Chapter Text
Crime in the city had quieted down since the Shredder and Kraang had been defeated years ago. Of course, the usual petty crime still existed, but it was nothing like the enemies they’d faced before. Everyone had moved on. Karai had taken over the Foot Clan, transformed it into an organization that did good instead of evil. Shredder’s underlings had parted ways, going off to live their own lives in whatever way they could. The kraang, for the most part, had disappeared from Earth, but there were still a few stragglers left in New York.
It was nothing the turtles couldn’t handle. They were twenty now, and they were well experienced ninjas, to the point in which nothing they faced these past couple of years seemed to even faze them.
Hell, they had stopped going on regular group patrols a long time ago. Nowadays, they usually just went in pairs and switched it up each night. With their enemies few and far between now, and with Splinter no longer with them to enforce things…..there was no reason they couldn’t take things easy when they were able to do so. They’d lost so much of their youth to the trauma of battle. They deserved to relax.
So tonight, Donnie, Leo, and Mikey had decided to stay home and do their own thing while Raph headed out to hang with Casey.
And, well, ‘hanging with Casey’ usually meant those two were going out on patrol and actively searching for petty crime. Beating up bad guys was a sort of stress relief for those two, and Leo had long since given up on stopping them from looking for trouble. They could handle a few Purple Dragons and whatever other thugs they’d come across.
Except, well…..no one could have predicted this.
“You got eyes on ‘em, Case?” Raph’s gruff voice spoke into his T-phone as he peered through the leaves of a tree, where he was perched on a thick branch hidden behind the foliage.
Central Park was pretty desolate at this hour, but there were still some folk passing through. It was mostly homeless, drug dealers, hookers, and the like - nothing they’d usually worry about. But about an hour ago, when he and Casey had been about ready to go home from patrol, they’d stumbled upon a couple of kraang who’d mentioned some sort of ‘plan’ involving the park tonight. So of course, tired as they were, the two had decided to stake out the park and see what sort of activity the Kraang were up to.
It shouldn’t be too difficult. There weren’t many kraang left, and the Hamatos and allies had been chipping away at their numbers these past few years. The kraang didn’t even have any functional bases anymore. So really, what could those pink aliens even do at this point?
That was a question Raph probably shouldn’t have asked.
“Uhhh Raph,” Casey’s nervous voice came through the quiet speaker of his phone. “I found them.”
Raphael’s brow furrowed in irritation. “And?” he asked impatiently. He just wanted to get this mission over with so he could go home and sleep. “What are they up to?” The turtle peered around the park, not seeing any Kraang bots from his position. “Where are you, anyway?”
Casey huffed. “Between you and the pond.”
Raph rolled his eyes, even though his friend couldn’t see this. “Which freakin’ pond, Casey? This park is huge.”
This time, it was Casey that sounded irritated. “The one to your right, dipshit. It’s not far from where we split off.” Casey had been about to say something else, but he cut himself off, only the sound of his breathing coming through Raph’s T-phone.
“Case?”
There was a shuffling sound coming through the phone, like Casey was on the move. Raph could briefly hear his feet running across a pathway before the sound disappeared again. “Raph,” Casey finally whispered urgently. “Dude, you have to get over here, like, now. These Kraang have mutagen .”
Raph tensed, already hopping down from his tree to head over to Casey’s location as discreetly as possible. “Fuck. I thought we trashed all their mutagen. How the hell did they get more?”
“I don’t know,” Casey replied. “But I’m tailing them. Not sure what they’re using it for.”
“Alright, don’t do anything stupid,” Raph said with a grunt. He wasn’t sure why he bothered to say this, knowing full well Casey couldn’t turn off his reckless impulses if he tried.
And sure enough, the next thing Raph heard was his friend’s signature “Goongala!” followed by a series of loud smashing sounds.
Raph growled in annoyance and ended the phone call as he sped toward the battle. He could hear the fight now even without his phone, so it wouldn’t take him long to get there. And when he did reach the fight, he found his friend completely surrounded by kraang. ‘Fuck, how are there so many?’ he thought to himself but wasted no time charging into battle. With one sweep of his legs, he knocked two of them off their feet, giving Casey an opening to escape.
“Thanks,” Casey said as he sprang out through the opening and immediately turned on his heel, swinging his hockey stick wildly at the enemies Raph had knocked down.
“What happened to not doing anything stupid?” Raph joked, half-irritated and half-amused. He expertly dodged and deflected attacks, then proceeded to use his sai to stab through the robots.
“Hey, I never agreed to those terms,” Casey responded with a cackle.
The two continued to throw each other insults and jokes throughout the fight, not taking it too seriously. But by the time they’d finished off the kraang bots, they were both exhausted. That hadn’t been a difficult fight, but there had been more kraang than usual. But….
