Chapter Text
Donatello peered at his computer screen, utterly mystified, his brow ridges creased in confusion. Where there should be one blue dot, there were two. Or, rather, there was one blue dot just where it should be, while another dot pulsed where it should definitely not.
Normally, Donnie enjoyed a little mystery. He loved an occasional conundrum—something that stretched his understanding and ignited his curiosity. But not tonight. Tonight, he just wanted this to work. He just wanted one understandable, explicable, steady blue dot. He wanted to check this task off his list with a flourish, take a gulp of coffee, and move on with satisfaction to the next project.
He turned accusing eyes to the space by his keyboard where a tiny, glowing tracking device lay. It’d taken him hours altogether–stolen from pockets of time here and there across multiple days—to hook that Utrom battery up to a tracker small enough to fit inside the hole drilled into the top of his shell. Well, the one April had helped him drill over a year ago. His memory of the drill puncturing through the keratin layer and into the protective dermal bone beneath still set his teeth painfully on edge.
But it had been worth it for peace-of-mind alone. Once that first tracker was inserted, April had helped him seal the hole with heat-resistant silicone and painted it carefully to conceal it from his brothers. He’d left the tracking code in April’s capable hands to use if needed. Protected from water, heat, explosions, and compression, the tracker had lasted almost thirteen months, sending out a persistent signal detectable across the Earth’s surface, or up to a half-mile underneath it. Not bad for a prototype.
But not enough.
Now it had failed. There’s only so much a tiny 21st-century Earth battery can do, and this one was kaput. Don needed something more powerful, something longer-lasting, something… permanent.
Luckily, he had just the thing—five of them, in fact! Hidden in a compartment at the back of a workbench drawer, accessible via an invisible panel-button, sat the miniscule Utrom nano-batteries. Each the size and width of a nail’s head, they glowed a soft, enticing blue. Donatello had “permanently borrowed” them from the medical facility where the turtles had been patched up on the Utrom homeworld after obliterating the Shredder’s spaceship.
Donnie felt a little—only a smidge—bad about surreptitiously slipping them out of the Utrom medical devices they’d been powering and into his arm-cast to smuggle them off-world. After all, it was for science! And besides, the turtles had helped capture Ch’rell, the most dangerous war criminal in Utrom history. What were five measly ( remarkable, exquisite, supremely advanced ) batteries compared to that?
Now, after all that painstaking work, one of those precious, irreplaceable batteries was connected to this apparently flawed, misfiring dud of a tracker! Donnie held the thing in his hands, resisting the sudden Raphael-like urge to crush the thing in his fist and be done with it.
But he needed this. He needed it to work. When installed back into his shell, this single Utrom battery would ensure Donnie never had to change out the tracker again. It would last decades—centuries, perhaps—without a recharge.
So, if the unthinkable happened and he did disappear, there wouldn’t be an arbitrary limit on the time his family and allies had to find him.
Donnie felt the familiar wave of anxiety flood through him, bumping up his heart rate so he could hear it thump in his ears at the thought of that alternate future into which Ultimate Drako had tossed him—the one in which he’d been missing. And his family, his whole future, had been crushed.
He pushed a deep breath against the tightness in his chest and took a minute to refocus his mind. Closing his eyes, he concentrated on the sounds of his lab, cataloging them slowly. He knew every click, whir, and hum. He was more fully at home here than anywhere else on Earth. Breathing more easily, feeling soothed, he ran his hands over the sanded-and-polished pale pine of his workbench.
He was grateful to have tonight to work on this, but he knew his time wouldn’t last forever.
Patrol had been quiet that night. The city had flowed and fluctuated below them. It was like how he imagined a coral reef must be—all life and energy and movement—and he and his brothers floated like snorkelers above it, watching but not participating. Sometimes, that felt isolating. But tonight, it had been sort of nice, their easy banter and gruff affection smoothing their way through the rippling night.
Afterward, Raph took off to visit Mrs. Morrison while Leo and Mikey stayed out to deliver some food and supplies to the Professor in the shantytown by the river. Don would usually accompany them, but tonight he begged off, vaguely citing a project he was almost done with. Now, the only other family member with Don in the lair was Master Splinter. Soft sounds of the television echoed through the passages of the old Reservoir Station.
It allowed him the privacy, the secrecy , he’d wanted. It wasn’t that he hadn’t told his brothers about the bleak alternate future that he’d been hurled into. He had. Eventually. But he certainly didn’t want them dwelling on it. And if they knew about this, about the extent to which Donatello was continuing to prepare for his own disappearance, well… That would be a hard conversation. One that Donnie wasn’t eager to repeat, not after how they’d reacted last time with the subdermal heart monitor discussion.
Eventually, if this went well, once he was sure everything was working with no unexpected bugs, Don could talk to his brothers about expanding the tracker project to them. He grimaced at the thought of Raph’s reaction. But when it came time, he’d have all the arguments lined up and ready to roll out.
Unexpected bugs…
The city map enlarged on the computer screen remained open. One dot, the correct dot, lay right where it should be on the edge of Central Park. That meant the tracker in Donatello’s hand was emitting the correct signal, marking the correct coordinates.
But the other dot, the wrong one, indicated an entirely different location on the east side of Manhattan Island in the Kips Bay neighborhood.
Don rubbed the back of his neck. He refreshed the page. He shut down and reopened the encrypted software. He finally restarted the entire computer. Yet there was no getting rid of that persistent, unwelcome signal.
“Dammit,” he cursed softly and rolled the tracker in his fingers.
His night was not over.
