Work Text:
Raphael is forgetting something.
He knows this. He knows this, and knowing is half the battle- as you already know, of course- but the thing that you’ve gotta understand is that Raphael is a busy, busy turtle, which is to say that Raphael’s got a lot on his plate and is booked and booked and busy and all sorts of involved with all sorts of things (the burden of the quaternary protagonist- you’ve gotta be interesting at least a solid fourth of the time), so when he comes back to the lair after a long day of doing this and that and a little bit of this again only to be stopped dead in his tracks by what seems to be a giant lamp in the middle of the living room-
Well, the long and short of it is that he immediately dives headlong from forgetting into forgot. But to be fair: look at that thing. Take it in. Visually. Spiritually. Let’s all bask in the light of the lamp that we’re all right by and then look deep in our hearts and ask ourselves: can you really, really blame him?
“What, did we redecorate?” he calls out as he edges around the base of said giant lamp. “Goin’ for a bit of a pet shop vibe? Back to the roots?”
Nobody answers. Nobody answers, and there’s a brief second where Raphael wonders if the guys aren’t also somehow the lamp and like, he’s not sure how that would work but you’ve gotta cut him some slack, alright? They’re always doing stuff like that. Like this. Turning into lamps and stuff. That’s a thing they can definitely happen, definitely, and okay we seem to be losing the thread a bit here but you understand what he’s getting at and he understands what he’s getting at and we all understand what he’s getting at so let’s just agree not to look too closely and move right along.
Anyways. A little more fighting to make his way around the lamp and he breaks out around the base into the kitchen where a series of precariously soldered metal rods climb on up towards a single bright-burning lightbulb that’s shining like a spotlight on April and Michelangelo, who in turn are hunched over the kitchen table with a mass of yellow fabric swamping them both. Raphael has to squint to see what they’re up to, and even then it doesn’t really help because April’s prodding at something on the table like it’s about to jump up and bite her (which knowing them it very well might) and then Michelangelo doing whatever it is that Michelangelo does which is always a mystery, so there’s really no point in hurting himself trying to figure out whatever’s going on up there.
Point is that it’s all sorta weird, but then all sorts of things are sorta weird and god knows Raphael’s no picnic himself, so it’s about time to get this show on the road don’t you think?
“Hey there, April,” Raphael says to that end, nodding her way. “Fancy seeing you here. If we’d’ve known you were coming over, we could’ve broken out the nice giant fu-“
Michelango sneezes. It’s loud.
“-ng lamp,” Raphael- who has been trying to swear beyond damn for literally as long as he’s been a twinkle in a corporation’s eye- finishes, unphased. “A little touch of the high life for our favorite reporter.”
“Hi, Raphael,” April says as he draws close to the table and pokes his nose down towards what she’s working on with very little regard for things like “personal space” and “””privacy.””” “I was wondering where you were at- it’s been too quiet around here! What’ve you been up to?”
“Little of this, little of that, little of this again,” Raphael tells her and she looks at him, wide-eyed and startled.
“Well don’t just admit to that out loud !” she scolds, and Raphael raises his hands in (mostly) affectionate acquiesce.
“Plausible deniability. Understood. What’re you guys doin’, then?” he asks, sandpaper smooth as always, and then turns to an aside with some indeterminate and uncaring god. “And are we sure it’s a good idea to leave these two alone?”
“Michelangelo and I were just sewing a button back onto one of my suits. It fell off the pocket, see?” April says, holding up the jumbled mass of fabric and nodding in its general direction which does absolutely nothing to help Raphael figure out which of the three hundred pockets exactly she might be talking about. Either way, he raises an eyebrow.
“Michelangelo wanted to help you sew a button?” he asks
“Yes, that’s what I said,” April says, and Raphael huffs.
“Let me rephrase: Michelangelo wanted to help you sew a button?” he says, and at the other end of the table Michelangelo turn to look at him, blinking slowly.
“Yeah, that’s what she said,” he says, and April points at him as he grins big and wide on her and they apparently synchronize in some head-in-the-clouds convention miles and miles above anything Raphael will ever manage.
“What he said,” she says. “Which is what I said, which is what he said I said, which is what he said. Keep up, won’t you?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. He said, she said, whatever. I say bull,” Raphael huffs, and Michelangelo props his head up on his hand and shoots him a slow, lazy look.
