Chapter Text
The Turtles sat in the TV room on their bean bag chairs with blankets and pillows everywhere. None of them were feeling well, having caught a particularly nasty cold.
Raphael lurched forward, sneezing violently into his handkerchief. Groaning, he pulled the cloth away from his face revealing clear strings of snot attached to the fabric. He sniveled and scowled, thoroughly unenthused.
“This…” he grumbled, “is entirely your fault! Why in the actual hell would you drink straight out of the milk carton if you’re sick!?” He pointed to his orange-clad brother, Michelangelo, who laughed awkwardly with a guilty expression, knowing full well it was in fact his fault.
“At least you haven’t been sick recently!” Leonardo chimed in. “I was poisoned literally a week ag-” He was cut off when his voice caught in his throat and he coughed into his elbow. When the coughing fit stopped, the blue turtle cleared his throat and turned to face his brothers to his left.
“I’m gonna kill him, Raph.”
“Not if I beat you to it.” Raph retorted, patting his brother’s carapace.
“You guys are so mean to me!” Mikey complained, and slumped into his bean bag chair.
“I have no sympathy for you.” Leo grumbled.
“Boys, your tea is done!” Splinter called, a steaming pot of tea in one hand and a stack of four tea cups in the other.
“Dad, they’re plotting to kill me!” Mikey whined. Splinter was neither convinced of the validity of this alleged plotted murder amongst his sons, nor did he care. He had heard whining all day–mainly from Michelangelo–and frankly could not care less.
“That is nice, son.” He said deadpan, handing his son a cup and poured the medicinal tea into it.
“What’s with the outfit?” Raphael asked, as his father poured him a cup of tea as well. “You going somewhere?”
Splinter was clad in his traditional ninja uniform that strongly resembled a kamishimo samurai’s robe, but shrunk down to fit him. Splinter used to wear this outfit far more when he was younger, but over the years it had been relegated to being his outfit for adventures topside.
“Yes.” He stated, pouring Leo a cup of tea as well. “I realized that we have no ibuprofen left, and you boys have burned through all of the tissues in the house.” Leonardo smiled looking into his steaming cup.
“Oh, is that why you gave us handkerchiefs?” Mikey asked, looking at his white cotton rag drenched in snot and wadded up in a ball next to him.
“Yes, but I know you like the tissues more, so I will go get some while I’m there.” His father explained.
“Yay!” Raph exclaimed, he too did not particularly like the handkerchiefs. He understood they were supposed to be reusable and thus “better,” but he went through them just as fast as tissues and wasn’t particularly fond of having a wet, snotty rag in his jacket pocket.
Splinter placed a hand on Donatello’s forehead. He was deeply asleep and didn’t even stir from being touched. Thankfully his fever had gone down with the help of the singular last pill of ibuprofen in the house, but Splinter knew that it most likely would not last much longer. He seemed fine at the moment though.
“Is there anything else you boys want from the store?” Splinter asked. Instantly, all three awake brothers raised their hands and started begging in unison for random things all at once.
“Oh! Can you please get some orange juice!?” He heard Leo shout.
“I want more potato chips, or tea cookies!” Raph exclaimed.
“Wait-wait! Can you please get donuts!?” Mikey asked with begging hands and big puppy dog eyes.
“What?? N-no!” Splinter retorted, trying to stop the cascading waterfall of increasingly absurd requests berating him. “I will get the orange juice because it has vitamins in it, but I am not getting any of those other things!” He insisted.
“Yay! Thanks dad!” Leo said cheerfully, being the only one of the three to have his request granted.
“Damn. Worth a try I guess.” Raph grumbled, having known his grocery ideas were not going to get approved.
“Yeah…” Mikey agreed, sulking a bit with his red-clad brother.
Splinter slung his backpack over his shoulder and turned to look at his ill sons.
“Okay, I will be back in a half hour. You boys behave yourselves!” He instructed. He figured by fifteen years old, they most likely would not do anything too insane, but some days it really was worth specifying.
“Yeah, yeah.” Michelangelo dismissed, rather ironically given the instruction was for the most part directed at him. Raphael coughed before glaring at his brother.
“Guess we’ll have to sacrifice Mikey a different day.” He sighed.
“What!?” The orange turtle protested. The turtles began bickering amongst themselves again and Splinter decided to just leave them. It seemed unlikely they would escalate to deadly force in their sickly states.
Splinter walked through the abandoned maze of tunnels that connected to the active subway for a short while before surfacing in an alley way. He shoved aside the heavy manhole cover and a gust of freezing air hit him. The cold stung his nose and sent a shiver through his body.
He scanned his surroundings. As expected, there was nobody in the dark, graffiti-decorated alleyway.
