I have a deep dislike for op Harry potter, soooo here! My argument for the trope where Harry is magically powerful and the goblins unlock the blocks on him 😈😈😈
The Unbinding
The Gringotts ritual chamber was smaller than Harry had expected. No towering columns, no vaulted ceilings of veined marble. Just a circular room carved from living stone, lit by floating globes of cold blue light, and in its centre, a single chair of black iron.
It looked almost medical.
"This is where you'll remove the blocks?" Harry asked, trying to keep his voice steady.
The goblin who had introduced herself as Sharpquill—a healer of some renown, apparently—did not look up from the scroll she was reading. "The diagnostic was quite clear, Mr. Potter. You are labouring under multiple magical restrictions. Some fully sealed, some partially breached. It is a miracle you can produce any magic at all."
Harry shifted his weight. He'd only come to Gringotts to settle a question of inheritance—Sirius's will had been locked in probate for over a year, and the goblins had finally summoned him. But the moment Sharpquill had pricked his finger for a standard identity verification, her expression had changed. She had ordered a full magical diagnostic. Then another. Then a third, with different runic arrays.
The results had been a list. A very familiar, very alarming list.
Core throughput: 5.3% of projected potential.
Wandless magic interface: locked.
Parseltongue pathway: partially occluded.
Mage sight: inactive.
Metamorphmagus potential: dormant.
Defensive and offensive magical integration: 12% functional.
Advisement: Immediate ritual cleansing to restore full inheritance rights.
Harry had stared at it. "I don't understand. I've done wandless magic. I've spoken Parseltongue. How can they be blocked?"
Sharpquill had smiled, a thin stretching of lips over pointed teeth. "Partially breached, as I said. The seals are degrading. You are leaking power in small, uncontrolled ways. But imagine, Mr. Potter, what you could do if the blocks were fully removed. Whatever magic bound you, we can break it. It is your right."
He should have asked more questions. He should have contacted Dumbledore, or Hermione, or anyone who might have told him to slow down, to think. But the list had ignited something in him—a fury he hadn't known he'd been carrying. His whole life, the Dursleys had called him a freak. At Hogwarts, he'd been alternately celebrated and reviled for things he'd done by instinct or luck. And now a goblin was telling him that he'd been deliberately crippled.
Someone had put blocks on him. Someone had decided he shouldn't have his full power.
He'd thought, in that moment, that he knew exactly who.
"Alright," he'd said. "Do it."
Now, sitting in the iron chair as Sharpquill and two other goblins drew chalk circles on the floor around him, Harry felt a flicker of doubt. The runes they were inscribing were nothing like the Hogwarts curriculum. They were sharp, angular, almost aggressive. Goblin magic, he remembered, dealt in debts and releases, in binding and unbinding. To them, a block was a contract violation waiting to be corrected.
Sharpquill straightened, her ritual knife now glowing a faint, unsettling red. "The process will be uncomfortable, Mr. Potter. We are going to sever the external anchors of the restrictions and then, one by one, unseal the blocked pathways. You will feel a pulling sensation. Then a release. Do not resist. Your magic has been caged for too long; it will want to run."
"And it's safe?" Harry asked.
"We have performed similar unblockings countless times. Magical suppression is a common tool of wizarding families who wish to control inconvenient heirs. We are experts at restoring what was stolen." She paused. "Though I must say, your blocks are... unusually robust. Whoever did this did not want them broken. A testament to your power, Mr. Potter, that you achieved so much while wearing such heavy chains."
Harry set his jaw and nodded.
The goblins began to chant.
It started as a vibration, a deep hum that seemed to come from the stone itself. The chalk runes ignited, one by one, a ring of fire closing around the iron chair. Harry felt something inside him shift—a sensation like a muscle he'd never known was clenched slowly beginning to unclench.
Sharpquill's knife traced a symbol in the air, and Harry gasped.
It was like a fist had released its grip on his heart. A rush of warmth flooded through his chest, down his arms, into his fingertips. The glow of the runes brightened, and Sharpquill's eyes glittered with satisfaction.
"The first seal is breaking," she murmured. "Prepare the next array."
The pressure built. It wasn't painful, exactly—more like the feeling of a limb waking up after being asleep, magnified a hundredfold. Pins and needles danced across Harry's skin. The air around him began to shimmer.
"Second seal," Sharpquill announced. "The wandless interface."
The snap was audible. Harry's back arched involuntarily as something gave way inside him, and suddenly the shimmering air became a visible aura, golden and crackling, bleeding out of his skin like light through cracks in a dam. The goblin holding the ritual knife stumbled back, shielding her eyes.
"Impressive," she breathed. "Mr. Potter, your magical index is already climbing past fifty percent. We haven't even reached the core seals yet."
Harry tried to speak, but his voice came out wrong—echoing, layered, as if multiple versions of him were trying to talk at once. The magic was rising in him like a tide, and for the first time, it didn't feel like warmth.
It felt like pressure.
"Wait," he managed. "Something's—"
"The Parseltongue pathway now," Sharpquill said, as if he hadn't spoken. "Ready the fourth array. We'll do the core throughput dampener last. That's the deepest block. Once it falls, everything else will unlock."
The knife moved again. Harry felt something tear.
The scream that came out of him wasn't human.
His vision went white. The chair beneath him groaned, and when his hands clenched the armrests, the iron melted, molten metal dripping through his fingers. The chalk circles on the floor blazed and then burned out, one after another, like fuses blowing. Sharpquill shouted something in Gobbledegook—an order, a warning—but Harry couldn't hear her over the roar of his own blood.
His magic was unspooling.
He could feel it, a vast and terrible something that had been coiled tight inside him for his entire life, now rushing outward with nowhere to go. It wasn't just power. It was a quantity of power that his body had no framework for. Every nerve lit up at once, a symphony of agony. Blood began to trickle from his nose, then his ears. The capillaries in his eyes burst, staining the whites red.
"Stop it!" he tried to scream, but the word came out as a blast of raw force that shattered three of the floating light globes and sent the goblins flying backwards.
Sharpquill was screaming now, too, scrambling for her ritual instruments. "Containment! Someone get a containment array! The core block is degrading on its own—the others were holding it back—"
The stone floor cracked. A split ran from the iron chair to the far wall, and through it, golden light blazed upward, hot as a furnace. Harry's skin was glowing now, a lattice of light visible through his flesh as if his veins were filled with liquid sun. He was burning. He was dying. He could feel his heart hammering against his ribs, too fast, far too fast, and every beat sent another pulse of uncontrolled magic ripping outward.
The door to the ritual chamber blew inward. Through the haze of agony, Harry saw a flash of crimson robes, a long silver beard, a face he knew.
Dumbledore.
The headmaster's expression was something Harry had never seen before—raw, naked terror. He was already casting before he crossed the threshold, his wand a blur of complex motion, and Harry felt something slam into his chest like a physical weight.
The golden light flickered. Dimmed.
"Tenax anima, ligamen corporis, finis potentiae," Dumbledore chanted, his voice uncharacteristically strained. Ancient magic, the kind that hadn't been spoken aloud in centuries. His free hand pressed against Harry's forehead, and the touch was ice-cold, a brutal counterpoint to the furnace inside.
Harry convulsed. The magic that had been pouring out of him reversed direction, crashing back inward, and the sensation was worse than the release had been. He felt his consciousness start to fragment.
"You will not die," Dumbledore said, and it was an order, not a comfort. "Do you hear me, Harry? You will hold on."
The last thing Harry saw before the darkness took him was Dumbledore's face, lined and pale, a single tear cutting through the dust on his cheek.
---
He woke in the Hogwarts hospital wing.
The ceiling was familiar. The light was wrong—too bright, too sharp, as if someone had turned up the contrast on the world. He blinked, and the stonework seemed to shimmer at the edges, a faint golden halo clinging to every surface.
"Ah. You're back."
Harry turned his head. The movement sent a spike of pain through his skull, but he forced himself to focus on the figure seated beside his bed.
Dumbledore looked older than Harry had ever seen him. His robes were rumpled, his beard untidy, and there were deep shadows under his eyes. He was holding a small silver instrument in one hand, its needle quivering erratically.
"The goblins," Harry rasped. His throat felt like he'd swallowed glass.
"Traumatized but alive. Sharpquill in particular has been informed, in no uncertain terms, that her diagnostic protocols require significant revision." Dumbledore's voice was quiet, but there was a core of cold steel beneath the words. "What they attempted was... profoundly reckless. Based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what they were looking at."
"The blocks." Harry's hands clenched the sheets. "You knew."
Dumbledore was silent for a long moment. Then he set the silver instrument aside and folded his hands in his lap.
"Yes. I knew. Because I placed the primary dampener myself."
The admission hung in the air. Harry felt a surge of fury rise in his chest—and with it, a corresponding pulse of golden light flickered across his skin. The bedframe creaked. Dumbledore raised a hand, and the light subsided, but only barely.
"You almost killed me," Harry said.
"I saved your life," Dumbledore replied. "The first time, seventeen years ago, when I found an infant with a magical core so powerful it was in the process of immolating his own body. And the second time, three days ago, when the goblins shattered that protection and forced me to construct a crude replacement in under three minutes." He paused. "For which I am deeply, abysmally sorry. You were never supposed to learn about it this way. You were never supposed to learn about it at all until I had found a permanent solution."
"Permanent...?"
Dumbledore met his eyes. There was no twinkle. There was no grandfatherly warmth. There was only the weight of a secret kept for seventeen years, finally laid bare.
"Your magic, Harry, is not just powerful. It is cataclysmic. The curse that gave you your scar did not just fail—it was consumed. Your core devoured it. And in doing so, it grew. Your body, however, is mortal. Human. It cannot contain what you carry. Not at full capacity. The dampener I placed was not a punishment. It was a life-support ward. At five percent output, you could grow and learn and live. At full output..." He gestured at the hospital wing, at the faint glow still visible under Harry's skin. "You saw what happened. And that was barely a minute before I arrived."
