Work Text:
Their tattered home, with its walls of damp brickwork and shaky foundations, lacks the usual cry of the youngest infant that morning. It’s why, Splinter supposes, that even in the biting cold the winter brings, he had finally managed to get a full night’s rest. Still, the rest of his new children call him, and he rises out of his tattered bed sheets to see to their requests.
As his feet press against the rough stone, he first wonders why the youngest does not cry for him this morning, unlike the last.
~
It only takes half an hour for what had been a fun day to crumble and leave them all staring at its wreckage.
Unpredictability is not something Donatello believes in, not truly. In a mathematical and scientific standpoint, there is technically a probability that something completely unplanned will occur, but a scientist such as himself can chip away and reduce that chance until it is almost nothing, not even worth a passing thought. He narrows down the paths an event can take, his mind calculating odds within a fraction of a second that another being simply could not begin to do – because Donatello, where he lacks, is gifted with an intelligence and brain like no other. There is no unpredictability because he plans, he calculates, he solves questions that have not been asked yet with a tilt of his head and a slight furrow of the brow.
He chips, chips, chips away until unpredictability is a speck of sand in a vast desert. Unseeable. Unthought of. Unimportant.
But the speck of sand is still there all the same, lurking underneath and waiting to surface with a gust of wind.
“I still can’t believe Ghost Bear gets sweet powers when he’s mutated! Why can’t I turn all transparent, huh?” Mikey is walking beside him as they make their way back to the small campfire they set up before Ghost Bear (now mutated, Donnie remembers to add to his database of villains) came and tried to destroy their snowman. His youngest brother is rubbing his arms, kicking the snow somewhat moodily. “All I get is a big shell that refuses to let me wear sun dresses.”
Donnie chuckles, snuggling into his coat a little more as the wind grows colder. He knows Mikey enough by now that he doesn’t mean it; the youngest loves his shell more than anything, bragging about how it was the prettiest out of all of them and sticking stickers onto it like it was a collage.
“Come on, you know summer dresses aren’t your style. Leo would, however –“
“Damn straight!” Leo calls from in front of them, rotating his foot so he faces the two youngest brothers.
“Please don’t inflate his ego more.” Raph groans. With a huff, he plops himself to the ground where their blankets and flasks lie, his tail curling around himself. April, who had been happily riding on his back, hops down from her perch with Mayhem held in her arms.
“Yeah. I can already see his head growing from here.” The human says. Leo grins.
“My head would still be smaller than Donnie’s forehead, if that’s the case.” His woefully irritating twin jibes. The soft shell feels the best way to retort to the quite frankly untrue insult is by scooping up some snow with his robotic hand and lugging it at Leo’s face.
Of course, that arrogant prick dodges. Still grinning like an idiot.
“Come on, if I ever want to play tic-tac-toe I know who to –“
Satisfaction is a very underrated feeling, Donnie realises, when the second snowball hits Leo square in the beak. The slider accidentally inhaled some of the snow and sneezes in a high pitched squeak that makes April coo.
“There’s no way you sneezed just like that video. There’s no way.” The human is laughing as she sits to pour a flask of hot chocolate. Leo wipes the snow of his nose, mumbling excuses under his breath in embarrassment.
“If he insults my regular sized forehead again I’ll show you the video I have of him when he was eight.” Donnie offers April with a smile.
Leo snaps his attention towards him. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“You know I would.”
Raph suddenly interrupts their staring contest by shoving a flask in both of their hands. It’s pleasantly warm under Donnie’s fingers, still having half the drink left from their break in the snowball fight before.
“Hey Mikey, you coming?” Raph turns his attention behind Don. Ever curious, the purple-clad brother turns his head and is somewhat surprised to find Mikey still standing where he had left him, a dazed expression on his face. He’s blinking in a slow manner, and the claws on his toes are unsheathed as they dig into the snow underneath them in a repetitive, almost instinctual motion.
The behaviour doesn’t correlate at all with Mikey’s usual stims and quirks. The usually fast-paced turtle is almost sluggish as he turns his head over to their group.
“Oh…yeah…spaced out there for a sec.” Mikey hums, stumbling through the snow towards them. The usual grace in his walk is gone, which only makes the furrow in Donnie’s brow increase.
