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It’s weird to wake up and be confused even though he knows – at the same time – exactly where he is. It doesn’t make it any less confusing. It should be, but it’s not. By now, he knows he should expect the cold, silver ground, the seemingly pink sky, and the non-stop screeching that accompanies the Kraang in their Hell of a home.
No wonder they’re invading earth, Mikey thinks. He hates being stuck here too.
The ground beneath him shudders and he barely throws himself to the side in time to avoid being stepped on by Rocktopus. His chest aches, residual pain from the poorly healed crack in his shell, and his legs shake with the effort of pushing forward – always forward.
He’s running on nothing but grappling worm juice and spite.
The ground continues shaking and he leaps away from the newly unsafe island to a smaller one. Scattered across it are the crystalline trees and hopefully nothing else. It appears to be otherwise deserted, so he pauses in the shadow created at the base on a tree. His chest still sends stabbing pain through his body, even as he wills his breathing to slow.
The pain refuses to be soothed. It just builds in waves.
Fatigue takes hold as soon as he’s gotten his heart to calm. Hunger comes with it, overly familiar and bone deep. The hunger is easier to ignore. The hollowness doesn’t ever truly disappear, so it’s easier to not pay it any mind.
He forces himself to be aware. To be awake. His body doesn’t want to listen, sending out signals to stop, rest, sleep. He hasn’t been able to listen to them for a while now – for however long he’s been stuck here.
A month? A year? Two?
And his brothers –
These thoughts aren’t productive, he tells himself. He shoves the thoughts away. He focuses on the creature – running through the island and other impossible geography of Dimension X. They don’t normally do anything unless disturbed. And there’s only one other thing besides him that lives here.
Kraang.
Just like that, fatigue and hunger become secondary. Any need for rest evaporates as fresh and unadulterated fear floods through him.
He has to move.
He’s not prepared. He scales the tree and harvest crystals until he’s afraid he’s lingered for too long.
Luckily it’s not too hard to track Rocktopus, its giant feet leave cracked imprints on the islands it’s trampled on. He moves as fast as possible, keeping himself small and compact – a bullet shooting across islands. He’s doubly fortunate that although Rocktopus is big, it’s not particularly fast.
Just swoop by to see how many Kraang are searching the quadrant. Then get the fuck away from here.
Easy.
His chest aches.
Rocktopus is chasing something, running as fast as it can, although it’s too clumsy to have any serious speed. He squints, looking for the telltale pink as he perches on a neighboring island - higher than the other one.
There’s no extra pink. He can’t even spot any stray rays from a blaster.
Then –
Green - flashing across the island and jumping out from under the foot of the Rocktopus and -
He can barely trace the movement, but tracks it to an island where the green is matched. Three green figures. His heart rams in his chest, sending blood rushing in his ears.
The Rocktopus pivots as the figures - could they be? Is it possible? - run from island to island. He’s stuck, watching them - they have to be, don’t they? - and his mind is blank and spinning all at once. If there was food in his stomach, he would have lost it already.
Then -
They’re not fast enough, somehow. The Rocktopus is more used to the terrain, eats up the space between them like it’s nothing. In no time at all, it’s on top of them.
He shakes himself out of the shock. The air of Dimension X is still sweet, but he can almost smell earth - just the hope of earth floods his senses. He’s fast - faster than Rochtopus, faster than the Kraang. With one push, he’s catapulting himself forward, wild and focused.
The monster raises it’s foot, bearing down on -
On -
His brothers .
He doesn’t let the building hope slow him down, doesn’t let himself trip or stumble.
He uses a grappling worm to pull one of them out of the way, not pausing before fully tackling another one of his brothers to safety. Then it’s just Leo - bracing himself, defenseless - and he springs back into the air.
Splinter always said he moved best when he wasn’t thinking at all. Now the thoughts are flushed out of the way - the questions, the accusations, the disbelief - in favor of grabbing at his brother’s shell, closing his other hand around his arm and half-pulling, half-tackling his brother out of the way.
The Rocktopus goans, pivoting towards him.
As if it could scare him.
As if he had lived in this hellscape for shell knows how long to let his brothers insta-die.