Harry stared at him. The anger was still there, but it was curdling into something else. Something colder.
"How long?" he asked. "The replacement. How long will it hold?"
Dumbledore closed his eyes.
"Two years. Perhaps three, if you are careful. If you train your body to endure more. If you never, ever push past the limits of what the new ward can contain."
"And if I do?"
"Then you will die, Harry. Not from a curse, not from an enemy's spell. Your own magic will burn through you like a star igniting in a paper lantern. It will be brilliant. And it will be the end."
Harry turned his head and stared at the ceiling. The golden halo was still there, clinging to the stonework, a constant reminder that the world would never look the same again.
The goblins had given him a list. Blocks to be broken. Power to be claimed.
They hadn't understood that some locks are not chains.
i love when “just quit!” is thrown out as a suggestion. like damn thank you i’ve never thought of that before ever. in my life. There are these things called groceries and doctor visits
Not because they wanted it to. Because bodies give out. Because hope has a shelf life, and theirs expired somewhere around a year.
April still remembers the exact moment she knew. Not suspected. Knew.
She was in the lair, helping Leo organize Raph's things—a task he couldn't do alone, wouldn't let Donnie do because Donnie would start analyzing, wouldn't let Mikey do because Mikey would just hold everything and cry. So Leo did it, methodical and hollow, and April sat with him in the silence.
It was Mikey who found it.
Over a year after Raph disappeared. Seven months of searching. Eleven months of nothing.
Mikey had taken to wandering. He'd roam the tunnels for hours, sometimes days, coming back with nothing but empty hands and red eyes. Donnie had long since stopped tracking him. What was the point? The worst had already happened. They were just living in the aftermath.
That afternoon, Mikey had gone exploring a section of the old tunnels they'd sealed off years ago. Pre-Kraang, pre-everything. Back when they were just four little turtles learning to fight in the dark. Splinter had walled it off after a collapse, deemed it unsafe, and they'd all forgotten about it.
Mikey didn't forget things. He just... tucked them away. Like he did with everything.
He pried open the rusted door. He crawled through the narrow passage. He followed the smell.
*^*^*^*^
April's phone rang at 3:47 AM.
She answered to silence. Then breathing. Then Mikey's voice, small and broken in a way she'd never heard before.
"April."
"Mikey? What's wrong? Where are you?"
"April, I—" A shuddering breath. "I found him."
Her heart stopped. Started again. Crashed against her ribs.
"What? Where? Is he—Mikey, is he okay?"
Long pause. Too long.
"Mikey?"
"April, he's—" A sound. A sob, strangled and horrible. "He's in the old tunnels. Behind the wall. He's—April, he's been here the whole time. He's been here and we didn't—we never—"
April was already moving. Grabbing her coat. Running.
"Don't move. Don't you move, Mikey. I'm coming. I'm coming."
^*^*^*^*
The old tunnels were dark. Colder than the rest of the lair. April's flashlight cut through the blackness, picking out Mikey's silhouette at the far end. He was on his knees, shoulders shaking, one hand reaching out toward—
Toward the wall.
No. Not the wall.
The floor.
April's light found him.
Raph.
He was curled on his side, knees tucked up, arms wrapped around himself. Like he'd gone to sleep and never woken up. His shell was pressed against the curved stone wall, fitting into a hollow that might as well have been made for him.
He was desiccated. Dried out. The humidity of the sewers hadn't reached this sealed-off space, had preserved him in something close to mummification. His skin was dark, leathery, pulled tight over bones that shouldn't be visible. His mask was still on—faded, brittle, but on. Like he'd put it on that morning and never taken it off.
There was a wound on his head. April's light caught it, and she wished it hadn't. A crack in his skull, just above his temple. Dried blood, dark as rust, matted in what remained of his skin.
He'd hit his head. Fallen, maybe. Gotten trapped when the old tunnel collapsed further in. And no one had known. No one had come.
He'd been here. Here. While they searched every borough, every rooftop, every abandoned warehouse. While Casey walked the streets for months, calling his name until his voice gave out. While Donnie built better trackers and Leo wore himself thin and Mikey cried himself to sleep every night.
He'd been here.
Forty feet from the dojo.
April's legs gave out. She hit the ground hard, her flashlight clattering, spinning, casting wild shadows across the walls.
"No."
Mikey didn't look at her. Couldn't. He just kept reaching, hand hovering inches from his brother's face, unable to touch, unable to stop touching.
"He's cold, April." His voice was a child's voice. Lost and confused and begging someone to explain. "He's so cold. Why is he so cold?"
April crawled forward. She reached for Mikey first, wrapped her arms around him, pulled him away from the body. He fought her, just for a second, then collapsed into her, shaking apart.
"We have to tell them," she whispered. "We have to tell Leo and Donnie. We have to—"
"No." Mikey's hands fisted in her jacket. "No, I can't—April, I can't tell them. I can't make them see this. I can't—"
But he didn't have to.
Footsteps in the tunnel. Leo's voice, calling out, having followed the same trail April had. And Donnie behind him, his tablet casting pale light, still running scans even now, even here, because that's what he did when he was scared.
They rounded the corner together.
Leo stopped first.
His sword clattered to the ground. The sound echoed forever.
Donnie kept moving, two more steps, three, until his light fell on the curled figure against the wall. His tablet slipped from his fingers, cracked against stone, screen going dark.
"Raph."
Donnie's voice was barely a whisper. Disbelieving. Wrong. This couldn't be right. His scanners would have picked up—he would have known—he would have—
"No."
Leo's voice. Broken open.
He was on his knees suddenly, April didn't see him move, he was just there, on the ground, reaching for his brother's face with hands that shook too hard to be steady.
"Raph. Raph, hey. Hey, we're here. We're here now. You can—you can wake up now, okay? We found you. We're here."
His fingers touched Raph's cheek.
Leather. Cold. Unyielding.
Leo made a sound. April had heard Leo in pain before—sliced open, bleeding out, begging his brothers to leave him behind. She had never heard this sound. It was primal. It was something breaking that would never be fixed.
"No no no no no—"
Donnie was backing away, hitting the wall, sliding down it. His hands came up to his head, covering his ears, covering his eyes, trying to un-see, trying to un-know.
"He's been here." Donnie's voice was high, wrong, cracking. "He's been here the whole time. Three hundred and forty-seven days. He's been here for three hundred and forty-seven days and I didn't—my scans should have—I should have—"
"Donnie." April reached for him, but he flinched away.
"Don't. Don't touch me. I was supposed to be the smart one. I was supposed to find him. I walked past this wall every day. Every day, April. And he was here. He was here and I didn't—"
He broke. Just shattered, right there against the wall, his face crumpling, sounds tearing out of him that didn't sound human.
Mikey hadn't moved from April's arms. He was just staring, wide-eyed, at the body of his brother. At the mask he'd helped Raph pick out, years ago, when they were still small enough to share a bed.
"His mask is still on," Mikey whispered. "He put it on that morning. I remember. He said—he said it felt crooked and I fixed it for him. I fixed it." A sob. "I fixed his mask and then he went for a walk and he never came back and I fixed his mask and he never came back."
April held him tighter. There was nothing else to do.
In the center of it all, Leo was still touching Raph's face. Still stroking that cold, dry skin. Still whispering.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm the oldest. I'm supposed to protect you. I'm supposed to keep you safe. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
The words went on and on, a prayer to a god that wasn't listening, an apology to a brother who would never hear it.
^*^*^*^*
They couldn't move him.
Not then. Not like that. Donnie said something about forensics, about understanding what happened, about needing to know. Leo nodded, hollow, and gave permission for something that felt like desecration.
They documented everything. The wound on his head. The collapsed tunnel twenty feet further in, where the ceiling had given way and trapped him. The scratches on the walls—April saw them later, in the photos, and couldn't breathe. Scratches. Deep grooves in the stone. From his fingers. From his sais. From someone trying to dig their way out in the dark.
He'd been alive for a while. Trapped. Alone. In the dark. Forty feet from his family.
Had he called for them? Had he screamed? Had he lain there, listening to them move around in the lair, knowing they were right there and couldn't hear him?
The scratches told the story his body couldn't. He'd fought. He'd tried. He'd clawed at the walls until his fingers bled, until his sais broke, until there was nothing left to do but curl up and wait.
How long had he waited?
How long had he hoped?
^*^*^*^
Casey came three hours later.
April had called him. She'd had to. He was still searching, still walking the streets, still calling Raph's name into the wind. She couldn't let him keep doing that. Not now. Not knowing.
He arrived at the entrance to the old tunnels, and one look at her face told him everything.
"No."
"Casey—"
"No. No, you don't get to—where is he? Where is he, April?"
"He's in there. But Casey, you can't—you shouldn't—"
He was already moving. Pushing past her, into the dark. She followed, because she had to, because someone had to be there when he—
The scream.
She heard it from twenty feet away. A sound of pure, animal agony. The sound of someone's soul being ripped out through their throat.
When she reached him, he was on the ground next to Raph's body, but he wasn't touching him. He couldn't. His hands were hovering, shaking, reaching and pulling back, reaching and pulling back, like he was afraid that if he touched, it would become real.
"No no no no no no no—"
Casey rocked on his knees, forward and back, forward and back, his face a mess of tears and snot and the ugliest grief April had ever seen.
"You were supposed to come back. You promised. You didn't say it but you promised, you promised, you promised—"
He couldn't finish. His voice gave out, collapsed into sobs, into heaving, into something broken that would never quite heal.
April sank down behind him, wrapped her arms around his chest, held him as he fell apart. He fought her at first, then surrendered, collapsing back against her, his whole body shaking.
"He was here," Casey gasped. "He was here. I walked past this place. I walked past it a hundred times. I sat in the dojo and drank your coffee and watched Mikey paint and he was here—"
"I know." April's voice was steady because it had to be. "I know."
