Chapter Text
When Casey was a child- before the Turtles- before Master Leonardo, he had been with his mom. Her stories were regaled to him with pictures held over campfires and lamplight for the most part, but he remembered her better than many assumed. He just didn’t like to think too hard about all that surrounded and sullied such tender moments. They hadn’t lasted, and Casey supposed that’s why everyone so adamantly reminded him of times before the Krang Labor Camp.
Before he lost her.
Casey was a child then, too little to fully comprehend what was going on when his mom dragged him from his bedrolls to try and escape. A fleeting notion. Once the Krang found an encampment, they raided it like savage dogs diving into the burning burrows of foxes. The both of them were dragged from the crevice his mother had crammed the both of them into with a rabbit-fast heartbeat that thrummed against his ear. He swore he felt it stop entirely when the glowing eye of a Krang bloodhound found them. It seemed as though the world fell silent save for his mother’s howl of fury when they were dragged out like roaches beneath the heel of some greater man.
But there was no greater man or higher power to judge them, only the mechanical whirr of a Krang suit ensnaring them into a hellish camp.
Casey didn’t—He didn’t see his mom after that.
He knew what must have happened to her from how she kissed his head and held him tight. He was worried his little ribs might crack entirely from the way she squeezed him. In hindsight, Casey knew she was trying to break him. If he were too broken then he would be discarded, and her hand would have been kinder than any Krang slaver. His lungs had howled in pain as he wept into her shoulders, not yet understanding the loss, but asking only what he had done to be hurt so wholly.
She didn’t tell him she loved him, only that she was sorry when they finally pried the two apart.
The boy tried not to think too hard on the labor camp itself, for it was just as it sounded. His hands shook terribly from the weight of his crafts- meant to build spiraling skyscrapers that would assault the very heavens above. He tried to spy its top from far beneath the skyline, like an ant pondering the will of giants. There were other children too, however infrequently they appeared. It was like water falling through his hands with how infrequently they appeared, and just how fast they disappeared. He tried not to feel the pang of loneliness as his youngest memories were stripped away and replaced with a dozen acidic green eyes staring back at him with flesh that beat like a broken heart.
They didn’t turn him, but they could have. He was a fast worker, even if his little feet stumbled over the growths that so often sprouted from others around him. Casey even thought himself proud with the reins that he was allowed, that he was deemed worthy of sentience when so many others were the tools to be worked till they dropped entirely.
He was a tool, in turn, just not one so easily defined.
It was a long con, and Casey hadn’t even begun to unravel it until he was seated in what he later found out was called an auditorium. Though the roof and walls had long since been torn away, Casey was deposited atop what remained of its stage. He saw in postcards and what little recordings remained that dancers and poets would recite their life works for notoriety. Dance was such a foreign concept to the boy, even as he grew, yet still he remembered the echo of the broken auditorium. They’d let him keep the only memory of his mother that she left with him. A small device with a single button that Casey hadn’t dared press. It was something his mother treasured, with the insignia of the turtles- a traitorous hope- etched into its back. Still, his Krang captors never took it. Instead, they pressed it themselves when they abandoned Casey in the auditorium.
There was another boy with Casey when they were left to their own devices. He was a year older than Casey, and by then nearly a head taller. A gangly, gaunt child who had become more bone than skin stretched across a slowing body. When he’d first come to the camp, the boy’s hair had been a greasy blond that shone like the sun who so rarely shone itself beyond the smog. Now, his hair was matted with blood and sinuous pink tendrils that wriggled just beneath his skin. It was a long-con then. He hadn’t a name to offer when he sat beside Casey, for names were meaningless when you didn’t live long enough to use them. Your identity was your effectiveness and productivity.
The boy had neither.
Instead of pondering the will of his Krang captors, Casey’s attention was drawn to the echoing emergence of what would become his newfound family. Ragtag and utterly off the walls to whatever nuclear image had once jumped out from postcards. The Turtles were a title that evoked such a righteous sense of victory in all who heard it. They were a cry for hope amidst the toxic clouds that had overtaken what little remained of the world.
And they were here. Belatedly, Casey would realize he had even questioned their existence. Even though his mom had spoken of them with such hushed pride that brought tears to her eyes. She’d had the device with her at all times, oftentimes running her bitten nail across the button like it would call them to salvation. Now, Casey watched one, Donatello, holding the mirrored device in one hand with a look of stricken fear. Oh, they were part of a matching set, Casey hadn’t considered that before.
“Casey?” Donatello called, his voice cracking as he looked out into the dimly lit auditorium. “We got your signal, and we’re here to help. Where are you?”
Oh.
They couldn’t see the two yet, could they? With an unhurried motion, Casey lifted one hand in a meek wave for attention.
All at once, each turtle stopped their descent into the main of the once grand hall. As though an unsettling realization had clawed its way into their throats. Casey obviously wasn’t the one they were looking for. He saw it in their eyes. The flash of disappointment quickly glossed over with newfound worry.
“It’s a pair of kids--”
“What are they–”
“How did they–”
“It’s a trap!”
All at once, the room erupted into chaos all around Casey. The boy at his side, nameless and without hope, burst into action with a speed he shouldn’t have been able to possess. The Krang had given him that, their parting gift to the turtles. Casey understood now, why most of the other kids didn’t stay long. He knew with such certainty that this was the fate they met- bait. He watched the boy’s body be torn asunder and leap into the newfound fray. Casey was not so fast, nor corrupted. He was used by higher powers. Greater stakes at that as he clutched the device close to his chest and closed his eyes to the battle raging before him. The boy who held his hand so tightly that Casey thought his fingers would break was gone. No one came back from the Krang. Nobody was strong enough.