He stands his ground and yells harshly, palming a few boom rocks to hurl against the rough face of the creature. The Rocktopus - like nearly everything else here - responds to sound. It was just a matter of finding out how to communicate “get the fuck away” through wordless screams.
It whines, but he can’t show any kindness here. He leaps up to kick the soft bulb on its head.
It falls into the abyss of islands below.
He turns back and for a single moment, can’t do anything but stare. All three of his brothers. Alive and well - almost glowing against the bleak pinks and silvers he’s grown used to. They’re talking, but none of the words process through the blood rushing in his ears and the circling thought that his brothers are here .
A giddy, hysterical laugh erupts out of him before he can stop it and - though he’s spent so long thinking, dreaming, imagining this moment - the first thing he says is, “What took you so long? I’ve been here for months.”
Despite his laugh, despite everything, he sounds… He sounds calm. Calmer than he feels. Calmer than he should sound, but suddenly the need to appear self-assured arises. He remembers that he was the one who was too quick to jump into the portal. He was the one who fucked things up.
Old insecurity crosses his arms, makes him talk as though his stomach isn’t empty, his bones don’t ache.
Instead of looking contrite or exasperated or sad or any of the other countless emotions he’s imagined seeing in their faces, they look confused. Maybe a bit concerned.
“Months?” Leo asks and he shuts down. The need to remove any concern bursts through and is a directing force when not one bit of him knows how to feel, how to react.
“Or maybe a few hours. I don’t have a watch.” And maybe - maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe - he’s angry. It’s hard to tell when everything now feels like it’s wrapped and tucked away. Maybe the hardness in his voice is anger. Maybe it’s a joke.
Mikey can’t tell - he can’t -
Raph jars him out of the downward spiral he’d nosedived into, “We only entered the portal like fifteen seconds after you!”
His brothers look just like he remembers them - warm and vivid. Raph’s face is every bit as sharp and determined, his body tense for a fight. And Leo stands beside him, he’s so earnest. Donnie, of course, is working a million times faster than them. Solving problems they haven’t found yet.
He says something about a time differential - it’s the only phrase that seeps through and his mind short circuits.
They look exactly the same. Not they’ve-aged-but-it’s-still-them, but exactly like his memories. Like no time has passed.
Like nothing ever happened.
His chest aches. A phantom pain he can’t stop feeling. A break that never heals.
His hunger, his fatigue, his scars have happened in time that hasn’t happened yet for his brothers. The rubber band of time stretched out and out and out for him, but it’s -
Months in Dimension X are seconds on Earth.
Nausea twists his empty stomach.
Raph places a hand on his shoulder. It’s all he can do to stay perfectly still. The Raph from months ago. He forces focus.
“You alright, little brother?” he whispers, hushed, while Leo is interrogating Donnie about this time differential. Raph’s bandana is a sharp red, it burns against everything else.
He swallows. The Kraang come to mind involuntarily, impressions of a place he’s done his best not to think about scratches at his mind. Unbidden, he imagines all four of them, trapped, tortured, starved. Protectiveness and fear war, but the thought of all of them chained and trapped is so revolting, the fear melts away to a second skin. Not a barrier.
There is no way in hell that he’s letting the Kraang have his brothers.
“I’m fine,” he says, and then remembers that his brothers don’t know anything about what’s happened. He’s struck violently with the thought that he doesn’t want them to know. “It’s just weird.”
Raph snorts, his concern fading, “I know - Dimension X is off. The sooner we leave the better.”
“We need to leave yesterday,” Mikey agrees, “Where’s your portal?”
Because they have to have one and if they’re all on the same page that getting out of Dimension X is smart, then they should leave now.
“It closed,” Raph begins.
Donnie cuts in, “We can’t just leave - if we leave, we’ll have no way of stopping the invasion.”
He barely stops himself from asking what invasion before he remembers. The vast looming threat of invasion that had sat thick in the air for months while they waited to figure out when and how the invasion would happen. It slipped his mind. How could he have forgotten that, even for a second?
His brothers have continued to talk without him and he wishes that he felt some stronger emotion at being left out, but the truth is that he’s happy to have space to create his own plan and collect his own thoughts. He’d sooner exterminate every Kraang he comes across than allow their gross tentacles on his brothers.
His brothers tell him they’ve decided to head out in the complete opposite direction of where they actually need to go and he feels a bit bad about stealing Leo’s position for the time being. He leads them to a massive Kraang base - not the prison.