“You need to broaden your horizons, dude,” he drawls, sage in the way that only someone who knows they don’t know what they’re talking about can be. “Come on, come hang out with us- it’ll be a blast. Pinky promise. Pinky swear.”
“ Do you want to join us, Raphael?” April says, perking up. “We’ve just about got that button back on, but we were trying a little bit of embroidery while we’re at it, see?”
She shows him the APRIL embroidered in messy but legible letters right along the jumpsuit’s collar, which for something that’s saying April’s name really does manage to have Michelangelo written all over it. There’s a little daisy next to it that’s about tens of hundreds of times neater and also April’s contribution, surely- a little clumsy, but full of heart. A bit of an underdog. Plucky. Would be something else as the lead in a baseball movie.
Now, it’s important we all band together here and understand that if Raphael really wanted to, then Raphael could embroider too. Raphael could embroider like nobody’s business, because Raphael’s been around the block when it comes to clothes; a natural consequence of getting what he can get when and where he can get it. Of course, another natural consequence of getting what he can get when and where he can get it is identity issues out the wazoo, so Raphael’s also got a whole lone-wolf, bad boy thing going on whenever it’s convenient, and because life is never easy it’s convenient right now which is to say:
Sewing? Embroidery? Ha! There’s nothing on earth, space, or sewer that Raphael would like to participate in less than sewing a button or a name or a daisy or maybe a little rose or an animal if some kind, that could be fun, that could be lots and lots of fun again if it was something that he wanted to do, which again it isn’t.
It isn’t.
“Yeah, no,” he scoffs, like the lone-wolf, bad boy that he absolutely, textually, and consistently is. “You couldn’t pay me.”
“Well that was never on the table,” April- perennially underpaid, underappreciated, and deeply impatient with it all- grumbles, and Michelangelo blinks in Raphael’s general direction.
“Come on dude, it’ll be fun. Promise,” he says, and then wiggles his eyebrows. “After this we’re gonna paint each other’s nails.”
Raphael huffs. Rolls his eyes. Breathes a little funny for a second as he’s hit with a wave of overwhelmingly agonizing jealousy for reasons completely unrelated to the conversation that he is having right here right now at this very minute.
“Yeah, alright, call me when you start braiding each other’s hair. Then it’ll really be a party,” he says like someone who is (NOT!) so desperate to participate in a bonding activity that he can hardly even see straight. April just giggles behind her hand and Raphael has a sudden, sinking feeling that he’s maybe not as subtle as he’d like to be, and an even more sudden and suspiciously buoyant feeling that he does not care. Again, driving it home: bad boy. Cool but rude. He thinks that he might just burst apart and die with it all.
“Alright,” Michelangelo singsongs, rolling his neck out as he slides straight up again. “I did my part, dude. I offered, you said no-“
“He was there, Michelangelo,” April interrupts, cool as ice and rude as anything. Raphael is very proud.
“-so you can’t be a jerk about it later,” Michelangelo finishes, unperturbed. “Seriously man, one single singular and totally untubular ‘why didn’t you guys invite me’ and I’m gonna have to pull out the tapes.”
“Oh, laying down the law are we?” Raphael snipes back, doing his damndest to regain his footing in a conversation that would not give him the upper hand on threat of death itself. “I’m shaking in my anti-gravity boots.”
He gestures to the anti-gravity boots in question. Again: it’s been a long, long day.
“See, that’s being a jerk. That’s what being a jerk looks like. Sounds like. Whatever. Point is is that it’s not cool, compadre. Not cool at all ,” Michelangelo says, shaking his head with a disappointment so palpable you can almost hear its voice. His eyes are vacant. Raphael’s eyes are vacant. April’s eyes are vacant. Three thoughts between the lot of them.
Regardless.
“If you two are going to fight then take it to the sewer,” April says, gesturing with a pair of sewing scissors like someone who’s a hazard to themselves and others. “There’s no time for that sort of thing-“
“Interpersonal conflict? Emotional complexity?” Raphael interrupts. He’s ignored.
“-because we’ve still gotta get this done. These buttons aren’t gonna repair themselves, you know.”
She stops. Considers for a moment.
“Though they will once I’m through with them,” she adds, and Raphael blinks.
“What does that mean?” he asks. “What’s that mean? That doesn’t mean anything, April. What does that mean?”
“I dunno, I thought she was pretty clear,” Michelangelo says, and Raphael scowls.
