Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Donatello peered at his computer screen, utterly mystified, his brow ridges creased in confusion. Where there should be one blue dot, there were two. Or, rather, there was one blue dot just where it should be, while another dot pulsed where it should definitely not.

Normally, Donnie enjoyed a little mystery. He loved an occasional conundrum—something that stretched his understanding and ignited his curiosity. But not tonight. Tonight, he just wanted this to work. He just wanted one understandable, explicable, steady blue dot. He wanted to check this task off his list with a flourish, take a gulp of coffee, and move on with satisfaction to the next project.

He turned accusing eyes to the space by his keyboard where a tiny, glowing tracking device lay. It’d taken him hours altogether–stolen from pockets of time here and there across multiple days—to hook that Utrom battery up to a tracker small enough to fit inside the hole drilled into the top of his shell. Well, the one April had helped him drill over a year ago. His memory of the drill puncturing through the keratin layer and into the protective dermal bone beneath still set his teeth painfully on edge.

But it had been worth it for peace-of-mind alone. Once that first tracker was inserted, April had helped him seal the hole with heat-resistant silicone and painted it carefully to conceal it from his brothers. He’d left the tracking code in April’s capable hands to use if needed. Protected from water, heat, explosions, and compression, the tracker had lasted almost thirteen months, sending out a persistent signal detectable across the Earth’s surface, or up to a half-mile underneath it. Not bad for a prototype.

But not enough.

Now it had failed. There’s only so much a tiny 21st-century Earth battery can do, and this one was kaput. Don needed something more powerful, something longer-lasting, something… permanent.

Luckily, he had just the thing—five of them, in fact! Hidden in a compartment at the back of a workbench drawer, accessible via an invisible panel-button, sat the miniscule Utrom nano-batteries. Each the size and width of a nail’s head, they glowed a soft, enticing blue. Donatello had “permanently borrowed” them from the medical facility where the turtles had been patched up on the Utrom homeworld after obliterating the Shredder’s spaceship.

Donnie felt a little—only a smidge—bad about surreptitiously slipping them out of the Utrom medical devices they’d been powering and into his arm-cast to smuggle them off-world. After all, it was for science! And besides, the turtles had helped capture Ch’rell, the most dangerous war criminal in Utrom history. What were five measly ( remarkable, exquisite, supremely advanced ) batteries compared to that?

Now, after all that painstaking work, one of those precious, irreplaceable batteries was connected to this apparently flawed, misfiring dud of a tracker! Donnie held the thing in his hands, resisting the sudden Raphael-like urge to crush the thing in his fist and be done with it.

But he needed this. He needed it to work. When installed back into his shell, this single Utrom battery would ensure Donnie never had to change out the tracker again. It would last decades—centuries, perhaps—without a recharge.

So, if the unthinkable happened and he did disappear, there wouldn’t be an arbitrary limit on the time his family and allies had to find him.

Donnie felt the familiar wave of anxiety flood through him, bumping up his heart rate so he could hear it thump in his ears at the thought of that alternate future into which Ultimate Drako had tossed him—the one in which he’d been missing. And his family, his whole future, had been crushed.

He pushed a deep breath against the tightness in his chest and took a minute to refocus his mind. Closing his eyes, he concentrated on the sounds of his lab, cataloging them slowly. He knew every click, whir, and hum. He was more fully at home here than anywhere else on Earth. Breathing more easily, feeling soothed, he ran his hands over the sanded-and-polished pale pine of his workbench.

He was grateful to have tonight to work on this, but he knew his time wouldn’t last forever. 

Patrol had been quiet that night. The city had flowed and fluctuated below them. It was like how he imagined a coral reef must be—all life and energy and movement—and he and his brothers floated like snorkelers above it, watching but not participating. Sometimes, that felt isolating. But tonight, it had been sort of nice, their easy banter and gruff affection smoothing their way through the rippling night.

Afterward, Raph took off to visit Mrs. Morrison while Leo and Mikey stayed out to deliver some food and supplies to the Professor in the shantytown by the river. Don would usually accompany them, but tonight he begged off, vaguely citing a project he was almost done with. Now, the only other family member with Don in the lair was Master Splinter. Soft sounds of the television echoed through the passages of the old Reservoir Station.

It allowed him the privacy, the secrecy , he’d wanted. It wasn’t that he hadn’t told his brothers about the bleak alternate future that he’d been hurled into. He had. Eventually. But he certainly didn’t want them dwelling on it. And if they knew about this, about the extent to which Donatello was continuing to prepare for his own disappearance, well… That would be a hard conversation. One that Donnie wasn’t eager to repeat, not after how they’d reacted last time with the subdermal heart monitor discussion.

Eventually, if this went well, once he was sure everything was working with no unexpected bugs, Don could talk to his brothers about expanding the tracker project to them. He grimaced at the thought of Raph’s reaction. But when it came time, he’d have all the arguments lined up and ready to roll out.

Unexpected bugs…

The city map enlarged on the computer screen remained open. One dot, the correct dot, lay right where it should be on the edge of Central Park. That meant the tracker in Donatello’s hand was emitting the correct signal, marking the correct coordinates.

But the other dot, the wrong one, indicated an entirely different location on the east side of Manhattan Island in the Kips Bay neighborhood.

Don rubbed the back of his neck. He refreshed the page. He shut down and reopened the encrypted software. He finally restarted the entire computer. Yet there was no getting rid of that persistent, unwelcome signal.

“Dammit,” he cursed softly and rolled the tracker in his fingers.

His night was not over.

The next step was to match the location of the aggravating extra dot to a building or business. It was the work of a moment to find just that—a seven-story apartment building with two businesses occupying its ground floor—a Greek restaurant on one side and a curiosities shop on the other. Antiques & Oddities , it was called. The name inspired a quick shiver of trepidation. Yeah, this was an oddity, actually. He certainly knew where his search would start.

Sighing, he opened the secret compartment within his workbench and stowed the tracker away. Until he figured out what was going on, he wasn’t going to rely on flawed tech.

In a fluid motion, he sheathed his bo and latched his shell cell onto his belt. The device held the tracking program, so it should pinpoint whatever was emitting this second signal easily.

On the way out, he grabbed a long trench coat and a low hat. For a foray like this, a disguise could prove useful.

One nice thing about being the only turtle in the lair was he didn’t have to come up with a lot of reasons for going out. With a quick call to his father letting him know he was checking on a “tech thing” and would be back soon, he escaped into the night, headed for Kips Bay.

The security system at Antiques & Oddities was no joke, but it couldn’t withstand the determination of a genius mutant turtle for long. With the door finally unlocked, cameras covered, and alarms silenced, Donnie slipped inside.

The smell that hit him—age-old paper, furniture polish, wool rugs—reminded him of April’s shop, Second Time Around , so much that he found himself instantly relaxing. He had to mentally shake himself to remain on his guard.

He flicked on a red-light headlamp and performed a quick survey of the store’s layout—two spacious rooms, both stuffed with the bric-a-brac of decades. Chenille sofas and sewing tables supported piles of cushions and Tiffany lamps. Turn-of-the-century lighting fixtures hung from the ceiling as pyramids of dolls, their original owners long dead, gazed at him through dusty, marble eyes.

Donnie relied on his ninja skills to move through the maze of fragile, time-worn objects, staring at his shell cell as the tracking program homed in on the signal. It lay east of him, in the back room.

Moving stealthily, Donnie rounded a massive carved oak chest to find that the back wall of the shop was covered from top to bottom in dead animals.

A menagerie of taxidermied forms from every continent posed in a wide variety of leaps, snarls, and twists. An emperor penguin stood on one side while a platypus crouched on the other. The wall displayed trophy heads of ibex, moose, warthogs, and a dozen more.

And, just to the right and near the bottom hung his own shell.

He almost missed it in the chaos of horns, fur, feathers, and tusks. But once he saw it, his eyes were locked. His heart missed a step before picking up, faster than before.

It was his . He knew it.

Same exact proportions.

There was the nick Leo had accidentally made while sparring when they were seven. Leo had cried at the time.

There was the healed-over scar where the Shredder had once cracked Don’s shell against a cement piling.

And the whorls were worn smooth where the strap held his bo.

His shell.

Don stepped forward, almost nervously, as if approaching something living, something unpredictable. His breathing stilled as he reached out to feel the rounded, barely perceptible divot where, beneath chipped paint, hardened silicone covered a hole. And that hole, he knew, contained a tracker.

Time slowed. Eventually, Donnie remembered to breathe. His hand stayed on the shell, resting with his palm on an upper scute and his fingers over the shell’s curved lip. It was cool to the touch.

He risked switching his headlamp from red to white. This was something he needed to see fully and without reserve.

In the fullness of the headlamp’s glow, concentric patterns of dark and light emerged, turning each scute into its own kind of topographic map. He knew his brothers’ scutes intimately, but he’d never seen his own quite like this.

How could this be? How could this be here?

In a daze, Donnie unconsciously reached over his shoulder to the shell on his back as if to make sure that, yes, it was still there, still attached.

With his left hand, he could feel the nick that Leo had chipped out of it so long ago while with his right hand, he could touch the same on his own back.

There were discernible differences, however. This other shell had lost some of the original rich color— from age ? Don wondered. Also, some rather shiny substance coated its surface—probably a lacquer which had kept the keratin scutes from falling off the bone plating beneath.

With relief, Don felt his own intense curiosity rising to replace the original horror. He gently lifted the shell off the pegs where it hung on the wall. Its weight was substantial, but an easy lift for Don nonetheless. To inspect its underside, he maneuvered it to rest gently on the floor.

The plastron was absent. A few strange and clearly unnatural marks lay at the top of the inner shell. But that wasn’t what caught Donnie’s attention.

He was intellectually prepared for what he saw. He’d seen plenty of photographs and diagrams of turtle shell interiors in his efforts to understand their physiology.

And yet, to see one’s own ridge of vertebrae, the bony diamonds of the spinal column fused to the shell with arcs of rib bone radiating out… It took his breath away. Softly, a little shakily, he ran his fingers down the path of spine to their base, noticing absently how the dull ivory of bone gave way to an almost mother-of-pearl sheen between the dorsal ribs.

It was really sort of beautiful.

What would the guys think?

The thought brought him back to himself.

Shell . He snorted a half-laugh. What was he going to do now?

He needed to get this back to the lair. He could think of about a dozen tests he’d like to run starting immediately. And he felt a very firm possessiveness over the shell already. He could take it now. It was his after all. Could it be stealing if you were taking something that was part of yourself?

However, to take it now would mean losing whatever information the owner of the shop had about it.

It wasn’t easy for Don to master his tumultuous emotions as he replaced it gently back on its wooden pegs. His manipulation of the shell had disturbed a thin film of dust, but otherwise it looked just as it had when he’d first entered.

He let himself out of the shop, carefully re-establishing the security network and leaving everything precisely as he’d found it. As he melted back into the city night, he reached for his shell cell. Donnie’s steps already turned in the direction of the apartment April and Casey shared.

“April? I’m sorry; I know it’s late to call. Can I come over? I have a favor to ask… No, this is something I’d like to talk over with you face-to-face.”

Chapter Text

For the conversation that followed, April and Don sat on the fire escape—Don in his trenchcoat and hat to avoid attracting unwanted attention. The comforting sounds of televised hockey wafted through the window.

It was one of the strangest conversations of April’s life. And that, coming from a woman who counted four giant green ninja turtles as her best friends, was saying something.

The next morning found April across the street from Antiques and Oddities at 10 o’clock sharp—opening time. She watched a clean-shaven, aging man unlock the door and flip the sign to “ Open ” before disappearing back into the cavernous interior.

April sat outside a café, sipping a latte and wiggling her foot impatiently. It wouldn’t do to look too eager. For the best results, she had to play this cool.

Finally, at 10:15, she allowed herself to stand and make her way to the entrance. The bell jingled on her way in, alerting the proprietor at the front desk to her presence. He looked up from a newspaper.

“Let me know if I can help ya with anything?” he queried with a hint of a Brooklyn accent and a voice heavy with long tobacco use.

“Thanks! Just looking today.” April flashed him a smile—never too soon to start buttering him up—and then proceeded to wander around the front room as if vaguely admiring his offerings.

Normally, she would’ve been authentically interested. It was always fun to see what her competitors were carrying and what prices the tags demanded. But today, she couldn’t focus. She itched to get to that back wall.

April picked up an old music box and pretended to inspect it, letting the tinny jingle of melody rise as she peered into the half-darkness beyond. Carrying the box with her as a kind of decoy, she finally thought it was time to explore the back wall.

It was precisely how Donnie had described it. Well out of the eyeline of the store owner, her attention zeroed in immediately on Donnie’s shell.

She would have recognized it anywhere. She knew it better than Don himself since he didn’t often get a good look at his own back.

To find it here—this precious part of her living, breathing, brilliant friend—hung on a wall among so much death swung her into a strange vertigo. April reminded herself that Donnie was very much alive. She’d seen him last night and spoken with him again this morning before she came. They’d figure this out. They’d do it together.

Before turning to make her way to the counter, she let her palm rest against the shell, smooth and oddly shinier than normal, as if to let it know that she was coming back for it.

As she approached the counter, she once again appraised the proprietor—rumpled, white-haired, and balding at the top—maybe in his late 60s. He didn’t look like a turtle-murderer. But she wouldn’t take him at face value.

He raised his head from his paper as April approached and cleared his throat gruffly. “Looks like you found something interesting, young lady.”

“What?” April tensed, immediately on her guard. But when she followed his gaze down to her hand, she saw that she was still clutching the music box. “I mean, yes. Yes, this is a lovely music box… I think my niece will really like it.”

“Then your niece has good taste. Can I wrap it for you?”

“You know, I was also quite intrigued by your wall of trophies back there.” April kept her tone casual as she set the music box on the counter and nodded her head back to indicate the room behind her. “You’ve got a lot of pretty unusual animals.”

“They’re my pride and joy.” The man quickly warmed to his topic. “A lot of those specimens are illegal to ship in-country nowadays. But they’re perfectly legal if they were already in the U.S. when the moratorium went up. What caught your interest? Zebra? Baboon?”

“Oh, those were remarkable. But what kind of turtle was that? Is that one real ?” April allowed a note of skepticism into her voice.

“Real? Oh, it’s real alright. You should see the other side of it; there’s no faking that! That there is an honest-to-goodness turtle shell, albeit no kinda turtle I’ve ever seen.”

“Oh, so you don’t know where it’s from?”

“Originally? ‘Fraid not. I bought it off a guy in Pennsylvania. He said it changed hands a fair amount before him. Said he took it to some fancy reptile professor at the university. A herbetologist or somethin’.”

Herpetologist —April thought but did not say. No need to look too informed.

“Anyway, that professor said she hadn’t seen nothing like it. She made like it was some kind of biological mutant or something. Some kind of evolutionary dead end, maybe.”

April sighed inwardly. They got part of it right.

“So you don’t know how old it is?”

“Funny you should ask that… I—here let me go get it and I’ll show you.”

The man disappeared into the back, reemerging with Donnie’s shell held awkwardly over his belly, the weight of it clearly too much for him. The thump with which he set it—curve-down—on the counter would’ve set April’s teeth on edge except she was too busy trying to keep her composure after catching sight of its interior for the first time. Seeing her friend’s shell was one thing. But this view of his spinal column was more than she’d bargained for.

“See this?”

April, head spinning, gathered her attention to focus on a small square cut from the shell’s bottom lip.

“The Pennsylvania guy said he sent that off for carbon dating.”

“Oh?” This had April’s attention. “And what were the results?” 

“Well, carbon dating is a tricky business, apparently, but the tests came back anywhere between one hundred and three hundred years.” April struggled to maintain her poker-face, muffling her dismay behind a mask of mild curiosity.

“Anything under 500 years is hard to pinpoint, I guess,” the man explained. “It’s old, but not dinosaur old, you know? I guess that’s why the professor lady didn’t want it.” He guffawed, the sound grating on every one of April’s raw nerves.

“Interesting.”

“Yeah,” the proprietor agreed. “When he found out it wasn’t, you know, a fossil or something, the guy let his grandsons use it as a Halloween costume. Heh!” the man smiled and pointed out the odd scoring at the top of the carapace. “You can still see where they used duct tape to strap it to their backs.”

He must’ve caught the flash in April’s eyes because he continued hurriedly, “But don’t you worry! It’s in great shape; I made sure of that before I bought it. You can see here, those marks are almost gone. You can only even see them, really, if ya know where to look.”

April’s knuckles were white as she gripped the counter’s edge. Her ability to be civil to this man who treated Donatello’s shell like an odd carnival prop was waning fast. She breathed in. She knew it wasn’t his fault. He couldn’t know. But she was ready for this to be over. She was ready to take her friend’s shell and get the hell out.

“How much?”

The abrupt question raised the man’s eyebrows just a touch, but he, too, knew how to keep a poker face. “Oh, I couldn’t let it go for any less than $450.”

“Done.”

April could tell the man was kicking himself, not asking for more. But she was not in a mood to haggle, and he seemed satisfied enough as April dug into her wallet and peeled off four one hundred dollar bills and one fifty. She’d come prepared.

“You got any paperwork on this shell?”

“Ah, no. No, I’m afraid not. But I can certify it’s legal. Bought it right here in the U-S-of-A, and I’d be happy to write you up a testimony to that fact.”

“No, don’t bother. It’s fine.”

Flustered by his customer’s abrupt attitude after a previously friendly conversation, the man hesitantly offered to wrap or ship the shell, but April brushed him off.

“No, thank you. I’ve got it.” With an intake of breath and a mental apology to Donnie, she wrapped her arms around the bulk of the shell and hauled it off the counter, out the door, and into the blinding light of day. She left a mystified shop owner in the doorway and an old music box abandoned on the counter.

She caught a taxi home. No way am I taking this on the subway, she thought. It was awkward to get the shell in the taxi door, but the kind (if extremely confused) cabbie helped her maneuver it into the trunk. She winced as he gave it a shove to make it fit.

She held her temples in her splayed fingers all the way back to her apartment. April didn’t care what time of day it was; she promised herself a very large glass of wine as soon as she got in her door.

By that evening, Donnie and April had smuggled the shell back to the lair and into the lab. Donatello had walked it right past Splinter and Don’s brothers, worn shell-on-top-of-shell under one of the big oversized trench coats. To April’s consternation, more duct tape had been involved.

Now, it lay under the light of several lamps, convex-side up, on top of Donatello’s workbench. April was in the kitchen, making coffee and giving Donnie a moment to examine it on his own. The lab door was closed and carefully locked—an unusual circumstance since Don recognized the need to leave it open in case of the odd explosion, toxic chemical spill, or rampant robot problem. Anything was possible in the lab.

This, however… This was its own deal. And for now, Don didn’t feel ready for his brothers to burst in and discover this thing. It was sure to generate a whole host of questions—all of them asked in various degrees of aggravation and panic—that Donnie could not even begin to answer.

Well, maybe just begin. He did have the info that April had gathered at the curiosities shop. If this second shell had been around between one to three hundred years, which he still wanted to confirm with another round of radiocarbon dating, clearly time travel was involved. But he probably could’ve guessed that anyway, he noted wryly to himself.