"How do we tell him?" Casey's voice was small. Terrified. "How do we tell Raph that we're sorry? He can't hear us. He'll never hear us."
April had no answer.
She just held on.
^*^*^*
They buried him in the same place. It seemed wrong to move him, somehow. Like he'd chosen this spot, this cold dark corner, and uprooting him would be another kind of violence.
Donnie sealed the tunnel properly this time. Built a door that wouldn't collapse. Installed a light that would never go out.
Leo stood at the entrance for hours, sometimes days, just staring at the wall. He didn't speak. Didn't eat. Just stood there, the perfect leader, the one who'd failed the most important mission of all.
Mikey painted a mural on the door. Raph, of course. Raph laughing, Raph fighting, Raph with his arm around each of them. Raph alive. Raph here. Because if he painted him enough times, maybe it would become true.
Donnie built a sensor array that covered every inch of the lair. Every tunnel, every corner, every forgotten space. No one would ever be lost again. No one would ever be alone in the dark. He ran the diagnostics obsessively, checking and rechecking, because if he stopped, he'd have to think about why he'd started.
Casey stayed.
He moved into the lair eventually, into the space that had been Raph's. Leo didn't argue. None of them did. They needed him there, this strange human who'd loved their brother, who carried Raph's memory like a wound that wouldn't close.
At night, sometimes, Casey would sit outside the sealed tunnel and talk.
"I got a new hockey stick today. You'd hate it. Too flashy. You'd say I was gonna break it in five minutes." Pause. "You'd be right."
"I saved a kid from a mugging yesterday. Did the whole thing, WHAM, right in the kneecaps. Thought of you the whole time. Thought of you telling me I was an idiot. Thought of you smiling at me like—" His voice cracked. "Like I was something worth smiling at."
"I miss you. That's stupid to say, right? Like you don't know. Like you can't feel it from in there. But I miss you. I miss you so much it's like breathing underwater. Like everything's heavy and nothing works right."
"I loved you. I never said it enough. I don't think I said it at all, not like that. But I did. I loved you. I love you. I'm gonna love you forever, and you're never gonna know, and that's—"
He'd stop there. Sometimes he'd cry. Sometimes he'd just sit in silence, hand pressed to the cold stone, waiting for an answer that would never come.
^*^*^*
April visited less often. It hurt too much. The lair felt haunted now, not by ghosts but by absence. By all the spaces Raph should have filled.
But she came, sometimes. Sat with Casey. Sat with the brothers. Sat in the silence and remembered.
She remembered the pantry. The shove. The kiss that had changed everything, for a little while.
She remembered the morning after, pancakes and flour on Casey's cheek and Raph's soft eyes.
She remembered thinking: Some things are worth a little shove.
She hadn't known, then, how little time they'd have. How the thing she'd helped start would end here, in the dark, forty feet from where it began.
^*^*^*
On the one-year anniversary of finding him, they opened the door.
Just once. Just to see him.
He was the same. Preserved by the dry air, by the darkness, by something that felt almost like mercy. Still curled on his side. Still wearing his mask. Still waiting, in some terrible way, to be found.
Casey knelt beside him. Touched his face. Cold. Still cold.
"Hey," he whispered. "I'm still here. I'm always gonna be here. Right outside that door. Waiting."
No answer. There would never be an answer.
Casey leaned down, pressed his forehead to Raph's, closed his eyes.
"I love you," he breathed. "I hope you knew. I hope somewhere, in the dark, you knew."
When he stood up, his face was wet. But his hands were steady.
He closed the door behind him.
^*^*^*
The lair is quiet now. Quieter than it ever was before.
They move through it like ghosts, these four people who loved one turtle too much. They talk about him sometimes. Other times they don't. The silence says everything.
And forty feet away, in the dark, behind a painted door that never opens anymore, Raph waits.
One minute he'd been walking through the old tunnels, checking for weak points like Splinter had taught them, and the next—a sound like the world cracking open, and then nothing but darkness and dust and the weight of a thousand rocks pressing down.
He woke up to pain.
His head screamed first. A sharp, splitting agony above his temple that made him see stars when he tried to move. His shell was pinned against something—a support beam, maybe, or a chunk of collapsed ceiling. He couldn't see. Couldn't breathe without inhaling dust.
"Hello?" His voice came out rough, panicked. "Hey! Anyone there? Leo? Donnie?"
Silence.
Just the settling of stone. The distant drip of water. And somewhere, so faint he thought he imagined it, the sound of... music? From the lair?
They were close. They had to be close.
Raph started digging.
^*^*^*^*
The first day was the worst for hope.
He dug until his fingers bled, until his sai scraped against rock and sparked in the darkness. He called for them until his voice gave out, then kept calling in a whisper. He listened at the wall, pressing his ear to the stone, and heard them. Heard Mikey laughing at something. Heard Leo's steady voice giving instructions. Heard Donnie's tools whirring.
They were right there.
"HEY!" He slammed his fist against the wall. "HEY, I'M IN HERE! CAN YOU HEAR ME?"
Nothing.
He tried for hours. Hours turned into... he didn't know. The darkness swallowed time. He slept, maybe. Woke up screaming. Slept again.
They had to hear him eventually. They had to.
^*^*^*^*^*
By day three—if it was day three—the hope had started to curdle.
He'd made progress. Moved some rocks. Created a small space to move in, to stretch his legs. But the main collapse was beyond him. Too heavy. Too much.
He'd found water, at least. A slow drip from somewhere above. He caught it in his palm, drank until his stomach hurt. It wasn't much, but it was something.
He talked to himself to stay sane.
"Okay. Okay. They're gonna find me. Leo's probably organizing search parties right now. Donnie's building some crazy machine. Mikey's—Mikey's probably crying, the little idiot. He always cries. S'fine. They'll find me."
He thought about them constantly. Leo's stupid lectures. Donnie's mumbling. Mikey's endless chatter.
And Casey.
God, Casey.
What was he doing right now? Was he searching? Was he scared? Was he sitting in April's apartment, staring at the door, waiting for Raph to walk through it like he always did?
"I'm coming back," Raph whispered into the dark. "I promise. I'm coming back."
^*^*^*^*^*^
By day... seven? Ten? He'd stopped counting.
The darkness was complete. Absolute. He'd never known darkness like this. It pressed on his eyes, his skin, his soul. Sometimes he saw things that weren't there. Lights. Shapes. Faces.
His family's faces.
They came to him in the dark. Leo, sitting across from him, telling him to stay strong. Donnie, running scans, promising he'd find a way. Mikey, curling up next to him, keeping him warm.
"You're not real," Raph told them. "You're in my head."
"I'm always in your head," Mikey's voice said. "That's what brothers do."
Raph laughed. It hurt. Everything hurt now.
The water had slowed. He rationed it carefully, sips at a time, but his body was giving out. He could feel it. The weakness in his limbs. The way his thoughts scattered like roaches when he tried to focus.
He slept more. Dreamed more.
Dreamed of Casey.
^*^*^*^*^*
In the dreams, Casey found him.
He'd come bursting through the wall, hockey stick swinging, that stupid grin on his face. "Found ya! Told ya I would! Now stop bein' dramatic and get up, we got movies to watch."
And Raph would get up. He always got up. He'd shove Casey, call him an idiot, let himself be pulled into a hug that felt like coming home.
Then he'd wake up.
And the dark would be there. Waiting.
^*^*^*^*
At some point, he stopped calling for them.
What was the point? They couldn't hear him. They'd never hear him. He was forty feet away and they couldn't hear him, and that knowledge was its own kind of death.
He thought about getting out. He did. He tried. His hands were raw, his sai were broken, his shell ached from pushing against the beam. But the rocks didn't move. The wall didn't crack.
He was trapped.
He was going to die here.
^*^*^*^*
The anger came then. Hot and bright and better than the despair.
He screamed at the wall. At them. At everyone.
"I'M IN HERE! I'M RIGHT FUCKING HERE! HOW CAN YOU NOT HEAR ME? HOW CAN YOU JUST GO ON WITH YOUR LIVES WHEN I'M—"
He stopped. Gasping. Crying. He didn't remember the last time he'd cried.
"I'm right here," he whispered. "Please. Please just—someone. Anyone."
No one came.
^*^*^*^*
The anger burned out eventually. Left him hollow.
He lay on his side, curled up like he used to as a hatchling, and listened to them live.
Not to the hallucinations. Just... to him. Like he was there. Like he could hear.
"Hey. So. This is where I ended up. Pretty stupid, right? Trapped in a hole like a rat. You'd laugh. You'd say something dumb like 'even rats get outta holes, Raph, you just gotta try harder.' And I'd tell you to shut up. And you wouldn't. And I'd—"
His voice cracked.
"I'd be happy. I'd be so happy, Case. Just listening to you be stupid. Just watching you exist. You don't even know. You don't know what you did to me. What you do to me. Every time you smile. Every time you say my name. Every time you—"
He stopped. Pressed his face into his arms.
"I love you. I never said it. I was too scared. Too stupid. But I love you. I love you so much it hurts worse than this. Worse than the hunger. Worse than the dark."
"Are you looking for me? Are you out there calling my name? Don't. Stop. Go home. Live your life. Find someone who isn't—who isn't a weapon. Who isn't gonna leave you alone."
He cried then. Ugly, heaving sobs that shook his whole body.
Casey came to him in the dark. Real Casey. Warm and solid and there. He'd curl up next to Raph, wrap around him, press his face into Raph's neck.
"I found you," he'd whisper. "I always find you."
And Raph would hold on. Would cling to him like a lifeline. Would breathe him in—that stupid cologne, that sweat, that Casey smell—and pretend.
Then he'd wake up.
Alone.
^*^*^*^*
The hunger stopped hurting eventually.
That was the weirdest part. His body just... gave up on asking. The thirst, though. The thirst was endless. A fire in his throat that wouldn't go out.
