Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Cover Art by Joyfuladorable

“Play back the video.” Leonardo’s words carried the unyielding cold of steel.

The only sounds in the vaulted room were the uncomfortable shifting of bodies as the Magistrate’s assistant moved to touch a screen, once more casting a holo-light projection in the center of the oblong conference table so those on both sides, Triceratons and Terran turtles alike, could see it clearly.

Donatello leaned forward intently, resting his elbows on the table’s polished metal surface. His hands, clenched together so tightly his knuckles paled beneath olive-green skin, pressed against his mouth. Don’s eyes fixed searchingly on the image.

His two brothers sat on either side of him, Leo arrow-straight and unnaturally still in the oversized Triceraton chair while Raph practically simmered with tension. Although the room’s temperature and humidity were set to the thick bayou-heat that Triceratons preferred, Raph’s arms remained crossed tightly over his plastron as if he were chilly. His fingers twitched against his biceps, clearly aching to reach for the sai at his belt. He bit down viciously on his breather in a way that couldn’t be helpful for his airflow.

From behind Raphael, the android body of Professor Honeycutt moved forward. A soft buzz sounded as the apertures of his eye cameras narrowed to focus on the glowing emblem of the Triceraton Republic. The symbol rotated above the table, then flickered out, replaced by the same security cam footage they’d already watched twice.

The wide angle of the silent footage captured the scene from above and behind the anti-grav train platform as it floated high over the enormous dome of the solarium where the Triceratons at this far-flung lunar outpost grew their food. Rows of maroon-leaved trees and scaffolds of tall, vining plants created an oddly lovely patchwork below, but the attention of the three turtles affixed to the platform itself. The video had only been recorded that morning at a change in shift, so the platform bustled with a variety of scientists and laborers, mostly Triceraton. But the crowds were smattered with other aliens as well—even a few Federation humanoids—and one lone turtle.

On the holo-screen, Mikey seemed to be enjoying himself immensely, like a little kid at his first amusement park. Even from this distance, the security cam caught his wide eyes as he’d marveled at the view of strange plants, flying vehicles, and the grand immensity of the yellow gas giant glowing beyond the outpost’s overarching dome.

The line between Donatello’s brow ridges deepened as the brothers again watched Mikey pull Professor Honeycutt away from a seemingly absorbing conversation with their Triceraton guide to point enthusiastically at something off-camera. As the crowds heaved and swirled around them, Mikey leaned against the waist-high transparent barrier that separated from them a dizzying 300-foot drop, trusting it to take his full weight.

Whatever it was that Honeycutt responded inspired Mikey to playfully punch his rounded metallic shoulder and release him back to his conversation. The turtle went back to gazing at the unfamiliar sights of Draxidia’s bustling lunar colony.

And then, everything seemed to happen at once.

A blinking blue light signaled the air-train’s imminent arrival at the anti-grav platform and two portions of the transparent barrier flickered a bright warning, then sank downward to allow passengers on and off. Mikey moved back automatically to make room, bumping into a young Triceraton with golden-yellow skin and a long silver-gray coat. She seemed to stagger momentarily at the weight of the turtle, her feet stumbling too close for comfort to the gaps in the transparent barrier but catching herself against its corner.

Mikey’s arms stretched out, ninja-fast, and his hands were on her.

She teetered and wavered, the weight of her body shifting before she staggered backwards through the opening of the platform’s barrier just as the train arrived.

The footage was silent, so no one in the room heard the woosh of displaced air, the gruesome crack and macabre thud of her body hitting the front of the train, the horrified gasps and screams of onlookers.

The impact threw her out and away, and for an instant a distant expression of appalled amazement flashed across her face before she was sucked down by the moon’s artificial gravity, offscreen into nothingness.

Nobody in the room heard Mikey’s strangled cry, but his brothers could imagine it.

They looked on—for the third time—as Mikey hurled himself to the very edge of the platform, and their stomachs roiled as he, too, tottered at its very brink before his hands caught at the barrier’s handrail.

Although the camera’s angle did not capture it, Michelangelo—their playful, irrepressible, carefree brother—would’ve had a clear view past the bulk of the train as this Triceraton girl fell 300 feet to her death, entombed in the tearing, tangled red limbs of the alien tree branches below.

In the chaos that followed, Professor Honeycutt struggled through the press of enormous bodies and the chaos of the stricken crowd toward the small figure of Michelangelo, who now sat slumped against the barrier, staring downward. Just as Honeycutt placed a metallic hand on Mikey’s shoulder, the scene on the holo-screen darkened, replaced briefly by the gold Triceraton emblem before that, too, vanished.

The low boom of the Magistrate's voice echoed through the hushed room. "I can't imagine that watching it a third time has changed what you—what we all —saw. I expect you now understand why your brother is in our custody. He is clearly guilty of murder."

"What we understand is that you dino-throwbacks need yer eyes examined." Raph, unable to remain seated, was on his feet, his weight pushed onto his fists against the table, eyes blazing. "It was an accident. Mikey was just reachin' out to try an' catch her!"

“We all saw him push her.”

“Mikey wouldn’t do that.”

“He just did.”

“Bullshit.”

The turtles didn’t know how the Triceraton computerized translator interpreted Raph’s curse, but the three Triceraton officials in the room glowered.

Raph threw his hands in the air and wheeled on Professor Honeycutt. “You were there, Professor. Can’t ya talk some sense into these pointy-skulled boneheads?”

Honeycutt, in a gesture that must have been habitual in his former history as a humanoid, ground his feet into the plush conference-room carpet even as his gaze rose to meet the pleading eyes of his three friends. “I…I wasn’t looking, I am afraid. I was discussing trade provisions with Mishon. I didn’t see it happen.”

Raph grunted in disgust and kicked his chair so hard it toppled.

“But I can say,” the professor's voice continued, carrying a tenuous note of strength, “That these Terrans are under the protection of General Consul Traximus and are valued advisors—”

“The General Consul has no authority in this matter,” the Magistrate barked.

“—Valued advisors, I say, in the continued peace talks with the—”

“Nor would he sanction the murder of one of his own people—”

“—Federation. Any legal action brought against them—”

“In particular, not the granddaughter—”

“Must be submitted to his office.”

“—of a senator.”

A pause.

“This young Triceraton was the granddaughter of a senator?” the android asked hesitantly.

“Her name, though I note you have not asked for it,” the Magistrate’s assistant sniffed, “was Xania. And she was the third grandchild of Senator Avada III, from an illustrious line of Triceraton dignitaries.”

By this time, Leo and Don, too, were standing. Their bodies were angled slightly—unconsciously, Honeycutt thought—as if preparing for battle.

Leonardo’s voice—still steady, still level, still edged: “I know I can speak for all of us, and Michelangelo especially, when I say that we are so sorry for Xania’s death. Our deepest sympathies extend to her family, whomever they may be. And right now, we wish to see our brother. We can help your investigators talk with him. He was at the scene; he may have clues as to how this happened. But it will be better when we are with him.”

“We know how this happened!” The Magistrate’s flattened palm descended hard onto the table, a metallic clang reverberating. “We know who killed Senator Avada’s granddaughter. We have the video evidence before us. All that remains in question is whether or not the assassin was acting alone or in collusion with his brothers.” The Magistrate flashed his sharpened teeth at the turtles. “Or other Federation associates.” He turned his eyes on Honeycutt.

“What kind of assassin would go around killing their targets on camera and in broad daylight?” Donatello spoke for the first time. “Did Mikey make any attempt to escape before your forces apprehended him? No. Assassins don’t just give themselves up like that.”

The Magistrate’s eyes narrowed darkly, but Donnie kept talking. “Does his behavior after the incident seem like that of a murderer? Or more like that of a saddened and horrified observer?”

“What kind of assassin you ask?” The Magistrate spoke through his teeth, the computerized translator missing some of the growled nuance, though it was clear nonetheless. “Perhaps the kind that believes themselves to be under the protection—” he spat the word, “—of the General Consul. Perhaps the kind that believe they are not answerable to the rule of law. Well, I have news for you. I am the authority on this moon, not your friend, General Consul Traximus. You may, as you say, have been here on a sight-seeing trip, a break from your advisory duties to the peace process. Or, you may all be Federation agents and saboteurs.”

“We ain’t that kind ‘a turtles.” Raph broke in. “Mikey’s not that kind ‘a turtle. He ain’t anyone’s agent! And there’s no way he would hurt anyone.”

“And is that why he carries a deadly weapon on his person at all times? Why each of you does? Because you are so peace loving? In the time it took to gather you here,” the Magistrate gestured expansively, “my team has investigated this Terran practice you claim to follow, this ninjutsu. And do you know what we found? A history of spies. Arsonists. Assassins with no honor.” Raph sputtered a furious protest, but the Magistrate talked over him. “I understand that the four of you have been training in deadly arts from your youth; it’s no surprise that you carry this contagion with you to my outpost, on my moon. Well, it ends here. Out of respect for the General Consul, and until my team uncovers evidence that you were accessories to this crime, I am simply confining the three of you and your Federation robot to your quarters.”

“What about Mikey?” Donatello cried.

“Where’s our brother, numbnuts?”

“I insist that Michelangelo be provided with a lawyer and that we be allowed to speak with him immediately.”

The Magistrate’s assistant spoke again as her boss gestured to the shadows of the room, signaling four massive Triceraton soldiers to come forward to relieve the turtles of their weapons. “Your Terran legal process has no bearing here on Draxidia. Two hours ago, the Terran Michelangelo was tried and found guilty by a judicial triumvirate.”

Donnie’s voice was a choked whisper. “Found guilty?”

“What?” Raph’s sai were suddenly in his hands, and he snarled at the looming Triceraton guard approaching him. “This all just happened today, ya half-evolved cretins! How the shell can ya hold his trial on the same day as the supposed crime?”

“On Draxidia, we believe in the right to a speedy trial,” the Magistrate intoned loftily. “Relinquish your weapons. You won’t do your brother any good by resorting to your barbarous Terran habits. You see, Michelangelo’s sentence has already been carried out.”

Art by Joyfuladorable

Chapter Text

Their quarters were, by the measure of the spartan outpost, relatively spacious. Functional furniture in unassuming colors squatted, too large for the turtles, perhaps, but comfortable enough. One window overlooked the moon’s surface, a view of bare rock and star-strewn sky that had enchanted both Don and Mikey when they’d first arrived two days ago. And the blessed, comparative cool of the Terran-conforming mini-atmosphere of the suite allowed them to take off their awkward breathers.

Something vaguely resembling Terran food appeared a few times per day-cycle in the deposit port located by the door. Not exactly the take-out Chinese they craved, but palatable enough. 

As jails went, this one was pretty cushy. They’d been prisoners in far worse (lest they forget being imprisoned during their first encounter with the Triceratons and the dreaded Games).

And yet, for the next two hours of waiting for the Triceratons to fulfill their promise of reuniting Michelangelo with his brothers, the place felt more like a torture chamber.

It was only that promise that had waylaid a full-out battle right there in the conference room. The Magistrate had claimed that, if they complied peacefully, Michelangelo would be taken to their quarters as soon as he was “medically fit.” Knowing their chances of actually getting their hands on their brother was better that way than battling a path through an entire outpost of thousands of Triceratons, all with zero knowledge of where Mikey even was being held, the three turtles had, reluctantly, surrendered their weapons and permitted themselves to be escorted, under guard, to their quarters.

And yet, as the minutes ticked away with no Mikey, patience frayed and anxiety flared.

After a fruitless search for some kind of makeshift weapon (even the dinnerware had been removed), Raph paced like a caged tiger, mumbling soft curses to himself.

Leo stationed himself next to Donatello, who had almost hyperventilated as soon as they were alone and whose skin even now seemed clammy and pale. He sat on the couch, bent almost into a C-shape, compulsively rubbing his thumbs over the burn-scars on his temples.

Leonardo kept a hand on Donatello’s upper shell, gently trailing his fingers across the whorls of his scutes, and trained his eyes on the door, waiting for the moment when it would slide open and reveal his missing brother.

Don was making a plea for reassurance. “You’re sure, Professor? You’re sure they won’t have used the mind probe on Mikey?”

“The mind probe is one of the first things the reinstated Triceraton Senate outlawed after Zanramon’s overthrow, Donatello.” Honeycutt’s cool, measured voice soothed his friend.

“Even on outposts like this one?”

“The Triceraton Republic is made almost entirely of outposts like this one.” Honeycutt gestured widely at their surroundings. “As you know, Triceratons destroyed much of their homeworld during intra-species conflict long ago, so now they’re scattered to these far-flung asteroids and moon colonies. But anything the Senate decides for one, they decide for all. No more mind probes.”

“Yer actin’ like Mikey’s got a mind to probe in the first place, Don.” Raph slowed his relentless pacing to pull on a pained, half-hearted smile. “Once they figure out all he’s got is chewed-up bubble-gum bouncin’ around his skull, they'll give up an’ send ‘im right back to us. You watch.”

Donnie gave Raph a slight, appreciative nod and breathed out slowly. But he kept tracing the scar ridges unthinkingly.

The hiss of the door had them all instantly on their feet, the three turtles half-reaching for absent weapons.

The small airlock that buffered the oxygen-rich room of the turtles from the nitrogen-and-sulfur atmosphere of the rest of the Triceraton station was the size of a large closet. Framed in its doorway stood one impressively-large, coffee-colored Triceraton in a soft heather tunic and with a breather hanging from his mouth. Behind him two guards held Mikey. He hung between them, limp and listless.

With one cry, Michelangelo’s brothers surged forward, pulling him from the Triceraton arms that held him and into their own.

They did not take much note of the presence of the extra Triceraton, who stepped into the room but was greeted and led into the shadows by Professor Honeycutt. Nor did they note the hiss and click of the airlock door as it magna-locked shut, blocking out the forms of the two Triceraton guards.

Their attention was reserved entirely for their brother. Green hands reached for his forehead, the pulse-point at his throat, squeezed his arms and rubbed his shell.

“Mikey? Mikey, we’re here.”

“Can you hear us? Mikey?”

A groan. A flicker of eyelids. A shudder.

“C’mon. Let’s get him to the couch,” Raph huffed, his gruff voice an octave lower than normal.

There, Raph and Leo held Michelangelo, ripples of involuntary muscle-movement occasionally coursing through the unconscious turtle’s body, and Donnie began a more thorough check. Don started by pulling Mikey’s mask to his neck and tenderly smoothing the skin at his temples in search of burn marks that matched Don’s own. But no—the skin under his mask lay unblemished, and Don allowed himself a quick inner sigh of relief.