Running his hands over the scutes, under the bright lamplight, Donnie noticed a few scrapes and cuts on the carapace that he was pretty sure did not mar his own shell. However, now that he thought of it, he couldn’t be certain since, prior to this, he hadn’t spent any time at all examining his own back. April could tell him, maybe.

As if summoned, her knock came at the door—their agreed-upon code of two loud and two soft taps that she would use to signal that she was alone. None of Don’s brothers had trailed her to the lab.

Don unlocked the door and gratefully took one of the mugs out of her hands. He re-locked it firmly behind her.

April raised her eyebrows at his caution. “I don’t know what you’re being so careful about, Donnie. Don’t you think it’s time to let your brothers in on this?” She gestured to the shell. “ This isn’t going to be a secret you can keep. It’s not a secret you should keep.”

Don nodded his reluctant agreement, sinking back into his lab chair with a sigh. “I know. You’re right. But I  won’t be able to give them answers. And they’re going to want answers. I’d just like a little more time to figure it out myself. Besides, you know how it will go.” Donnie turned pleading eyes up to meet April’s. “I’m going to be trying to do the tests I want, and they’re going to be breathing down my neck. They’re going to insist on hanging out in here, getting bored and getting on each other’s nerves. Getting on my nerves…The last time Mikey spent over 30 minutes in here, it took me almost an hour to clean the teriyaki sauce out of the centrifuge.” 

April smiled her acknowledgement and pulled up a folding chair to sit, knee-to-knee with Don.

“I’m not saying you’re wrong about that. But think about the alternative. Are you going to be keeping your lab locked? Because you better believe they’re going to notice that. And then do everything in their power to learn why . And where are you going to hide it while you’re out on patrol or in training—which, by the way, you’re not going to be able to get out of because what possible reason could you give?”

Don groaned and dropped his head into his hands.

April pursed her lips sympathetically and put a gentle hand on Don’s shoulder. “I know. I feel for you. But I guarantee this’ll all go faster if you’re upfront about it.”

April paused to gaze at the shell, the source of this whole muddle. Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully.

“What tests are you planning first? DNA?”

Donnie raised his head and swiveled his chair to the left a few degrees, putting his hand on the shell and drumming his fingers against its surface. “For starters! This thing is definitely me , but that should help determine if it’s a different-timeline-me or a whole-different-universe-me. Maybe an entirely different Donnie was doing some inter-dimensional sightseeing and got lost?” His voice had been hopeful, but it now dropped in tone. “Or, it could be a precise match for me -me, which wouldn’t be good…”

They both sat with that for a moment.

“Also,” Don continued, “we need confirmation of the carbon-14 test. You know how notoriously finicky they are. And an age-analysis would be nice!” Ever the scientist, Donnie’s voice quickened with the anticipation of data-gathering. “I think I can use some Utrom tech for a skeletochronology test on the vertebrae to get a fair read on how old this Donatello was when he died. I may even be able to find out how he died. A spectral analysis should—”

A loud knock interrupted Don’s flow, followed by the rattling handle that signaled a brother attempting to enter.

“Hey, Donnie?” Through the door, Mikey’s voice was confused. “What’s going on? Did you know this thing’s locked? You okay? What are you guys doing in there?”

April looked on, vaguely amused, as Mikey’s questions became more demanding and as Donnie hurriedly threw an old blanket over the shell.

“What’d’ya say, Don?” April asked. “It’s like ripping off a band-aid. Best to just get it over with quickly. But it’s your call.” April moved to the door; her hand rested on its handle.

Chapter Text

April poked her head out of the lab door. “Mikey!” she exclaimed, her smile falsely bright.

It only served to make Michelangelo suspicious. “April?” he asked, brows raised quizzically. “What’ve you guys got cooking in there? And why aren’t I in on it?”

“Look, could you grab your family and bring them back here? All of them Donnie has something he needs to talk to you about.”

Mikey was angling his head, trying to peer around April into the lab beyond.

“Mikey? It’s important.”

That last word got his attention. His eyes refocused on April with abrupt clarity. The last time Don had said something was important, Bishop’s genetic accelerant had ended up unleashing an outbreak of mutants, including, albeit somewhat later on, Donatello himself.

Mikey disappeared down the shadowed hall.

The word “important” seemed to have the same magical effect on Don’s whole family, who were, within minutes, ensconced in a tight half-circle around Donnie’s workbench.

Don had moved the shell to a side table, hidden under the blanket. He didn’t want it to draw notice until the right moment. He had some explaining to do first. Thank goodness April was here to lend support.

In retrospect, it was the tracker conversation that derailed all other rational discussion.

Donnie had shown the old, dead tracker alongside the new, improved one and explained the small hole in the top of his carapace. He valiantly tried to move forward to the vital bit, but a heated argument erupted over the revelation of the tracker (and the advisability of making more) between “inexcusable-invasion-of-privacy” Raphael and “completely-reasonable-security-measure” Leonardo. No one seemed to notice Mikey, now bored, as he aimlessly wandered around the lab a bit, waiting for this fight to blow over.

And so it was that he peeked under a blanket on a darkened side-table.

“ Donnie ?!” The distraught pitch of Mikey’s voice cut straight through the argument between his vociferous brothers. “What is this?”

All eyes moved to Mikey as he turned with Donnie’s found-shell in his hands. That alone was more than enough to frighten Don’s family, but as Mikey lifted it to show its unnervingly familiar green side to the whole group, he turned its interior toward himself and caught sight of its underside. Donnie saw what was happening and lurched toward Mikey, but it was too late.

Mikey wasn’t normally squeamish, but the unexpected, ghoulish line of vertebral bones and ribs so alarmed him that he let out a high-pitched yelp and flung the shell away, into the middle of the shocked half-circle of onlookers. It landed right in front of where Raph and Leo stood, their argument silenced, and its convex side hit the smooth concrete of the lab with a resounding crack. One of the scutes popped off, revealing pearl-white bone beneath.

The shell spun a few times, like a hollow, oversized top, before coming to a tottering rest.

Everyone was silent, staring at the shell, at the partial skeleton inside it, for the space of three heartbeats. And then they all began to talk at once—all in various levels of rising distress.

Amid the cacophony, Don stumbled forward to take possession of the shell and place it, concave side down , on the workbench.

Seeing this, April interrupted her own attempts to “explain down” the situation, and she reached forward to scoop up the dislodged keratin scute from the floor, placing it gently beside the shell. She gave Donnie’s hand a squeeze, drew one of the folding chairs up behind him, and pushed him firmly into it.

She did the same for Splinter with Don’s more comfortable lab rolling chair. The old rat seemed befuddled, but with this act of kindness, he was able to recover somewhat.

He folded his long paws over the top of his cane and rapped it loudly on the floor. “My sons !”

His authoritative voice silenced the panicked questions that Mikey and Leo had been lobbing non-stop at Donnie, but failed to silence Raph, whose steady, appalled chant of “fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,” previously just an indistinguishable part of the noise, was now the only audible sound in the room.

“Language, Raphael.” Splinter didn’t feel much like chiding his son in this instance, but felt it was important to maintain some kind of normalcy. Raph dutifully quieted. But his normally emerald skin had a wilted-lettuce look and his eyes remained fixed in horror on the shell.

Splinter took his opportunity. “Donatello. It seems the tracker is not the only thing you’d like to discuss with us. Please, continue.”

And so Donnie did. After taking a deep, steadying breath, he wearily walked his family through the double set of signals, the trip to Antiques & Oddities and what he’d found there, as well as April’s morning errand.

This time, the others listened wordlessly, until he got to the part about the carbon dating.

“But Don, how is that remotely possible?” Leo asked. “Can it mean there was some other mutant turtle from hundreds of years ago who happened to have a similar shell?” As one, they all turned their gazes from Leo back to Donnie.

Don shook his head miserably. “I wish I could say that was a possibility, but no. Shells are like fingerprints. And this one is definitely mine. Or some version of mine. Plus there’s… you know. The tracker’s in it.”

A low rumble from Raph’s direction was quickly evolving into a full-blown growl. Donnie tried to head it off.

“April and I were talking.” April nodded encouragingly. “We haven’t confirmed the carbon dating yet. Also, it could be a Donatello from a closely neighboring universe or a different timeline. Maybe this one got a little…misplaced. Like I did in that—in that other one.” Don didn’t want to linger on that. He pressed on. “We have numerous possibilities to investigate, but I need time to do it. That’s all I’m asking for here. More time. A few tests.” Donnie looked up at each of his loved ones in turn. “I don’t know if I can get all the answers. But I promise I'll try.”

The lab lay quiet for a moment as the whole family absorbed what Donnie was saying. Then, Splinter inclined his head slowly, his eyes sorrowful.

“Yes, my son. We must give you that time. And when you are finished running your tests, we will take this shell and we will give it— him —a proper funeral. This was somebody’s son. This was somebody’s brother. We will do for the father and brothers of this Donatello what they could not do for themselves. What they could not do for him.”

“Yes, Father.” In hushed voices, the four turtles spoke as one.  

It took a little longer for the conversation to settle out, to distill from the slurry of angst the simple and necessary next steps as well as a need for hot herbal tea.

No tests tonight. They were all beat. And scared. As the family trickled out one by one to reconvene in the kitchen for tea and rice pudding, each found a moment to touch Don—both out of a desire to reassure him, but also a need to be reassured by him. After the ice-water shock of seeing his shell without him in it, they needed to make sure of Donatello’s living, breathing warmth. His presence.

In a few minutes, only Mikey and Don were left. Mikey held the slim keratin scute in his hands, rubbing it lightly with one thumb. Don gently took it out of his brother’s hands and settled it next to the shell, covering both with a blanket. He knew it wasn’t logical, but he didn’t want the shell to be left alone and uncovered in the chilly lab. As he turned back around, Mikey folded himself in under Donnie’s arm, pressing his forehead into the smooth muscle of Don’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry I broke your shell,” he whispered.

“It’s okay, Mikey,” Don replied soothingly, wrapping his arms around his brother. “Tomorrow, I’ll superglue it.”

Mikey snorted a wet laugh. To his dismay, Don realized that Michelangelo was crying. Laughing, yes. But also crying.

“In the words of Raphael,” Mikey said, “fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”

“Yeah,” Donnie rubbed Mikey’s head, then rested his chin on it. He smiled sadly. “That sounds about right.”

The carbon testing would take some time. Donnie didn’t have anything like the equipment he’d need in his lab. However, April still had some valuable connections in that world, so finding a testing lab to fit it in wasn’t hard. Don took the sample from the interior of one of the vertebrae, a section with less likelihood of contamination, and packed it in a small, sturdy ziploc bag for April to send off.

His brothers hadn’t loved the sound of the bonesaw, or the part where he crushed a portion of a scute with a mortar and pestle for DNA analysis. But if they were going to stick to him this close, giving him barely enough room to move around his lab, then so be it. They’d have to put up with bonesaws, crushed scutes, and whatever other medical tests he chose to submit the shell, or himself, to as he pieced out this puzzle.

Eventually, he convinced them that they could move to other parts of the lair. Their hovering wasn’t helping, and he promised he’d call them as soon as he had news.

But when the first news came in the form of the DNA results, he was admittedly reluctant. He and the shell were, unsurprisingly for anyone who’d gotten a good look at it, a perfect match.

Splinter was meditating and April was getting some much-needed sleep at home, so it was just the four turtles gathered in the lab when Donnie broke the news.

“So what’s that mean?” Raph stood with his arms folded over his chest. “What does that mean for us? For it ?” He jerked his head to indicate the shell.

“It means it’s not ‘another universe’ Donnie. This universe. But still maybe a different timeline?”

“If so, a timeline in which you also placed an untested Utrom tracker in your shell, presumably without telling us?” Leo clarified.

Donnie didn’t try to argue that only the battery was untested Utrom technology while the tracker was all his own work. “Mm-hm,” he murmured a neutral affirmation instead.

“Or,” Raph, never one to prevaricate, said what everyone was thinking. “This is you .” He stabbed a finger at the shell, covered with a blanket in its place on the workbench. “ You end up dead some-hundred years ago and this is what’s left of ya.”

It was a relief for someone else to say it. To stop for a minute guarding his reactions in an attempt to keep everyone else from worrying. And Donnie knew that, although Raph’s words were spoken in a cold fury, it was fear that underlaid them, and love at the root of that.

So, Donnie sighed and nodded his head. He leaned against his workbench. “Yeah. At this point, that’s the most likely scenario.”

Unconsciously, each of Don’s brothers, already close, drew a little nearer to him.

“Well, that settles it.” Raph’s hands were on his sai as if an enemy could pop out of the lab’s shadows at any moment. “You ain’t gonna so much as take a piss without us at your back for the next fifty years or so. That shell-o-yers—the one holdin’ ya together, right now?—is stayin’ right here. With us .”

Donnie shook his head softly, looking from one brother to another. “Guys, this is crazy…” He faltered as he saw a steely resolve and unusual agreement in their stern faces. Even Mikey, who Don could usually rely on for a little empathy, stood quiet and unmoved.

“Look,” Don tried a new tack. “Think about it. The only reason we found this shell is because of the tracker. It doesn’t mean that yours aren’t out there somewhere, too. It doesn’t mean that whatever happens to me doesn’t also happen to all of you. I—” Donnie stared down at his hands, his fingers curled in on themselves. “I can’t risk that.”

Leo spoke with the certainty of granite. “Whatever is risked, Donnie, we risk it together.”

Mikey looked pensive. “Does this mean we all move into Donnie’s room? We’ll need bunk beds. I call tops!”

The anxiety in Donatello’s eyes solidified into dread as he contemplated an entire life stretching before him without any semblance of privacy.

Mouth open to argue, Don was interrupted by a pulsing green swirl of light, an all-too-familiar, marrow-chilling hum, and the slam of high air pressure as if they were suddenly in a train tunnel.

Out of thin, albeit glowing, air, Renet stepped toward them, time scepter raised dramatically in one hand.

Chapter Text

The shimmering light dissipated behind Renet and Donnie’s ears popped as the pressure equalized. And for some reason (that he’d really have to look into one of these days), time travel always smelled like burnt marshmallows.

Before Renet could utter a word, before any of them could breathe a greeting, Raph was at her side, twisting her hand holding the scepter behind her back while he held one glittering sai poised at her carotid artery.

“Just the person I was hoping to see today,” Raph growled, his voice broken glass in their ears. “We got a message for ya. Stay the fuck away.”

“Raph,” Leo’s voice was gentle but urgent.

Raphael ignored him. “We’ve had enough of you and your fancy stick,” he continued. “So you can twirl it around and go back to whatever-the-fuck level of Null Time ya slunk outta. Or, you can shove it up yer ass, for all I care. But ya ain’t welcome here.”

Renet was frozen, her blue eyes locked on Raph, her lips pursed in confusion, but, strangely, not fear.

Donnie moved forward slowly until he stood right in front of the Timestress and his brother. Then, he gently took each of Raph’s hands in his own—pulling away first the one that threatened Renet’s throat, then the one that was pinning back her arm. “Hey,” Don murmured to his brother softly, “Hey, hey, hey . It’s okay. No one’s going anywhere. We’re okay. We can just talk to her, Raph. We don’t need weapons right now.”

Raphael, still visibly seething, allowed Donnie to maneuver him away from their unexpected visitor. Raph kept his sai at the ready and his eyes locked on Renet, needing to be sure that she, and everyone else in the lab, had fully and sufficiently heard him. She could prattle on about wooly mammoths or 20’s gin joints for all he cared.  But either way, at the end of this conversation, she was either taking herself back through her fancy portal or landing outside the lair on her keester; either exit was fine with him.

With Raph at a mostly-safe distance from Renet, tension in the room eased a few degrees. Mikey breathed a sigh, then gave Renet a wave and a pallid, apologetic smile. “Sorry ‘bout that, Renet! It’s sorta been a stressful couple of days.”

Through the entire ordeal, Renet seemed inexplicably calm, if rather confused. And that wasn’t the only unusual thing. Now that they had a chance to look at her, she seemed different. Really different. For one thing, she was wearing more clothes than usual. Not that the turtles were judgy about that, not being big clothes-wearers themselves, but she was wearing some kind of silvery tight-fitting pants and a blue tunic with silver piping. A blue turban-like headdress wrapped her hair, and over her head a circle of green time-energy fizzed and popped.

She looks confident, Donnie thought.

She looks hot, thought Mikey.

She looks old, thought Leo—like, at least 25.

Raphael was still mastering his continued impulse to sock her and was not, at this moment, terribly interested in how she looked.

“Oh, I so totally understand.” Renet’s voice, when it came, had mellowed from a school-girl chirp into a woman’s cadence, although it kept that sing-song valleygirl quality. (It was strange, hearing that lingo coming from the mouth of a full-grown woman, and a clearly powerful one at that, but Renet had once explained that it was the dialect of the 79th Level of Null Time and that it wasn’t actually even English. It was just a quirk of the way that the embedded universal translators expressed things. Apparently, 90s Valleyspeak had actually developed after a period of occupation of Time Masters in Southern California to set things right after what Renet called the “catastrophic Lisa Kudrow debacle.” The turtles hadn’t asked. Well, Mikey had, but he didn’t understand the answer.)

Renet continued, “I’m really sorry to surprise you like this. It’s been, like, soooo long!”

“Longer for you, it looks like, Renet?” Leo hoped he wasn’t being rude by calling attention to her age. April had tried giving them some guidance on that at some point, hadn’t she?

Renet’s smile, though, was warm. “Fer shur! On the 79th Level of Null Time, I’m known as Lord Renet now.”

“Whoa!” Mikey’s eyes were wide.

“But, unfortunately, we don’t have time to—” Renet squeezed her eyes shut and twisted her head to the side, seeming to lose her train of thought for a moment. “Ugh, sorry. It’s so weird but I’m having a concurrent experience right now. Seriously, this is, like, no fun!” Don’s brothers automatically turned to him for translation, but Donnie just shrugged. He had no idea what Renet was talking about. Concurrent experience ?

Through force of will, Renet brought her attention back to her small audience. “Turtles, I must again ask for your assistance. The fabric of time itself is being threatened by a group of totally gross extremists.” Renet spread her arms in supplication. Despite her word-choice, the turtles heard the gravity in her voice. She was talking fast. “They’re using unauthorized time-breeching tech to reach into Earth’s past to find weak points in the time stream and tear them apart. We need your help to defend one of those points.”

“Shell, no!” Raph, who’d been pacing just behind Don, erupted in anger. “You should get your hearing checked, lady. We’re done with ya; we’re done with time-hopping. No more dinos. No more castles. No feudal Japan. Finished!”

Don looked anxiously back and forth between his brother and Renet— Lord Renet, he reminded himself. “Raph, don’t you think we should at least—”

“No! No, Donnie, I do not think we should ‘ at least ’ anything! And do you know why ?” Raph stalked to the workbench and ripped the blanket off the shell that lay there.

“What’s that look like to you, huh?” he asked the confused Timestress. “No? Well, I’ll tell you. It’s him . It looks like him.” Raph thrust a pointed finger at Don. “So if you think any of us are going anywhere with you—”

“He’s right.” This time it was Leo’s steady, firm agreement that interrupted Raphael. “We’ve done our part, Renet. We helped you last time. And the time before that. But at some point, you and the other Timelords—”

“Lords of Time. Not Doctor Who ,” Donnie whispered to Leo.

