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Mikey sat on the cot in Donnie’s lab car; he couldn’t follow what Donnie was rambling about, but tried to listen anyway. Something about putting people’s brains in computers? Horror cliché alert. He glanced at the clock nailed to the car’s wall, nearly three in the morning now. He sighed and heard Donnie chuckle. Mikey looked down just in time to see Donnie look back at him from the computer screen.
“What? Neuro-mapping not as interesting as it sounds?”
Mikey returned the smile. “No, I love all that sci-fi talk you do! It’s just getting late – well, early, actually. Do you want to try and get some sleep? Just a couple hours will be good for you, you know.”
Donnie gulped and silence filled the already still lair. It’s true that he’d been having a hard time sleeping. It had only been nearly a week since their experiences with Ultimate Draco, since they’d been scattered across time and space. While Donnie had, eventually, told his family some of what he’d been through, there were some things he wasn’t ready to deal with just yet. His family had been kind and patient, but it felt too much like pity to be a comfort anymore. Mikey especially, seemed to be trying to spend time with him. It was the fourth night in a row that the two of them had stayed awake till the early morning together.
Donnie didn’t need to be babied. “You don’t have to stay up with me, you know.”
“I know,” Mikey replied before Donnie had finished the sentence, smiling, trying to reassure Donnie that he wasn’t a burden.
“Then why are you here?” Donnie said it meaner than he’d intended, but he could blame the sleep deprivation as well as any growing frustration at being treated with kid gloves for the past week.
Mikey blinked at him, “What do you mean?”
“I mean, if you’re not here to keep your poor, traumatized brother company when he can’t sleep, then why aren’t you sleeping? You literally love sleeping!”
Mikey blinked at him then chuckled slightly, “Maybe your poor, traumatized brother can’t sleep and needs the company.”
Donnie scoffed, “Yeah, cause getting teleported to a world where we’re superheroes, beloved by humanity and called upon by Mayor O’Neil to save the world sounds so horrible!”
A strange emotion passed over Mikey’s face, but he quickly shrugged it off and talked past it. He stood up and took a step towards Donnie with his hands up and saying, “Alright fine, you can be right about that, but I’m still right about needing at least a little sleep.”
Wait, hang on. Something in the back of Donnie’s mind started creeping up to the front, something was wrong. Mikey wouldn’t really make a joke like that, would he? He would make fun of their other traumatic experiences, try to make them smaller and easier to deal with. But that kind of joke, didn’t make Donnie’s experience feel smaller, it made Mikey’s feel bigger. That’s not something Mikey had a habit of doing. And as the seemingly poor taste joke turned over in Donnie’s mind, other pieces started to fall together. This was the fourth night in a row Mikey had stayed up with him…
“Why are you still skipping training?”
Mikey stilled, staring at Donnie. “Uh, what?”
He crossed his arms and set Mikey with a scrutinizing glare, “The way you tell it, your ninja training did what four superpowered turtles couldn’t do. Where you really the one who defeated The Sliver? Cause if you were, I’d think you’d be training as much as Leo does, but you’re not.”
“Uh, yeah, I’m a Battle Nexus Champion! Of course I defeated The Sliver, and that means I don’t need training,” Mikey said, but there was something missing. He was as loud as usual, but then his confidence seemed… shaken? Like there was something scared or uncertain right underneath it and right now, he was too tired to fully cover it up.
“Mikey,” Donnie said in the firmest big brother voice he could muster this early in the morning.
There was a moment of silence before he answered, “You’re already dealing with a lot, you don’t need my problems on top of it.”
“You’re the one who brought it up!” Donnie groaned, then took a deep breath. “Just… I’m done being the one who needs help. Let me do for you what you’ve been doing for me. It’s my turn, so spill!”
Mikey stared at him for the better part of a minute and Donnie worried he’d fallen asleep on his feet. Then he sighed and said, “Do, uh- do you think Master Splinter would ever, like, go evil?”
Donnie almost took a step back, he was so surprised that even the thought. The question almost didn’t make sense. “Of course not!”
“Exactly! I mean, it’s bullshit, right? He’d never!” Mikey emphatically said, but his voice grew smaller with each declaration.
Donnie put his hands up, stepping toward his brother with the intent to stop a sudden shaking that was rolling through him. “Mikey, why are you worried Master Splinter would go evil?”
Mikey took in a deep breath and the shaking – didn’t stop but settled some. “I know I said that Sliver was that world’s Shredder - or I guess Raph said it and I didn’t say he was wrong – because he wasn’t! Sliver was the big evil bad guy! He had a bomb made to kill literally every living thing on the planet outside his tower of evil. That’s bad guy stuff! And I just… It wasn’t Oroku Saki though. It was Splinter. He was the one who made a – a genocide bomb! And I just – I know they’re not the same person, our realities are so, sooooo different. But it keeps nagging in the back of my head. What if? You know?”