He steers clear of that sector. If his brothers notice the arching route he takes, they don’t say anything. It’s probably more due to the fact they look like the drunk twenty-somethings they see staggering around late at night in the city. They’re slow .
From what he could tell based on the limited intel he’d been able to gather, the Kraang have some very important technology in this base. He’s blitzed it before on his own for supplies and it’s well fortified with a very strict security system, but it’s also key to a lot of Kraang manufacturing.
He’s going over these facts in his head when they reach the outskirts of the base’s security. Before they go any farther, he has to make sure they’re all clear on the plan and he has to stock up on his supplies. Besides, he finds that a break before jumping into action is increasingly beneficial. His chest rarely stops hurting enough to not be a burden and it’s helpful to gather as much energy as possible before diving in head first.
It’s clear that Leo and Raph don’t share his thoughts. They goad each other into petty fights while he takes his time gathering the rocks and worms - the weapons of champions. Donnie, meanwhile, keeps close by his side, talking quietly the whole time, mostly with words he barely recognizes. As he pauses, stretching out his chest until the pain eases into a low, rolling wave, he asks a question that is… probably stupid, in retrospect, but it sets Donnie off on a rant about X again, so he takes it as a win.
Something about the ecological improbabilities, he thinks. Whatever that means.
All he knows is that if you make a certain sound, the tree gives you mini-bombs. He won’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
Fighting the Kraang in X is the most terrified he’s ever been. It’s not an overstatement or him being dramatic or anything. Leo gets flung aside by the Kraang’s big, bad, molten security and he’s hardly able to breathe.
The Kraang surround them in the center of the base, home to hundreds of portals and large armory doors that go places he’s repressing. His body aches and screams, always one bad hit away from crippling, while he whips around trying to defend his brothers from every threat.
Leatherhead, sweet, darling, loyal Leatherhead, is an asset and friend so comforting he almost chokes on the sheer relief.
The real fight is blur, only notable due to his heart almost jumping out of his throat when the Kraang bring out fucking tanks and the last ditch effort to destroy the Kraang base and make his brother happy.
His chest screams, his vision blurs, but his hand is steady and the crystal lands in his hand just as he re-enters his gritty, smog-ridden home. Donnie pulls him up onto the roof and he sprawls out, letting his body tingle with adrenaline as he looks up at the sky.
He’s home.
The sky is tinged gray, the street below them is jammed up with cars and cyclists and pedestrians, everything smells faintly rotten, like trash or pollution, the sun is nothing but a blurry, yellow smear in the unending greyscape of the sky. The air tastes like ash and oil and doesn’t sting on the way down. He feels heavy and weighted, forced back into the earth’s gravity.
He’s almost sick with it. He is when his brothers order pizza and he can’t help but gorge himself until his stomach is fit to burst. It bites him hard in the ass, but the pizza still tastes better coming back up than the worms ever did going down.
The whole time he’s stuck with the bone deep knowledge that he doesn’t want them to know. If they haven’t noticed, then they can’t fault him for his weakness, his loss of control, the time he spent locked in a silver room with nothing but torture and flavorless mush to break up the days. Shell knows that Splinter would give him that look - the one that seems to be reserved just for him, like something about him is just irreparably odd.
They seem to believe his lie about the time, which makes him feel… He doesn’t know. The feeling sits in the center of his chest, right behind the pain of his shell, but he can’t name it.
The next day, he wakes early without meaning to. Sleep had been restless and surreal, so the early movement was welcomed. The living room is eerie without his brothers, without noise. It feels too much like a dream he could wake up from, so he wonders.
He finds Donnie working in his lab, a blowtorch screeching in the early hours of their day. He’s not too stuck up to admit he missed his brother, even this evil-scientist, manic version of him. Besides, his chest is probably something a medical professional, or the closest thing they have to it, should look at.
“Have you slept?” he asks, taking in the lab as he does. Even though he knows it was only seconds to them, a large part of him is still shocked by the utter same-ness. The same gadget they’d been working on lays on the corner of his workbench, half finished. Beakers filled with miscellaneous substances sit unobserved, just like the last time he was here. The only difference is the Kraang communication orb sat on the opposite shelf, instead of front and center on the table, and the heap of scrap metal Donnie’s tearing into.