“Lords of Time. Whatever. You’ve got to shoulder this responsibility yourselves. I won’t jeopardize my family again.” Leo’s voice was sure, but his eyes flicked nervously toward the shell.

Renet heard Leonardo out without interruption, her brows furrowed. In the silence that followed, she stepped to the workbench and took a close look at the shell that lay there, running her hand over its whorls and scars.

Raph started forward, a barely-audible vibration emanating from his chest, but Donnie pressed a hand on his shoulder, signaling him to let Renet examine the shell.

Finally, Renet came upon the tracker, which Don had removed from the shell and set on the workbench at its head, still glowing blue. Renet took it carefully in her fingers and nodded. “Ohmygawd, that’s why I’m experiencing a concurrent temporal event right now! This is gonna give me, like, such a headache!”

Donnie tried to decipher her meaning. “You’re remembering a second time stream right now?”

“Not exactly.” Renet kneaded the palm of her hand into her forehead. “It’s not a memory because it’s happening at the same time. And it’s just this timestream, but it’s been bifurcated. So, while I’m here with all four of you, I’m also on the other side of it where it’s just me and Donnie in this lab. You know, concurrently.”

Renet shook her head and tried to refocus on the turtles in front of her. “My guess is that when the Donatello on the other side of this timestream travels into the past with me, he’ll leave his shell there with this tracker. And then when you discovered the tracker all these years later, you altered history so that instead of arriving to find Donnie alone, now I find you all together.

“He’ll leave his shell there?” Raph fumed. “It’s not like he misplaced his fucking wrench, Renet!”

“Yeah... Sorry? I don’t know what happened or anything; I’m experiencing this time event right along with you; it’s just that there’s two of them now.”

Renet shook her head. She looked up, her eyes sorrowful, but decisive. “Either way, I’m telling you the same thing I’m telling him. I can’t promise you that this isn’t a direct result of what awaits you.” She gestured at the shell, and a glimmer of young Renet, their Renet, arose in her voice, “But I, like, need you. If you come with me, you risk your lives, but if you don’t… you risk your entire timeline . Your very existence. And the existence of everything you’ve ever known.” She looked in alarm at the time scepter in her hands as its light danced enigmatically. “I wish I could explain everything right now, but our window of opportunity is closing. We’re out of time. I won’t take you by force. You have to decide. Now.”

“Whaddya mean we don’t have time?” Raph rolled his eyes. “Ya’ve got a frickin’ time scepter Seems to me like time’s the only thing ya got plenty of.”

Renet regarded him, not seeming to take offense, and spoke clearly and quickly. “We may perceive time as linear, but in fact that’s because our experience of it is limited. It has currents and channels and the time scepter helps us navigate those. But it can’t create a channel where there’s none. If we, like, miss our chance? We’ll have to wait for the next one. And because of the imminent threat to this timestream, that’s totally something this universe can’t afford.” Seeing something in the pattern of the scepter that no one else could discern, Renet gave it a sharp twist of her wrist. A green whirlpool of temporal energy blossomed in front of them. “What do you say turtles? Will you come with me? It’s now or never!”

Chapter Text

From the coolness of the sewers, the brothers stepped through Renet’s time portal into a humid summer night. Renet herself quickly followed, closing the portal with a swipe of the time scepter. In its light, her face showed immense relief that the turtles had joined her after all.

“Hey, nice landing, Renet!” Mikey gazed around appreciatively.

“Yeah,” Raph bit back a curse and waved away a humming mosquito. “If by that you mean not ten feet above the ground like all the last times, sure.” Raphael was there, but he wasn’t happy about it. What was he going to do, let his three brothers vanish through that portal without him? But he wasn’t letting go of his ire or his grip on his sai. “Where the shell are we?”

“And when?” Leo added, willing his eyes to adjust as he scanned the shadows.

Above them, a deciduous forest of beech, oak, and American elm towered, their branches and leaves black against a magnificently star-studded sky. The air smelled of loam with just a hint of woodsmoke. Lightning bugs blinked brightly around them, and crickets thrummed from the bushes.

“Whoa,” Mikey whispered.

In the soft glow of Renet’s time scepter, Donnie’s eyes were alight. “Mid-Atlantic, late 1600s?”

Renet raised a playful eyebrow at him. For a moment, another flash of the teenage apprentice timestress-Renet broke through the veneer of the more capable-and-serious Lord of Time. “You’re warm!”

“No, no… mid 1700s”

“You wanna clue us in, brainiac?” Raph asked. “One creepy, dark forest looks like the next creepy, dark forest to me.”

Don shrugged sheepishly and reverently placed his hand on a nearby tree. “Plenty of American chestnuts, unblighted. No light pollution—look at that Milky Way! This is a stewarded forest—there have been Native controlled burns here, but not for a little while; the underbrush is beginning to take over…” Donnie glanced to Renet. “How far off am I?”

“You got it. Province of Maryland, 1758.”

Donnie gave a soft, satisfied sigh and went back to gazing at the stars through the branches of the chestnut tree.

“So, we on a sightseein’ tour or what?” Raph folded his arms over his chest impatiently.

“Raph’s right, Renet.” Leo stated. “We’re here. Let's do whatever it is you need us to do and get back home.” His eyes darted to Donnie.

Upon arrival, Donatello’s three brothers, without a word, had moved around him, creating a loose, defensive triangle. They may have left that empty shell behind them in the lair, but it was still very much on their minds.

Renet gave a quick nod and gestured through the forest with the scepter. “This way. I’ll fill you in as we walk. It’s not far. I brought us a little out of the way to avoid, like, unwanted attention.”

With only the pale green glow from Renet’s time scepter to guide them, the turtles followed her closely through the trees. By relying on their enhanced mutant eyesight and ninja skills, they smoothly navigated tangled roots, low-hanging branches, and marshy patches. Renet moved swiftly, with a determination that impressed itself on the brothers who had only previously known her as a flighty, impulsive teen. This Renet was a little intimidating.

“Renet, you told us the timestream was being threatened by extremists,” Leo began. “Who are they? What kind of extremists do you mean?”

“How well do you remember the Utrom Tribunal’s sentencing of the war criminal Ch'rell?”

“How well do we remember?” Raph slashed irritably at a low branch. “We were there. We almost had our shells handed to us first, and that ain’t something we’re likely to forget.”

“Then you’ll know that most of the Utrom collective was way relieved to see Ch’rell banished to an ice asteroid.”

“Most?” Donnie’s attention caught on the word.

“Most.” Renet nodded solemnly. “A distinct faction of the Utrom actually sympathized with Ch’rell’s ideas. Perceived Utrom superiority over other life forms, the belief that the Utrom should therefore dominate the galaxy, blah, blah, blah—these are concepts that didn’t gain much traction while their home planet was stable. But societal changes fractured Utrom society about two of your Earth-decades after the trial. Now a certain faction—they call themselves the K.R.A.N.G., conceived of Ch’rell as some kind of hyper-rad hero, a martyr. Can you believe that? A martyr. Ew, gag me! They believe that if Ch’rell had been successful in aims during his centuries on Earth, the Utrom—specifically Ch’rell’s version of the Utrom—would rule vast portions of the universe.” Renet paused, her face betraying a deep anxiety. “Unfortunately, they’re not, like…wrong.”

“Krang, huh?” Mikey tried the word out. “Sounds like a metal band.”

Renet smiled sadly. “If only they were. It’s an acronym. Kr’Utromishnettt Revishlueeag Aaaa Neohᴴth Grah.” 

The turtles blinked.

“Oops, sorry. I forget you don’t understand Intergalactic Standard yet. Kr’Utromishnetag Revishlueeag Aaaa Neohᴴth Grahag essentially means ‘Utrom tentacles supplant all foes.’ It’s way catchier in the original dialect—internal rhyme scheme.”

As she spoke, the forest gave way to a wide clearing, a field with neat rows of a tall species of plant with wide, dark-green leaves. Beyond the field, framed by the black forest behind it, a small split-log cabin sat with a lantern glowing from an unshuttered window.

Donnie took a careful few steps forward to reach the nearest plant, taking one long, shiny leaf in his fingers and examining it closely in the moonlight.

“Tobacco? You’ve brought us to a tobacco farm?”

“Dude. Smoking kills.” Mikey folded his arms and glared disapprovingly at the plant.

“Renet, why are we here?” A pained look flashed across Leo’s face as he gestured to the peaceful field in the moonlight. “What does all of this have to do with the Utrom?”

“The K.R.A.N.G. of that future decade managed to steal temporal fuel crystals from the 79th Level of Null Time.” Renet rolled her eyes and sighed. “You know, secret mission, honey trap…long story. It’s a bit embarrassing, frankly. Anyway, those crystals, in combination with a repurposed Triceraton transmat, gave them time-travel capabilities. They only have three fuel crystals, but that gives them three opportunities—three chances to exploit weaknesses in the timestream—points where one event or the life of one person makes the difference between Ch’rell’s defeat and intergalactic devastation. This—well, specifically he —is one of those points.” Renet pointed meaningfully at the cabin.

With the light of the time scepter diminished, the turtles’ eyes had adjusted to the softer, silver moonlight. And on the roof of the distant cabin, they could just make out a small figure—the white of a shirt, the angled bend of a knee. There was someone on the roof, head back, gazing at the splendor of the night sky.

“All of history relies on a farmer on a roof?” Raph’s voice was skeptical.

“I think you all know just how vital one person can be in the scheme of things,” Renet replied mildly.

Donnie uncomfortably felt the flicker of his brothers’ attention on him as they all remembered that desolate, alternate future.

Renet continued, “He’s just a young farmer for now, but in a few years, he’ll be seriously important. He’ll develop efficient agricultural techniques that revolutionize farming in this area. Crop rotation, improved soil conditions, better yields with less land. At first, they’re applied to tobacco, but when the same strategies are used for wheat and corn, it feeds people. It feeds Washington’s troops at Valley Forge. If that farmer dies now, the Continental Army starves. When the army starves, the French remain neutral, battles are forfeit, the American Revolution is lost. Democracy—even this mondo messed-up version of it—is set back by almost a century.”

“What does that have to do with the heavy-metal Utrom dudes?” Mikey asked.

“Ch’rell and the Utrom may be located mostly in Japan for now, but their influence, even in the 18th century, is worldwide. Mortu’s Guardians versus Ch’rell’s Foot, Democracy versus Totalitarianism… This planet is already a stage for all of it.”

The weight of Renet’s words sank in, but she didn’t give them time to process it. “From right now, the next three days are a temporal anomaly. It’s a convergence of many time channels, and the most likely time and place for the K.R.A.N.G. assassins to hit since they have to conserve their crystals. Whatever they attempt, it’ll be soon! And if the K.R.A.N.G. are successful, if this farmer dies, history shifts. The colonies stay in British hands, causing a cascade of changes by which Ch’rell is able to defeat the Utrom Guardians. By the 1930s, totalitarianism wins. And by the 1950s, Ch’rell subjugates the whole human race. From there, extracting the resources of this planet and laying waste to the rest of this galaxy are all in a decade or two of work.” Renet took stock of the horrified faces. “Sorry, I know it’s a total bummer. But you’re here now!”

Renet brushed off her hands as if finishing a round of dusting and took up her scepter. “Gosh! That was a lot of explaining. Okay, turtles. I’ll leave you to it. See you guys in three or four days.”

Their looks of confusion transformed into panic. They all four spoke at once, questions overlapping simultaneously:

“Three or four days ?”

 “Yer just leaving us here!?”

“Wait, what now?” 

“How are we supposed to do this?”

Taken aback, Renet raised her hands to quell their voices. “Hold on, now, I have two more time-attacks to prevent, and my windows of opportunity are very narrow. I will need to be, like, manipulating the channels of space and time to prevent intergalactic chaos. All you need to do is keep that one guy over there breathing until I get back.”

Renet stepped back into the trees and made some incomprehensible adjustments to the scepter. Before using it to wave a portal into existence, she looked back at the four dismayed turtles. “Oh, and remember—the K.R.A.N.G. from your future aren’t the same as 21st century Foot. When they come, they’ll be fantastically dangerous. And I don’t mean that in a good way, Mikey.” Renet lifted a warning finger. “If you find you’re outmatched, remember your job is simply to keep them from killing Banneker. Seriously, if that’s how it goes down, just find a place to hide and wait for me.”

With that, Renet twirled the scepter and was engulfed in a viridescent disc of temporal energy. A moment later, she’d vanished.

“Outmatched?” Raph grumbled to himself. “When she gets back here, I’ll show her outmatched!”

But Leo noticed Donnie’s sharp intake of breath and watched his genius brother as his eyes, wide with excitement under his purple mask, were drawn back to fasten on the cabin and the small figure on its roof. “Banneker? Guys, she said Banneker !”

“Yeah?” Mikey asked.

“So?” Raph added.

“ Benjamin Banneker! Oh, this is going to be fun. Well,” Don raised his brow ridges impishly, “fun for me anyway.”

Raph groaned. He rested both hands atop his head, gazing helplessly at the vast expanse of 18th century dirt at their feet. In the back of his mind itched the existence of a shell that was, by no fluke, two or three hundred years old. “Donnie, what’s fun for you ain’t always that much fun for the rest of us.”

That night, the turtles staked out the cabin, watching to get a sense of who this Banneker was—this farmer upon whose shoulders, apparently, the fate of the galaxy rested.

As they crept closer, using the outskirts of the forest as cover, Donnie regaled his brothers with a flurry of excited whispers—all about clocks and eclipses and, strangely, cicadas. Leo couldn’t keep it all straight.

They circled behind the cabin where a fence staked out a vegetable garden patch and numerous conical straw bee hives. Raph took particular care as they edged around the hives, and he let his fingers run over the cylindrical epipen he kept in a special holder that Donnie had crafted and attached to his belt. Raph had more than one reason to dislike insects and creepy-crawlies. His bee allergy had been a frightening discovery on a trip to Northampton. It was bad enough then, and he certainly wasn't excited to find out how anaphylaxis was treated in the 1700s.

Eventually, drawing very near to the cabin, Leo signaled for quiet. The four turtles silently watched as the object of their attention stretched his arms, gave a last, appreciative look at the brilliant arc of the Milky Way, and clambered down the ladder leaning against the roof.

For the first time, in the light of the moon and stars, they got a closer look at him.

He was a young Black man, somewhere around April’s age, with a round, good-natured face. Though not tall, Banneker had the powerful build of someone who spent his days hoisting bales of tobacco. 

No voices emerged from the cabin when he entered. Was he alone? Or maybe his family was asleep.

Leo marveled to himself. The farm was orderly and well maintained. What kind of man could steward an 18th century farm with this kind of care during the day and still find the energy to stargaze at night?

With another hand signal, the four turtles melted back into the forest’s shadows. They’d spend the night here, out of sight and a healthy distance away from the bees, but able to monitor the farm easily enough in case the K.R.A.N.G. arrived early.

Luckily, it was a warm night in the summer. Renet had plucked the turtles out of their home without any gear or prep. All they had were the weapons strapped to backs and belts.

 In those last moments of indecision, there hadn’t even been enough time to scrawl a hasty note to Splinter. Leo shifted uncomfortably at the thought as he tried to make a place to rest for himself on the spongy ground. Hopefully, when this was done and Renet took them home, they’d arrive at the same point in time when they’d left. He didn’t want their father to worry if he found himself alone in an empty lair with four missing sons and one vacant shell.

Leo sighed. Sleep would not come easy that night.

Chapter Text

Mikey sat on look-out duty early the next morning as the pink glow of sunrise warmed the eastern horizon above the treeline. He perched on a branch about fifteen feet above his sleeping brothers, entertaining himself by inventing increasingly unusual pizza recipes and deciding which ingredients to bestow on which of his favorite comic book characters. He was just getting around to assigning each of the Robins their own toppings (Dick Grayson—boba and bacon, Jason Todd—pickles and walnuts, Tim Drake…) when the cabin’s door opened.

Banneker stepped out in a rough-woven linen shirt tucked haphazardly into worn canvas britches. He seemed to be lacing up his boots, taking a long and thoughtful look at the pale sky before heading to the barn, a simple but neatly-ordered affair just to the northeast of the cabin.

Mikey didn’t think much of it when Banneker emerged a few minutes later with a pitchfork in his hand and, whistling an aimless tune, casually began making his way to the vegetable garden out back. It was uncomfortably close to the patch of forest where the turtles rested, but the man was just about to do some extravagantly boring gardening, Mikey assumed.

Until he caught a flick of Banneker’s eyes.

Shell!

Mikey had jumped down from his perch with barely enough time to awaken his brothers before Banneker charged into the forest, straight into their makeshift camp, eyes alight with anger and the pitchfork brandished menacingly.

Banneker’s wild “Yhaaaaa!” of aggression abruptly ended in a yelp of utter shock as he saw before him, not the ragtag band of mule thieves he’d clearly been expecting, but rather four large, anthropomorphic turtles bearing fearsome-looking weapons.

As Banneker fell backward over the log he’d just leapt across, Mikey expertly nabbed the pitchfork out of the startled human’s hands with his nunchaku.

Eyes wide with fear, the young man crab-crawled backward for a moment, unable to regain his feet, his breath coming in short, hollow gasps. “ Demons !” he accused, then desperately started chanting the Lord’s Prayer in a cracked, fearful whisper: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed…”

Donatello took a step forward and laid his bo carefully in the leaf litter next to him. Then he sank to his knees, empty hands open to show he meant no harm.

“Hey, hey, it’s okay.” Don’s voice, always the softest of the four, was now at its most gentle. “It’s okay, Mr. Banneker. We’re not here to hurt you, I promise. I know we look odd—”

“Speak for yourself,” Raph mumbled.

“—But we’re not going to hurt you. Guys …” Donnie aimed this last hissed word at his brothers, signaling with a sharp jerk of his head that they should lay down their arms. Leo nodded and, somewhat reluctantly, Donatello’s brothers slowly complied.

“See?” Don’s attention was back on Banneker, whose back was pressed against a tree trunk, words of prayer still falling from his lips in a whispered torrent.

But the blade-sharp edge of fear in his eyes seemed to be easing, giving way, even, to something like confusion and—could it be?—curiosity.

Donnie risked an apologetic smile. “Sorry, Mr. Banneker. We really, really didn’t mean to scare you like that.”

“By sleeping soundly when you attacked us with a pitchfork.” Mikey interrupted Raph’s grumble with an elbow-jab to the plastron.

“You see, we’re actually here to help you,” Donnie persevered. “We are supposed to be looking out for you a bit, and, well, we thought we could do that from out here . We’re really sorry to be trespassing like this.”

Banneker’s prayer had slowly quieted. Clearly, adrenaline still had him in its hold, but his breathing steadied. The young man’s eyes were fixed in astonishment on Donatello’s face.

“You’re… you’re turtles.”

“You got it!” Mikey chimed in brightly before Raph could say something sarcastic.

“We are turtles.” Donnie nodded agreeably. “But we have some human DNA, too. Genetic material—” he amended, remembering that he was in 1758. At Banneker’s blank look, he kept trying. “Heredity? Parentage?”

