Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Casey Jones had known for years that his grandfather was involved in some kind of mob shit.

Not the dumb mob shit his dad did with the petty posturing and shootouts with the cops and beating up local business owners just to feel powerful. Serious mob shit, over in Japan, yakuza and everything. Or so Casey had to assume. Grandfather didn’t read him in on anything important—he said if Casey really wanted to know he could stop running around and sabotaging the Purple Dragons like a vigilante with delusions of grandeur. And Casey wasn’t about to go easy on his dad just to get an in on cool ninja stuff when he could go hang out with Raph and the guys and get cool ninja stuff that way, so he stayed out of it. Granddad was chill enough about it that Casey was staying at his building during a particularly bad patch with Hun and mostly had the run of the place. Extremely polite ninja were in position to turn him back from anywhere he wasn’t supposed to be, but the advantage of being friends with people who did cool ninja stuff was that he picked up a thing or two. It wasn’t that hard to get into the basement.

He just wanted to do it because he'd been bored. Granddad had cancelled their evening game, which not only left Casey at loose ends but was unusual as hell. Usually spending time getting his butt kicked at Go or Chess or just a set of riddles was Granddad’s condition for Casey staying over. He didn’t accept Casey phoning it in, either. There was this ice-cold tone he got when he reminded Casey “My time is very valuable. When I am here, I want you present,” that was more effective at getting Casey to sit down and shut up than any public school teacher he’d had yet. So if it had their game getting cancelled, it had to be big.

Casey had also known for years that his grandfather had some whole Hatfield-McCoy level thing with some shmucks he’d never met. It hadn’t really seemed important before, just a kind of family trivia that was less important than the schedule for hockey practice or where he could track down more batteries for his shockey stick or the best entrances to the sewers to meet up with the guys.

It sure seemed important now, because he’d overheard one of the patrols talking about a prisoner the master—Grandfather—had a particular interest in, and something about a shell. Casey had come down here because he was bored and now he was pressing his ear to a glass to a wall hoping desperately that he was wrong.

Instead, what he got to hear was his grandfather Saki’s unmistakeable tone saying “Oh no, Hamato. You don’t get away that easy. While I’m here I want you present.”

If Casey had even a single little shred of hope left, it was crushed by the equally unmistakeable voice of Mikey saying “Yeah, well, I want an infinite pizza, but we don’t always get what we want. And I learned that from the Eagles.”

Rolling Stones, you idiot, Casey thought, because Mikey getting classic rock references wrong was his running joke to drive Raph up the wall, and did not say, because if he was caught now there was no way he could pull off a daring rescue.

Rescue his best friend’s brother, who was his friend too, who was getting tortured by Casey’s Grandfather, out of the basement of a building full of ninja. No big. He’d been practicing for this against his asshole dad for years. What difference did another generation make when it came to assholes.

Casey had to wait for three minutes until his fingers stopped shaking enough to set the glass down silently.

The Shredder’s guys were pretty persistent, Mikey would give them that. But he was persistenter than all of them and had practice talking about only what would drive people up a wall. They didn’t even get as far as breaking his shell before the Shredder said “Enough. Leave him for now. Once he’s had some time to consider his position…”

Mikey would have told him what position he could consider, using language Splinter would have been disappointed in, but he’d bitten his tongue pretty bad when they started putting hot shards into his feet and if he talked he was pretty sure blood would come out. So he just grunted something that didn’t sound nearly as chill as he wanted and glared at all of them on their way out of the room.

Then he let his eyes slide closed and tried to focus on his breathing. It suuuuuuuucked. His everything hurt, but his lungs extra hurt whenever he tried to take a deep breath. It was hard enough meditating in the dojo, when he could listen to the distant gurgling of water and his family breathing. Like this, with so many parts of his body throbbing and screaming at him, he couldn’t get enough focus to figure out if he still had all his toenails. Forget mind-over-mattering the pain.

it was going to be fine. His brothers were coming. They would get him out of here, and kick Foot ninja butt, and he could go home and crawl into an ice bath and do a big sleepy until everything stopped hurting so much. And no matter how long it took, he wasn’t going to tell the Shredder shit.

When the door creaked open, he didn’t even bother opening his eyes. Nope, not happening. Prisoner too sleepy to torture, come back later.

“Mike,” a probably-hallucinatory voice hissed. “Hey. Mikey. Wake up.”

The hand that prodded him in a miraculously not-hurting shoulder was too vivid to be a hallucination. So was that cologne. Mikey cracked one eye open. “Casey…?” Ooh, yeah, blood.

“Yeah, bud. It’s me.” There was a rattling and the chains holding him to a table fell away. Mikey started struggling up immediately, hissing every time he put pressure on a new injury. Still not bad enough to stop him from getting upright to spit.

“Hey, hey. Take it easy.” Casey was there immediately, stabilizing his shell as Mikey coughed out the blood that had been clotting in his mouth. “Here.”

A water bottle nudged at his lips, and Mikey swished and spat to clear out the last of the blood before making grabby hands. “Water. Gimme.” His throat hurt too. That was just rude.

Casey let him handle his own drink, looking over at the door. He didn’t have his full vigilante getup on—no mask, no paint. Just a gym bag slung over his back with a stick poking out of it.

“Where’s everyone else?” Mikey asked, once he’d gotten enough water to soothe his throat.

“Look, we’re short on time here, can you walk and talk?”

“Yeah,” Mikey said, more confidently than he felt. He put his feet on the floor and stood up. It took two steps on burning feet before the dizziness hit him like a wall and he was puking back up the water he’d just drunk. Aw, water.

“Jesus, they did a number on you.” Casey nudged under his arm and propped him upright. “C’mon.”

They stumbled out into the hallway like a weird three-legged race while Mikey gritted his teeth. The hallway outside was dim and empty, one light coming from further down that was enough to make Mikey’s eyes hurt. Thankfully Casey turned them away from it, heading deeper into the dark that smelled like cold stone.

“Where’s the others?” Mikey asked again, croaking. Boy, stomach acid and blood did not mix, his mouth tasted nasty.

“Didn’t have time to get ‘em. We’ll call from outside.”

Mikey squinted at him. He sounded weird. What…

Casey turned his head and looked back down the hallway, light spilling over his jaw. It was weird seeing him without his mask. He looked like he was ready to kill someone if he had to. He looked…weirdly familiar.

“Casey,” Mikey said, head spinning in more ways than one. “How did you get here.”

“We don’t have time for this,” Casey said, and tried to keep moving down the hall.

Mikey shoved back and refused to walk. “How did you get here, Casey.” He wasn’t even supposed to come by the lair this week. Said he had family in town.

Casey blew out a breath. “Turns out my grandpa’s involved in a lot of shit.”

The memory of the Shredder’s face in profile, looking ready to kill someone, blinked through Mikey’s brain like a brand. He shoved away from Casey immediately, falling over as he tried to get away.

“Mikey!” Casey came right after him—of course he did, it wasn't like he was hurt, because he lived here, with the Foot, with his grandpa the Shredder. “Mikey, come on, we gotta go.”

“This is a trap, you’re—this is a trick, I’m not going back!”

“Look, we both know I’m too dumb for that.” Casey tried to grab his arm again and Mikey smacked it. It didn’t really work.

“Or that’s what you want me to think, Casey. If that’s even your name. My horoscope SAID to watch out for betrayal today, I should have listened."

“Christ on a cracker.” He grabbed Mikey’s arm and hauled.

Mikey was caught off-guard. His head blurred and he lost track of what was happening until he was slung over Casey’s shoulder, headed down the hallway again. He didn’t like this development at all. He kicked Casey about it.

“Ow, Jesus Mike, stoppit!”

“Put me down put me down put me down!” Every step Casey took jounced his ribs and set a stab of pain into his lungs. He was dimly aware that it would hurt a lot to hit the ground but it would be better than getting carried away by the Shredder’s fucking grandson.

“Shut up and let me save your life, you—oh, fuck.”

Casey coming to a stop hurt almost as much as Casey running, especially when Mikey got squashed between the gym bag and a door. He squeaked out a pitiful little whine that Raph would have made fun of him for for forever, and then another one when hitting the ground hurt half as much as he expected. Which was still a lot.

The other side of the door was even darker than the hallway when Casey shut it. Mikey took advantage of the pressure this took off his eyes to get together a plan to cuss him out. It got ruined before he could right when Casey shoved a hand over his mouth.

Mikey made indignant noises and tried licking and even biting. Casey hissed out something that was too quiet to be identifiable as a curse word.

Footsteps clattered down the hallway, barely audible through the door. Sounded like a lot of guys. His brothers? If Casey was lying about his family he could be lying about where they were—

“He’s escaped!” shouted a distant voice that was definitely not Mikey’s brothers. Oh. Mikey stopped trying to bite the hand that shushed him.

The feet came back in the other direction and the doorknob rattled as someone tried it. Casey tensed like he was getting ready to run.

<“Locked. He couldn't have gone in here,”> one of them reported to the others in Japanese. The footsteps moved away.

Casey blew out a breath and took his hand away from Mikey’s mouth. “Now do you believe I’m on your side?”

Mikey glowered at him. He didn’t talk to liars.

Casey made a face and wiped off his hand on his pants. “Look. Hate me if you want. Think whatever you want. Just let me get you out of here."

Sometimes Casey really hated being right. Like, for example, when he told Mikey that they didn’t have time for Mikey to argue with him. He’d wanted to get past the standard patrol routes before the alarm was raised. Now, they were moving in short bursts from safe spot to safe spot, and there weren’t any alternative routes through dropped ceilings that Mikey was in good enough shape to take. They had to stick to hallways, doors, stairways, all those conventional and obvious points of weakness.

Granddad liked aggressive strategies. He said defensive plays just gave your opponent time to think of something clever. Now that the security cameras were down, he was approaching the sweep of his headquarters the same way, with lots of patrols in motion. Which meant that there was no one guarding the stairs up, thank fuck.

It also meant that a particularly zealous ninja came down the stairs just in time to see Casey helping Mikey get up to the landing. The turtle was wincing with every step but refused to allow Casey to carry him again.

Casey immediately ducked out from where he was providing the little support Mikey would allow and yanked down his shockey stick. Feint for the legs, spin to catch the ninja’s counterstrike on his go bag, spin back and slam the electrified end into the soldier’s neck. He went down hard and fast. Casey had set the weapon to max voltage already—couldn’t afford not to play for keeps.

“Dude,” Mikey said. “You’ve got a knife in your bag.”

He groped around and yanked out a kunai that had apparently been torn out of the ninja’s hand during the strike at his go bag. “Oh. huh.” He held it out to Mikey. “If I give you this, are you gonna stab me?”

“…no,” Mikey said, without much conviction.

“Good to know,” Casey said, and stuck it in one of the pockets of his cargo pants. Mikey pouted at him. “Come on. We’re almost there.”

“Where’s there?” He hadn’t actually gotten any less suspicious, which, okay, hurt Casey’s feelings a little bit. But also he couldn’t exactly blame the guy.

“Door to the street. Twenty feet from a manhole. We’ll get down and call your bros so Granddad can’t catch the signal.” For someone who scoffed at modern technology as causing carelessness and weakening valuable skills, Granddad was pretty up-to-date on setting up systems inside his buildings to tell him exactly what was going through every phone call and internet search made on the network. Casey had never tried seeing if that would work on the shell-phone Donnie had made him, and wasn’t about to take the risk now.

“So you are going to trap them,” Mikey said. “Why else would you want professional bait!”

“I want them to get you out of here, brainiac,” Casey said, exasperated.

“That’s exactly what a guy planning a trap would say,” Mikey accused.

Casey groaned. “Okay, you’re out of it.” He ran up the last flight of stairs and made sure the hallway was clear, and then went back down to help Mikey. Mikey accepted this in bad grace, but as long as he wasn’t kicking, Casey would count his blessings.

They made it up the stairs. They made it to the door. Casey got only enough time to think that maybe he had been wrong, and maybe they would make it all the way outside before a shout came from the end of the hall.

“Here! The prisoner is getting away!”

“Fuck,” Casey hissed, and shoved the door open. “Mikey, manhole, thirty feet left. Go.”

“But—”

They had never had the time to argue, and now they had negative time to argue. Casey spushed Mikey out the door—so hard he stumbled, but at least he’d be alive to apologize to—and yanked it shut as soon as he was clear.

