TMNT - A Looking Glass Darkly: Chapter 7
(Prev)
A/N: Welp, I cried multiple times writing this one. Have fun. For bonus pain have a listen to the song "It's Not Me, It's You" by Skillet, it definitely inspired the overall vibe and a few lines of dialogue, as did this prompt by @whumpster-dumpster.
~
“I really am sor—”
“Last time I’m gonna say this, Graviturtle: save your breath,” Raphael huffed, straight to the point but not unkind as he slid over one of the snack bowls still scattered around the coffee table. “Seriously, just take a sec, have a drink, eat some chips or pretzels or somethin’. You look like whatever death warmed over would be if it just ran a marathon.”
Great. Precisely the put-together, well-composed impression he had wanted to make on Michelangelo’s family. Why couldn’t they just let him apologize however many times he had to, accept it and go on to pretend that horrifying, humiliating outburst had never happened? Grav slumped more than leaned toward the coffee table, reaching for the snack bowl simply because he had been told to. Embarrassingly, infuriatingly, his hands were still quaking, violently enough that his gloves couldn’t disguise it. The chips snapped to shards between his fingers.
For a long moment he stared at said shards in his palm, hearing the echo of that glass hitting the ground yet again. Hearing Leonardo hit the ground too under the assault of his powers. If Grav were to lift his head, he would see his counterpart puttering around in the kitchen, making a soothing tea for him. (Going out of his way for him when he shouldn’t have to.) He was up and about, walking without much trouble; he didn’t look hurt from the landing…but looks could be deceiving. Grav knew that better than anyone. Even a short fall could break something.
No more broken than you are.
A gentle hand nudged his arm for attention. He watched it happen in his peripheral vision but…he couldn’t quite feel it. Or the remnants of food in his gloved hand…or the couch underneath him…or…
“Hey,” Grid murmured, ducking his head in an attempt to meet his eyes. “You goin’ somewhere?”
Was he? He shouldn’t. He needed to be present not just to take accountability for the big scene he had caused but to appreciate the efforts everyone was making for him. He couldn’t let himself disconnect and drift, no matter how much he may want to. He watched his own hand move mechanically more so than he consciously lifted it but the fact that he was still here enough to get it to his mouth was a win, however small.
Salt and vinegar chips, he discovered belatedly, awareness of flavors bleeding in gradually. He’d never cared for them. But the sharp tang of the vinegar was probably good for him right now so he tried to refine and retrain his hundred-yard stare through the fog onto the bowl. Grid got the hint and moved it to his lap.
“Once Leonardo’s done with your tea,” Shelle began lowly as he sank down on his other side, “I’m gonna ask him again about using their human friends’ apartment while they’re away.”
More people to owe and inconvenience. “You don’t…”
“I know I don’t have to. I want to for all our sakes. It’s too much here,” he insisted. “Michelangelo and his brothers have done everything they can to make us comfortable but it’s just not. We gave it a shot, didn’t we? We tried it their way on their turf. We need somewhere we can breathe without—”
“Shelle.” Leaning over the back of the couch, Blob pressed comfortingly cool hands to Grav’s shoulders, icing out the hot prickles of tension that had wriggled their way back under his cape to bunch the muscles and curl him in on himself. “Not the time.”
He wasn’t wrong, though. Revisiting the topic of the apartment would be a good next step. Judging by Shelle’s furrowed brow and pursed lips, he probably felt like he was being shot down entirely. Grav wanted to assure him otherwise, praise him for thinking ahead and being good at it when he couldn’t.
Somewhere along the line he’d ended up with another chip in his hand. He wasn’t sure when that happened.
Goin’ somewhere?
“…Gray,” he mumbled, dejected, almost wistful, letting it drop back into the bowl.
Blob leaned further for a fuller, tighter hug, draping himself like a clammy gel mold over his shell. Grid squeezed his nearest knee with a firm pressure and Shelle promptly swept his topic of conversation off the table for another time. Grav wished he didn’t have to; he wished this didn’t happen often enough for them to drop everything for him so unquestioningly, often enough to have a stupid color code, but it was easier to give them a head’s up in a single syllable, despite being barely audible with the vinegar gluing his tongue to the roof of his mouth.
“What are five things you can see?” Shelle prompted, nodding minutely at the room around them.
“…TV. Table. Lamp. The…chair.” His chair. He hadn’t seen the rat sit in the recliner since they arrived and essentially monopolized the living room. He shouldn’t be so certain it was his; he just knew. “…Michelangelo.”
“Mikey?” Leonardo either detected him with whatever heightened ninja senses he had been trained for or he had overheard even at a distance, poking his head out of the kitchen. “Where have you been?”