“Parentage?” Raph looked vaguely disgusted.

Man, Don thought. This whole 18th century thing might be harder than I thought.

Luckily, Mikey was there to help cut to the chase. “Yeah, see? We got, like, teeth and stuff!” He gave Banneker a wide, toothsome grin that he probably intended to be charming but came out as rather disturbing.

“Alright, put them away, Mikey. Poor guy is gonna think you’re a cannibal or something.” Raph gently cuffed the back of Michelangelo’s head. “No need to give ‘im nightmares.”

Banneker’s eyes flashed from brother to brother, taking in every detail.

“The point is,” Donnie reiterated, “we’re not monsters. We’re not going to hurt you.”

“How?...How, how do you… exist ?”

“Well, it’s a long story. One that I hope I’ll get the chance to tell you sometime. But for now, as a fellow scientist—” Don frowned at the modern word and tried again. “Naturalist?—as a fellow naturalist, I hope that you’ll let us prove to you that we can be trusted.” Don gently rose from his knees to his feet and oh-so-slowly reached out his three-fingered hand, offering it to the young man still sprawled in the dirt.

Something sparked in Banneker’s expression at the word naturalist —a kind of light, a kind of hunger , that Donnie’s three brothers recognized immediately. They’d seen it so often in Donatello when given a challenge or at the budding of an idea. And, immediately, something inside of all of them, some protective muscle, also relaxed. No longer was Banneker a stranger, a potential threat. He was simply a young man, practically a kid, seemingly alone, and with the stars of the galaxy still gleaming in his eyes from the night before. A kid, and one who wanted more than what a Maryland tobacco farm had to offer.

Donnie saw it, too. “Besides,” he grinned, “don’t you want the chance to figure us out?”

Banneker looked at Donnie’s proffered hand, green and three-fingered and wholly open to him, and he took it.

Banneker’s mind was working a mile a minute. The feel of the creature’s skin ( Could you call something a creature if it spoke to you? ) was leathery and supple, warmer than he’d somehow imagined. Its face, flatter than a person’s, nonetheless expressed emotion like a human’s.

Having hauled the young man to his feet, Donatello introduced himself. “I’m Donnie,” putting a hand to his plastron. “And these are my brothers: Mikey, Raph, and Leo.” He stuck to nicknames. Best keep it simple for now. Each turtle nodded as he was introduced.

Banneker followed suit. “Ben. Benjamin… Benjamin Banneker.”

Donnie’s face suddenly glowed and he reached for Banneker’s hand again, this time to shake it eagerly. “Mr. Banneker, it is an honor. Sincerely, an honor. I am so happy to meet you, I want—”

“Don,” Leo pointedly interrupted his starstruck brother, noting the bewilderment on Banneker’s face. They were not ready to have the time travel conversation yet, and Donnie was rapidly approaching the point of no return on that score.

Leo turned to the human. “How did you find us this morning?” His question was partly diversionary, partly a product of true curiosity. “How did you know exactly where we were?”

“The birds.” Banneker dipped his head toward the trees. “They weren’t singing this morning from this side of the house. That and my mule was jumpy. Thought he smelled something.”

“Yeah, well, that was probably Mikey.” Raph grinned and hitched a thumb at his orange-masked brother who looked back at him askance.

“Hey! I’m not the one that April had to pull aside for a ‘special hygiene’ conversation—”

“That was three years ago, shell-for-brains!”

The argument that followed had Banneker gazing with a profound combination of amazement and amusement at the two bickering turtles. “They always like this?”

Leo heaved a sigh.

“Usually,” Donnie replied.

Banneker shook his head, a smile playing around the corners of his mouth. “Reminds me of my sisters. Come on.” He started leading them toward the cabin. “If I’m going to be visited by impossible turtle-demons, the least I can do for my guests is feed you. Even if you are creations of my own fevered mind, my mother, God rest her soul, taught me to be polite.”

The split-log cabin was small but skillfully-built with a stone chimney standing on one side. Inside, daylight from two glassless windows at front and black, now unshuttered, lit a simple room furnished with a smoothly sanded table, a few stools, a narrow bed, and one rocking chair. A ladder led to a wide loft space under the eaves.

In the hearth, a few embers burned under a cast-iron tripod holding a large skillet. The smell of woodsmoke and bacon fat made the turtles’ mouths water. How long had it been since they’d eaten?

Michelangelo, true to his uninhibited nature, started rummaging through the various jars and bottles inquisitively, opening the spices to take long whiffs of each with gusto before replacing them on the shelf and helping himself to the next. Leo, embarrassed by his brother’s rude behavior, started forward to stop him, but Ben, bemused, waved him back discreetly. “I surely don’t mind,” he told Leo. “He seems to be enjoying himself.”

Next came a series of thick ceramic jars. “Buttermilk,” Mikey murmured, “molasses, cornmeal… beer!” His eyes lit up.

“Put it back, Mikey,” Leo admonished.

Mikey shrugged and did as he was told. The next jar was similar except for the holes punched into the clay lid, but its contents so startled Mikey that he almost dropped it. Only his quick ninja reflexes saved the vessel from disaster. A surge of water splashed out and onto his green skin.

“Whoaaaaaa.” Mikey’s eyes latched onto Banneker in pure admiration. “Bro. You eat these?”

“The leeches?” Ben shook his head vigorously. “No, no! They’re for medicinal use,” Banneker’s laugh was full and warm. “Usually I keep them down in the cellar,” the young man explained. “I just have them up here to remind me to refresh their water.”

Mikey gazed down into the darkness of the jar. He watched the four or five lanky shadows lazily, almost gracefully, curling and twisting in the clear water.

“They can last a long time as long as you keep their water fresh for ‘em.” Banneker stated. “I caught these myself.”

“That’s it !” Raph’s eyes blazed. “She threw us in the Dark Ages. We’re in the frickin’ Dark Ages! When I get my hand on Renet, I’ll—”

“Raph! Manners .” Leo hissed.

Mikey carefully returned the jar to its shelf, placing the lid on the top with a firm clink as if worried the leeches would crawl out.

“You know, Raph,” Donnie began, “leeches can actually perform several invaluable—” Donnie’s voice stopped abruptly as his eyes fell on a shelf across the room where a three-foot tall clock of dark wood rested. Its face was hand-painted with care, and its ornately-carved wooden hands pointed to the time—6:28. A pattern of stylized columbine in blues and greens climbed the door on the clock’s front below its face.

Donnie moved to stand in front of it, holding his breath, eyes wide as if it were some kind of advanced alien robot. His brothers looked at him in confusion, but Banneker’s face glowed with bashful pride.

“I see you’ve heard about my little project.” Banneker ducked his head and rubbed the back of his neck, once again reminding the turtles startlingly of Donnie upon revealing some new fantastical gizmo.

“First clock built on this continent? Yeah, I’ve heard about it.” Donnie looked back at its builder, face aglow. “May I?”

“Be my guest. It’s nice to have a connoisseur. Most folks who come to see it don’t really know what they’re looking at, but I can tell you have a sense of it.”

Donnie gently opened the small latch revealing an intricate interlocking sculpture made of cogs, wheels, and gears—all, impossibly, carved from the same dark wood as the mechanism’s casing.

The confused skepticism of Donnie’s brothers gave way to amazement as they watched the internal workings click rhythmically away, perfectly-carved wooden teeth moving against one another harmoniously. Unexpectedly, a lever fired as they watched, and a resonant brooong filled the room, marking the half-hour.

“Dude!” Mikey’s voice was hushed. “You made that?”

“Took me almost two years," Banneker replied. “And I had some help. A gentleman loaned me a pocket watch to look at beforehand. And the decorations, well that’s all the work of my sister Molly.”

“You did all this just by looking at a watch?” Leo was impressed.

“Well, I may have done more than look at it. Had to take it apart to see how everything fit.”

“Fan- freakin -tastic. Now we got two Donatellos.” Raph muttered to Leo, but the affectionate smirk on his face as he looked at the two inventors belied the annoyance in his words.

As Donnie continued to marvel at the clock’s innards, tracing the workings of each cog with his eyes, Banneker busied himself stoking the embers in the hearth, adding sticks and a good-sized log until a fire crackled merrily. Under Mikey’s curious gaze, he mixed cornmeal and a dollop of fat from one of the clay jars, adding a little buttermilk to make a thick batter.

“Whatcha making?” Mikey asked.

“Corn pone for breakfast.” Banneker looked at the turtle quizzically. “You never had corn pone before?” Mikey shook his head. “Well, it’s no jam and crumpets, or whatever fancy folk eat, but it’ll stick to your ribs. I just wish I had some of my sister Jemmy’s sausage gravy to go with it. Tastes like heaven with some of her gravy!”

“Mr. Banneker—” Leo ventured.

“Please, call me Ben. All the mythical figments of my imagination do.” His wry smile softened. “And my friends, too.”

“Ben.” Leo nodded. “Ben, where is your family? You mentioned your sisters, but I don’t see any sign of anyone living here except for you.”

Eyes on the browning corn pone, Ben’s face, otherwise-unlined, creased around the edges. “My parents are buried in the cemetery just up the Patapsco.  They left me the farm to care for. My ma left us just last year, and my sisters are all married. Jemmy lives just a few miles downriver; she comes by every so often with eggs and cheese. Makes sure I’m eating and sleeping and not messing with my star-charts too late.

Donnie’s brothers gave each other a knowing glance.

Ben continued, “Other two are in Baltimore. They all got their own families now.”

“And you’re here all by yourself?” Mikey imagined with a tremor of apprehension what it would be like if his own brothers moved away. “Aren’t you lonely ?”

Leave it to Mikey to ask the uncomfortable questions, Leo thought.

Ben’s sad answering smile told more of the truth than he’d probably intended, but he shrugged and gestured to the mantle over his bed where a small collection of volumes sat, bookended by lumps of purple-veined chert and black obsidian. “How could I be lonely when I’ve got my Aristotle and Newton to keep me company? Bible, too, of course. I see my family at church every Sunday. And in the meantime, I’ve got all this to see to.” Ben gestured to indicate the house, the garden, the fields, then slid the first steaming circle of corn pone onto a plate and poured in the remaining batter for a second one.

“You farm this whole place yourself?” Raph asked.

Ben looked up, his gaze suddenly sharp. “When the time comes to harvest, I hire hands to work with me. Pay them honestly. And I’d never ask men to do something that I wasn’t willing.”

“Yeah,” Raph was taken aback. “Sure, I only meant—”

Ben nodded, “I know, I know. It’s just that lotta the farms ‘round here do it differently. You see, my father was once a slave. And my mother’s father, too. But when they got their freedom, they made sure none of their children would ever be bonded. They worked their fingers to the bone to make this place what it is, and I aim to do the same to keep it.” Ben’s words were fierce, his eyes intent on the flames in the hearth, as if seeing something that none of the turtles could.

He let the crackle of the fire fill the room for a minute, then spoke again into the silence. “I was born free, like my sisters. But don’t think I can’t see what is happening around me. How it’s getting worse. Every year, I see it. More laws, more indignities, fewer people even questioning it! And what do I do?” Banneker’s voice ebbed. He seemed almost to be speaking to himself now, his eyes still on the fire. “I look at the stars. I raise my bees, I sell my tobacco. In other words, nothing .”

Don shot up to a stand, hands on the table, the stool toppling over behind him. “No, that’s not it. You do . You do take action, you do stand up!”

“Don,” Leo’s voice was clipped, but Donnie kept talking, heedless of his brother’s warning.

“You show these people. And what you show them undermines all of their racist shit. You show them how flawed their prejudices are, their made-up, self-serving ‘science,’ I promise you that you do. And they may not want to see it, they may pretend to themselves that they don’t. But I promise you that you will fight. Not with weapons, but with words!” Don’s voice, clear as a bell, suddenly stopped.

In the startled silence that followed, Ben’s eyes narrowed. He nodded softly, and slid the second round of corn pone from the pan, cutting the steaming discs into enough portions for each of them before he spoke.

“I’d like to say grace before we eat. And then, while we share our meal, perhaps you can explain how you know so much about me. And about everything I’m going to do.”

Chapter Text

To his credit, Ben did not interrupt through the entire explanation. He sat, his hands folded in front of him on the table, his fingers interlocking, and his eyes on his guests as the turtles shared the story.

Leo chose not to start with the found-shell. It was entirely too distressing and, as Leo worked the idea like a sore tooth, he somehow felt that by talking about it, they made whatever event that resulted in it somehow more likely. So Leo started by skipping straight to Renet’s arrival and the concept of time travel. That was plenty.

They left the details vague, which was easy since not even Donnie had a clear idea of how the time scepter actually worked.

“Two or three hundred years is nothing,” Mikey bragged. “You shoulda seen when we zapped back to the dinosaurs!”

Raph scoffed. “You got the pea-brain of a dino. Fit right in.”

Donnie couldn’t resist. “Well, Raph, actually a lot of dinosaurs were probably highly intelligent and socially complex.”

Mikey stuck his tongue out at his red-masked brother, “See Raph, just like me… socially complex.”

Raphael rolled his eyes.

“Dino… sores?” Ben was trying the word out, brows deeply furrowed in confusion.

Leo made a desperate attempt to get the conversation back on track. “So those other time travelers—the ones we mentioned before?—we think they’re going to try to attack you to disrupt our timestream…”

“And replace it with one a lot nastier,” Donnie finished.

Ben took a moment, absently running a finger over the edge of the table, his gaze elsewhere. “It’s hard to believe… Not the time travel part. I can see how that might be, what with the repercussions of Fibonacci’s third theorem—”

“Right?!” Donnie exclaimed in agreement.

“But the part about me,” Ben continued. “I’m just a farmer. I’m nobody, nobody special anyway. I don’t think a clock and a few bees are going to be saving the world, are they?”

Leo shifted uncomfortably. “We can’t tell you exactly what it is that you’ll be doing in the future. It would risk changing it.” He glanced pointedly at Don. “We can just say that it will be important. Profoundly important.”

“You’ll do lots of important things,” Donnie added. “Even if they don’t always feel like it at the time.”

Raph grunted and washed the last of his meal down with a swig of water from a tin cup. “Yeah. Believe me, we got some experience ‘long those lines.”

“Meanwhile,” added Mikey, “we may have some time to kill. That corn pone was pretty awesome. Whaddya know about making pizza ?”

By that afternoon, a plan was in place.

At all times, a turtle would be on watch for Utrom assassins (as well as unexpected human guests) in three-hour shifts. The roof would’ve been ideal for the view, but far too obvious if surprise visitors arrived. So, a quick survey of the forest produced a tall and sturdy American chestnut that became the watcher’s post—thick, comfortable branches and enough greenery to provide camouflage but not so much to obscure the line of sight toward the road and down toward the meandering river a quarter of a mile from the cabin.

Ben, in the meantime, anxious for his crop that was only two or three weeks away from the start of harvest, was convinced to call off the hired hands he’d usually relied on and accept help from the turtles.

The next day being Sunday, he could ride the mule to church and let them know without too much kerfuffle, that he’d found some spare help for the week. His sisters might pester him a little, but Ben could obfuscate with the best of them, he was certain.

As for the quality of the turtles’ labor, of that he was less sure. He looked at them skeptically. “You ever worked a farm before?”

The turtles’ expressions ranged from defensive to abashed.

“We’ve been on a farm before!” Mikey supplied helpfully. Ben raised a brow.

Leo stepped in. “We’ve never done farm work. But we’re strong and quick to learn.”

Ben gave them an appraising look and pursed his lips. “Alright. I’ll get each of you a hoe.” Leo sharply elbowed Mikey in the plastron as he inhaled to speak— “and you can show me your abilities,” Ben continued, oblivious.

The oppressive Maryland sun beat on the turtles’ heads and shells, the air itself seeming to sag under the weight of the humidity, as three of the turtles and one human made their way down the precise rows of tall, leafy tobacco plants. Bent slightly forward, they used the sharp metal blades of the hoes to slice away the weeds around the tobacco stalks just as Ben had shown them, cutting up the tangles of roots. Mikey glanced over his shoulder enviously, eyes picking out Leo, who had drawn first shift in the shaded watch-tree. He lowered his head and turned back to the row to half-heartedly slap at the tendrils of weeds winding around a tobacco stalk’s base.

Ben, moving inhumanly fast with the ease of long practice, was well out ahead of them.

“Ben’s great,” Mikey sighed. “I’m really happy we’re going to save him from the big, bad Nazi Utrom. But next time, let’s ask Renet if we can rescue a pineapple tree farmer or something? Somebody growing something we can at least eat?”

Raph huffed his agreement. “Preferably in the shade?” He swung the hoe so hard at a weed so hard that he almost took out a tobacco stalk.

“I hate to tell you this, guys, but pineapples don’t grow on trees,” Donnie frowned. “They’re ground bromeliads.” He’d thought they’d be better at this. But the going was slow, and Donnie was painfully discovering muscles in his back and shoulders that he hadn’t known before. Must be something in the unusual, stooped posture and movement, he marveled. So different from his bo.

He paused to wipe sweat from his brow. He was grateful they even had sweat—part of the quirks of mutation along with the whole bipedalism and brains thing—that in this case meant they weren’t cooking in their shells. But it was a near thing.

“ Blaugh !” Raph’s yell of revulsion recaptured their attention. “It’s one of those caterpillar things Ben told us about.”

Hearing Raph’s cry, Ben ambled back toward them with a look of concern that clarified into mild amusement as he saw the fat, four-inch, lime-green caterpillar Raph was pointing to, munching on a tobacco leaf. The others gathered around, a little in awe of the caterpillar’s girth, prominent green beak, and curved horn coming off its bottom end.

“You just gonna let that hornworm eat my crop?” Ben’s eyes sparkled with amusement at Raph’s obvious disgust.

“No! I’m— I’m getting to it. Gimme a minute.” Summoning all his willpower, Raph reached forward to clasp the hornworm between two fingers. It took a little tug to detach its many legs from the stem it had settled on. Once he’d peeled it off, Raph held it at arm’s length. Its skin felt soft and malleable, barely covering the squishy innards beneath. Raph fought to keep his stomach from rebelling and reached his arm back in order to throw the worm far, far away from himself.

“Uh-uh- uh !? You throwing that pest elsewhere into my tobacco?” Ben gave him a stern look.

Raph grimaced.

“You have to kill it, Raph,” Don broke the news sympathetically. “It’s going to hurt the crop.”

“Kill it?” Raph’s face, usually a mask of bravado, took on a distinct element of distress as he looked at the small wriggling creature between his fingers. Its stubby legs clawed the air for purchase. “How?”

“You could step on it?” Don glanced with concern at their bare feet.

“You could bite it?” Mikey suggested hesitantly.

Ben sighed and reached out to take the squirming caterpillar from Raph’s hands, then tossed it gently onto the dirt in front of them. “You’ve got a hoe,” he said, and with a practiced swing, he cut it in half.

Ben turned to head back up the row. The three ninja, schooled in violence from a young age and veterans of many battles against robots, aliens, and evil warlords, looked sadly at the two caterpillar halves resting in the dirt.

“Bros,” Mikey shook his head mournfully. “I don’t think we’re cut out for this farming thing.”