But, glancing around to his other siblings, they don’t seem to pick up on the discrepancies in behaviour. They do not search for anomalies, or even patterns for that matter, in every event. Donnie carefully catalogs, but they flippantly dismiss – the way it has always been.
Michelangelo himself breaks Donnie’s careful system in each movement, in each second he lives. Because Mikey is that grain of sand he has always worked so hard to scrape away, the embodiment of the unpredictability that Donnie declares war with. Mikey is sporadic, an outlier in every data set, an inexplainable output. His youngest brother was born loud and bright, a bold stain against the ordered sequences Donnie calculates. There is no predicting him, and where the soft shell feels he should be annoyed with this fact he only finds acceptance. Perhaps some things should be left as they are.
However, it makes the decision of what to do next about Mikey’s current behaviour a little harder than what it should be – does he draw attention to it, or dismiss it?
~
Splinter dismisses the odd behaviour from the youngest turtle for now, busily scraping together the remains of the outdated cereal in plastic bowls and handing them to his three remaining sons. The turtles are huddled together tightly due to the cold that refuses to ease its grip in the sewers, but perk up considerably at the sight of food. Blue digs in with his hands, abandoning the spoon beside him entirely, whilst Purple pulls out the different shapes and lines them into different sections on the table. Though only three, the intelligence that shines behind his multicoloured eyes is clear to the rat. It makes him smile, just a little, despite the depression that still drags his heart.
He would return back to his room at this point, if it weren’t for Red tugging his tail. The eldest hasn’t touched his cereal, pushing it next to Orange’s bowl.
Orange, who isn’t in Red’s arms like he usually is.
“Where is your brother, Red?” Splinter asks. Red holds his tail harder, but the pain doesn’t register to the rat.
“He sleepy.” Red replies, and Splinter feels his heart stutter. “He won't wake no more.”
~
“You getting tired, little man?” Raph asks as they finish packing up their gear, ready to head back to their homes for the day. Donnie, from where he was leaning against Leo’s shell, twists so he can see the box turtle in question.
“Hmm?” Mikey is sitting on the snow-covered ground with his eyes glazed over in fatigue. Again, his hands are digging into the snow around him, creating a small hole.
Drowsiness is an expected problem that Donnie and his brothers have learned to adapt to in colder weather. Their reptilian genes mean that they quite literally slow down, becoming tired and less responsive the colder it gets. As children, they would actually slip into a state of hibernation during the winter (Donnie remembers, fondly, the turtle piles that he and his brothers would make under their fortress of blankets as the world began to fade away in a blur of colours) but as they had gotten older their resilience had increased. Months sleeping away the winters evolved into them eating less and taking care to wrap up in thick coats if they wanted to go outside in the snow, such as today.
Donnie’s eyes assess Mikey, locking onto the torn sleeves of his jacket and how it still remained damp after their scuffle with Ghost Bear. They had all gotten covered in snow, sure, but with a damaged coat?
“Raph, grab that blanket.” Donnie is good at analysing and identifying problems, but Leo is much quicker at acting on the information they present. Now that it’s obvious what is happening, why Mikey is suddenly so drowsy, his twin snaps into action with an ease that he had always possessed, leading them with a stern voice in the subject where he is at his most confident.
Where Donnie studies science, Leo studies medicine. A knowledge that they are finding themselves in need of far too much these days, in his opinion.
“Mmm?” Mikey hums when Raph drapes an oversized blanket around his shoulders and plucks him off the snow with ease.
“Why didn’t you tell us you were getting cold, huh?” Leo prods Mikey, who only looks up at him in confusion.
“Don’t…feel…cold.” Donnie notes with slight panic how his words slur into each other. It’s progressing fast, too fast for him to gather data, certainly not helped by the cold wind that brings down snowflakes from the sky.
“April! Get back to your apartment and make it as warm as you physically can without killing yourself in the process!” Leo says. April nods, her frightened eyes tearing away from Mikey. A moment later she disappears in a shimmer of blue, Mayhem having teleported her back to her home.
“His temperature is dropping. It has been for a while, it seems.” Donnie reads the vitals he had neglected to check an hour ago, scanning the words as they scroll down the screen. The data soothes him, even if it does not bring good news – data can be manipulated, edited, formulated. This is something he understands, something he can draw a conclusion from.