“You’d think a rainy day was clear if it gave you the time of day,” he says. Michelangelo just shrugs, unbothered.
“You can lead a turtle to basic life skills, but you can’t make him drink,” he says, wise as a bat out of hell and mixing metaphors like a barista with a chip on their shoulder and a rush hour that’s not gonna work itself, and Raphael blinks again because like. What else is there to do?
“Look, see, now you’re not makin’ any sense either,” he says mournfully. “It’s contagious.”
“Well I thought he was pretty clear,” April says, and then it’s again with the laughing and Raph knows that someone’s being lead on the runaround here but he can’t for the life of him figure out who, what, when or where, much less why. You’d think that those ninja-quick reflexes would do him a favor now and then; you’d also, coincidentally enough, think wrong enough to flunk yourself out of remedial classes.
Well, moving on. In circles, probably, but moving on regardless.
“Yeah, yeah,” Raphael sighs, more air than anything as he tries to shake the feeling that the horse behind the carrot on a stick here might just be him . “Why are you doing all that here anyways? Wouldn’t your apartment be more convenient? Quieter at least, especially ‘cause I can’t imagine Michelangelo over here is making it all that easy to concentrate.”
“Hey, watch it. The Michelangelo over here can hear you,” Michelangelo mutters, and April laughs heavy through her nose.
“You guys are closer to the station for one thing,” she explains, smoothing out the jumpsuit on the table and pushing it back towards Michelangelo as puts all that righteous indignation aside in favor of making a laser-focused and frankly downright valiant attempt at threading the needle. “And for the other, I don’t do much detailed work on anything in my apartment, so it doesn’t have very good lighting. Not for this kind of thing, and not for much anything else either.”
“What, and the sewers do?” Raphael asks, which would’ve been a completely reasonable question were it not for the giant lamp there- forgot about that, did you?- but April shoots him a bit of a look anyways.
“ Donatello does,” she corrects. “He said he just so happened to be developing a special high-powered lamp- top secret stuff of course, but he agreed to let us use it for a bit!”
“I agreed to let you test it. There’s no free range here, and for that matter there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” a voice from… god on high apparently corrects, tinny and distant, and Raphael has a whole two seconds to be confused by that before there’s a whole bunch of clanging and banging and audiovisual rearranging and then a hatch in the base of the lamp opens up and out comes Donatello, emerging from the depths like the world’s ugliest butterfly. He hits the ground with an oomph and a cloud of dust, brushing himself up before hooking an arm back up in the hatch and shooting them a grin.
“You understand that they don’t pay us enough for this,” Raphael mutters. This contributes nothing to the larger conversation.
“Woah, Donatello, dude,” Michelangelo- who is, on the other hand, contractually obligated to contribute to the larger conversation- says from the table. “Was that like, a threat?”
“Don’t be silly Michelangelo. It obviously wasn’t a threat,” April scoffs, and then turns to Donatello and lowers her voice a bit. “ Was that a threat?”
“More a promise, I’m afraid,” Donatello says, and Raphael grimaces.
“And that’s a cliché,” he says. “You’re losing your touch, Donatello.”
“Functional impossibility,” Donatello says with a wave of his wrench.
“I’d like to direct your attention to the giant lamp in our lair,” Raphael says, voice dry as the desert sun or otherwise the bulb of the giant lamp that is, again, right there.
“Oh, gladly! Some of my best work, really- this baby could outshine the sun,” Donatello says, perking up and happy as a clam if a clam were also a mutant turtle. He lovingly pokes at an open and openly sparking wire then which is fine, of course. He’ll be fine. It’s fine. Turtles aren’t conducive to any sorta shock past shell, which is to say that turtles aren’t conductors; two or so years ago Leonardo had tried to lead the Philharmonic in Hot Cross Buns and just about fell all over himself. Deeply embarrassing day in human history, and ten times worse for any turtles.
Anyways.
“The power of the sun and they’re using it for a fashion show,” Raphael mutters. “What’s next? You looking to use nuclear fission to bake some cookies?”
“Maybe to power my TV,” April jokes with a little half-laugh threaded through the edges, and then immediately perks up a bit in that overtly genuine and borderline manic way people do when they have a really good really bad idea. “Or maybe my camera! Oh, Donatello, do you think that maybe-“
“Two steps ahead of you, sister,” Donatello says, already scribbling away in that notepad of his at the speed of light since apparently harnessing the power of the sun alone wasn’t enough for him. “One superpowered news camera coming right up. Now would you like that to be unstable or super unstable?”