At day’s end, a long soak in the cool waters of the Patapsco River refreshed the sore and weary workers. Ben showed Donnie how to bait and lay crawdad traps in the shallows as Mikey and Raph splashed and tussled in the faster currents. The sounds of laughter floated up through the leaves arching above them. Dragonflies spun and swerved, gleaming iridescent blue among the horsetail grasses that grew from the silt at the river’s edge.

Afterward, Donnie, walking up to the chestnut to relieve Leo of his watch, took an appreciative breath. Not too bad, he thought. Even without computers, robotics, and the tech gear of the 21st century that he so loved, there was something to be said for this kind of science—the intriguing chemistry of rich, black soil and the curious curl of roots. He could get used to it.

The small church Ben attended on Sundays, five or six miles down the river and to the east of his cabin, lay along a dusty country road. It followed the path of the river, edged by forest, so it wasn’t hard for the turtles to keep to the varying shades of green tree-shadow while keeping Ben on his mule, Euclid, in easy view.

Ben had expressed skepticism that anyone would attack a man on his way to church, but the turtles had proven resolute in their determination to have ninja eyes on him at all times.

“Utrom assassins don’t observe the sabbath,” Donnie told him with an apologetic shrug.

There had been some debate about whether to risk the trip at all, but Ben asserted his certainty that if he didn’t show for the service, he’d have three concerned sisters and all their families at his cabin’s door by midafternoon. Better to show his face and pretend that things were normal, and then get back to the isolated, defensible farmstead as soon as possible.

The morning went without a hitch. Ben’s warm reception by friends and neighbors at the door showed how well-regarded he was in the community. The three women who enveloped him in embraces and who shared something of the Banneker look about the eyes could only have been his sisters, and a cadre of children, nieces and nephews, gathered noisily around him. Their voices raised in delight, they stripped his pockets of wax-wrapped molasses candies he had hidden therein—at least until the oldest of the sisters sternly ushered the whole contingent inside.

As the service progressed, the murmur of voices in prayer and then luxuriant waves of gospel emanated from the clapboard building. Although the experience of a Christian service was fairly new to the turtles, the experience of spiritual practice certainly was not, and Leo suggested that Mikey continue his watch as the others took the opportunity to meditate. Leo, Raph, and Donnie let the voices of the congregation and the summer-morning birdsong wash over them, helping to relax their bodies and deepen their breath.

For Donatello, it was the first time he’d fully let go of his tension since his grim discovery at Antiques and Oddities . Despite the threat of Utrom time-terrorists, despite the knowledge that his own empty shell lay under a blanket in his lab more than two centuries from now, he felt strangely safe here. Surrounded by the bolstering presence of his brothers, in the company of a new friend who inspired his affection and admiration, it was hard for Don to imagine that the whole universe was at risk.

When the service ended and Mikey signaled to them to emerge from their meditative state, the three brothers found themselves refreshed and focused.

It was, perhaps, this renewed focus and attentiveness that caused Donnie to notice the detail of something missing from Raph’s belt as they returned to the farm early that afternoon.

“Raph? Where’s your epipen?”

Raphael’s fingers automatically jerked to its holder at his side, finding only an empty slot where the small device usually fit. Eyes wide in surprise, his thoughts anxiously flitted over the past hours, the forest, the church… the water. He and Mikey had been so excited for a cold water plunge after the long, hot afternoon in the fields yesterday that they’d raced to the river and jumped straight in without taking off their gear. He imagined his epipen, the yellow plastic tube with that invaluable, currently irreplaceable, epinephrine drifting off and away in the river’s swift current. That had to be it.

Donnie felt his own heartbeat quicken at Raph’s stricken look. Without his epipen, any bee or wasp sting was now a potentially deadly danger to his brother.  All the more reason to do their job here and get Renet to take them back to their own time, with all the blessings of modern antibiotics, vaccines, and antihistamines, as soon as possible. Every day in this place, Don reminded himself sternly, was a risk.

Donnie cursed softly and massaged his forehead, desperately trying to remember any treatments he could use for anaphylaxis, just in case.

Ben, who had been in the tobacco barn, un-harnessing and feeding Euclid, emerged with a wide straw hat on his head, tight-woven netting hanging from it. One hand held a similar hat and his other carried a smoldering torch, a heavily-scented smoke wafting from it.

“And who will help me tend the bees?” he asked with a wide smile. Four stricken faces greeted him.

“Raph will be keeping watch.” Leo pointed to the designated tree, a healthy distance from the ominous beehives.

Chapter Text

In the end, Donnie unsurprisingly volunteered to work with Ben among the hives while Leo hauled water from the river and Mikey promised Ben his first taste of pizza.

Though the tomatoes in Ben’s garden were still hard green marbles (Ben was a little surprised that the turtles knew what the “unusual plant” was), Mikey saw enough among the young farmer’s herbs to promise a feast. Ben also introduced Mikey to the contents of the spacious underground cellar, dug into the earth at the back of the cabin and accessible through a sturdy wooden door. In its cool darkness, its shelves lay heavy with onions, garlic, barley, sugar cane, dried meats, and other delectables. Elated, Mikey began gathering ingredients.

Meanwhile, Ben led Donnie from straw hive to hive—or “skeps,” as Ben called them. His voice murmured low in a soothing flow to the busy insects.

“A lot of them are out seeking flowers right now,” Ben instructed his eager student from under the hat and woven netting. “So, it’s a good time to check on them. But there will still be plenty left behind, so the smoke’ll help keep ‘em drowsy while we look inside.”

“What exactly are we checking for?” A bee landed on the netting inches in front of Donnie’s face and he examined its furry underbelly and pollen-laden legs with interest. “We’re not harvesting their honey?”

“Not today; we’ll give them another month or two for that.” Ben waved the smoke toward a likely-looking hive. The tightly-woven straw shone gold in the afternoon light. “Today, we are checking for pests—damp, mold, making sure the queen is fat and healthy.”

Ben placed the torch in Don’s hand, and to the turtle’s surprise, his friend grasped the top of the skep with bare fingers, gently pulling the top third of the structure off like a cap. Donnie hadn’t even seen the line in the structure. He gasped at the thick folds and rows of amber honeycomb that hung from the top of the skep, layered perfectly against one another with just enough room for the vibrating blanket of bees to crawl over them—and over one another—comfortably. Each perfect tiny hexagonal cell held a fat drop of honey, some capped with wax and some still open.

The bees clinging to the comb—and, despite the time of day, there were many—seemed mildly annoyed but otherwise surprisingly unfazed to be thrust into the glaring afternoon light.

Ben chuckled at Don’s amazement and beamed with pride. “It’s a skep of my own devising. No need to burn out the bees with fire or sulfur to get at the honey and wax each season. I’ll take a share from the cap and leave the rest for them to weather the winter. Then smoke them out to a new-woven skep next spring.”

Ben examined Don’s face, alight with fascination, and continued to smile. His voice changed in timbre as he recited: “ Honey from the comb is sweet to your taste. Know also that wisdom is sweet to your soul… ” Responding to Donnie’s questioning look, Ben winked. “Proverbs 24:13.”  With careful fingers, Ben reached forward, gently pushing aside bees with his still-bare fingertips, to break off a small piece of comb and press it, sticky, into Donnie’s hand. “Try some,” he said.

After pushing aside the netting and raising the comb to his mouth, Don gently blew on the last remaining bee clinging to the comb until it flew dazedly away. Always up for an experiment, Donnie popped the fragment of fresh comb onto his tongue. 

And so the afternoon passed lazily, Ben teaching Don about the importance of keeping a queen bee settled, Raph twirling his sai high in a tree, and Leo acting as Mikey’s sous-chef in the cool of the cabin.

Ben and Don were graced with a few stings apiece. Neither had made it out of Ben’s apiary unscathed. But both agreed it was well-worth a little discomfort.

Their reward, that evening, was cornmeal-crust pizza topped with a basil-and-buttermilk cream sauce, wild morels, onions from the cellar, and tiny cubes of salt pork. Chunks of honeycomb stolen from the bees served as dessert. Even Raph agreed that the best pizzeria in New York was hardly a match.

A quarter-moon hung in the sky on that startlingly clear night. Donnie couldn’t get over the brilliance of the night sky here, unadulterated by 21st century light pollution. He remembered his first glimpse of the Milky Way on a winter night in Northampton, the entire arm of a galaxy arching above them. But this , the aching purity of this sky and the shocking radiance of its stars, was altogether different, altogether more .

When Don once more approached the watch-tree and gave the signal-whistle for Leo to jump down, he was surprised to hear Leo’s voice from above, “I’m good, Donnie.”

“It’s my turn at watch.”

“I know…” Leo’s voice was soft, considerate. “But Don, we don’t know how much longer we’re going to be here. We’re going to save Ben and then hitch a ride with Renet back home. The sooner, the better as far as I’m concerned. But—” Don heard something wistful in Leo’s tone. “When I saw you two talking together about bees and all that today, it reminded me.” A pause. “He’s your intellectual equal, Don. I didn’t think I’d ever say that. About anyone. But I get that Ben is different. He’s interested in the same things you love.”

“Robotics and quantum computing?” Don teased. He was leaning against the bark of the watch-tree now, letting his brother’s words drift down to him from the darkness above. He sensed something urgent in what his brother was saying.

“Maybe not. But he certainly wants to understand the world, Don. Fully. A little crazily . Just like you. He wants to take it all apart and put it back together and know how it ticks. Just like you. And there’s a lot of things that we can offer you, Donnie. We’re your family and we love you. We love you so much. But we can’t give you that. I can’t talk about Fibonacci’s third theorem or—”

“Leo, I don’t need you to—”

“I know. And I get that, what with April and Fugitoid and Leatherhead, New York is not exactly an intellectual desert. We’ve collected a lot of smart friends.”

Donatello snorted softly in agreement.

“But Ben is special. And he’s one of your heroes. And if there’s one thing I can give you, both of you really, it’s a little more time hanging out together.”

Gratitude flooded Donnie in a wave.

“Just be sure,” Leo’s voice took on a firm tone, “No theory of relativity, no combustion engines, none of that. I don’t want to get home to discover that Benjamin Banneker invented the world’s first microwave made out of pine wood 200 years too early.”

“It would be hard to make a serviceable magnetron for a microwave out of wood, Leo… Gather enough horseshoes, on the other hand, and it might be possible to—”

A chestnut flew from the upper branches, hitting Don squarely on the top of his skull.

“Don’t even start! Just go. Go have some time with your hero. You can come back to trade with me in a couple of hours.”

“Thanks, Leo.”

Donnie found Ben in the same place they’d first seen him back on that first night—the roof. Feeling invisible enough in the darkness of the slender moon, Don climbed the ladder and lay next to him. Ben smiled in greeting. Together, they gazed up and out over the river, heads pillowed in their hands.

Ben nodded his chin toward the bright constellation to their south. “Scorpio.”

Don sighed in satisfaction. “Yeah. We can’t usually see the tail in New York. I mean, from the city, you can’t see much of anything anyway, but even out in the country… This far south, you can see the whole thing.” Don admired the constellation’s curled tail and the bright bronze flare of Antares on the mythical creature’s carapace.

“You know, Antares is 550 light years away? From right now, we’re looking at light generated in the early 1200s. Can you imagine? Ghengis Khan? Timbuktu?” Donnie grinned and shrugged. “Robin Hood?”

Ben turned to him, face alive with wonder. “How’d you know all that?”

Donnie, chagrinned, realized he was already violating good time-traveler etiquette. “Sorry,” he told Ben. “Too many spoilers. There are some things I can say. But to explain how I know them would explain too much of how things work, and it’s hard to un-know something once you know it.”

“I understand,” Ben acknowledged regretfully, turning his head back to the stars. “Feel like that’s gonna be a theme of our conversation. You give me these tantalizing little glimpses into another world without even meaning to and then have to go mum on me.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t blame you. Still, it is good , you know. It’s good to have you here. You and I, we can talk. Really talk. And that’s not something I take lightly. It’s not that common around here.”

“You…write letters,” Don said, remembering.

“Yes. Yes, I write letters. That is true. To those great men, those ‘accomplished thinkers.’ But I know what they think of me. A tobacco farmer with a grammar school education. A colored boy.” The word sliced the air between them. “That won’t change. Not in my lifetime. Not in that of my nieces and nephews. Not for a hundred years, and maybe more.” Now, Ben turned to Don, looking at him squarely, demanding an answer. “Will it?”

“No. It won’t. And, in some ways, far longer than that.” Donnie turned his head to meet Ben’s eyes, to look him full in the face. “It’s going to be a long time. We’re still…” Don felt his voice stutter, shame on behalf of his whole messed-up century heavy in his voice. “We’re still not there. Not fully.”

Ben took that in with a sharp breath and nodded.

They let silence stretch then for a while, the sounds of the summer night—crickets on the forest edges and frogs in the river below—taking the place of their voices. Donnie sensed the young man’s disappointment, his friend’s grief, and did not choose to talk over it.

“And you?” Banneker eventually asked. “Where do you sit in all of that? You ‘write letters,’ too? Or do you get to attend their colleges and join their naturalist societies?”

“Nope, not me. Mutant turtles aren’t really a thing yet. I write letters, too, in a way. Sort of. And I live in the sewers.”

“Sewers? Like in ancient Rome?”

Donnie rolled his eyes again, frustrated with himself and his big mouth. “Something like that—”

“I know, I know. ‘Spoilers’ you called them.”

“Yeah,” Don sighed.

“So, what can you tell me? What can you tell me about out there?” Ben nodded toward the sparkling expanse above them. “You said…You assured me that you are from Earth. But these people, these ones who are coming for me? They’re coming from a star? A different star?”

Don’s eyes involuntarily moved to the part of the sky where, although he couldn’t see the star with the naked eye from here, he knew the Utrom originated. “That’s right. A whole different galaxy , in fact. You don’t know what that is yet, but suffice it to say they’re from a star that’s really, really, really far away. Farther than all of these.” Don gestured at the array before them. “In fact, there are millions—maybe billions—of inhabited planets out there. Planets with whole other kinds of life just as incredible and complex as all this here.” Again a moment was given to the crickets and frogs, the warm air thick with the scent of honeysuckle that grew over the garden fence. “I’m sorry,” Don resumed. “I know it’s a lot to take in.”

“No…” Ben’s voice was reverent in the darkness. “No, don’t be sorry. I always knew that Creation was more vast than I could ever see. I just never imagined how much more.”

“And that—that doesn’t bother you?”

Ben was quiet for a moment before he finally spoke. “I went to a Quaker school, did you know that? Growing up? At least until my family needed me back here on the farm. Some of those ideas got pretty well into my blood, I suppose. Sunk in deep. And those Quakers, well, they don’t do a lot of pretending to know things that we can really only guess at. So, I expect they served me well in that regard. Beings? People and creatures from across the stars?— Aside from those looking to kill me, you understand?— No, that doesn’t bother me. Rather the opposite. I find it to be a marvel. A blessed marvel.”

Donnie grinned, a bright slice of white in the darkness. “Well then, Ben. If that’s how you feel, let me tell you about dinosaurs!”

Ben didn’t get much sleep that night, his mind abuzz with those beautiful things he and Donnie had talked of—of far-off stars and strange, ancient bird-lizards. Of the abolition, Don had promised , of slavery (although his understanding of what came next sounded vague and complicated). It was too much. Too much to think about for anyone, and in the night when all but one watch-turtle was bedded in the fresh straw of the barn for the night, Ben had lit a lantern and sought comfort in the steady, familiar clarity of Newton’s Principia . Finally soothed into an hour or two of sleep, he nevertheless woke, mind once more whirring, in the lavender glow of dawn. He itched to be out and about and alive in this world of wonders.

Slipping from bed, he gathered the yoke and buckets for hauling the day’s water and took the path down to the river. He nodded to the turtle— which one this morning? —that he knew watched him, invisibly, from the chestnut tree’s branches. The nod carried a hopefully-understandable message— I’ll just be a minute, no need to fret —before he disappeared into the line of willows and brush that fringed the river. He longed for a few moments of privacy to wash himself and splash his face.

This morning he meandered down the path a little ways to a rocky pool where the water was especially cold and sweet—just the thing for a morning ducking.

As he rose from the water, buckets filled and waiting for him, a shock of yellow caught his eye in the muddy bank. Bending to investigate, he saw it was a tube, about the length of a forefinger, yellow as an egg yolk and made of some curious, smooth material he’d never seen. It was partially obscured, pressed into the soft silt. Frowning, he picked it up, rubbing the mud off with a thumb. Ben inspected it closely and tucked it into the patch-pocket at his hip. This inexplicable device certainly had something to do with his four guests. He’d ask Donnie.

Shouldering the yoke with the buckets, Ben started back up the path and was well within view of the cabin—about halfway there—when a hoveringing whirlpool of green light bloomed into existence in front of him and to the right, about six feet above the ground. From it dropped seven enormous, unimaginable creatures like the titans of Greek mythology. They were monsters. Aliens. Assassins .

Chapter Text

It was Raphael’s watch, and the aggravated young turtle had been anxiously waiting for Ben to re-emerge from the foliage. Of all the turtles, Raph knew the insatiable itch to have some time alone every now and again. But in this circumstance, with intergalactic terrorists not only trying to assassinate Ben but END the whole timeline and establish a tyrant with the lifespan of centuries to rule the universe, he didn't think it was asking all that much to stay within eyeshot, anyway. Just as he was about to abandon his post and go looking for their wayward human, he saw Ben ascending the path up the bank. Raph let out a breath and leaned his shell heavily back against the tree’s trunk.

His relief was short-lived.

An all-too-familiar hum and pop split the peace of the morning. The green spiral of temporal energy, that caramelized-sugar smell that always somehow made him hungry at the most inconvenient time—Raph hadn’t even consciously processed these things before giving a sharp yell to alert his sleeping brothers. His body was already in motion. He was out of the tree, sai in his grasp, hurtling like a bullet to put himself between Ben and whomever was emerging from that time portal.

Let it be Renet; let it be Renet, he thought desperately. I swear not to threaten her this time, just let it be Renet.

It was not Renet.

From the portal, a squad of Triceraton dropped. They hit the ground surprisingly lightly for such massive creatures, a testament to their controlled athleticism. They landed in a circle, facing out, energy weapons raised.

But it wasn’t this sight that made Raph’s blood run cold. Nestled neatly into the abdomen of each Triceraton soldier, in a basketball-sized fistula seemingly carved directly into flesh, sat an Utrom.

They weren’t like any Utrom that Raph had ever seen. Not only were they implanted inside another living creature, which was new, but they’d changed. He was used to relatively-disgusting-but-innocuous-seeming pink blobs with stubby tentacles lining the bottom. These were… different .

The tentacles seemed to have proliferated into slimy sunbursts, emerging all around each Utrom body, twisting and curling into the flesh and bone of their Triceraton hosts to fasten themselves firmly in place. It was stomach-turningly easy to imagine what was happening at the back—the tentacles creeping in between vertebrae, twisting up the spinal cords to penetrate the brains.

Crap , Raph thought.

And then he had no more time to think because an energy blaster was firing and his body was spinning into a kick and the heel of one foot was connecting to Triceraton orbital bone with a crunch. The fight was on.

