Chapter Text
“Somewhere in an abandoned sewer pipe, there’s a family that remains undiscovered by human eyes. Experiments unfit for the bustling life of the city above them. They have very little but each other to keep them company. A rat, and four turtles who- HEY!” April squawked as three large fingers wrapped around her head.
“Dude! Put the camera away!” Donnie reached for her phone.
April held it at arms length, struggling to shove him away. “Come onnn! Just let me have a couple shots! I’ll make them vague silhouettes!”
If April O’Neil was known for anything, it was getting into a new obsession every other week. Her new mini documentary kick had proven unsuccessful so far. The large pack of mutants she called friends were not keen on having their photos taken.
Unfortunately, this meant her best friend had to be the voice of reason, and it was a voice she didn’t always like to hear. Donatello was a lot of things, but a joykill wasn’t supposed to be one of them. That was Leo’s job.
“I’m not gonna show anyone, just my mom and dad!” April ducked under his arm, but Donnie kept up the chase.
“Dad is going to actually kill me if you have even one photo of us.”
“No he won’t! Splinter likes me, right?”
“Not that much.” He snatched it.
She groaned as he deleted the video and handed her phone back. She shoved it in her pocket. “You guys suck.”
“Stop whining, yeesh. We’re lucky Dad even lets you hang out still.”
“Where are the guys?”
“We were training, Dad just sent me to see who was here.”
They walked into the dojo just in time to see Raphael hit the mat with a heavy thud. Mikey stood over him, waving cheerfully. “Hey Apes!”
The other two turtles mumbled their greetings as Splinter walked over to her. “April. Are you joining the match?”
She nodded, already beginning to stretch. “I did have PE today though, so I’m not on my A game.”
Leo perked up from his spot on the floor. “Did your second semester start already?”
“Yeah like two days ago.”
“Silence!” Splinter barked. “Proceed with the round, Leonardo.”
Leo grabbed his practice swords, gripping them tightly as he stared Mikey down. April held out hope for him, but odds were stacked against Leo, and he slammed into the mat within a few seconds. Mikey’s eyes landed on Splinter.
“Leonardo, this cannot continue.”
“Yes sensei.”
“You are two and a half years older than Michelangelo. Do not let him get the best of you.”
“Yes, Sensei.”
“Michelangelo, good work as always.”
Mikey beamed. These training sessions always ended in one of two ways, and Leo was already glaring at the floor.
Donnie took the mat, and April could feel herself about to be thrown like a ragdoll. “Donnie, can you win this one?”
He just rolled his eyes.
The fight lasted for about two minutes. Donnie managed to disarm Mikey and throw his nunchaku out of reach, but it wasn’t enough to save him from several punches to the face, and a hard kick that knocked him out of the ring.
April bit her lip. “Great. Can’t wait to fight a cracked out middle schooler.”
“Hey!”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Raph yelled from the corner.
“It means middle schoolers suck.”
April didn’t last long against Mikey at all, and she could even tell he was going easy on her. She groaned, laying her head back against the mat.
Mikey stuck a tongue out. “Hur durrr, ‘middle schoolers suuuck.’”
“Shut up, Michael.”
Raph sighed, tugging at his belt. “Master Splinter, we can’t use our ‘play the winner’ rotation effectively if Mikey’s the only one winning.”
“Silence, Raffaello.”
Leo covered Raph’s mouth before he could talk back. “Master, what if we played two on two for a little bit?”
Splinter thought over the suggestion. “Very well. April and Raffaello, go against Leonardo and Donatello. Michelangelo, call.”
Mikey nodded, stepping off to the side while the others took their places on the mat. “Hajime!”
…
By the end of practice, the five of them were aching. The group of teens draped themselves over the tattered old pillows piled around the tv. Splinter retreated to his room.
Raph sat down next to Donnie, already getting out his noise canceling headphones. If the smell of sweat wasn’t enough to drive him insane, the conversation would do it eventually. Donnie threw an arm around his shoulders, and he squirmed until it was moved.
Leo sat next to April, fingers pressing into his own palm one by one. “How was school?”
“Nothing interesting. Ooh but my lab partner keeps coming to class with a ton of bruises and cuts. He says it’s hockey, but he got kicked off the team like two months ago. I think he forgot he told me.”
“He’s probably just a hothead like Raph,” Mikey snorted.
“Doesn’t matter to me. He’s a nice guy, I like him.”
“Woah, don’t go getting married on us O’Neil.” Donnie tugged at her bow, making her locs fall out of the hairstyle she had done.
She yanked the bow on his mask in turn, smacking him for good measure. “Yeah right.”
“Who is this guy even getting into fights with?”