Donnie ignores him. The music in his headphones blares out. He can hear the steady, techno beats from three feet away. “Dee? You’re not working yourself to the bone already, are you?”
“Mikey? I’m busy,” he mutters.
Ouch. Whatever. He’s got the little brother skills somewhere inside of him, they’re just a bit rusty. “Whatcha working on?” he asks. Carefully, he navigates around his brother’s welder set up and hops up on a stool across from him. There, now they’re face to face.
“Mmhm,” he hums. “Can this wait?”
Ugh, he’d forgotten that his brother could have total blinders on. “Not really, man.” When that still doesn’t get a response, he leans forward, ignoring the tightness across his plastron. “How different is time in Dimension X from time here?” Maybe that will get his attention.
Donnie looks up and - oh shit, wrong thing to say apparently - “I don’t know! The only thing I know is that the Kraang are coming - but I don’t know when or how or anything else!”
“Woah, Dee.” He puts the questions about his shell on the mental back burner. It can wait. “That sounds like a lot of pressure, man.”
At last, Donnie puts down the tools he’d been using and sighs. His shoulders drop, like he’s being held down by a great, unwieldy weight. “I don’t have time to answer your questions about Dimension X. I probably don’t even have time to make anything that stands a chance of actually beating the Kraang.”
“We’re going to beat the Kraang,” Mikey argues. “I’m going to exterminate those motherfuckers or die trying.”
Donnie blinks. “That’s… a strong emotional response.”
Uhhhhh… Mikey forgot that he didn’t used to have that level of animosity toward the Kraang. He used to - what did he used to do? “Just feeling passionate, I suppose. And they’re trying to steal our home - I’ve seen where they live and I am not down for them bringing any of that here.”
“Right…”
“Look,” Mikey says, waving his hands, “We’re off topic. Are you okay?"
Donnie places his head in his hands, breathing deep. “I don’t have time to worry about if I’m fine or not. The Kraang are coming - sooner than we know or can plan for. They have to be the number one priority.”
“You still need to sleep. To eat.”
It’s too late. Donnie exhales and lifts his head, returning to whatever project he’d been working on before. He lifts one piece of metal, turning it so that two long straight edges are aligned and picks up his welding mask to cover his face.
Mikey picks himself up off the stool, landing hard on the concrete floor and stumbling with the unexpected harshness. Earth gravity.
He makes breakfast. The rest of his family wakes when he’s already made several servings of eggs and vegetable fried rice.
It seems that things will just… return to normal - whatever normal is. He’s been successful. The reason behind his scar is something none of his brothers even begin to question. It’s easier, so, so much easier, to just pack everything away.
Splinter calls them in for training. They go through their katas and their routine exercises. It takes Mikey only a bit longer than usual to fall into step behind his brothers. It’s a skill he hasn’t practiced in a while.
After their routine, Splinter sets them up to spar. Raph and Donnie get paired together, leaving him and Leo to duel after.
Donnie is pretty much dead on his feet, exhaustion clear in his sloppy footwork and the visible bags under his eyes. Raph takes him down in a few seconds and turns to gloat his easy victory.
“Donatello,” Splinter states, his voice soft and serious, “You must not burn out all of your oil before a fight or you will be left in darkness.”
Donnie rolls into a seated position from where he’d been laying on the floor. “Hai, Sensei.”
Sprinter’s ears twitch with displeasure, but he says nothing else.
When he and Leo circle each other, he can’t help but see the Rocktopus bearing down, the helplessness in his brother’s eyes, the immense way they were all out of their depth. He remembers that he’s alive and on earth . His brothers are safe as they can be.
The overwhelming swell of feeling slows his reaction time and Leo’s katanas graze the back of his shell as he rolls away. He bounces out of the way, but Earth’s gravity messes with him again and he takes extra steps. The extra time means that his blocks are delayed and his nunchaku get caught up on the steel blades. Leo has no such delays.
With one well-timed yank, his weapons are pulled out of his hands, leaving him bereft. Leo presses his advantage, eating up the space between them with wide arching slices of his swords. He only just avoids them. He is fast - very fast. Always has been and always will be.