But Donatello’s breath stilled at what he found next.

Above and behind the sensitive flap of skin that marked Mikey’s left ear, Don’s gentle fingers found three small metallic circles. With a glance of alarm at Raph and Leo, Don carefully angled the side of Mikey’s head toward the light. Arranged in a triangle, each barely a centimeter across, the circles shone steel-gray. The skin around them, a tad darker green than usual and just slightly puffy with inflammation, otherwise seemed normal. No large scars or unsightly stitches. Just three dots of polished metal and their brother, insensible in their arms.

“Don?” Leo rasped.

“I… I don’t know. This isn’t like any Triceraton tech I’ve ever seen before, but I haven’t had enough experience.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what this is.” Bitter helplessness rose in Don’s throat and he tried to swallow his fear.

Raph had one hand on Mikey’s arm and another on Donnie’s shoulder, grounding himself. “How long has it been since we were together this mornin’? Eight hours maybe? I knew we shouldn’ta split up. We definitely shouldn’ta let Mikey go sightseein’ while we went off to some stupid sports thing, Leo. And, meanwhile, Don was all alone with that Triceraton astrophysics guy that we know nuthin’ about!”

“Doctor Xvo was really nice,” Don mumbled faintly.

“Nice, huh? These are the same people that tried to microwave your brain like a Cup-O’-Noodles not all that long ago, genius. And now we’re all just besties, pallin’ around with them. We trusted them with one another; we trusted them with… with him.” Raph’s voice roughened, looking at the face of his brother, at the three metallic, alien dots against the jade of his skin.

Raph snorted, summoning the familiar surge of rage to beat back the wave of sorrow. “And they took Mikey in, what? Four hours ago, tops? What could’a happened to him in just four hours?”

“I believe I may be able to help.” The stranger’s voice came from the other side of the room. The massive Triceraton stepped forward into the lamplight.

Leo and Raph shared a glance. They’d been so focused on their brother that they’d ignored this other, lurking presence in the room—in their tenuous, vulnerable space.

Leonardo carefully extricated himself from Mikey’s side and stood to face the Triceraton. “Who are you? What has been done to my brother?”

“Excuse my intrusion,” the Triceraton’s voice was thunder-deep, but soft with empathy. “My name is Mardoon. I am distant kin to General Consul Traximus, and when I heard today that an advisor was needed to acquaint you with the Triceraton judicial process, I volunteered. I know your names and have been apprised of your situation. You once saved my cousin from The Games under Zanramon’s rule, and it is thanks to you that the Republic is restored and now has an opportunity to make a lasting peace with the Federation.” Here, he nodded his giant head toward Honeycutt. “I am versed in our laws and systems, even during this time of great transition. Though I am not a resident of this outpost, the least I can do is offer you my services until someone more experienced can be appointed.”

“Yer like our lawyer?” Raph’s tone was accusatory. “Some bang-up job ya did for Mikey.”

“I am your counselor. I’m afraid it is probably somewhat different from what you term a ‘lawyer.’ I was forbidden from attending the triumvate’s hearing, for instance, or speaking before they sentenced him, but I can describe what that sentence consisted of.”

“Please. Tell us everything.” Leo’s gaze was steady and he motioned Mardoon to a chair before he took a spot at Mikey’s feet, one hand resting lightly on his brother’s ankles as if merely reassuring himself that Michelangelo was there.

They were together. They were alive. This was fixable.

But the Tricerton’s next words were a mystery.

“On Earth, do you use memory planting?”

The question was greeted with three blank stares from the turtles, but Professor Honeycutt’s electronic hum of surprise caught their attention.

“Professor?” Don asked.

“Mmm.” Honeycutt’s lime-colored eyes glowed as he turned his face to his friends. “Memory planting is an experimental bio-medical procedure in which the recorded memories and experiences of one individual are implanted into the mind of another. In the Federation, its use was banned as it was deemed too unsafe.”

Mardoon grunted his agreement. “But in the Republic, and especially under Zanramon’s Empire, it was quite common. Originally a military tool to record and extract memories from dead soldiers for intelligence purposes, it later became a prevalent practice for civilians to record significant chunks of their everyday experiences, either to re-experience them later or to bequeath them to future generations.”

“When you say extract—” Donnie’s voice carried a tight note.

“Extract pre-recorded memories only, I assure you, Donatello. I am aware of what you experienced with the mind probe. Zanramon’s extraction of your memories, or attempted extraction, was of unrecorded memories—an agonizing, potentially fatal process.”

Leo thought he could hear Raph’s teeth grinding.

“However, the mind probe that was used on you was collected and, even in its damaged state, analyzed. The data retrieved about your brain structure was stored and used today in the insertion of a memory conductor drive adjacent to Michelangelo’s hippocampus. It was, when conducted on an alien species for which we have very little anatomical information, unforgivably experimental.”

Don was grateful that, for the moment, Michelangelo’s weight was pinning Raph to the couch. As it was, his rough cry echoed against the walls of the room. “Experimental, huh? When I get my sai back, I’m gonna be experimentin’ with pullin’ that Magistrate’s lungs out through his ribcage!”

“On behalf of the Republic, on behalf of Triceratons everywhere, you have my deepest apologies.” Mardoon’s massive head lowered. “We have no way to know what the effects of three years of Xania’s recorded memories will have now that they’ve been implanted into your brother.”

“What?!” The enraged and astounded exclamations of Michelangelo’s three brothers drowned out the “Oh my” of Professor Honeycut.

And, abruptly, the noise woke Michelangelo.

Art by Joyfuladorable!

Chapter Text

Mikey lurched out of unconsciousness like someone nearly drowned—with a heaving gulp of breath like a backwards scream.

His limbs flailed blindly, hitting—and in Leo’s case, kicking—the brothers around him even as they pressed against him with a flurry of both anxious and comforting words.

Mikey’s eyes scanned the room wildly, not seeming to even process what he was seeing until they landed with a jolt on Donnie’s face, then Raph’s right next to it, and finally Leo’s as he came around to kneel on the other side of him.

A gasp, a heartbeat of astonished silence, and then Mikey hurled himself into their collective arms with wild, uncontrolled sobs.

Leo held him against his plastron as his brother cried, Mikey’s fingers digging into the meat of Raph and Leo’s arms painfully. At first, nothing else could be heard except for the soft hum of the air recyclers, Mikey’s broken wails, and the susurrant comfort of his brothers.

Eventually, his words began to come.

“Missed you. Missed you so much. Didn’t know if I’d never see you again. If they’d let me see you again. And then you were gone, and, and there was just her and her life, but you guys were gone!”

It took Raphael a moment to realize that the sound was off, like a badly-dubbed anime, Mikey’s lips weren’t matching his voice. He was speaking, but the voice they were hearing, though clearly a match for Mikey’s pitch and tone, was coming from the room’s computerized translator. And what Mikey was actually speaking, the guttural flow of consonants and stilted grunts—that was in Triceratonese. Mikey was speaking Triceratonese—speaking to them in Triceratonese. A hurried flow that he wasn’t even aware of.

It had been mere hours since Raphael had seen his brother, and in that time, Michelangelo had watched a girl die, been arrested for her murder, sentenced to a violating brain operation, and now he was speaking fucking Triceratonese.

Donnie and Leo had the same, sudden realization and they looked at each other in sharp astonishment.

“Mikey, Mikey. We’re here.” Leo soothed, taking Mikey by the shoulders for a moment and pushing him back so he could look him in the face.

“Yeah, bro. We’re right here and we ain’t goin’ nowhere. Ya can speak English to us ya know.” Raph said with a confused smile. “We ain’t gonna understand if ya keep speakin’ like these boneheads.” He lobbed a half-nod at Mardoon.

“It may take him a little time to remember how to speak English.” Honeycutt interjected. “From his point of view, he has only been hearing Triceratonese, predominantly, for the last three years.”

“Earth years or Triceraton years?” Donnie asked, anxiety etched into the corners of his eyes.

A downward tone from Honeycutt. “Triceraton years. That would be approximately four Earth years.”

“How?” Leo looked bewildered. Mikey curled back against his plastron like a little kid, his tumultuous sobs fading into mere hiccuping tears. Leo shook his head. “How is that possible? We saw him this morning. We were all together eating breakfast just this morning!”

“The memory-planting has that effect.” Mardoon’s rumbling voice joined the conversation. “The subject feels the full extent of what has been recorded. Every moment.”

Mardoon gestured to the side of his own head where the turtles noticed for the first time three small metal circles that matched Mikey’s just in front of the rise of his bony frill. “Old-timers like myself tend to only record special occasions, but these days, young people like Xania tend to record much, much more of their daily life.” He gave the universal ‘kids these days’ head-shake, then resumed his explanation. “Time is not actually stretched, of course, but Michelangelo’s perception of time would be extended to experience first-hand whatever Xania recorded—in her case, much of the last three years of her life.”

“Including her death?” Don was motionless.

Mardoon nodded. “I have been informed that when her memory recording was salvaged, it showed that it was, indeed, active and functioning at the time of her death.”

“Then that would’ve been the last thing that Mikey experienced.” Donatello’s words ached with horror.

Mikey, his eyes still pressed tightly closed, took a heaving breath and spoke. Still in Triceratonese, but slowly, slowly, and the translator picked up every word. “That’s the last thing I remember. Or, that I remember Xania remember. That awful, crushing pain and then falling. Just falling.” Mikey opened his eyes and gazed around frantically. “She’s dead. I remember watching her die, and then I was her, I mean I wasn’t her -her, but I was seeing as her, feeling as her.”

“I’m so sorry, Mikey.” Don gripped his hand. “For us, this is the same day. For you, it’s been years, but for us, we saw you just a few hours ago. We couldn’t stop it, we didn’t know.” 

Michelangelo shifted his weight to throw his arms around Donnie and held tight. This time, he tried English. It came out awkwardly, slowly like he couldn’t quite get his tongue in the right place to make the vowel sounds, but it was his voice this time, not the computerized approximation of it.

“Yeah, Don. I know. I mean, I figured it out.” Mikey pressed his forehead against Don’s shoulder and took in two deep breaths before he tried to speak again, his mouth curving painfully around the unpracticed language. “She—Xania, she knew about this kind of… of punishment. So it took me a bit, but I figured it out. This was my punishment, my consequence for…” Mikey’s voice faltered. Something like a moan came from deep in his throat. “For letting her die.”

Raph looked on, his eyes brimming and a snarl starting in his throat. “Why?” He leapt up and rounded on Mardoon. “Why is this the thing you use on people? Hasn’t he been through enough, watchin’ that girl fall and then that fart-scapade of a trial? And now this? To have to have that in his head without him even knowin’ what was happenin’? What kind of fucked-up notion of justice you got here?”

Mardoon grumbled a sigh. “It is not a sentence I endorse. The original idea was that, when someone takes a life outside of battle, they should have a sense—a full sense—of what it is that they have taken. Memory planting gave judges a way of forcing a perpetrator to feel the terrible entirety of the crime, including, in some instances, the moment of death itself.”

“That’s fucked up.”

Mardoon let out a huff that must have been a Triceraton version of a sigh. “I’m not going to argue that with you. But it is not entirely irreversible. And luckily, it seems your brother still has retained his sense of self in spite of the—uncertain—nature of the procedure on an alien brain.”

“Yeah…” Raphael’s tone was low and vulpine. His eyes narrowed as he seemed to lean toward Mardoon. “Real lucky.”

Leo, sensing the dangerous crackle of his brother’s energy, stepped in, placing a restraining hand on Raph’s shoulder and speaking softly. “Look, this is the one person who is offering to help us, the one person who’s been able to explain what actually is going on here.” Leo’s eyes softened. “Please, Raph. We’re all having a hard time with this, but we’ve got to take it on together.”

Raphael snorted, but his shoulders dropped and he backed a few steps off, finally turning back to the couch where Michelangelo still clung to Donnie like a waterlogged kitten.

But Mikey, to everyone’s surprise, giggled.

“Mikey?” Don asked with concern.

“Sorry.” Mikey sniffed back tears, but erupted into delighted giggles again immediately afterwards. “Sorry, I just... I needed to hear that. I needed to hear Raph threaten somebody, and Leo calm the situation down by saying something unbearably corny.” Mikey looked up now at Don with big, brimming eyes. “Now if you want to launch into a lecture about the tensile strength of spider silk or maybe invent something useful out of a kitchen appliance, then I’ll really know I’m home.”

Don allowed himself a half-smile. “I’ll see what I can do. I’m here for you on the spider silk, but I’ve got to warn you that the Triceraton authorities didn’t leave us a great selection when it comes to kitchen appliances.”

Mikey released a satisfied sigh and relaxed back against Don’s shoulder. “You’ll think of something.”

Leo returned to the couch. “Mikey, can you tell us what you’ve been through? It would help us to know what happened after—after your arrest.” 

Mikey sobered at once, but nodded his understanding. Sitting up, he took a breath and used the heels of his palms to rub at his eyes. “I mean, it was all sorta a blur, you know? And it feels like a long time ago, but I remember the judges—these three Triceraton dudes in funny red clothes and some really crazy bling—and they sat there and we all watched,” here, Mikey’s voice faltered a little, “—watched the security video. And then there was some talking, but it was all in Triceratonese and there wasn’t a computer-translator, and I didn’t know Triceratonese back then—” Leo winced at the knowledge that for Mikey, back then meant years ago while for them it was a mere few hours. “—so I didn’t really know what they were saying. And I remember asking questions, and asking for you, but they didn’t listen to me. And then they took me to this room. There was this chair…”

Here, Mikey’s head dropped. “I tried to fight, I did, Leo, but there were a lot of them and I didn’t have my ‘chucks. I didn’t understand what was going on, you know?”

Raph looked away, his throat tightening. Where had they been when Mikey had been frightened and trapped, confused beyond words as he’d been forced into a surgical chair for a punishment he didn’t see coming, a punishment he didn’t deserve? Did he think his brothers were coming for him? What had they even been told at that point? Were the three of them sitting in that fucking conference room, watching that shitty video, imagining they had all the time in the world to get Michelangelo out of this situation when, actually, it was already too late?