Ben recognized that the thing pointed at his frontal lobe was some kind of gun, albeit unlike any musket or dueling pistol he’d ever seen or imagined. For one thing, it had a triangular barrel. Which was odd. How did it help the thing function?

Ben found himself wondering if the last thought he had before he died would be about the engineering of the device that killed him. Or, would it be a thought about his own thinking about the engineering of—

Three shuriken buried themselves in the hand of the creature that held the gun. In that instant, Ben could hear the sharp fwiks —one, two, three—of metal slicing through tendons and biting into bone.

Surprisingly, despite the immediate spurt of blood and the obvious damage to the hand, it somehow remained steady. The face of the horned reptilian creature— was this what Donnie had called a dinosaur? —remained blank, and it merely repositioned its arm, preparing again to fire. To Ben’s horror, the pink monstrosity within the stomach of the lizard-thing released a high-pitched squeal of triumph, revealing rows of shark-like, pointed teeth.

Without his conscious direction, Ben’s body dove to the left as a blast of lurid magenta heat erupted from the gun, searing the air and grazing his shoulder. Blinding pain shot down his arm and rolled through his body.

But just as the assassin took aim again, two blurs of spinning green ferocity slammed into it, knocking the giant and the horribly-grinning devil-creature inside of it to the ground.

Even as it toppled, the two turtles—Leo and Mikey, Ben could now see—had used the momentum of their hits to bounce back into the broken circle of assailants, where they joined forces with Raphael, who was grappling with his own monster.

Suddenly, Donnie was at Ben’s side, pulling him to the questionable cover of the honeysuckle gate-post. Don’s fingers gently moved over his friend’s shoulder where the linen had burned away, revealing a band of seared skin. Don winced in sympathy. “Yeah, that’s gonna leave a mark. You okay?”

Ben breathed sharply through his nose and nodded his head. “I know you said they’d look strange,” Ben gasped, “But that is a little more strange than I’d imagined.”

Donnie lifted his brow ridges. “Yeah. The gooey part in the middle? That we expected. It’s the Triceraton packaging that threw us for a loop here.”

“Tri-sarah-ton…”

“Yeah.”

“Dinosaurs?”

Donnie half-shrugged. “Sorta.” He looked back to the fight, clearly itching to aid his brothers. “You okay here for a minute?”

Ben nodded.

“Stay back.” And then Don was gone, transformed into lithe motion, joining in the quick pattern of battle.

The dazed human could only marvel at the grace and power of his ninja friends as each duck and wove, punched and thrust, evading the bone-crushing might of their much-bigger foes. They swerved and spun off one another, wordlessly but unfailingly ready to follow through after one another’s movements as if they were of one mind. Mesmerized, Ben watched as Michelangelo leapt onto one of the attacker’s backs, wrapping his nunchaku chain around its nose-horn to pull the creature’s head up, leaving room for Raphael to surge forward and jam his sai into a weak spot in the armor at creature’s neck. Simultaneously, Donnie used his bo to vault over the three combatants and slam his foot into another who was charging Mikey from behind.

“Don?” Leo called, ducking a blow. “Why don’t they have helmets? These guys are just straight breathing our atmosphere!”

“Yeah, I noticed that, too.” Don replied, taking on a soldier that was aiming again at Ben. “It might be benefiting the K.R.A.N.G., helping them keep control of their minds. They’re treating the Triceraton as expendable—temporary control over long-term survival.”

“Usin’ Triceraton guts as a hotel probably ain’t helpin’!” Raph yelled.

“But what are we gonna call them!?” Mikey joined the conversation. “Tricerakrang?”

As they spoke, the turtles’ weapons whirled and jabbed into the tender corners of the giants’ bodies—knees and necks, groin and eyes—and yet they seemed to have little effect. No bellows of pain or anger echoed through the morning air. No orders or threats. The turtles were fighting with every ounce of strength and skill, giving many more hits than they got, but nothing they did seemed to actually hurt their opponents. Only the creaky, unnerving laughter of the smaller creatures perched inside the bigger ones answered the turtles’ blows.

“How about Utromatons?” Mikey gasped, narrowly avoiding a powerful fist.

The hits that the huge aliens did get in were whoppers. All four turtles were breathing heavily. Mikey was wobbling on one leg and Raph was holding his left shoulder oddly. Not one of them remained unscathed.

“I got it! TricerUtrom !” Mikey pivoted on his good leg to land a resounding fwack on one of the attacker’s skulls, to no perceivable effect.

“Guys?” Mikey’s voice wavered. “You get the feeling this isn’t really working quite like it should?

“No kiddin’.” Raph barely blocked a slash to his plastron before twisting away. “They’re like fighting a freakin’ brick wall. Every hit I make hurts me worse than it hurts them.”

“Foolish turtles!” one jiggling Utrom crowed. “You will bow before the might of K.R.A.N.G. and we will have you for our flesh-vessels!”

“Aw, shucks,” Mikey went for a jab at the soft Utrom underbelly, only to be blocked by a muscular Triceraton arm. “I bet you say that to all the ninja.”

“Flesh-vessels?” Leo fumed. “Is that the offer you made to these Triceratons?”

“The blood and bone of these lowly prisoners serve the glory of Utrom!” one answered in a passionate squeal.

“The glory of Utrom!” the rest howled in synchrony.

“Mortu once told me that Utrom evolved as parasites,” Donnie explained, rolling to avoid a smashing blow, then was on his feet again. “They lived inside their hosts, controlling their movements and reflexes. Only in the past two thousand years or so have the Utrom made the ethical choice to leave unwilling hosts and transition to technology instead.”

“ Blasphemy !” For a moment, the electric-anger of all the TricerUtrom focused exclusively on Donatello.

“Donnie!” Leo yelled a sharp warning, but Mikey, closest to him, had already taken action, tackling his brother out of harm’s way as all seven angry TricerUtrom converged, ready to tear the turtle limb from limb.

“We are the followers of the True Path!” the Utrom screeched together. “The Path revealed to us by Ch’rell! The lesser serve the greater. Kr’Utromishnetag Revishlueeag Aaaa Neohᴴth Grahag! ” It became a chant. The Utrom repeated it at an increasingly frenzied pace, their attack intensifying with their passion.

“It doesn’t matter what we do to the Triceratons,” Donnie cried out to his brothers as they took up positions in a defensive line, desperately blocking the aliens’ access to Ben. “Wounding them is totally ineffectual. They’re not in control of their own neural pathways. We have to stop fighting the Triceratons and start fighting the Utrom .”

“You got any brilliant ideas along those lines, genius?” Raph had to yell over the Utroms’ high-pitched chant to be heard. “If ya hadn’t noticed, they’re pretty frickin’ good at protecting the chewy bit.”

“Yeah. It’s taking too many licks to get to the center,” Mikey agreed.

Leo groaned. “Can we please dispense with the Tootsie Roll Pop analogy? You’re not being funny.”

Suddenly, one Triceraton attacker plowed through the turtles, hurling Mikey into the dirt and aiming straight for Ben. With a quick backflip and with a flash of silver, Leo’s katana interceded. The triceraton’s arm fell heavily into the dust. Ben stared at the clean-cleaved circle of pink muscle around white bone. Surely, surely now, the creature would finally cry out in anguish?

Without even looking at the arm that lay on the ground, and seemingly oblivious to the dark blood jetting from its remaining stump, the giant alien merely clenched its other massive hand into a fist and again stepped forward.

Grimly, almost hopelessly, Leo turned his face back toward Ben. Between panted breaths, Leo told him, “Run!”

Chapter Text

They did have a plan for this. Back on their first night in Maryland together, they’d decided that the forest—the dense old-growth woods stretching behind Ben’s cabin—provided his best protection if separated from the turtles. He could find his way back, tunnel deep into the underbrush, and hide to wait for Renet.

If he could get there.

The problem was, on top of their seeming invulnerability to pain or injury, the TricerUtrom were fast .

At close to twice the height of the turtles, the TricerUtrom didn’t have to extend themselves to keep up with the much-smaller human. When Ben leapt over a fence, the TricerUtrom crashed straight through it. When Ben dove behind a tall row of sorghum in his garden, the TricerUtrom simply mowed it down with their energy weapons.

The turtles sprinted alongside, trying to distract Ben’s attackers, but knew it to be hopeless. Easily outpaced, Ben and the turtles now found themselves cornered, this time at the back of the cabin between the smoking vestiges of Ben’s vegetable garden and the beehives.

Combat resumed. All of the turtles’ mocking bluster and brash confidence evaporated, replaced by focused desperation. Despite their urgent attempts to land hits directly on the cackling, almost gleeful Utrom, the K.R.A.N.G. operatives were kept safe and snug. The puppified Triceratons took hits to their heads and limbs, leaving them mangled and bleeding, but steadfastly blocked all shots to their tentacle-infested abdomens.

Mikey kept apologizing to his Triceraton opponents every time he landed a blow against their leathery hide. Thunk —”Sorry!” Pow — “Whoa, that’s gonna bruise. Sorry, dude!” Fwap —”My bad!”

“Mikey,” Raph shouted over his own opponent. “Stop apologizing to the aliens trying to kill us.”

“But they’re not the ones trying, bro! It’s the squishy pink turd-faces inside that are making them do this!”

One of the Triceraton was, in fact, down—the one that had lost an arm. Apparently it had finally bled out. Its “flesh-vessel” now useless, that particular Utrom had abandoned its host and slunk away. It left behind a huge and hollow corpse. Since the Triceraton’s stomach, liver, and other temporarily-unnecessary innards had been apparently scooped out to make room for the parasitic Utrom, the gaping hole granted a disconcerting view all the way back to the Triceraton’s spinal column.

His fleeting glimpse of it nauseatingly reminded Raph of Don’s empty shell back home—that bright shock of white vertebrae. And for an instant, he imagined Donnie here but all alone, fighting these monsters without his brothers beside him. Fighting parasites that could, apparently, set up shop in your guts and use your belly as a window seat. That could use you up or bleed you out and then just move on to the next victim.

Through a twist of vertigo, Raph realized for the first time that death might not have been the very worst thing to happen to Donatello on the other side of that timestream.

Meanwhile, as Donnie parried, kicked, and spun with increasingly pained, leaden muscles, he wondered anxiously where that missing Utrom had got to and how, exactly, it might go about parasitizing a new host.

“Don?” Leo’s eyes shot just for an instant to the Triceraton corpse, the one he’d technically killed. “Do you think the Triceraton are still aware?” Leo ducked a brutal swipe at his head. “Are they still feeling this?”

Donatello didn’t have time to answer. In reaching out with his bo to dislodge a blaster aimed at Ben, he’d left himself open to a second Triceraton’s powerful kick. A boot cracked against platron, and Don flew backwards, sending both him and Ben careening into the planks of the cabin behind them. Don’s head smacked against a corner-plank with a meaty thwack . His bo went spinning into the vegetable patch three or four yards away. It might as well have been a mile.

Ben, who’d been flung against the cabin wall and found himself sandwiched between it and Donnie’s shell, gazed upward, gasping for breath. Sensing this fight was near its conclusion, he started to whisper a psalm skyward. “I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me…”

Donnie, head spinning, struggled first to his knees, then to his feet. Swaying slightly, he planted his body between the approaching TricerUtrom and his human friend. Don’s empty hands balled into fists as the aliens loomed over him and Ben.

Raph was the closest.

Raph was too far away. Too far to reach Donatello. Too far to take on Donnie’s attackers. He saw his choices play out in his mind with terrible, vivid clarity—his thrown sai clattering uselessly against the armor and thick skin of the TricerUtrom right before they pounded his brother into splinters. Before they ripped Donnie out of his own shell.

Or…

“ Rhaaaaaaaaaaa !” With a wordless roar of pure rage that split the air, Raph attacked the one thing he actually was close enough to—a rounded straw beehive.

This early in the morning, the bees were just awakening for their day. They did not expect, in their tiny insect minds, to have steel blades plunged into their home and then have that home flung through the morning air to burst against the skulls of two massive aliens.

They did not expect it. But, over one hundred million years of evolution meant they knew exactly what to do next.

A veritable cyclone of enraged bees enveloped the huge creatures against whom their hive had been smashed, stinging every inch of exposed flesh.

But Raph wasn’t done. He thrust his way through the apiary, brandishing his sai like pitchforks, hurling skeps at every TricerUtrom in sight until the air itself was a mass of writhing, buzzing, fiercely-stinging insects.

Around them, almost invisible through the boiling clouds of bees, the TricerUtrom—really just the Utrom—were screaming.

Raph closed his eyes against the blinding pain, sharp an insistent, of multiple stings. These bees were not choosey. Chest heaving, clutching his sai, Raph might have just stood there and waited to be stung to death had not Leo emerged through the chaos and pulled Raph forward in an unrelenting, iron grip.

Startled, Raph found himself propelled roughly toward the cabin, then shoved unceremoniously through the inconspicuous wooden doors of Ben’s cellar and into the cool, earth-smelling darkness.

Behind him he heard someone, Leo probably, shut and latch the cellar doors. Raph felt the throb of stingers in his skin—his legs, his neck, the tender place between his plastron and his shell. He struggled to see, to hear, to perform the count of his brothers that was as automatic as his own heartbeat, but his eyes were slow to adjust. He felt like he was underwater. Were they all there?

Raph tried to ask, but his mouth felt strangely slow and tingly.

At last, Ben struck flint and the soft yellow light of an oil lamp was set aglow, revealing all three of Raph’s brothers and the human they’d been charged with protecting.

Raph fell to his knees. Donnie knelt next to him. A trickle of blood oozed down a gash at Don’s scalp, but his eyes were surprisingly focused in the lantern-light. Raph could hear him cursing softly but ferociously as his gentle fingers ran over Raph’s skin, finding and picking out each of the miniscule black bee stingers.

For a time, the muted thunks of bee bodies thrummed against the wooden doors of the cellar. From outside, the shrieks of soft-fleshed Utrom, who were unable to block the small infuriated creatures, melted into agonized gurgles.

Raph felt a few addled bees still crawling on the back of his neck. He dazedly tried brushing their furry bodies off.

Mikey was saying something, but it seemed to be coming from a long way away, as if he were shouting through a tunnel.

“Dude! What were you thinking? Triceraton skin is practically made of football leather. And you’re allergic, bro!”

Raph wheezed. He retched. With a last thread of air drawn through his constricting throat, he croaked an answer. “I was thinkin’, start fighting the Utrom. ”

Later, when Mikey thought back to the events in the cellar after the battle, he always thought of those weird melting clock paintings that Don had once shown him out of some old art book they’d scavenged from the dump. Salvador Dali, Donnie had told him. They were the ones where the clocks seemed to be oozing over table edges, the numbers sloughing off into meaninglessness. That’s how time felt. It could’ve been minutes; it could’ve been hours. But every second was excruciating.

The whole world narrowed to Raph’s faltering wheeze, his eyes wide and frantic as he tried to drag oxygen down his swelling windpipe and into his lungs through pure force of will.

Leo and Donnie had managed to push Raphael onto his shell on the dirt of the cellar floor while Mikey grabbed a few nearby sacks of barley and thrust them under his feet and legs, keeping them elevated. Years ago, after Raph had stepped on that bee up in Northampton, Donnie had led them all in endless rounds of anaphylaxis drills. Mikey was grateful now for the muscle-memory of it, because he certainly couldn’t think straight with the sound of Raph’s ragged pulls of breath as if he was trying to suck in air through a folded straw.

Don was murmuring low and steady, his voice unwavering, but Mikey could discern a tremble in his fingers where they brushed against Raph’s face, shoulders, and neck. And that terrified Mikey almost as much as the wheezing did. If Donnie was that scared…

“Mikey,” Don’s voice cut through the white noise of fear. “I need you to use that lamp and keep searching every inch of Raph’s skin. I almost certainly missed some stingers, and we need to find every last one.” Donnie’s gaze held Mikey’s for a moment, and Mikey nodded his understanding, accepting this for the gift it was—something to do, a way to be truly useful. He clutched the lantern, starting at Raph’s feet, trying to focus on his task instead of the sounds of his brother asphyxiating in front of him.

“Ben?” Don’s next appeal was to the young farmer, kneeling in the back of the cellar with a look of anguish on his face. “Ben, what do you do for this? What remedy do you use? You must have something ,” Don pleaded. “Please! Some root, some herb? Something?!”

Ben shook his head, his face a mask of distress. “The only thing I’ve heard people use is those,” he gestured to where the ceramic jar of leeches stood on its shelf.

Through his agony, Raph somehow caught sight of the motion, and heaved a convulsive lurch of protest, attempting to sit up, so that Leo and Don had to wrestle him back to the ground.

“No, no, no, shhhhhh…” Donnie tried to placate him. “It’s okay; it’s okay. No leeches, I promise . No leeches, Raph. It’s okay. Shhh. Keep taking even, steady breaths, remember? Even, steady breaths. I promise you. No leeches. They’d only lower your blood pressure anyway, and we don’t need that. Shhhhh.”

They managed to get Raph back down, but his condition had worsened. He was struggling just to stay conscious. His chest spasmed. His eyes fluttered.

“Don?” Leo couldn’t hide the desperate entreaty in his voice. “We have to do something . What can we do ?”

Donatello didn’t answer. He stared down at Raphael in a fog, eyes glazed, hands clenching and unclenching. “I—” His breath hitched for a moment, matching his gasping brother’s. “I don’t know!” Don suddenly buried his head against Raph’s shoulder with a wail of fury. “I need the epipen! I need the fucking epipen!”

The cellar fell suddenly silent. Raph wasn’t breathing. No one was breathing.

Mikey had a floating feeling of shock. He wondered abstractly how the moment his whole world came crashing down around him could possibly be so very, very quiet.

And then, a voice, hesitant and frightened, came from the back of the cellar: “What’s an epipen?”

The three turtles froze. Something was offered in that voice, like a tendril of hope.

In the brief time that had passed since his early morning wash in the river, Ben had been attacked by seven enormous horned lizards with brain-creatures emerging from their stomachs, fiercely defended by four more reptiles he’d come to consider his friends, had run for his life, had been thrown bodily against a wall, and was now watching one of his defenders, his friends, die. It was a lot. But epipen . Something about that word had turned and clicked in his awareness like a cog in a wheel.

“I… I found this just this morning by the river.” From his pocket, Ben withdrew a long tube of yellow plastic with a bright orange tip. “Can it—can this be what you need?”

A sob of relief tore itself from Donnie’s throat. He flung himself toward Ben’s outstretched hand and snatched up the device, ripping off the blue safety cap with his teeth and jamming the orange tip against Raph’s thigh, chest heaving as he struggled to keep his emotions in check. He waited, counting out fifteen slow seconds to be sure that every single drop of epinephrine possible— could there have been water damage? Dilution? —had entered Raph’s body. Then, he returned to Raphael’s swollen face and neck, gently feeling the divot below the side of his chin to find that achingly weak pulse. But it was there. It was still there. And he could tell that Raph was still fighting.

“That’s it, that’s it. Give it time. It’ll work. Just give it time.”

Mikey wasn’t sure if Donnie was reassuring Raph, the rest of them, or just himself, but Mikey drank in his words like water in the desert.

The melty-clock thing happened again, and an eternity-moment later, Mikey heard a hitch and a stutter and saw Raph’s plastron rise.

