Chapter Text
There are voices echoing loudly down the hall, their words inaudible, but the tone- joyous, much too happy for the late hour- is one she easily recognizes. Natalie’s head hurts like she’d been partying, except, no, she hasn’t. Ever since she’d made the move from Atlanta to New York for her internship, she’d been careful not to let her guard down, lest she become a victim in an unfamiliar town, and besides, it’s not like she’s had the time to make any friends here.
In the distance, she can hear water moving, like the rush of a waterfall. A moment after the noise registers, the smell hits her like a truck. Sewage. She’s not in her apartment, for sure.
Natalie’s eyes snap open.
Her eyes ache, even in the dim light, and it’s like every part of her body capable of feeling pain lights up at the same time. Natalie had had just one beer. There's no way she got blackout drunk from just that! So why does she feel so strange? It’s not just the headache or the light; it’s the way it feels like her body is lagging five seconds behind.
No, no. She can't focus on that now. If she's been kidnapped or something… The thought trails off. Who would kidnap her and bring her to the sewers of all places? It's more likely that she sleepwalked all the way down here… if she ever sleepwalked.
Natalie forces herself into a sitting position, and the movement makes the room spin like a ship at sea. She squints at the wall until her vision settles. The room she’s in is unfamiliar, with large concrete walls, and pipes running across the floor, along the walls, and even above her, all pouring large volumes of water into the center of the room. She doesn’t see a ladder, or a door, or any easy way in or out. Trying to remember what she was doing before she woke up is fruitless. All she can remember is coming home from work and watching TV. Fuck.
“The energy originated from right down here!” One of the voices says triumphantly. The voice is familiar, though Natalie can’t tell from where. “I’ve never seen anything like this before! It might be a new power cell, or- or a-”
Someone else laughs harshly, another familiar voice that she can’t quite name. “Or another alien monster?” He suggests sarcastically.
“Or another alien monster.” The first voice confirms, enthusiasm somewhat muted.
Natalie can see the shadows growing tall on the wall as they approach. Four of them. Oh thank god. They must be construction workers, she decides, as she attempts to stand. Her feet are bare, she notes with disgust, right before a sudden rush of pins and needles keels her over. Right. So standing up isn't an option. Nice to know.
“Or,” Another voice says, as the four shadows round the corner. “Or that.”
Natalie squints at the four humanoid turtles standing at the mouth of the room, their silhouettes familiar, and suddenly it all clicks.
“Oh, um,” Donnie tucks what looks like a radon sensor into his belt, and carefully creeps forward. He offers her a hand. “Don’t be scared, miss. Are you okay?”
Natalie laughs. At first, it’s a polite kind of laugh, the sort of thing that one does when a coworker says something not exactly funny enough to be genuine. She notes the way that Raph exchanges a look with Leo, and it ramps up, increasing in voracity like the drop of one’s stomach on a roller coaster. A snort slips in, and despite her head hurting, it only makes her laugh harder, louder because god, isn’t this ridiculous? She hasn’t had a dream so convincing in years! It's her fault, she supposes, for watching TMNT before falling asleep.
“Uh oh,” Mikey says, talking behind his hand as if it would make her unable to hear him. “Looks like someone is a few slices short of a pizza pie.”
“I’m fine,” Natalie forces herself to take a few deep breaths. “I was just- I didn’t realize, but it’s funny.”
Her chest hurts. Carefully, she takes Donnie’s extended hand, gets to her feet. Her vision swims, briefly, but she forces herself to stay up. The texture of his skin is strange. Similar to leather, but warmer than the lifeless things one would find in a department store. It’s a detail her mind had never conjured before in similar dreams. She’d dreamed of the sewers, to an extent, and even this sort of scene, but never that. Natalie doesn’t ponder long on where it came from; after all, it doesn’t really matter. A dream is a dream, no matter how detailed it might be.
“You’re not scared? Or surprised at seeing humanoid talking turtles?” Leo asks, a look of suspicion crossing over his features briefly, as if she’s some kind of trap waiting to be sprung.
That almost sets her off on another laughing spree. Natalie is five feet tall, and has never engaged in physical sport in her life. The most threat she'd ever be able to create would be with the help of a gun, which her mind has not deemed worthy of giving her. Probably because her first action would be to shoot the Shredder in the head. That kind of thing would probably mess up whatever dream plan is in store for her.