“The next thing I knew,” Mikey continued, “was her life. Xania’s life. It was so scary, especially at first because I didn’t know what was happening; I was just dropped in the middle of it, trapped in this other person’s experiences. It was like…” Mikey drew his knees up and folded his hands around his legs. “It was like I was watching a movie, except I could see and hear and feel and taste everything. I couldn't hear Xania’s thoughts exactly, but I could tell how she felt about things. I got used to it, but I was just along for the ride.” Mikey smiled weakly.

“At first I tried so hard to do something—to make something happen. To reach out and touch something, or to make her say something. I thought if I could just break through somehow I could find you. I could reach you. I could let you know where I was.” The tears had started again, and they slid down Mikey’s cheeks, dripping off his chin. But he didn’t stop; it was like the story was a pent-up river and now the floodgates were open.

“I didn’t know.” Mikey turned his eyes up to Leo’s. “It took me a long time to understand what was happening. That these were just memories she’d recorded, that I couldn’t change anything, I couldn’t do anything until… until she was dead. And I knew when that was going to be, and as time rolled by, I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop it. Every birthday, every vacation to the gardens of Excidia… all those classes at University, working so hard for a future I knew she would never really have. (Those botany classes were real snoozes, by the way; you woulda loved them, Don.) And Xania was amazing, really, she was! She was clever, like April. And curious like you, Don. And she loved comics, though her taste in Cosmo-Defenders left something to be desired; don’t even get me started on that last story arc!”

Mikey’s tone softened. “And I cared about her. I—I guess I even sorta loved her after a while, but even though I knew what was going to happen, I knew what was coming for her, I also didn’t want to stop it because, because…” Mikey clenched his teeth together and squeezed his eyes shut, an anguished moan coming from his throat.

It was Mardoon who finally spoke, his voice rich with compassion. “Because you knew that only when Xania was dead could you be yourself again.”

Mikey nodded vigorously, tears falling in even greater profusion, but his shoulders relaxed at hearing the truth he couldn’t say. “Yeah,” he sniffed, then dug the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. “That’s bad, isn’t it? To care about someone but to want them to die at the same time so I could finally be free? It’s… that’s real selfish.”

“No, Mikey.” Leo put an arm around Mikey’s shoulder and pulled him in tight, speaking sternly. “No, that isn’t selfish. It’s natural. It’s only natural to want to live your own life. To not be imprisoned inside someone else’s memories.”

“Mikey, you didn’t ask for this; you didn’t want this to happen.” Donnie gripped his brother’s shell. “None of this is your fault.”

Raph joined in. “We saw the video, Mikey. We saw what happened. Ya tried to save her. We saw ya reach out to help her. It was just an accident.”

At that last word, Mikey sat bolt upright, every muscle tense, his eyes wide and wild. “What? What do you mean? No! No, it wasn’t an accident.” Michelangelo looked around in confusion, eyes flitting from brother to brother, then to Professor Honeycut and finally rested upon Mardoon. “No. The judges were uber-creeps, but they were right about one thing. Xania was murdered.”

In the half-beat of silence that followed that word, Mardoon’s holo-pad crackled to life. He turned for a moment, conversing in muted Triceratonese with the face on the screen, and then turned back to the brothers.

“It is Senator Avada III. Xania's grandmother.” Mardoon’s substantial brow furrowed. “She’s here. And she wants to see Michelangelo.”

Art by Joyfuladorable

Chapter Text

Senator Avada III sat imperiously in the low chair that Mardoon had vacated for her. Her pebbled skin, like that of her granddaughter Xania, shone the color of autumn honeycomb in the sconce-light of the turtles' quarters. But whereas Xania had carried herself with a quiet, understated confidence, there was nothing at all understated about her grandmother. Sumptuous robes of maroon and deep amber cascaded down her shoulders and piled in swaths on the floor. Even her horns shone with a golden-filigree inlay. And her eyes, fixed on Mikey, flared with the ferocity of a Triceraton general.

She had found, however, worthy adversaries in the forms of Mikey’s three brothers, who stood protectively around him. If they’d had their weapons, they would’ve been at the ready, but as it was, their hands hung, in false repose, at their sides.

Between Mardoon, who had again retreated to the shadows, the gloriously-arrayed senator, and her two, hulking bodyguards who towered like oaks at either side of their illustrious charge, the living area of the turtles' quarters no longer felt quite so spacious. All four Triceratons wore breathers in the Terran atmosphere of the room, though the cord slipping down from Avada’s mouth seemed oddly unnecessary, as if somehow she could have breathed in lava and exhaled lightning if she had so willed it.

“And so this is the kind of imprisonment that awaits those who have shed the blood of my family?” Avada sniffed, gesturing languidly at the accommodations. “Comfortable rooms and warm beds? Little did I expect, when I came to face my granddaughter’s murderers, that they would be ensconced in such luxury!”

Raph bristled. “Listen, lady. Ya got no right to waltz in here and start blamin’ us. The only reason we let ya in here in the first place was because my brother—” here, a jerk of the head toward Mikey, “—insisted. Outta courtesy for the bereaved. But you wanna start callin’ him—callin’ us —murderers and you can waltz right back on out, and don’t let the door hit ya!”

Mikey, who had been studiously contemplating the carpet pattern, waves of anxiety simply rolling off him, suddenly looked up. “No, Raph, no. It’s okay. I mean.” He swallowed, raising his eyes to meet the Senator’s. And suddenly, Mikey was no longer speaking English. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said in slow Triceratonese, pulling himself to stand. 

The room’s automated translator kicked in, and once again Raph felt that profoundly unsettling disjointedness of hearing Mikey’s familiar voice through the medium of the computer.

“You’re… sorry?” Avada sneered at the word. 

“I’m so, so sorry for what you are going through right now. Xania was…” Mikey took a shuddering breath. “Xania was a really awesome person. And she really admired you. I know that you wanted something different for her than botany, something more prestigious, maybe. I remember your conversation on that last Horn Sharpening Day, and I understand! But I think if you coulda seen what she was doing here, the life that she was making for herself, you would change your mind. You see, she wasn’t just messing around with dirt and plants; she was feeding her people. Her work was going to feed the whole Republic someday, and some of those plants woulda helped recycle air on a thousand space colonies! It may not have been the same as making laws and rubbing elbows with fancy bigwigs and all that, but it was still important and I know that if you woulda seen it…” Mikey looked up from his babble of increasingly fast Triceratonese and suddenly realized that Avada, too, had risen and was now standing, seething, in front of him. “You…would have… been proud?” He fumbled to the end with a nervous question.

“How dare you lecture me about my own granddaughter. You.” Senator Avada spat the word. “You who took her away from us. You. Have. No. Right.” Every word was a curse. “I hope you live in misery. I hope you feel, now, the full value of what you have taken from us!”

Donatello stepped forward. “Mikey didn’t kill her. None of us had a hand in this. Please, listen to what we’re saying.”

“You’re saying it is an accident that a perfectly healthy Triceraton girl just happened to stumble through a barrier and fall to her death?”

“No!” Mikey, still in Triceratonese, exclaimed. “That’s not what I am saying. It wasn’t just something that happened. It wasn’t an accident. I think—” another shuddering breath, “I know Xania was poisoned.”

The senator’s eyes narrowed, considering Mikey closely. Her gaze felt like a dissecting scalpel. Eventually, she spoke. “My granddaughter was hit by an air-train and fell from the height of the M’zan Tower. Her manner of death was most certainly not poison.”

“No, I mean… yes!” For a moment, Mikey felt like he was underwater, in over his head. But when he looked around at his brothers, he saw Leo’s clear-eyed gaze, Donnie’s encouraging nod. He felt Raph’s stolid, protective presence. He persevered. “I mean that she was poisoned first. I think the poison is why she stumbled, why she fell. Somebody was trying to kill her. It just wasn’t me.”

Avada’s intent gaze flickered from turtle to turtle, finally resting back on Michelangelo. She sank back onto the chair, posture rigid, but clearly interested. “Explain what makes you so sure.”

Mikey opened his mouth—

But Avada had raised her hand, her palm flat to Mikey. “First, it is simply freezing in here. Is your home planet some kind of barren tundra? How do you stand it, Counselor?” Avada flashed an accusing glare at Mardoon as if the cooler temperatures on Earth were somehow his fault.

“We can adjust the atmosphere controls, if you like?” Donatello offered, stepping toward the wall panel.

“Fine, fine. Just accuse us a’ murder and then let us fall all over ourselves to make ya right at home,” Raph grumbled sarcastically under his breath.

Avada pretended not to hear. “My man will do it. He knows how I like it.” She gestured without looking behind her, and one of her guards unpeeled from her side to tap at the controls on the far wall. Almost immediately, the temperature and humidity of the room began to rise.

Avada closed her eyes and sighed. “Better.” Her eyes opened, focused sharply on Mikey. “Very well. Explain yourself.”

Mikey had experienced the morning as two separate people and in two separate ways, so his telling was tangled if you didn’t know whose perspective you were listening to. But, slowly, his audience pieced it together.

Xania had been having a fairly typical morning. She’d met a friend for breakfast—mushroom tarts and z’nar juice from a favorite spot at the outpost’s main junction. She’d been just a tad late arriving on the platform, grateful—Mikey knew—not to have missed the air-train to work at her new job in one of the plant genetics labs. She was making her way to the front of the platform when she felt a bright, sharp bite of pain at the back of her neck, just where the protection of her frill ended and her neck bones became her backbones. At first, all she’d felt was confusion. Draxidia did not have any stinging creatures in its carefully-designed interior.

But when she reached back to touch the spot, she found something different. Plucking it from her skin, she brought the object to examine—a tiny metal dart, complete with a drop of blood staining its treacherously-pointed tip.

Bafflement. Trapped in the recorded memory, Mikey couldn’t “hear” thoughts, but he could feel the swell of emotions, and complete confusion almost immediately gave way to a dreadful fear. Looking in alarm behind her, the busy platform seemed a swirling mass of strangers. When she looked back to her hand the very dart between her fingers seemed to sway and multiply. She transferred the thing to her palm as a wave of dizziness rocked her, and she staggered forward directly into the shell of a strange-looking alien. Orange mask. Green skin. Michelangelo.

Just as she had reeled into him, Mikey had simultaneously backed into her and for a hopeful spark of a moment, she thought she’d regained her balance, but no, her legs were not responding to her direction. Xania opened her mouth to let out a cry for help, but no sound emerged and she was already falling.

Mikey, realizing that she wasn’t in control and that this stranger was sliding dangerously toward the hole in the barrier frantically reached out to catch her, but only managed to lay the tips of his fingers on the folds of her sheer gray coat before she slipped through his grasp. The terrible momentum of her plunge pulled her down and out, across the brink of the barrier, through the blackness of unsupported air, into the blinding pain of the train’s impact. Her palm opened, the dart slipping free, dropping with her in the outpost’s artificial gravity. And then there was simply the transparent dome and the cold stars beyond it, wheeling and spinning into oblivion.

Silence greeted Mikey at the end of his story. The only sound in the room was the soft whir of the life support system cranking out more heat. Mikey reached up to scrub at his face with his palms, somehow surprised to find wetness there. He hadn’t realized he’d resumed crying. He hadn’t realized, either, that he’d collapsed back onto the couch, but there he was. Don had joined him, wrapping a warm arm securely around his shoulders while Leo and Raph remained standing sentinel, waiting to see if their brother would be believed.

Avada had not moved. Her posture held its perfect magisterial poise. But her eyes, too, were closed and tears fell down her proud, angular beak.

For a minute, no one spoke.

Finally, Avada’s words filled the room. “We had not allowed for an autopsy. I had not allowed for it. Undignified. I thought I knew how she died. But if what you say is true, we will find this poison in her blood. If what you say is true, we will find this dart among the y’nar trees where she fell.”

Mikey nodded.

“And you will take this to the Magistrate?” Leo asked. “You will ask him to test Xania’s blood? To search the trees?”

Avada opened her eyes. “I will. I will not rest until those who murdered my granddaughter are found and brought to justice.”

With no further words, Avada stood and made her way toward the door. Upon reaching it, though, she paused and once more gestured for one of her guards to re-adjust the atmosphere controls to their previous settings.

As he did so, Avada spoke, not facing Mikey, but with her head tilted to the side, her Triceratonese clear and sharp. “Xania was something special. She might’ve been a marvelous politician if she’d made the attempt. But nevertheless, I did see her, what she was doing in this pokey little outpost at the tail-end of nowhere. I do see. Traditionalists such as myself may not like it, but these are the places that will grow the Republic’s future. I may not have told her, not directly. But I was proud of her. I am proud.”

Without waiting for an answer, Avada pushed the controls on the airlock and swept into it, followed by her guards.

Once the senator was gone, the group breathed a collective sigh of relief. Yet the terrible tension of the day pulled at them all.

“I will be back tomorrow,” Mardoon vowed. “With Senator Avada taking you seriously… It is a promising development.”

“Yeah. Too late for Mikey, though.” Raph’s anger was still a burning coal

Mardoon nodded sadly and made his exit.

When they were alone, Leo pulled his brothers and Honeycutt into a huddle. “Well? Don, can you get us out of here?”

Donatello had his answer ready. “It’ll take me about ten minutes to overload the magna-lock on the door. The trick is, I’ve got to open both doors simultaneously—the one to the airlock and the one to the passage. Otherwise, it’ll give the sentry outside too much warning to sound the alarm and bring down reinforcements. We’ll have to take care of him quick. Can you handle him as soon as I blow the doors?”

Raph grinned and cracked his knuckles. “Thought you’d never ask.”

“Wait! Wait, what are we doing?” Mikey’s eyes were wide. “We’re not leaving!”

“Oh, yeah,” Raph answered. “We’re not just ‘leaving’, Mikey. We are gettin’ the shell outta here on the fastest damn ship we can find. Personally, I’m voting for the Magistrate’s ship. Give ‘em the Zanramon treatment, ya know? An’ if we gotta knock some Tricera-creep skulls together on the way, well, that’s just too dang bad.”

“But we can’t!” Mikey pleaded. “Not now. When Senator Avada goes to the Magistrate, when they find that dart, it’ll be clear that I’m innocent. But if we leave now, it’ll look like we just slunk out. Like I’m guilty. Like I killed Xania.”

“Mikey, it doesn’t matter what these Triceratons think.” Leo put a firm hand on Mikey’s shoulder. “You know you didn’t kill her. You don’t have to feel guilty about that.”

“And we can’t risk things goin’ pear-shaped again, Mikey,” Raph added, his arms folded. “You saw what that trial looked like! I don’t want you or any one of us on the other end of Triceraton ‘justice’ ever again. They could drag you back out that door anytime they want.” Raph’s face twisted into a scowl. “The sooner we can get back to Federation space and wrangle some kinda transmat device home, the happier I’ll be.”