“His heart rate is slow. So is his pulse.” Donnie reads to his brothers. “He’s definitely heading to brumation if we don’t warm him up soon.”
“Come on, Mikey. Don’t go falling asleep now.” Raph holds Mikey close, as if he can single-handedly push back the wind and snow with his bare hands. But Donnie can’t help but notice that the eldest is also blinking a little heavier than usual. In fact, Leo is also somewhat sluggish, though he only notices because he’s watched how Leo darts between actions all his life.
Okay, so maybe staying out in the cold all day and fighting a giant polar bear wasn’t a good idea. For reptiles, that is.
However, the tiredness Donnie feels buzzing in his brain is easily pushed back. They’re all much safer than Mikey, who is slipping away from them with each second.
“Don’t!” Donnie intercepts Raph, who had been shrugging off his thick coat to place over Mikey.
“But –“
“All of us are in danger if we start giving our coats to each other! And statistically it’s going to be much easier to carry Angelo home than you if you decide to start hibernating too!” The soft shell explains.
“Don’s right.” Leo picks up his sword. “You giving away your only protection from the cold is counter productive, hermano. We need to focus on getting Mikey to April’s.”
Raph looks unhappy but stands all the same. Mikey is tucked in his arms, limbs retracting partially into his shell.
“Don’t let him do that.” Leo mutters, grabbing their blankets. “We might not be able to get him out.”
The slider begins to arch his sword in a circle through the air, but falters. Donnie can see his face twist through a few emotions, looking back from Mikey to the blade in his hand.
“I…I don’t know if I can portal us there reliably.” It is strange, Donnie notes as he stares at his twin, for Leo to be so open with an insecurity. Sure, there’s no denying the blue ninja has them, but they are usually swept away with a sly grin and a broad hand gesture – it is simply how Leo is, striving for a twisted perfection that only Donnie understands, and so he doesn’t question it. Easier to let sleeping dogs lie, if he were to be so cliché in his thoughts. It surprises him when Leo admits a fault, because admitting a lack in confidence for Leo is like plucking away his scales one by one.
Then again, if it weren’t for Mikey’s current condition Donnie is sure this bold display of weakness would not have occurred. Once again, his youngest brother wraps an unpredictability around them all as it orbits around himself.
“Running to April’s will only take us seven minutes and twenty three seconds, based on the wind speed and weather conditions.” Donnie does not draw attention to Leo’s honestly. He slides back to the stable foundations of logic.
“Right. Let’s not waste time.” Raph stands. Mikey barely moves in his hold and his third eyelid transforms his usual red eyes to a white haze. Not a good sign, and they all know it.
No further persuasion is needed for them all to take off running, sticking close to the shadows and scarcely kicking up snow under their feet. Donnie pushes himself harder than ever, not relying on his hover shell to safely fly ahead in the snow storm building, ignoring the burn in his thighs as he pulls a muscle. Sharp pants burst from his parted jaws as they reach the final block, and his breath crystallises in the air in puffs of fog. His feet briefly slip on a patch of black ice, but the soft shell is tugged along with Leo’s hand wrapped around his wrist.
Mikey has closed his eyes at some point in the journey, despite their efforts. He doesn’t move either, limp in Raph’s hold.
Donnie swallows thickly and overtakes Leo.
~
Orange is where Splinter had tucked him last night, now the only turtle swallowed by the lone thin blanket that they have. He is partially tucked into shell with only the lower sections of each limb on display.
“Orange.” Splinter mumbles. He doesn’t know why his voice is dry, or why his hands shake as he reaches to hold the youngest child. “Orange, it is time for you to wake.”
His hideous hands brush over Orange’s green scales, circling to his shell. A movement that would usually trigger the turtle to giggle and awaken is powerless now. Orange does not stir.
“Orange?” Splinter finds himself leaning forward in a swift movement, his overgrown hair untucking from behind his ear and partially blocking his vision as he scoops up the turtle in the blanket. His nail scratches under Orange’s chin. There is no chirp this time as a reaction to the petting. His youngest son is limp in Splinter’s hold.
And silent, too.
Unnaturally so.