“Uh, Case? I thought you said they had mutagen,” Raph stated, kicking a fallen bot as he searched around. He didn’t see any canisters in sight.
“Huh?” Casey leaned forward, looking over the pile of defeated kraang bots. “They did. I swear they did. I-It was in some sorta gun thing.”
Raph sighed, annoyed. “Then one of ‘em must’a taken off with it while we were distracted,” he said with a groan. “Ugh, I just wanna go home.” But they couldn’t now. If the kraang had a gun full of mutagen, it meant they planned to shoot mutagen at people. And if they were planning to make more mutants, it could spell trouble for everyone. As much as Raph enjoyed fighting, he really didn’t want to deal with the kind of shit they’d been through before. So they had no choice but to search for the kraang that got away. With a heavy sigh, Raph tucked his sai away and started walking. “Let’s fucking get this over with.”
It wasn’t even ten minutes of searching for the escaped kraang bot before they found any sign of it.
And that sign was in the form of a pair of crab-like mutants. They were rampaging through the park, obviously experiencing the distress of being freshly mutated. Raph winced in sympathy but fought them nonetheless, trying to stop the two from destroying everything in sight and attracting too much attention. The park was pretty desolate past 2AM, but Raph didn’t want to take any chances. He and Casey fought and tried to reason with them, but eventually the crab mutants had had enough and ran off.
Casey made a move to follow them, but Raph grabbed his shoulder, stopping him. “It’s too late to help them. We gotta find that kraang bot or someone else could end up like those guys,” he warned before promptly marching off in the direction he assumed the kraang had gone.
Once they reached the pond, they found a place to lay low and scan the area for any movement.
And…. ah. There was a woman speaking with a shady-looking man, trading something off.
‘A drug deal,’ Raph thought.
But there was someone else there. A child? She was crouched by the pond, playing with….a turtle?
Casey clicked his tongue in annoyance. “What kind of parent brings a toddler to the park in the middle of the night to buy drugs?”
‘The kind that cares more about gettin’ high than about the wellbeing of their own fuckin’ kid,’ Raph thought, but he kept that answer to himself. He knew that was exactly the kind of shit that Casey’s mother had done to him as a kid, so Raph wasn’t about to add to that now. They needed to focus. “Doesn’t matter,” he answered instead. “Just keep an eye out for that kraang. These’re the only people I see around, so no doubt that thing’ll be after them next.”
And sure enough, there it was. The bot appeared behind the drug dealer, mutagen-gun aimed at the man’s back.
“GOONGALA!” Casey shouted and flung himself out into the open, charging toward the bot with his hockey stick raised for a strike.
Raph followed as quickly as he could, not bothering to stay hidden as he charged into battle.
Several things happened at once. Casey swung his weapon. The kraang bot sprung back to avoid Casey’s attack. The kraang fired its weapon. The drug dealer ducked down. The woman flung herself to the side. The mutagen streamed through the air, narrowly missing them both. The little girl stood and turned to face the commotion, dropping the turtle she’d been playing with just as the mutagen splattered over her front.
The child screamed.
It was an awful scream, ear-piercing and full of so much pain and fear - a sound that would likely haunt Raphael’s dreams.
The girl’s form morphed, her already-pale skin turning a ghostly white, hair falling out, ears and nose morphing, eight fingers melding together into four thicker ones, spine cracking and popping as it curved outward and formed a shell around her back. In just a second, the innocent child had been completely transformed. “Ma-maaaaaa,” she cried out with the most anguish Raph had ever heard as she stumbled toward her mother.
But the woman let out her own ear-piercing scream and shoved the mutated child away, into the water. The woman screamed again in a panic and scrambled away, leaving her child behind as she fled the scene, shouting about a monster. The drug dealer followed close behind and disappeared from sight.
Raph felt blinding rage toward the mother, but more than that, he felt the sharp pain of fear in his chest as he beelined toward the pond. He wasted no time jumping in to pull the flailing child from the water. Holding her close, he climbed ashore and knelt on the ground. He held her desperately as he gave her shell a few light thwacks to help her cough up any of the water she may have swallowed. She did, thankfully, but with her gasps of breath came painful wails and fat tears rolling down her cheeks. “It’s okay,” Raph reassured her in the gentle voice he’d only ever used for Spike and Chompy when he thought no one was listening. But now, that voice was drenched in a thinly-veiled layer of grief for this poor child whose life had just been flipped upside down. “You’re okay,” he said as comfortingly as he could and shifted to sit cross-legged and hold the sobbing child against his plastron.
Her little hands clung to him desperately, and she buried her face into the crook of his neck, wailing loudly as she shook in his arms. Whether the shaking was from fear, mutation pain, or from the cold water, Raph wasn’t sure.
“Shit…” Casey said regretfully as he hesitantly approached, having already finished off the lone kraang. “Dude, I- I didn’t think it’d hit the kid.”