“We made sure to leave plenty of the floor for you to pitch in and clean up,” Raphael ribbed lightly, though almost simultaneously he and Leonardo seemed to pick up on something in their brother’s body language that had them both stepping forward. Michelangelo dodged the unspoken concern with a wordless, noncommittal shrug at them, his gaze mostly lingering on the Supers.
“Yeah, uh…sorry I dipped out on you guys earlier.” Judging by their silence he could probably infer that none of them had noticed him leaving; they were all pretty preoccupied at the time. He cleared his throat. “Anyway. Can we…Can we talk? Maybe in the dojo? Nice and quiet in there, not so…” He jazzed his hands vaguely.
Not so public. Maybe they wouldn’t have to initiate the conversation about staying elsewhere; maybe Leonardo in all his surety about his family’s welcome was wrong. This could be Michelangelo acting on Splinter’s behalf, breaking the news that he was kicking them out for causing so much chaos and trouble.
Blob squirmed uncomfortably. “I really don’t know if now’s a good—”
“S’ fine.”
“Grav—”
“It’s…fine,” he repeated, taking care to enunciate more clearly. “Let’s…Yeah. Let’s go.” Getting up, getting the blood moving would probably be good for him, even if he couldn’t entirely feel his legs underneath him. Grid’s sturdy arm around him helped. His brothers wouldn’t let him fall again. (Never again.)
The conversation might even go smoother this way, he decided idly, with him removed just enough from the world to be numb to whatever might happen. He may not take it to heart.
That didn’t mean, however, that his heart rate didn’t pick up as Michelangelo gestured them on ahead in the right direction and then hesitated to follow, muttering something they couldn’t hear to his brothers. Leonardo seemed taken aback, Raphael less so, jaw setting as he jerked a small nod. That didn’t mean he couldn’t feel the flicker of anxiety crawling up the back of his throat as their friend came to meet them, taking a few moments to fiddle with his hands and muster his courage. He looked so like Blob when he did that. Was this the first time Grav had spotted such a similarity? Whenever he saw Blob plucking strings of slime between his fingers, something serious was weighing on his mind—
“My father wants to talk to you.”
And now that weight was crashing down on Grav’s chest. For a moment or an eternity it felt like his heart stopped entirely. When it restarted, it nearly drowned out whatever Michelangelo was hurrying to say next.
“Not alone, obviously, unless you’d prefer it that way, which I, uh, really doubt. It doesn’t have to be just you and him, and definitely not one-on-one, no worries about that; I’ll stay too if you want me around for this. But he really—he needs to talk to you.”
“Not interested,” Shelle spat.
“Whatever he ‘needs’, we don’t got to give,” Grid announced flatly.
“…It is less about what I need, Michelangelo,” Splinter’s voice had them all rather shamefully jumping out of their skin, “and more about what your friends need, which they have been denied.”
Grav could only hope the dojo mats weren’t flammable as lightning crackled up and down Shelle’s person, igniting his spine and coursing down his arms for smoke to seethe from his clenching fists. Even Blob was fuming, the ambush automatically bringing a layer of caustically bright poison ooze to the surface of his skin—as innate and animal as it was a superpower, aposematic.
Grid’s arm tightened around Grav to what would have been painful force were he fully grounded but it was necessary; his knees automatically went weak as the rat padded into view. He was wise enough to heed Blob’s clear warning and stay at the same distance as Michelangelo. He walked slowly, obviously telegraphing his every move so as not to make them jump again.
It still came as no less of a surprise when he knelt before them.
When he set his walking stick down, it was far enough to the side that it would be deliberately difficult to reach it again—making a clear show of disarming himself. His paws were shaking, Grav noted numbly. Not something he would usually notice in this state of mind but this display was unexpected enough, jarring enough to tug him back a bit.
Splinter looked…so small there on the floor, ancient beyond his years, beyond the months he had lived that Sliver never would. His ears and whiskers drooped, his head with them, until he was doubled over face down on the floor.
What was this? What was he doing? What was he going to do to them?
“I am sorry beyond words,” he whispered, “for any pain and grief my presence has resurfaced for you. However unintentionally.”
He knows.
It was rare to garner a full-on snarl from Blob of all people but Grid and Shelle were soon to echo it, rumbling and sizzling respectively. Michelangelo shrank under the force of their stare with a squeak, because how else could the rat know? But Splinter continued before they could accuse or advance on his son.