“Me too.” Donnie was already fiddling with the panel. He’d cracked open some kind of kitchen appliance and was pulling out its guts—a tangle of wires—inspecting them for which might be most useful for blowing a magnalock fuse. “Usually I’m all about a space adventure, but this time I’m with Raph. What we’ve all been through today is enough space adventure to last me a decade.”

“A lifetime!” Raph interjected.

“I feel somewhat responsible, my friends, since I’m the one who suggested this trip. Yet, I find myself in full agreement,” hummed Professor Honeycutt.

“But…” Mikey’s gaze darted from one brother to the next. “But how can we go when Xania’s murderer is still out there?”

This stopped his brothers in their tracks.

“You're just acting like she doesn’t matter. Like whoever killed her, whoever shot her with that dart and then watched her fall, can just go on with their life and everything is fine. Like this is done.”  

This time, Mikey was not crying. He was too angry to cry. And at some point, Mikey had lapsed back into speaking Triceratonese—a hurried, throaty babble of Triceratonese that the translator had trouble keeping up with. “Well, she matters to me. I spent years living her life. I didn’t want to. And I can tell you that’s not how she thought those memory recordings would be used. But now she’s in my head. And so are her friends and her family and all the steps of the stupid safety procedure for handling Madovian fire-fern spores, which I will not ever need to know!” Mikey gestured to his temple and the three round marks now melded into his skull. “But Xania’s memories are not going anywhere. She matters. And this is not done.”

Art by Joyfuladorable

Chapter Text

The decision was made. They would stay. They would see this through.

Leo’s stomach twisted at the knowledge that they were choosing continued imprisonment. Maybe it was just for a little while, maybe just until the next morning when this could all be sorted out and the authorities set onto the trail of the real killer. But the thought gnawed at him that, at any moment, a whole cohort of armed Triceraton guards could arrive at the door and march Michelangelo or any one of his brothers off into the inscrutable dark innards of the station for whatever strange and terrible procedures the Triceratons could conjure. It went against his every instinct.

But Mikey was right. They’d be leaving this mess unresolved. They’d be leaving a murderer—someone who had not only caused the death of one Triceraton girl, but had also framed his brother and caused him unthinkable suffering and distress—undiscovered. Unpunished. And so, they would stay.

Before bed, Mikey asked for guarzik tea. His explorations unearthed some from a cabinet in the suite’s small kitchen. It was a Triceraton staple, and Xania always made it when she needed something soothing at night.

Mikey volunteered to make them all mugs of the stuff: “You’ll love this Leo, it’s your kind of thing. You know, traditional.” While his brothers stood awkwardly and tried to pretend everything was normal, Mikey moved around the kitchen to find the necessary supplies. He heated the water to just the right temperature and steeped the yellow-speckled guarzik leaves for the correct amount of time. His brothers watched him carefully add a strange orange powder (“I’m not really sure what this stuff is; this is just how Xania did it.”) before pouring the milky, turmeric-colored substance into four separate cups and gesturing them to the table.

Mikey, not wanting to be rude, offered the Professor a portion, but he merely hummed his thanks and kindly reminded Mikey that his android body couldn’t process food or drink.

After blowing gently across the tea’s surface, Mikey closed his eyes and was first to take a long, savoring sip. And, promptly, he spit it out in a shocked, arching splutter that mostly hit Raph sitting across from him, but also caught Leo and Donnie with some side-splatter.

“ That …is not how it tastes!” Mikey cried, horrified. He gazed into the mug with a look of betrayal.

On any normal day, Raph, dripping, might have erupted into a show of indignation and chased Mikey around the table, but in this instance he simply took the kitchen-cloth that Don offered him and mopped his face.

“I was a little worried about that,” Donnie admitted, looking curiously at the brew in his own cup and taking a timid, experimental sip. He winced and put the mug carefully down. “Your taste buds aren’t the same anymore, Mikey.”

“Yes,” the Professor agreed. “What Xania may have enjoyed, and how foods may have tasted to her will be different for you.”

“But, nakronian fizzes! Boshi bread? Agat fruit?” Mikey’s eyes were wide with misery. “None of those are going to taste good anymore?”

“Well, they'll be different now, Mikey.” Donnie scratched the back of his neck. “Whatever Xania remembered eating, it will be with her set of Triceraton tastes, Triceraton biology. They might still be edible, but they won’t be the same.”

“But you're only going to be eating things that have been carefully vetted for our systems,” Leo told him sternly. “Everything in this kitchen has been determined to be safe for us when we got here. And, of course, there’s the meals they’re dropping off in the deposit port.”

Raph made a face. “Safe, sure. But also pretty disgusting. These guys never hear of salt?”

Mikey’s face crumpled. He sighed, and started gathering up the untouched mugs. “Let’s just go to bed.”

At Mikey’s request, they all slept in the same room. He and Don took the bed—narrow for a triceraton perhaps, but wide enough for two turtles—while Leo and Raph made-do with cushions pulled from the couch piled up on the floor. Mikey didn’t want to be separated from any of them, even while asleep, and after the day they’d had, none of his brothers were eager to let him out of their sight.

Professor Honeycutt installed himself in the charging dock the Triceratons had set up against the wall of the living area, back when they were guests of the Republic rather than prisoners. “Goodnight, my friends,” the android said before the whirring hum of his processor droned down in tone and his shining green eyes dimmed.

Now, the only light came from a soft, almost imperceptible glow around the edges of the ceiling so Mikey could just make out the comforting, bulky presences of his brothers in the darkness. He closed his eyes and listened to the steady, sleeping breaths of Don and Raph. He waited for sleep to claim him, too, but his mind swam with thoughts of Xania. Had her brother, serving on the far side of Triceraton space, heard of her death? Who would take care of her pet, the Beltaran bat-like creature who liked to sleep under her chin at night?

“Leo?” Mikey’s voice was hushed. He turned on his side to get a view of Leonardo in the dim of the room. His eyes were closed, but Mikey could tell he was awake.

“Yeah, Mikey?”

“I met Zog. I mean Xania did. Xania met Zog. But she was memory-recording that day. Like most days. So, I sorta met him, too.”

Silence. For a moment, Mikey thought Leo hadn’t heard him. But then, he heard Leo sigh softly and turn toward him on his makeshift cushion-mattress. “Tell me.”

“It was early days. I mean, my Triceratonese wasn’t very good yet, and I could only catch bits and pieces of the conversation. But I could tell how Xania felt. And she liked him. He was the uncle, I think? Maybe cousin, but I think uncle, of one of her friends in her botany program. He was on leave from his unit for a couple weeks, and took them out for a meal. The three of them went to see the meteor-shower on Centarion. It was pretty cool.”

A beat. Then two. Then Leo asked, “What was he like?”

“He was funny. I mean, I didn’t really get his jokes because my Triceratonese wasn’t good enough. But Xania and her friend laughed a lot. They thought he was funny.”  Mikey blinked into the darkness. “Leo, I don’t remember Zog being funny.”

“Yeah. But that wasn’t really him. The Zog we met… It’s like Don said, he’d been addled by all that oxygen poisoning. We never met the real him, the original him. As far as he was concerned, he was still in the middle of a war with the Federation. He was a soldier on the front lines trying to protect his squad.”

“And we let him think that. Leo, we took him into battle. We…I… I gave him orders! I told Zog it was ‘for the sake of the Republic.’ I did that.” Mikey was breathing faster now. His voice was still rough and low, but it carried a thread of terrible sorrow that was, in Leo’s memory, completely new, completely out of character for Michelangelo. And it scared him.

“Mikey,” Leo’s whisper carried a fierce intensity. “Mikey, what were we going to do with him? We didn’t have the means back then to reach the professor or contact the Triceraton Republic. He was the last Triceraton on Earth—the only Triceraton on Earth. Thinking he was still part of his battalion gave him purpose. Comfort, even. It gave a confusing situation meaning.” No sound from Mikey, but Leo knew he was listening. 

“What were we going to do?” Leo continued. “Tell him we were actually his enemies and then park him on the couch in the lair watching Desperate Housewives as we went off to fight the Shredder? You think he would’ve been happy with that?”

“No?” Mikey’s voice was a shade less miserable.

“No.” Leo put all the certainty he could into that one word.

“I mean, I think he woulda been more of a House fan. Maybe CSI: New York .”

Leo snorted a sad laugh. “Probably.” 

“What if we’d just told him to stand guard or something?”

“If we’d done that, we’d all be dead. The four of us. Master Splinter. We’d have died that night. He’d probably have been found by Bishop if not co-opted by Shredder first. There was just—” Leo reached his hand up to find Mikey’s where it lay on the bed. He squeezed. “Just no good solution in that moment. We needed him, Mikey.”

“We used him. We took advantage of him.”

The air recycler whirred. Leonardo felt his chest ache. It was a familiar feeling. “I know.”

“We let him think we were his commanding officers.”

“Yes.” Leo let all the regret he’d been feeling flood into his voice. “I am sorry.”

“Yeah. Me too. He was a good dude.”

“He was.”

Michelangelo lay still a minute, letting a tide of sadness rise and fall with the breaths of his sleeping brothers. He didn’t let go of Leo’s hand.

“Leo?” Mikey asked. “Zog had a memory-recorder, too. Just like Xania. I saw it! I mean, his family never got it or anything. It’s at the bottom of New York Harbor. But that means…” His voice again carried that tenuous violin-string note. “It means that his family never knew. He just never came home.”

“Missing in action.”

“Yeah. The Triceratons call it something different.” Here, Mikey spoke in Triceratonese, a quick phrase, too quiet for the room’s translator to pick up—something full of hard T’s and husky K’s. “It means something like ‘taken in the storm’, but it’s the same thing. Do you think… Do you think we could let them know? I think—” Mikey took a shuddering breath. “I know we owe Zog that.”

 Leo released Mikey’s hand and propped himself up on an elbow so he could see Michelangelo’s face in the faint light. He thought of how brutal it would be to tell Zog’s family of his death. Of their part in it. Of their gratitude for his courage. Of their remorse. The turtles would have to weather the grief of Zog’s family, certainly, and likely their anger too.

“You never cease to amaze me, Michelangelo.” He sighed. “And yes. We will. I promise you we will do that. Maybe Traximus can help. But first… First—” Leo raised a finger. “—we do as you suggested and find out who killed Xania. One Triceraton conundrum at a time.” 

Leo gave Mikey a soft smile and raised his palm to the other turtle’s brow, gently running his hand over his brother’s head like he used to do when they were kids and Mikey had a bad dream. “Now get some sleep. It’s either been one whole day or four entire years since you’ve slept; I’m really not sure which.”

“Okay, Leo.” Mikey closed his eyes, releasing the responsibility for Xania, for Zog, into the misty future of tomorrow. “I missed you.”

When Mikey opened his eyes again, it was to the same deep, hushed darkness that it had been before. But every cell in his body was screaming at him that something was very, very wrong.

For one thing, he was panting. Deep, desperate pants like he couldn’t get enough air no matter how much he pulled into his lungs in quick, heaving gasps. And he was unbelievably hot; the air was thick and warm as soup. 

And something smelled! It almost gagged Mikey—a fetid, sticky odor like the slosh of liquid at the bottom of a New York dumpster.

It was weird, wonderfully weird, granted, being awake in his very own body with control over his very own fingers and eyelids and toes, but that was the only wonderful thing, and the rest of Mikey’s consciousness was composed entirely of terror.

He lurched to the other side of the bed to grab Donatello forcefully by the arm and started shaking him. “Hey, Don?” he wheezed. What was going on with his voice? He sounded like he’d been smoking from the time he hatched. “Donnie? You gotta wake up! Something’s wrong!” He coughed out the last two words and kept pulling on Donatello’s arm, but to no avail. Don’s form sagged from his side onto his shell, but his arm felt clammy and he did not stir, no matter how urgently—and then frantically—Mikey shook him. The movement made Don’s head jerk loosely, not in the relaxation of sleep but in the frightening floppiness of true unconsciousness.

His heart in his throat, still panting, Mikey dug his fingers into Don’s neck, searching for a heartbeat and, at the same time, managing to yell for his other brothers, though it felt like the words ripped at his throat. “Leo?!” Coughing. Gasping. “Raph! Don needs help!” Nothing. No response. No sound. Having found Don’s pulse, faint but dizzyingly fast, Mikey threw himself to the floor at the foot of the bed where he knew Raph was sleeping. He was in the same state as Donnie—head lolling, unresponsive. And then Leo. The same.

And all that time the sticky, subway-mop-bucket air was trying to strangle him, choke him, drown him. It burned down his nose and through his throat, and yet his body was desperate for it and demanded that he cram more of it into his lungs.

The room began to spin. The transparent dome and the cold stars beyond it wheeling and spinning into oblivion.

He retched at the memory that was not his own and staggered— I’m coming right back; I’m not leaving you guys, I’m coming right back —into the main living area, the room with the suite’s life support controls. Falling against the wall, he reached up with his fingers to awaken the screen, forgetting for a moment that it would be completely in Triceratonese and then remembering with a thrill that he could read Triceratonese. Sure enough, the nitrogen and sulfur levels were ticking up. And the air recyclers were busily sucking oxygen away. As Mikey watched in anguish, the amount of oxygen in the room dropped from ten percent to nine percent. The life support was reverting to Triceraton-normal.

No, no, no, no, no, Mikey thought. I just got back. I just got them back. His fingers fumbled against the screen, but his vision had developed funny black holes in it, that bubbled and conjoined like the goo in a lava lamp and he couldn’t make his fingers do what he instructed them to. Or, now, his legs.

He sank to the floor. If Mikey could have spared the breath to sob, he would have.

On the wall of the room across from him, through the pulsating lava-lamp of nothingness, Michelangelo caught sight of a blinking light. A green blinking light. Professor Honeycutt’s charging port. Their android friend was hanging there, inert. For all intents and purposes, he was asleep.

And directly under that blinking green light on that charging port was an emergency eject button. It would pop Honeycutt, awake and aware, right out of that port. Professor Honeycutt, who didn’t need oxygen.

Mikey tried to grip the smooth wall with his fingertips to pull himself back onto his jello-like feet. 

And when that didn’t work, he began to crawl.