~
Raph all but rips the window off its hinges as they scramble inside April’s apartment. A blast of warm air envelops them all and Donnie’s mind is already clearing from its dampened state. It’s awareness, however, curses himself to the tirade of negative emotions that have been lurking in its sedated depths.
“Over here!” April calls, ushering them all into her kitchen. She has pushed away the dining table and in its place is a mound of blankets and heaters, all placed strategically in front of an open oven that wafts more warm air towards it. Raph’s movements are rapid, panicked – but he lowers Mikey with a caring gentleness that contrasts against his aggressive appearance. Donnie watches the eldest staring to build a nest out of the blankets, only pausing to shrug off his coat and envelop the box turtle.
“I’ve texted Dad for heat lamps. Dunno when he’ll see the text, but –“ Leo isn’t looking up as he talks, pulling off his mittens and tossing them backwards, “ – we could use them if this doesn’t work.”
“Good idea.” Donnie murmurs. He copies his brother’s actions, ripping off his winter wear and flipping down his goggles to assess Mikey. What greets him is red screens, flashing warnings that makes bile rise in his throat. A breath shudders from his chest as he reads the data burdened to him.
“Leo…his pulse and heart rate are plummeting.” Donnie forces out. His eyes are widening behind his multicoloured lenses, pupils shrinking as the readings continue.
Raph whimpers and tucks himself close to Mikey. With the vast number of warm blankets around them, the snapper aids in creating a perfect heat pocket that should be helping.
Key word: should. Mikey isn’t getting warmer, he’s getting worse. Heart stuttering, pulse sluggish, until –
“His heart’s stopped.” Donnie whispers. The data blurs in front of his eyes and his limbs lock into place.
“No!” Leo snarls, diving forward and prying Mikey from Raph’s grip, ripping up the blankets as he does so. Donnie stares and stares as Mikey twists like a dead weight in Leo’s hold, not even stirring when the slider checks his pulse and breath over and over.
“No! No, no, no!” Leo folds his hands and presses hard against Mikey’s plastron. It is a brave or desperate attempt as CPR, a technique that is ineffective against their hardened chests and abnormal physiology. Leo knows this.
“Don’t! Wake up!” Leo pants between erratic breaths as if desperation can bring back a heartbeat.
~
“Wake up!” Splinter’s voice cracks because his child is not breathing, stiff and cold in his hands. So small that he still fits in his palms quite easily.
Orange looks like he is only resting, but the winter cold had snatched his precious breath away in the night whilst his own father had been blissfully unaware in his room.
“My son, my son, my son…” Splinter murmurs like a prayer, pressing his lips against the turtle’s forehead.
“Pops?” Red whispers from behind him. Splinter snaps his head around with Orange clutched against his chest, tears pricking at the corners of his yellowed eyes.
“GET OUT!” Grief and terror harmonise in Splinter’s ragged scream. Grief for the life that had been torn away from him so suddenly, and terror for the innocence of his remaining sons being killed just as swiftly if they were to see the cold body he held. “LEAVE!”
Red dashes away with a scared cry and rapid footfalls. Splinter turns his attention back to Orange with a long wail vocalising from the feral depths of his throat, over and over.
~
Someone is wailing a singular flat tone. Donnie realises that it’s himself. April collapses to the floor with a hitched breath.
“No, no, no, no.” Leo’s chest compressions have turned to weak fists pounding on Mikey’s plastron. Raph slowly raises his arm and pulls Leo away and close to his side.
“Raph –“ The slider reaches out for their fallen brother until his arm tremors and falls to his side. Quieter, now: “Raph, please.”
Donnie’s legs are moving, stumbling over to Raph’s side in a sudden need for his oldest brother’s hold. Raph himself is crying in quaking shakes, but his arm around Donnie’s shoulders is stable and grounding. The soft shell looks away from the red letters on his screen and pressed his snout against Raph’s elbow crook. Unlike his brothers, he leaves the image of Mikey’s frozen body behind with eyes squeezed shut.
They failed. They failed.
No data collection prepares him for the fierce burning at the back of his throat. No amount of calculating the odds can predict the way his chest coils and he swears he can feel the guarded emotion in his heart rip itself apart into painful shreds.