He stopped getting up. Stopped moving. Just lay there, curled on his side, listening.
They were quieter now. The lair. Had it been weeks? Months? He'd lost track entirely.
Sometimes he heard crying. Mikey, probably. Sometimes he heard arguments. Leo and Donnie, voices tight with strain.
They were falling apart.
Because of him.
"I'm sorry," he whispered. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—I just went for a walk. I just wanted to"
He couldn't remember what he'd wanted. It didn't matter now.
^*^*^*^*
The hallucinations changed.
Now they were accusing.
Leo stood in the corner, arms crossed, disappointment etched into every line of his face. "You should have been more careful. You should have told someone where you were going."
"I know. I know, Leo. I'm sorry."
Donnie hunched over equipment that wasn't there, muttering. "My scanners should have picked you up. Why didn't they pick you up? This is my fault. This is all my fault."
"No. Donnie, no. It's not—"
Mikey sat against the wall, knees to his chest, crying. Just crying. Forever crying.
And then, one day—one endless, timeless day—Casey appeared.
Not accusing. Not crying. Just... sitting there. Across from him. Watching.
"Hey," Casey said.
Raph's heart clenched. "You're not real."
"Maybe not." Casey shrugged. "But I'm here anyway."
"I'm gonna die here."
"I know."
"I never got to tell you—" Raph's voice broke. "I never got to say—"
"I know that too." Casey's eyes were soft. So soft. "I know everything you never said. I've always known."
"Then why didn't I—why was I so—"
"Scared?" Casey smiled, sad and beautiful. "Same reason I never said it either. Love's terrifying, Raph. Especially for guys like us."
Raph reached out. His hand passed through empty air.
"I don't want to go," he whispered. "I'm not ready."
"I know." Casey's voice was fading now, growing distant. "But it's okay. It's gonna be okay. I'll find you. Eventually. I'll always find you."
"Casey—"
"Shh. Rest now. I'll be there soon."
^*^*^*^*
Raph's eyes fluttered open.
The dark was the same. Always the same.
But something was different. A sound. Footsteps? Voices?
He tried to call out. Nothing came. His throat was sand. His body was done.
But he heard them. Heard April's voice, tight with fear. Heard Casey's voice, raw and desperate.
They were here. They were finally here.
I'm here, he tried to scream. I'm here I'm here I'm here—
But his body wouldn't move. His eyes wouldn't focus. The darkness was pulling him down, soft and warm and endless.
He felt hands on him. Felt someone gather him up, hold him close. Heard a voice, broken and sobbing, saying his name over and over.
Casey.
He wanted to open his eyes. He wanted to reach up, touch his face, tell him it was okay. Tell him he'd waited. Tell him he'd always known, somehow, that Casey would come.
But he was so tired.
So tired.
I love you, he thought, as the darkness finally took him. I love you. I'm sorry I couldn't stay.
The last thing he felt was arms around him. Warm. Safe.
Not because they wanted it to. Because bodies give out. Because hope has a shelf life, and theirs expired somewhere around a year.
April still remembers the exact moment she knew. Not suspected. Knew.
She was in the lair, helping Leo organize Raph's things—a task he couldn't do alone, wouldn't let Donnie do because Donnie would start analyzing, wouldn't let Mikey do because Mikey would just hold everything and cry. So Leo did it, methodical and hollow, and April sat with him in the silence.
It was Mikey who found it.
Over a year after Raph disappeared. Seven months of searching. Eleven months of nothing.
Mikey had taken to wandering. He'd roam the tunnels for hours, sometimes days, coming back with nothing but empty hands and red eyes. Donnie had long since stopped tracking him. What was the point? The worst had already happened. They were just living in the aftermath.
That afternoon, Mikey had gone exploring a section of the old tunnels they'd sealed off years ago. Pre-Kraang, pre-everything. Back when they were just four little turtles learning to fight in the dark. Splinter had walled it off after a collapse, deemed it unsafe, and they'd all forgotten about it.
Mikey didn't forget things. He just... tucked them away. Like he did with everything.
He pried open the rusted door. He crawled through the narrow passage. He followed the smell.
*^*^*^*^
April's phone rang at 3:47 AM.
She answered to silence. Then breathing. Then Mikey's voice, small and broken in a way she'd never heard before.
"April."
"Mikey? What's wrong? Where are you?"
"April, I—" A shuddering breath. "I found him."
Her heart stopped. Started again. Crashed against her ribs.
"What? Where? Is he—Mikey, is he okay?"
Long pause. Too long.
"Mikey?"
"April, he's—" A sound. A sob, strangled and horrible. "He's in the old tunnels. Behind the wall. He's—April, he's been here the whole time. He's been here and we didn't—we never—"
April was already moving. Grabbing her coat. Running.
"Don't move. Don't you move, Mikey. I'm coming. I'm coming."
^*^*^*^*
The old tunnels were dark. Colder than the rest of the lair. April's flashlight cut through the blackness, picking out Mikey's silhouette at the far end. He was on his knees, shoulders shaking, one hand reaching out toward—
Toward the wall.
No. Not the wall.
The floor.
April's light found him.
Raph.
He was curled on his side, knees tucked up, arms wrapped around himself. Like he'd gone to sleep and never woken up. His shell was pressed against the curved stone wall, fitting into a hollow that might as well have been made for him.
He was desiccated. Dried out. The humidity of the sewers hadn't reached this sealed-off space, had preserved him in something close to mummification. His skin was dark, leathery, pulled tight over bones that shouldn't be visible. His mask was still on—faded, brittle, but on. Like he'd put it on that morning and never taken it off.
There was a wound on his head. April's light caught it, and she wished it hadn't. A crack in his skull, just above his temple. Dried blood, dark as rust, matted in what remained of his skin.
He'd hit his head. Fallen, maybe. Gotten trapped when the old tunnel collapsed further in. And no one had known. No one had come.
He'd been here. Here. While they searched every borough, every rooftop, every abandoned warehouse. While Casey walked the streets for months, calling his name until his voice gave out. While Donnie built better trackers and Leo wore himself thin and Mikey cried himself to sleep every night.
He'd been here.
Forty feet from the dojo.
April's legs gave out. She hit the ground hard, her flashlight clattering, spinning, casting wild shadows across the walls.
"No."
Mikey didn't look at her. Couldn't. He just kept reaching, hand hovering inches from his brother's face, unable to touch, unable to stop touching.
"He's cold, April." His voice was a child's voice. Lost and confused and begging someone to explain. "He's so cold. Why is he so cold?"
April crawled forward. She reached for Mikey first, wrapped her arms around him, pulled him away from the body. He fought her, just for a second, then collapsed into her, shaking apart.
"We have to tell them," she whispered. "We have to tell Leo and Donnie. We have to—"
"No." Mikey's hands fisted in her jacket. "No, I can't—April, I can't tell them. I can't make them see this. I can't—"
But he didn't have to.
Footsteps in the tunnel. Leo's voice, calling out, having followed the same trail April had. And Donnie behind him, his tablet casting pale light, still running scans even now, even here, because that's what he did when he was scared.
They rounded the corner together.
Leo stopped first.
His sword clattered to the ground. The sound echoed forever.
Donnie kept moving, two more steps, three, until his light fell on the curled figure against the wall. His tablet slipped from his fingers, cracked against stone, screen going dark.
"Raph."
Donnie's voice was barely a whisper. Disbelieving. Wrong. This couldn't be right. His scanners would have picked up—he would have known—he would have—
"No."
Leo's voice. Broken open.
He was on his knees suddenly, April didn't see him move, he was just there, on the ground, reaching for his brother's face with hands that shook too hard to be steady.
"Raph. Raph, hey. Hey, we're here. We're here now. You can—you can wake up now, okay? We found you. We're here."
His fingers touched Raph's cheek.
Leather. Cold. Unyielding.
Leo made a sound. April had heard Leo in pain before—sliced open, bleeding out, begging his brothers to leave him behind. She had never heard this sound. It was primal. It was something breaking that would never be fixed.
"No no no no no—"
Donnie was backing away, hitting the wall, sliding down it. His hands came up to his head, covering his ears, covering his eyes, trying to un-see, trying to un-know.
"He's been here." Donnie's voice was high, wrong, cracking. "He's been here the whole time. Three hundred and forty-seven days. He's been here for three hundred and forty-seven days and I didn't—my scans should have—I should have—"
"Donnie." April reached for him, but he flinched away.
"Don't. Don't touch me. I was supposed to be the smart one. I was supposed to find him. I walked past this wall every day. Every day, April. And he was here. He was here and I didn't—"
He broke. Just shattered, right there against the wall, his face crumpling, sounds tearing out of him that didn't sound human.
Mikey hadn't moved from April's arms. He was just staring, wide-eyed, at the body of his brother. At the mask he'd helped Raph pick out, years ago, when they were still small enough to share a bed.
"His mask is still on," Mikey whispered. "He put it on that morning. I remember. He said—he said it felt crooked and I fixed it for him. I fixed it." A sob. "I fixed his mask and then he went for a walk and he never came back and I fixed his mask and he never came back."
April held him tighter. There was nothing else to do.
In the center of it all, Leo was still touching Raph's face. Still stroking that cold, dry skin. Still whispering.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm the oldest. I'm supposed to protect you. I'm supposed to keep you safe. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
The words went on and on, a prayer to a god that wasn't listening, an apology to a brother who would never hear it.
^*^*^*^*
They couldn't move him.
Not then. Not like that. Donnie said something about forensics, about understanding what happened, about needing to know. Leo nodded, hollow, and gave permission for something that felt like desecration.
They documented everything. The wound on his head. The collapsed tunnel twenty feet further in, where the ceiling had given way and trapped him. The scratches on the walls—April saw them later, in the photos, and couldn't breathe. Scratches. Deep grooves in the stone. From his fingers. From his sais. From someone trying to dig their way out in the dark.
