Chapter Text
Darkness surrounded Venus like an endless void; except, it was interrupted by a small candle right at the center of the training area, propped on the flat surface of one of her tessen and casting shadows around her. Her breaths were soft, quiet enough that they couldn't be heard in the stillness as she sat in a seiza in front of the candle. With her eyes shut, she focused on her surroundings intently, relying on sound and vibrations the most.
Then, she felt it - movement from her two o'clock; seven o'clock; eleven o'clock; and finally her four o'clock.
She felt a tiny grin threatening to break her composure, but she remained still. Tonight was an important night, particularly for her brothers. Venus would hate to bring their mood down with what she knew was coming next but at the moment, she was but another student acting on the instruction of her teacher; to guard the candle no matter what. And she wasn't one to do things halfway.
A disturbance in the air by her left alerted her. In one fluid motion, she carried her occupied fan and drew its twin from her belt with a practiced flick of her wrist, and the test began.
She defended the candle from Leonardo's katana, Raphael's sai, Donatello's bo staff, and Michelangelo's nunchaku with ease in the beginning but transitioned to a challenge by the middle. It was expected; it wasn't exactly a cakewalk preventing a candle from getting mutilated with one hand and actively parrying every incoming attack with the other. But she'd readily admit her brothers had gotten better at their footwork and timing.
Raphael used to charge in first at any chance he got without much of a backup plan, bulldozing his way through every problem, which constantly landed him on the ground with aching muscles and bruised pride. Now, he strikes when needed, searching for openings, and patiently waiting...
But upon the ten-minute mark of Venus's successful vigil of the candle, Raphael seemingly grew antsy. He went in for the kill with a battle cry - bulldozing his way through every problem, again - only to end up a couple of feet away by a well-placed roundhouse kick to the plastron, courtesy of Venus. Yeah, they were going to work on that very soon.
Donatello and Michelangelo were nearly successful; they had the idea of working together to distract her and get the candle. An effectively good strategy - Michael as the distraction and Donatello gunning for their target - but it ultimately fell into oblivion when Venus dropped to the floor and swept Michelangelo's ankles, forcing him to collide with a shocked Donatello (who had the bright idea to mimic Raphael and charge in with his staff ready for a swing) until they were sprawled on the floor, unable to get back up.
By the fifteen-minute mark, it was Leonardo against Venus.
He put up a good fight, keeping Venus on her toes. His katana blades nearly grazed the wax at any opportunity, but Venus's quick reactions and the sturdy material of her tessen stopped the swords from making so much as a nick. It was only a matter of time, though, that one of them would falter for just a moment, giving the other a chance to strike. And the first to fall had been Venus, thanks to Leonardo's wits.
He had used his katana to reflect the candlelight at her eyes, rendering her blind for a few seconds. But those few seconds were enough. Leonardo leaped and cut the top of the candle with delicate precision, leaving the wick intact and the tiny flame burning over the blade's surface, a sure sign that victory was his.
"Yame."
At Sensei's word, their training ended, with Leonardo blowing out the tiny flame. Venus, still rubbing the floating imprint of the candlelight from her eyes, felt blooming pride for her brother. It seemed those one-on-one lessons with her and Master Splinter paid off tonight.
Over the years, she grew to learn that Leonardo was a bit of a perfectionist in his unique way. He trained and meditated with Venus and Sensei even when he didn't have to, studied and learned each lesson carefully, and practiced the katas with diligence until it became muscle memory.
(Sometimes, Venus worried that he wasn't giving himself the time to be an ordinary teenager like his brothers—well, as normal as they could be, considering their whole situation. But she shelved that thought for now.)
Leonardo never slacked off in the things he did, not even in group training, which more or less earned him the nickname--
"Teacher's pet," Raphael spat with a frown.
"Ninja drop-out," Leonardo jibed back with a taunting smile, tossing the cut half of the candle to his brother like a piece of wood to a kindling spark.
And Michelangelo and Donatello just had to live up to their titles as the youngest duo and contributed to the burning pile Leonardo created with a synchronized, "Ooooh."