“Michelangelo is not to blame; he never breached your trust. I came to my own conclusions. And the…the conclusions I came to, the realization of the pain your…” His tail lashed; Grav couldn’t suppress his own twitch at the movement. “…disgusting excuse for a father caused you…it breaks my heart.” His breathing trembled, muffled against the floor yet deafening in everyone else’s silence. “There are no words I can ever offer to detract from the damage he has done.”
“Glad you understand that much,” Shelle hissed, shifting as if to stalk for the door, only to be caught off guard by a hand hooking his elbow. Grav barely noticed it was his own, despite twitching again more noticeably at the jolt he received on contact. It was nothing compared to the shock of what he was looking at, what he was hearing.
“Even if I had the words, they would still not be enough because I am not the one who truly needed to say them. Regardless, it needs to be said. The thought of it going unsaid for one more moment is maddening to me; I cannot stand for it.” Literally, it seemed, as he only pressed his face deeper into the floor.
“…Why?” Blob muttered. “What do you care? It’s not like it’s actually your fault.”
At face value the words would make it seem like he was letting him off the hook but the tone made it clear he was only reinforcing the point: Not like you can actually make up for any of it. Salt effectively in the wound, judging by the pained sound Splinter made low in his throat. When he managed to speak again, it was thick with tears they couldn’t see, but as fervent as they had ever heard him. More fervent than they had ever heard their own father outside of his pontificating about world domination.
“It is not your fault either.” Every word slowly, near desperately enunciated for emphasis. “It never was. If you take nothing else from this conversation, if there is nothing else I can offer you, take that. You deserve to hear someone apologize for what happened to you. What he did to you. You deserved so much better and still do and I am so, so sorry.”
Grav must have detached and floated away entirely before his brothers could catch him. There was no way this was true reality.
Grid shifted on the spot, shrugged to make himself that much bigger and scoffed as if to dismiss it all; only his brothers knew him well enough to hear the trace of uncertainty, confusion. “We don’t need your pity. We never asked for it.”
“It is not pity to acknowledge your pain, and your pain is not weakness. I do not look at you and see weakness—”
“Then what? Take a good, long look if you’re suddenly so interested! Use those unfailing powers of observation you rat masters always seem to have! Micro-analyze us, categorize us all you want!” Shelle barked. “What do you see?!”
One would think a boulder had rolled onto Splinter’s back by the effort it took him to push back up onto his knees. Dim, pained eyes darted from face to face to face to face. Wary, numb, demanding, guarded in turn.
“I see what he did not,” he concluded softly. “Enough.”
When it took more than a couple of seconds for him to elaborate, Shelle sputtered. “What’s that supposed to—?”
“You, just as you are. Every one of you. You are enough. You should have been enough; you should have been everything to him. He was the one sorely lacking for being so blind to everything you are: strong, kind, brave, loyal, protective, loving brothers, heroes—and sons, who deserved to be loved and protected too.”
Blob was already shaking his head. “No, no, this is that emotional tripping thing they talk about, isn’t it? Love bombing. Making some grand gesture to show how sorry you are, singing our praises, buttering us up to get in our good books so we’ll lower our guard and you can figure out how to manipulate us.”
“You do not have to believe me. You are well within your right not to but I do not think I have said anything that you would not readily say to each other.” Again he looked at each of them in turn with every repeat statement. “You are strong. You are brave. You did not deserve to be hurt. None of it was your fault. You deserve to be loved—”
“Okay, stop it!” Grid cut him off, looming another five inches (a testament of the truly unnerved.) “You don’t—You don’t get to say all that to us. You haven’t earned it!”
But he hadn’t earned their scorn either, Grav mused distantly. Not really. Splinter didn’t point that out to them, though.
“Then,” he conceded, “as the humans say, you have the floor. Is there anything you wish to say to me? Or rather…is there anything you would say to him, if given the chance?” Under their incredulous stares he bowed his head shamefacedly, his voice falling even softer. “However unwillingly, however cruelly, I share his likeness. If perhaps speaking to me as you would to him might relieve even an ounce of the pain he inflicted, soothe whatever scars he left on your hearts and minds, feel free. You are free. Speak your minds and I will listen as he did not. Without judgment. Without anger. Without a filter or an excuse.”
“Well, don’t expect any of us to speak without anger or judgment. I hate you,” Shellectro bit out.
“Shelle.” Grav’s breath of his name may as well have been from a ghost; it went right through him, unheard, unheeded.