It wasn’t a deep breath. It wasn’t a flood of oxygen into the turtle’s starved lungs. But it was something. And it was followed by another something. And another, until a weak, unsteady kind of rhythm that could loosely count as breathing, was achieved.

Don wound his arm around Raph’s own and collapsed next to him on the dirt floor, closing his eyes wordlessly. Mikey found himself curled against Leo’s plastron as they sat together on the ground, tears leaking from the corners of their eyes as they watched the rise-and-fall of their brother’s chest. Mikey let all the emotions of the day—the battle and its harrowing aftermath, wash over and through him.

Eventually, Mikey lifted his head to find Ben, too, wiping at his eyes.

Shakily, Mikey detached himself from Leo and scooched over to throw both his arms around the young farmer, clutching him in an exuberant hug.

“You found it! Dude, you found it!”

“I’m… I’m sorry,” Ben stammered. “I didn’t know what it was. I mean, I still don’t. But I’m just grateful it worked.”

“You saved his life.” Leo leaned forward to enwrap Ben’s calloused brown hands in his own green ones. “Thank you.”

Don had levered himself upright again. His own fingers were on Raph’s wrist, re-checking his pulse, but he gave Ben a warm, rather watery, smile and was just about to say something when a gruff cough and croak came from his patient.

Raph’s bleary eyes were open, and he, too, was trying to sit up. Again, Leo and Don eased him back down, and Don placed Leo’s hands firmly on Raph’s plastron. “Keep him lying down. We need to get him something to drink—something now . As much as possible, really, to get the allergen moving out of his system. I need to find him some water… It’s too far to the river and back—” Don’s eyes unfocused as he grappled with this new, immediate problem.

Then, he turned toward the shelves of the cellar—onions, garlic, barley. “Ben, do you have…” and then his eyes fell on the ceramic leech jar. “Just how fresh is that water?” he whispered.

Within moments, Don had found an empty cornmeal jar. Using his body to shield what he was doing from Raph, Donnie poured off as much of the leech-water into the cornmeal jar as possible. When two of the squirming black creatures slipped through, Don picked them out with his fingers and tossed them back into the dregs of the first jar with a muttered apology to each.

Then, hiding the leech jar behind a stack of onions, Don turned triumphantly back to Raph. Working with Leo, they maneuvered him into a half-sitting position and Donnie lifted the jar of water to Raph’s lips.

“Come on, Raph. You know the drill. You gotta drink this water; you need to drink as much as you possibly can to help your body process the allergen. Get some swallows down for me, okay?”

Raph managed a few good sips before pausing to take a shuddering breath. He looked up at Donnie, an edge of skepticism in his eyes. Raph’s voice was a rasp. “Tastes… weird . I don’t know. Earthy.”

“It’s river water, Raph. It’s going to taste a little earthy.” Don told himself he wasn’t technically lying. It was river water. Originally. “Keep drinking,” he urged.

Later, as they prepared themselves to emerge from the cellar and face whatever remains of the bloody fray awaited them past those wooden doors, Mikey sidled up to Don, a certain glow in his eyes.

“Leech water, huh?” Mikey managed a low whisper. “You’ve got real guts, bro! I don’t wanna be you when Raph finds out!”

“Is Raph going to find out, Mikey?” Don’s voice was pleasant enough, but Michelangelo could hear a cautionary undercurrent. A brief montage of all the terrible things Donnie could-and-would make happen played through Mikey’s mind—the broken skateboard axles that somehow never would get priority, internet glitches during his favorite cartoons, being relegated to scrubbing pigeon-doo off the Battle Shell for the rest of his natural life.

“He won’t hear it from me!” Mikey hoped his grin was convincing.

Chapter Text

When at last the four turtles and their human friend emerged from the cellar into the blinding light of day, they found the back section of Ben’s farm in ruins—a crushed and scorched vegetable garden, trodden scraps of straw beehives (now almost entirely vacant of bees), and the blistered bodies of seven Triceraton soldiers. Inside the bellies of six of those soldiers, Utrom hung dead and limp.

“Do they look…I don’t know— mushier ?—than before?” Mikey asked, peering in at one particularly gooey Utrom corpse.

Donatello, his eyes on a sharp lookout for wayward bees, was carefully guiding Raph toward the front of the cabin. But even thus distracted and with a splitting headache, Donnie did steal a glance, purely for the sake of science, at the nearest dead Utrom and hummed thoughtfully. “The venom in a bee stinger contains apamine, which destroys nerve tissue. Utrom are really mostly made of nerve tissue, and with no skin to protect them, they didn’t stand much of a chance. It would’ve been a brilliant strategy if it wasn’t so inconceivably idiodic.” This last comment, he directed at Raph.

“Yeah, yer welcome,” Raph grunted.

“Guess this gives new meaning to the term ‘ sting operation ,’ huh?” Mikey trotted to catch up as they rounded the corner. “Hey, Raph, what do bees like to chew?” He did not wait for an answer. “ Bumble gum! Get it? Hey, why did the bee go to the dermatologist? It had hives !”

Before Raph could turn and use the last shreds of his strength to pound his younger brother into the dust, Leo had pulled Mikey back and out of reach. “Too soon, Mikey. Too soon.”

Once Raph was carefully re-positioned in the relative comfort of Ben’s bed on his shell with his legs propped up, Donnie performed a quick medical inspection on each and every one of them. Together, the little group cleaned and wrapped the most obvious injuries, treating the energy-weapon burns with liberal amounts of a goldenrod salve that Ben offered up.

Donnie diagnosed himself with a concussion and promised his brothers to stay in the cool dark of the cabin. It suited Don, since that was where he wanted to be to continue to monitor Raph’s breathing and heart rate. The unvoiced worry that one dose of epinephrine might not be enough ate at his peace of mind. However, the regenerative properties of the mutagen in their blood seemed to be working its magic. So, as the morning passed, Raph gained more color and his breathing deepened. Every couple of hours, Leo brought up fresh water from the river, which Don pressed upon Raph mercilessly, forcing him to drink enough to continue to dilute the toxicity of the bee venom. Raph, grumbling, knew better than to actively resist when Donnie wore that obstinate look on his face.

With Mikey’s sprained ankle, the hard work of digging graves for the Triceraton and Utrom fell largely to Leo and Ben, but the two—both uncommonly strong from training and farm labor, respectively—made short work of them. By noon, a wide, deep trench for the Triceraton stretched beyond the vegetable garden. Past that, a smaller one awaited the Utrom. 

Leo insisted that the Triceraton, as victims of the K.R.A.N.G., be buried with due honor and quite separately from the parasitic Utrom that had used them as grotesque marionettes and been responsible for their deaths.

Mikey, then, who always did have a strong stomach, made himself useful by popping the swollen bodies of the K.R.A.N.G. operatives out of the cavities they’d gouged from their unwilling hosts. In death, the Utrom tentacles drooped loosely and proved easy enough for Mikey to untwist and pry free.

The ill-fated Triceratons, though themselves entirely protected from the bees by their thick hides, had not survived the ravages that the Utrom had wrought upon their internal organs. Leo hoped their deaths had been reasonably quick. He hoped that, by that point, they’d been beyond pain.

He wondered if the Triceraton had families. He assumed so.  He wondered if those families would ever know what happened to them.

The question of the one spare, escaped K.R.A.N.G. operative still puzzled the turtles, and they kept their eyes open as they went about cleaning up the farm and putting order to the chaos. Mikey carefully checked insides of the water buckets Ben had spilled when the aliens first attacked, thinking that the rogue Utrom might have hidden from the bees. No luck.

Donnie, bo in hand, carefully inspected every inch of Ben’s cabin, including the actual ceiling and the loft. No dice. Even the chimney was empty.

Leo kept his katana loose in their sheaths on his back, his eyes scanning the corners and crevices of the wreckage the Tricerutrom had wrought.

Eventually, in the endless series of hurried tasks—no one wanted a dozen dead aliens just lying around if Ben’s sister Jemmy decided to deliver some cheese to her little brother—the extra Utrom was, if not forgotten, at least not top-of-mind.

And that is when it pounced.

Michelangelo was alone on the edge of the forest, past the trampled vestiges of the vegetable garden, filling in the Utrom grave, when the remaining  K.R.A.N.G. operative dropped straight from its hiding place in the crook of a tree branch and directly onto the top of Mikey’s head.

Mikey leapt upwards like a shot, hands clawing at the slimy monstrosity, desperately trying to dislodge it and hurl it away. But the thing was both intensely slippery and also insanely powerful, its tentacles griping Mikey’s skull and groping to curl tightly inside his ears and to wiggle up his nostrils.

Frantic, Mikey tried to scream, but even that action was to the Utrom’s advantage as it surged its viscous bodyweight forward, prying Mikey’s mouth open even farther, but muffling any sound coming out. Chittering hysterically, the Utrom tried to shove itself past Mikey’s teeth and down into his gullet. Mikey choked and gagged, hurling himself backwards onto his shell and rolling in the dirt. All to no avail. Nothing seemed to loosen the alien’s unyielding grip.

Grinning maniacally, sharp teeth bared, the Utrom suddenly released a foul-smelling gas. It spit the stuff it straight into Mikey’s face. Though still out of his mind with terror, Mikey felt his limbs grow strangely weak, his eyes rolling back in his head as his ability to resist suddenly waned. He felt the creature, hissing and victorious, preparing to slide down his throat and into his stomach, where it would certainly carve out a hole and take up residence, just as it had with the Triceratons.

Mikey felt utter despair take hold.

And then came the sound of a swoosh, a sharp fwap , and the spray of warm blood over Mikey’s plastron.

But not his own blood. It was the Utrom’s. 

More fwaps sounded, and a piercing shriek shattered the stillness, eventually wavering and falling into a guttural wail. One more fwap . Then silence. Silence, except for Ben’s soft voice, reciting a prayer, as he wrenched the dying Utrom off Mikey’s face and heaved its twitching body into the dirt beside him.

Lying on Mikey’s other side was a hoe, its blade bright with Utrom blood.

Mikey, eyes wide, stared at his rescuer, then turned aside and vomited into the summer dust.  Ben bent to rub Michelangelo’s shell soothingly, his own chest heaving from the fear and exertion.

In the next moment, Mikey’s three brothers were there. Eyes shining white with furious aggression, weapons at the ready, they took in the whole scene—their gagging brother, the breathless human, the bloody Utrom corpse, and the abandoned hoe. As Donnie and Leo rushed forward to comfort and examine their shaken brother—embracing him, checking his pupils, murmuring assurances into his ears, all simultaneously—Raph knelt by the pink tentacled pile that had tried to parasitize Michelangelo.

Mouth bent in a snarl, Raph carefully considered where the creature’s forehead would be. With one sharp thrust of his sai, he impaled it to the hilt. The carcass gave one jerking shudder, then lay still. Then, with the remaining sai, Raph turned its body over, careful not to touch it, to examine the savagely deep gashes scoring its top.

Ben watched him.

Finally, Raph grunted in appreciation. “Nice work with that hoe,” he said simply. He placed his hand on Ben’s shoulder and gave it a rough, grateful squeeze.

Ben nodded at him. “I’ve had a lot of practice,” he replied, releasing a shuddering breath. “Hornworms.”

It was dusk. The seven Triceraton and the Utrom renegades that had parasitized them were buried deep. All four turtles had attended Ben’s short scripture reading over the Triceraton grave, and now the five of them were gathered on the banks of the river to wash off the grave-mud and the pall of battle. And, in Mikey’s case, the Utrom blood.

The story was told from every angle. Leo had been at the river, getting more water for Raph. Donnie had been tending to his brother inside the cabin. Only Ben had heard the sound of the scuffle. And even he had not heard Mikey. Rather, it had been the high-pitched squeals of triumph from the K.R.A.N.G. that had alerted him to the attack.

Leo, twisting a morning glory vine in his hand, shuddered a little. It had been too close. Again .

It was in the midst of this re-telling that a green pulse of light and the customary pop announced Renet’s arrival.

Oblivious to the mood, Renet beamed with delight and pride, hugging all the turtles who would allow her near them—namely, all of them except Raph—while babbling happily.

“Gosharoonies, I’m so glad you’re all okay. That makes three out of three successful missions. Radical!”

Mikey had apparently recovered more quickly from his attempted parasitization than any of his brothers had. His hug with Renet ended in a complicated handshake that almost became a dance at the end as they both spun in a full 360° circle. Leo’s brow ridges knit in confusion. When exactly had Mikey and Renet, in all the craziness of their experiences together, had time to create a private handshake? Figures.

“The other missions were successful?” Donnie asked. “Our whole timeline is safe?”

Renet nodded soberly. “For now. Thanks to you. Thanks to all of you. The K.R.A.N.G. have no crystals left. Mortu and the Utrom Guard have the few renegades that remain on the run. There'll be no interphasic multi-temporal assassination attempts in this timestream for a while, I can tell you that!”

“Renet?” Leo narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “Who’d you get to help you those other two times?”

Renet smiled apologetically and raised her brows. “So, it’s like this…”

“It’s us , ain’t it?” Raph accused. “You just hopped into the future and abducted future-us, didn’t ya?”

“Whoa! Nice choice, Renet!” Mikey nodded enthusiastically. “Bros, we get to do this two more times!”

“Yeah, fantastic, Mikey.” Raph’s voice was still hoarse. “Maybe next time you’ll get stung by a hundred bees.”

“Dude, I got stung by the same bees you did. I just respond to them better.” Mikey sniffed, calmly claiming the moral high ground. “ And Ben and I fought off a K.R.A.N.G. alien all on our own. We got this!”

“Ben and I ?” Raph snorted.

“Um, I think that was mostly Ben , Mikey,” Don corrected.

For the first time, Renet focused her attention on Ben, who’d been hanging back in the presence of this very strange, absurdly-dressed white woman. Renet, unfazed, pushed forward to shake his hand energetically.

“Mr. Banneker, it's an honor, it totally is. Sorry to have bothered you with all this; we’ll get outta your hair in two shakes, I swear; but it really is a pleasure to meet you.”

“She’s almost as bad as Donnie,” Raph murmured to Leo.

“Pleasure’s mine,” Ben replied bashfully. “These last few days have been… illuminating.”

“Hopefully not too illuminating!” Renet gave a nervous laugh. “We don’t want you inventing airplanes or anything.”

Ben gave her a confused look. Donatello tried to look innocent, but it came off just looking as if he were about to sneeze.

“Hm.” Renet gave him an appraising look. “I guess it’s hard to be too mad at you when you’ve saved multiple galaxies from a totalitarian dictatorship.” Her expression softened as they rested on Don. “Plus, I’m glad you’re alive.” Her eyes grew a little unfocused. “In that other version of right now, I can’t even find you.” Renet refocused her eyes on Donnie. “Guess that does explain the extra shell,” she said softly into the quiet.

“Whaddya mean?” Raph’s hands were on his sai hilts, and Don was suddenly glad there were no beehives nearby.

“Well, it looks like in that other timeline that I’m experiencing concurrently ( not gonna miss that, by the way!), Ben is still alive, which is really good. You know. Restored timeline and everything. But I can’t find Donatello, which is bad. Sounds like at some point, Donnie got Ben to a safe hiding place in the forest, but then he—” Renet shrugged. “—disappeared.”

“Which is how my shell ended up left behind.”

“Yeah, totally. Other Ben says the last time he saw you,” she told Don, “you were luring the K.R.A.N.G. away, toward the river.” Ben raised his brows at the words “Other Ben,” but didn’t interrupt.

Renet continued. “Whatever happened there resulted in Other Ben also surviving, which is really awesome because otherwise the whole timestream would’ve collapsed into a totalitarian dystopia the first time through and we wouldn’t even be having this conversation! The downside is you and your shell with its neato tracker must’ve got washed downriver. Or something… equally bad.”

Donnie was nodding his understanding, “To show up on some taxidermy wall in the 21st century.”

“Exactly. Round One Donnie popped in the tracker, but never returned to the 21st century and left his shell here, which means that Round Two Donnie,”—she pointed at the turtle in question— “(That’s you, by the way)  found the tracker in the future, which led to your survival!” Renet smiled brightly.

“ That’s it!” Raph snarled, elbowing his way past Don to face Renet, a little too close. Donnie could see Raph’s balance wobble almost imperceptibly, and he reached to grasp his brother’s shoulder, both to steady him and to draw him back from the Lord of Time. But Raph was not to be moved.

“You’re gonna wave your magic fairy time-wand and get us to that other timestream before those K.R.A.N.G. attack, and we’re gonna save Don!” The last word became a wheeze and he stumbled forward, but this time both Donnie and Mikey pulled him back into their steadying arms.

“But you already did save him, just by being with him when I came to get you. Just by coming here! You’re not actually in a different timestream; you’re in the same one—which is why the extra shell made you stick close to Donatello, which is why you were with him when I came for you, which is why you all came here together, which is why he’s alive!”

Renet’s logic mollified Raph momentarily, but her next words ruined the effect.

“Which is actually a bummer of a problem, really.”

Raph, suddenly incapable of words, gnashed his teeth at the Timestress, but Leo was able to get in front of him to mediate. “Renet,” Leo kept his voice as calm as possible. “How can it be ‘sort of a problem’ that Donnie is alive? That doesn’t seem like a problem to us.”

But it was Donatello who answered. “Because I’m alive, I don’t leave my shell here, so it doesn’t end up in the curiosities shop a couple centuries from now. Which means that I never find the shell, which means I’m on my own that night when Renet comes to find us, which means I do come alone and die and leave my shell here, et cetera. See? It creates a—”

“ Time loop ,” Donnie and Renet said together with matching dismayed looks.

“It’s more than a 250-year-long time loop, but still!” Donnie shook his head.

“Aw, geez!” Renet put a hand to her head and moaned. “Time loops are, like, the worst . Nevermind the concurrent experiences, the paperwork alone’s gonna bury me alive!”

“Wait,” Leo raised a finger. “But you just said that you got future versions of us to help you. How could you have done that if there’s no future?”

“Oh, the future totally still exists.” As Renet spoke, she worriedly twisted several dials on the scepter, gazing fixedly at the changes in the light pattern as if it were a crystal ball. “But when there’s a time loop, you get redirected into the loop so the future is perceived as not occurring. You get sorta stuck.”

Finally, she dropped the scepter to her side and sighed dramatically. “I can fix it, but it isn’t going to be much fun. I’m gonna have to slog around this century for a while. If I calibrate the time scepter to hone in on a localized Utrom power signature from the battery Donnie’s tracker, I can find his shell at some point in the concurrent 18th century and plant it in the exact same place in this 18th century and then get out real quick before the time loop collapses and the other, bifurcated 18th century ceases to exist. It’s gonna be a tight one, fer shur! You guys wanna come along and help?” she asked, hopefully.

Donnie, a familiar gleam in his eyes, started to reply, but his three brothers cut him off with a determined, resounding, “ No! ” Leo couldn’t stop himself from grabbing the top of Donnie’s shell, as if worried he’d have to physically restrain his brother from joining Renet. Raph glowered fiercely at the Timestress with a look that could peel paint.

“Sorry, Renet,” Mikey rubbed his neck. “I think we all just wanna get back home for now. You know, see our dad, play some fooz-ball, experience indoor plumbing and all that.”