Lit like a fuse, Raphael stomped over to Leonardo as if he was asking for a fight, and it seemed as though the latter was ready to give it any minute now when he stood his ground.
Venus rolled her eyes. Oh, not this again. It's always those two, I swear... "Boys, that's enough."
Leonardo backed off, as did Raphael. Barely. But Master Splinter got the boys to settle down and listen to his words of wisdom which Venus grew to memorize by heart, with her sitting at his side. "The outside world will not be so kind to you, my sons," Master Splinter advised sagely, then gave Venus a particular side-eye that she wisely pretended not to notice. "And I am sure your sister has told you four this many months ago."
Venus did her best to mask her slight wince, and the boys fidgeted a little on their spots, undoubtedly remembering the night they tried to sneak out of the lair without Sensei and Venus knowing about it (again). Well...without Sensei knowing about it, which proved to be their doom. As they expected, Splinter had not been happy by the time they got back from their safe and successful visit topside.
Venus took the brunt of the scolding that night, reprimanded for not telling him of their plans, while her brothers took the sequel of the lecture the next day, except it ended with them being sent to the Hashi for about four hours. She saw them at dinner, looking pretty dead on their feet but apologetic all the same.
So, suffice it to say, they didn't make another attempt at leaving the lair. Until now, that is, with the most significant difference being Sensei allowing it after a year of more training and a promise not to get themselves into big trouble (a promise that felt a bit too flimsy considering he wanted four teenage boys to swear on it.)
"All of you are different in ways those living on the surface may never understand," Splinter continued. "To survive, you must be vigilant, merge with the shadows, exercise secrecy, and most importantly - look out for one another."
Sensei placed a paw on Venus's shoulder as he gifted everyone a knowing gaze. "You only have each other in this world."
(She remembered those cold nights in the rain when it had only been her and Father. Now, it was her, and Father, and her brothers. The only ones she had in the world.)
"Yes, Sensei," they chorused at the same time Michelangelo clapped the stray fly he had been attempting to swat for a while in between his hands. Venus held back a chuckle at Splinter's unamused frown, and just when she was about to ask their father not to start up another sermon about stealth, it happened. The lair began to shake, causing dust to fall from the ceiling and the ground to quiver beneath them.
They scrambled to their feet and soon heard a strange sound amid the shaking, something Venus could only link to army men marching in unison. But that shouldn't even be remotely possible—humans finding them? Here? Unless there was some secret government branch that specialized in aliens or something, no one should have been able to track them to the sewers, so it had to be something else causing this. Something sinister, she would think.
"Earthquake!" Michelangelo cried in a panic, latching onto Donatello, who chose the perfect time to get his thinking glasses on.
"In New York? Possible, but unlikely considering-- Woah!"
Quick on her feet, Venus pulled her brothers out of the impact range of falling concrete slabs. Next thing she knew, one wall of the lair burst open and silver...things emerged from the hole of its creation, smaller in size yet Venus was perceptive enough to know that if those things could chew through hard brick and cement without a problem, then they were strong enough to cause everyone serious harm.
They fought the silver creatures without a moment's hesitation. Venus had wrecked more than ten to realize the numbers weren't dwindling, only multiplying; how many of these things were there?
"Just what are these things?" Venus questioned, stabbing one of them into a sparking heap with her tanto. Ugh, more and more keep popping up no matter what they did. Even with Sensei's help, they were getting outnumbered, and that spelled trouble in every measure.
"Like I said, New York City cockroaches!" Michelangelo quipped whilst knocking away another set of mechanical beasts.
"Can it, Mikey!" Raphael dug a sai into an attacking creature's head until it went limp. "Yo, Vee! If ya got a plan, now's the time to share it with the whole class!"
Before she could even spit out a vague idea, Venus immediately noticed a few of the silver creatures gnawing on the support beams of the lair like termites, causing the whole place to shudder dangerously. Hairline fractures crawled the surfaces in seconds as more dust fell from above, and when one support beam broke and fell away by sharp jaws, the rest followed, too sudden for Venus to even yell out an earlier warning.