This alley in particular was fairly long and probably would have worked as a back street if not for how narrow and poorly lit it was. There was the occasional homeless person zonked out on the ground, but otherwise no one really ventured back here.
Splinter was never concerned with homeless people seeing him. He was fairly certain that if Homeless Joe told someone he saw a giant rat walking on two feet that said hello to him and gave him a candy bar, most people would think he had really lost it this time, or needed to perhaps get a refund.
Splinter did his best to reposition the manhole lid, but eventually gave up, not wanting to hurt his back. Halfway covered would have to suffice.
The rat man walked down the alley for a few minutes, being sure to check corners before he turned or passed them. Soon though he heard the sounds of people talking and their footsteps getting closer. He quickly threw himself into a pile of trash bags and rearranged them around himself to be completely hidden. As the voices grew nearer, he was able to start making out what they were saying.
“Ugh, could we have possibly gotten stuck with a more boring assignment?” He heard one voice say. “They split up our units too, don’t even get to be with our friends.” It grumbled. It sounded like a young man’s voice with a ghetto sounding accent.
“Can’t Oroku-whatever the hell his name is and his army of pretty samurai boys do this? It’s cold as f%&k out here!” He complained.
“Seriously, what’s even the point of this anyway?” A new voice chimed in. This one also sounded like it was from a young man, but he had what Splinter thought sounded like a California surfer accent. “Why we gotta look for some f%&king… urban legends? I mean, giant turtles? C’mon with that.”
“They’re not ‘urban legends’ you moron!” A new voice criticized. Splinter wasn’t sure why, but he felt he had heard this voice before. It sounded like a teenage boys’ voice, perhaps not much older than his sons.
“I got the scar on my arm from one of them! Those things killed a member of my unit and hospitalized the others! They are very real and very, very dangerous!” The boy lectured. By now the group was passing in front of where Splinter was hiding in the trash.
They were Foot Soldiers–only the three of them thankfully–and none appeared to be of the Elite Guard or “Oroku Saki’s pretty samurai boys” as they had apparently become known as amongst the lower ranks. Splinter found that mildly amusing.
He recognized the teenager in the group; an Asian boy with an attitude as sharp as his spiky black hair. They had encountered each other back in May when they first discovered the Foot Clan in New York City.
“Geez, take it easy, Batman. Sorry I ain’t out for vengeance!” Mocked the man with the surfer accent. Splinter could see that he had long, shoulder length, ratty brown hair and a Foot Shack beanie, a thick snow coat and at least two gold chain necklaces around his neck. The spiky-haired boy scoffed and turned his back, but still kept his glare fixed on the man that was supposed to be his comrade.
“Whatever…” he muttered, “You wouldn’t understand.” He turned away and started walking, his headband's tails and the fur collar on his snow jacket fluttering behind him. “How about you just keep your b!#ching down a bit. New Jersey is probably getting noise complaints.”
The long haired Foot soldier scowled.
“Ugh, the nerve of this kid!” He exclaimed to the other Foot soldier which Splinter saw was a young African American man with his hair fluffed in an Afro, with his Foot Clan headband wrapped around his head and then disappearing into his hair. He had bright diamond stud earrings and his hand firmly in his snow jacket’s pockets.
“Just ignore him, dude. We only have to be out here for a couple more hours…” he said, “Maybe someone’ll find something and we can leave early.”
“I just hope it’s not me. I can’t imagine the amount of paperwork they’d make me do.” The man with the long hair stated as he and the man with the Afro began following after the spiky haired boy.
“I heard the reward is crazy if you find them though.”
“Wait, there’s a reward!?”
“Dude, did you even go to the big meeting back in June?” Their conversation continued as their voices faded out of earshot down the alleyway.
Splinter, fairly certain they were gone now, poked his head out of the pile of trash bags and looked around. With this new information, the rat man now knew for certain what Leo had learned from Karai was true.
Saki was indeed searching high and low for them. Though why were they here in Brooklyn? The Foot Clan was for the most part stationed in Manhattan, they were disturbingly close to the lair. Did they know where the lair was? Or was it just a random chance? They mentioned other groups, how many were there? Splinter didn’t really know for sure, but decided it best to stay on extra high alert going forward.
He contemplated if this was a new thing related to what had happened between Leo and Karai. Something about that situation still felt strange to Splinter, so many things felt like they didn’t add up. This didn’t feel like Shredder’s typical tactics or logic, but he supposed maybe he just didn't have all of the information.
Regardless of the exact reason why, the rat man made a mental note to drill it into his sons’ heads that they needed to start being extremely careful when going topsides for a while. Stealth was unfortunately not their forté.