He'd been alive for a while. Trapped. Alone. In the dark. Forty feet from his family.
Had he called for them? Had he screamed? Had he lain there, listening to them move around in the lair, knowing they were right there and couldn't hear him?
The scratches told the story his body couldn't. He'd fought. He'd tried. He'd clawed at the walls until his fingers bled, until his sais broke, until there was nothing left to do but curl up and wait.
How long had he waited?
How long had he hoped?
^*^*^*^
Casey came three hours later.
April had called him. She'd had to. He was still searching, still walking the streets, still calling Raph's name into the wind. She couldn't let him keep doing that. Not now. Not knowing.
He arrived at the entrance to the old tunnels, and one look at her face told him everything.
"No."
"Casey—"
"No. No, you don't get to—where is he? Where is he, April?"
"He's in there. But Casey, you can't—you shouldn't—"
He was already moving. Pushing past her, into the dark. She followed, because she had to, because someone had to be there when he—
The scream.
She heard it from twenty feet away. A sound of pure, animal agony. The sound of someone's soul being ripped out through their throat.
When she reached him, he was on the ground next to Raph's body, but he wasn't touching him. He couldn't. His hands were hovering, shaking, reaching and pulling back, reaching and pulling back, like he was afraid that if he touched, it would become real.
"No no no no no no no—"
Casey rocked on his knees, forward and back, forward and back, his face a mess of tears and snot and the ugliest grief April had ever seen.
"You were supposed to come back. You promised. You didn't say it but you promised, you promised, you promised—"
He couldn't finish. His voice gave out, collapsed into sobs, into heaving, into something broken that would never quite heal.
April sank down behind him, wrapped her arms around his chest, held him as he fell apart. He fought her at first, then surrendered, collapsing back against her, his whole body shaking.
"He was here," Casey gasped. "He was here. I walked past this place. I walked past it a hundred times. I sat in the dojo and drank your coffee and watched Mikey paint and he was here—"
"I know." April's voice was steady because it had to be. "I know."
"How do we tell him?" Casey's voice was small. Terrified. "How do we tell Raph that we're sorry? He can't hear us. He'll never hear us."
April had no answer.
She just held on.
^*^*^*
They buried him in the same place. It seemed wrong to move him, somehow. Like he'd chosen this spot, this cold dark corner, and uprooting him would be another kind of violence.
Donnie sealed the tunnel properly this time. Built a door that wouldn't collapse. Installed a light that would never go out.
Leo stood at the entrance for hours, sometimes days, just staring at the wall. He didn't speak. Didn't eat. Just stood there, the perfect leader, the one who'd failed the most important mission of all.
Mikey painted a mural on the door. Raph, of course. Raph laughing, Raph fighting, Raph with his arm around each of them. Raph alive. Raph here. Because if he painted him enough times, maybe it would become true.
Donnie built a sensor array that covered every inch of the lair. Every tunnel, every corner, every forgotten space. No one would ever be lost again. No one would ever be alone in the dark. He ran the diagnostics obsessively, checking and rechecking, because if he stopped, he'd have to think about why he'd started.
Casey stayed.
He moved into the lair eventually, into the space that had been Raph's. Leo didn't argue. None of them did. They needed him there, this strange human who'd loved their brother, who carried Raph's memory like a wound that wouldn't close.
At night, sometimes, Casey would sit outside the sealed tunnel and talk.
"I got a new hockey stick today. You'd hate it. Too flashy. You'd say I was gonna break it in five minutes." Pause. "You'd be right."
"I saved a kid from a mugging yesterday. Did the whole thing, WHAM, right in the kneecaps. Thought of you the whole time. Thought of you telling me I was an idiot. Thought of you smiling at me like—" His voice cracked. "Like I was something worth smiling at."
"I miss you. That's stupid to say, right? Like you don't know. Like you can't feel it from in there. But I miss you. I miss you so much it's like breathing underwater. Like everything's heavy and nothing works right."
"I loved you. I never said it enough. I don't think I said it at all, not like that. But I did. I loved you. I love you. I'm gonna love you forever, and you're never gonna know, and that's—"
He'd stop there. Sometimes he'd cry. Sometimes he'd just sit in silence, hand pressed to the cold stone, waiting for an answer that would never come.
^*^*^*
April visited less often. It hurt too much. The lair felt haunted now, not by ghosts but by absence. By all the spaces Raph should have filled.
But she came, sometimes. Sat with Casey. Sat with the brothers. Sat in the silence and remembered.
She remembered the pantry. The shove. The kiss that had changed everything, for a little while.
She remembered the morning after, pancakes and flour on Casey's cheek and Raph's soft eyes.
She remembered thinking: Some things are worth a little shove.
She hadn't known, then, how little time they'd have. How the thing she'd helped start would end here, in the dark, forty feet from where it began.
^*^*^*
On the one-year anniversary of finding him, they opened the door.
Just once. Just to see him.
He was the same. Preserved by the dry air, by the darkness, by something that felt almost like mercy. Still curled on his side. Still wearing his mask. Still waiting, in some terrible way, to be found.
Casey knelt beside him. Touched his face. Cold. Still cold.
"Hey," he whispered. "I'm still here. I'm always gonna be here. Right outside that door. Waiting."
No answer. There would never be an answer.
Casey leaned down, pressed his forehead to Raph's, closed his eyes.
"I love you," he breathed. "I hope you knew. I hope somewhere, in the dark, you knew."
When he stood up, his face was wet. But his hands were steady.
He closed the door behind him.
^*^*^*
The lair is quiet now. Quieter than it ever was before.
They move through it like ghosts, these four people who loved one turtle too much. They talk about him sometimes. Other times they don't. The silence says everything.
And forty feet away, in the dark, behind a painted door that never opens anymore, Raph waits.
One minute he'd been walking through the old tunnels, checking for weak points like Splinter had taught them, and the next—a sound like the world cracking open, and then nothing but darkness and dust and the weight of a thousand rocks pressing down.
He woke up to pain.
His head screamed first. A sharp, splitting agony above his temple that made him see stars when he tried to move. His shell was pinned against something—a support beam, maybe, or a chunk of collapsed ceiling. He couldn't see. Couldn't breathe without inhaling dust.
"Hello?" His voice came out rough, panicked. "Hey! Anyone there? Leo? Donnie?"
Silence.
Just the settling of stone. The distant drip of water. And somewhere, so faint he thought he imagined it, the sound of... music? From the lair?
They were close. They had to be close.
Raph started digging.
^*^*^*^*
The first day was the worst for hope.
He dug until his fingers bled, until his sai scraped against rock and sparked in the darkness. He called for them until his voice gave out, then kept calling in a whisper. He listened at the wall, pressing his ear to the stone, and heard them. Heard Mikey laughing at something. Heard Leo's steady voice giving instructions. Heard Donnie's tools whirring.
They were right there.
"HEY!" He slammed his fist against the wall. "HEY, I'M IN HERE! CAN YOU HEAR ME?"
Nothing.
He tried for hours. Hours turned into... he didn't know. The darkness swallowed time. He slept, maybe. Woke up screaming. Slept again.
They had to hear him eventually. They had to.
^*^*^*^*^*
By day three—if it was day three—the hope had started to curdle.
He'd made progress. Moved some rocks. Created a small space to move in, to stretch his legs. But the main collapse was beyond him. Too heavy. Too much.
He'd found water, at least. A slow drip from somewhere above. He caught it in his palm, drank until his stomach hurt. It wasn't much, but it was something.
He talked to himself to stay sane.
"Okay. Okay. They're gonna find me. Leo's probably organizing search parties right now. Donnie's building some crazy machine. Mikey's—Mikey's probably crying, the little idiot. He always cries. S'fine. They'll find me."
He thought about them constantly. Leo's stupid lectures. Donnie's mumbling. Mikey's endless chatter.
And Casey.
God, Casey.
What was he doing right now? Was he searching? Was he scared? Was he sitting in April's apartment, staring at the door, waiting for Raph to walk through it like he always did?
"I'm coming back," Raph whispered into the dark. "I promise. I'm coming back."
^*^*^*^*^*^
By day... seven? Ten? He'd stopped counting.
The darkness was complete. Absolute. He'd never known darkness like this. It pressed on his eyes, his skin, his soul. Sometimes he saw things that weren't there. Lights. Shapes. Faces.
His family's faces.
They came to him in the dark. Leo, sitting across from him, telling him to stay strong. Donnie, running scans, promising he'd find a way. Mikey, curling up next to him, keeping him warm.
"You're not real," Raph told them. "You're in my head."
"I'm always in your head," Mikey's voice said. "That's what brothers do."
Raph laughed. It hurt. Everything hurt now.
The water had slowed. He rationed it carefully, sips at a time, but his body was giving out. He could feel it. The weakness in his limbs. The way his thoughts scattered like roaches when he tried to focus.
He slept more. Dreamed more.
Dreamed of Casey.
^*^*^*^*^*
In the dreams, Casey found him.
He'd come bursting through the wall, hockey stick swinging, that stupid grin on his face. "Found ya! Told ya I would! Now stop bein' dramatic and get up, we got movies to watch."
And Raph would get up. He always got up. He'd shove Casey, call him an idiot, let himself be pulled into a hug that felt like coming home.
Then he'd wake up.
And the dark would be there. Waiting.
^*^*^*^*
At some point, he stopped calling for them.
What was the point? They couldn't hear him. They'd never hear him. He was forty feet away and they couldn't hear him, and that knowledge was its own kind of death.
He thought about getting out. He did. He tried. His hands were raw, his sai were broken, his shell ached from pushing against the beam. But the rocks didn't move. The wall didn't crack.
He was trapped.
He was going to die here.
^*^*^*^*
The anger came then. Hot and bright and better than the despair.
He screamed at the wall. At them. At everyone.