He jammed the stolen kunai in the crack between the door and its hinges, and kicked it. A ninja kick slammed into him from behind, but his go bag took the brunt of it and he caught himself on the wall before he could fall all the way to the floor. He spun, snarling, and used his shockey stick to take down his first attacker. There were more coming, he knew it, and he needed to buy Mikey a little more time.

A second kick, a third, and the kunai handle broke clean off, leaving the blade stuck in the gap. Even if they took him down, that should buy a few minutes.

Casey shrugged out of his go bag—really, he should have known better than to think he was getting out of here—and turned to face his grandfather’s elite ninja with nothing but a hockey stick he’d rigged with a homemade taser and a broken knife handle.

Some backup would’ve been nice, but it was better knowing that his friends would be safer without him.

“Well?” he yelled, when the ninja recognized him and started milling around in confusion. “You want a piece of me? Come on!"

Mikey wasn’t ready for the door to shut behind him. It didn’t make sense. How could a bunch of angry Foot ninja chase him out of there if the door shut behind him?

Despite appearances to the contrary, he wasn’t actually stupid, and even with his hands aching the day he couldn’t get a manhole open was the day you could make soup in his shell. He got away immediately.

Once he was nice and safe under the streets, he hesitated—would Casey be coming after him? Should he wait?

No. No, just because Casey had gotten him out, that didn’t mean he was okay again. Mikey had to get home. He had to warn everybody. He hadn’t told the Shredder anything, but Casey knew where they lived. Casey knew…

…Casey knew where they lived this whole time, and the Shredder had never come knocking.

That thing where Mikey wasn’t actually stupid? He might have to take that back.

Wasn’t like he’d be much help right now. He just had to get home, and warn everybody—wait, no, he had to tell them where Casey was—wait—

“Mikey!”

Mikey had never been this glad to hear Leo’s panicky mother-hen voice in his life. He leaned against one of the least-gross patches of wall and tried to look so cool and uninjured as his brothers ran down the walkway towards him.

“Heyyyyyyyyyy,” he said. Look at him, this was no big thing, he was totally cool. “Shredder’s hotel service sucks, bee tee dubs. Zero out of ten, do not—” His knees gave out before he could finish his cool spiel and he was out as soon as his head hit the floor.

Chapter Text

Casey took down at least five ninja before they managed to wrestle his shockey stick off him, and definitely felt his feet and fists connect with a few more before they got all his limbs and wrestled him to the floor.

He kept kicking and bucking even when they had him down, because one lesson he’d learned over and over his whole life that even when someone had beaten you, you could still make their life pretty damn miserable as long as you didn’t admit you were beaten.

“Grandson. Enough.”

Casey froze as he processed his granddad’s voice, and then went limp. There went the ballgame, then. He pressed his face into the floor and breathed out, long and slow. Manacles snapped around his wrists.

“Bring him,” Oroku Saki ordered, and Casey was hoisted to his feet and frog-marched down the hall. He didn’t bother fighting. Had to save his energy. Casey had taken enough beatings in his day that he knew how much pain he could handle, and it probably wouldn’t be less than his grandfather knew how to inflict.

Going up the stairs instead of down was...a surprise. He thought he had a grasp on how things were going to go when they got to Granddad’s office, but instead of breaking out the needles or the thumbscrews or whatever, Casey’s grandfather just took a seat behind his Western-style desk and waved for the goons to shove Casey down into a padded leather chair.

Casey looked up finally and met his grandfather’s eyes, setting his jaw and not bothering to hide his fury.

“It seems I have indulged you too much, grandson,” Grandfather said. Casey’s shockey stick was laying on the table between them. He drummed his fingers on it before he spoke again. “Did you design this yourself?”

Casey jerked his head, not quite a nod.

“Use your words, if you please.”

Casey scowled. “Yeah. It’s mine.”

Saki looked it up and down. “And here I thought it was just a toy for your silly obsession.” Casey didn’t rise to the bait. “Where is the Hamato?”

“Gone,” Casey said. “You’re never gonna find him.” He let the New York creep over his vowels, thickening them in the way his grandfather always hated. It worked. Saki sneered.

“And what did you destroy to accomplish this?” he asked. “Should I expect to lose my loyal soldiers to bombs? Fire?”

“No,” Casey snapped.

“What was your plan, precisely? We have your bag. If you tell me what you were stealing, it will make this much easier for both of us.” His face was smoothing out. Icing over. He sounded so goddamn reasonable about this.

“I didn’t steal nothing,” Casey bit out. “That whole bag is mine. Carried it in, I’ll carry it out.”

“No sabotage? No theft of information?”

Casey’s hands clenched behind his back. “No. Grandfather.” He made it an accusation. Granddad just smiled.

“A disappointing lack of ambition, but a reassuring loyalty.”

What?

“I suppose you aren’t ready to tell me where the abomination fled to yet.”

“Go to hell,” Casey said, eloquently.

Granddad sighed, like he did when Casey made a stupid move to end one of their board games faster. “Casey, this is for your own good. Look at how fast he abandoned you. They will always put their own blood first. You must learn to do the same.”

“Yeah, fat fucking chance,” Casey said. Four years of being polite and not swearing, out the window. What was Granddad going to do, torture him about it?

Instead of scolding him or threatening to break out the hot irons, his grandfather just shook his head. “I knew I should have started introducing you to the family business sooner. But after the mess your father made of his operations—” The mess Hun made? Hey, Casey had worked hard on that mess. “—and your complete refusal to apply yourself, I had little faith you would be a sound investment.”

“Gee, thanks for that.”

Granddad smiled at him without teeth. “I don’t make the same mistake twice, Grandson.”

Wow, Casey thought he hated the sound of that. “So kill me and get it over with.”

Saki actually laughed. “Oh, that would be even more of a waste now that you’re finally proving what you're capable of.” He pressed a button or something under his desk, and the door opened. He said something to the guy in Japanese that sounded like instructions—Casey caught his name and the word ‘room’ and not much else—and then said in English “We’ll talk more tomorrow,” before Casey was once again marched away.

They took him right back to the room that was his whenever he stayed at his Granddad’s place, which was an upgrade from the dank little dungeon Mikey had gotten locked in. Casey was already making plans on how to bust out of here again, so he let them take off the cuffs and shut him inside.

And then the lock clicked behind him, and he realized it was on the outside now, and also that he might have made a mistake.

Lock was on the outside. At least the hinges were on the inside. He was going to have trouble getting any kind of leverage on them, since when he dug through the bag that had been brought back and left on his bed someone had pulled out his toolkit. And his spare knife. And his grappling gun, and his shell-phone, and the throwing stars he’d borrowed from Raph.

On a hunch, Casey climbed up on the bed and checked the window. Yeah, those bars on the outside were new. Cute, Granddad.

Casey pressed his forehead against the glass, blew out a long, slow breath. Okay, yeah, this just got a lot harder.

Still. He was down but he wasn’t licked yet.

Raph took up first watch at Mikey’s bedside, once Don had gotten him bandaged up and tucked in. His diagnosis was that the injuries were painful, but not critical. Raph didn’t love that.

He also said it would be better for Mikey to sleep and heal faster. Raph wanted it on record, he didn’t love that either, but it least it had Mikey quiet and not running off anywhere and getting himself more hurt, or vanishing from under their noses, or climbing on Raph’s shell and driving him up the wall until he was yelling at Mikey to go away just so he could get a minute’s peace—

“Raphael,” Splinter said. Raph snapped his head up, guiltily. “You must not blame yourself for this.”

“Well. Good,” Raph said. “’Cause I’m not.” He crossed his arms and kicked at the floor. “I know whose fault this is. It’s that creep Shredder’s fault.”

Splinter’s voice sounded sharp. “Shredder?”

“Yeah. Mikey said something about him before he. Y’know.” Raph jerked an elbow at the bed.

“Of course,” Splinter said. “I thought I...recognized the technique.”

Raph ended up staring. “...Sensei?”

“Yes?”

Raph couldn’t really bring himself to ask Splinter if he’d been tortured by Shredder.

Mikey came to at this point, groaning and mumbling. “...number of that bus…”

“Mikey?” Raph leaned forward, trying not to bump any injuries. “Mikey, can you hear me?”

“Raph, is that you?”

“Yeah, Mikey. It’s me.”

“Come...closer…”

Raph leaned in.

“If I don’t make it...you can have my henway…”

“What?” Mikey must have gotten knocked on the noggin harder than they realized. “What’s a henway?”

“About five pounds.” Mikey cracked an eyelid and grinned at him, splitting his lip again. “Boom. Gottem.”

Raph stared at him. “I’m gonna kill you.”

“Peace,” Splinter said, like they didn’t know what he sounded like when he was trying not to laugh. “Michelangelo, how are you feeling?”

“Ow. I’m feeling ow.”

Raph hit the call button that was just one of Donnie’s repurposed Big Red Buttons and pretended it was like socking Mikey on the shoulder, like this was totally normal. It sort of helped.

“You told us you were going to visit your friend Woody,” Splinter said, gently. “Do you remember what happened?”

Mikey blinked. “Oh, shell, Woody. He’s gotta think I ditched him.”

“I’ll call him,” Raph said, impatient. “What happened?”

Their brothers slammed the door open at that point and Donnie demanded, “Mikey, do you know where you are?”

Answers had to wait for Donnie to finish a concussion test and conclude that yeah, Mikey was concussed. Leo made lots of appropriately concerned noises about it. Donnie just turned down the lights and said, “But the scanners confirmed there’s no internal bleeding or skull fractures, so you should be okay with lots of sleep,”

“Yeah, great,” Raph said, impatient. “We can tie him down. Mikey, how the shell did you get got by Shredder?”

“Wrong place, wrong time,” Mikey said “Ran into some Foot guys breaking into a shop. Didn’t even make it to Woody’s. Did get to see Shredder’s interior decorating, and I gotta say, it sucks.”

“...But you broke out,” Leo said. “Right?”

“Uh,” Mikey said, and shot a furtive glance at Raph. “I think I want a glass of water.”

“I’ve got water bottles,” Donnie said. “Or ice chips, do you want ice chips?”

“Um,” Mikey said, and stole a glance at Raph again.

“Spit it out, Mike,” Raph said.

“Casey’sintheFootbuthehelpedmebreakout,” Mikey said, all in a rush.

Raph didn’t catch most of it, but—“They got Casey? He’s with his grandpa this week, he’s not patrolling.”

“Haha,” Mikey said. It didn’t sound like laughter. “Soooo it turns out his dad being an evil mob boss who sucks kind of...runs in the family?”

“And what the hell does that mean.” Raph was getting annoyed.

“The grandpa he’s with this week is Shredder.”

Raph stared at him. “That’s a stupid joke, Mikey. Even for you.” His voice sounded far away in his own ears.

“No joke, dude.” Mikey looked miserable about it. “He said so himself. Sorry.”

Raph was out of words.

“There were rumors, when I was still in Japan,” Splinter said, slowly. “About Oroku Saki’s son running away to America. Hun being Oroku Hiroto...would not be impossible.”

“Casey’s not in the Foot,” Raph snapped. “He—he wouldn’t.” Casey was his best friend. He had been for years. He’d mentioned his grandpa, old and prickly and demanding. Raph had helped him practice formal things in Japanese to say to him. Casey had said the old guy had weird business, but he also said over and over how much he hated his dad’s gang. He wouldn’t join the Foot, ever.

...Would he? Had he ever fought the Foot with them, or had he always been somewhere else?

“I don’t know, dude,” Mikey said, sounding dubious. “I mean. He knows where we live, and Shredder’s never come here, but...he had all the keys.”

“Sounds like a trick Shredder would play,” Leo said, sounding all leaderly and bitter. “Letting us think someone’s a friend, and then sending him after us.”

Raph rounded on him, teeth bared. “Yeah, well not everyone’s dumb enough to get suckered in when a creepy dude gives him a sword and a compliment, Leo!”

“Yame!” Splinter snapped. “Raphael—”

Yeah, okay, he had maybe crossed a line. “Master Splinter, we have to go after him!”

