Chapter Text
The world turned strangely quiet around Mikey, the sounds of the apocalypse no longer reaching his ears. Anticipation coated his tongue—the same metallic taste as blood—making it impossible to form words. He didn't need to, though. Nothing had been left unsaid.
Mikey knew opening the portal would be his end. But if there was even just the smallest chance it might change something—even if that something was just giving them all a headstart—it would be worth it.
So, he tore a hole into the very fabric of reality.
Feeling the atoms that make up his existence disintegrate was deeply weird. There should most certainly be excruciating pain, but Mikey couldn't feel it. Despite that, he knew he only had a few more seconds left. That was fine. He’d long since known this would be his last resort. It was something he’d accepted a while ago.
He winked at Junior. This was his end, his destiny, and he refused to face it with sadness.
The empty space between his atoms embraced him. His final thoughts were of his brothers. Donnie and Raph and Leo, younger and carefree, smiling at him.
And then he was falling.
For one horrible moment, the panic set it, clouding his mind. He grabbed and squashed it with practiced ease. He was Hamato Michelangelo. A little free-fall wasn’t a problem for him.
Or, it wouldn’t be if his ninpo hadn’t been utterly drained from that miracle portal of his. (And wasn’t that weird? He’d quite literally dissolved into nothing, and yet, here he was. But he’d think about that after he stopped plummeting to his (second?) death.)
His ninpo might be drained, but his brothers’ were still there, within reach. He pulled at it and, a moment later, it gave. It still wasn’t his, he still could barely focus, but still he managed to slow his rapid descent to something a little less rapid. Usually, his flight only had to work against gravity, but now he also had to fight the velocity of suddenly plummeting through the sky.
He didn’t gain control of the direction he was moving in, but the closer the ground came, the further his fall slowed. Individual skyscrapers reached towards him and then, before he knew it, one of them clipped his side.
Pain exploded along his side, forceful enough that for one horrible moment, he lost the grip on his ninpo. He took hold of it again, somehow—impossibly—with even more adrenaline shooting through his system. It hadn't kill him. The impact could’ve shattered his bones into dust, but it hadn’t. Take that, gravity.
Unfortunately, the impact did send him bouncing off the skyscraper, careening down towards the street below. He tried to reach for something, anything to hold onto, but his hands came away empty. For the briefest of moments, he considered using his chains to grab something, but he wasn’t sure he could keep his flight up if he tried to split his focus into two.
When he finally hit the ground, the air was forced out of his lungs.
He counted that as a win. The air leaving his lungs meant there were still lungs in place it could leave.
He’d survived. His whole body ached, his ninpo was utterly drained and exhaustion made it impossible to do much more than lie there and groan in pain, but he'd survived.
"Woah, guys, did you just feel that?" Mikey knew his ninpo had been quite glitchy ever since he made that portal to save Leo, but this felt different. It wasn't his connection to it that had decided to sputter like a dying engine, it was his ninpo itself.
No, that wasn't quite right either. It was more like one of his brothers had connected to it, except he knew what they felt like pretty darn well and this hadn't been them.
By the looks on their faces, they'd felt it too.
Donnie had taken a defensive stand even before Mikey had spoken, arms raised and feet snapping to the ground. Usually, it was Raph who got ready to protect them like that. And if it wasn't him, it was Leo. Except neither of them were in the state to fight. Raph was still adjusting to his lack of depth perception and Leo looked more like a mummy than a turtle.
They'd all been curled up on a giant pile of pillows and blankets, basking in each other's presence, but now the air was filled with tension.
"It kinda felt like you, Mikey." Even as Raph said that, Mikey could see he was just as confused as he was about that.
"I swear I didn't do anything!" It didn't feel like he had to clarify, but he did anyway.
That was when something changed. How exactly their ninpo worked was far above him on the best of days, he'd always relied on his intuition for that. But ever since they’d activated it, he'd felt his brothers right there, a soothing presence in the background, within his reach. Except now, he could feel someone else as well.
He didn't know what his ninpo felt like to his brothers, but if he had to guess it'd be exactly like the new presence.
"Donnie?" Raph asked, his voice pitching higher in distress.
"What! This isn't on me. Not everything is my fault!" He glared at Raph. "Your clones aren't even in alpha yet, don't blame me for the second coming of Michelangelo."
"The what?” Mikey stared at him.