Art by Joyfuladorable

Chapter Text

The next time Mikey woke, it was only to promptly-and-ineffectively try to will himself straight back to sleep again. Or death. Death wouldn’t be so bad in comparison, would it? Definitely not so much agonizing muscle pain. And surely not so blazingly, insanely bright.

Mikey groaned and brought his arm up in an attempt to shade his eyes, but even that slight movement caused a surging spasm that turned his groan into a sharp gasp.

“Hey, Mikey. Hey, I’m here.” Don’s voice. “Can we turn down the lights a bit, Professor?” His voice echoed a little as he turned his head, but then it was back, focused on Mikey—familiar and warm. “Is that better?” he asked as the terrible brightness glowing through his eyelids dimmed to bearable.

“Don?” Mikey’s mouth felt dry.

“Yeah, I’m here. And you’re good. We’re all good, Mikey. Thanks to you. Here…” a straw found his mouth, and when Mikey sucked on it he was rewarded with blessedly cold water. He sighed in relief and took a few long pulls.

“What… What happened? I feel like I’ve been napping in a mosh pit.” Was he speaking English? He mentally checked. Yup. English.

“You’ve never been in a mosh pit.” Don’s voice held a smile.

“You’ve never been mauled by a giant sloth, but I bet you can guess how it would feel.”

He could sense Donnie’s eyes narrow. “Well, I’m not sure that I can, but I’ll give this one to you. Here, take one more drink.” As Mikey did, he felt Donnie’s cool hand on his brow. Finally, he summoned the strength to open his eyes. The sight of Don’s olive skin and kind face was more refreshing than the water.

Professor Honeycutt approached on Mikey’s other side. “Michelangelo, I am so happy you are awake.”

“Thanks, Professor.” Mikey raised his head a little to look around the room, a bare-bones medical bay with two Triceraton-sized beds along with the chair Donnie was sitting in, but the three of them were alone. “Where’s Raph and Leo?”

“They’re in the next room; they’re fine.” Donatello assured him. “When the medical team got to our quarters, they wheeled you and me out before Raph and Leo.”

“That’s when they realized their mistake.” Honeycutt gave a sad, electronic sigh. “Not only is there a difference in atmospheric content between Terran-normal and Triceraton-normal, there’s also a difference in air-pressure. Normally, it isn’t an issue, but since you and Donatello had been breathing too much nitrogen—”

“It caused little bubbles to form in our blood. Decompression sickness. It gave us the bends!” Donatello shook his head in amazement. Mikey noticed for the first time the slump of Don’s shoulders, the telltale crimp in his eye-ridge line that showed he, too, was in pain.

“Your cases are not dangerously severe, but you will experience significant discomfort for a while as well as weariness,” Honeycutt informed him. “The medics learned their lesson after you two and are taking it more slowly with your brothers, who are in a pressurized hyperbaric chamber for a few more hours, at least, to avoid similar problems and help their bodies adjust. They’re being kept asleep for now, but Mardoon is keeping an eye on them.”

“But we are all reoxygenated,” Don smiled. “Our brain-functions read normal. And we’re alive. And that’s because of you, Mikey.”

Michelangelo blinked. The events of the last hours-which-felt-like-years swirled in his mind. “Bro, I remember… It was so hot, and it smelled gnarly. And you…” Mikey shot a quick look of remembered panic toward Don, “You guys wouldn’t wake up.”

Donnie nodded solemnly. “They say the timer on the life-support system malfunctioned. Tried to go back to Triceraton-normal days ahead of schedule. If you hadn’t awoken the Professor, here, we’d be goners.”

Honeycutt explained. “I pressed the emergency alarm and put four breathers from the backup stash on all of you. But the medics were surprisingly quick.”

“Emergency alarm?” Mikey wondered.

“Next to the door. Every set of quarters has them.” Honeycutt nodded to a large yellow button next to the door of the med-bay room.

“Ah. Right. Of course. Good to know.”

“You did good.” Donnie’s eyes were intent on Mikey’s. “I don’t know how you were even conscious, much less able to think about getting to the Professor. Mikey, you did real good.” Donnie gently pressed his forehead against his brother’s, and they both just breathed together for a moment.

Until Mikey broke the silence. “That is why they call me the smart one.”

Don laughed, releasing his brother and giving him an affectionate, pained punch to the shoulder that made both of them wince. “Yup. I yield the title. You’ve won it fair and square. Of course, that also means that you need to be the one to calibrate the Battleshell’s laser systems when we get home.”

“Ah, well…”

“Oh, and rewire the security feed now that the roadwork on Park Avenue is complete.”

“So, here’s the thing…”

“And I’ll tell Raph he can come to you for that engine rebuild on the Shell Cycle.”

”Dude. I surrender.” Mikey shook his head regretfully. “It was nice while it lasted.”

Don nodded in mock-sympathy.

An electronic chirp announced someone was at the door. Mikey and Don looked at each other in surprise, and Mikey didn’t miss that Donnie raised himself to a pained stand, placing himself between the door and Michelangelo’s bed before he said, “Enter.”

Senator Avada III processed into the room with royal aplomb, skirts billowing and a breather in her beak since the room was being kept at Terran-normal. Dressed now in luxurious green and gold, Avada looked even more magisterial than she had the last time they’d seen her. Her bodyguards strode at her heels, each wearing their ever-present energy blasters across their chests.

“Senator,” Donatello politely acknowledged.

“Turtles. Professor.” She almost-imperceptibly inclined her head to each. “I heard just now about the malfunction that almost cost you and your brothers your lives. I came straight here. I was horrified at the thought that I might never have been able to apologize to you if you had died.”

In his mind, Mikey could imagine Raphael’s derisive snort at her words, but Donatello was more polite.

“Apologize, Senator?”

“Indeed,” her tone was clipped, but sounded sincere. “The analysis of my granddaughter’s blood came back positive for quarozine. It’s a quick-acting neurotoxin from the Triceraton homeworld. It’s quite rare now, though available, for a price, in both Federation and Triceraton space. It would have caused immediate nausea and disorientation. Xania most certainly would have died within minutes without treatment.” Avada’s beak pressed into a tight line. “You were correct. The Magistrate’s people are combing through the trees where she fell to search for the dart that you say delivered the poison. I have convinced him to free you from confinement. But, in the meantime, Xania’s murderer is still out there.”

Mikey nodded miserably. “I’m so sorry, Senator.”

Avada closed her eyes for a moment, recomposing herself before she continued. “Clearly, someone is trying to compromise the peace process. The Federation contains elements, pockets of extremists who would delight in the failure of the treaty, and this is certainly an attempt by these factions to undermine it. They think that by killing a family member of a high-ranking Senator, they can destabilize the talks.”

Donatello and Honeycutt both tried to speak, but Avada raised her hand imperiously. “They are wrong. I will not let Xania’s death jeopardize what our people have worked so hard for in these last years.”

“I’m… glad to hear that, Senator,” Donatello said hesitantly. 

“Within the hour, I will be leaving Draxidia, returning to my place at the talks. The investigation into Xania’s murder will rest in the Magistrate’s capable hands.”

Donatello barely stopped himself from rolling his eyes.

“But before I do,” the Triceraton Senator continued, her tone somewhat softened, “I want to see a little of what Xania has been doing. You were right, Michelangelo. I had not fully valued Xania’s work with these… plants. I was blinded by my own ambition for her. I failed to see the honor that she brought to my family, the glory to the Republic simply because it was less…glorious. I hoped—'' Avada had been addressing the whole room as if they’d been an audience in a senate chamber, but now she turned her attention directly to Michelangelo. “I hoped that you might guide me. In the gardens. The ones where she worked as a botanist, where she spent so much of her time and her passion.”

“Me?” Michelangelo didn’t intend for his voice to rise in just that way.

“You, whether I like it or not, hold her recent memories. Part of her lives in you. You know the gardens well enough, I assume?”

“Uh, yeah. Sure! I mean, I’d be honored, Senator Avada.” Mikey’s glow of excitement wasn’t entirely his own, Donnie saw. It was layered with Xania’s memories, the years she’d longed for the approval of this great matriarch of her family, only to have those hopes repeatedly dashed. And now Mikey had the chance to fix some of that, to heal that rift even now, when it was, at least on one side, too late.

Donatello stepped forward, worry creasing his features. “Michelangelo means he would be honored, Senator. But I’m afraid we are both still recovering from our experience last night, and he is in no shape to give a tour of the gardens. Our brothers are still in pressure-chambers, and when they wake up, we’ll want to be there.”

“Don- nie!” Mikey whined. It was a whine, at least, that was all his own. “It won’t take long. The Senator says she’s leaving soon anyway; this will be my— Xania’s —last chance to show her everything she’s accomplished.”

Donatello looked into his brother’s face, his attempt at stern fortitude melting under his brother’s pitiful look.

“And you can come with us. You know: science!”

Don’s responding half-smile told Mikey he’d won.

Senator Avada interjected. “My bodyguards will accompany us, and they are well-armed. So you can put aside any worries of harm befalling your brother or yourself.”

“I will stay with Leonardo and Raphael and let them know where you are when they wake,” Honeycut added helpfully.

Don was outnumbered. He put his hands up. “Okay, okay. A short visit. Let’s just take it slowly, Mikey. We’ve still got nitrogen bubbles in our blood, remember.”

Mikey flashed a grin of triumph. “We’ll be like two little-old-man turtles, Don. Slow and steady wins the race.”

With his feet on the loamy floor of the garden-fields in the solarium, Mikey wasn’t so sure this whole thing was such a great idea. The carefully-nurtured trellises of heavy fruit and rows of flowering trees were certainly beautiful, and the little group wound through them with admiration, at least on Donnie’s part. But Mikey’s memories from Xania turned out to be somewhat… haphazard. Was this a farbi flower or a zul’ich blossom? Which vine would grow well under the UV-bulbs of a roving asteroid base, and which only thrived in the light of an actual star system? To these details, he’d never paid much attention.

Moreover, both he and Don were wrecked. Being fully upright showed them how little they’d recovered. They slouched against trees and took every chance to sit on the sides of planting boxes to pant heavily through their breathers. Their muscles screamed in protest at even mild exertion.

Nor did Senator Avada, now that she was here, really seem to show that much interest in the work Xania had done. Michelangelo felt his enthusiasm wane as the senator’s affect grew subtly more distant. She nodded at the right times and asked the occasional question, but Mikey could tell her heart wasn’t in it. A flood of disappointment—was it his or Xania’s?— welled up inside him.

It was almost a relief when the senator’s holo-pad chirped and Avada politely excused herself to take the holo-call. “Official business,” she said. She took one of her guards with her and left the other to watch over the turtles from a disinterested distance. Mikey and Don slumped against one another on a planter, their lungs working far too hard.

“Meh.” Mikey finally grunted. “These gardens were way more fun when I was a knowledgeable Triceraton without decompression sickness. Well,” he amended, looking around them, “Somewhat more fun.”

Don laid his head on Mikey’s shoulder and looked through the transparent dome to the starry myriad above. “I’d like to come back here sometime. You know, when my legs weren’t trying to tell me they were on fire every time I moved. And maybe with an actual botanist. Someone who can explain how photosynthesis works without oxygen. No offense, Mikey.”

“None taken, bro. This whole thing has reminded me how much time I spent trying to write ‘Quantum Leap: the Rock Musical’ in my head while Xania was in her botany classes.”

Donnie huffed a laugh. “I’d like to hear that sometime. Can Scott Bakula sing?”

Mikey nodded solemnly. “Scott Bakula can do it all, Don.”

Don smiled, then raised his head to look around. “Avada is sort of taking a while. You think we should throw in the towel?” His question was hopeful as he experimentally stretched a leg and winced.

“Let’s give her another couple of minutes. It’s probably something about treaty stipulations or that wacky nosocardia project she’s got going. She’ll be pissed if we just ditch her.”

Donnie suddenly went very, very still. “Wait. Do you mean a nosocarzium project?”

“Yeah. That’s it! Noso-car-zium… that’s the one.”

Don gave a thoughtful nod. When he spoke again, it was after a quick look at the Triceraton guard. He was standing too far away to hear them, but Don lowered his voice, regardless. “Mikey, why do you think that Avada is heading a nosocarzium project?”

Mikey’s face crinkled at the sudden fragile tension in Donnie’s tone, but he lowered his own voice to match his brother’s. “Xania found it. Last Horn Sharpening Day. She knew that the senator had some old baby pictures of her and her brother on her holo-pad, so she hacked it to show him. She found the pictures, but first she found a bunch of weird blueprints and sciency stuff about nosocarzium. Xania didn’t know much about it, so she didn’t really pay attention, but when Avada got back and saw Xania with the holo-pad she was really cheesed, you know?” Mikey sighed. “Just another thing to argue about in addition to Xania ‘throwing away’ her future.” Mikey quirked an eyebrow at his brother. “Why do you ask?”

Donnie’s facial expression was in the “processing” mode, his brow-line lowered and his mouth pinched tight in thought. But still, he found the mental energy to answer Mikey. “Nosocarzium is a chemical compound. A really dangerous, toxic one that can be used as a bioweapon. It doesn’t surprise me that Xania might not have known about it because it wasn’t really in her wheelhouse. But it has the property of self-replicating in oxygenated atmospheres, so it can take out whole planets if released in enough quantities.” Donnie turned his head to gaze at his brother. “And, because of its threat specifically to oxygen-breathing Federation humanoids, it is expressly prohibited in all drafts of the treaty. Mikey, Avada shouldn’t be making this stuff. No one should be making this stuff!”

“Well, you can try telling her that when she comes back, but something tells me she’s not going to want to listen to you.”

“Mikey, I don’t think she’s coming back.” Mikey looked confused, but Donnie, pain temporarily forgotten, stood and hauled his brother to his feet. Mikey groaned in protest. Donnie threw a winning grin and a quick wave over his shoulder at the Triceraton guard Avada had left—not to watch over them, he now realized, but to watch them.

Don pulled Mikey along, walking down the path slowly as if they were just on a casual stroll. They felt the presence of the guard behind them, following them, keeping a distance but nonetheless keeping pace.

“If she’s got a nosocarzium operation going,” Don whispered, “then it’s because they’re trying to fast-track the process… secretly put it in mass production before the treaty goes into effect, then hide it somewhere and use it to threaten the Federation when they want to get the upper hand. It risks the whole peace process, and it completely undermines Traximus’s authority. But a self-centered glory-hog like Avada might just take that risk.”

“Oooooh! You called her a hog!” Mikey was impressed.