“No,” Splinter said, sounding absolutely final. “Raphael, I understand your concern for your friend, but for the moment, he is safe.” He held up one hand before Raph could argue again. “Even if he is, as you believe, in opposition to his grandfather, Oroku Saki is not a man to easily let go of anything or anyone he claims as his. I truly believe Casey will not be hurt.”

Raph wanted to argue more, but Donnie clamped a hand on his wrist. “Concussed patients need quiet,” he hissed. “Fight outside my lab.”

Fine. Raph could go outside. Raph could go way outside. He could go back to—

“Raphael,” Splinter said, before Raph had gotten more than five steps down the hallway. “Please don’t make me have to worry whether another of my sons will vanish and come home bleeding tonight.”

Raph hunched his shoulders almost far enough to sink into his shell. “Wasn’t gonna,” he mumbled. Lied. Well, he wasn’t going to now. Splinter sounded all weird and sad like he had when the Shredder first showed up, and he finally told them Oroku Saki had a grudge against their family because Splinter left Japan to escape him.

Splinter laid one furry hand on his head. “I know you’re afraid, but your friend is capable and determined. If he needs to effect his own escape, he will.”

Casey wasn’t having much luck with this escape attempt.

It started out okay. They’d left his belt with him, and the buckle was sturdy enough he could use it to start jiggling the pins out of the hinges. He had to stop every ten seconds and make sure there wasn’t any noise from the hallway, but he made slow and steady progress until all the door needed was one good tug to fall in.

Problem was, he was an idiot who didn’t realize a door would make a noise when it hit the ground. Even if he was lucky and the CC cameras were still down, it wasn’t like ninja had an early bedtime.

Fuck it. He had his stuff, he knew the way out, he had to try. Casey shouldered his bag and started running.

Most of the stuff he’d lost was probably staying lost. Don would kill him for losing one of his shell-phones, but he’d make another if Casey asked nice. Probably another grappling gun, too. He could scrounge another of anything else, maybe pick up a babysitting gig or a shift at the rink and make enough to buy replacements.

He could definitely make another shockey stick, but he didn’t want to. His blood, sweat, and tears were on that thing. It was his. It had taken him three prototypes and a bunch of minor electrical burns to build, and he didn’t want to leave it in Granddad’s hands. Someone who hurt his friends didn’t get to keep even that much of Casey Jones.

If Casey knew his grandfather—and honestly, given recent reveals, he was pretty sure he did—the way he’d been handling the stick during their talk meant he thought it was important. Casey had a hunch about where he would find it.

Sure enough, when he reached Granddad’s office, there it was, still lying across the desk. Casey grabbed it and turned to go.

“You certainly don’t waste time,” Grandfather said from the doorway. Casey stopped. “Though we will have to discuss the perils of sentiment when you’ve calmed down.”

Casey gritted his teeth. “I’d say sorry, but I’m not,” he said, and charged the door.

He wasn’t planning on using the shock function. He was—Casey still didn’t know how he felt, okay, but he didn’t want to kill his grandfather. That didn’t seem like a super unreasonable thing to want. Just knocking him down, getting past him, that would be enough.

Turned out it would be impossible. Casey’s grandfather grabbed the stick coming at him and yanked in a way Casey had never dealt with before. The shockey stick twisted out of his hands so fast it hurt, and a blow to the knees knocked him to the floor hard enough to rattle his teeth.

“No hesitation. Good,” Saki said.

Casey grabbed for his ankles and tried to pull his own unbalancing maneuver, but Granddad’s stance was as hard as rock.

“Stubborn as your father ever was,” he said. Bastard didn’t even sound disappointed. It was just like they were playing chess and he was chiding Casey for an unsurprising tactic.

“I’m not,” Casey growled out, fighting for breath, “Him.”

“To my considerable relief,” his grandfather said.

Casey was seriously considering the merits of just fucking biting him when he heard a familiar buzz, shortly followed by a burst of pain to the back of the neck. Unconsciousness was almost a relief.

Chapter Text

The morning started bright and early with Casey getting hauled out of his room by two burly ninja, given exactly five minutes in a bathroom, and marched down to an infirmary before he was even properly awake. The hot shower he got to take helped him get some consciousness back, but not enough to realize that he’d lost his clothes until he came back out to boxers and a hospital gown. Whee.

“Pretty sure this is a privacy violation,” Casey said conversationally as a doctor he didn’t recognize checked his blood pressure. Grandfather snorted from his chair across the room.

“Less than going to a local doctor would be.” His eyes narrowed. “Unless there’s something you’d like to tell me.”

That was a tone of voice Casey was used to recognizing in their games as a sign that Granddad was done fucking around, and he was pretty confident in mentally filing it under ‘someone is going to die.’ Fortunately, he could honestly say, “Jesus, no. Got my vaccinations when my Ma was alive, but Hun never took me in. For obvious reasons.” And Casey knew better than to go himself.

Granddad sat back and nodded. “At least he remembered some caution.”

Getting his blood drawn for the first time was surprisingly not bad, given how much Raph complained about it when he had to give some up for Donnie’s experiments.

“What exactly are you looking for with this?” Casey asked, watching the little red line zwoop up the tube. “Cause I can promise you I haven’t got the clap.”

“Don’t be vulgar.”

“Why the fuck not?” If Casey wasn’t going to fight his way out—when Granddad was in the room, at least—he at least deserved to run his mouth.

Granddad didn’t bother arguing. He just gave Casey a look that said a whole list of reasons would be coming down the pike.

Honestly, the worst thing about this whole situation might be that Casey was starting to understand his asshole dad better. At least when it came to ‘getting the hell out of dodge.’

The doc prodded him a bit more, rebandaged the worst scrapes from escape attempt 1, slapped an aloe patch on the burn from escape attempt 2, and then Casey was allowed to put pants back on. Not, unfortunately, his pants. Ninja pants. Ninja shirt.

“Well, thanks for this wakeup call,” Casey said, swiping the curtain out of the way and attempting a casual mosey to the door. “Appreciate the health check, I’ll just be hitting the road, then—”

There were still two very large men on the other side of the infirmary door. Casey shut it again.

“I’m afraid we won’t have time for that today,” Granddad said from three inches behind him. Casey did not jump out of his skin about it, because you couldn’t know Leo and Mikey for more than two weeks without getting desensitized to this shit. “You have a lot to catch up on, grandson.”

Yeah, in case it wasn’t clear already, Casey fucking hated literally everything about this.

For some silly reason, Casey had thought that ‘everyone vs Casey’ was the kind of thing he’d gotten to leave behind in fifth grade, before he’d had a growth spurt and also decided that he was going to take exactly zero shit from anyone. But apparently around here it was the hottest game in town.

On a good day, with backup, the right terrain, his shockey stick, and a plan, Casey could handle an entire street patrol of six Purple Dragons by himself, no sweat.

Hungry, tired, hurt, and armed with only a bo staff was not a good day. He got up to two ninjas before one of them got his ankle hard and he ended up on the floor.

“Hm,” his grandfather said. “Raw potential, but an absolutely wasted form. I see we’ll be starting with the very basics.”

“You’re an absolutely wasted form,” Casey muttered into the tatami mats.

Saki ignored him.

Casey at least got breakfast before the torment moved in an entirely different direction.

Back when his ma was alive and well enough to look after him, when he was in elementary school, he used to go to Japanese classes in Gramercy on the weekend. His dad hadn’t been super happy about it, so once Ma started spending too much time at the hospital to get him over there, it stopped being a thing. By the time he was running around with Raph and the guys, he didn’t remember enough that it seemed at all worth bringing up. They spoke it for real and he just remembered sitting at the kitchen table fumbling his way through an excited ramble of all the new words he learned while Ma Jones smiled at him. It didn’t count.

So getting a fucking homework packet full of grammar exercises and math problems, uh, sucked!

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Casey said, staring at it. Granddad completely ignored him.

“You have half an hour,” he said, and that was that.

The rest of the day was exactly the same way. Thing after thing after thing. Granddad stayed in the room most of the time—sometimes watching, sometimes handling business. Once Casey felt ready to absolutely drop, he got fed again, and then Granddad just walked him back to his room and pulled out a Go board like he was planning to keep playacting normality.

Casey would have cussed him out, but one, he was tired, and two, this might be his chance to get some actual answers.

“So what the hell was all that about?” Casey asked, as his grandfather set out the board and the pieces on the floor between them.

Once again, there was absolutely zero takeup. Granddad said, “You take white,” and nothing else.

Casey fished out a piece and tapped it on the board. “What was all that about...sir,” he tried.

“I’m coming to understand I failed you by not involving myself further in your education,” his grandfather said, calmly. “It’s important to have a baseline for what you need to learn before lessons begin in earnest.”

I don’t need lessons,” Casey muttered. He started putting pieces down before his grandfather could get impatient.

“You do,” his grandfather said, implacably. “You are undisciplined, your basics are atrocious, you rely too much on your weapons, you fail to plan ahead.” He was neatly boxing out Casey’s pieces. “And yet, you are clever, and cunning, and persistent, and strong.” The last piece of his wall went down with a clack. “You are wasting yourself, Casey. You need support, instruction, structure, and discipline if you hope to achieve anything. I can provide all four.”

“You’re not gonna ask what I want?” Casey snapped.

“You’re young. You don’t know what you want.” He delivered this with absolute confidence and a casual wave of his hand. “Unless you have some other plan for your future you’ve been working towards…?”

Casey glared down at the board.

“As I expected.”

One of the reasons Raph was his best friend was Raph never asked what he was going to do with his life. Even April sometimes asked him about college applications, usually after she’d gotten done fretting over her own and was trying to be polite and make the conversation go in both directions, even if Casey liked listening to her talk about it way more than he liked coming up with anything himself. When he and Hun crossed paths at the apartment, Hun needled him, wanting to know when he was going to make something of himself. Casey usually turned the question back around on him—oh, something? Something like the chief dickhead of a gang of thugs that could barely handle Brooklyn?

Yeah, that tactic wasn’t going to work on Granddad, who had started with literally nothing and risen up until even Casey had admired him—jesus. A full day ago.

Just because Casey didn’t know what he wanted except his friends and the rooftops and the feeling that he was protecting people, he knew what he didn’t want. And he sure as hell didn’t want to sit here and let his grandfather smack him into shape just because he’d planned it out better than his dad doing the same thing.

Instead of grabbing another stone, Casey flung the entire basket against the wall, sending the little stones scattering across the floor.

Saki gave him an unamused look. Casey crossed his arms and bared his teeth in a snarl.

“Very well. If you want to behave like a child, I’ll leave you to your tantrum.” He stood, leaving the board behind, the game incomplete. “I expect you to behave better tomorrow.”

“Eat shit.”

Granddad didn’t give any sign he’d heard him. Just walked up to the door, rapped politely on it, and exited five seconds later.

Casey sat there for five minutes, waiting. When he was absolutely sure his grandfather wouldn’t be coming back in, he grabbed one side of the Go board, smashed it to pieces, and used the big wooden splinters to start disassembling the bed.

One of the long metal slats from the frame fit nicely into the gap of the door. The new one they’d gotten, with different hinges, didn’t quite fit as well. It was loose enough he could pull a version of the credit card trick and go out swinging.

A ninja got him with a tranq dart three hallways from the door.

Donnie cleared him to leave the hospital bed after two days. Mikey loved being a turtle, and specifically loved being like 20% alien goo (“Mikey, it’s three percent at best—”) because if he’d had to be there any longer he would have gone screaming insane.

His brothers would tell you he already was, because they were lame.

Mikey was delighted to remove himself and his little handheld video game from the weird rattling hospital bed Donnie had scavenged out of a junkyard to the weird creaky couch he had helped Raph scavenge out of a junkyard. At least, he was delighted until he realized Raph was on the other end of the couch, glowering at an innocent infomercial.

“Whoa, dude. What did the cake pops ever do to you?”

“Two days,” he said, like he was chewing on a mouthful of gravel. Mikey had tried that. Not on purpose, but skateboarding made things happen in a turtle’s life. “Casey’s been off the streets stuck and with the Shredder for two days.”

Mikey frowned. “Are you sure he didn’t go home?”

“Oh, wow, what a crazy idea, I’ll have to go check his place. Oh wait. I did.”

Oooooohhhh boy. Category-5 Raph Mood, right here. No wonder Mikey hadn’t seen him since the whole post-wakeup briefing.