Donnie quickly waved him off. "Don't worry about it. We-”
"Wait," Leo interrupted him slowly, trying very hard to focus through the haze of painkillers still clouding his mind—which was his own dang fault for vanishing into another dimension and getting the daylights beaten out of him by a furious alien. "Wouldn't he be, y'know," Leo gestured around with one hand, "the third coming of Michelangelo?"
Mikey couldn't help the snort that escaped him, even as Donnie looked like he was about to have an aneurysm. His purple brother slowly exhaled through his nose, pinching the place between his eyes. "Please stop talking, Nardo. You barely make sense on the best of days."
“…Hey!” came the belated shout of indignation.
Raph and Mikey traded a quick glance. Raph cleared his throat. “Uh, guys? Shouldn’t we do something about this?”
"Oh, for sure," Leo agreed, closing his eyes again and generally just looking like he didn't plan on moving a single muscle, "let's just call Draxum. He loves to help nowadays, right?"
"And that's precisely why we're not gonna bother Barry," Mikey said before anyone else could jump in, "he's already super busy rebuilding everything down in the Hidden City." He stretched his arms over his head until one of the joints gave a satisfying pop, "besides, we can track this down on our own! This is exactly the kinda stuff we do, guys."
Donnie sighed. "Mikey's right, Leo. This is precisely the 'kind of stuff we do'."
For a moment, Leo simply stared at Donnie. Then, deliberately slowly, he said: "You do remember that I broke, like, every bone in my body, right?"
"Like you'd ever let us forget that," Donnie replied, rolling his eyes. "That is why only Angelo and I will go."
"Wait, what? Raph can go too." Raph's objection earned him a skeptical look from everyone else.
"Oh, but you can't just leave me all alone, Raphael." Leo—very dramatically—draped a hand over his forehead. "I am still horrifically injured. What if I need to get something to drink?" Leo asked, blinking his eyes open to give Raph just about the worst puppy eyes Mikey had seen in a while. "You can't just expect me to be walking around. What if I stumble and then die, huh? Do you want to be responsible for my untimely death?"
As Raph set out to reply something, Donnie used one of his metal arm things to shove Mikey towards the exit, casting a quick glance back at their brothers. "Let's just go."
He nodded and quickly bounced after Donnie. Mikey might not have the smallest idea on how they'd actually find the person who'd caused the weird ninpo thing, but between Donnie's brains and his creativity they were bound to come up with something.
“Oh, uh, please be careful out there,” Raph called after them, the worry in his voice obvious.
A lifetime ago, Mikey would’ve responded something along the lines of always being careful or not needing Raph to fret over him like this, but now things had changed. With everything that had happened to them, Shredder hunting them and the whole foot clan business and then, just a week ago, the alien invasion that they’d stopped single-handedly, Mikey could understand why Raph would be worried.
The whole surface was still shaken, with everyone being on high alert as the city was slowly starting to rebuild itself. None of them had gone up since their final fight, partially because half of them weren’t fit to leave the new lair, but also because it seemed much too risky as things were.
But they also couldn’t leave this weird ninpo thing unexplored.
Mikey turned to Raph and gave him his best grin. “Don't worry, Raphie. I promise on our limited edition Jupiter Jim: Secret Saturn Sanctuary figure that we're gonna be super careful."
"What he said."
Their promise seemed to reassure Raph. He still looked worried, but he knew how much swearing on their limited edition Jupiter Jim figure meant.
With that, they headed out. Mikey would've loved to take the turtle tank, but traffic was still down in a lot of places. Countless roads had been destroyed or buried beneath rubble when the krang had attacked. The humans were doing an admirable job at cleaning everything up again (and rescuing everyone who needed rescuing), but it had barely even been a week. Not even the humans could get a whole city up and running again in that time.
So, they walked instead. Or, at least they walked until Donnie found a spot where he could safely ascend to the surface with his battle shell. Mikey climbed on his back and then they lifted off, towards whatever adventure was waiting for them now.
After flying around the city for what felt like hours, they landed on one of the few rooftops that was still intact, still no sign of anything out of the ordinary. Well, aside from the carnage the krang had caused that the humans were still cleaning up, but they’d expected that when they’d headed to the surface.
Donnie hadn’t said anything about it, but Mikey could tell he was paying even more attention to remaining unseen than before all of this had happened. As much as he didn’t want to think about it, Mikey knew that the humans knew about them now. Maybe with a lot of the finer details missing, but he’d seen videos of their final fight circulating online. They knew about them. And, sooner or later, they’d have to face the humans.