“But what she wouldn’t risk,” Don continued, quickening their pace just fractionally, “Is the secret getting out too soon. Before they could create enough of it, before they could use it to its full devastating potential. She wouldn’t risk Xania knowing about it.” Donnie’s eyes were sorrowful, and they pleaded for understanding from Mikey.

And Mikey was catching on. “The…the senator? No! Xania was her own granddaughter!” Mikey’s voice rose in pitch and volume.

“Keep your voice down,” Donnie hushed. 

Mikey lowered his tone, but his voice was still anguished. “She cried! Remember? Back in the room… She cried about Xania!”

“I’m sorry, Mikey, I’m so sorry, but Avada calling out the hit on Xania is the only thing that makes sense. And it doesn’t mean she wasn’t sad about doing it. From her point of view, Xania’s knowledge threatened not only her lustrous family name, but all of her designs for the Republic’s future.” 

Another backwards glance at the Triceraton guard affirmed that he was still keeping up. A call had come in on his holo-pad, and he held it in front of him, speaking low as he walked after the two turtles. Donatello gave him an innocent smile, which he did not return. Donnie turned back to his brother, increasing their speed another slight fraction, but without trying to look like they were increasing their speed.

“Oh, shell . That woman is ruthless! Donnie, we’ve got to tell them! We’ve got to tell Mardoon and the Magistrate. We’ve got to get word to Traximus!”

“That sounds great, Mikey, let’s do that. But first, we need to focus on surviving the next five minutes.”

Mikey looked behind them. “Him?” Understanding dawned.

“Him.” Don nodded. “He's not our guard. He’s our assassin.”

Mikey’s eyes widened. “I told Senator Avada about their argument on Horn Sharpening Day. She knows Xania recorded that day. She knows I remember it. She knows I remember what was on that holo-pad.”

“Yeah. And isn’t it an interesting coincidence that our life support happened to ‘malfunction’ that very same night after our big friend here messed with it?”

Mikey gasped and stopped in his tracks between rows of those strange, maroon trees. “She tried to kill us!” Mikey was beyond keeping his tone down. He was infuriated.

Donnie spared a glance at the Triceraton guard behind them. His holo-call had ended. And apparently his orders had come through because now the business-end of his blaster was aimed directly at the two turtles.

Donnie hurled himself into his brother’s side, flinging them both through a break in the trees. “Mikey, run!”

Art by Joyfuladorable

Chapter Text

Don felt the searing heat of the blaster ray sizzle through the air directly behind his shell. It was an all-too-familiar feeling.

They ran.

Weaponless and sick, Don and Mikey tore through the regimented rows of solarium-planted trees, branches ripping at their faces and limbs, slicing blood-red scratches into their flesh. Their pursuer charged behind them, firing indiscriminately into the carefully-planted forest, leaving blasted stumps and broken limbs in his wake. Their cover was being reduced to ragged shards of splintered wood.

 The tearing branches had no effect on their attacker’s sturdy Triceraton hide, and he didn’t even seem winded by the chase. 

The two turtles, on the other hand, were heaving, their straw-thin breathers not made for this kind of heavy use. Donnie could feel the excruciating snap-crackle-pop of the nitrogen bubbles in his blood with every movement, and he knew Mikey felt the same.

“Mikey!” Don dove behind a planter-box and pulled his brother down with him. “I need a moment.” He heaved, sucking on the thin trickle of oxygen through his breather. “Where are we? Where are we going? Can’t—can’t go back to the main elevator; she’ll have it guarded.”

Despite everything he’d been through in the past day, despite the enormous hit-man breathing down their necks and the enmity of a woman they had trusted, Mikey found it within himself to smirk. “No,” he shook his head. “Cargo lift. At the back. She won’t know about it. We’re almost out of the woods.” Mikey’s expression sharpened and he elbowed his brother’s arm. “Get it? Out of the woods?” He gestured with his chin beyond the last line of trees to a section of planters growing long, frilly fronds in strange transparent coverings. “Just past those things. We’re almost there.”

Don beamed his response. “Mikey, you are the smart one.”

“Oh, don’t you dare! Don’t you dare try to put that on me again.” Mikey grabbed Donnie’s arm and pulled him onward. “I am not fixing the Shell Cycle!”

But unluckily for them, the Triceraton assassin had used his blaster effectively, creating clear visual sightlines littered with blackened, slightly smoking, downed trees. Mid-leap over a freshly-blasted log, the turtles realized their mistake as the air behind them once again cracked with the magenta lightning of the ray gun. 

This time, it found its target and with a cry of anguish, Don collapsed into the maroon branches of a fallen tree.

“Donnie!” Mikey twisted his body around. His muscles screamed with the change of momentum as he scrambled back to his injured brother.

Don writhed for a moment on the ground before instinctively curling in on himself with a whimper that stopped Mikey’s heart. He didn’t think he’d ever heard Donnie make a sound like that before. Mikey’s fingers flitted across Don’s skin,  afraid to touch him for fear of causing him further pain. “Don? Where’d you get hit?”

“Shell, lower shell,” Don grunted through gritted teeth, his eyes clenched shut. “Mikey, go. Go, go quick. Before he gets here.”

The Triceraton assassin stalked toward them across the ruins of the forest. He was in no hurry. He had them in his sights. He had plenty of time.

Mikey held Don by the shoulder and he shifted his stance so his eyes could feverishly scan his brother’s shell. Sure enough, a large circular burn blackened his lower left scutes. Upturned fragments of bloodied, smoking bone marked the wound’s center, startling pink flesh revealed in the deep cracks beneath. Spokes of scorched keratin radiated outward. “You’re okay.” Mikey was trying to convince himself as much as Donnie. “You’re gonna be okay, Don. They got really good doctors here. Couple’a bandaids is all you need.”

“Mikey, go! Please. Get help.” Don tried again, but his words had no effect.

“I’m not leaving you here alone with a Triceraton assassin, Donatello.” Mikey never used his full name, so Don knew he was serious. Mikey glanced up. “Here comes ugly.”

“Mikey…”

The Triceraton was closer now. So much closer. He couldn’t miss. With a twisted smile on his face, the first actual expression Mikey had seen there, the Triceraton raised his blaster. Mikey squeezed Don’s shoulder before letting go, ignoring his brother’s continued murmured pleas. From the garden’s wreckage, he grabbed a broken tree limb the circumference of his arm, as if it could somehow be used as a shield against that blaster which had just taken out entire trees. But, nonetheless, he raised the branch and stepped squarely in front of Donatello’s prone form.

The Triceraton squeezed the trigger.

One thing about leveling a forest of trees with what is essentially a juiced-up handgun is that eventually, just as a revolver runs out of bullets, a laser blaster runs out of power. Especially one that was very definitely not set to ‘stun.’ The blaster made a sad, downward-toned “mooooop” noise and went dark.

In the moment that followed, Mikey and the Triceraton looked in surprise at the weapon. And then at each other. After a blink of mutual astonishment, and then with an intermingled shout of fury, they both charged forward, Mikey with his broken branch and the Triceraton with his defunct blaster.

On the ground, Don gasped and rolled to his side, then his knees, desperate to be of some use to Mikey. His vision faded out, then in again, focusing eventually on the dark earth and the strange, kidney-bean-colored leaves beneath him. The sounds of the battle, composed of meaty thunks and resounding thwacks, told him little. The combatants grunted as hits landed home. But, Don knew, the Triceraton was almost three times Mikey’s size, could actually breathe the atmosphere,  and presumably was not suffering from a fizzing, debilitating pain. How long could Mikey possibly last?

The only shred of comfort Don could find was in Michelangelo’s voice, winded but clear, heckling his opponent in a percussive rhythm of flawless Triceratonese. Donnie had no idea what Mikey was saying; the translator was hopelessly offline. But whatever Mikey’s taunts were, they were apparently working—if working meant roars of escalating rage from the assassin.

Finally, Don hauled himself up and staggered, dazed, through his own thrumming pain, toward the sounds of the fight only to find Mikey hurling himself back at Donatello. He seemed to have lost his branch in the battle, and similarly, the Triceraton beyond him was missing his blaster.

“Mikey?”

Michelangelo flashed Donnie a worryingly maniacal grin as he surged toward him and then past him. “Stay there! I’ve got an idea,” Mikey yelled to him.

Stay there, he says. Donnie gulped, trying to center the enraged Triceraton into the middle of his dizzy, kaleidoscopic vision. Things seemed to be going a little blurry at the edges. But what was clear enough was this Triceraton, now with a gashed lip and bloodied nose, was in no mood for mercy.

Donatello tried to straighten himself and almost passed out. He widened his stance in an effort to remain upright and opened both his hands in wide appeal. “What do you say we talk about this?” Don croaked with a false-hopeful smile.

The Triceraton seethed and quickened his pace.

Simultaneously, Mikey reappeared at Don’s left side. Each of Mikey’s hands clutched a giant bouquet of fronds. They were more like the plants Don was used to on Earth, a vivid, frothy green. These were rather large, but also feathery, delicate, and speckled underneath with pretty yellow dots.

“Jump right on my signal,” Mikey instructed. “And make sure to close your eyes.”

The Triceraton was about fifteen feet away. The sound that emanated from him was a terrible reverberation, like that of a steam engine barreling down railroad tracks. He lowered his massive head, undoubtedly fixed on impaling both turtles with one swing of his forehead-horns. With blood dripping from his nose, he charged.

Mikey held out the fronds, closed his eyes, elbowed his brother sharply in the side, and blew as hard as his starved lungs would allow onto the leaves before leaping out of the way.

Don landed hard on his shoulder. He felt the broken fragments of his shell grind against one another at the impact, sending bright bursts of new agony in undulating waves through his body. But he did not feel himself crushed beneath Triceraton boots, lifted into the air and smashed against a tree, or impaled on a Triceraton horn, all of which had seemed likely scenarios mere seconds ago.

A blood-curdling howl filled the solarium, echoing against the dome high above and then rising in pitch to frantic, anguished shouts. Not Mikey, Donatello realized in melting relief. The Triceraton. But what did that mean about Mikey?

Don wrenched himself upwards. He peeled open his tightly-closed eyes and dragged himself to his knees. Mikey was sitting, panting but still definitely breathing—miraculously, both their breathers were still intact—as he watched the Triceraton in front of him claw at his eyes and scream. The plant fronds lay in front of him, partway trampled into the dirt. Around their stems, the remains of their transparent wrappings showed where Mikey had ripped them loose with his fingers.

Seeing Don’s expression of astonishment, Mikey smiled his reassurance and, giving the thrashing, bellowing Triceraton wide berth, staggered toward his brother. Taking firm hold of both of Donnie’s biceps, Mikey hauled him to a stand and threw one of his brother’s arms over his own shell so he could support him as they hobbled together, gasping and half-dead with weariness, to the cargo lift, leaving the sounds of suffering behind them.

At the cargo lift, they found a large yellow emergency button. Mikey pushed it.

As they waited for help to arrive, Mikey sagged against one broad metal beam of the solarium wall. Don leaned against his brother so that his charred, fractured shell did not touch anything. He finally whispered. “Mikey, how’d you do that?”

“It’s the first step of the safety procedure for handling Madovian fire-fern spores, bro. Xania would be the first to tell you, always wear goggles.”

Art by Joyfuladorable

Chapter Text

By the time Raph and Leo woke up and emerged, pain-free, from the pressure chamber, the damaged section of Donatello’s shell was covered by a transparent, synthetic-bone overlay with something that looked to Mikey surprisingly like gel toothpaste—blue, gooey, and somewhat transparent—shimmering beneath it. The Triceraton surgeon who worked on Don assured Mikey and Professor Honeycutt that the substance would stimulate repair and combat infection, slowly absorbing into the body as Donatello’s own scutes, bone, and flesh regrew and mended.

In time, Don’s shell would be as good as new. And his internal injuries had ceased to hemorrhage and were already healing.

Explaining all of that to Raphael and Leonardo, though, in addition to everything that had happened from the moment they’d gone to bed the previous evening— that was something Michelangelo wished that Don had been more able to help out with. As it was, Donatello was technically conscious, but more than a little dopey on pain meds. Mikey couldn’t help but be a little jealous, but somebody needed to be awake and sober to sort this all out, and that responsibility fell to him.

Thankfully, the needle-sharp pain of the bends had finally receded, and Mikey could at least hold himself up without wanting to sploosh into a puddle on the floor.

His two newly-awake brothers listened to Mikey’s story with a frightening intensity, their stances taut. Except for an occasional clarifying question, they remained almost entirely silent as they all gathered around Donnie’s med-bay bed. Don himself only interjected with the occasional sigh or, in one case, giggle— “Out of the woods!” —before drifting back into a sleepy, dazed euphoria. Leo kept his hand on Don’s brow, stroking it just as he had Michelangelo’s last night before they went to sleep.

Mikey was almost to the good part with the fire-ferns, drawing out how he’d disarmed the Triceraton assassin who’d been trying to use his blaster like a club, when the door-tone sounded, interrupting Mikey’s story mid-kick.

It was Mardoon.

Their Triceraton legal counselor looked anxious and disheveled as he explained the situation.

Senator Avada was making a fuss with the Magistrate, demanding the arrest, and, preferably, immediate execution of all four turtles and their android ally. They needed to come, and quickly, to explain their side of the story before they found themselves in yet another Triceraton jail.

Leo looked to Don, his brow creased. “We can’t just leave him alone. Now that we all know what we know, each of us is a threat to her power. Each of us remains in danger.”

“I’ll stay with ‘im.” Raph’s arms were crossed over his chest. He looked like he had just downed a mug of guarzik tea. “You really don’t want me in the same room with the Magistrate, anyway. I might not be real diplomatic.”

Leo hesitated, but Raph gave him a confident half-smile and moved forward to place both his hands on Don’s arm. Don smiled blearily up at him. “Ain’t no one comin’ in that door until we hear the all-clear. I got us covered. You just watch your own shells.”

Leo gave a tight nod and looked to Mikey. “All right, Mikey. We’re with Mardoon. And, this time, when you’re telling the story, go a little lighter on the action sequences; these guys might not be as patient as we are.”

The conference room was just the same as before. Same polished-metal oblong table, same windows overlooking the bustling center of the lunar outpost, same vaulted ceiling and over-large chairs. But this time, it was stuffed with even more Triceratons.

Leo and Mikey’s attention fixed on Avada first, which made sense because she was certainly the loudest in the room. Incandescent with outrage, she was interrupted mid-yell by the entrance of the turtles, Mardoon, and Honeycutt.