“I hate you,” he repeated, stark and scathing. “I hate looking at you, I hate hearing his—your voice, I hate what you’ve done to us, I hate everything that’s been dredged back up; I hate that you still hold so much power over us when you’re dead! It’s over; we’re finally rid of you because I pulled the trigger! The whole rest of the world has moved on and they’re glad about it! I should’ve gotten a monument for that like your son over there but what do I get instead? All the fallout, all the cleanup! If I think about it too long, I get so mad sometimes I don’t even know what to do with myself. I shouldn’t feel anything anymore, I should’ve been able to just bury it with you but I hate you so much, I can’t stop. Why should I waste another iota of emotional output on someone, something like you? You’re beneath us! Do you understand? All that work to make us feel like we were beneath you and you’re six feet under us.”
Michelangelo flinched, the sole reminder that he hadn’t become one with the walls. The choice of words, no matter how accurate, was a line crossed for Blob too; he roiled uncomfortably.
“Shelle…”
“We don’t need pity or apologies or praise from you; we’re better than you! We’re getting better!” he insisted, finally remembering to tear his arm out of Grav’s grasp with a contrail of sparks. “You can say you see ‘enough’ but we’re more than that! We’re better off now than we ever were with you.”
He said it with such defiance, such bitter gloating, as if he expected Sliver to protest. When no such protest came, its absence was a glitch in the system. The heat and power and surety behind his rant stalled, if only for a moment, but it was enough to be palpable, and the fact that even the rat’s silence could spark a reaction from him was infuriating enough to kickstart another surge.
“How can you just look at me like that? I hate that! How can you just waltz in here as easy as you waltzed out of our lives and we’re the ones who still have to suffer for it?! We should be better by now! We have to be or—or what was it even for?! Don’t look at me like you care, like you’re sad about this! It was quicker than you deserved; I made it quick and I hate myself for that! I made it happen and I hate myself for that too but I know you didn’t suffer! Why didn’t you suffer?!”
Everyone else cringed at the dizzying pitch of his screech, like a speaker blowing out. Splinter’s ears flattened, his fur prickled but somehow he found the willpower not to shy away from the screaming that followed.
“Did you feel anything? Ever?! Why did you stop?! What did we do wrong? What’d we ever do to make you stop feeling for us?! We weren’t asking for much! If you’re so smart why was that so hard to understand? We didn’t want the world on a silver platter, you stupid, selfish, twisted freak, we just—! We needed—!” His eyes burned with more than electricity, overbright as he tore them away from the rat’s mournful face with a hiss. “Ugh, it doesn’t even matter!”
“It does.”
Two gentle words stole the oxygen from Shelle’s bluster, snuffing him out in a flash. It was like all the color drained out of him with it, leaving him ashen, the air thick with a taste like scorched metal.
“Not anymore. It’s too late,” he rasped after too long a pause, now as flat and toneless as a phone hanging off the hook. Defeated with nothing to fight and even more grievous, nothing to fix. Nothing could fix it. He dragged a heavy hand down his face. Thin stray moisture smeared down his cheek under his palm and then sizzled away into nothingness just as soon as it was shed. “We were never gonna get what we needed, were we? Now we never will.”
“…We could’ve, though. That’s the worst part.”
Blob’s throat caught thickly as he spoke. He checked himself for it with a long inhale through his nose, shook his head and flung a hand at Splinter, then at Michelangelo.
“These guys are proof, aren’t they? That there is a world where he can be a good father.” He let that notion sit, as if it were a miraculous revelation; the longer it sunk in, the heavier it weighed, until he had to draw himself up against it. “So actually, if you’re feeling so chatty, I got a question for you, o wise one. Why couldn’t all of this be us?”
Michelangelo made an indeterminate noise but Blob didn’t give him the chance to chime in, pointedly pressing on.
“No, no, I’m asking dear ol’ dad. If you magically understand everything we’ve gone through all of a sudden, if you think you know us so well, what’s your grand conclusion on that? Huh? Why don’t we get a good father? What’s the difference between me and Michelangelo? Is he really that much better than me or was there some universal coin flip I missed? Luck of the draw? A wish upon a star? Dumb luck? Vain hope?”
When it became clear it wasn’t rhetorical and he expected some kind of response, Splinter spoke carefully. “I do not know why. You should have been granted that much; it is what every child deserves. But hope is rarely ever in vain. It is one of our most vital weapons for survival.”
“Oh, yeah? Is that one of your little ninjutsu nuggets of wisdom? Cause it’s a lot easier to believe when that hope hasn’t been weaponized against you,” Blob pointed out acidly. “I should be able to hate you like Shelle. Everything you did to him, to all of them, it’s the closest I’ve ever come to hating someone but…a part of me always hoped. Hope in the potential for change, that’s at the heart of being a hero!”
He stabbed a thumb at his chest, his soft center visibly giving under the jab, too giving.
