tells Donnie.
“What’re you going to do with Raph?” Donnie wants to know.
“Nothing yet. You know what to do to spare your brother from any pain.”
“You’re doing more harm than good,” Deep Voice mutters. Raph and Donnie can both tell they’re not the ones being admonished.
“Donnie?” Raph whips his head from side to side, hearing the footsteps get softer and softer. “Leave him alone,” he snarls, thrashing against his restraints. His limbs tremble with a blinding rage that he itches to purge with a swing of his fists or his sai. “I swear you’ll pay if you don’t bring him back here.”
“Whose bright idea was it not to gag these things?” Nasal Voice asks, closing the door to Raph’s yelling.