“Maybe he’s just mad at me,” Mikey said, weakly. “I kind of bit him.”

The Raph glare moved from the TV to him. “Why did you bite him.”

“Uhhhhhh…” Mikey fiddled with his DS. “It wasn’t, like, a great time for me to find out Casey might be evil.”

“You said he saved you.”

“It was kind of confusing, okay! We were being chased by a bunch of ninja!”

This did not calm Raph down. It did the opposite of calm Raph down. “You two were fighting your way out?”

“I mean. I was concussed.” Mikey shrunk down in his seat and tried to look recently-concussed and vulnerable. “So I just like...ran when he told me to run.”

“You ditched him?”

Mikey winced, thinking about closed doors and not going back and Casey telling him they didn’t have time to fight. It wasn’t the way he’d have put it. It wasn’t that Raph was wrong.

“You ditched him.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Mikey tried.

Raph didn’t say anything. He just got up and started digging in the basket next to the coffee table where they kept the extra shuriken and smoke bombs.

“Uh, Raph? Raphie?” Mikey tried. Neither of these got him a response. “What’cha doing?”

“Going to find my dumbass best friend.”

Donnie had made a series of vicious threats to impress upon Mikey that ‘getting out of bed’ was not at all the same thing as ‘leaving the lair’ and if he did the second Donnie would block every single mobile game from his phone. Mikey knew his limits.

He texted Leo about it instead.

“Don’t you think you should, like...wait?” Mikey tried. “For—”

“No, Mikey, I don’t,” Raph said, and was gone.

Mikey sunk deeper into the couch and wished he was still concussed enough he didn’t have to think about this.

Leo and Donnie took turns Raph-sitting for the rest of the week, because it still wasn’t smart for any of them to go out alone, and Mikey wasn’t really being left alone with Raph anymore. He started resorting to baking all of Raph’s favorite snacks, but that could only last as long as they had freezer space.

They didn’t find the Foot headquarters again. They didn’t even find the Foot. Yeah, vanishing was what made a ninja a ninja, but they literally weren’t doing anything. No weird smuggling at the docks, no thefts, no intimidation, none of their usual tricks. April even used her internship at the New York Local to sneak into the crime reporters’ desks, and found nothing. She was very sorry about it when she visited.

“Dude, if there’s nothing to find, there’s nothing to find,” Mikey said. “You want a raspberry muffin? We have a bunch.”

She also was able to tell him that even though school break was over, Casey wasn’t there.

“Doesn’t he ditch sometimes?” Mikey tried. It was hard to stay optimistic about this, but hey, somebody had to. Raph was in the kind of mood that required a whole new category, Leo had done this whole thing where he was getting ready to face Casey as an enemy, and Donnie—

“April!” Donnie entered the kitchen so fast he almost crashed into the table. “I need to test this on you.”

Donnie had been locked in his lab when he wasn’t being dragged out to sleep, eat, or run around with Raph.

“What am I testing?” April asked, acting like this was no big deal. Favorite human for a reason. Mikey gave her another raspberry muffin.

“Tracking implant,” he said, holding up a sealed vial. “I got the one in Leo to work—” Oh, Leo had not mentioned this. “—but I don’t know if it’ll work in humans, and I need to test it. Shoulder is probably the best place for an incision.”

April took a very deep breath in and let it out again. “Donnie. You’re still not allowed to do surgery on me.”

“I’ll be careful,” Donnie said, in a wounded tone. “I’ve got the local anesthetic at human levels now. Casey tested—” He cut himself off. “I mean—”

Mikey surreptitiously nudged the plate of muffins over towards the empty seat while April physically steered Donnie into it.

“I don’t want to lose you too,” Donnie said, despondently, to a muffin.

“I’m not going anywhere,” April said, reassuringly.

“Yeah, well, neither are we for a bit.” Oh, hey, Leo and Raph were back.

Oh, hey, Raph’s leg was bleeding. He was also blinking groggily at them. Mikey pulled out an empty chair while Donnie sprang up for the first aid kit.

“Gonna...grrublfutzz,” Raph muttered, sounding dazed.

“Bishop’s back,” Leo said. “Hi, April.”

“Hi,” April echoed, faintly. “Is Raph okay?”

“Camamsn...keemeern.” His head lolled back over the chair. “Ssssupid.”

“One of the agents got a dart in him, but we were close enough to the Shellraiser to get back in before he crashed,” Leo reported.

Donnie, back with the first-aid kit, gave Leo, who was always last on the list to be designated driver, a hard look. “And how many new dents does it have now?”

“Fewer than Raph,” Leo said, neatly dodging the question. “But I was saying—I think we lost them, but we’re on lockdown for a bit. We’re not taking chances with the EPF.”

Mikey, remembering a spinning buzz saw, shuddered.

“I can do another grocery run, if you guys need it,” April offered.

“I think we’re good,” Donnie said, hands full of bandage.

“We’re out of butter,” Mikey disagreed. “And flour. And ham.”

“Heyyyyyyy, muffffffff…” Raph almost sounded coherent, until he got caught on the ‘f’. He waved one hand wildly towards the table. Mikey put a muffin in it. “kkkkss.” Figuring out how chewing worked occupied him for the remainder of first aid.

“I got some blood, I’ll see if I can get us a counter-agent,” Donnie said. He seemed to have forgotten all about the microchip on the table, which gave April a chance to quietly pocket it. Hopefully Donnie had already turned that on.

“I’ll tell Sensei,” Leo said. “Mikey, can you…” He looked at Raph, who was still chewing very slowly on the edge of the muffin.

“Sure,” Mikey agreed.

“And I better get home.” April took her muffin for the road. “I’ll let you know when I get there. Text me the rest of your list by 3 tomorrow, okay?”

“You got it,” Mikey agreed, and just like that he was alone with Raph again.

Raph worked on his muffin in silence for another several minutes. Swallowing went without incident. Mikey just sat and texted Woody, occasionally sneaking looks up to make sure Raph hadn’t started choking.

“’M sorry,” Raph said, unexpectedly. “Donwanna.” He swatted at Mikey. “You. Home. ‘S good.”

A tiny little bit of the guilt that had been hanging on Mikey’s shell like unwanted moss dried up and dropped away. “I know, dude.”

“Ijus.” Raph sighed and rolled forward, resting his head on the table. “Scared. Fuckn...scared.”

“Yeah,” Mikey agreed. “Me too.”

Casey didn’t have the energy to be angry anymore, much less scared.

He was pretty sure it had been a week, but the second time they’d tranq’d him for trying to escape he woke up with his sense of time all screwy and he wasn’t sure how long it had been then. It at least meant they weren’t tranqing him anymore, after he’d absolutely eaten shit trying to climb the stairs.

He’d been corralled into a routine of waking up and training and eating and training and worksheets and fighting. The worst part might have been that it was working. The weights got easier to lift and the fights got easier to take and the bruises got easier to ignore. Well, actually, the worst part might be that after two days of learning the pattern literally everyone around him only spoke in Japanese, like this was the world’s lousiest immersion school. Between all of that and figuring out his next escape attempts, his brain hurt too much to worry about what was coming next.

The count was at eight escape attempts, not counting breaking Mikey out. Casey was learning a little more each time. He wasn’t going back for his shockey stick, either. That was turning out to be the real game, here, figuring out how much of himself he had to trade for the chance to keep going. What he could sacrifice to get his opponent to let their guard down.

When he had to grit his teeth and stop fucking swearing when he talked because if he did, no one would acknowledge a single thing he said, even if he was screaming at them. Real cute, Grandfather.

Point was, he was learning and taking things one day at a time and only looking forward to enacting his next plan. So it was a deeply unpleasant surprise when his grandfather told him, after testing his new vocabulary, <“You’re doing very well. Another two months and you’ll be able to navigate the country yourself, I think.”>

<“...I don’t understand,”> Casey said, a phrase he’d been giving a serious workout lately.

<“Japan. We leave in a week.”>

“Fucking what,” Casey said, out loud, in English, two rules broken right there. Grandfather, of course, stared right through him about it. <“Excuse me?”>

<“You will return home with me to continue your education,”> Grandfather said. <“A new environment will help you. Karai will take command here.”>

Casey’s fists clenched on his knees. Even if he knew enough words to argue about this, he knew exactly where it would get him. Absolutely nowhere.

<“I hate this,”> he told his grandfather instead. Another phrase he’d been giving a serious workout lately. It was a rebellion he was still allowed, because it was completely pointless.

<“You will understand in time,”> his grandfather said, and left him kneeling there on the floor.

Casey flopped down on top of the mattress he had instead of a bedframe now, because he’d only been caught using parts from that once before it was taken away. Just like his belt, and his boots, and the screwdriver he’d smuggled in, and the part of the bedframe they’d missed that he’d used to strike sparks to make a fire, and his go bag.

The little part at the back of his head that had been trying to figure out opportunities for his next escape briefly kicked into overdrive. Another little part, the one that had focused on relearning sentence structures and not swearing and abandoning his hockey stick—the part of him that was good at cutting away everything he could survive without—started turning over. He could go along with this. Get Shredder to let his guard down. Learn about the Foot. Get better. Figure out enough to break away one day and make him sorry…

...Or he could let that part keep running forever, cutting away everything that made him him until there was nothing left but exactly the shape other people were trying to make him, and didn’t remember how to be anything else.

Oh, look at that. He still had the energy left to be terrified after all.

Chapter Text

After at least a week and maybe two of his grandfather’s Ninja Indoctrination for Dummies routine, Casey was starting to get used to surprises being deeply unpleasant things. At least walking into the morning fight block before lunch and seeing his Aunt Karai warming up was almost a pleasant surprise.

“Hey, Auntie!” And then he remembered that she was here to take over so Granddad could drag Casey to another continent and lock him down and oh look at that they were right back to deeply unpleasant.

“Casey,” she said. She swept a quick look over him, spotting all the bruises on his arms and the still healing cut over his right eye from a bad dodge yesterday. Her lips thinned but it didn’t stop her from telling him, <“We will be training together today.”>

Casey rolled his eyes and went to grab a stick. “Yaaaaaaaaay,” he mumbled, not bothering to be respectful.

Who knew, maybe this would be better than the usual five-vee-one he had to deal with in the mornings.

It was not. Karai put him on his ass and didn’t stop about it, swinging her own sword-length stick at him until he managed to roll over or get up and continue the fight. He was shaking and had sweated through the back of his shirt when she called a halt.

<“Enough. You’re exhausted. We’re not going to get any further.”> She frowned at where he was slumped against the wall, panting and trying not to throw up. It helped that the block was before lunch and his stomach was empty. <“Are you hurt?”>

Casey shook his head, wheezing till his breath got back. He’d already been through a gym block this morning, lifting weights that were heavier than yesterday’s. <“Grandfather works me like I’m you. Doesn’t understand I didn’t get all the family...”> He didn’t know the word for that in Japanese. He waved his hand about it. She got the message.

<“I’ll talk to him.”> She racked her stick. <“You need to tell my father these things, Casey. He wants to help.”>

<“I disagree,”> Casey said, flatly. He didn’t have nearly the vocabulary he wanted, but he had been best friends with Raph for half a year now, which was enough to come up with a couple phrases he was pretty sure were absolutely filthy. He used one of the ones Raph saved for falling off a roof to tell her exactly how much he disagreed.

<“You owe your aunt more respect than that, Grandson.”> Oh, goody. Another deeply unpleasant surprise. <“She is your superior, as well as family.”>

<“Of course, Grandfather.”> The words made his stomach churn, but hey, since it was also the one complaining they hadn’t had lunch yet, it could get with the program. Granddad was fine enough with him missing one meal that if Casey got himself pariah’d for breaking rules this close to lunch, he would be ignored and left here instead of allowed to go eat. Casey would appreciate a little cooperation from the side here.

Granddad and Karai immediately started talking with each other at a level way beyond what Casey’s worksheet-fortified vocab could follow. Granddad’s hand signal was at least clear enough that Casey fell in behind them and followed them out of the room.

He’d been kind of hoping to get sent to the kids’ table if just for some peace and quiet, but in yet another unpleasant surprise, they all ended up sitting down at the same table for what looked like it was shaping up to be the world’s worst family lunch. Casey had a moment where he was almost wishing he could be back in his nice predictable boot camp, and then realized he was having that thought and promptly throttled it. Just because he could feel himself slowly giving in and letting himself be led didn’t mean he was allowed to enjoy it.