“Here they are!” she howled, pointing at them with one clawed finger and turning to the hulking Magistrate as the room’s computer translator kicked in. “I demand their immediate arrest. They attacked me and assaulted my men in the gardens; we were fortunate to escape with our lives, and one of my men may be permanently blinded! First, they kill my granddaughter—” Here, Avada allowed her voice to wobble precariously, “—and now they try to murder a Senator of the Republic!”

“Whoa, slow down there, that’s not what happened!” Mikey protested. “Also, the fire-fern pollen is totally gonna wear off in a few days; not that that dude deserves it to.” He rolled his eyes.

“Mikey…” Leo’s warned, then sighed. “What my brother means is that Senator Avada’s guards attacked him and Donatello—under Senator Avada’s orders. They were the aggressors. My brothers were merely trying to escape. Donatello was shot in the shell!”

“A defensive action!” hissed the senator. “One of my guards shot the Terran reptile as he was attacking my other guard. Isn’t that right, Varku?”

“Yes, ma’am,” rumbled the remaining, uninjured guard loyally.

The Magistrate glowered down at the turtles. “I knew permitting you freedom was a mistake,” he spat. He half-raised his hand to gesture for his guards to escort the turtles out, but Mardoon stepped forward.

“Your honor, we have evidence that the turtles are not to blame. The poison found in Xania’s system—”

Avada snorted derisively. “Just because they ‘happen’ to have alibis for the morning at the platform does not prove their innocence. They could easily have orchestrated—”

“And,” Mardoon continued over her, unmollified, “We have reason to believe that the Senator herself ordered the assassination of her own granddaughter.”

If there had been a Triceraton award equivalent for best actor in a drama, Mikey was sure that Avada could have earned it. She promptly burst into tears and threw herself backwards into a chair, abruptly exchanging her role of vengeful angel of righteousness for one of heartbroken, grieving grandma. It was impressive. “To be accused,” she wailed, “of such a crime! It crushes me! It pierces me to my core!” She buried her eyes in her sumptuous garment.

Clearly out of his depth, the Magistrate tried to drum up some kind of official jargon. “Do you,” he cleared his throat, looking back and forth between the senator and Mardoon with discomfort. “Do you, Counselor Mardoon, have any evidence for your accusation?”

“I saw her plans,” Mikey interjected. “I mean, Xania saw her plans, and I saw Xania see her plans for a nosocardia—”

“Nosocarzium,” Mardoon whispered helpfully.

“Nosocarzium-producing operation. Blueprints for a sub-surface asteroid factory, fancy chemical symbols. All the sciencey-stuff.” Mikey pointed to Avada. “It’s all on her holo-pad; you just have to look there. Donnie said it would violate the treaty and jeopardize the peace process. Oh, and kill whole planets. That’s some serious Grand Moff Tarkin shit.”

“Magistrate!” Avada was in indignant-mode again and had rounded on the official at the look of uncertainty in his eyes. “Are you sincerely taking the word of these alien ruffians over a Senator of the Republic? One whose ancestors have served the Triceraton people for a millennium and more?”

The Magistrate cringed under the ferocity of her glare. He swallowed and addressed Mardoon. “The testimony of a Terran is not evidence. Nor do I have the authority to confiscate and examine the personal belongings of a Senator…”

“But I do.” The door had hissed open and the voice that emerged was rich, gravelly, and one of the best sounds that Mikey had ever heard.

“Traximus!” Michelangelo leapt forward and wrapped his arms as far as he could around the sienna-colored Triceraton, his face alight with joy. “You’re here! Dude, you have got some timing!” Mikey released him and backed up enough to take in his soft blue tunic and magnificent ivory cape. “Nice duds!”

Traximus gave a gruff snort of affection and nodded toward the others as he and his escort of three Triceratons—now the room was really packed—fully entered. “Leonardo, Mardoon…” his tone grew a shade cooler. “Magistrate.”

“General Consul.” The Magistrate lowered his head, eyes wide.

“I have been informed, thanks to a subspace link from my advisor, Professor Honeycutt, of what has transpired. The peace talks are in recess, and I came as soon as I could.” Now, Traximus turned the entirety of his prodigious attention onto Avada, who met his gaze with one of ferocity. “Senator Avada. As General Consul, I hereby dismiss you from your role in the peace talks with the Federation. As a First Citizen of the Republic, I call for your removal from the Senate. And under the authority of the Triceraton Constitution, I order your arrest for high treason, collusion to commit the murder of the botanist Xania, and the attempted murder of advisors to the Republic. Your belongings, including your quarters, space cruiser, and holo-pad, shall be immediately seized and searched. Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

One of Traximus’s staff came forward to relieve Avada’s guard of his weapon and hold his hand out for Avada’s holo-pad. With an incensed hiss, she slipped it out of a pocket. For a minute, Mikey worried that she might throw it against a wall or stomp it under her foot, but instead, she handed it over with a glare.

“Only this, General Consul. You are a fool. You and your bleating herd of staff—all fools!” Tear tracks still lined her face, but the mask was gone and her eyes flared with spite. “Your brain must’ve been addled when you were enslaved in The Games if you think that peace with the Federation is going to bring prosperity to our people. Our people, who have only known conquest. You see, once we cease to grow outward, we will start caving in. And with nothing to stop the Federation strike-ships, they will be at our door in a decade, mark my words. And if I had to sacrifice my own granddaughter for this cause, if I have to sacrifice myself? It is well worth it. Down with the Republic! Let us return to Empire!”

“Noted,” Traximus replied mildly. Then to his guards. “Take her.”

“Wait.” Mikey, to the surprise of everyone in the room, stepped forward to stand in front of Avada. She looked down at him with a sneer. Mikey began to speak in clear, precise Triceratonese. The room’s translator kicked in for Leo, allowing him to follow Mikey's words.

“Two days ago, I didn’t know your granddaughter. But now I think I know her better than anyone alive.” Mikey looked straight into her eyes, his gaze clear and unafraid.

“She loved you. She thought you were helping the Triceraton people, you know? She thought you were working to ensure generations of peace. She thought you were brave. And she was doing the same in her own way, nurturing and growing the plants that would give air and food and life to all those future Triceratons. And, for the first time, they would get the choice to be explorers and teachers and storytellers rather than being conscripted as soldiers.”

Mikey glanced at Leo, who knew his brother was thinking of Zog.

“But now?” Mikey turned back to the fuming senator. “Now, she would see that you are too frightened to even try an alternative to war. Too scared to hope for something better. She would see that you aren’t brave at all. You’re a coward.” Mikey’s words were scathing, but his voice was a well of sadness. “She would never forgive you. Not for the Republic, and not for herself. I’m glad I have her memories now. Because you don’t deserve them.”

With a shriek, Avada tried to throw herself at Mikey as if to finish the job she had ordered in the solarium right there in the conference room. Mikey did not move a muscle, but merely gazed at her with those melancholy eyes. Traximus’s guards held her fast, binding her in their arms as they escorted the baying, roaring, cursing former-senator to a containment cell.

“Mikey,” Leo stepped behind Mikey and clasped his shoulder in the sudden quiet of the room. “Mikey, that was some speech!”

Mikey still wore an expression of sorrow, but a glimmer of his habitual summer-smile broke through as he turned his head to respond. “Hey, thanks, bro. Wish you coulda understood it in the original Triceratonese. It had more panache!”

“I couldn’t have said it better myself,” Traximus rumbled. “I may have a job opening for a new speech writer.”

“Eh, you couldn’t afford me, Traxi.” Now Mikey’s smile shone with its full wattage. “Besides, I’m destined for the spotlight, not the wings.”

“There will be others like her, Cousin.” Mardoon’s face was still drawn, serious, as he looked to Traximus.

“There will.” Traximus put his arm over Mardoon’s shoulder. “But I have more faith in the Triceraton Republic than she does. And in the stabilizing benefits of true peace.”

“Thank you, my friends.” Traximus turned his focus to encompass both turtles and Professor Honeycutt. “Once again, you have saved the Republic.”

Three days later, the turtles stood on the deck of Traximus’s space cruiser. With the release of artificial gravity, the ship’s thrusters propelled it through the open bay doors and into the wide, glittering expanse of stars beyond. They were headed, eventually, to New York City, Planet Earth. But with a few stops along the way.

“How long is it gonna take us to get to the asteroid where Zog’s family lives, Don?” Mikey asked, his voice betraying a touch of nerves.

“About a week, according to Traximus. Maybe less.” Donnie leaned against Raphael’s shoulder, letting his brother help take some of the strain off his still-aching shell and spine. “It’s on the way to the lunar colony where the peace talks are resuming, so we’re lucky to get such cushy accommodations.” Donnie shifted to bend his head in toward Mikey’s. “It’s a good idea.” Donnie told him softly. “It’s important.”

“And long past due.” Leonardo agreed.

“But is his family… Are they really gonna want to see us?”

“They already said they did, Mikey.” Raph’s words may have been exasperated, but his tone carried none of its usual heat. “And if we get there and they changed their minds, we just won’t bother ‘em.”

“They’ll want to,” Leo said. “I would want to.”

“But that means the countdown starts now,” Raph’s voice was gruff. “If you are wantin’ that memory conductor doohickey removed, Mikey, you gotta decide while we’re still in Triceraton space. Nobody’s gonna have the medical know-how once we’re outta here.”

For a moment, the only sound was the hum of the deck under their feet as the cruiser increased its speed.

“I haven’t changed my mind. This isn’t something I chose, you know? But neither did Xania. And I wouldn’t want all those memories just removed. That wouldn’t feel right. Senator Avada was right about one thing. Xania’s part of me now. A geeky, guarzik-guzzling, plant-obsessed part of me." Mikey's hands clenched into fists at his sides. "To get rid of all that... It would feel like losing her. Like watching her die. Again.”

Raph nodded in understanding. “Okay. If that’s how you want it.” He shrugged. “Real convincin’.” But then his tone dipped into sardonic. “ Xania’s part of ya,’ huh? Real smart lady, that Avada…  Is that what she said right before you and Don went traipsing off with her an’ her goons to go look at flowers? Is that what the nice megalomaniac said ‘fore she tried to barbecue the both of ya?”

“We are never going to hear the end of this,” Donnie murmured, staring wearily into the darkness of space.

“We didn’t know she was a megalomaniac, Raph!” Mikey protested. “She used all her grandmother-powers. It’s not Xania’s fault her granny turned out to be such a jerk.”

“Sure, sure. But maybe next time you two wanna pal around with an alien supervillain, you can at least wait until Leo and I are awake!” That last word was more like a shout.

As ever, the bickering continued. But it grew out of love. And, supplied with a shared gratitude for this love, a good dose of vexation, a substantial supply of blackmarket Triceraton comics, and the borrowed memories of an alien botanist, the little family began their long journey home.

Art by Joyfuladorable

Chapter Text

One month after the turtles’ return to New York

When Leo saw the door to his room ajar, his shoulders tensed. The certainty that Klunk had wriggled his way in to chew on his bonsai tree hit him. That exasperating cat couldn’t seem to leave the thing alone.

But when he flung the door open and charged inside, it wasn’t Klunk but Mikey who sat on a stool drawn up close to the small tree, peering at it intently.

“Mikey.” His brother’s name came in a relieved breath. “I thought you were Klunk.”

Mikey looked up, startled from his reverie by his brother’s voice, then gave his classic broad, sweet smile. “Nah, bro. Less fur, no ears.”

Leo snorted a soft laugh and dragged a chair beside his brother. “We do have ears, you know, Mikey. Just not the outside part. Our ears are internal.”

Mikey wagged a finger at him. “First, you confuse me with Klunk; now you are confusing yourself with Don. Tryin’ to steal his nerdy science lecture!”

Leo planted an elbow on the table, feeling the warmth of the ultra-violet grow light over the bonsai. “Having ears isn’t exactly mind-bending science. I don’t need to run this one by Donatello. It’s just a statement of fact. How would we hear anything without ears?”

Mikey smiled condescendingly and turned his attention back to the bonsai. “Well, I’ll believe it when Donnie says it. Until then, you’ll just be another dude with a theory.”

Leo gave up. “What’re you doing in here, Mikey?” In truth, he already knew.

“Oh, yeah. Sorry, Leo. I just wanted to check in on it.”

Their gazes lay on the tree now—a dwarf pomegranate April had unearthed years ago at an estate sale.

When she’d found it, the thing had been orphaned, leaves going a brittle orange, crusted with dust, roots running dry. But Leo’s attentive care had, over time, returned it to life. Now, slender fingers of gray root emerged from the verdant moss of a low, squared, earthen pot. Rising from where the tree clutched the soil, the trunk, bent and twisted, curved sinuously—first to the left and then a sharp right—until arm-like branches swept away from the main stem, some guided and molded with tiny wires, directing their growth and flow. These ended in flourishes of brilliant, narrow green leaves. Nestled within those leaves lay long, scarlet flowers—flashy trumpets of color designed to entice the nonexistent bees of the sewer.

The effect was, frankly, entrancing. The tree stood, gnarled and curling but also perfectly balanced and proportioned. It had the feeling of something immense within something tiny, as if a powerful energy had been condensed or concentrated. Every branch, considered. Every choice, deliberate. To care for a bonsai, Leo had once told Mikey years ago, was not to impose control, but to nurture relationship.

Leo was an artist, and this was his canvas—the muscular coil of bark, the graceful curve of bough, the vivid burst of flower.

“Did Xania have anything like this?” Leo’s voice was gentle, curious.

Mikey reached out, barely touching the bark with his fingertips. “Like bonsai? Nah. Triceratons are more into functionality, you know? Less about how a plant looks, more about whether it can sustain an intergalactic army. Even now the war’s over, they still don’t have a homeworld left, so things are usually—” Mikey took a moment to inhale the tangy scent of a flower, “—more practical. But she woulda liked it, bro.”

Mikey grasped the sides of the shallow pot, carefully rotating it under its light so he and his brother could see the other side where the fluid bend of the tree was marred by a confusing jumble of strange gray tape wrapped around an offshoot with a single branch emerging.

“You fixed it! Here—where Klunk knocked it over and snapped that branch.” Mikey’s tone swelled with admiration. “You stuck it back on.”

Leo shook his head. “I didn’t ‘stick it back on,’ Mikey. I grafted it back on. It was a little more complex, believe me.” Leo smiled softly. “It will take some time to heal, and for the branch to fully reconnect, but it should be fine, eventually.”