“It’s okay…it’s okay…” Raph whispers over and over. His voice is strained but he continues to speak anyway, even when his tears clog his throat and sobs erupt from within. Leo is still trying to move back towards Mikey with half-hearted tugs. Eventually, his hand meets Mikey’s lifeless own, and he winds his fingers around it tight.
“My sons!” It’s at this time that Splinter bursts into the kitchen with his hands laden with heat lamps and blankets. Donnie doesn’t look up, but hearing the wounded sound his father makes is enough to let him know that his eyes too have laid upon their youngest who lies hollow in the centre of the floor.
The brain, when overloaded, will try and filter out inputs by ignoring them entirely and shutting itself off. Donnie somewhat notes that his mind is following this hypothesis when he can’t hear what his family says, or can only feel a trace of his father’s soft hand running across his cheek. It’s hitting him now, the longer the seconds span out without Mikey’s warmth accompanying them. There is nothing but the claws of grief that rake further down his chest with every breath he takes, every breath that has been stolen from his youngest brother. A heartbeat that he no longer cares for thuds louder and louder in his ears, triggering him to press his face harder into Raph’s muscular arm.
“How did this happen?” His father asks quietly. When no one answers, Raph begins to retell the events of the day. The snapper starts from the very beginning, detailing the fun they had been happening only hours ago.
Hours. A lot can change in such a passage of time, Donnie now realises. By now, he had predicted they would all be back home and continuing their Jupiter Jim movie marathon.
“It was no injury he succumbed to?” His dad asks. Donnie only pays attention because his voice is sharp, unexpectedly so, and lined with an emotion he cannot identify.
“Yeah…he just got real cold and…and none of us…”
None of us realised, Donnie finishes in his head with a taut bitterness. Not until it was already going to be too late.
“Then we must hurry! Quick!” Splinter stands as if he has all the youth on his side. Donnie looks up and watches as their father is piling blankets over Mikey’s body again, only this time he is rubbing the orange-clad’s exposed arms and legs.
“Pops…he’s…” Raph begins to try and tell him. Splinter shakes his head viciously.
“Blue! Help me warm up your brother with these heat lamps! Red, Purple – you must help too!”
“He’s dead, Dad!” Leo snaps, uncurling from Raoh’s side. The slider tries to tug a blanket away but Splinter keeps a firm hold on it. “I know, I had to feel his pulse –“
“You must trust me, Leonardo.” Leo stops with a jolt when their father uses his full name. For a moment, the rat’s hands cup each side of the slider’s face and bring it towards his. “We can still save him. He has not left us yet.”
“He…” Raph whispers. Donnie’s voice is still locked in his throat, eyes shifting to Mikey. Their brother’s lax face makes his shiver.
“What do you mean?” Leo breathes. Splinter grabs another towel and forces a heat lamp into his arms.
“This has happened before.” Is all he says. Their father then kneels, tenderly tucking the blankets tight into Mikey’s sides. “I thought I had lost him forever, long ago.”
~
There is nowhere he can lay his son to rest with the dignity he deserves, not in these sewers. A large shoe box is all he can find, but he spends hours lining it with newspapers and colourful scraps of material he thinks Orange would have liked.
He doesn’t tell his remaining sons. He can’t. Instead, he stays locked in his room with the box turtle’s body wrapped in a blanket until the shoe box is complete.
In a cruel twist of fate, the winter that had taken Orange’s life had released its icy grips on the sewer tunnels once and for all. It makes writing the kanji on the box lid – a final message to his son – easier, but no less painful.
“Rest now, my bright Orange.” Splinter holds his baby close with his back hunched over the shoebox. His lips press a final kiss against his small forehead that he holds for a few seconds. “You must find a better life than what I can offer, all on your own…”
The movement barely registers to him. A fist curling, arm flexing as it fights away the drowsiness of sleep. The grieving father, through blurred vision, cannot see the way his son seems to pull himself back to life in his hold in minute movements.
He does, however, hear a heartbeat stutter and blossom with his enhanced ears.
“Orange?” With a frantic hand, Splinter wiped away the tears gathering in his eyes. When his hand pulls away, Orange’s red eyes stare back up at him with a twinkling joy dancing within them. A smile spreads on his beak and his tiny fists reach out to his father.
