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When Michelangelo jumps through the portal into Dimension X, there are three things he expects to happen. The first is that he expects his big brothers to follow through the portal a few seconds after him.
It’s a natural reaction, of course. Where one of them goes the others follow. Even if his brothers were against him coming, Mikey jumped through the portal, and that’s it. No question. They’ll be mad at him, but he’s here, and he’s gonna get Leatherhead if it’s the last thing he does. Trying to make him stay out of getting one of his best friends back was one of their worst moves yet, and as soon as Mikey finishes falling through random pink spirals into another dimension, he’s gonna have to tell them how stupid that was.
Like Mikey would stay behind.
The air rushes past him, the pink coming to an abrupt end, and then he’s dropping to the ground, just barely managing to roll out of a massive faceplant.
Mikey stumbles when he stands, and is immediately met with a whirlwind of pink, purple, and weird . Mikey has always been weird, kinda defines the term, but even this… is well. Odd. Odder than himself, odder than most of the things he and his bros have seen, and odder than anything in his dimension could ever be.
Around him are islands. Ones that float, like, in midair.
The one he’s floating on bobs up and down slightly– surrounded by bright crystals trees and some odd looking bugs that Mikey’s pretty tempted to touch if it weren’t for the fact that his bros will be here soon and will definitely yell at him for it.
Whatever texture the ground is beneath him scratches at his feet… becoming an increasingly uncomfortable sensation that Mikey hopes to get rid of soon. The air feels prickly. Those weird breathy things that Donnie made help a lot, but Mikey can still feel it, deep in his bones.
Colors here even feel different, making his eyes work harder and faster; everything is in contrast one moment and then the next it’s all blended together, and it makes him swallow, makes him close his and hug himself close.
It’s almost too much.
Mikey hates it here. He wants to get LH, and he wants to leave, he wants to go home, he wants his brothers – he glances up at the portal, and it continues to shine faintly, pink and swirly and triangle-shaped, but it doesn’t move, doesn’t sway, and doesn’t shoot out any older brothers.
He sits there, and he waits. He waits for what feels like forever and even longer after that (or a few minutes, but who really knows) when suddenly the portal sparks. Mikey stands up. Mikey watches it spark some more. Mikey watches it spark, and then it collapses.
Oh.
His– his big brothers didn’t come. They aren’t here, and the portal is gone. His first thought is oh gods, they left me here . Mikey is the family screwup, and maybe this time it was just too much. They saw it for what it was, a chance to get rid of him, trap him in here.
But that’s dumb. Where one goes, the others follow. Even when his bros were mad with him, were angry, they’d never leave him behind in some freaking dimension where their worst enemy lives.
Which is when the more logical thought hits him: they’re hurt, something happened, or they just can’t get to me right now . All of which are still bad. Right now he can only hope that they’re home, they’re safe, and when they can they’ll come for Mikey.
He really would appreciate it if that was soon. He was gonna make pizza gyoza for dinner. Can’t do that in an alien dimension. Probably.
Still majorly sucks. But if he can find LH, maybe he can find a portal too. The sooner, the better.
Mikey runs.
The second thing he’s expecting is that he lands near where Leatherhead is being kept, or at the least pretty damn close. That also happens to be a lie.
There had been a base – one that he was able to spot fairly quickly – floating on its own little island, surrounded by more of those sparkly trees and glowing the typical Kraang pink. It’s kinda fun to jump from island to island, floaty metal pieces to big balls of… something in the air, but that little place, which seems so close actually turns out to be pretty far.
One time he’d heard that mountains are so huge that you can see them from really far away and think they were actually close. Mikey was sure about that before, but man he was pretty certain that was true now.
Mikey’s internal clock is not all that great, but even he knows it’s been a few hours, and he feels like he’s getting nowhere. “Man, I’d be lookin’ for a new home base if I had to live here too.” He groans, stopping to catch his breath.
Believe it or not, it’s actually the first thing he’s said since he landed here, and the words echo weirdly in the air. Just like everything else.
It still makes him feel better. Talking always makes him feel better.