“Jeez. We must be losing our touch.” Raph crossing his arms, sounding oddly annoyed with her reaction, or lack of.
“No,” Natalie waves a hand as if dispelling a bad smell from the air. “Why would I be?” And then gesturing to it all, laughs again. “This is just a dream! What is this, season one? Two?” Pointing at Raph, she asks, “Did the cockroach thing already happen? Did Casey? I bet I can guess what happens next.”
Raph’s eyes widen comically. “How do you know about that?”
Donnie’s pulls out his little meter reader again. He lets go of her elbow for a moment, and whatever strength allowed her to stand immediately leaves. Natalie’s head feels like a soda can being crushed underfoot, and she tilts, legs buckling like a newborn foal’s. Someone catches her, helps her to the ground. She keeps her eyes clenched tightly shut and presses against her temples.
“Usually I wake up by now.” She says, more quietly.
Usually, dreams don’t involve pain so much as the promise of pain; even nightmares can’t really simulate it right. So why does her head hurt so bad?
“What do you think, Donnie?” Leo asks. “A head injury or something?”
“Maybe I slipped into another dimension.” Natalie offers. “That’s what they always do in fanfiction.”
“Yeah, and I’m a tooth fairy.” Raph scoffs.
“Well,” Donnie taps the screen of the machine. “I think she might be telling the truth, kinda. See this energy reading? It’s consistent with the readings from the Kraang’s inter-dimensional portals, just muddled with human life signs.” Looking up from his machine, he meets her gaze, eyes wide. “I think she came from an alternate Earth.”
As if having waited for the perfect thematic beat, the headache hits her again, this time making her so dizzy that bile rises in her throat. She leans over just in time to puke up the remnants of her dinner: three day old pepperoni pizza.
“Oh, gross dude.” Mikey mutters.
Natalie wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. “No. Not real. This is a dream.” She repeats stubbornly.
“Sure it is,” Raph agrees gamely, slinging her arm over his shoulder. His shell is harder than she’d expected. “So why don’t you tell us where you live, and this can continue to be a nice little dream. How’s that sound to ya?”
Absentmindedly, she taps her nails against it, and giggles at the sound. Click-clack, click-clack, click-clack.
“Wait, we can’t just take her home,” Donnie says, grabbing onto Raph’s other arm. Raph flings him away, and scoops her into a fireman’s carry. He starts walking, and Natalie has to close her eyes briefly to keep the sickness at bay. “Something happened here. The energy, those things she said- she couldn’t have possibly known about us without something extra dimensional going on.”
“Or she’s just drunk. It’s not like drunks haven’t fallen down here before.” Leo says, though he doesn’t sound like he himself believes it. “And even if she’s not, she’s obviously unwell. We should take her home, come back tomorrow and see if she’s less-”
“Stupefied?” Mikey interjects.
“Loopy.” Leo corrects. “So,” He says, turning to her. “Where do you live?”
"Um, a building next to this bodega like a block south from TCRI. I don't have the address memorized. I've only been here for like, a week."
"TCRI's experimenting on random people now?" Leo says. He's not talking to her specifically, but Natalie can't help but feel a little spited. Random people?
"I'm not a random person." She huffs. "I worked really hard to get an internship there! So technically TCRI is experimenting on co-eds. But they aren't because TCRI isn't real, and neither are you."
"That makes no sense!" Raph snaps. "If you work at TCRI, how is it not real?"
"Raph…" Leo cautions.
"Obviously-" Natalie feels another rush of nausea as he climbs up one of the ladders to the surface. The foul New York air smells like a Bath and BodyWorks in comparison to the sewers. "Obviously the TCRI I work for isn't run by the Kraang. It's just a coincidence that the acronym is the same. Cartoons do stuff like that all the time. Like calling it a T-phone when iphones exist."
"So in your universe, we're a cartoon…" Donnie trails off, lost in thought.
Natalie has never been especially scared of heights, but she hides her face in the crook of Raph's shoulder as he scales the side of the building. This may just be a dream (or maybe she's in a coma?), but it doesn't make the potential fall seem any less scary. She dozes off, clinging perhaps a little too familiarly to Raphael as they pick up speed.
"Do we have a theme song?" Mikey asks excitedly. "And fans? I bet I'm the favorite."
"As if," Raph scoffs. Natalie has no doubt that if he wasn't currently holding her, he'd have punctuated that with a slap. "Which floor are you?"
"Third. The one with the window open."