Splinter hopped up onto a trash dumpster and then onto a fire escape ladder that was just extended low enough for him to grab. He climbed the fire escape up to the top of the building and skillfully leapt from one building to the next, using the height of the roof tops to stay out of human sight.
After some more building-hoping and alley-traversing, Splinter made it to the building a block down from the convenience store his family frequented. He had already come across two other groups of Foot Clan soldiers wandering through the streets and was beginning to suspect that this Foot Clan surplus was far worse than he initially thought. He pulled out his spyglass and surveyed the area.
As he feared, there were more Foot Soldiers. At the street corner, there was a small group of three amongst the evening traffic. One was a young man with blonde shoulder length hair who was checking his watch with one hand and was holding a walkie talkie he appeared to be listening to with his other hand.
Another was also a young man with short black hair and a white snow jacket. He stretched his arms and seemed to be complaining about something–most likely his boredom. Among the two men was also a girl with starkly bleached platinum hair tied back in a ponytail and a crimson puffer jacket. She was leaning against a light pole, obviously tuning out the two guys in her group while playing a video game system; perhaps one of those GameBoys Michelangelo had been begging for for Christmas.
“They are here too!?” Splinter exclaimed to himself. “They…They are everywhere! What is Saki up to?” He sighed and pulled the spyglass away from his eye. He wondered how much of Brooklyn was this way. Surely Shredder did not have enough Foot soldiers to cover all of New York like this. Was it just this area? And if it was, was it because he knew their lair was nearby? He wished he knew more.
Splinter’s eyes remained frozen on the Foot Clan’s insignias.
“I still cannot believe I am uttering that name again… and seeing those headbands…”
Memories of Saki, long long ago, came back to him. A flash of a day so distant and yet felt like it could have been yesterday appeared. Saki, perhaps no older than about twenty or so, held up a mauve headband with an insignia in the middle. It was of a stylized Foot in black ink, the symbol of the Foot Clan, Japan’s most ruthless crime syndicate the light of day had never seen.
“Check it out Yoshi!” Saki’s voice sang with excitement and pride.
“Wow!! Congrats, man!” Splinter remembered saying with equal excitement of his best friend’s achievement.
But then Splinter’s mind drifted to that night…
Tang Shen’s limp and battered body grasped in Saki’s hand. Sweat glistened on his forehead as the fires around them raged and crackled.
“Why!? WHY, SAKI!?” Splinter had screamed, tears filling his eyes. Rage and pain and so many emotions seared his heart. He wanted to kill the man before him more than anything in the world. The man who used to be his best friend.
“You BETRAYED me, Yoshi!!” Saki screamed back, his voice rough and raw. “You turned on me, on all of us!! YOU’RE A F%&KING COWARD!” That last word stung like salt in a wound, like a knife. Like Saki’s blades.
Splinter shook his head in an attempt to stop the flood of horrible memories.
“Ngh- No-no! Focus on the mission!” He made himself say outloud. He tried to focus on reality, the icy wind, the cold concrete, the bright lights, real things.
He sighed and looked at the convenience store again. The Foot Clan would definitely raise the stakes of this mission, but Splinter was fairly certain that his typical route in and out would work just fine.
The rat man collapsed his spyglass and shoved it back into the side pocket of his backpack then took off to get his groceries.
He leapt over the gap between his building and the next until he got to the convenience store. He rolled into the landing and hopped off the side onto the fire escape in the alleyway. He slid down the ladders one floor at a time until finally landing with a soft thud onto the ground below.
He straightened his backpack, checked his surroundings, then casually walked to the “employees only” entrance. The door was left propped open by a chunk of brick and Splinter entered, unslinging his backpack from his back and unto onto his front so he could easily add groceries to it. He made note of the fortunate lack of employees in the back storage room and got to work finding what he needed before his solitude was interrupted.
Splinter walked through the towering isles of boxes and crates of the new goods, ready to be put out on the shelves. The boxes were sorted vaguely by type, though it wasn’t always perfect.
“Here we go!” Splinter said as he came to a group of several very large boxes on the shelves, each with different brands of tissues. One of the bulk boxes was thankfully already opened and on the bottom shelf. He grabbed a box and looked at it thoughtfully.
“Hm, is this the brand they like? I don’t remember…” He flipped it around and read some of the product details. He vaguely recalled the cute little star guy on it, but brands always had so many variants that all looked exactly the same. “I do not think it really matters much… a tissue is a tissue.” He shoved the box into the bottom of his backpack and grabbed three other boxes. He hoped his sons would be okay with the bluish green box as opposed to the teal box or the turquoise box.