Unfortunately he doesn’t make it much farther before having to stop. Mikey is tired, feels like he’s been going all day.
Maybe I have. Who knows.
Taking a nap is not really something he wants to be doing, but if he needs energy, and that seems to be um… what’s that word Dee is always saying… depleted. Right. His energy was depleted right now.
A group of those crystal trees sits on the other side of the island, and Mikey makes his way over, laying down beneath their odd shapes and points, and closes his eyes.
He doesn’t sleep for long, Mikey knows, but he sleeps. A little. When he wakes the sky looks just the same as when he closed his eyes – just pink pink pink – so he can’t really tell if no time has passed or if like… a bunch of hours have passed.
Don would probably know.
Mikey frowns. He misses his brothers. They’d probably know how long it’d been if they were here. He wants them to be here. They’re better… they better be okay, and coming soon. Mikey doesn’t know how much longer he can be alone. Michelangelo hates being alone.
Getting back up, he brushes Dimension X dirt off of him, stretching out his muscles. He wouldn’t call himself exactly well-rested, but he was as good to go as he’d ever be, and he needed to get to his friend and then get home.
It takes him another day to get to the Kraang base. There doesn’t really seem to be day or night here (or at least not one he’s seen) so Mikey can only guess that it’s been a day. It sure feels like it but Leo is the one with the super good internal clock, so who knows.
But making it to the base only seems to blow through expectation three.
The Kraang are not as easy to take down in their own dimension as they are on Earth. He sneaks past the stone giants with ease, but the base is crawling with these ugly pink blobs everywhere, and Mikey is focused more on getting LH and getting them out than he is about stealth.
Idiot.
Mikey has never been tortured before. He’s imagined it, of course. With the lives they lead, it’d be hard not to imagine it. But even with an imagination like his, whatever he could conjure up for torture could never ever beat actually having to live the real thing.
He’d always assumed the Kraang were dumb. They had invaded his dimension, sure. And they had developed robot bodies to house their pink, gross, slimey bodies. But they were easy to take down, usually. They spoke in odd, broken English, and didn’t have very durable bases.
I totally should've known better.
You see, whatever the Kraang lack in other areas, they sure make up for in torture. It starts off with electric shocks. Not surprising, to be honest. They feel just like the electric batons the Kraang carry back home, when they’d gotten a lucky hit on him and his bros. Sucks. Majorly. But he can take it. I can take it .
Turns out, he can’t take it.
Not after they shock him, hard, three or four times in a row. Not after they immediately start beating him after, which hurts by the way, especially when he’s clamped to a metal chair, and he’s just shocked, and their metal arms don’t hold back.
Yet still Mikey displays his great talent of not being able to keep his mouth shut. “Fuck. You.” He snarls, then proceeds that by spitting out blood onto the cold metal floor to join the stark red that’s already sitting there.
“The ones known as the Kraang want the thing known as the location of The Turtles.”
He lets out a broken laugh. “Yeah? Well the one known as Michelangelo wants you to walk off a bridge, but I guess we both aren’t getting what we want.”
And so on and so forth. The Kraang start to eventually hate Mikey’s beautiful, crafty responses though. So one day when they pull Mikey out of his cell, they decide to skip the beating and go straight to dissecting.
Worse. So much worse. Please please please come and get me I just want to go home please please help–
They slice into him in small, even little lines, oddly curious about the way Mikey bleeds. Please. Please stop. They get bolder. Harsher. Mikey would tell them to go fuck themselves, but he’s too busy screaming. He screams for a long, long while. He doesn’t stop.
His arm is broken at some point. His plastron cracks. He doesn’t go back to his cell. He doesn’t move. He stays staring at the ceiling, silent, and cries.
They fix his arm. They don’t fix his plastron. When he laughs, it’s something hollow and empty. He doesn’t remember when he used to laugh differently.
Eventually… though. Eventually one of the Kraang gets too close. He bites down, hard, and the shock that fills him is brutal, agonizing. The shock that fills him also fries the electronic shackles tying him to the table.