Not even mom could.
“Hey, hey, hey…kid. Look at me for a moment, let me see those pretty eyes, yeah?” an unfamiliar voice beckoned him closer as a hand settled on his shoulder.
“I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,” Casey answered reflexively as his brown eyes caught the bright blue of Master Leonardo’s. His Sensei. His mother’s friend. She called the man as such, even if Casey never got to meet the turtle in the flesh- until now that was.
“You’re um–You’re Cass’s kid, right?” Leonardo asked, his voice catching on her name like it was some forbidden knowledge. Something he wasn’t supposed to say.
Dumbly, Casey nodded in return. He was named after her because there was nothing else to call him. He was her shadow and was named appropriately because of it.
“We’re friends. We’re going to get you out of here. Ninja in, Ninja their faces, and Ninja out, right?” Leo said it with a smile that Casey assumed was supposed to be humorous.
Whatever fragile peace they’d brokered in this onslaught of chaos was shattered as Leonardo was ripped away from Casey by a wayward tendril that wrapped itself tightly around one of Leonardo’s arm. It tore the turtle apart from the now openly sobbing child and left him without a sword. Said blade now lay before a snotty Casey as he kicked out against the tendrils that wormed their way closer with every sharp breath he took.
“Kid! You have to strike!” Leonardo shouted from where Michalaeneglo was untangling him from the barbed mass of thorny flesh.
Casey couldn’t—He couldn’t breathe. That nameless boy had been so scared.
“Strike now, goddamnit!”
He couldn’t do it. The boy had such soft eyes.
“Raph, get him!”
The splatter of blood was what finally got Casey to open his eyes. The pain was delayed as he looked up in horror at the towering figure of Raphael hunched atop the boy. There was a barbed arm running through his shoulder, and straight into the palm of Casey’s hand. He had been spared from its original intent at least, straight through the child’s rabbit-fast heart. It beat hard enough to hurt as he openly began to sob against the blood dripping down his face like rainfall.
When Casey next felt fully in his body, he was sitting in Commander O’Neil’s office. It was a temporary setup within a decrepit subway car amidst one of their larger encampments. He recognized the woman from his mother’s stories but said nothing when she hurried him into her office. He hadn’t wanted to speak. He still had Raphael’s blood on his face, clothes, his hands. He’d tried washing it off when the Turtles weren’t looking, but it only smudged itself across his dirtied arms. Whether or not O’Neil caught onto his dissociative state, she didn’t comment on it. Instead, she covered his ears with a dusty set of headphones connected to a broken cord.
She didn’t want him to hear.
Casey was beginning to get good at disobeying orders.
He knew they were arguing about him. They’d been at it for well over an hour just down the hall. It had begun as a whispered argument full of barbed words and hushed gestures, though it had grown to raised voices laced with frustration.
“He’s a child, Donnie! You can’t expect him to bear that burden!”
“Were we not children when this began? The world isn’t what it used to be and he will die if he hesitates next time. Those are facts- that is science.”
“He’s a child regardless, Donnie. He’s going through a lot right now, most of which we can’t even begin to understand. He needs time,” April sounded exacerbated, but persistent. They’d been going in circles like this as though they were two prowling cats baring their fangs.
“He should have been with Cass,” Mikey spoke up. None of them seemed to want to address the elephant in the room. They’d gotten the wrong Casey. The boy knew as much from the way they didn’t dare speak his name, even though it was written on the tags of his weathered shirt.
“But he wasn’t,” Donnie shot back from deeper within the compound.
“So, what? Are we just going to ignore that can of worms?”
“You,” April began with a pointed jab, “should be more worried about Raph. He needs you right now just as much as that kid does, and if you three can’t be nice right now then you avoid my fucking office.”
When another set of footsteps made themselves known, Casey scrambled to put the headphones back on to disguise his prying. Master Leonardo was watching him from the broken doorway with a raised brow. When Casey tried to scramble back at Leonardo’s slow approach, he watched a stricken look overtake the turtle’s eyes.
“One moment, kiddo, let’s get this off you,” the swordsmith muttered as he moved to remove Csdey’s headset entirely. Setting it aside, Leonardo came to crouch beside Casey with a long sigh. It was oftentimes a sound his mother would make when she seemed at a loss for where to go next.
“Are you mad at me too?” Casey blurted out without a second thought. There was a look on Leo’s face. Everyone had been looking at him like that since they arrived. Like they were seeing someone else.
“No, kid–Casey–no one is mad at you,” Leonardo began with trepidation.
“But I–”
“No one is mad at you,” Leonardo reaffirmed sternly. “My brothers are scared, I’m scared too. Sometimes people say things the wrong way when they’re afraid, but we aren’t mad. None of this is your fault.”
“I hesitated,” Casey whispered with a shudder. He could still remember the spray of blood upon his face from the impromptu rescue.
“Yes…you did, but this was just your first fight. I know that isn’t fair to you, it really isn’t. The world didn’t use to be like this, kid.” Leonardo seemed to be struggling now as he took a deep breath. “We’re all still getting used to this new world and the way the rules work here. We used to be able to be gentle, but we can’t anymore. If we are soft–if you are soft–then the Krang will take you back.”
“I don’t know how to fight,” Casey admitted in a shameful whisper.
“I’ll teach you. We were supposed to fix this world for your generation, and I’m sorry we couldn’t. I’m sorry that this is just the way the world is.”
Casey stopped hesitating after that. Delusions of a better world for him to live in were discarded fast after that. His generation would be spared no softness, so Casey could afford no weakness.