The next step was to match the location of the aggravating extra dot to a building or business. It was the work of a moment to find just that—a seven-story apartment building with two businesses occupying its ground floor—a Greek restaurant on one side and a curiosities shop on the other. Antiques & Oddities , it was called. The name inspired a quick shiver of trepidation. Yeah, this was an oddity, actually. He certainly knew where his search would start.
Sighing, he opened the secret compartment within his workbench and stowed the tracker away. Until he figured out what was going on, he wasn’t going to rely on flawed tech.
In a fluid motion, he sheathed his bo and latched his shell cell onto his belt. The device held the tracking program, so it should pinpoint whatever was emitting this second signal easily.
On the way out, he grabbed a long trench coat and a low hat. For a foray like this, a disguise could prove useful.
One nice thing about being the only turtle in the lair was he didn’t have to come up with a lot of reasons for going out. With a quick call to his father letting him know he was checking on a “tech thing” and would be back soon, he escaped into the night, headed for Kips Bay.
The security system at Antiques & Oddities was no joke, but it couldn’t withstand the determination of a genius mutant turtle for long. With the door finally unlocked, cameras covered, and alarms silenced, Donnie slipped inside.
The smell that hit him—age-old paper, furniture polish, wool rugs—reminded him of April’s shop, Second Time Around , so much that he found himself instantly relaxing. He had to mentally shake himself to remain on his guard.
He flicked on a red-light headlamp and performed a quick survey of the store’s layout—two spacious rooms, both stuffed with the bric-a-brac of decades. Chenille sofas and sewing tables supported piles of cushions and Tiffany lamps. Turn-of-the-century lighting fixtures hung from the ceiling as pyramids of dolls, their original owners long dead, gazed at him through dusty, marble eyes.
Donnie relied on his ninja skills to move through the maze of fragile, time-worn objects, staring at his shell cell as the tracking program homed in on the signal. It lay east of him, in the back room.
Moving stealthily, Donnie rounded a massive carved oak chest to find that the back wall of the shop was covered from top to bottom in dead animals.
A menagerie of taxidermied forms from every continent posed in a wide variety of leaps, snarls, and twists. An emperor penguin stood on one side while a platypus crouched on the other. The wall displayed trophy heads of ibex, moose, warthogs, and a dozen more.
And, just to the right and near the bottom hung his own shell.
He almost missed it in the chaos of horns, fur, feathers, and tusks. But once he saw it, his eyes were locked. His heart missed a step before picking up, faster than before.
It was his . He knew it.
Same exact proportions.
There was the nick Leo had accidentally made while sparring when they were seven. Leo had cried at the time.
There was the healed-over scar where the Shredder had once cracked Don’s shell against a cement piling.
And the whorls were worn smooth where the strap held his bo.
His shell.
Don stepped forward, almost nervously, as if approaching something living, something unpredictable. His breathing stilled as he reached out to feel the rounded, barely perceptible divot where, beneath chipped paint, hardened silicone covered a hole. And that hole, he knew, contained a tracker.
Time slowed. Eventually, Donnie remembered to breathe. His hand stayed on the shell, resting with his palm on an upper scute and his fingers over the shell’s curved lip. It was cool to the touch.
He risked switching his headlamp from red to white. This was something he needed to see fully and without reserve.
In the fullness of the headlamp’s glow, concentric patterns of dark and light emerged, turning each scute into its own kind of topographic map. He knew his brothers’ scutes intimately, but he’d never seen his own quite like this.
How could this be? How could this be here?
In a daze, Donnie unconsciously reached over his shoulder to the shell on his back as if to make sure that, yes, it was still there, still attached.
With his left hand, he could feel the nick that Leo had chipped out of it so long ago while with his right hand, he could touch the same on his own back.
There were discernible differences, however. This other shell had lost some of the original rich color— from age ? Don wondered. Also, some rather shiny substance coated its surface—probably a lacquer which had kept the keratin scutes from falling off the bone plating beneath.
With relief, Don felt his own intense curiosity rising to replace the original horror. He gently lifted the shell off the pegs where it hung on the wall. Its weight was substantial, but an easy lift for Don nonetheless. To inspect its underside, he maneuvered it to rest gently on the floor.
The plastron was absent. A few strange and clearly unnatural marks lay at the top of the inner shell. But that wasn’t what caught Donnie’s attention.
He was intellectually prepared for what he saw. He’d seen plenty of photographs and diagrams of turtle shell interiors in his efforts to understand their physiology.
And yet, to see one’s own ridge of vertebrae, the bony diamonds of the spinal column fused to the shell with arcs of rib bone radiating out… It took his breath away. Softly, a little shakily, he ran his fingers down the path of spine to their base, noticing absently how the dull ivory of bone gave way to an almost mother-of-pearl sheen between the dorsal ribs.
It was really sort of beautiful.
What would the guys think?
The thought brought him back to himself.
Shell . He snorted a half-laugh. What was he going to do now?
He needed to get this back to the lair. He could think of about a dozen tests he’d like to run starting immediately. And he felt a very firm possessiveness over the shell already. He could take it now. It was his after all. Could it be stealing if you were taking something that was part of yourself?
However, to take it now would mean losing whatever information the owner of the shop had about it.
It wasn’t easy for Don to master his tumultuous emotions as he replaced it gently back on its wooden pegs. His manipulation of the shell had disturbed a thin film of dust, but otherwise it looked just as it had when he’d first entered.
He let himself out of the shop, carefully re-establishing the security network and leaving everything precisely as he’d found it. As he melted back into the city night, he reached for his shell cell. Donnie’s steps already turned in the direction of the apartment April and Casey shared.
“April? I’m sorry; I know it’s late to call. Can I come over? I have a favor to ask… No, this is something I’d like to talk over with you face-to-face.”