Raph sighed, staring up at his friend from the ground. “Not your fault, Case.”
Casey didn’t seem to calm down though, only appearing to panic more. “Dude, what the fuck do we do? That’s a fucking kid. W-what do we do?!”
Raph looked at him frantically, his eyes portraying the panic he felt. “I don’t know! I mean, we can’t just leave her here!” he whisper-shouted, causing the child to flinch and let out a whimper. Raph took a breath and did his best to calm himself, speaking more carefully. “We can’t leave her.”
The girl’s mother had abandoned her. And from the woman’s reaction, there was a good chance she wouldn’t accept the mutant child back even if they tried to track her down. Not that Raph would want to hand a child back into that woman’s hands anyway.
A frown etched itself onto Casey’s face as he crouched in front of them. A long silence passed between them as they waited for the child’s cries to die down to quiet sniffles. “So….what should we do then?”
Raph sighed again, feeling his exhaustion catch up to him. He shivered. The high stakes situation and jumping into the cold water had woken him up a bit, but now he was just tired and cold. And a bit heartbroken for this child he’d just met. And really, really scared and out of his depth with what to do with the kid. “.....Would you mind if we went back to your place?” he asked Casey surprisingly softly, not wanting to frighten the girl again. “I’d go home, but uh….it’s late. We’re soaked. The lair is kinda far, and the sewers are kinda cold.”
Last thing he wanted was to get the kid sick by taking her on a long hike through the sewers to get back to the lair after having been dunked into a pond.
Besides, Casey’s apartment was only a ten minute walk from here, tops.
Casey nodded in response, getting to his feet and offering Raph a hand.
When they got to Casey’s place, Raph was quick to get the kid out of her soaked clothes. Unfortunately, they weren’t salvageable, having been torn and ripped when her shell had formed.
He’d disposed of the ruined clothing and run a warm bath for her, letting the child soak to try and ease any lingering aches she may have had from both the cold and her recent mutation. When that was done, Raph wrapped her in a large towel and brought her into the living room area, where Casey dumped a pile of extra blankets and pillows. Raph settled himself on the pile as though it were a beanbag and held the small turtle gently against his plastron. They sat for a long while in silence, just processing everything.
This was a baby mutant turtle.
And…just……. fuck.
Raph had gone on patrol to kick criminal ass, not to come home with a literal child.
But here he was, now suddenly adoptive father to an infant that he had met only an hour ago. And he didn’t know anything about her. What’s her name? How old is she? Is she even old enough to tell him? She’s obviously albino, but what kinda health effects does that have on her? And does she have any allergies? Or other health issues?
Fuck, Raph was really out of his depth here.
He wished he could go back in time and ask his dad how he’d managed to raise four mutant children when Raph was freaking out over the idea of being responsible for just one.
“Raph?” Casey’s voice broke him from his thoughts. “You okay, dude?”
Raphael shook his head, meeting his friend’s eyes. “I have no idea what I’m doing,” he admitted.
Casey just shrugged, far too nonchalant for Raph’s liking. “You’ve been taking care of a baby alien turtle. Why not a baby mutant turtle?”
Raph bristled. “That’s not the same, Case.”
Casey sighed, leaning back on the couch and letting himself slouch against the cushions. “Look, man. At least she’s a turtle like you guys? You already know what sorta things mutant turtles need to stay healthy or whatever, so…. I mean, it’s a start, right?”
At least Casey was actually taking this seriously and trying to help.
An exhausted sigh escaped Raph. He seemed to deflate a bit. “I guess you’re right,” he agreed. “No use worrying over it now anyway.” The small turtle had fallen asleep in his arms. He would have to try asking her questions next time she wakes. For now, he was going to let her rest. He was sure she needed it as much as he did. It had been a long and eventful night, and it was going on 4AM. Raph winced. “Leo’s probably home pacing,” he realized as he pulled out his T-phone.
Sure enough, there was a multitude of unread texts and missed calls from his eldest brother, as well as a few from the younger two. He’d still had his notifications on silent from when he and Casey were staking out the park. And with everything that had happened since, he hadn’t even thought to check his phone or contact his family to let them know he was alright. He never stayed out this late without informing them.
Casey let out a quiet chuckle as he pulled out his own phone, seeing a series of texts from the others as well, asking if Raph was with him and if anything had happened. “You should probably tell them what’s going on.”
But Raph just shook his head and lazily typed to the four brothers’ group chat with one hand while he held the sleeping child with the other. “I ain’t explaining everything now, otherwise they’re really gonna blow up my phone.”
Instead, he sent a simple text.
- R: Sorry. Long night. Crashing at Caseys.
That should be enough to stop Leo’s pacing, Raph figured. At least his brothers would know he’s okay and where he was staying. He’d explain everything in the morning.
For now……man, he really needed to sleep.