“That’s my heart. That’s my job! And then every time you sent us limping home to retreat and you laughed, like we were any other common enemies, I had to kick myself for that. Every single day you made me feel like having hope for you to change meant I was betraying my brothers. You made me feel so stupid for ever believing in you, for thinking you ever believed in me. Tch, I was supposed to be your favorite!”
Griddex stiffened, barely perceptible. This might be the first time Blob had acknowledged as much aloud, at least in front of them. (Michelangelo too seemed taken aback. Either the concept of his father playing favorites was foreign to him or he may suspect another brother of holding that title, not him.)
“Isn’t that what you always said?” Blob persisted. “Or was ‘favorite’ just code to mean ‘most gullible’? Babying me all those years, playing it up, keeping me blind to how you were treating the others. What made you stop? Did you get bored of me soaking it all up? Was I just too easy? Gotta go get off on some more interesting mind games with the sons who are an actual challenge—and hey, if that doesn’t work, you can beat ’em a little more literally! Would it really have hurt so much to keep up the act? I knew—or I thought I knew you were capable of it cause of how you coddled me. Sweetening up the poison. Why couldn’t you keep the mask up for them too? Isn’t that what parenting is, having enough love to go around for all your kids?”
“…One would hope.”
“Yeah, well, once you were gone I hoped I could finally let go and accept you could never be who I thought you were. But now here you are, Splinter,” he spat, the set of his shoulders and his sludge hardening, turning greener by the second. “You with your oh-so-amazing family, with your sons who you protect and adore. They actually get to be your boys, not your toys! They get to feel safe with you; that’s setting the bar at ground level and you just dish it out like it’s so easy! Dangling all that love in front of us like you’re all so much better—Why?! What do they have that we don’t?! What have they done to earn it that we haven’t? Free TV time and fun family dinners and playing and joking around and talking you up like you actually want them to succeed. Like you’re proud of them. Like it’s real. Why does it get to be real for them and not us? Cause I’d bet you anything we hoped and prayed for it more than they ever have. They haven’t needed to. Do they even understand how good they’ve got it?”
His glare at Michelangelo was dampened by the tears teeming, streaking freely down his cheeks.
“Well, do you? You better count your blessings, Michelangelo, cause you can bet we are every second we spend here. All the could-have-beens and should-have-beens. You’ve still got a dad to be your hero. We should have too and I-I’ll never get to know why we didn’t. We’re superheroes. Just for that, didn’t we need a hero to look up to? It’s—” Hiccupping tremulously, he ducked his head, curling into his own arms in a futile attempt to reabsorb his poison, the literally toxic levels of envy. “It’s just not fair.”
“Speak for yourself, Blob,” Grid growled, finally releasing Grav to fold his arms like a wall. “I never needed him.”
The gruff, bluntly confident dismissal melted Blob further into his shell, for which Shelle leveled Grid with a look—flat, tired and deeply unconvinced.
“Yes, you did.”
“Nope. Nuh-uh. Not like any of you did.” Grid shot a sneer at the rat. “Cause you—you never needed me. Shell, you never even wanted me. Sayin’ sorry now, you think that covers all the times you made me feel like I was nothin’ to you?” He chuckled bitterly. “The neophyte. Bet ya didn’t even expect me to know what that means but that’s all I was to you, huh? Just the big, slow, stupid screw-up. The drag-down, dead weight dummy.”
Blob quivered, palming roughly at his eyes to no avail. They just kept welling, his voice just kept wobbling. “Don’t, bro, don’t talk like—”
“Like what? He asked for it! No downplayin’ it, no filter, I’m just sayin’ it how it is!” he barked, wrenching away from the group. “How it’s always been. Call yourself a father? A guardian? A teacher? Yeah, well, you taught me real quick how to get by without needin’ you cause if I ever made any little mistake, you sure weren’t gonna help me fix it! No, you’d make a mountain out of it, rub it in my face like you expected it from me all along. All those lectures, all those warnings, threats, walkin’ me in circles on eggshells. Actin’ like I was some bomb waitin’ to go off, like I was just one slip away from losin’ it.” He scoffed again, throwing up his hands. “Whatever ‘it’ was, all the nothin’ you gave me. I dunno how I ever bought into it then and I’m not buyin’ into it now!”
The rat’s shoulders slumped minutely.
“What did you ever do for me, huh? Just me? Go on like that about strength and kindness and love in ‘every one’ of us but that’s just a vague catchall to make me feel included, right? Just a token nod like ‘Oh, yeah, you’re here too.’”
“When I said every one of you, I meant every one of you.”