“Super, please, and hold the sugar while you’re at it,” April says, leaning forwards on her elbows. “The more immediately dangerous the better, actually. I’ve got a reputation to uphold, you know.”
“There’s something wrong with you,” Raphael tells her.
“And you’re no fun at all,” April says with a wave like she is not discussing harnessing notoriously destructive natural power for the purpose of the five o’clock news.
“B ooooo ring,” Michelangelo echoes, finally getting that needle good and threaded- as worthy an opponent as any inanimate object can be, Raphael supposes- and now carefully sewing the third in a line of buttons to the front of April’s suit. It’s shaped like a little flower. The whole thing is disgustingly cutesy, and Raphael would give two shells and a baby to be able to participate, but that’s neither here nor there.
“All work and no play, Raphael. That’s what does it,” Donatello says in his I’m Smarter Than You voice, and Raphael throws his hands in the air.
“Like he just doesn’t care,” Michelangelo offers.
“Sew your damn button,” Raphael tells him.
“I already did, ” Michelangelo ready-aim-fires back, and gestures to the button that he did, in fact, already sew, and pretty decently too. “We’re onto the next one now, aren’t we April?”
“We are!” April exclaims, and then drags her bag out from underneath the table and tugs out another jumpsuit that’s exactly the same as the first and lays it down on the table, looking entirely too proud of herself for what the situation warrants.
“The girl’s consistent. You’ve gotta give her that,” Donatello muses, and Raphael balks. Gestures a little bit. Gestures a little bit more. Entirely helpless, naturally, and really he’s gotta ask: is there no peace in the world? No rest? Hell, even a quick little turtle power nap?
“I don’t gotta give her anything at all,” he says to that end. “Seriously, April, how many of those things do you have ?”
“Well I like to have multiples of the same outfit. Just in case. It’s convenient!” April says. You’ll notice that she’s dodging the question.
“No, it makes it seem like you’re a cartoon character,” Raphael says.
A moment of perfectly unweighted and not at all pointed silence.
“To be fair, it’s very fashionable,” Donatello offers, breaking the (perfectly unweighted and not at all pointed) silence, and Raphael is thrown so off-kilter for a moment that he just about goes green with it.
“No, no it’s not, ” he says. “I know you’ve always got your head in the clouds, but let’s be realistic here.”
“Woah, bro. Yo, Joe. That’s not very nice,” Michelangelo says, despite the fact that the general state of their cartoons implies that that particular joke probably would not be able to cross dimensional lines, or at the very least not without a permit. “And not very true either. That’s kinda embarrassing for you, man. Look, you’re all red.”
He flicks the corner of Raphael’s mask and in doing so risks death itself. A story is a story however, and a story needs a cast, so Raphael (begrudgingly) ( so so begrudgingly) lets him live to see another day.
“See, Donatello thinks it’s cool! And I’m sure Michelangelo thinks so too, don’t you Michelangelo?” April insists, finally recovering enough from her offense to defend herself, and Raphael shoots her a capital-L Look.
“Michelangelo’s opinion doesn’t hold water here. He thinks everything is cool,” he says flatly.
“Harsh, but true enough I suppose,” Donatello calls, which is great. If Donatello would just keep on agreeing with Raphael well then maybe he’ll get a bit bigger of a speaking role next time.
Anyways.
“Woah, woah, woah! Not true guys, and not cool,” Michelangelo says with a scowl. “I think plenty of things aren’t cool. Math homework. Squirrels. Uhhh, financial inequality.”
“He’s got a point,” Donatello hums. They all take a second to think about how uncool financial inequality is.
“But he thinks the suit is cool at least, don’t you Michelangelo?” April says, and he shoots her a thumbs up that she apparently decides to take as definitive fact because she gestures like see?
“Okay, so two people think it’s cool and those people are mutant turtles,” Raphael scoffs. “Not exactly a good look, and in more ways than one.”
“But we’ve got numbers at least,” April offers. “And you can add Leonardo to that list- he thinks it’s cool, too. Told me so himself and everything.”
Raphael snorts.