He was certain each box would probably only last each turtle about a day or two at the rate they had been going through them, but by then they would most likely be better enough he could send Michelangelo and perhaps whoever else was the most on the mend to get more.
With the tissues now in his possession, he moved on to the real reason for this trip, the ibuprofen. He grabbed two packs of the normal pills and shoved them into the backpack. He still did not know how he and Donatello had not noticed their supply had run out. Splinter counted it as a win that his sons had not injured themselves so badly or gotten sick enough that they required such medicine since running out. At least—until now.
Splinter walked through the isles looking for the orange juice, but instead came across a box of tea cookies. He stopped and stared at the box for a moment. He said he wasn’t going to buy any…
But…
He did like a nice tea cookie with his tea.
Splinter sighed and grabbed the box.
“I am such a push over.” He grumbled and added the item to his bag of other goods. He continued on his way, turning the corner and found various refrigerated drinks; milk, lemonade, orange juice, all sorts of things. He grabbed a gallon jug of the orange juice he knew his boys liked and–after some shifting and skilled reorganizing–put the jug in his bag. It added a significant amount of weight to the bag, especially compared to the other items he had gotten.
He zipped the pack closed and slung it across his back with a grunt.
“Ugh… this orange juice is heavy… better go before I cave and get any more junk food.” He adjusted his backpack a bit before making his way to the exit. He pushed the door open with a creak and stepped into the alleyway.
Just then, in the corner of his eye, Splinter noticed a figure at the end of the alleyway; A young man with short dark hair froze as their eyes met. Piercings crawled all the way up his ears, while a mauve headband with an easily recognizable symbol was positioned just above his brow. The symbol of the Foot Clan.
It was only a split second, but it was a split second too long. Splinter quickly closed the backdoor to the store. He heard the Foot soldier scramble for his radio and take a few very slow steps to reorient himself.
“S23 to S5!” He heard the man call over his radio.
“Go for 5.” The radio responded.
“I just saw something! It didn't look much like a turtle, more like a… a three foot tall rat with clothes and a backpack?” He explained rapidly with a certain doubt in his voice like he couldn't believe what his own eyes had just seen.
“Copy, what’s your 20?” The scratchy radio voice asked.
Splinter tried to breathe as he felt panic beginning to grip him. What did he do now? This Foot soldier didn't seem to know who he was, but that meant basically nothing with reinforcements on the way. He felt it far too unlikely that there was not a single person in the Foot Clan who knew who he was or at the very least couldn’t figure out who he was very quickly. He only really could run and hope they couldn’t follow.
“The convenience store on Tracy street by the intersection with Hall street! I saw it in the alley-” The Foot soldier stopped mid sentence when Splinter dashed from the backdoor across the width of the alley, hopped onto a dumpster and launched himself across the alley again and onto the ladder on the fire escape.
“-Oh! Wait–It’s making a run for it!!” The Foot soldier shouted, correcting his status over the radio.
“10-4, we’re on our way! Keep your eyes on it!”
“Copy!” The Foot soldier holstered his radio back on his belt and watched Splinter now half-way up the fire escape. The Foot Soldier jogged into the alley to get a better look.
“Augh! S#%t!” He cursed as he saw no way for someone with his athletic ability to get up there. “How did he get up there so fast!?” He barely believed what he was seeing, the rat-man-thing-whatever it was had been so swift and fast, it was a blur. How could something that fast be alive?
“Jess, where's the rat dude?” Splinter heard a voice demand that sounded like the one on the radio.
“He-he’s up on the roof!” The Foot soldier said as Splinter hopped up onto the rooftop and began running to the next.
“Well, don’t just stand there, Get your @$s up there!!” Their voices faded as Splinter continued to run.
“Ah yes, of course I get spotted after my backpack is filled with groceries!” He grumbled between steady breaths. He came to the edge of the building and leapt across the gap and onto the next building putting extra power into his leap to offset the weight of the backpack.
He was thankfully not far from the lair, but the last thing he wanted to do was carelessly lead the Foot Clan straight to it. He decided he would have to lose them first, maybe even make them think the lair was in a different location than it was if the opportunity presented itself.
Splinter then remembered his sons at home. His plan was going to take hours. He was confident he wouldn't be caught, but he knew his sons would start worrying if their father’s mission went from thirty minutes to three hours.
The last thing he wanted was his sons trying to “rescue” him in their sickly states. He was proud to have such brave and heroic sons, but it often bordered reckless stupidity. Their thinking skills too often left something to be desired.
He pulled his phone–his “shellphone,” as Donatello insisted–from the opposite side pocket to his spyglass and called up Leonardo. He and Donatello were always the best about answering and not turning the phone over to the cat randomly.