“Grafted…” Mikey’s eyes grew distant as he ran his fingers gently over the pale lines of grafting tape. This newfound interest didn’t surprise Leo. It had become expected to find his brother lost in thought at the strangest moments—examining the slippery seeds of a tomato, for instance, or the fine vein structure of lettuce. Mikey had recently let Raph play a new videogame without him as he lost himself in conversation with Don over the evolution of the avocado.

Leonardo’s gaze hung on the three small metal dots at Mikey’s temple as his brother’s attention drifted away momentarily. Something of Xania’s passion for botany had settled itself deep into Michelangelo. The connections were sticky, somehow, catching the young turtle and immersing him, taking him somewhere his family could not easily follow.

It wasn’t always about plants, of course. Sometimes, the triggers were less pronounced. Mikey would be playing a game, watching a show, or practicing a move, and the undertow of Xania’s life would grab him for a moment, seldom more. And when he returned to them, washed back onto the shores of his mind, just a little dazed, it was also with a current of sadness behind his eyes, a tiny crease to the side of his mouth that he would cover almost instantly with the bright flash of a joke or a tease, diving into the swirl of the ‘next thing’ without acknowledging what had pulled him under in the moment before. 

Sitting in front of the pomegranate bonsai, Leo followed his impulse to reach for Mikey’s hand, as if to tug his brother back from that call of memory physically. And it worked. As Mikey’s eyes refocused on Leo, a swirl of emotion clouded them, then dissipated.

“Mikey…”

Mikey’s shake of the head was tiny, unconscious. “Tell me about grafting.”

Leo’s brow creased, but he allowed himself to be led to the topic. “Uh… in Japanese, it is tsugiki.” He reached out to smooth down a fold of the grafting tape. “I’ve used the method to try revitalizing this broken branch from the same plant, but traditionally, you’d use a whole different individual, even a different species.”

Mikey turned his head, looking confused. “A different species?”

“Sure, like a lemon to a lime or a cherry branch on a plum tree. You can combine the strengths of two different plants into one. The roots of the stock plant can provide nutrients to the new branch, and the branches’ leaves allow the flow of sugars made from sunlight back into the tree. Plus, now you get two different kinds of fruit.”

Mikey’s eyes were far away again, but Leo knew he was still present with him because he was talking, albeit more softly than was usual for Michelangelo. And he hadn’t let go of Leo’s hand. “Two different kinds of fruit from the same tree? That’s wild, dude.” He squinted a little. “So it can be a good thing? Like, not somethin’ just for when a branch breaks, like this one. Something done on purpose. Something that helps.”

“It can be really good, if the host tree integrates the new branch. Give it a little time, and the scar will heal. It will always be present, but you won’t see it unless you know where to look.”

Leo caught the movement of Mikey’s hand, the one not held in his own. Mikey’s fingertips lightly brushed the three small circles that marked Xania’s memory implants. Mikey’s eyes refocused, a light in them that looked just a little covetous.

“You didn’t take the opportunity to, you know, graft on a fig branch or something? Or, I don’t know…mango? Kiwi?”

Leo huffed a light laugh. “I don’t know what’s compatible with a pomegranate, Mikey. I’m not growing this to provide you with random new pizza toppings if that’s what you think.” Mikey's expression drooped, just a little. “Besides,” Leo continued, indicating the grafted limb, “this branch that Klunk broke off produced the biggest pomegranate last year. You know, big for a bonsai. Six whole seeds!” Leo grinned. “The same number that Persephone ate.”

“Persephone?”

“It’s this myth from ancient Greece.” With a gleam of excitement, Leo assumed his storytelling voice, and Mikey, smiling, settled in a bit, taking back his hand to rest his chin in his palm. When Leo’s imagination sparked with a good narrative, he could rival one of Don’s astronomy infodumps for levels of enthusiasm.

“It starts with Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, and her daughter, Persephone. Everything is great, all green and growing, until Hades abducts—or lures, it depends on the version—Persephone into the underworld.”

“The underworld!” Mikey’s eyes went wide. “She, like, died?”

“I mean…” Leo scrunched up his face. “It’s god-and-goddess stuff, so, yes-and-no? But,” he shrugged, “for all intents and purposes…yes.”

“Whoa.”

“Exactly. Her mother, Demeter, was stricken with sorrow. She stopped doing her summer nurturing-the-fields thing and wandered, alone and grieving. And, untended, the Earth became cold and barren.”

“But wh-why was she alone?” Mikey’s eye-ridges furrowed.

“Well,” Leo paused, thinking, “I don’t know, Mikey. Maybe she was the only one who loved Persephone? Or maybe she didn’t know how to reach out to others who loved her, too.”

To Leo’s alarm, he found that Mikey’s eyes were filling with tears.

“It’s…” Mikey took a minute to sniff. “It’s just— I bet it’s hard when you feel alone like that.” Leo nodded. He thought his heart might crumple into a ball inside his chest. Mikey continued, “When maybe you were the only one who knew her.”

Leo leaned forward and took both of Mikey’s shoulders in his hands. “I know.” And he put all the love and care he felt into those simple words. “I’m sorry.”

Mikey nodded his acknowledgment and pushed the heels of his hands against his eyes, just as he had done way back on Draxidia when they first had him back. But his words were clear. “It’s not your fault. Go on. Go on with the story.”

Leo’s mouth pinched into a hard line. “You sure? I’m sorry, Mikey, I should’ve thought. I shouldn’t have—”

“No, I want to hear. I want to hear the pomegranate part.”

Leo breathed out deeply, squeezing his brother’s shoulders before letting go. “OK, well… Hades eventually agreed to release his hold on Persephone, but before she returned to the Earth, bringing with her all the life of springtime, he tricked her into eating six pomegranate seeds.”

Mikey snorted. “You wouldn’t have to trick me into eating pomegranate seeds. Pomegranates are great! Remember that gorgonzola pizza with the pomegranate seeds that April brought?”

Leo smiled. “I do! But in this case, tasting the food of the underworld, especially such a very symbolic food, meant that she was now married to Hades. Although she could arise in the spring to walk the Earth with her mother, making everything bloom, every winter, she has to return and spend six months, one for each seed, in the underworld with her husband.”

“What?!” Mikey’s cry was outraged. “Dude!”

“I know, I know!” Leo raised his hands, palms out in capitulation.

“That is so messed up!”

“I know. It’s bad. But, you know. This is the same mythological schema where another woman was tricked into having sexual relations with a bull, Mikey. It’s…” Leo winced and rubbed the back of his neck in embarrassment. “Par for the course?”

“And this is the fruit ya want to grow, bro?” Mikey looked askance at the formerly innocent pomegranate tree. “One that traps pretty goddess-ladies in hell with uber-creepy dickwads?”

“That's—” Leo winced. “That’s not why.” He sighed, taking a moment to formulate his words. “Pomegranates are a symbol of life, sure, but they are also about that transition between life and death, between this world and the next. Those seeds do more than trap Persephone. They also allow her, and pretty much only her, the power to move between realms. Between the land of the dead and that of the living. Or between this reality and something…different.”

Mikey’s eyes landed on Leo’s meditation mat, rolled up neatly and leaned against the table that held the bonsai.

“Like, the astral plane?”

“Yes.” Leo smiled. “I mean, I don’t think eating a lot of pomegranate seeds will help me enter the astral plane. But, having this tree here deepens my focus. Symbols matter. At least, they do to me. And I think maybe that helps.” Leo leaned forward to carefully reposition the small tree so its best side was facing out. It stood, small but beautiful, in the spartan room. “Also,” Leo allowed with a half-shrug, “it was what April happened to bring home from that estate sale.”

“You know, Leo,” Mikey’s tone was thoughtful, “I think there’s something like that for Triceratons.” 

“Oh?”

“Yeah, like, there’s this special food—it’s not a fruit; it’s more like this space-mushroom thing—that you can only ever eat at funeral feasts. It’s, like, really good. Or, Xania thought so.” Mikey shrugged. “She only ever had it the once that I remember, when her Great Uncle Z’gro died. But it’s— it’s, like, seriously too special for everyday eating. Too powerful. It is supposed to thin the barrier to Kro’viz, where the dead ancestors hang out.”

“I—” Leo tried not to let consternation slip into his voice. “I didn’t know there was a funeral feast, Mikey. Xania would’ve had one, too?”

“I mean, yeah. She woulda. But it would’ve been after we left, you know? The funeral feasts aren’t scheduled until the next V’nor.”

Leo had absolutely no clue what a V’nor was.

“And her family would have been there? I mean, not Avada, obviously. But the rest of her family? And her friends? Her brother?”

Mikey nodded, a lump forming in his throat that he tried to swallow. “Definitely. Xania’s brother Tev probably led the ceremony. And I’m sure M’ava and all Xania’s friends from her botany program were there.”

Leo remembered those last days on the far-off lunar colony. He remembered the unceasing itch to get his family off that rock and back to Earth where they belonged. In his mind’s eye, he could see the blackened edges of the blaster hole in Don’s shell, visible through the transparent goop the Triceraton doctors slathered over it. He clearly recalled the line of tears down Mikey’s cheeks that never seemed to fully dry. At the time, Leo felt that if he could just get them away and get them home, this would just be another crazy, trauma-clouded adventure. Just like all the others. 

But the pain of it had followed them. 

Just like all the others.

“I’m sorry, Mikey. We should’ve stayed.” Leo hung his head. “I was in such a hurry to get us away from there, but I should have thought. We could have stayed until V’nor, or whatever, if you needed. I should have known it wasn’t enough to talk to some of her friends over some console in a sterile meeting room. You deserved to meet Tevel in person. You deserved to go through the ceremonies with them.”

Mikey, too, was looking down. His only answer was a long sniff.

Leo lurched forward and grabbed his brother in a tight hug, lifting him off the stool so that they both stood. Mikey leaned into him, burying his head in his brother’s shoulder.

“You’ve been grieving alone. This whole time. We want to help you but don’t always know how.”  Leo could feel the warmth of tears on his shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”

Mikey mumbled something into Leo’s arm.

“What, Mikey?”

Michelangelo drew his head back and took the opportunity to tug his mask down so it hung damply around his neck. “It wasn’t just you. I thought it would be okay. I thought I would be okay, you know? I spent so long in Xania’s memories just missing the shell out of you guys…” Mikey smiled, sad-helpless. “I loved being back to myself. And I was so so so happy to be with all you again. I thought it would just fix everything. And I am happy, Leo. I really, really am. But I’m also really sad.” Mikey’s voice cracked on the last word, the muscles in his face tightening.

“I know. I know.” Leo brought Mikey back into the hug, softer this time.

Mikey rested his chin on top of Leo’s shoulder and breathed deep, only a little shuddery. “Do you think we could have a funeral feast?”

“What?”

“You know, a funeral feast for Xania. But with pomegranate seeds instead of that weird mushroom thing.”

“Pomegranate gorgonzola pizza?” Leo asked knowingly.

“If you insist!” Mikey grinned through the sheen of tears. “The gorgonzola can represent the fungus! And the pomegranates are the gate to the other world.”

Leo laughed softly and levered them both back into their seats. “I’m in! But don’t expect my poor little bonsai to do all the heavy lifting with the pomegranates. We’ll get April to find a couple for us from the store.”

“Deal!” For the first time in a while, Mikey glowed with that old, brilliant enthusiasm for a project underway. “And…maybe we could invite Tevel?”

“Xania’s brother?” That threw Leo for a loop, but he recovered quickly. “I don’t… I don’t see why not. I mean, you asked him here during your intergalactic conference call. We can ask Professor Honeycutt to re-extend the invitation. Just… don’t be too disappointed if he can’t make it.”

“I know, but he wanted to come; I know he did!” Mikey’s exuberance pushed him off the stool, and he started pacing the room, gesturing enthusiastically. “And we can take him up to Northampton, and the two of us can teach you all how to play gzan-kia!”

“If it works out, Mikey, I am happy to learn gzan-kia.” Leo shrugged, mystified but pleased.

“Great! And  we can all wear the Triceraton ancestor death masks for the funeral feast!”

Leo’s broad smile dropped. “Ancestor death masks?”

“Yeah, totally! Each mask represents a particular one of Xania’s Triceraton ancestors.” Mikey misinterpreted Leo’s hesitance. “Oh, don’t worry. There’s a hole in the mouth part so you can still eat through it. I’ll make them out of papier-mache before Tevel gets here. It’s to show how the Trieraton ancestors welcome the spirit of the recently dead into their world. You can be Great Uncle Z’gro!” Mikey beamed at Leo, delighted to be able to bestow such an honor on his brother.

“Uh…” Leo hated to rain on Mikey’s shiny new parade. “Mikey, don’t you think that would be, um, cultural appropriation or something?”

“Oh.” Instant deflation. “Yeah, I guess so.” Mikey’s eyes wandered forlornly back up to the bonsai and turned contemplative. “But…we can still have the pizza, right?”

“Definitely.”

That was the answer Mikey was looking for. He resumed his chatter, everything from the apparently baroque rules of gzan-kia to the tentative hope that Tevel might be able to bring Xania’s pet bat-creature, Guarzik, for a short visit. Mostly, Leo listened attentively, picking a yellow leaf or snipping a random twig from his bonsai as he did.

Eventually, when Mikey’s patter of speech slowed, Leo put down his pruning tools. He shifted to lay an arm over his brother’s shoulders and guide him back into the lair toward the quiet bustle of their family’s evening rituals. But before they passed through the doorway, Leo wanted to say one more thing.

“Mikey, you know you can talk about her, right?”

Mikey didn’t quite meet his eyes, picking at the wrap around his wrist. “Yeah?”

“Yes. It doesn’t make us uncomfortable. And it wouldn’t matter if it did. We love you, and she is part of your life. It’s OK to be sad. And it is also OK if you being sad makes us sad. Because you don’t need to be sad alone. Got it?”

“Got it.” Mikey nodded, breathing deeply and finally looking up. Then, he nudged Leo with his elbow. “Thanks, little brother.”

“Little?!” Leo was aghast.

“You do get that I’m four years older than you, now, dude?”

“What? That— that is not how it works, Mikey.”

“Oh, I very much think it is. And as your elder sibling, I’m also four years wiser than you, so I should know.” Mikey stuck his tongue out at Leo as he moonwalked backward down the hallway.

“Oh, yes, I see it now. Real mature!” Leo laughed, shaking his head at Mikey’s antics before following his brother, carefully pulling the door firmly closed behind them.

Art by Joyfuladorable