Grid drowned the assurance out with an ugly laugh before he could even reach the last few syllables. “Yeah, right! You wouldn’t even deign to show me a little love when your ‘love’ was torture! And you could’ve. I was standin’ right there practically beggin’ for it, I was—pathetically primed and ready for you to take me on but no, one run with the drill and suddenly I wasn’t even good enough to keep playin’ your stress tester! It should’ve been me!”
“Griddex,” Shelle hissed somewhere between chastising and pleading. How many times did they have to tell him that wouldn’t have been any better before he believed them? Unsurprisingly he blew right past any opportunity for protest.
“They never should’ve had to put up with you but as usual, they were everythin’ you preferred. Blob’s got his bleedin’ heartstrings for you to pluck at, that’s why he was your favorite. Shelle’s got all those smarts you could use. But Grav, why him? Cause he was steppin’ up to be what we really needed? Everythin’ you should’ve been? Oh, nooo, you couldn’t have that, not if what we needed wasn’t you, cause we’re never allowed to be good enough or we might end up bein’ too good for you!” His knuckles cracked at the force with which he clenched his fists, pacing testily. “And y’know what the real kicker is? He wouldn’t’ve had to step up and be better than ya bargained for and we wouldn’t have needed him to if you weren’t such a sack of scum! Whatcha call it—self-fulfilling prophecy?”
A surge forward—a stomp, punctuating, barely a shade short of predatory. Michelangelo’s hand twitched nervously toward his belt.
“So how’s it feel to know with all your calm and control, you broke before we did? How’s it feel to be the one who screwed everything up?! We’ve had it backwards all this time, we didn’t lose you! You lost us, you lost your conscience and your mind, you lost it all! Tryin’ so hard to keep us under your thumb, you just pushed us outta your grubby little reach; it was all for nothing! It—It’d be hilarious if it wasn’t so pitiful! And you don’t even deserve the pity, cause you did it to yourself!”
The next laugh was even rougher, raw, short-lived as it trailed off into a snarl.
“But y’know what? I would’ve taken a pitiful father any day over a warped old wackbag, cause then you took it out on us. All that time makin’ me feel like I was the hair trigger, one wrong move away from crackin’ up when you were ready to try and take over the world—or ruin it if ya couldn’t have it! You ruined everything! The mistake, the monster, it’s not me, it’s you! It was always you! The only way I was losin’ everything I ever needed or wanted was cause you tried to take it from me! Why?! What else could ya want from me?! I gave and gave and tried and tried, shell if I didn’t try so hard to fit in your mold and be whatever you wanted for some stupid, useless reason; you can’t tell me I was good and worthwhile all along now that it’s over, that’s not enough! It was never enough! Why wasn’t I ever enough for you?! That’s all I ever wanted!”
With that thunderously reverberating roar, he lunged. Everyone in the room would have likely anticipated him charging straight at the rat but in a twist—a reminder that they, like Sliver, may have underestimated his self-control—he turned his rage on the wooden training dummies nearby, decapitating one in a punch that shot cavernous cracks down its trunk, tearing the other entirely from its base with a nauseating crunch like bone and hurling it full force at the dojo wall.
It was almost more startling when it never made impact; Grav wasn’t conscious of preventing it until it was already hovering gently, gently down onto the floor near the mats.
Grid stared at it, shoulders heaving with every ragged breath, then slumping.
“…And there he goes again,” he rasped, shooting a wry, twisted smile at Grav, then at Splinter. His jaw tremored. “Cleanin’ up your messes. Ya see, I never needed you. Cause I had them. You didn’t deserve me needin’ you.” His voice and body were becoming smaller with every word. “I just…I wanted you…to want me.”
I would have, Splinter mouthed soundlessly. It was unclear if his voice had broken or if he didn’t dare say it aloud for fear Grid wouldn’t deign to hear it. It didn’t matter. Grid was obviously retreating into himself, repinning his attention where it always ended up, on his brothers. On his leader, who met his gaze and then the others’ with the same constant as always.
I want you. And you. And you too. I’d give you anything, all of it if I could; I just want you to be happy and safe.
And…somehow…surreally…maybe Splinter wanted that for them too. Or was it all just the scripted theatrics of a villain in disguise?
Five things you can see. Grid. Shelle. Blob. …Him. And Michelangelo.
Head on straight, feet on the ground. Grav had to root himself, be present. He wasn’t going anywhere. There was something he needed to do.
“Michelangelo…are you…would you mind stepping outside for a minute? Please?” Michelangelo tensed, obviously caught off guard. Grav was probably the last person he expected to ask that. Still he hesitated, eyes flicking toward his father. The loyalty, the love that drove his hesitation ached palpably. So did Grav’s throat when he swallowed. “I-I’d be more comfortable if you do.”