“That’s because Leonardo thinks you’re cool, and Leonardo is a sap,” he says, matter of fact and cool as a cat. “The other day he nearly cried because he saw a bush that looked like-“
He stops in his tracks. Wrinkles his nose. Realizes with a very quick and sharp certainty that he is never going to recover his dignity ever- never ever ever - as Donatello pokes his head right back out of his little death trap hatch over there and shoots him a grin entirely too sharklike for who and what they are.
“Like who, Raphael?” he singsongs. He’s got a bolt balanced precariously on top of his head. He’s got Raphael’s dignity balanced precariously in his hands. “Like someone you know, perhaps? Like someone you know very well?”
“It was all in the leaves,” Michelangelo says, and then turns to April all conspiratal, lowers his voice a notch or three but it’s Michelangelo so they’re still hearing him from Jersey to infinity and then (of course) beyond. Lost cause, their eardrums, the eardrums of the galaxy at large. Lost in a sea of stars. “Allllll in the leaves. Green, y’know? All that greenery. I swear April, I thought Raphie over there had split in two.”
“Mitosis,” Donatello says, grave. “Irreversible, I’m afraid.”
And then he bursts into laughter.
“Alright, alright you two. It wasn’t that funny,” Raphael grumbles, and he has to raise his voice so as to be heard over all three of them now, but that’s fine. Betrayal of the highest order, but also fine.
“No can do, bro. It really really was,” Michelangelo says, and Donatello has to latch onto the side of his not-doomsday device to hold himself up.
“You looked so much like that bush, Raphael,” he wheezes between laughs. “April, he looked so much like that bush.”
“Leonardo wanted to take it down here but said it wouldn’t be able to thrive. Said it needed light to grow,” Michelangelo says. “Said he had to learn how to let go.”
“And it’s just growing up so fast,” Donatello says through tears- and really, it’s not that funny- still somehow managing an impression of Leonardo’s Emotional (™) voice that’s so damn good it’s like he’s right here with us, and Raphael genuinely considers seeing if he can’t paint himself a tunnel and run right through the wall because even if it doesn’t work, a few bricks to the face wouldn’t hurt nearly as much as this.
“Please, like Leonardo could keep a plant alive,” he scoffs in a desperate and extremely unsuccessful attempt to maintain a little dignity. “For someone with a literal green thumb he never did get the sitch on vegetation.”
“Come on now, Raphael, he’s done a good enough job with you,” April says, and she looks just about bursting with her attempts to hold in laughter. “And surely a bush that looks just like you but isn’t you would be easier - would be easier to- “
Her voice cracks as she does them all a favor and cuts herself off by bursting into laughter. A deep, long-standing, from the stomach kinda laughter, the sort of laugh that just keeps going and going and doesn’t stop and where is she even keeping all that air?
“Who is this for?” Raphael asks nobody at all, and to no avail. The laughter continues. The laughter carries on and on and on while Raphael checks his watch and taps his foot over and over again for ten seconds straight, and really it’s all started to sound a bit like an entirely too heavy-handed sitcom by the time they finally start tapering off. Exhausting, really. Exhaustingly annoying.
“Ah, a classic,” Donatello finally, finally, finally says, wiping a tear from the corner of his eye. “But all jokes aside, where is Leonardo anyways? You’d think he’d’ve stepped in before the last of his dignity went down the drain.”
Now, for our readers who have been here from the start, and have since forgotten what happened way back when: once upon a time, Raphael was forgetting something. Once upon about two minutes later, Raphael forgot that something.
And now, the long-awaited belated conclusion to the saga of forgetfulness, this lovelorn ballad to those of us who can’t hold a thought for more than a second, the fashionably late belle of the ball, the cherry on top of the damn-it-all-to-hell mother fu -
Michelangelo sneezes. It’s loud.
- ng sundae:
Where is Leonardo anyways?
Well. About that.
“About that,” Raph coughs, sheepish as anything and everything and anyone on earth, and immediately everyone groans. Donatello smacks his head into his palm. He’s still got the wrench in there. It’s not pretty all around. “How would you boys feel about taking a little day trip?”
And once upon (yet another) time, in a land approximately five miles, 22 action-packed minutes, and one skateboard ‘round the fountain away, Leonardo looks at his turtlecom and notes with a mild twinge of annoyance that Raphael was supposed to be there to pick him up 4,218 words ago.
“Well, at least the company’s good,” he says, and right there- stoic at his side, and sporting both the torn red packaging of a granola bar and then a certain je ne sais quoi- Raphael bush does not say a single word at all.