And just like that, Natalie's back in her apartment, where she swears she had been in just minutes before. However she’d ended up in the sewers, she must have ended up somewhere pretty close to where she lives. It's just as she left it. There's a few empty beer cans by the couch, and the single light bulb in the kitchen casts stark shadows across the floor. Her computer is still playing, but instead of the TMNT episode she was watching before, it plays an episode of Star Trek Animated.
She's back in her apartment with four visitors, and even as she swears that this can't be real, she can't deny how real it feels. The hardwood floors beneath her feet, the chill of her air conditioning, just a little too cool to compensate for the warm summer night; it all feels like it should.
It dawns on her how odd this is. This dream. Because even though Donnie claims to have a solution, it just can’t be true. This sort of thing just doesn’t happen. Hell, it’s even fallen out of favor in fandom, relegated to early 2000’s fanfiction archives where lemons and limes and uwu’s still exist, frozen forever in the internet’s unyielding gaze. But there is one unavoidable truth about all of this:
Dreams don't feel like this.
"Maybe it's not a dream," Natalie admits, closing the window behind them. "But if this isn't a dream, now what? There has to be a reason I'm here, right?"
"I guess that's what we'll have to figure out," Leo says. "What happened before you ended up in the sewers?"
Behind him, Mikey sneaks towards her fridge. Leo reaches a hand out, pulling him away from the handle before he can pull it.
"You're welcome to whatever's in the fridge," Natalie says offhandedly as she leans against the frame. Her mother would kill her if she didn't do the bare minimum of being a good host, and showing her guests traditional southern hospitality, even in weird circumstances like these. "Um, I came home from work and was watching cartoons. The same as I always do."
The door jingles as Mikey opens it, and starts to rummage through her takeout boxes. Natalie is intensely glad that she’d finished up her beer earlier this morning. It would have been oddly embarrassing for her childhood heroes to see that part of her displayed so blatantly.
"What cartoon?" Donnie probes.
"Yours." Natalie says, perhaps a bit too quickly. "I was watching season three. The one with all the-" She cuts herself off. "I probably shouldn't say that, actually. The butterfly effect might be a problem here."
"So what, we’re just supposed to believe some weird chick stumbling around the sewers that we’re not real?” Raph scoffs, leaning against the wooden panel of her pull down bed.
“You’ve literally fought aliens… who are from another dimension,” Natalie says slowly. “And the possibility of being cartoon characters in another universe is weird to you?”
Raph scowls. Natalie tries her best not to do the ‘looking into the camera like she’s on the office’ face.
Leo steps in, the curtain still clinging to the handle of his katana. “We have experienced stranger things,” He admits. “But do you have any proof?"
“I guess? You could ask me questions, and I’d probably know the answers.” Natalie walks over to her couch, tucking her legs up to her chest. “It's just a little hard when I can’t tell you things about the plot.” And then, almost regrettably, she suggests, "Want me to sing the theme song or something?”
"I guess that could work," Donnie presses a button on his t-phone and sets it down on the couch beside her, as if setting down a bomb. "Go ahead then."
Natalie snorts, because by god, she knows the words all too well, despite not having watched the show in a while, and isn’t that embarrassing? More embarrassing still to sing it in front of the subjects of the song when she has the singing voice of a pigeon.
“I mean, if that’s what you want to hear, I’m fine with it. It’s not going to be on key though.”
And she sings it, humming the opening chorus and talk singing the rest. At first Raph’s expression doesn’t change. He’s all frowns and crossed arms, but when she does his character intro, it blinks into something like discomfort. Donnie’s interest doesn’t wane throughout the entire thing, though Mikey starts beatboxing halfway through to the correct beat, which startles her more than the wrong one would, prompting Leo to smack him half heartedly like a teenager hitting the snooze button.
“Either you’ve got a really good and impossibly accurate imagination, or, we’re a cartoon in another universe.” Leo sighs, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. “Now what?”
"Now we get back to patrol. If she's not against us, she's not our problem." Raph says brusquely, already inching back towards the window.
"It's more complicated than that, Raph," Donnie pulls out his t-phone, and starts to type. “If she came from an alternate universe where we’re just a cartoon, it essentially gives her precognition. That could make her a target for the Kraang or the Shredder, if they ever got word of it.”
Mikey slams the fridge door shut, eyes wide. “She can start a car?!”