“Um…Sensei?”
“It is alright, Michelangelo. Go on. Tell your brothers there is no cause for alarm,” he urged gently, then after a moment’s thought, “And please pass along my request for a cup of that chamomile Leonardo was brewing.”
A mundane comment, no doubt intended to be familiar and disarming. Manipulative, was Grav’s first habitual assessment. Reassuring, was the more logical conclusion in their case. Michelangelo offered a weak, reluctant smile and nod, sidling gingerly toward the door. Grav didn’t watch him go, keeping his eyes trained on Splinter, but the shadows in his peripheral vision told him Michelangelo’s brothers were probably hovering just outside, drawn by concern and curiosity and the cacophony. Thankfully Michelangelo let the door close firmly after him. No peeking. They had seen and heard too much already. Hopefully they knew without anyone needing to tell them that none of it was ever to leave this room.
This part wouldn’t.
It was just them now—he and his team standing together with a rat across from them. An intrusive thought occurred that Grav could send him hurtling into the wall much like one of those training dummies, much like he had sent Leonardo flying. Much like Sliver had once sent him flying.
He could. But he wouldn’t.
A deep breath first. He didn’t feel it hit his lungs but he tried.
Then the plunge, before he came to his senses and thought too long about the dozens or hundreds of reasons it wasn’t safe. His brothers were with him. That was the only reliable semblance of safety he’d ever had and would ever get. If they could put it all on the table, he had to meet them where they were.
Protection. Sliding his whip from his belt, he passed it to Griddex without a word. Grid shot him a worried, uncertain look but tightened his grip on it regardless, as Grav knew he would. Nothing and no one here would be able to pry it from that fist but him.
Security. The belt itself next, and the harness. Those went to Shelle. The clipping and clattering rang disconcertingly loud in everyone else’s hush. Shelle hesitated, clenching and unclenching his hands a few times to cool down before accepting them or he would singe and tarnish the metal.
…Camouflage.
He rolled his gloves down inch by inch—easier said than done with his hands so unsteady and slick with sweat. The striped scars left by meticulously tallied tail lashes and scratches, the more chaotically scattered nicks and chips from shards of glass, they all shone too stark thanks to the perspiration. Stepping out of his boots revealed much of the same.
Painstakingly he peeled off his mask, still damp, slightly glued to his cheeks with the tears and sweat that had dried there after his panic attack. The thin claw mark along his cheekbone stung with imagined—remembered pain when exposed to the air. His head was pounding just as hard as his heart.
He shed his cape. That was the worst part, letting the cloak of safety and insulation from the outside fall away. Exposing his throat, the fine ligature line crossed far too many times. One would usually have to squint to make it out. Even with his vision blurred by fresh tears welling, Splinter didn’t have to.
Grav passed all the fabric components to Blob, who bundled them up and hugged them to his chest with just as much force as he would their owner.
Once it was all stripped away, he had to stand there for the excruciatingly crawl of a full minute and collect himself enough to stifle every urge to shiver. He was cold. The world was cold. And yet his eyes burned as he spread his arms. Leaden, languishing. It felt like the scarred skin stretched too tight over his bones with the movement.
“This is what you did to us,” he said simply, softly, almost too soft for anyone but the rat to hear. “All of us, not just me. I may have the only visible proof but I’m not the only one wearing it. Carrying it. Every single day.”
He wasn’t sure what he expected. Shock value often had a way of rooting out the pretenders, those who claimed unconditional acceptance and then balked at the uncomfortable, unaesthetic, messy mural of the truth. He hated being gawked at, being made a spectacle when he couldn’t curate how it was perceived but for once he’d chosen this. He wanted to observe the reaction. True to Shelle’s challenge: Take a good, long look.
Splinter struggled to suppress his shiver too. Failing. He drew a difficult breath, blinked hard…
But he kept his head up and didn’t look away.
Grav took a step without entirely realizing he had until he noticed his brothers had tensed. Grid’s free hand lifted automatically to grab him, draw him back, and then hesitated. No manhandling.
Another step. Another. It felt like a mile. The farther he ventured from his safety net, the more he sensed them bristling behind him. That was good. They had his back no matter what.
Splinter watched him approach as one would watch a deer in the wild, motionless for fear of missing it or scaring it off. Grav sank down across from him, just shy of arms’ length, only because his legs wouldn’t hold him anymore.
And there they sat.
Quiet.
Still.
Small.
“…I can’t think of what to say,” he admitted eventually, almost offhand. It could have been minutes since he last spoke or it could have been an hour. Maybe it didn’t matter. Splinter gazed up at him all the while, eyes glassy, wide open in a way Grav hadn’t seen his father’s in years. And never would again.