Casey went in planning to keep his head down, his guard up, and his mouth shut. He even made it long enough to get most of a solid meal in him before negotiations devolved.

“Casey,” Grandfather said, and when he kept going in English Casey was so distracted he almost missed the first half of the sentence anyways. “You are familiar with the city. Do you have any recommendations on the best areas to expand?”

“Nah,” Casey said, spinning one chopstick between his fingers like a drumstick. It got three spins before he fumbled it and it went clattering across the table. Well, he was never very good at the drums either. Aunt Karai looked vaguely disappointed. “Sorry if I haven’t exactly put a lot of thought into the best way to be a scumbag.”

“You will have to let go of your petulance eventually,” Granddad said, scooping himself some more vegetables.

“Watch me,” Casey said, venomously. He tried to squash any kind of tremor out of his voice, staring his grandfather down over the table. After a few minutes Saki sighed like this was barely a concern and picked up his chopsticks again.

“Your hiding place in the locker room has already been emptied.”

Casey felt such a fury sweep over him that he slammed his fist against the table in a moment of pure reaction. Grandfather kept talking. “The window in your room has been repaired. The lighter you were concealing in your mattress has been found.”

The fury immediately drained away, cold unease seeping in to take its place. Preparations for his three remaining escape plans, torn apart with ruthless efficiency. He’d been working those window bars for eight days.

“As interesting as it has been to watch you exercise initiative, we no longer have time for me to indulge you. Your skills demonstrated thus far have been sufficient.” Initiative—indulge— “Where, exactly, are you planning to run, Grandson? Hamato Yoshi will not endanger whatever hole he’s crawled into for the past seventeen years by taking you in. We both know you won’t return to your father. Even if you reached your mother’s family, how long could you stay there? I’ve been collecting news of your exploits from these past few months. You’ve collected quite a list of opponents. Mutants. Aliens.” His lips quirked in a very slight smirk. “My forces. Tell me, could you ever be content if you hid in the country, away from the action?”

Casey opened his mouth to tell him yeah, sure, he’d be fine, he’d fucking thrive, except nothing came out. There was a reason he hadn’t run upstate after his Ma died, even before he’d made the kind of friends to make staying really worth it.

Grandfather raised an eyebrow at him. A croak escaped Casey’s throat.

“As I thought.”

Casey shoved himself to his feet and stormed out of the room. No one stopped him. Looked like this was another rebellion that no longer mattered.

Aunt Karai found him hours later, going to town on a punching bag. She sighed, and stepped into place to hold it for him.

“Oh, hey, thanks for that,” Casey said, sarcastically. “And for earlier, too, so glad to have the help.”

“You’re just going to exhaust yourself like this,” Karai said, absolutely certain. “Arguing with my father is like trying to fight a mountain. You can beat your knuckles bloody, and at the end of it, the mountain will still be there.”

Casey growled, putting in a vicious one-two hit. “So I have to get a pickaxe, is what you’re saying.”

“Casey.”

“Sorry if I’m not thrilled to hand over my own life so someone else can tell me how to live it!” Casey snapped. “I know people want their kids to go into the family business, but seriously, why am I the weirdo for not wanting to join a gang—and burn down homes—and kill people?” He punctuated each example with as strong a hook as he could muster.

At the end of it, Karai was still holding the bag, and he was running out of breath again.

She eyed him, and when he just stood there with limp arms, reached up and fingered one of the bright red streaks in her hair. Casey had gotten enough genes from his Ma and the grandmother he’d never met that he didn’t have to dye his own hair a normal human color. Right now it made him feel lucky because he was sure that Granddad would have had some kind of opinion about it. Every time he saw her Karai had hers scrupulously dark all the way to the roots—except for those two little red streaks framing her face.

“You can have your own life,” she said. “There’s room for it, especially if you’re not burning all your energy to make it obvious you’re disobeying. It’s easier to just be who he wants you to be.”

Casey thunked his head forward, resting his forehead on the cool surface of the heavy bag. “Aaaaaand now I understand why you live on the other side of the world from him whenever you can.”

There was a very quiet huff that might have been a laugh.

“Did you—do—” He tipped his head to try to look around the bag at her. “Have you managed to hang onto anything?”

She gave him an absolutely serene and unreadable look. Yeah, hanging onto a private life under a controlling bastard probably did mean not dumping to your mouthy kid nephew, huh.

“Yeah, yeah, forget I asked,” Casey muttered, and started unraveling the tape from his hands.

“Look,” Aunt Karai said. “You’re not going to be back in New York for a while. Let me take you out to eat. We can go get something you won’t get much in Hasuda.”

Casey almost reflexively told her where she could stick it. He wound up hesitating instead. Something niggled at his brain.

“Pizza?” he asked after a moment, like he was being talked into it.

Woody Dirkins met Michelangelo the Talking Turtle when he followed delivery instructions to a shady back alley and had a bright green dude in a trenchcoat pop out from behind a dumpster to collect the pizza. At that point Woody had kinda been expecting whoever jumped out of the creepy alley would have a knife, so it wasn’t much harder to keep his cool about the random unarmed cosplayer.

Mikey had taken the non-reaction as a personal challenge and a week later they were friends. He still couldn’t make Woody crack. It was one of the skills that served Woody well in customer service, being able to maintain a disaffected possibly-stoned totally unfazed demeanor in the face of anything that walked through his door. Ninja turtles. Ten-year-olds at a birthday party. Drunk fratboys.

And, apparently, Casey fucking Jones.

The thing is, Woody knew who Casey was before they ran into each other in the sewers of New York in pursuit of their dumbass friends. Casey didn’t know him, because Woody wasn’t dumb enough to stick up like a nail waiting for the hammer to fall. Or to go around in a hockey mask beating up gangbangers, but he was repeating himself. They didn’t hang out at school or anything. They nodded to each other at movie nights, once a month, maybe.

But Mikey had been blowing up Woody’s phone for the past week and a half about how Raph hated him and Casey might be dead and it was all his fault. And now here was the meathead himself, trailing along in the wake of the scary kind of businesswoman Woody didn’t expect to see anywhere outside the Financial District to sit down at the corner table.

Still wasn’t the worst thing he’d faced at work, so Woody pulled out his order pad, put on his best sleepy blink, and took their order. Ms. Business gave it with a distasteful expression, eying the restaurant’s fake Italian countryside windows suspiciously.

“You’re sure?” she asked Casey once Woody started walking away.

“C’mon, Auntie, it’s New York pizza. You can’t get this anywhere else.”

Woody went to the kitchen and put in the order. And then he texted Mikey.

It was late afternoon, which meant just-woken-up time, which meant Mikey blinked fuzzily at his phone and needed a minute to process the incoming text.

Once he did he was immediately rolling off his hammock, stumbling out of his room and down the hall to bang on Raph’s door.

“Raph! Raph Raph Raph Raph Raph—”

The door pulled open so fast Mikey almost fell through. Raph, glowering hard, did not look receptive to anything other than the best news of his life.

Lucky for him, Mikey was an awesome brother and that was what he had. “He’s alive. Casey’s alive. Woody says he’s at Rupert’s with a scary lady and we have to go get him right now.”

Raph processed this way faster than Mikey had, said “Donnie’s in the lab,” and then promptly went to go bang on Leo’s door himself.

Casey didn’t actually know if Woody Dirkins would be any help at all.

He was used to seeing the guy around the lair, and heard plenty about him secondhand from Mikey, who was absolutely licked for him. Which, honestly, Casey thought the guy was kind of a loser, but if he made Mikey happy he was probably fine.

There was still a big goddamn difference between ‘chill enough to pal around with over-energetic mutants’ and ‘actually helpful in a crisis.’ He hadn’t looked like he recognized Casey walking in, when Casey had snuck a peek at him, but if Woody knew the score he wouldn’t act like he recognized him anyway, right?

So either this plan was completely working or it was utterly useless and Casey was out of ideas, and if he thought about which one it was it was going to make him insane. And then Aunt Karai started telling him about the area around the Foot compound in Japan and if he thought about actually having to live there it was going to make him insane. So he kept his head down and made “mm-hm” noises and ate his pizza and tried not to think at all.

Mostly that boiled down to just thinking please please please please please.

When they finished eating, Karai wasn’t exactly eager to stick around. Casey went along with her to the till, proving that he was being good and following the rule she’d set down before they left that he wasn’t allowed to get more than five feet from her.

Woody was working the till now. He blandly thanked her and said, “Come again,” on a monotonic autopilot. Karai was clearly already forgetting him as she turned away.

In the split second when Karai’s back was to Woody and Casey was still watching his face, there was a barely-there but unmistakeable wink.

Woody Dirkins, you magnificent bastard.

Casey didn’t acknowledge it, just following Karai onto the sidewalk. She’d driven them here, probably because it had the fewest possibilities for escape. They were parked a block down the street. Casey automatically catalogued the manholes, cellar doors, and steam vents. The manholes were too far down the street. Karai was scanning the rooftops in her own assessment of the area, so if the guys were up there, they better be good at—

...Aw, nuts, Casey could see the Foot ninja flicker out of hiding just long enough to signal an all-clear to Karai. So the turtles weren’t on the rooftops, and probably hadn’t appeared the whole time they were in there, or Karai would be way less chill right now.

There were twenty yards from the door of the pizza restaurant to the car. Casey’s best guess was that there would be something involving the steam vent. He slowed down well before it, keeping just inside Karai’s five-foot limit, and walked across it carefully.

Sometimes you could see through the grates, if you peeked. Casey didn’t peek. He didn’t look down. If they were there, he might tip Karai off, and if they weren’t…

...if they weren’t, he wanted to have thirty more seconds of pretending they were.

Five steps to cross the grate. Solid sidewalk on the other side. Head up, eyes forward, walk normally. Nothing was going to happen. There was no reason for anything to happen.

When nothing happened and his feet hit the sidewalk, Casey still felt his stomach sink in disappointment. Despair? Some kind of depressing d-word.

And then the grate slammed up into the air with a clang that rattled his eardrums.

Aunt Karai’s reflexes were about what you’d expect from a ninja boss. She was already spinning around, arms reaching for him, ready to grab Casey and drag him forward out of the way.

The grappling hook that wrapped around his stomach was faster. Casey pulled his arms up in front of his face as a shield, letting himself just not fight for the first time since he’d heard Mikey getting tortured through a wall. He was tugged away into the dark depths of the city’s underbelly moments before the grate that had gone sailing up into the air slammed back down over the steam vent.

Would you look at that. A pleasant surprise.

He only banged into like two walls on the way down before he crashed into a familiar lump of meat and bone. Raph’s arms wrapped around him and pulled them both down onto a rumbly floor.

“I got him, go!”

“Oh hey,” Casey said, blinking at the ceiling and trying to remember which way was up. “Tiny Shellraiser’s done?”

Raph punched him in the arm, right at a spot that had just banged off the wall.

“Dude, ow,” Casey said, and then started to laugh. He was out. He got away.

“Don’t you ever do that again,” Raph snapped, voice rough and the best thing Casey had heard all year maybe. He grabbed Casey’s hand and squeezed it, hard. “I thought you were dead, you idiot.”

Casey squeezed his best friend’s hand back, letting his head flop back against what felt to his finely cultivated skull tastebuds like a pickup truck bed. It was finally sinking in. He'd gotten away from the Shredder. He was still here. He was still Casey Jones. “Yeah. Me too.”

Chapter Text

Casey had been accused of having a few screws loose before, but when his only reaction to being cuffed to a chair in the Hamato living room was relief he figured he could never argue with it again. Raph was more upset than he was.

“Sensei, we don’t have to do this! Casey’s our friend!”

“A precaution only, Raphael,” Splinter was saying. Casey just got comfy on the chair while Leo adjusted the chains to make sure he didn’t have enough wiggle room to walk away.

“It’s cool, bro,” Casey said. The adrenaline was starting to majorly crash, and it was a relief to just lean his head against the wing of the wingback chair and rest for a bit.

“Shut up, Jones,” Raph grumbled.

“It’s not that we don’t want to trust you,” Leo said, and he sounded very earnest about it. “It’s just that we can’t.”