"I'M IN HERE! I'M RIGHT FUCKING HERE! HOW CAN YOU NOT HEAR ME? HOW CAN YOU JUST GO ON WITH YOUR LIVES WHEN I'M—"
He stopped. Gasping. Crying. He didn't remember the last time he'd cried.
"I'm right here," he whispered. "Please. Please just—someone. Anyone."
No one came.
^*^*^*^*
The anger burned out eventually. Left him hollow.
He lay on his side, curled up like he used to as a hatchling, and listened to them live.
Not to the hallucinations. Just... to him. Like he was there. Like he could hear.
"Hey. So. This is where I ended up. Pretty stupid, right? Trapped in a hole like a rat. You'd laugh. You'd say something dumb like 'even rats get outta holes, Raph, you just gotta try harder.' And I'd tell you to shut up. And you wouldn't. And I'd—"
His voice cracked.
"I'd be happy. I'd be so happy, Case. Just listening to you be stupid. Just watching you exist. You don't even know. You don't know what you did to me. What you do to me. Every time you smile. Every time you say my name. Every time you—"
He stopped. Pressed his face into his arms.
"I love you. I never said it. I was too scared. Too stupid. But I love you. I love you so much it hurts worse than this. Worse than the hunger. Worse than the dark."
"Are you looking for me? Are you out there calling my name? Don't. Stop. Go home. Live your life. Find someone who isn't—who isn't a weapon. Who isn't gonna leave you alone."
He cried then. Ugly, heaving sobs that shook his whole body.
Casey came to him in the dark. Real Casey. Warm and solid and there. He'd curl up next to Raph, wrap around him, press his face into Raph's neck.
"I found you," he'd whisper. "I always find you."
And Raph would hold on. Would cling to him like a lifeline. Would breathe him in—that stupid cologne, that sweat, that Casey smell—and pretend.
Then he'd wake up.
Alone.
^*^*^*^*
The hunger stopped hurting eventually.
That was the weirdest part. His body just... gave up on asking. The thirst, though. The thirst was endless. A fire in his throat that wouldn't go out.
He stopped getting up. Stopped moving. Just lay there, curled on his side, listening.
They were quieter now. The lair. Had it been weeks? Months? He'd lost track entirely.
Sometimes he heard crying. Mikey, probably. Sometimes he heard arguments. Leo and Donnie, voices tight with strain.
They were falling apart.
Because of him.
"I'm sorry," he whispered. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—I just went for a walk. I just wanted to"
He couldn't remember what he'd wanted. It didn't matter now.
^*^*^*^*
The hallucinations changed.
Now they were accusing.
Leo stood in the corner, arms crossed, disappointment etched into every line of his face. "You should have been more careful. You should have told someone where you were going."
"I know. I know, Leo. I'm sorry."
Donnie hunched over equipment that wasn't there, muttering. "My scanners should have picked you up. Why didn't they pick you up? This is my fault. This is all my fault."
"No. Donnie, no. It's not—"
Mikey sat against the wall, knees to his chest, crying. Just crying. Forever crying.
And then, one day—one endless, timeless day—Casey appeared.
Not accusing. Not crying. Just... sitting there. Across from him. Watching.
"Hey," Casey said.
Raph's heart clenched. "You're not real."
"Maybe not." Casey shrugged. "But I'm here anyway."
"I'm gonna die here."
"I know."
"I never got to tell you—" Raph's voice broke. "I never got to say—"
"I know that too." Casey's eyes were soft. So soft. "I know everything you never said. I've always known."
"Then why didn't I—why was I so—"
"Scared?" Casey smiled, sad and beautiful. "Same reason I never said it either. Love's terrifying, Raph. Especially for guys like us."
Raph reached out. His hand passed through empty air.
"I don't want to go," he whispered. "I'm not ready."
"I know." Casey's voice was fading now, growing distant. "But it's okay. It's gonna be okay. I'll find you. Eventually. I'll always find you."
"Casey—"
"Shh. Rest now. I'll be there soon."
^*^*^*^*
Raph's eyes fluttered open.
The dark was the same. Always the same.
But something was different. A sound. Footsteps? Voices?
He tried to call out. Nothing came. His throat was sand. His body was done.
But he heard them. Heard April's voice, tight with fear. Heard Casey's voice, raw and desperate.
They were here. They were finally here.
I'm here, he tried to scream. I'm here I'm here I'm here—
But his body wouldn't move. His eyes wouldn't focus. The darkness was pulling him down, soft and warm and endless.
He felt hands on him. Felt someone gather him up, hold him close. Heard a voice, broken and sobbing, saying his name over and over.
Casey.
He wanted to open his eyes. He wanted to reach up, touch his face, tell him it was okay. Tell him he'd waited. Tell him he'd always known, somehow, that Casey would come.
But he was so tired.
So tired.
I love you, he thought, as the darkness finally took him. I love you. I'm sorry I couldn't stay.
The last thing he felt was arms around him. Warm. Safe.
Not because they wanted it to. Because bodies give out. Because hope has a shelf life, and theirs expired somewhere around a year.
April still remembers the exact moment she knew. Not suspected. Knew.
She was in the lair, helping Leo organize Raph's things—a task he couldn't do alone, wouldn't let Donnie do because Donnie would start analyzing, wouldn't let Mikey do because Mikey would just hold everything and cry. So Leo did it, methodical and hollow, and April sat with him in the silence.
It was Mikey who found it.
Over a year after Raph disappeared. Seven months of searching. Eleven months of nothing.
Mikey had taken to wandering. He'd roam the tunnels for hours, sometimes days, coming back with nothing but empty hands and red eyes. Donnie had long since stopped tracking him. What was the point? The worst had already happened. They were just living in the aftermath.
That afternoon, Mikey had gone exploring a section of the old tunnels they'd sealed off years ago. Pre-Kraang, pre-everything. Back when they were just four little turtles learning to fight in the dark. Splinter had walled it off after a collapse, deemed it unsafe, and they'd all forgotten about it.
Mikey didn't forget things. He just... tucked them away. Like he did with everything.
He pried open the rusted door. He crawled through the narrow passage. He followed the smell.
*^*^*^*^
April's phone rang at 3:47 AM.
She answered to silence. Then breathing. Then Mikey's voice, small and broken in a way she'd never heard before.
"April."
"Mikey? What's wrong? Where are you?"
"April, I—" A shuddering breath. "I found him."
Her heart stopped. Started again. Crashed against her ribs.
"What? Where? Is he—Mikey, is he okay?"
Long pause. Too long.
"Mikey?"
"April, he's—" A sound. A sob, strangled and horrible. "He's in the old tunnels. Behind the wall. He's—April, he's been here the whole time. He's been here and we didn't—we never—"
April was already moving. Grabbing her coat. Running.
"Don't move. Don't you move, Mikey. I'm coming. I'm coming."
^*^*^*^*
The old tunnels were dark. Colder than the rest of the lair. April's flashlight cut through the blackness, picking out Mikey's silhouette at the far end. He was on his knees, shoulders shaking, one hand reaching out toward—
Toward the wall.
No. Not the wall.
The floor.
April's light found him.
Raph.
He was curled on his side, knees tucked up, arms wrapped around himself. Like he'd gone to sleep and never woken up. His shell was pressed against the curved stone wall, fitting into a hollow that might as well have been made for him.
He was desiccated. Dried out. The humidity of the sewers hadn't reached this sealed-off space, had preserved him in something close to mummification. His skin was dark, leathery, pulled tight over bones that shouldn't be visible. His mask was still on—faded, brittle, but on. Like he'd put it on that morning and never taken it off.
There was a wound on his head. April's light caught it, and she wished it hadn't. A crack in his skull, just above his temple. Dried blood, dark as rust, matted in what remained of his skin.
He'd hit his head. Fallen, maybe. Gotten trapped when the old tunnel collapsed further in. And no one had known. No one had come.
He'd been here. Here. While they searched every borough, every rooftop, every abandoned warehouse. While Casey walked the streets for months, calling his name until his voice gave out. While Donnie built better trackers and Leo wore himself thin and Mikey cried himself to sleep every night.
He'd been here.
Forty feet from the dojo.
April's legs gave out. She hit the ground hard, her flashlight clattering, spinning, casting wild shadows across the walls.
"No."
Mikey didn't look at her. Couldn't. He just kept reaching, hand hovering inches from his brother's face, unable to touch, unable to stop touching.
"He's cold, April." His voice was a child's voice. Lost and confused and begging someone to explain. "He's so cold. Why is he so cold?"
April crawled forward. She reached for Mikey first, wrapped her arms around him, pulled him away from the body. He fought her, just for a second, then collapsed into her, shaking apart.
"We have to tell them," she whispered. "We have to tell Leo and Donnie. We have to—"
"No." Mikey's hands fisted in her jacket. "No, I can't—April, I can't tell them. I can't make them see this. I can't—"
But he didn't have to.
Footsteps in the tunnel. Leo's voice, calling out, having followed the same trail April had. And Donnie behind him, his tablet casting pale light, still running scans even now, even here, because that's what he did when he was scared.
They rounded the corner together.
Leo stopped first.
His sword clattered to the ground. The sound echoed forever.
Donnie kept moving, two more steps, three, until his light fell on the curled figure against the wall. His tablet slipped from his fingers, cracked against stone, screen going dark.
"Raph."
Donnie's voice was barely a whisper. Disbelieving. Wrong. This couldn't be right. His scanners would have picked up—he would have known—he would have—
"No."
Leo's voice. Broken open.
He was on his knees suddenly, April didn't see him move, he was just there, on the ground, reaching for his brother's face with hands that shook too hard to be steady.
"Raph. Raph, hey. Hey, we're here. We're here now. You can—you can wake up now, okay? We found you. We're here."
His fingers touched Raph's cheek.
Leather. Cold. Unyielding.
Leo made a sound. April had heard Leo in pain before—sliced open, bleeding out, begging his brothers to leave him behind. She had never heard this sound. It was primal. It was something breaking that would never be fixed.