“We appreciate your taking care of that… time loop thing,” Leo added carefully.

“I do want to get a round of antihistamines into Raph,” Donnie pursed his lips, looking at his brother critically. “He’s still has some symptoms from anaphylaxis… And the epinephrine is causing increased irritability.”

“I don’t think that’s the epinephrine, bro,” Mikey stage-whispered to Donnie, earning a slap upside the head from Raph.

“You can get us back safely to where-and-when we left?” Leo asked.

“Oh, yeah! No problem. And assuming I’m successful at transplanting Round One Donatello’s shell into this side of the timestream, everything should be just the same, extra shell and all!”

“And if you’re not successful?” Leo didn’t actually want to know, but he felt he had to ask.

“Well, then, you’ll be stuck forever in the moment you return. Like I said, the future will still exist, but you won’t be able to move into it, perceptually, you know?”

At the stupefied looks of the turtles, Renet placed her hand not holding the scepter squarely on her hip. “Whatever!” she huffed. “As if I’d let that happen. I’m pretty good at this stuff now; you totally don’t have to worry about it.” She waved her hand in a dismissive gesture, then refocused on the lantern-like scepter, making adjustments with a renewed resolve. “Give me a couple minutes to prep the scepter and we’ll get you outta here.”

All this time, Ben had been looking on in amazement and confusion, trying to decipher all that was being said. Now, this expression was replaced by one of sadness as his four friends turned back to him. “Well,” he said softly, “I suppose this is goodbye…”

Michelangelo’s rush forward to embrace him took the soft-spoken farmer by surprise, and he staggered a little under the weight of the young turtle’s affection before finding his balance.

“It’s been awesome. And that corn-crust pizza was the bomb! I’ll be making it for our dad. It’ll be called ‘The Banneker’ in honor of you, dude.” Mikey gave Ben a firm, brotherly pat on the back. “Thanks for saving my life, bro.”

Ben chuckled. “The feeling’s mutual, my friend.”

Raph drew Ben into a rough embrace next. “I guess I sorta got used ta havin’ two brainiacs around. Gonna miss ya.” He released Ben and shuffled his feet a bit, looking at his toes. “Sorry ‘bout your bees.”

Ben huffed a soft laugh. “Oh, it will be fine. I can re-establish my beehives. And since you encouraged them, shall we say, to save our lives, I’d call it more than a fair trade.”

Leo squeezed Ben’s shoulder. “It’ll be good for you to get back to your life, to other humans. Fewer aliens. Take care of yourself, Ben.”

“You, too.” Ben smiled. “Sounds like you got a lot going on back when you’re from.”

Leo, long-suffering, sighed. “Yeah. You don’t know the half of it.”

Donnie’s goodbye was the last. He wrapped his arms around the young scientist-farmer and squeezed his eyes shut. “Keep writing letters,” Don said softly. “I know it might sometimes feel like you’re howling in the wilderness, but they matter. I promise you, they matter . Keep writing.”

Ben gave his friend a tight squeeze, then moved back to hold Don at arm’s length, hands still on either shoulder and his dark eyes intent on Donnie’s. “You too. I don’t have the gift of knowing the future, but I suspect the same might be said of your letters—or whatever is your equivalent—someday.”

Donnie smiled with a touch of chagrin and ducked his head.

Before they left, Leo interrupted Renet’s adjustments to the scepter. He took a moment to pull the Lord of Time aside, away from his family and Ben, who were exchanging last pizza-topping recommendations.

“Renet, who were those Triceraton soldiers? How did they get... How did they get taken like that?”

Renet’s expressive blue eyes widened and she bit her lip. “Yeah. The K.R.A.N.G. faction raided Triceraton settlements for hosts. I don’t really even know if these were soldiers, Leo. They might just have been civilians wearing scavenged Triceraton armor.”

“Will you—” Leo felt dizzy. “Will you let them know? Their families? Will you let them know what happened?”

Renet’s voice was hesitant. “I’ll see what I can do, Leo. But the Triceraton understand what happens when they’re taken by the K.R.A.N.G.  They’ve seen it.” Renet’s mouth twitched. “I don’t know if giving them all those bogus details would really bring them peace.”  Renet lifted her head inquisitively. “Would you want to know?”

Leo held her gaze. His own eyes held the clear, stern certainty of ice. “I would need to know.”

At last, Renet was ready. She held her scepter in front of her, its top spinning quickly. “Alright, guys. Let’s send you home!”

The turtles murmured their final words of parting to their brave, ingenious friend to whom they owed so much. To whom they owed their lives, their whole timestream, and everything in it. The last sight the turtles had of Benjamin Banneker was framed by his cabin on one side, dark rows of tobacco on the other, and a velvety blue evening sky deepening to black over the young man’s head.

Chapter Text

Renet must’ve done her job, because everything seemed normal enough when the turtles re-emerged through the churning window of green temporal light, back into Donatello’s lab. Well, that’s if “normal enough” meant your brother’s empty shell under a blanket three feet away even as he stood next to you. But, all things considered, knowing it was just a left-over from a time loop that no longer existed, they’d take it.

And, as Don’s patchwork air circulation system whirred and the computer fan hummed, it did indeed seem that time was not stuck, but was pushing forward with its usual momentum into the future, moment by moment.

“ Alright !” Mikey performed a gleeful backflip, making a nimble landing on his good leg. It just so happened to get him closer to the lab door, where he called, “Dibs on the first hot shower!”

Raph tried to leap forward in protest, but a stumbling step and an unsteady wheeze in his breath cut him short.

“Whoa there.” Donnie was already digging into his medical chest, fingers greedily sorting through all the marvelous bottles and vials. Ah, hello again, modern medicine , he thought happily. “You’re going to get some antihistamines in you, first thing, Raph.”

Leo sternly pressed Raph down onto the cot at the side of the lab they used as an infirmary. “And I’m going to go get you some good old New York municipal water. Don’t think I haven’t noticed that you haven’t been drinking enough.”

Raph, somewhat deflated, settled his shell against the wall grumpily. “New York water tastes like chlorine.”

Don’s dark eyes sparkled. “You like 18th century water better?”

“Eh.” Raph shrugged. “I got used to it.”

Don and Leo exchanged a quick, subtle smile.

Before Leo left, he rested a hand on Donnie’s shoulder. “You doing okay?”

Donnie nodded. “Yeah. I’m good.” His eyes darted toward Raph and the corner of his mouth twitched. “I’m not the one who almost died back there.”

“Well, Don, you sorta did.” Leo’s gaze rested uneasily on the blanket that covered the shell.

Donnie grinned sweetly, brow ridges raised. “Not any more. Not after Renet did what she apparently just did. But I know what you mean. And I’m okay. Thanks, Leo.” 

If it were up to Donatello, he would’ve found somewhere to dispose of the shell on his own, permanently, secretly, and with no fuss—the wet concrete of a skyscraper construction site, for instance. The bottom of the Mariana Trench would have been ideal. Or, better yet, the lava chamber of an active volcano, One-Ring style, he thought longingly. Drop it. Leave it. Forget all about it.

But he was not so lucky.

Donnie contended that, because the other part of the bifurcated timeline had collapsed into oblivion and he had never actually died back there, they really had no need to have any kind of ceremony for his other shell. Splinter was not so easily persuaded.

“Just because something does not currently exist, my son, it does not mean that it never did.”

It was hard logic to argue with.

Not that Donnie didn’t try.

He expected to find a little more sympathetic understanding when he brought it up with April.

They sat together on her fire escape in much the same positions they’d held when he’d told her of his discovery of the shell in the first place.

A glass of wine rested in April’s palm, and a mug of black coffee sat cupped between Donnie’s hands.

Tonight’s sky was a light-bleached orange monochrome. Donnie missed the star-lit Maryland nights of Ben’s time. But sharing the evening with a close friend felt just right. And what New York City lacked in sky, it made up for, to some extent, in light-spangled cityscape.

“I guess I don’t get why Master Splinter is still so intent on this,” Don complained. “Renet destroyed the time loop; she collapsed that side of the bifurcated timestream altogether. She ensured that there is never a Donatello who doesn’t find that shell, so it is the sole remnant of something that literally never happened . Why do we need a whole ritual for something that, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists?” Donnie’s voice rose and he gestured so widely that some of his coffee sloshed out of the mug in his hand.

April swirled the pinot noir in her glass, looking into its depths. “What do your brothers say?”

Don huffed. “Not much. Mikey is cooking enough to feed a moderately sized army. Raph is stewing. Leo is meditating. More than usual. Everybody’s a little—I don’t know—rough around the edges, I guess. All the more reason to just get rid of the thing and get back to normal, right?”

April’s answering twitch of her lips was noncommittal. “And you think getting ‘rid’ of the shell will fix the problem?”

Donnie wilted a little. Resting his forehead against the metal handrail of the fire escape, he closed his eyes. “I guess not. I don’t even really know what the problem is anymore. If it was rescuing Ben and saving the timeline, we did that. If it was preventing me from dying in 1758, that’s fixed, too.” Don raised his hands helplessly. “So why are we going to Northampton? Why do we need to—” he broke off, gesturing into the air.

April took a long sip of her wine and, for a moment, they sat in a melancholy silence. Then, April said, “My grandmother tied a red ribbon around each and every one of her children’s wrists when they were born. She kept them tied on until they turned one year old. My mom, her brother, all her sisters.”

Donnie gazed at April, mystified.

“It was a tradition,” April continued. “A ritual, you could say. It was something she brought with her from the Old Country—something about deflecting evil, protecting her babies from the perils of the world. And she faced a lot of those when she was young. She lost three siblings to various accidents and diseases when she was a little girl, you know? My bubbe knew all about peril.”

“A ritual—” Donnie intoned, beginning to catch on.

“Yeah, a ritual. Ritual helps people deal, Donnie. In a merciless, chaotic world, ritual helps us face those parts of life we can’t actually control. Like your siblings dying of diptheria in Poland…” April paused. “Or your brother leaving you. Even after he promised he wouldn’t.”

Donnie’s heart leapt straight into his throat. “But I didn’t—!”

“You did .” April’s voice, though still gentle, was nevertheless unyielding. “You did. Maybe not a ‘you’ that you remember, but you in all the ways that matter. You left them. You left us. Renet popped in with her Valley Girl accent and  her frantic story about saving the universe and not having any time to gather your brothers, and off you went. Alone. You followed her straight into that maw of a portal, and that was it.”

“But I had to. Well, that previous me had to. She said the timeline was at risk; millions—billions, even—of lives were in the balance.”

“Yes. I’m not debating the logic with you, Don.”

A plea— “It was the right choice!”

“It was .” April affirmed with a sharp nod. “Irrefutably, it was.”

“So why are we arguing?”

“Because sometimes the right choice still sucks. Sometimes the right choice still leaves unintended consequences. Sometimes the right choice still hurts other people. And, right now, your brothers are hurting, Don. They’re not thinking about all those lives and the salvaged universe. Those are real enough, but they’re abstract. Your brothers are thinking about that empty shell and what it would be like on the other side of that timestream when you were just gone . Just like you described to us after Drako. Minus one brother. Minus one son. Minus one friend. That’s the only math that would’ve mattered to us if you’d disappeared.”

Don looked up into April’s face, a picture of misery. “I might’ve had enough time to call. Renet didn’t say. And she would’ve at least come back to tell them… She would have let them know?” Donnie’s voice rose into a question at the end.

“Tssk!” April hissed a laugh through her teeth. “ That’s your defense?”

“I didn’t know I needed one.” Defeated, Donnie pressed his head back against the cool metal.

“Look,” April’s voice softened. “Nobody’s mad at you. Everybody gets it. You did the only thing that any Donatello could possibly do. But your brothers—all of us—we just need a chance to help process it. You know? Before Mikey stress-cooks through a whole year’s food budget in the space of a week.”

Don gave a quick smile, listening closely as April continued. “A ritual gives us that. Just like my bubbe with those ribbons. That ritual helped her feel like she was protecting her kids, like she was doing something. And this will help us feel that, too. It offers us an opportunity to be sad. To be together. To try to forgive the universe for being so deeply messed up. This isn’t for you, Donnie. It’s for us .”

April stretched out her hand. “Okay?”

Don, head still lowered, reached to grasp it. “Okay.”

And so, a mere two nights later, Donatello found himself, along with Mikey and Splinter, in the back of the Battle Shell, on the long ride to Northampton. Raph was driving, Leo navigating. The extra shell, now wrapped neatly in a clean white sheet, was squeezed between two of the back seats to avoid banging it about. April and Casey had gone ahead to prepare the way and chop firewood for the cremation.

While Splinter slept or meditated (Donnie couldn’t be completely sure which), Donatello’s fingers nervously worried at a knot on his bo. Usually, reciting a particular litany of rather beautiful equations involving unreal numbers in his head could soothe his muddled feelings, but they weren’t working at the moment. His thoughts kept meandering out of his control to his extreme discomfort with what lay ahead. His conversation with April had helped him come around to it, but that didn’t mean he was settled with it.

His whole family had been subdued, each in their own way, as they packed the Battle Shell, disguised as a “Tortuga Bros” moving truck, for the trip. But no one was as restless or as anxious as Donatello.

Fully absorbed in his own thoughts, Donnie was suddenly surprised to find his brother on the bench seat beside him. Mikey pulled Donnie to him and gently laid his head on Donatello’s shoulder. “Bro, give it a rest. You’re gonna wear that thing down to a twig. And then where will we be when we’re attacked by tree-people from the future?”

Don smiled softly and rested his cheek comfortably against the top of Mikey’s head. “Tree-people, huh?”

“Yep. And they’re gonna be so pissed.”

Don hummed agreeably and laid the bo down. Mikey took up his brother’s now-empty hand to enclose it within his own. “Donnie, can I ask you something?

“Sure.”

“So, the only reason that we were in the lair with you when Renet came was because you found your shell with the tracker in it, right?”

“Right.”

“And the only reason that shell had a tracker in it was because you were worried about disappearing.”

“Yeah.” Donnie didn’t like where this was going.

“And the reason you were worried about disappearing was because of what you saw in that alternate future. The one Ultimate Drako sent you to.”

“Yes.”

“So, now that you did see that alternate future, and you did drill a hole in your shell for the tracker, and we were with you when Renet came…that means that the alternate future never happens at all and that whole timeline collapsed, too. Just like what Renet said happened to the time loop. Right?”

Don let out a breath through his nose. “I don’t know, Mikey. I hope so. I’d like to think so. But you’d have to ask Renet. I don’t really understand it at all; I’m no Timelord.”

Mikey raised a finger. “Lord of Time.”

“Right.” Don smiled. “I’m no Lord of Time.”

They shared the silence for a minute, listening to the thrum of the bass that emanated from the speakers in the front.

“You put the tracker in, didn’t you?” Mikey asked.

“What?”

“In your shell. After all this, you still put the tracker in your shell. Even though you don’t really need it anymore.”

“Yes.”

Mikey released a breath. “Good.”

“And I kept the extra from that shell.” Don gestured to the large white bundle.

“What?!”

“Yeah. It’s an Utrom battery, Mikey. It’s a few hundred years old now, but it is clearly still working. There are only five others like it on the planet. Now there are six! I wasn’t just going to stand by while it went up in smoke.”

“Whoa. That’s cheating or something, bro.” Mikey raised his head to look at Don, his eyes wide and admiring.

Donnie grinned. “So, send the time-police after me. I’m keeping it.”

“Pfft! You’re such a rebel!” Mikey lay his head back down on Don’s shoulder. “But I’m not ratting on you.”

“You know what’s good for you,” Donnie teased.

“You’ve been pretty quiet the last couple days. You good with this?”

“I don’t know about good with it. Let’s settle for ‘resigned.’”

“April gave you a talking-to?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s real convincing.”

Donnie sighed. “Yeah.”

Mikey shifted his head slightly to look at the shell. “Look, Master Splinter is right. We need to do this. You weren’t the only one who had some kinda feelings about that thing, you know? But I get why you’re wiggin’ out. You’ve never liked being the center of attention. And to be attending your own funeral? Duuuude .”

“Yeah.”

“You think Leo will give a speech?”

“No.”

“Leo’s good at the speech-giving, though. It’d be good .”

“ Stop .”

“Hey, if it’s any help, think of it as for Ben. My man saved the universe and no one even knows! I know he died a really, really long time ago. But he was our friend, and for us, we were with him just a few days ago, and now he’s gone. We weren’t able to be at his funeral, you know? You weren’t able to mourn for him. Just like those other brothers weren’t able to mourn for you.” Mikey’s voice edged up at the end, a strain that caused Don to clasp his brother’s hand a little more tightly.

“That’s a good idea, Mikey. I do miss Ben. It hurts to know that he’s not out there.”

“This can be his ceremony, too. If it helps.”

“Yeah. His ceremony, too,” Don agreed.

They stayed like that for the rest of the drive, Mikey eventually falling asleep on Don’s shoulder, a small line of drool marking the spot.

Unseen, Splinter softly smiled.

It did help.

As Splinter chanted the sutras, Leo joining because he was the only one who knew them well enough, Don remembered Ben. He thought of the joy they shared in Newton’s laws and the stained-glass structure of a dragonfly’s wing. As he did, cedar incense filled his nose. Its smoke rolled upward into the night sky, preparing a path for what came next.

Earlier that day, Mikey had spent some time on his own collecting coneflowers near the barn, and he’d wordlessly piled them in a pink-and-purple heap, along with one favorite comic book, over the sheet-enveloped shell as they’d raised the pyre of kindling and logs around it. Now, as Raph lit the tinder at its base, Donnie could see his brother battling emotions that threatened to choke him. Tears gleamed on Raph’s cheeks and his jaw muscles clenched. In the light of the flames, Don made room for Raph to come and sit beside him, drawing him in close. The four turtles huddled together under the thick wool blankets April had brought out for them, watching the bonfire grow. Sutras silenced, the only sound was the crackle of the blaze and the sharp pop of pine logs.

Donnie thought of the story he’d read online after they’d returned. Of how Ben had died a septuagenarian after decades of work to form and reform this new nation, just in its infancy. And how, on the night of Ben’s funeral, something strange had happened. His tidy cabin, his beautiful clock, his stacks of books and papers—they’d all burned. No one knew how or why, but they’d gone up in a conflagration that lit the night.

Now, Donnie watched the luminous embers of this bonfire. As sparks drifted upward, mingling with the stars, Don thought about Ben’s deep sense of faith. And he imagined that this was Ben’s tribute, and that those were the glowing fragments of all those things his friend treasured, rising heavenward toward him— now to be joined by a shell, a comic, and some coneflowers.

Something deep and tight in Donatello’s chest unclenched. Feeling at peace for the first time since that Sunday on the banks of the Patapsco, Donnie nestled a little more heavily into Raphael’s side and took comfort in the weight of his brother’s arm, firm and grounding, over the back of his shell. He felt the presence of Leo and Mikey, protectively close, and sensed Splinter, Casey, and April in the flickering firelight just beyond.

With a breath of gratitude, Donatello welcomed the heat of the flames—of that past that never was—and as he did, he relaxed into the knowledge of a whole, unknown future still out there, awaiting him.