Raph put his headphones on, no longer interested in listening. The static didn’t come. He pressed the power button a few times, but every attempt did nothing. “Donnie? My headphones are broken.”
“That’s weird.” Donnie lifted his arms from around Raph and April, taking the headphones. He put them on, then pulled them back off and fiddled with them. “Some kind of interference, maybe. Is there some kind of military op happening nearby?”
Leo frowned. “Not that I’ve noticed. Scanners have been pretty boring all day.”
“I’ve never run into anything like this before. It’s probably screwing with our phones too. Mikey, text me.”
“Not sending.”
“That’s just wonderful,” Donnie grit his teeth. “Must have started during training.”
Leo pulled out his own phone, hitting the side with the base of his hand. “What kind of military operation starts at three in the afternoon?”
“I don’t know. Do they have a normal start time? Apes, does your phone work?”
April shot a text to her mom. “Mine’s good.”
“So it’s just my tech.”
“Is it my code?”
“No, this is a hardware issue. Your code is perfect.”
She snorted. “Perfect? It’s not even good.”
“In any case, this looks like some kind of signal interference. It’s screwing with the chip.”
“Sun’s almost down,” Leo pointed out. “We can head topside and look around.”
Mikey nodded. “Let’s do that.”
“I’ll talk to dad, you guys start suiting up.”
Leo stood, walking up to his father’s door. He could already feel images flashing in his head before he could reach the room. He took a shaky breath, stopping at the doorway and holding the light switch. Perfect pressure. One. Two. Three. One. Two. Three.
“Leonardo?”
He snapped his head up. His father had left the room, but Leo had already flipped the light switch. He had to finish. Leo slipped past his father, into the room. His muscles relaxed on their own.
“Please do not have an episode,” his father sighed, following him in. “What is the matter?”
“Donnie’s tech is being interfered with. Some kind of government signal. It’s almost sundown, and I thought we might investigate and see what the problem is so he can fix it. We just need your permission.”
“Permission granted.”
“Thank you, Master.” Leo turned to leave, reaching for the light switch again.
“Leonardo, please spare me your rituals.”
He froze.
“…You are dismissed.”
“I know.”
“Then leave.”
“You- you told me not to flick the switch, and I just- if I don’t then something-”
Splinter grit his teeth. “Fine. Just do it.”
Leo flicked the switch gently with a thumb and finger, trying to finish quickly for his father’s sake. His head swam as he stepped through the doorway.
Mikey was pulling his shirt off. “We good Nardo?”
“Yeah, we’re good. I’ll be ready in two.”
“Sweet. Might wanna get that scanner calibrated, Don.”
Donnie rolled his eyes. “Don’t tell me what to do, I get enough of that from Leo and April.”
Mikey bit back an insult. Clearly no one was having it today. They always got snippy with him after sparring.
…
It was chilly in the sewers, but at least the temperature was kept at bay with a couple of janky space heaters. Above ground it was freezing. Mid January wasn’t doing any of them favors.
The air cut into their skin as they jumped from rooftop to rooftop, somehow growing colder every time they stopped to adjust their course. Avoiding Purple Dragon territory was putting minutes on their travel time, and complaints were frequent and unrelenting.
It took about twenty minutes for Leo to finally snap. “Stop it! Okay? We need our phones to work. This is actually important for once.”
“My face is about to peel off, Leo,” Raph grumbled. “I want to go where it’s warm and get some water on my skin.”
April pulled her scarf off her face. “Lotion would work better.”
“I would rather die.”
“Don’t start, is this about the texture again?”
“Shut up guys,” Donnie hissed. “I found the signal.”
Mikey scrambled over to where he sat. “That old building with the huge antennas?”
“I think so.”
“Then what are we waiting for?”
Leo’s head snapped up. “Mikey-”
But he was long gone, diving into the street to get to the building. The others barely gave it thought, scaling their way down the walls to the roof of the short building. Leo groaned, chasing after the group.
Donnie was already unscrewing a vent, despite Leo’s attempts to stop him. “Can we hold on? We need a plan.”
“What are we supposed to plan for?” Mikey shot. “We have no idea what’s in there.”
“Which is why we need a plan.”
The vent hit the ground with a clang, and their eyes landed on the solid block of concrete filling what should have been an air duct.
Donnie slipped his screwdriver back in his belt. “Okayyy… now what?”
April bit her cheek. “What if we just tore up the antennas?”
“We don’t actually know if that’s what’s causing the issue.”
“What kind of a building doesn’t have ventilation?” Raph grunted.
Leo leaned over the edge, scanning the wall. “Let’s try a window. Mikey, lower Donnie down and see if he can get one open.”
“Okay yeah, punish me for trying to get into the air vent before you could lecture us,” Donnie mumbled.