He slides under a kick aimed at his plastron and grabs his kusarigama from where it landed and jumps over Splinter, using Leo’s hesitance to give him time as he scales the vast tree in the dojo, creeping up into the shadows of the leaves.
“What - Mikey! Get down!” Leo shouts. He’s always shown the most reverence toward the tree, but Mikey’s never seen the point in leaving it untouched. He watches Leo center himself, backing away from the space under the branches. He waits, staying still long enough for Leo to consider that he might actually have moved away from the tree. Leo’s stance widens, his swords at the ready, but he just has to wait.
Splinter hasn’t called the match, meaning he probably knows exactly where Mikey is and is waiting to see how this plays out.
Wait.
Has he always been this patient? It feels like it. Patience was a skill he had to rely on in Dimension X. Good things come to those who wait. Like doors open for just a second too long and power crystals left unprotected.
Like Leo relaxing just enough, lowering his swords, letting his frustration hinder his form and focus.
Now.
He lunges, clearing Splinter easily, and correctly accounts for earthen gravity as he tackles Leo. They land roughly on the dojo mats, rolling and tumbling as they fight for control of the tackle.
Mikey manages to land on top, using a tight and strong hold to subdue his brother’s struggles, but Leo thrashes and counters with all his might, finally managing to break the hold long enough to bring them chest to chest. Leo’s hand strikes the center of his chest without warning and he feels something shift .
He howls, rolling off and heaving in big, gasping breaths. His limbs feel weak and shaky as pain pulses out from his plastron.
Splinter calls the match. “Very… creative use of your environment, Michelangelo. Leonardo, you allowed your guard to drop and your brother almost bested you. Do not allow frustration to color your judgement.”
“Hai, Sensei.”
“And, Michelangelo, do not give up on the hold so easily. A strike to the chest is jarring, but seasoned ninja are able to fight through it.”
He gives a thumbs up from where he still crouches protectively around his chest. “H-hai, Sensei.” The crack in his plastron hurts like a stab wound.
He waits for his brothers to become suspicious, to ask what is keeping him on the ground for so long, but they don’t.
After training, Mikey goes to sit on the couch. It’s soft and comfortable. He relishes the opportunity to sit and relax. Raph sits across from him, reading a comic. This is good, normal behavior. Raph is shit at covering up his feelings, especially when he’s worried. If he noticed anything amiss, Mikey would know.
“You just gonna stare at me?” Raph asks, looking over the top of his comic book.
Mikey grins, “Just debating if I should try and beat your high score or not.”
“Oh, you can try. But you won’t win.”
Raph gets up, moving across the floor with deliberate steps. He palms Mikey’s head and shakes it. “It requires some strategy. You wouldn’t know where to start, shell for brains.”
“Ha! And you do?”
“I am the master,” he spread his hands out wide, palms facing up, “of strategy.”
Mikey snorts, absently thumbing at the uneven line where his plastron healed.
“You need ice, man? Did Leo really knock you that hard?”
His hand freezes. “No, I’m - It’s just a bit sore.”
“Well, don’t go climbing any more trees while it’s still sore.”
Mikey smiles. Raph goes back to his comic and he lets out a sigh of relief. He doesn’t like lying to his family. He doesn’t like the guilt that comes with it, or the worry, or the creeping sense that it’s all going to come crashing down, but when he thinks about Dimension X, his mind just… whites out, a bit. It feels like someone has packed everything to do with that hell hole in a box with the words “DO NOT TOUCH” carved onto the surface.
He doesn’t want to think about it. He wants to pet Ice Cream Kitty and check up on Donnie when he pulls all-nighters. He wants to spar with Leo and play video games with Raph. He wants to spray paint the walls of the abandoned subway around them, filling the dank, grey spaces with splashes of color. He wants to be as far away as possible from the him that was ready to die if it meant not having to spend another day locked away, answering the same useless questions, strapped to the same horrific table. He wants to make sure the Earth never falls into the hands of the Kraang and that means not letting his own baggage slow things down.
He twists, moving to walk back toward his room for his spray paint. His chest complains, but it’s never stopped him before. The blank walls of the nearby tunnel are calling to him and he has some extra energy to burn.
Besides, he wants to bury Dimension X so deep in his mind that nothing could pry it out of him. To begin, he needs a distraction.