Donnie cringed, he did know. Donnie could empathize with confusing what he’d seen in the other reality with what he sees here. “What if” was ringing around his head all the time now too. He subconsciously kept grabbing Mikey’s arm to make sure it was there, kept testing Leo’s sight, kept walking around at night making sure all of them were still there and safe. Mikey had stayed up with him for four nights in a row, and it was still a comfort, even when he just fell asleep and snored on the lab’s cot.
“Splinter, our Splinter, would never go evil,” Donnie said… with the surety of someone who never saw it, the surety his brothers gave him when he told them about the Shredder taking over. “He loves us and he’d never hurt-”
“He loved them too,” Mickey cut in, “It wasn’t enough.”
“What?”
“The Sliver. He loved his sons, but hated everyone else. His plan was to kill everyone who wasn’t them!” Mikey fell back onto the cot, staring at the floor with tired eyes. “And they loved him too. There was so much pain and regret when they fought him. They were ready to give up and just let him win, because it was easier than fighting their father, the person who raised them and taught them how to be heroes. They all still loved him and he loved them and it wasn’t enough. Sliver still tried to wipe out humanity and we had to kill him, we had to do whatever it took to stop him.
And it just! Destroys everything, you know? In every story, love’s supposed to win! Turn the bad guy good again! You know, Darth Vader turning on the evil emperor! Family is supposed to be stronger than that! How! How could he still be evil when his sons still loved him? How could he still be evil when he still loved his sons? That’s not how it’s supposed to work! God, and now! Now I’m left here wondering- if we were like them. If we’d been used the way they had, and Splinter decided to take it out on all life on earth…
And then I can see it. Our father getting so fed up with how humanity treats us…”
Donnie stared at Mikey with his mouth on the floor. That was what Mikey had seen? That was where Mikey had gone? He covered it so well, telling them just enough details for them not to ask for more, let them fill in the blanks with whatever made the most sense to them. An evil Splinter… Donnie didn’t know how he’d react to that. An evil Splinter who still loved them? Who wanted to kill all humanity? Who got so close killing all humanity that they had to kill him?
“Mikey,” Donnie started, lowering himself next to his brother on the cot, but he didn’t know where to go from there.
Mikey breathed a joyless laugh, “I think you saw his grave before I killed him.”
Donnie grabbed Mikey’s arm, squeezing it tight. Mikey bouncing between poor tasting jokes and hysterical rants was- this was the worst emotional state Donnie’s ever seen him. Even future Mikey had emotional stability in the face of an apocalypse, even if he was cruel and cynical.
There was a long silence before he asked, “Do you have nightmares?”
“You know I’ve always had scary dreams,” Mikey answered in an almost self-teasing tone, still trying to deflect the pain with humor. “But now, even the good ones are bad. Even if we’re all happy and safe and loved - it wasn’t enough to stop it from happening to them, it could happen to us too.”
“It could happen to us,” Donnie repeated under his breath and closed his eyes, images of his aged up brothers dying at the hands of Karai and the Shredder. His grip on Mikey’s arm got painfully tight. “But we can do our best to stop it, we can change it… We have to change it…”
“Don,” Mikey’s voice was quiet and he gripped Donnie’s hand tightly. “We can avoid your reality by sticking together and taking care of each other. Especially taking care of you, right?” There was a beat of silence and Donnie didn’t say anything. He wanted to say something, that it wasn’t so simple, but it had been hadn’t it? He’d vanished and everything fell apart, he came back and everything started coming together again. So Mikey continued, “But there’s not really anything we can do to avoid my little dark prophecy, is there? Sticking together and taking care of each other… is what drove them to that ending. Too much love. There’s nothing we can do to avoid it.”
“But that world was so different,” Donnie reiterated, “They didn’t even have our names, they had superpowers, they were so different. I don’t think it’s worth worrying about.”
“But you’re still going to worry about that apocalypse future you saw, even though it was so different, and we know how to avoid it.”
“I’m not going to be babied for the next 30 years,” Donnie grumbled.
Mikey shook his head, “Technically, just for the next year. Once that’s over, the future you saw can’t happen, because you won’t be able to be missing for 30 years, just 29.”
“Mikey…”
“It’s not like I can just, decide to stop worrying about it,” Mikey said, “I know your alternate reality is more likely than mine, but it’s not impossible. It happened once, it could happen again.”
Donnie thought back to that experience, his brother’s seeing him again after so much time had passed for them. How ready they were to go along with anything he said. What April had said about hope. “And we’ll deal with it together if it comes. Yours or mine.”
“We can try,” Mikey nodded and sighed, “Let’s go get some sleep, you can stay in my room if you want? I’ve got the bunk beds.”
Donnie nodded, he was exhausted. This was the fourth night in a row they’d stayed up this late together.