The window took some time to get open, and Donnie had to be switched from Mikey to Raph just to keep him from being dropped. He started by tearing off the janky bug screen, and spent the next three minutes trying to break the lock.
Once it was open, Donnie climbed inside. Raph lowered the rest of them in, and scaled his way down so Mikey could drag him into the room.
It was dark. The apartment looked practically abandoned, if it weren’t for the impeccable cleanliness. There was nothing in it. No furniture, no sign of life. There wasn’t a spot of dust, no odd sounds or bad smells. It was empty.
“This feels like Raph’s room,” Mikey snorted.
Raph shushed him before Leo could, and went to the front door. As he opened it, harsh white light broke into the room. The hallway on the other side of the door was cold and industrial, walls of bare metal.
Leo’s stomach began to knot, his hands twitching with a reaction he didn’t quite understand. This wasn’t one of his episodes. It was something else entirely.
Mikey’s gaze fell on him. “Leo? Do you need a lightswitch or something?”
He practically choked, struggling to say anything.
Raph put a hand on his shoulder. “Donnie, did you bring the lightswitch?”
“Right here.”
Flicking it didn’t help with anything but getting through the doorway. Walking into the hallway only made him feel worse, but the compulsions didn’t come. It would have to work itself out somehow.
April put a hand on his shoulder, looking just as uneasy as he felt. “Are you okay? We can leave.”
“Let’s just go.”
“Leo, you don’t look good,” Donnie cut in.
“Doesn’t matter.”
They pushed forward, Donnie still watching the scanner. Every now and then, the buzz of an LED sent Raph’s skin crawling.
They finally stopped.
“Here.”
It was a hellish amalgamation of cables and wires that spiraled up to the ceiling. It wrapped around itself like a tree, filling the center of the room and surrounded by a dingy looking console.
Donnie went straight to the console, beginning to search for the center of the signal. The others just stared, their throats dry.
“Who’s making all this?” April breathed.
A metal clank echoed in the hallway behind them, and everyone but Donnie had their weapons drawn in an instant.
It was a robot. Or some kind of robotic casing. It was holding a gun. A pulsing, fleshy growth took up the center of the figure, three wide eyes looking in different directions at each of them in turn. It spoke with a garbled, almost feminine voice. “Kraang property identified. Proceeding with recapture.”
April dove behind the console before anyone else, shielding her head from the gunfire with her hands. A shot ripped into Leo’s arm. It burned straight through, smoking ever so slightly as he dove for cover.
Donnie tore something out of the console, diving under cover with the others. “I found something! We gotta go! Now!”
Leo spotted a look in Michelangelo’s eyes. “MICHAEL, WAIT!”
He didn’t listen. He snatched a katana out of Leo’s hand, charging forward and cleanly slicing the robotic casing, nearly getting shot in the chest. The thing in the middle leapt out, but Mikey was quick to cut it in half. An alarm blared, and more of those things came from the other hallways.
Raph led the mad dash back down the hallway they had come from, finding another one of those barren apartments and slamming into the window without a second thought. He just barely pulled into his shell to keep his head from hitting the concrete. The others slammed into the ground nearby, April just barely managing to tuck and roll. More gunfire rained onto the pavement, but they had already started running again, not taking a moment to rest until they were back underground.
While Leo took to tapping on his shell to slow the panic, April’s voice cut through the heavy breathing. “What the hell was that?”
Mikey shook his leg, gagging. “Did you see its massive teeth right on the bottom? Those could probably slice through my arm! I think I have it’s blood on me too.”
That seemed to trigger something. “What were you thinking?” Leo snapped. “Taking my katana?”
“You weren’t using it!”
“I GOT SHOT!”
Donnie jumped in, teeth grit. “Can we continue this discussion at home? Mikey, let me clean the katana before he has an aneurysm.”
Leo glared at Mikey. “Let’s move.”
…
While Donnie took to the workshop to decipher what he had found, the others were in the med bay, debriefing Splinter while Raph cleaned up everyone’s wounds.
“They said something about Kraang.”
Splinter turned as if he had been slapped, gaze glassy.
Leo rested a hand on his shoulder. “Dad? What’s going on?”
“The Kraang.”
“Dad, talk to us. What’s going on?”
Raph glanced between them. Splinter was exhibiting behavior similar to Leo’s back at the lab. “Dad, what do you know about the Kraang?”
“They made me… they…”
“Grab a chair. He’s having a panic attack.”
Mikey was quick to drag one over, guiding Splinter into the seat. “This is officially freaking me out.”
It took several minutes for Splinter to get ahold of himself. When his breathing finally slowed, he stared up at them pathetically. None of them had ever seen him like this. “The Kraang,” he wheezed, “were the ones who made me… this.”