“No,” Donnie says flatly, catching Mikey’s hand before he can throw her car keys at her. “She can tell the future because she’s seen the future.”
“She could lead them right to the lair." Leo realizes, just as Raph asks, "How much do you know?” His voice is blatantly suspicious.
"First off, I can barely get to work and back without a GPS. Even if the show ever did say where exactly in the sewers you lived, I wouldn't be able to figure out how to get there. And secondly-" Natalie pauses. If this is reality then she probably shouldn't say the truth, which is that she's seen the show from start to finish at least thirteen times. That makes her sound like a friendless nerd, which…. Admittedly, she is. But they don't need to know that. "I know..." She coughs, slightly embarrassed. “Kind of everything?”
"Start with your job." Donnie urges. "What are you doing there? Is there anything that could lead to dimension hopping?"
“Besides making cows better predisposed for making dairy, I have no idea.” Natalie pauses. “I could try and find out.”
She really shouldn’t get involved, and yet- well, isn’t this everything she’d always wanted? To be a part of her favorite childhood franchise? Might as well have a little fun with it, and besides, how else is she going to get home?
“Uh-uh,” Donnie says, standing up and shaking his head vigorously. “Remember Timothy? Not a chance!”
“I’m not an idiot though,” Natalie protests. “And besides, I’m not entirely defenseless.”
She turns and opens the dresser beside the couch, and when her fingers come into contact with cool metal, she wraps her fingers around it, and sets it on the coffee table. It seems oddly grounded with an audience of mutant turtles.
“I… I can see that.” Donnie says, somewhat unhappily. He sighs, and rubs his head like he has a headache.
Raph scoffs. “Do you really think that a pistol is going to take care of the kraang? Maybe one or two, but an entire building full?”
“I won’t get caught. I’m supposed to be there, remember? And besides, I’m still not entirely sure that I’m not just in a coma or something.” Natalie pauses, a sudden thought finally breaking through the shock/apathy like an iceberg through a hull.
“If I somehow managed to cross realities without knowing it, then who’s to say that this is the only one? I’ve read tons of stories where this happened to the protagonist. What if this is just a story?” Natalie looks up in horror, fingers digging into the flesh of her cheeks as realization dawns on her. “What if I’m just some middle schooler’s shitty OC?”
As Raph snorts and says, “You read fanfiction of us?”
Donnie says, “Doesn’t your self awareness make that impractical? I’ve never seen a seventh grader write dialogue this well.”
“What, like you talk to seventh graders all the time?”
“Well, no,” Donnie says, rubbing the back of his head bashfully. “But I have read some of Mikey’s Super Robo Mecha Force Five Fanfiction, and I think that’s comparable.”
“Wait, really?” Mikey smiles with a mouth full, and then realizing the insult, frowns, “Hey!”
“That- that actually makes me feel a little better. God knows I couldn’t write for shit back then.” Natalie admits.
There is a small moment of silence as her upstairs neighbor starts to vacuum, and Natalie wonders what exactly she’s supposed to do now. If this is her reality now (and there’s a part of her that is still resistant to the idea), then she has an obligation to do something, right? But what could she possibly find out from her internship? It’s not like they would do something cartoonishly evil right there in the open.
“So you’ll do it? You’ll look into what the Kraang are doing?” Leo questions.
“Okay, so I’ll go to work tomorrow, and see if I find anything. I get off around six, so you can come anytime after that.” It’s still startlingly strange to have four humanoid turtles in her studio apartment, but hey, she’ll roll with it, she supposes. “I can buy pizza, since you kinda saved me and all.”
“Pizza!” Mikey grins, as Raph drags him towards the window. “Ooh, ooh! Can you get pepperoni-onion-jelly bean-”
“I refuse to order anything where jellybeans and cheese go together.”
“Ugh, fine. Pepperoni is fine, I guess.” Mikey says, before slinking out into the night.
Raph follows behind, eyes narrowed as he blends into the darkness. And then Donnie twists through the window, his bo nearly getting stuck in the narrow opening.
Leo pauses, one leg out the door. There’s a slight pink tinge to his cheeks as he cringes, and turns back, “And, uh, what’s your name? I think we skipped the introductions…”
“Natalie,” She says, with a slight smile. “Thanks for getting me home, Leo.”
“Right. Of course. No problem at all mi-, uh, Natalie.” He salutes stiffly, like a pantomime of solider, and then he too is gone, and Natalie’s flat is once more filled with silence.