Mikey kills the other two Kraang, and by the time the alarms go off, he’s halfway through the ventilation shafts. He drops to the ground, and takes in the pink sky. He hates it but anything is better than that metal ceiling.
The air doesn’t sting him, the ground doesn’t bother him, and the colors are normal now, at least.
Is that good?
Two months and one week after Mikey landed in this horrible dimension (because of course the Kraang kept track of the time for him, just to watch lose any hope in a rescue), he escapes, covered in burns. Bruises. Cuts. Scars. A broken plastron. And nothing to do but run.
He runs for what feels like hours, and it’s only then that he remembers LH, trapped, hurting, still stuck in that horrible place. He… he can’t make himself go back.
He thinks LH would understand.
“Help.” He whispers when he finally stops, his voice is still horribly raw, “Please.” Nobody answers. Nobody ever answers. He jumps to the next island. Two months. He’s been here two months. It feels so much longer.
Help.
Leo, Raph, and Donnie still haven’t come. Don’t leave me here. Please. Please come back. Please don’t abandon me.
Nobody answers.
He’s starting to wonder if anyone ever will.
Mikey learns, once he can, that Dimension X for all it’s weird and horrible has one upside. Everything here responds to sound. He learns this the hard way, of course. He’s been on the run for a week now, and the only thing he’s found that’s even slightly edible are these gross little grub creatures.
And because he’s tired, and alone, and kinda disgusted with his dinner, he very angrily kicks one of the little crystal trees as hard as he can. There’s a little bit on the bottom that snaps off, and then a few seconds later the tree starts to glow in quickening pulses.
The other trees start to match.
Oh shit oh fuck shit shit shit–
He only barely manages to not to blow himself to smithereens. He does slam his whole back into the almost identical island behind him though, and with that he screams. He looks up. The crystal trees above him shudder.
Mikey braces himself for impact. It… it doesn’t come. When he opens his eyes, little shards of the multicolored trees are lying all around him, and seem no closer to exploding than anything else. He picks one up, twirls it around in his hands. A small metal ball floats out from the two islands. Mikey chucks the shard at it.
The shard explodes in a display of smoke and color, and the ball careens back a little, scorch marks clearly visible.
Huh. That’s… interesting.
He tries it again, and again, and again. Each time, he gets the same results. He picks up the rocks, shoves a bunch in his belt. He experiments with sounds a few times too– smaller sounds for a few pieces, bigger sounds for a whole lot of pieces.
Similarly he finds that most other things respond to sound too. The few… animals he finds. A few plants, even some rocks. He’s able to find a smidge more food. He’s able to survive easier. It’s been two and a half months.
Still no brothers.
Still alone.
When he’s been there for almost six months, he finds a pit full of bones. He hasn’t found many animals, and not ones that would have bones this big, but the pit is there all the same. He’s afraid of what made this pile.
He’s afraid of what’s out there, what he hasn't seen yet even after the Kraang, even after so long. He’s afraid that barely recognizes the skulls of any of the dead things sitting here.
Bang rock in hand, Mikey walks over to the edge, peering down suspiciously. It’s deep. Nothing… nothing looks to be new though, so that’s good, right?
Ha. I’ve never been that lucky.
Walking around the edge he scans the cracked skulls, the snapped bones, the volume of death in front of him.
One of the sides isn’t steep like the others, so he cautiously makes his way down to the beginning of the pit. Remnants of life he hasn’t even discovered yet lay inches from his feet.
There’s a skull that sits at the top. A Kraang one. It’s hollow. Looks like a hat. A helmet. Mikey takes it, examining the head. There’s no crack, no chips. A dead Kraang was dumped here. Without a suit, without a way to move. Serves them right, the assholes.
Climbing out of the pit, Mikey gets off that island as fast as he can. Something will come back there, because it’s Dimension X, and he doesn’t plan to be around when it does.
A few islands over is a tiny crystal tree forest. They’re safe to sleep under, he’s found. Nothing like these trees. Nothing except Mikey. They have bugs too– grappling worms and other little beetle-like things that taste gross but are at least edible.
They also bleed a bright purple.