They had all heard the story. Escaping the lab, finding the abandoned pipeline, slowly gathering the supplies they needed to survive. The alien aspect had apparently been conveniently left out.
Raph went back to cleaning Leo’s wound. “Hold still, Lee.”
“D’you think that's why you got so weird, Leo?” April asked, rolling her bruised shoulder to work out the soreness.
Leo sucked in a harsh breath as Raph disinfected his burn. “Maybe. It wasn’t a compulsion.”
“If they know of our existence,” Splinter warned, “our bad luck is bound to increase quickly. We must be prepared to be hunted.”
“Great,” Raph mumbled.
Donnie walked in with his beast of a computer before anyone could ask what to do next. “Bad news, guys.”
Raph threw his arms up. “Now what?”
“I grabbed way more than I needed, and I was able to get through some of these janky firewalls. Look.”
The group crowded around the screen, looking at a map of the globe with several dots in different continents.
“I think these are other labs,” he continued. “These guys are doing a full scale invasion right under everyone’s noses.”
April took the mouse. “What does that mean for us?”
“…Mass mutation?” Leo glanced at Splinter, who was spacing out again.
Donnie shook his head in disbelief. “Anything’s possible with these guys, we’re dealing with an alien invasion over twenty years in the making.”
“These are all densely populated cities,” Leo pointed out. “Tokyo, Shanghai, Mexico City, I think that’s Delhi?.”
Mikey coughed, “nerd!”
Leo ignored it. “Why hasn’t there been one in New York for so long? If this stuff interferes with Donnie’s tech then they've been out of commission for over a decade.”
Splinter wrung his hands. “The destruction of the lab must have set them back several years.”
“Why? If these are what we think they are, they have a ton of labs around the planet. Why would they take so long to rebuild?”
“I don’t know.”
April stared at the screen, face set in a scowl. “We need to stop this.”
“No,” Splinter said firmly. “I will not have any of you place us in greater danger than we are already in. With any luck, this will pass over us and be dealt with another time, by another people.”
The others exchanged glances.
“You will not seek out Kraang, and you will not provoke them. You will attend to other concerns. There is no use in fighting those things. They are the concern of a future generation. Take April home, and forget about this.”
…
The walk back to April’s apartment was tense. April massaged her shoulder, lost in thought. “So what are we gonna do about this?”
“You heard Splinter,” Mikey said unconvincingly, “we can’t put ourselves in danger.”
April shook her head. “We’re in danger either way. Something tells me they’re not gonna wait eighty years to wipe out all life on the planet. And it’s not like some cop is gonna believe us either. We have to do something.”
“But this is huge! It’s global. We can’t get much further than Manhattan,” Donnie pointed out.
They stopped short when they realized Leo had fallen behind, staring at him while he looked through the grates at the sky. His voice was soft, but firm. “I think Dad doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
The air shifted in an instant. Leo, defying Splinter outright. With him on the other side of the line, facing their father’s anger would be very different.
Raph joined in almost immediately, speaking up for the first time since they left the medbay. “I’m not gonna let these things put our lives in danger without putting up a fight. If they really are hunting us, we should hunt them back.”
“We’re gonna risk going against Splinter’s orders?” Mikey challenged.
Leo eyed him. “You’re one to talk about orders, Mikey.”
“Whatever. I don’t want to be on Dad’s bad side, but if we’re doing this we’re doing this.”
“I’ve been on his bad side my whole life,” Donnie shot. “You could use some of it.”
Raph stared him down. “What do you think, Don?”
“I just… I don’t know if we can pull this off.”
“It’s up to us to try to.” All eyes landed on Leo, and he began to press his fingers into his palms. “We can’t let dad know. Not unless we get in too deep. If he knows, he’ll probably tell April’s parents and without her we’re dead in the water.” His eyes scanned the group, landing on Donnie’s uncertain gaze. “You and April are our eyes and ears. You’re the only ones who can pick apart the Kraang tech.”
Donnie nodded.
April crossed her arms. “So we’re doing it.”
“Yeah. No one else can.”
Mikey lifted the manhole cover, and they climbed out. April climbed the janky fire escape, pulling her window open. She shot a look back at the guys, a look of pained determination on her face.
“Why do I feel like this is going to ruin our lives?” Donnie mumbled.
Mikey elbowed him good naturedly. “Hey, don’t be such a downer! We got this!”
“Nothing’s gonna happen to us that I can’t help fix,” Raph said firmly. “I’ll keep you dorks in one piece.”
Donnie relaxed a little. “Big talk, little brother.”
“I know what I’m talking about. We’ll be just fine.”
As they walked back home in the safety of the sewers, for just a moment, Raph’s brothers believed him.