“My son…” Splinter hardly dares to believe what he sees - doesn’t believe it – until the box turtle’s hands grip his snout with mindless babbled and chirps erupting from his mouth.
Words fail to contain Splinter’s emotions. He only holds Orange tight against his chest and focuses on the heartbeat that drums strong and steady in his grip.
~
Logic. It’s logic and fact that Donnie had neglected – not even thought of researching. When his family finish setting up the heat lamps and building a cocoon of warmth for Mikey, Donnie reads about the brumation habits of box turtles. He reads, and stares.
Box turtles can freeze up to 80% of all bodily functions. They frequently have undetectable pulses and heartbeats during brumation.
Yes, unpredictable is a good word to describe Mikey.
“What’re reading?” Leo asks quietly from over his shoulder. He shifts slightly from his position on Donnie’s back, and this time the soft shell doesn’t complain. It is somewhat grounding to feel the presence of his twin against his exposed shell.
After all, it had been Leo’s idea to initiate the turtle pile as a way to get Mikey’s temperature back to normal levels. That, and a good old fashioned turtle pile has always been a source of comfort from them all for traumatic events, and thinking your youngest brother had frozen to death definitely classes as one.
Raph huffs in his sleep, curling Mikey closer to him. The box turtle would usually take centrepiece at the top of the pile or at least share with Leo, but in order to keep him as warm as possible he was currently pressed against Raph’s plastron. The snapper’s arm was being used as a mattress of sorts, and his tail curled around the youngest’s waist. Donnie has taken position lying between Mikey and Raph on top in a diagonal manner, his plastron face down against Raph’s shoulder and draping down over his tail and Mikey’s shell. His legs were coiled around Raph’s spiked shell and Leo’s own pair of gangly legs from where he lay on top of Donnie like a throw cover. Encasing them all is an army of blankets piled way over their heads and bodies, isolating them from the rest of the world for the time being. Small threads of light occasionally slipped through the material, but it was otherwise completely dark.
Donnie twisted the purple glow of his phone so that Leo could read its words.
“Holy shit.” Leo mutters. “Another way Mikey’s invincible, I guess.”
Leo did make a point – box turtles were certainly hardy, that’s for sure.
“Good.” Donnie switches off his phone, shrouding them in darkness again. “I don’t want to deal with…that again.”
“Yeah. Me neither.” Leo replies quietly, resting his chin on the back of Donnie’s head. In a rare act, Donnie chirps into the silence. His twin predictably chirps back, and then Raph, who wakes from his doze.
“Mmm…we chirpin’?”
“Donnie actually started it this time.”
“Knew he was a soft shell under all that tech.”
“I don’t appreciate that pun.”
Raph opens his eye and smiles softly, letting out a churr as he does so. Donnie and Leo echo it in varying tones.
And then, one more chirp erupts from the pile.
“Mikey?!” Raph shifts and almost knocks Donnie and Leo down completely. “You awake, little man?”
Donnie watches, with Leo’s head close to his, as Mikey pries open his eyes for the first time in days. He looks confused, frowning for a few moments.
“Did I fall asleep at McDonalds again? I told you to not let me have the strawberry shake…” the box turtle mumbles. Raph laughs, this time actually knocking Donnie and Leo to the bottom of the nest as he scoops up Mikey in a tight hug.
“Little brother!” The snapper’s tail circles the twins and pulls them into the embrace. Donnie doesn’t even feel the impulse to complain about the contract, opting to hold Mikey’s shell as tightly as possible instead to stop him from slipping away.
“Wha…” Mikey murmurs. He is boneless against them, always happy to receive a hug and still too tired to stand on his own. “Bros…?”
“Just shut up and let us hug you, okay?!” Leo vocalises for them all. Mikey shrugs with a hum, and nuzzles his face against the slider’s shoulder.
~
Splinter smiles as his tired gaze finds all four of his sons piled on top of each other with a thin blanket draped across them. Orange is in their centre, a soft smile across his beak as the other turtles huddle around him. The image takes his mind away from the tattered shoebox that is shoved at the back of his makeshift room, shrouded in shadows.
“See you in the morning, my sons.” A sentence has never brought as much joy as it does tonight. “And sweet dreams for you all.”