“Seriously. I get it,” Casey said. “Granddad hates you guys. This is—uh, Don?” Donnie was yanking at his t-shirt, pulling it down to expose the skin inside his collarbone.

“Hold still,” Donnie said, brusquely. Casey hissed as one of his worst bruises got poked. “What is this? Did this happen from the grappling hook?”

“Nah, that’s old,” Casey assured him. He got a squint for his troubles.

“How old.”

Casey wracked his brain. Training all started to blend together at some point. “This morning, maybe?” Karai was tougher than his usual fights, but it also could have been a leftover from yesterday. 

“What happened?” Leo asked. He was also looking at the bruise now. Casey loved being a zoo exhibit, really. Didn’t help that it was pretty obviously a hit from a weapon.

“Couldn’t tell you exactly. Granddad was getting intense about training. I’ve gotten hit by a lot of ninja lately.”

“I’m gonna kill him,” Raph growled again, for the fifth time since Casey had gotten yanked into the mini-Shellraiser. Shellraisette?

“I’ll go in somewhere else,” Donnie said, and started yanking Casey’s shirt up from his waist.

“Hey, hey hey hey! What are you doing? Watch the goods!”

“Don’t be such a baby. I need to microchip you so this can’t happen again.”

“Excuse me?”

“Donnie, we don’t trust him yet—”

“Which is why I need to microchip him—”

“Donnie, put your stupid gun down—”

Casey bit down on a laugh that he was pretty sure would turn hysterical if it came out as the three of them descended into squabbling. Cuffs aside, this could have been any one of a dozen nights he’d spent at the lair in the past couple of months.

“Good news!” Mikey called from somewhere behind the chair. “Woody said the scary lady’s gone and he’s okay. She didn’t come back in the restaurant.”

Casey blew out a breath. “Thank fuck. Mike, tell Woody I owe him forever, okay?”

“...Sure, dude,” Mikey said, and it was so weirdly quiet Casey didn’t notice Donnie was working again until an icy spray hissed over his right hip.

“Hey, what the—” Fchk. “—oh, that didn’t even hurt.”

“Told you to quit being such a baby.” Donnie spun the little doohickey that looked like a cross between a laser gun and a PEZ dispenser around one finger with an extremely satisfied expression. “That microchip’s got a ping response good for over a thousand miles. You’re not going anywhere without me knowing about it.”

Casey sighed and thunked his head back. “Good thing I’m not getting dragged to Japan, then.”

“You what,” Donnie said, almost dropping the doohickey.

“I’m gonna kill him,” Raph growled for the sixth time.

“Japan?” Splinter’s voice cut through whatever Leo was about to say before he could start.

“Granddad decided I needed to <continue my education> in a <new environment,>” Casey said, quoting him with no small bitterness. “Aunt Karai came to town to take over for him so he could drag me back to Hatsuda himself.”

“Aunt?” Leo sounded like a strangled cat.

“Aunt.” Raph sounded like his brain was breaking. “Karai is the lady who sends you weird birthday presents?”

Oh, right, he’d told Raph about the package of caltrop bombs and kit-kats from last year.

Splinter knelt in front of the chair, staring him in the eye. Casey tried not to fidget and look away. “Mr. Jones. What happened?”

Casey tried to find his bottomless well of snark, but it had been running dry lately. “He wasn’t expecting me to get Mikey out. Didn’t think I was a sound investment. Once he saw me fight, he decided I was going to join the family business.” He clenched one fist next to his leg. “Wasn’t really about to take no for an answer.”

Splinter didn’t say anything, but he inclined his head in a way that made Casey unsettlingly sure he got it. For once, the turtles were quiet.

“I’ve been trying to bust out since that first day and getting nowhere.” A couple of unpleasant pieces that he’d put together at lunch stuck in his throat. “I think he might have been letting me try the whole time just to see what I could do. Aunt Karai was trying to be nice enough to talk me around, so...pizza.” He shrugged, jingling the chains, looking over Splinter’s shoulder. “Kind of a Hail Mary. Wasn’t sure it’d be worth your time to spring me.” He made eye contact with his best friend’s dad again. “Granddad hates you, sir. What’d you even do?”

Splinter gave him a ratty mirthless smile. “Something I’m sure you have seen he considers unforgivable. I took my leave.”

“Whaaaaaaaat,” Mikey breathed from somewhere behind Casey’s chair.

“Master Splinter?” Leo asked, like he was lost.

Splinter laid his cane across his lap and sighed. “My sons. I told you when I began to teach you that I was taught by my mother, as she was taught by her father, as part of a Hamato clan tradition stretching back centuries. I did not lie to you. That was where I began. By the time I was a young man, however...I was tired of being the last scion of a dying clan. I didn’t see a point in preserving tradition for its own sake or letting the skills I had cultivated go to waste. I sought out the last great ninja clan in Japan and asked for instruction from Oroku Saki. In exchange, I swore fealty to the Foot.”

Not even Mikey could think of something to say to that.

“I did learn enough to realize I had made a mistake,” Splinter said, eventually, very dry. “After a few years. At first...I tried to convince my teacher the clan should change.”

“Bet he loved that,” Casey muttered.

“Quite the contrary,” Splinter said, and Casey couldn’t really tell if the guy was fucking with him or not. “When it became clear he would tolerate no dissent, to any degree, I chose to walk away. It was a difficult proposition—I only made it with help from a childhood friend, and by temporarily faking my death. In the end, as I have already told you, it became necessary to leave the country. There’s a reason I found myself in New York in time to find you all, my sons.” He bowed his head. “And there is a reason Oroku Saki remains enraged enough to seek revenge over two decades later. He was proud to have brought the Hamato clan into his ranks. For defying him—for successfully deserting him—he would gladly see me dead, or worse.” He stood and looked at the turtles. Donnie and Raph, the only ones Casey could still see, were staring at their father. “And, to my most profound regret, the four of you with me.”

None of them said anything, so Casey took it upon himself to lighten the mood. “Sucks, doesn’t he?” Splinter’s whiskers twitched, which Casey decided to take as a victory. “Look, Master Splinter—I get how bad this looks. I know I look like a trap. If you wanna leave me chained up to make sure I’m not about to rat you out—uh—sorry, no offense—I get it, it’s fine. But I swear, I didn’t know my gramps was the Shredder until last week. I’m not with him. And I’m not going back.”

Splinter looked at Casey like he was a particularly confusing mousetrap—not to stereotype or anything—and he wasn’t sure if he could get the cheese out without getting killed. Casey stared back at him. He really didn’t care if they left him locked up here, as long as he could just close his eyes for a bit and take a nap. Nothing was going to get him, and nothing was going to get him away from here. He could live with that.

The clicking of chains from behind the chair took him completely by surprise, especially when they puddled loose around him. Raph was still in eyeshot, so who—

“Leonardo,” Splinter said, severely.

“Father, you’re the last person who gets to deny anyone the chance to make their own destiny.”

...Leo talking back? Casey didn’t know he knew how to do that. He traded looks with Raph, trying to figure out if this counted for their ‘Splinter Jr. quotes’ tally. Raph shrugged.

“I take your point,” Splinter said, finally. “Casey. You are welcome in our home for as long as you choose to stay.”

“Thanks,” Casey said. “Seriously. I’ll get out of your—”

“Shut up,” Raph said, and clasped his hand to haul Casey to his feet. “You got any more bruises we should know about, dingus?”

“Eh,” Casey said. That worked about as well as one might expect.

Ten minutes later, he’d been sent back to the wingback chair, this time with a few ice packs and a threat from Raph that he’d break out the chains himself if Casey tried to go anywhere.

After a full day of ninja boot camp, getting yanked around by a grappling hook, and a wild ride through the sewers, Casey was more than happy to sit tight. He got his ice packs arranged for max comfort, leaned his head back, and closed his eyes.

And then cracked one open again because if there was one thing ninja boot camp had been good for it had been training his ‘getting watched’ reflexes. “Hi Mikey.”

Mikey’s head, which had been peering over the top of the chair, vanished with a squeak.

“You doing okay, dude?” Casey asked. Mikey had looked like he was doing better earlier, but Casey hadn’t exactly gotten the best look at him. “You weren’t doing so hot before.”

“’m good,” Mikey mumbled. His head snuck back over the chair again. “You’re not...mad at me?”

“Why the fuck would I be mad at you?” Casey said, blankly.

“I ditched you.” Head gone again. “I thought you were evil and I got us caught and then I ditched you.”

“Mike.” Casey took the icepack off his smaller bruise and chucked it over the back of the chair. Netted him a nice yelp. “I told you to run, dingus. If you hadn’t ditched, and I had to deal with Gramps’ stupid training and you being stuck there, that’s rock bottom, alright?”

“Raph was mad at me.”

“Yeah, well, Raph’s never happy unless he’s got something to be mad about.” That got him a giggle. “Seriously, Mikey, we’re good. Just don’t make me have to save your ass for at least a couple days, alright? I gotta catch up on my beauty sleep.”

“Yeah, you need as much of that as you can get,” Mikey snarked. The ice pack dropped back over the top of the chair onto Casey’s head.

“Oh, look who’s talking, shellhead.”

“Hey, everyone agrees, I’m the cute one.” Mikey stepped into view and flipped his mask tails. “I’ll get out of your hair, Leo and me are going to make a run around to Rupert’s and make sure Woody’s okay.”

“Cool.” Casey shut his eyes. “Tell him thanks again.”

They took the long way around on the rooftops to get back to Rupert’s, gambling that if they struck fast and faded away they could dodge Bishop’s troops. Mikey was in a good mood, humming to himself and hopping extra obstacles and not particularly talkative. It gave Leo plenty of time to think.

He wasn’t sure he wanted that.

The first time they’d run into Shredder, Leo had met him alone. It hadn’t just been a sword and a compliment—it had been someone taking him seriously on a day when it felt like his brothers never would. It had been someone recognizing his skills when he’d been starting to wonder if his father was ever going to let him move on from the lessons he’d already mastered that his brothers were still trying to learn.

And yes, okay, it had been a cool sword.

His brothers had been sneaky enough to watch him get it, and then demand answers as soon as they were alone. He had given up trying to explain himself and fallen back on insisting they should at least see what Master Splinter thought.

Leo had hoped his father would see it—the thought that they could be part of something bigger, a structured clan of ninja that didn’t care that Leo and his brothers weren’t human. Something powerful. Something where they could all grow into great warriors, and maybe Leo himself could take command of more than just a team of four where the other three complained every step of the way.

Instead, Splinter had looked over the sword, gravely listened to their story, and finally told them what he knew about the Shredder. Or. Part of what he knew about the Shredder. (Not that Leo had any feelings about Splinter not trusting them with the full story there, or anything. That would be a waste of time.)

The way Master Splinter had put it, the Foot was the single most powerful ninja clan left in the world, having carved out a place at the grey edges of legality. Their jonin, Oroku Saki, was a dangerous and brilliant warrior who tolerated no rivals. As far as he was concerned any ninja were either with him or against him.

“...Do we want to be with him?”

“Do you?”

Splinter had left it up to them. They had to take the time to argue about it. At that point, it had only been a couple of weeks since they’d first run into Agent Bishop and the EPF—since the harm humans could do to them had suddenly gotten way bigger and scarier than the Purple Dragons in back alleys.

In the end, Leo had brought himself to admit that he couldn’t let his feelings rule his head, and agree with his brothers that it wasn’t worth trading freedom for what might not even be safety.

And then Splinter had told them that he left Japan to get away from the way the Shredder had made the world and that the Foot were responsible for the kind of crime they’d already decided to spend their previous time aboveground fighting when they could.

In hindsight, Leo really wasn’t surprised that Splinter was withholding more relevant information from them. As soon as they got home, he was going to go up to Sensei and ask him if there was anything else he wasn’t telling them. Once Leo could figure out how to keep from asking why Casey was worth the truth and they weren’t.

Why Leo wasn’t.

Mikey hissed a warning just in time for Leo to skid to a halt behind a billboard on the building a block over from Rupert’s.

“See anyone?” he hissed.

Leo scanned the twelve-to-seven-o’clock periphery. “No. You?”

“No. Just that lady on the corn—oh, shell, that’s Karai!”

Both of them immediately hit the roof. They’d taken enough arrows on their shells the last time she was in town to know better than to leave anything sticking out.