Instantly, the home they grew up in collapsed in stages. It was a nightmare coming to life and Venus had no way of waking up from it. Cement bricks came down, adding to the trembling, and her family scrambled through the chaos. Some of the bigger pipes dropped too. Venus dodged falling debris left and right, and halfway caught sight of the silver creatures escaping through where they first entered. She tried to run after them, to do something, but then the hole got blocked by more rubble, and the voices of her family echoed behind her, sending a jolt in her heart. She was too far away—
"Vee, look out!"
—and she was separated from the only ones she had in the world by a wall of their broken home.
~
As a child, Venus was taught to never panic in the face of danger or a crisis. "Clear your mind," Sensei would tell her. "Think of your next move. Breathe. Focus on what is in front of you, what you can control."
That advice was much easier to remember when she was with her family. She took her job as the eldest of her brothers very seriously, so panic was off the table when it came to dealing with a problem. But this? This was a problem bigger than she'd like to handle on her own.
"Sensei? Boys?"
Her voice bounced off the dim cavern that was her home as she faced the too-tall mountain of debris and childhood memories. Something familiar and awful blossomed slowly in her chest, to which she fought back by trying to see if she could find a way through this barrier. Maybe if there was some kind of gap, she could hear her brothers and father on the other side or see if they were okay.
None. No openings at all. Not even a little crack between the cement bricks and dirt. She was trapped.
That dreadfully familiar feeling came back stronger. It planted itself in her lungs, its roots tightening around them in a vice grip, so much so that Venus had half a mind to wonder if it was the enclosed space making it hard to breathe or simply just her. Her limbs shook and it wasn't too long ago that their home quivered in the same way. A heaviness she knew once upon a time returned. It threatened to choke her, to render her useless, mentally blind, and panicked.
Venus didn't know what happened to her family. She had no clue if they were hurt or worse - if those silver creatures came back to finish the job. They were separated and that fact alone left her mouth dry and heart pulsing so terribly that she thought it'd explode.
What do I do, what should I do, what can I do?
She had to think. She had to come up with a plan. Yeah, that's what she can do, something she can control right now. Focus.
"Okay, girl, let's focus here," Venus whispered to herself without spending too much attention on how her voice trembled. She assessed the debris before her and figured as much that she couldn't possibly move any of the bigger chunks out of the way without causing some sort of domino effect leading to her death via tumbling bricks and dirt. She wasn't entirely sure if the rest of the sewer system was in the same state of disarray but she didn't feel comfortable enough to find out. She had to stay in case her brothers managed to find a way to communicate with—
Wait!
"My phone," she realized, and she barely had the time to feel embarrassed over that slip-up when her Shell Cell, coined by both the creator and the resident name-giver, rang from her belt. And just like that, the constricting feeling in her body relaxed, akin to heavy logs dropping from her shell, and she could breathe.
"Guys? You there?" She clamped down the previous terror the moment she picked up. She didn't need her brothers to worry more than they probably were.
"Vee!"
"Thank shell you answered, we were worried something happened to you!"
"Haha! Yeah, Raph looked like he wanted to follow those weird robot things and chew his way through the rubble-- ow!"
"Keep that up and you'll be the one chewin' rubble!"
Venus was always grateful for the things she grew up having but hearing her brothers' voices together trumped any gift she found in the junkyard. "I'm glad you guys are okay. How about Sensei? Is he with you?"
"I am here, my daughter," her sensei's voice rang, bringing more assurances to her frayed nerves.
"He's not physically here with us, though," Donatello jumped in with an explanation as always. "I managed to reach him via Shell Cell and did the same for you with some tweaking here and there on the connection so we could stay on the line simultaneously."
Honestly, that boy always manages to surprise Venus with his unique brand of genius. "Three-way calling; impressive, Donatello!"