“You do not need to say anything if you do not want to.”
“Well, they covered most of what I would’ve said already. And this basically does the rest. ‘A picture says a thousand words’ and all that. And I’m just…tired. Of rehashing it all over and over again and how talking about it really doesn’t make it better as much as it feels like it should.” A hand flitted minutely, defeatedly. “We don’t get closure. We just cope. Clean up as best we can. Carry it.
“And I’m tired of being scared all the time. Hurting. Watching my brothers hurt. Hurting more because I have to watch them hurt. Hating you. Missing you. Thinking about everything you should’ve done better or I should’ve done better or how things could’ve been different if we were just more…” He shrugged listlessly, then hunched his shoulders against the light, eerie nakedness of being without his cape. “I don’t know. Maybe just more.”
“You are,” Splinter murmured like a promise. “You are so much more than he ever gave you credit for.”
“Hmh. Do you really believe that? You can look at…” He ducked his heavy head at his overall person. “…all this, look past it and still see enough of…something underneath?”
“I see my sons.”
…Shell.
Not more tears slipping through the cracks, not now that his mask wasn’t there to absorb them. Would he and his brothers ever run out of tears? Would they ever run out of reasons to shed them?
He let them fall. There was nothing to hide him anymore and he was tired.
And Splinter didn’t look away.
There they sat.
A father. And a child, crying.
Splinter didn’t reach. He didn’t even lean forward. He simply opened his paws, loose and still on his knees. Asking.
Sliver never asked for anything.
Grav and his brothers had learned not to.
They may not deserve to.
“…We’ve been terrible to you,” he croaked, barely intelligible. His brothers probably couldn’t make it out at this distance. “Acting like you were the bad guy since we arrived and…and you haven’t done anything wrong. You’ve been nothing but kind to us. I’m sorry.”
He half expected another chiding about over-apologizing but that so rarely ever made him feel any better. Splinter seemed to sense that. “Apology accepted,” he said instead. “As I would continue to accept all of you, for as long as you need. Wholeheartedly.”
So easily. Tenderly. Lovingly.
Why couldn’t it ever be that easy for Sliver?
He’d probably never know. All he knew was that here in front of him was a father. If only for a time, until the walls between their worlds were reclosed and he may never get the chance again.
Grav wasn’t sure about his brothers, this may not be what they needed now, but he couldn’t let it slip out of his grasp.
Against every instinct turning his cold blood to ice, screaming in his head and squeezing his heart and closing his throat and grinding his lungs to a halt, he reached, shaking with ever the same supplication:
Please don’t hurt me.
The brush against his hand was warm. Giving. All paw pads, no claws. The longer it lingered, the higher the crest of anticipation and dread roiled in his stomach. Gathering into himself, coiled and ready to bolt at any telltale shift in pressure.
The shift didn’t come.
It kept not coming. No flex of his nails to dig in. No warning twitch of his tail curled on the floor close by—but not too close.
His paw was soft. Grav had forgotten how that felt. He knew he’d missed it; he’d forgotten just how much until now that it was within reach again. It had been so long.
Maybe for this one moment, if he let the rest of this strange, bittersweet world float away and all he held onto was this paw, he could try to pretend…Maybe they could both pretend this was right and real and theirs all along.
The terror and grief were familiar. But he had practice, too much practice pushing them down. The hope was achingly fresh and it hurt just as much, had the potential to hurt even more.
“T—” However small his voice was, he still choked on it. Shameful, but not shameful enough to choke it back. “Tell me again? What you see?”
“My sons,” he repeated at the same volume, with such imploring fondness Grav could almost believe him.
He actually wanted to.
Our father…My father used to hold my hand. My father used to hold me.
The father killed off by power and pride and rage and hatred, shards…slivers of scrap metal twisted into something made to look like a mockery of love, a sieve to pulp them or bleed them dry.
That wasn’t his father anymore. Nor was this. He and his brothers had no claim to this. They hadn’t earned it but here it was, here he was, offering when he never had to. A gift. A reminder. What could’ve been.
What is. A father, seeing him—without his mask, his airs, his power, just him, no matter what a scared, scarred mess he was—as a son. For however long they had.
Grav was missing it already and it wasn’t even over yet. Breaking his heart all over again just to remember.
Healing something in him (though nowhere near everything, it was something. Not closure, just something to help him cope) the longer this moment lasted. So he’d never forget.
That paw didn’t press or squeeze but…settled. At rest.
And maybe, maybe he could dare to breathe.
~
(Next: TBA)