But not when all of his family was still recovering.
So, they just had to stay hidden.
Mikey got off of Donnie’s shell and let himself collapse on the uncaring concrete of the roof, stretching his limbs out after clinging to Donnie for all this time.
After a moment, Donnie sat down next to him and sighed.
They’d hoped that Mikey would be able to sense whoever this other person was if they got close enough, but no dice. At least they’d gotten out of the lair for a while.
Donnie tapped around on his wrist brace and Mikey half-heartedly lifted his head to watch. With a few swift clicks Donnie navigated to his trusted tracker app, something Mikey had noticed him doing whenever he was getting a little stressed or anxious ever since they’d lost Raph. Seeing that his brothers were still roughly where they were supposed to be always calmed Donnie down.
Except that wasn’t the case now.
He closed the little hologram thingy that had popped up, pressed some hidden button for a few moments and his wrist computer brace let out a sad little beep before shutting down. He powered it up again, opened the tracker again. He slapped the brace against his other hand and the hologram shook for a second.
“Donnie, what’s going on?” Mikey didn’t like this. He didn’t like how this looked like something was wrong with Donnie’s tech all of a sudden.
“It’s glitching.” It sounded like he wanted to convince himself of that fact as much as he wanted to convince Mikey.
Mikey sat up and leaned closer, tilting his head from one side to the other to see whatever was making Donnie act like this.
Then he spotted it. A little orange blob, a few blocks away from their current position. All fine and dandy, except for the fact that orange was his color and he was right next to Donnie. A fact that was confirmed by the second orange dot right next to Donnie’s purple.
“Why am I on there twice?”
Donnie gritted his teeth. “I don’t know.”
“We should go check it out.” Energy built up in every part of his body as his thoughts began to race.
Mikey suddenly couldn’t wait for Donnie’s response any longer and took off. The other orange dot had been moving, but it had been pretty slow. He’d be able to catch up with it easily. Even as he jumped from rooftop to rooftop, he didn’t want to jump to any conclusions, but part of him - the same part of him he relied on for fighting, his gut instinct - knew he was right even as Donnie yelled for him to stop.
The random ninpo flare up had felt exactly like him. There was another person running around with the exact same tracker as him. Junior’s existence proved that traveling back in time was not only possible, but had been done by himself. Unless something else had suddenly messed with reality, that meant-
Metal arms wrapped around his plastron and lifted him off his feet.
Mikey twisted in their hold to throw an accusatory glare at Donnie, who gave him an unimpressed stare back.
“Don’t just go running towards an unidentified threat, Angelo.” Donnie placed him back on the rooftop, but Mikey knew he’d snatch him up again if he tried to bolt.
“It’s not a threat.” He saw how utterly unconvinced Donnie still was and decided to double down. “Trust me. There’s no way he’s a threat.”
“You can’t know- No. Absolutely not, that’s not possible.” Donnie stared at him like he was expecting Mikey to reveal it had all been an impossible prank. “Why would he land now?”
He looked at Mikey like he was supposed to have an answer to that. “I don’t know! I have never done time travel before, remember?”
Donnie looked at him for a moment longer, then turned away and sighed. “What will we encounter? A trap? Another version of my brother because that’d be just the kind of luck I have? The purple dragons messing with me again? Vote now on your phones.”
Despite his words, Donnie walked in the direction of whatever was awaiting them and Mikey scrambled to follow.
It only took them a few more partially destroyed houses to find the alley the signal was coming from. Before Mikey knew what was happening, Donnie was already floating down, so he quickly climbed down the building to join him.
When he turned around, he came face to face with a stranger.
Except, could he even call him that? Could he be a stranger to himself, even if this other him looked positively ancient? And that had to be him. The tracker and the ninpo had pretty much already confirmed this in his head, but actually seeing the person they’d been after cemented it.
That was himself. Even aged and wrinkly and wearing clothes he’d never seen before, that was himself.
Out of all the differences he’d immediately noticed, Mikey’s mind focused on one thing that dwarfed them all. For one moment, he didn’t care about what the appearance of another version of him meant or would entail. "Ohmigosh, when do I grow hair?"
His counterpart gave him the exact same grin Mikey always did when he was about to tell a joke, his eyes lighting up. "Most people would ask when they go bald."
A moment later, the old version of himself passed out.