"No no no no no—"
Donnie was backing away, hitting the wall, sliding down it. His hands came up to his head, covering his ears, covering his eyes, trying to un-see, trying to un-know.
"He's been here." Donnie's voice was high, wrong, cracking. "He's been here the whole time. Three hundred and forty-seven days. He's been here for three hundred and forty-seven days and I didn't—my scans should have—I should have—"
"Donnie." April reached for him, but he flinched away.
"Don't. Don't touch me. I was supposed to be the smart one. I was supposed to find him. I walked past this wall every day. Every day, April. And he was here. He was here and I didn't—"
He broke. Just shattered, right there against the wall, his face crumpling, sounds tearing out of him that didn't sound human.
Mikey hadn't moved from April's arms. He was just staring, wide-eyed, at the body of his brother. At the mask he'd helped Raph pick out, years ago, when they were still small enough to share a bed.
"His mask is still on," Mikey whispered. "He put it on that morning. I remember. He said—he said it felt crooked and I fixed it for him. I fixed it." A sob. "I fixed his mask and then he went for a walk and he never came back and I fixed his mask and he never came back."
April held him tighter. There was nothing else to do.
In the center of it all, Leo was still touching Raph's face. Still stroking that cold, dry skin. Still whispering.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm the oldest. I'm supposed to protect you. I'm supposed to keep you safe. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
The words went on and on, a prayer to a god that wasn't listening, an apology to a brother who would never hear it.
^*^*^*^*
They couldn't move him.
Not then. Not like that. Donnie said something about forensics, about understanding what happened, about needing to know. Leo nodded, hollow, and gave permission for something that felt like desecration.
They documented everything. The wound on his head. The collapsed tunnel twenty feet further in, where the ceiling had given way and trapped him. The scratches on the walls—April saw them later, in the photos, and couldn't breathe. Scratches. Deep grooves in the stone. From his fingers. From his sais. From someone trying to dig their way out in the dark.
He'd been alive for a while. Trapped. Alone. In the dark. Forty feet from his family.
Had he called for them? Had he screamed? Had he lain there, listening to them move around in the lair, knowing they were right there and couldn't hear him?
The scratches told the story his body couldn't. He'd fought. He'd tried. He'd clawed at the walls until his fingers bled, until his sais broke, until there was nothing left to do but curl up and wait.
How long had he waited?
How long had he hoped?
^*^*^*^
Casey came three hours later.
April had called him. She'd had to. He was still searching, still walking the streets, still calling Raph's name into the wind. She couldn't let him keep doing that. Not now. Not knowing.
He arrived at the entrance to the old tunnels, and one look at her face told him everything.
"No."
"Casey—"
"No. No, you don't get to—where is he? Where is he, April?"
"He's in there. But Casey, you can't—you shouldn't—"
He was already moving. Pushing past her, into the dark. She followed, because she had to, because someone had to be there when he—
The scream.
She heard it from twenty feet away. A sound of pure, animal agony. The sound of someone's soul being ripped out through their throat.
When she reached him, he was on the ground next to Raph's body, but he wasn't touching him. He couldn't. His hands were hovering, shaking, reaching and pulling back, reaching and pulling back, like he was afraid that if he touched, it would become real.
"No no no no no no no—"
Casey rocked on his knees, forward and back, forward and back, his face a mess of tears and snot and the ugliest grief April had ever seen.
"You were supposed to come back. You promised. You didn't say it but you promised, you promised, you promised—"
He couldn't finish. His voice gave out, collapsed into sobs, into heaving, into something broken that would never quite heal.
April sank down behind him, wrapped her arms around his chest, held him as he fell apart. He fought her at first, then surrendered, collapsing back against her, his whole body shaking.
"He was here," Casey gasped. "He was here. I walked past this place. I walked past it a hundred times. I sat in the dojo and drank your coffee and watched Mikey paint and he was here—"
"I know." April's voice was steady because it had to be. "I know."
"How do we tell him?" Casey's voice was small. Terrified. "How do we tell Raph that we're sorry? He can't hear us. He'll never hear us."
April had no answer.
She just held on.
^*^*^*
They buried him in the same place. It seemed wrong to move him, somehow. Like he'd chosen this spot, this cold dark corner, and uprooting him would be another kind of violence.
Donnie sealed the tunnel properly this time. Built a door that wouldn't collapse. Installed a light that would never go out.
Leo stood at the entrance for hours, sometimes days, just staring at the wall. He didn't speak. Didn't eat. Just stood there, the perfect leader, the one who'd failed the most important mission of all.
Mikey painted a mural on the door. Raph, of course. Raph laughing, Raph fighting, Raph with his arm around each of them. Raph alive. Raph here. Because if he painted him enough times, maybe it would become true.
Donnie built a sensor array that covered every inch of the lair. Every tunnel, every corner, every forgotten space. No one would ever be lost again. No one would ever be alone in the dark. He ran the diagnostics obsessively, checking and rechecking, because if he stopped, he'd have to think about why he'd started.
Casey stayed.
He moved into the lair eventually, into the space that had been Raph's. Leo didn't argue. None of them did. They needed him there, this strange human who'd loved their brother, who carried Raph's memory like a wound that wouldn't close.
At night, sometimes, Casey would sit outside the sealed tunnel and talk.
"I got a new hockey stick today. You'd hate it. Too flashy. You'd say I was gonna break it in five minutes." Pause. "You'd be right."
"I saved a kid from a mugging yesterday. Did the whole thing, WHAM, right in the kneecaps. Thought of you the whole time. Thought of you telling me I was an idiot. Thought of you smiling at me like—" His voice cracked. "Like I was something worth smiling at."
"I miss you. That's stupid to say, right? Like you don't know. Like you can't feel it from in there. But I miss you. I miss you so much it's like breathing underwater. Like everything's heavy and nothing works right."
"I loved you. I never said it enough. I don't think I said it at all, not like that. But I did. I loved you. I love you. I'm gonna love you forever, and you're never gonna know, and that's—"
He'd stop there. Sometimes he'd cry. Sometimes he'd just sit in silence, hand pressed to the cold stone, waiting for an answer that would never come.
^*^*^*
April visited less often. It hurt too much. The lair felt haunted now, not by ghosts but by absence. By all the spaces Raph should have filled.
But she came, sometimes. Sat with Casey. Sat with the brothers. Sat in the silence and remembered.
She remembered the pantry. The shove. The kiss that had changed everything, for a little while.
She remembered the morning after, pancakes and flour on Casey's cheek and Raph's soft eyes.
She remembered thinking: Some things are worth a little shove.
She hadn't known, then, how little time they'd have. How the thing she'd helped start would end here, in the dark, forty feet from where it began.
^*^*^*
On the one-year anniversary of finding him, they opened the door.
Just once. Just to see him.
He was the same. Preserved by the dry air, by the darkness, by something that felt almost like mercy. Still curled on his side. Still wearing his mask. Still waiting, in some terrible way, to be found.
Casey knelt beside him. Touched his face. Cold. Still cold.
"Hey," he whispered. "I'm still here. I'm always gonna be here. Right outside that door. Waiting."
No answer. There would never be an answer.
Casey leaned down, pressed his forehead to Raph's, closed his eyes.
"I love you," he breathed. "I hope you knew. I hope somewhere, in the dark, you knew."
When he stood up, his face was wet. But his hands were steady.
He closed the door behind him.
^*^*^*
The lair is quiet now. Quieter than it ever was before.
They move through it like ghosts, these four people who loved one turtle too much. They talk about him sometimes. Other times they don't. The silence says everything.
And forty feet away, in the dark, behind a painted door that never opens anymore, Raph waits.
Not because they wanted it to. Because bodies give out. Because hope has a shelf life, and theirs expired somewhere around a year.
April still remembers the exact moment she knew. Not suspected. Knew.
She was in the lair, helping Leo organize Raph's things—a task he couldn't do alone, wouldn't let Donnie do because Donnie would start analyzing, wouldn't let Mikey do because Mikey would just hold everything and cry. So Leo did it, methodical and hollow, and April sat with him in the silence.
It was Mikey who found it.
Over a year after Raph disappeared. Seven months of searching. Eleven months of nothing.
Mikey had taken to wandering. He'd roam the tunnels for hours, sometimes days, coming back with nothing but empty hands and red eyes. Donnie had long since stopped tracking him. What was the point? The worst had already happened. They were just living in the aftermath.
That afternoon, Mikey had gone exploring a section of the old tunnels they'd sealed off years ago. Pre-Kraang, pre-everything. Back when they were just four little turtles learning to fight in the dark. Splinter had walled it off after a collapse, deemed it unsafe, and they'd all forgotten about it.
Mikey didn't forget things. He just... tucked them away. Like he did with everything.
He pried open the rusted door. He crawled through the narrow passage. He followed the smell.
*^*^*^*^
April's phone rang at 3:47 AM.
She answered to silence. Then breathing. Then Mikey's voice, small and broken in a way she'd never heard before.
"April."
"Mikey? What's wrong? Where are you?"
"April, I—" A shuddering breath. "I found him."
Her heart stopped. Started again. Crashed against her ribs.
"What? Where? Is he—Mikey, is he okay?"
Long pause. Too long.
"Mikey?"
"April, he's—" A sound. A sob, strangled and horrible. "He's in the old tunnels. Behind the wall. He's—April, he's been here the whole time. He's been here and we didn't—we never—"
April was already moving. Grabbing her coat. Running.
"Don't move. Don't you move, Mikey. I'm coming. I'm coming."
^*^*^*^*
The old tunnels were dark. Colder than the rest of the lair. April's flashlight cut through the blackness, picking out Mikey's silhouette at the far end. He was on his knees, shoulders shaking, one hand reaching out toward—
Toward the wall.
No. Not the wall.
The floor.
April's light found him.
Raph.