He crushes a few onto the ground, watches as the purple drains out of them slowly. He covers his fingers in it, grabbing the skull. Then he paints the thing like he’s a war chieftain.
Holding it up against the pink sky, he looks at his work. He puts it on his head. It fits perfectly. The white and the purple blend in with everything else in this place.
Mikey’s starting to wonder if he's blended too.
A month later he finds what made the pit of bones. A month later he finds out cute things are not to be trusted. He hasn’t really found any cute things by this point, to be fair. Everything in this place is ugly, weird, and vile.
Mikey is always touching out and reaching for things. Here he finds he wants to do the opposite. Touch is his enemy, most of the time.
Touch hurts. Touch hurt me.
Which is why he’s leery. At first. Of the little squishy blob that’s sitting prettily on some rocks on the other end of this little island. It’s a cute little blob. Smiles. Dances happily. Mikey is immediately suspicious.
Nothing can be this happy living in Dimension X.
But Mikey is, above all else, lonely . Living by yourself for seven months will do that to you. Will do a lot of things to you. It… it looks cute though. It looks harmless. He makes his way over. Cautiously. It stares at him, eyes wide and curious. Mikey gives it a scratch. It laughs.
Mikey scratches it some more. It laughs louder, shoots out little clouds of something from it’s head. He frowns. He’s not sure he likes that laugh. Pulling his hand away, he looks at the thing with a growing sense of dread. It laughs once more, and then the ground rumbles around them.
So that big rock was not actually a rock.
The… thing chases after him, roaring and raging and stomping, big and imposing and definitely not cute. It’s got eight little legs that should not be able to hold its body up, and Mikey spends almost a half hour dodging and avoiding it.
When he’s finally in a position to make some offensive move toward the creature, he watches as a handful of bang rocks make it stumble back, annoyed. The little cute creature sits on top, and Mikey in his anger, throws a bang rock at it as hard as he can. It screams in shock and pain.
Holy fuck it has a weakness.
Grabbing his grappling worm, he takes a swing around the island – the weird gravity making him pick up speed – and sends the monster a very hard kick as he sails overhead of the… the… Rocktopus (Yeah, I like that), making the little bouncy creature screech once again, and its host follows soon after. He follows it up with a few more bang rocks, and the creature backs off– stepping back in fear.
He throws two more bang rocks at its feet, then pulls the last one out of his leather sash. He really hopes he doesn’t have to use it.
The Rocktopus turns and hightails it off the island, disappearing to wherever it goes. He laughs in relief, shakily putting his last rock back. Mikey gets off that island just as fast. He doesn’t go back in that area. Ever.
He stays away from cute things after that, too. Cute kills.
He’ll have to tell his bros if they ever come for him. If he ever gets home. He probably won’t. It’s still a nice dream, though.
He remembers when he used to call himself cute. Cute kills.
Hah. Guess that is a good motto.
A year in and Mikey gives up hope that anyone is ever coming for him. He gives up a lot of things. Memories of his family, memories of he used to be before, when he still had pillars to lean on and a feel of safety deep in his bones that could never be wiped away with them by his side even on the worst of days.
He gives up tastes and smells too. He loses what pizza gyoza tastes like, he loses pizza and junk food and fizzy drinks and piles of food gathering around his family as they sit around to have a movie night. He loses what the calming incense in the dojo smelled like, the tea Leo made, the permanent chemical smell in Donnie’s lab, the stupid body spray Raph used all the time. He loses the smells of food and the familiarity of home with it.
Loses the city sights, the way it looked at night, the scratches on the countertop, and the way his brothers gripped their weapons with such confidence and skill. He loses the way Ice Cream Kitty used to look at him when he’d pull her out of the freezer and set her on the counter as he cooked.
So many things he gives up, so many things he loses in favor of the harsh and brutal environment of Dimension X.
Michelangelo, in the end, gives up himself.
It’s the only way to survive here.
One year, six months, and ten days after Mikey dropped through that portal into Dimension X, his brothers finally come for him.
He thinks they probably didn’t come fast enough.