Sure enough, there was the telltale whisper-soft zip and dull thud of an arrow finding its mark against the billboard.

Only the one.

Frowning, Leo very carefully peered up over the edge of the rooftop. Karai, dressed in a long black coat, was already walking away from them and away from Rupert’s. She was around the corner and out of sight in the next ten seconds.

“We good?” Mikey whispered.

One glance at the arrow told Leo they probably were. There was a message tied around it. “Yeah. She wasn’t aiming for us.”

He still stayed careful and swift as he yanked the arrow down to him and unrolled the message. Mikey peeked over his shoulder so they could both read it in the floodlight reflecting off the billboard.

A note exactly like this had invited Leo to go meet with the Shredder in the first place, and kicked off one of the most tense and exhausting weeks of their lives. This one was worse.

Casey blinked awake from the first nap he’d had in two weeks and saw Raph squashed into a beanbag chair that definitely hadn’t been a foot away from Casey when he’d gone to sleep. Raph was snout-deep in one of Mikey’s comics, judging by the bright costumes on the page, and seemed fully engrossed. Casey tried shifting one of his no-longer-ice-but-still-very-cold-water packs to the perfect position for dropping down the back of one scaley neck.

“Don’t even think about it.”

“What?” Casey quickly dropped the ice pack back in his lap. “Think about what? Where am I?”

“Cute.” Raph shifted around to get a better look at him. “You healed yet?”

“No,” Casey said. “I gotta get way more sleep for that.” Like another eight hours or so. He didn’t get the family stamina but Hun had still passed on a couple of lucky breaks.

“Fine.” Raph kicked the chair instead of him. “You wanna explain what the hell you meant about it not being worth our time to spring you?”

“Ahaha,” said Casey, who did not want to do that.

Raph glared at him with a set to his mouth that meant he wasn’t leaving this alone until he got answers or Casey wrestled him into the ground. Since the second one was kind of beyond Casey’s means at the moment…

“Look, you get it,” Casey said. “I saw how Mikey felt about me finding him—”

“Mikey’s an idiot,” Raph snapped. “And he was supposed to apologize about that.”

“He did! He did, but dude. I get it.” Casey squished himself down in the chair more and stared at his knees. “If a guy was trying to destroy me, I wouldn’t wanna run around with his family either, y’know? Plus...you got your brothers with you. The last thing you should have to worry about is getting them dragged into some dumbass mess.”

“Yeah, well,” Raph grumbled. He kicked Casey’s shin, not hard enough to bruise. “Lucky for you, this ain’t a tradeoff. And lucky for me, I got three brothers. I only got one meathead best friend, got it?”

Weird. Casey thought not being scared any more would have made it easier to talk. Where had the lump in his throat come from? “Yeah. I got it.”

“Good.”

They sat there for a bit in compatible silence until a familiar voice called, “Knock knock! Anyone home?”

“Hey!” Casey sat up and waved at April. “Apes! How ya been?”

“Better than you,” she said. “Oh my god, they actually found you.” She set down the paper bag she was holding and came over to give him a hug.

“Oh, sure, ignore the hero of the hour,” Raph said from his beanbag.

“From what I’ve heard that was Woody,” April said. She patted him on the head anyway. “But well done.”

“Thanks, I’ll be here all week,” Raph said. “Speaking of, you get the stuff?”

“Yeah. Casey, I went by the thrift store and grabbed some clothes for you,” April told him. “I can try to get your assignments down here too, so you’re not that behind when you go back to school.”

“Gross, school,” Casey muttered. “Give a guy a day to catch his breath. Why do I need clothes again?”

“You’re staying with us till old Shredhead leaves town,” Raph said. It wasn’t a question. “At least. We know he can’t find our place and that’ll give you some breathing room to figure out where you go next.”

Casey had crashed with the turtles before, when he needed a break from his dad’s place. There were worse places to be. “As long as I’m not sharing with your stinky feet.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Raph said, like a friend did.

“We can still run around the sewers, right? I’ve been cooped up inside this whole time.”

“For two weeks? Are you going to need Vitamin D or something?” April asked, frowning at him.

“Oh, nah, save your money.” Casey waved her off. He spotted Donnie coming into the room and added, “That stuff doesn’t do anything for me anyways.”

“What are you talking about,” Donnie said. “Your body needs Vitamin D to function! It’s science!” Aaaaand there he went, off on a rant about bones and the body. One successful subject change, thank you Donatello.

He was still lecturing four minutes later when Mikey and Leo came running in at top speed, getting everyone’s attention.

“Uh,” Leo said, as everyone present stared at them. “Mikey, you explain it.”

“Why me?”

“I’m getting Sensei.” Leo was off again before Mikey could argue, which, truly was the only way to handle the guy sometimes.

“Ssssssso,” Mikey said. “Raph, Donnie, you got a minute?”

Oh, looked like they were disinviting Team Mostly-Human from this particular event. Yeah, screw that. “What happened to Woody?” Casey asked, because he could put two and two together just fine.

“What?” Mikey’s face got another degree of freaked out. “Something happened to Woody?”

“You were checking on him, right?”

“Um,” Mikey said, and Casey caught sight of a little paper crumpling in his fist.

Bruises or not, Casey could still move pretty fast when he wanted to, and Mikey was already off balance. He got his hands on the paper without much trouble.

The trouble came after he read it.

To the Hamato clan:

In your arrogance, you overstep.

Return my grandson and daughter’s heir and your insult will be forgiven. Refuse, and I will consider it an act of war, to be repaid by your city in blood.

Decide quickly.

Oroku Saki

Below that was a time and a location. One of the private terminals at LaGuardia. 11 AM tomorrow.

“Aw, hell,” Casey breathed.

“What?” Raph snapped. Casey handed over the note and sat down on the couch, hard.

He could see his grandfather’s face in his head, cold and implacable and ready to kill someone. And that would happen if Casey stayed here. He’d seen how many ninja the Foot clan had on them, right now. This whole thing hadn’t been just about training Casey up as a good little soldier. Granddad wanted him to take over from Karai, one day, the same way he wanted Karai to take over after him.

After all. Casey was hanging around with all this potential and no real plans for his future. Granddad would probably say he was doing him a favor.

And Casey...Casey had seen what the Shredder was willing to do to his enemies. The turtles were stubborn, and they didn’t know his granddad, and they knew Splinter had gotten away. They would probably think they could make this work. That they had to save him.

Hell. Hell, hell, hell. He couldn’t let that happen. Not when he’d live through whatever Shredder could do to him and they might not.

Casey breathed out hard through his nose and looked up at where Raph and Donnie were having a hissing argument with Mikey and April was reading the note. The motion didn’t escape Raph’s attention.

“I know that look, Jones,” Raph said flatly. “You’re thinking about doing something stupid. Am I going to have to tie you to a chair again?”

Casey tried for his breeziest, most nonchalant grin. “Aw, who, me?”

Raph and Donnie traded a look.

“I’ll go get the chains,” Donnie said. Nuts.

“Again?” April asked.

Chapter Text

Casey kept up a measured and reasonable response as he convinced his friends they shouldn’t actually tie him to a chair and mindlessly throw themselves into a fight they had no chance of winning. Which of course meant that he and Raph were yelling in each other’s faces until April broke out the Donnie-enhanced Super Soaker.

“Are you two done now?” she asked, as Casey shook his wet hair out of his face and Raph sputtered.

“But he—”

“I just—”

She leveled the nozzle at the two of them again. “Are you done?” Her voice was very dangerous. “Because if you’re not, I’m giving this to Mikey.” Mikey very obviously perked up.

Casey drew one hand down over his face, wiping off the water. His shirt was drenched. “Yeah. ‘M done.”

Before Raph could say anything that might make him not done, Casey grabbed the bag from the thrift store and went to go change.

Getting changed into clothes that his grandfather had nothing to do with, even if they weren’t ones Casey had picked himself, felt amazing. Granted, it also felt kind of tight around the shoulders and loose around the waist, but that was nothing. One fake-alligator skin belt later and he was good to go—as long as he didn’t start doing jumping jacks and bust his shirt seams.

He opened the door feeling a lot calmer. Not even Leo hanging around like a mook on guard duty spoiled his mood. Immediately.

That took until Leo started following him down the hall to kick in.

“Look, I don’t need a lecture about death before dishonor or whatever,” Casey said, sourly.

“Good thing that’s not what I was going to say,” Leo said, because right, he was as much of an asshole as Raph, he just hid it better.

“Good thing that’s not what I was going to say,” Casey mimicked in a mocking nasally voice. He wasn’t sure where exactly they stood right now but he’d be perfectly happy to return to Leo hating him. That he understood.

“Did Raph ever tell you what us meeting the Shredder looked like?” Leo demanded, ignoring him. “Or do you know?”

Casey actually stopped and squinted at him. “Uh. Noooo…?”

“He tried recruiting us,” Leo said, and stopped being able to meet Casey’s eyes. “He tried to recruit me. Offered me an heirloom sword and said I was good, but he could teach me how to be great.”

Casey swallowed an angry lump in his throat. “Oh, and I’m supposed to think you’re so much better—“

“Casey, shut up for once, will you?” Leo snapped. There it was. Leo hating him, business as usual, they could stop having this conversation now—”Your grandfather scares me more than anyone else in the world. I only talked to him alone for five minutes and I didn’t know him and I wanted him to like me and I don’t know what I would have done if my brothers hadn’t been there, okay?”

That…was more words than Casey had heard Leo say that weren’t about ninja stuff at once, like, ever. Damn.

“And you were stuck with him, and you got away, and I thought you might want someone to notice you worked hard at it,” Leo muttered.

“I did, yeah,” Casey said. Was there. A way out of this conversation? He had no idea what to say.

“Great.” Leo made a Serious Leader Face at him. “So can you maybe not go back to a master manipulator who wants you to kill us until we’ve tried anything else?”

He’d agreed to wait on surrendering, but after ten minutes, Casey was starting to consider just walking up to the surface and hailing a cab just to get away from the arguing. It was downright depressing how many long ways they were finding that just led right back to ‘fight while severely outnumbered and probably get killed.’

“If we just had more time, I could modify a teleport device for you,” Donnie was saying now. “You could use it to get out once you were in Japan.”

Casey, back flat on the floor and legs resting on a chair, sighed. “And how am I supposed to hang onto that, in this brilliant plan of yours?”

“...swallow it?” Donnie offered. “Or we can use your tracker and teleport to you, and then get you out.”

“If I disappear, Granddad’s going to guess it was you guys in five seconds flat and then we’re back to square one.” Casey shot him down reflexively at this point.

“We could do what Sensei did and fake your death,” Leo suggested. Ooh, that had promise.

“I’m afraid he will be far more skeptical of that tactic this time,” Splinter said, sounding almost apologetic, like he had used up the one ‘get out of jail free’ card. “And if he believes it, that becomes further cause for him to declare a blood feud.”

“We could make it look like an accident,” Mikey said.

“How, are you going to summon a fake meteor?” A pillow smacked him in the face and bounced off. “Yeah, kinda like that.”

“Will you quit kidding around?” Raph, thrower of the pillow, snapped at him.

“Well, sorry, Raph, what do you want me to say? Sure, let’s go through with the plan that’ll wreck all of your guys’ lives instead of just mine? I don’t think misery loves company, actually, misery would like to go be very alone actually.”

“Tough!” Raph said, and Casey was very sure that if his dad hadn’t been right there he’d be cussing Casey out right now.

“So the problem’s not getting you out but keeping you out let’s focus on that instead,” April suggested, with a kind of patience that suggested she would rather be pulling out their teeth. “There have to be more people who have stayed away from the Foot.”

“Yeah, well, the only one coming to mind is—” The shooting down came almost reflexively again and when Casey’s mouth bothered to consult with his brain the realization hit him like another pillow to the face. “...Jesus fucking Christ.”

“What?” three voices asked at once. Casey didn’t bother answering, already rolling to his feet.

“I need a phone.” This was going to suck.

The number Casey’d had memorized since he was five went through with no problem. An extremely mad voice demanded “What?” after the third ring.

“Hey, Pops. Miss me?”

“Casey. Where the hell have you been?”

“Enjoying Granddad’s company. He decided he wasn’t taking ‘no’ for an answer. You know what he’s like.”