"Heh, oh it was nothing—"
"Okay, before we inflate Einstein's head any bigger than it is, I say we get the shell outta here," Raphael interrupted and Venus put her thoughts back on track, right where they should be. Her family was okay and that's all that mattered. The next course of action would undoubtedly be to reunite someplace safer but considering the state of the lair, that would pose some problems.
"That's not gonna be easy," she said warily, eyeing the broken pieces of their home around her. "Whatever those mechanical menaces are, they managed to tear down most of the support structures of the lair. We don't even know if they did the same damage to the other tunnels."
"Then I propose we meet at the old drainage junction at the south point," Master Splinter suggested and Venus quickly pulled up a map in her head, pinpointing which available channels she could use from where she was. She could only hope those little beasts didn't devour any other tunnels on their way out.
Having heard that the boys will take the south conduit to get there, Venus concluded she'd take the north. It was admittedly one of the longer routes but it was the only passageway available in the area she was stuck in. With any luck, she'd meet the rest of her family at the junction and not cross paths with those metal creatures on the way there.
By the time she reached the north conduit, though, her luck ran out. The tunnel up ahead was also caved in, obstructing the path. Wonderful.
"Okay, that's a no on that one, then," she muttered. No way forward and no way back, which left right above, a.k.a the streets of New York. A risky plan but such is the life of a ninja. Venus knew she'd worry her sensei and brothers if she didn't make it to their chosen meeting place, but what good would it do for her if she decided to stay in an already compromised place just to look for another way out?
Decision made, she went to the nearest manhole and hoped that whatever was up there, wouldn't cause much trouble for her to reach her family.
~
Venus's "brothers in peril" senses were tingling, which meant that something was a hundred percent wrong. In this case, her brothers were either in trouble, they were going to be, or they somehow attracted it, and none of those options sounded great.
Ugh, and just when she believed they were gonna have a nice, permission-granted run topside... Well, it's whatever. She needed to get to her brothers now that she was above ground. Concealed in the shadows, she leaped from roof to roof, finally landing on one that had a water tower to hide beneath in case of any late-night goers. Her hunch told her to come here and most of the time, it was always correct.
And wouldn't you know it, her brothers somehow got themselves in a situation with humans. Humans who looked like they belonged in a comic book fair with all the wacky hairstyles and odd choice of clothing, but the strange purple tattoos running along their skin grabbed her interest. Venus couldn't be precisely sure, but she guessed those tattoos were dragons. Could they be in a gang? Given the costume theme they got going on and the general feel they gave off, it was possible.
Venus wondered how well the boys would manage. While a part of her wished to get down there and help, another part tugged at her curiosity. Would her brothers go all out or would they practice self-control in the heat of battle? She got her answer as she watched her brothers duke it out with the tattooed gang, knocking them down as though they'd been doing it their whole lives. They were in sync and it made Venus feel a surge of pride. Maybe this was how Sensei felt when he saw her perfect those difficult kicks during her turtle tot training days.
It didn't take too long (it went on for about eight minutes which was impressive) before the fight was over, and the tattooed humans ran with their tails between their legs. Hmph. Serves them right for calling her boys "freaks".
Speaking of, maybe now's a good time to get down there and pull off that mysterious and cool "I've been watching this whole time" speech that martial arts masters always used on their students. It could make for a good prank that would make Michael proud and Venus wasn't one to pass up on messing with her brothers.
But then swift blurs of movement from around her quickly snatched her attention. With narrowed eyes, Venus focused on the shadowy figures standing on the other rooftops. It was obvious that they weren't affiliated with the tattooed gang from earlier. Rather than street clothes, they all wore matching uniforms—uniforms that ninjas typically wear.
For some reason, they were... Familiar. Had Venus seen them before? She couldn't discern much of their features thanks to the dimness of the night but she could've sworn she saw them once long ago. Could she have seen them on TV probably?
She didn't get to ponder, though. The newcomers surrounded her siblings in an instant and already another fight began. So far, the boys were doing well. They held their own even against the large numbers. But Venus, though confident in their skills, wasn't naive enough to believe it would last. Judging from how quick the dark-clad ninjas were in recovering, and how equally skilled they were, she was sure this fight would end badly.