“Heh. Coulda told you that would happen.”

“Yeah, well, you didn’t. But if you wanna talk, I’m not exactly planning to go along with getting dragged back to Japan, and hey, look at that, you managed to get out of it. How?”

Clink of glass in the background. Bastard was probably drinking again. “And I should tell you that...why?”

“Are you telling me you don’t wanna screw him over?”

“Tempting. But it’s not gonna work for you.”

“Why not?”

“Because I split for the other side of the world, kid, and got a couple decades before he pushed all the way over here. He’s here now. You and I can’t exactly make it off-planet. You’re out of places to go.”

Casey growled. “Fine. Then you wanna help me get him out of here?”

“So how’s that gonna work?”

“I’ve got the turtles. You know they’re pains in the ass when they want to be. If we got on his case, and the Purple Dragons wanna expand into whatever’s left, I’d stay out of your business for three months.”

“No can do.”

“Six months.”

“Kid.”

“A year.”

“You think he’s gonna drag you back home for less than a year?” Hun asked. Fucker. Motherfucker. “Sorry. Not my problem.” Rat bastard useless shitlicking—“You’re better off with him than me anyhow.”

“FUCK you,” Casey yelled down the line, and slammed off the call. He was still shaking.

The phone clattered against the wall without breaking. It didn’t help the shaking. Casey held back from slamming his own fists against the wall, barely. Fucking—sounding sorry for himself about it—

“Case?” Raph asked, from up the hall. They’d given him privacy for this. Casey pulled himself back together and opened the lab door.

“Fucking useless.” He'd been right, that sucked. He’d expected nothing and was still disappointed.

Raph just nodded and said “C’mon. There’s food.”

This was why they were friends.

There were snacks spread out all across the coffee table like the cupboard had exploded. Casey handed over the T-phone, snagged a thing of fruit snacks, said, “Never mind,” and plunked himself against the side of the couch. “No pizza?”

“It’s kind of hard to get takeout right now,” Donnie said, turning the phone over. “The EPF’s on another alien hunting kick. Did you crack this?”

“What do aliens have to do with anything?” Casey asked, instead of answering the question.

“They’re the EPF,” Leo said, like Casey was the dumb one here.

“...And? You guys are ninjas.”

“Earth Protection Force, dude.” Mikey was eating a roll of dry salami like it was a banana. “Hunting aliens is like, their whole thing, and they’re super good at it, which sucks ‘cuz Bishop decided we count for being like three percent alien goo.”

“It’s only three—oh, you got it right that time.”

Casey only sort of heard Donnie. He’d frozen with some fake grapes halfway to his mouth.

Raph had complained about Bishop and the EPF before, not long after he and Casey became friends. They didn’t know each other super well back then. Casey hadn’t gotten the details besides ‘there’s a guy hunting us down for being monsters.’ But the guy good enough to chase down ninja went after...space aliens.

“Casey?”

“So hypothetically,” Casey said. “If I had like one more secret family bombshell to drop.”

“You can’t seriously tell me you’re an alien,” Donnie said, grumpy.

“Not even mostly. But Granddad is.”

Donnie was used to wanting to strangle Casey Jones. This was a familiar feeling. He knew all the reasons it was a bad idea to act on it.

This was a good time to remind himself of all of them, as he got his microscope slides and sterile poking implement out of his lab while everyone else kept shouting at the infuriating human. Oh, sorry, mostly human.

He got a sample from April first, after quietly confirming that she was human as far as she knew, and sandwiched the drop of blood between two slides. He had to break out the air horn before his brothers cleared away from Casey, but he got that sample too, with a minimum of talking.

“Don…”

“I need to check this,” Donnie said, cutting off any attempt Casey could make to explain. He wanted confirmation of evidence from his own tools, which at least only gave him bad data when he did something wrong, before he had this conversation.

The evidence was fast. April’s blood under the microscope looked like every picture or drawing he had ever seen. Casey’s blood had a few weird little spikey balls in it that didn’t match a single one of the images online.

Donnie banged his head against a wall a few times, and then went to go break up the shouting in the living room that had already reached levels loud enough to penetrate his soundproofing again. This was fine. He had all the information now. He had an idea to make Casey’s stupid plan work. They didn’t have as much time as they could have had, but he had an idea.

He had to blow the air horn twice to get everyone’s attention.

“I have an idea, but I’m going to need more blood.”

“...Well, that’s up there with the creepiest things you’ve ever said,” Casey said.

Donnie refused to deal with any arguing in his lab, so his brothers went off to start putting the other stages of the plan together. April was allowed to stay, as a lab assistant, and Casey didn’t have a choice about getting plunked in Raph’s borrowed gaming chair with a carton of juice and tubing in his arm. He was lucky Donnie wasn’t breaking out the chains.

“So I’m sensing some irritation here,”

“Who said I was irritated?” Donnie hauled the centrifuge onto the counter with a loud thud. “I’m not irritated.”

April, working on her laptop, looked up long enough to give him an ironic expression strong enough to magnetize. “Sure.”

“I’m not!”

“You’ve asked me literally zero questions,” Casey pointed out. “I know you have them. You always have them and you left before I started explaining.”

“Shut up. Drink your juice.”

“Irritated…” Casey said in a sing-song voice, raising the carton to drink straight out of it anyway.

Donnie did not strangle Casey Jones. He plugged in the centrifuge and started calibrating and ignored him completely. It didn’t matter if he had questions, since obviously Casey didn’t want to answer them.

“So, Casey,” April said. She had her Reporter Interview voice on. “I didn’t hear outside, with the shouting and everything. How long have you known about this?”

“...Since I was like, thirteen? After my Ma died.”

“You really didn’t know before?”

“No? I told yooo—oh.”

Donnie looked up suspiciously. Casey was staring at April, but when Donnie looked over at her, she just blinked innocently at him.

“No. It’s not like—a thing. My grandma was human. My Ma’s side is all human. I didn’t even get the hair thing.”

“The hair thing?”

April kept asking questions and Casey kept answering them. Donnie started surreptitiously scribbling down notes. Apparently white was the Shredder’s natural hair color, and Karai’s too, except she dyed it. Casey was allergic to fish and made his own Vitamin D. Wherever Shredder’s kind of alien came from—which Casey didn’t know, because the reason Shredder ended up on earth in the first place was to hide out from being a wanted criminal, looked like a leopard didn’t change his spots—the gravity was stronger. Which was why Shredder hit so hard when they fought him. And also why Casey had never broken a bone.

“Do you have any questions, Donnie?” April asked, after a long pause while Donnie finished scribbling down some more notes and a half-baked idea that they could probably test Casey’s bone density in a way that wouldn’t risk hurting him. Probably.

“No, I think that answered most of them,” Donnie answered, still distracted. Maybe some kind of sonar? How hard would it be to make an X-ray machine? That was a good project to have anyway. Wait, no, question—“Why didn’t you tell us sooner?”

“I didn’t tell anybody. Didn’t want to end up in a lab getting milked for my blood by some whackjob scientist.”

April laughed. Donnie scowled. “Hey.”

“Relax, you’re my favorite whackjob scientist,” Casey said. “Also, I think this is full.”

It was. Donnie swapped out the blood bag for an empty one and put about a tablespoon of blood into the centrifuge. Several hundred RPMs later, he pulled it out carefully and found that it had broken up into different layers.

Sure enough, the top layer, when he looked at it under the microscope, had lots and lots of weird little spikey balls.

“Oh, wow, this might actually work,” Donnie said. “One batch of genuine alien blood, coming right up.”

“So we just need everything else to work,” April said.

Casey gave a weird, wheezey little laugh. “No pressure!”

Oroku Saki was perfectly content to wait as the clock approached 10:30. All New York business affairs had been handed over to Karai’s capable hands. The luggage, including equipment to continue Casey’s training immediately once they reached the Foot’s central compound, was already stowed in the private plane’s storage area under his feet. Their 11:15 takeoff remained confirmed with air traffic control. There was no doubt the boy would come—he had already proven willing to sacrifice himself for his friends once already, and Saki hadn’t had nearly enough time to train that out of him. The closer Casey arrived to the scheduled departure, the less time he would have to come up with any more of his clever plans. No more waiting. Last night’s distraction was time Saki hadn’t wanted to waste, even if it was probably for the best to force his grandson to cut his ties to the Hamato now.

If Casey hadn’t made contact with the Hamato until he came around to understand how things had to be, that connection would have been a convenient way to bring his errant student’s line back into the fold...but perhaps that could still be managed. Who knew what the future would bring?

His cell phone rang. Not the one that he was using to stay in touch with the perimeter guards—the one with the number he gave to business and personal contacts. The time was wrong for Japan, but perhaps one of his contacts in New York had failed to get the message that he would be leaving town and they should be in touch with Karai. Worth picking up; he could claim he had another meeting as soon as the perimeter spotted Casey on approach.

“Oroku Saki,” he said, on picking up.

“Hey, Granddad.”

“Casey.” He caught the attention of the ninja waiting by the door and signaled for them to wait for further orders. “Are you having trouble entering the airport?” It was unfortunately difficult to surveil all the entrances of a place this large, and the turtles would surely choose an unobtrusive approach.

“Yeah, about that. I’d love to come along on your little field trip, but, ooh, I just don’t think you’re going to have the time to wait for me.”

“I assure you, grandson. If you make me wait, I will, but you will not like the results of wasting my time.”

“Yeah, you’re not going to like it either.” The boy sounded far too confident. Saki didn’t care for it. “One question. Have you ever heard of the Earth Protection Force?”

“I have.” The American government’s UFO chasing team. Hardly concerning to him.

“Cool. Then you know what it means that as of, eh, fifteen minutes ago, they’ve heard of you.”

“...Really.”

“Special delivery for Agent Bishop. Physical confirmation of a genuine alien on planet, accumulating political power and weaponry, and, would you look at that, for the next hour he’s right there in grabbing range.”

Hm. He signaled instructions to the waiting ninja to check with the lookouts on the Manhattan exits. “And what makes you think I hadn’t already arranged a truce with Agent Bishop in order to conduct my business in privacy?” It was a bluff, but a good bluff. He could surely arrange enough time for Casey to come join him, if he applied pressure correctly.

“Yeah, see, I did think of that, and then I figured if that was true, you wouldn’t have been nearly as paranoid about who’s had their mitts on my blood.” Clever boy.

Saki still pushed him. “I assume that’s what you used for proof. You’ve only put yourself in danger. If you come with me, I can keep you safe.” The influence of the EPF surely didn’t extend that far overseas; he had enough contacts in the Japanese government they would never approve a strike against him, and any clandestine force could simply be wiped out on their approach to the compound.

“Think I’ll take my chances,” Casey said, flatly.

His other phone buzzed with an update. Not the immediate perimeter, but one of the agents surveilling the nearest bridge to Manhattan. There was an armored government vehicle in the traffic headed this way. It could be for any number of reasons...and yet, he was quite certain Casey wasn’t bluffing.

Saki had positioned his forces carefully, brought certain pressures to bear, made a careful and calculated strategy based on everything he already knew and had learned of his grandson. He had laid out his intentions clearly on the board.

And Casey, when backed into a corner, had chosen to upend the game entirely and lose on his own terms, taking his opponent down with him.

“Like I said. You haven’t got the time to wait for me. You’ll make your flight time—Bishop’s not getting through to air traffic control, for some reason, no matter how hard he tries—but I wouldn’t recommend sticking around past it to chat in person. I hear he’s got a lousy sense of humor.”

No hesitation. Blocking the trap didn’t seem like sentiment, either, given that it would keep Saki on the run instead of forced to regroup. It seemed the boy had learned something.

“I see I managed to teach you well after all,” he told his grandson.

“Yeah? Then you better watch the fuck out,” Casey said, and hung up.

Saki sent orders to the pilot to prepare to leave as soon as possible, to the perimeter guards to disperse, and to Karai to bolster security and begin surveilling the EPF. These last businesses taken care of, he switched off both phones, buckled his seatbelt, and sat back to watch the takeoff.

As his adopted planet fell away below him, he started to laugh.

This hadn’t been a waste of time after all. Casey was learning well. He would doubtless learn more before the situation in New York settled enough for Saki to return and take care of business here again.

The Shredder was perfectly content to wait.