Leonardo was in a bind, struggling to fend off a bunch of ninjas at once with his katana, and when she saw one of them attempting to sneak behind him and drive a kunai at his head, Venus went in instantly. With a classic flying kick, she sent the guy skirting across the alley and used the momentum to propel the other ninjas away from Leonardo. And if she added a bit more power to her kicks, that was between her and the poor suckers who fell victim to them.
"Vee!"
"Well, look who's here!"
"Nice kick, Vivi!"
"Vee," Leonardo said in awe and relief. "What're you doing here? I thought you were heading over to—" he punched an incoming enemy in the face, "—the junction?"
She shrugged and without even looking, she elbowed the ninja stalking at her back in the gut. "I was, but the tunnel got blocked off and thought I could use a detour." And just because she was feeling a little bit cheeky tonight, she added, "So, first official night topside and already you guys have gotten yourselves into trouble."
Raphael snorted, using his sai to disarm an enemy's attack. "Eh, at least we get some fun. These bozos are puttin' up one shell of a fight."
No kidding. These ninjas fought well, she'd give them that. They were also just as persistent, which Venus gradually found to be a little annoying after a while. These guys were probably more irritating to deal with than those silver creatures back in the sewers (and wow, how long had that incident been? A couple of minutes? Hours?).
A short while passed and Venus wasn't ignorant of the fact that they were slowly getting overwhelmed. Trained as they were, they were still outnumbered, five to a dozen; she'd be remiss to let this go on. At any rate, they weren't here to pick and finish fights. They were supposed to meet up with Sensei and that was what they were going to do. Plus, she was more than willing to deal with Raphael's complaints about running away for a whole week.
Finding Donatello rigging a nearby vehicle already, she called out, "Boys, time to book it!"
"What?!" Raphael, as she had already anticipated, didn't like the plan. "C'mon, we were just getting—"
"Raphael."
"...Fine."
With Donatello behind the wheel, they jumped in the back of the vehicle and sped off into the night, and for their first fight topside, they did pretty great, in Venus's opinion.
("Donatello, do you - ow - want me to - ouch - take the wheel?"
"No need, sis! I got it!"
"Tell that to our poor shells, Don; your steering needs a lotta work."
"No backseat driving, Mikey!")
Reuniting with Splinter moments later eased the rest of Venus's worries but finding their new home on top of that? One of the best nights of her life. Not to disrespect the first home she grew up in but this dwelling hidden beneath the junction took the cake in style, space, and viability. It even had a second floor with some expansive burrows lining the old walls. Her brothers would finally have rooms of their own. (Michael was already calling dibs on the "rooms" on the second floor.)
She digested everything in one turnaround, eyes scanning for any possible danger out of habit until she later sighed in relief and delicate sorrow. They may have lost their childhood home and the memories tied to it, but maybe here, they could start again. Just as they had years ago. She felt Sensei at her side, idly watching the boys try to wrestle each other for one room or another, laughter echoing around the shapely chamber.
"What do you think, my daughter?"
Venus remembered that first night well. As much as she had been too small to throw a punch, she recalled vividly that feeling of excitement sprouting through when Sensei showed her and her then-baby brothers their first lair. It hadn't been much but it became home to them over time, a welcomed change from staying in one burrow their first few years living under the city. This place could be home too, she thought, with a little bit of elbow grease and some good ol' turtle innovation.
It'll be a good change. For all that the world threw curveballs at them, they still had each other.
"I think it's perfect, Sensei."
~
"Alright, boys, let's see you clean up for a change; the place's filthy."
"Aw, c'mon, Vivi!"
"Can't we go exploring? We only just got here!"
"I'm with Don, I wanna see that big tunnel up ahead!"
"No buts, ifs, or what-abouts about it, misters. Sister says get cleaning!"
"Hey, we're old enough for sister says, Vee, you can't tell us what to—"
"You wanna repeat that, Phael?"
"...No, ma'am."