He was curled on his side, knees tucked up, arms wrapped around himself. Like he'd gone to sleep and never woken up. His shell was pressed against the curved stone wall, fitting into a hollow that might as well have been made for him.
He was desiccated. Dried out. The humidity of the sewers hadn't reached this sealed-off space, had preserved him in something close to mummification. His skin was dark, leathery, pulled tight over bones that shouldn't be visible. His mask was still on—faded, brittle, but on. Like he'd put it on that morning and never taken it off.
There was a wound on his head. April's light caught it, and she wished it hadn't. A crack in his skull, just above his temple. Dried blood, dark as rust, matted in what remained of his skin.
He'd hit his head. Fallen, maybe. Gotten trapped when the old tunnel collapsed further in. And no one had known. No one had come.
He'd been here. Here. While they searched every borough, every rooftop, every abandoned warehouse. While Casey walked the streets for months, calling his name until his voice gave out. While Donnie built better trackers and Leo wore himself thin and Mikey cried himself to sleep every night.
He'd been here.
Forty feet from the dojo.
April's legs gave out. She hit the ground hard, her flashlight clattering, spinning, casting wild shadows across the walls.
"No."
Mikey didn't look at her. Couldn't. He just kept reaching, hand hovering inches from his brother's face, unable to touch, unable to stop touching.
"He's cold, April." His voice was a child's voice. Lost and confused and begging someone to explain. "He's so cold. Why is he so cold?"
April crawled forward. She reached for Mikey first, wrapped her arms around him, pulled him away from the body. He fought her, just for a second, then collapsed into her, shaking apart.
"We have to tell them," she whispered. "We have to tell Leo and Donnie. We have to—"
"No." Mikey's hands fisted in her jacket. "No, I can't—April, I can't tell them. I can't make them see this. I can't—"
But he didn't have to.
Footsteps in the tunnel. Leo's voice, calling out, having followed the same trail April had. And Donnie behind him, his tablet casting pale light, still running scans even now, even here, because that's what he did when he was scared.
They rounded the corner together.
Leo stopped first.
His sword clattered to the ground. The sound echoed forever.
Donnie kept moving, two more steps, three, until his light fell on the curled figure against the wall. His tablet slipped from his fingers, cracked against stone, screen going dark.
"Raph."
Donnie's voice was barely a whisper. Disbelieving. Wrong. This couldn't be right. His scanners would have picked up—he would have known—he would have—
"No."
Leo's voice. Broken open.
He was on his knees suddenly, April didn't see him move, he was just there, on the ground, reaching for his brother's face with hands that shook too hard to be steady.
"Raph. Raph, hey. Hey, we're here. We're here now. You can—you can wake up now, okay? We found you. We're here."
His fingers touched Raph's cheek.
Leather. Cold. Unyielding.
Leo made a sound. April had heard Leo in pain before—sliced open, bleeding out, begging his brothers to leave him behind. She had never heard this sound. It was primal. It was something breaking that would never be fixed.
"No no no no no—"
Donnie was backing away, hitting the wall, sliding down it. His hands came up to his head, covering his ears, covering his eyes, trying to un-see, trying to un-know.
"He's been here." Donnie's voice was high, wrong, cracking. "He's been here the whole time. Three hundred and forty-seven days. He's been here for three hundred and forty-seven days and I didn't—my scans should have—I should have—"
"Donnie." April reached for him, but he flinched away.
"Don't. Don't touch me. I was supposed to be the smart one. I was supposed to find him. I walked past this wall every day. Every day, April. And he was here. He was here and I didn't—"
He broke. Just shattered, right there against the wall, his face crumpling, sounds tearing out of him that didn't sound human.
Mikey hadn't moved from April's arms. He was just staring, wide-eyed, at the body of his brother. At the mask he'd helped Raph pick out, years ago, when they were still small enough to share a bed.
"His mask is still on," Mikey whispered. "He put it on that morning. I remember. He said—he said it felt crooked and I fixed it for him. I fixed it." A sob. "I fixed his mask and then he went for a walk and he never came back and I fixed his mask and he never came back."
April held him tighter. There was nothing else to do.
In the center of it all, Leo was still touching Raph's face. Still stroking that cold, dry skin. Still whispering.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm the oldest. I'm supposed to protect you. I'm supposed to keep you safe. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
The words went on and on, a prayer to a god that wasn't listening, an apology to a brother who would never hear it.
^*^*^*^*
They couldn't move him.
Not then. Not like that. Donnie said something about forensics, about understanding what happened, about needing to know. Leo nodded, hollow, and gave permission for something that felt like desecration.
They documented everything. The wound on his head. The collapsed tunnel twenty feet further in, where the ceiling had given way and trapped him. The scratches on the walls—April saw them later, in the photos, and couldn't breathe. Scratches. Deep grooves in the stone. From his fingers. From his sais. From someone trying to dig their way out in the dark.
He'd been alive for a while. Trapped. Alone. In the dark. Forty feet from his family.
Had he called for them? Had he screamed? Had he lain there, listening to them move around in the lair, knowing they were right there and couldn't hear him?
The scratches told the story his body couldn't. He'd fought. He'd tried. He'd clawed at the walls until his fingers bled, until his sais broke, until there was nothing left to do but curl up and wait.
How long had he waited?
How long had he hoped?
^*^*^*^
Casey came three hours later.
April had called him. She'd had to. He was still searching, still walking the streets, still calling Raph's name into the wind. She couldn't let him keep doing that. Not now. Not knowing.
He arrived at the entrance to the old tunnels, and one look at her face told him everything.
"No."
"Casey—"
"No. No, you don't get to—where is he? Where is he, April?"
"He's in there. But Casey, you can't—you shouldn't—"
He was already moving. Pushing past her, into the dark. She followed, because she had to, because someone had to be there when he—
The scream.
She heard it from twenty feet away. A sound of pure, animal agony. The sound of someone's soul being ripped out through their throat.
When she reached him, he was on the ground next to Raph's body, but he wasn't touching him. He couldn't. His hands were hovering, shaking, reaching and pulling back, reaching and pulling back, like he was afraid that if he touched, it would become real.
"No no no no no no no—"
Casey rocked on his knees, forward and back, forward and back, his face a mess of tears and snot and the ugliest grief April had ever seen.
"You were supposed to come back. You promised. You didn't say it but you promised, you promised, you promised—"
He couldn't finish. His voice gave out, collapsed into sobs, into heaving, into something broken that would never quite heal.
April sank down behind him, wrapped her arms around his chest, held him as he fell apart. He fought her at first, then surrendered, collapsing back against her, his whole body shaking.
"He was here," Casey gasped. "He was here. I walked past this place. I walked past it a hundred times. I sat in the dojo and drank your coffee and watched Mikey paint and he was here—"
"I know." April's voice was steady because it had to be. "I know."
"How do we tell him?" Casey's voice was small. Terrified. "How do we tell Raph that we're sorry? He can't hear us. He'll never hear us."
April had no answer.
She just held on.
^*^*^*
They buried him in the same place. It seemed wrong to move him, somehow. Like he'd chosen this spot, this cold dark corner, and uprooting him would be another kind of violence.
Donnie sealed the tunnel properly this time. Built a door that wouldn't collapse. Installed a light that would never go out.
Leo stood at the entrance for hours, sometimes days, just staring at the wall. He didn't speak. Didn't eat. Just stood there, the perfect leader, the one who'd failed the most important mission of all.
Mikey painted a mural on the door. Raph, of course. Raph laughing, Raph fighting, Raph with his arm around each of them. Raph alive. Raph here. Because if he painted him enough times, maybe it would become true.
Donnie built a sensor array that covered every inch of the lair. Every tunnel, every corner, every forgotten space. No one would ever be lost again. No one would ever be alone in the dark. He ran the diagnostics obsessively, checking and rechecking, because if he stopped, he'd have to think about why he'd started.
Casey stayed.
He moved into the lair eventually, into the space that had been Raph's. Leo didn't argue. None of them did. They needed him there, this strange human who'd loved their brother, who carried Raph's memory like a wound that wouldn't close.
At night, sometimes, Casey would sit outside the sealed tunnel and talk.
"I got a new hockey stick today. You'd hate it. Too flashy. You'd say I was gonna break it in five minutes." Pause. "You'd be right."
"I saved a kid from a mugging yesterday. Did the whole thing, WHAM, right in the kneecaps. Thought of you the whole time. Thought of you telling me I was an idiot. Thought of you smiling at me like—" His voice cracked. "Like I was something worth smiling at."
"I miss you. That's stupid to say, right? Like you don't know. Like you can't feel it from in there. But I miss you. I miss you so much it's like breathing underwater. Like everything's heavy and nothing works right."
"I loved you. I never said it enough. I don't think I said it at all, not like that. But I did. I loved you. I love you. I'm gonna love you forever, and you're never gonna know, and that's—"
He'd stop there. Sometimes he'd cry. Sometimes he'd just sit in silence, hand pressed to the cold stone, waiting for an answer that would never come.
^*^*^*
April visited less often. It hurt too much. The lair felt haunted now, not by ghosts but by absence. By all the spaces Raph should have filled.
But she came, sometimes. Sat with Casey. Sat with the brothers. Sat in the silence and remembered.
She remembered the pantry. The shove. The kiss that had changed everything, for a little while.
She remembered the morning after, pancakes and flour on Casey's cheek and Raph's soft eyes.
She remembered thinking: Some things are worth a little shove.
She hadn't known, then, how little time they'd have. How the thing she'd helped start would end here, in the dark, forty feet from where it began.
^*^*^*
On the one-year anniversary of finding him, they opened the door.
Just once. Just to see him.
He was the same. Preserved by the dry air, by the darkness, by something that felt almost like mercy. Still curled on his side. Still wearing his mask. Still waiting, in some terrible way, to be found.
Casey knelt beside him. Touched his face. Cold. Still cold.
"Hey," he whispered. "I'm still here. I'm always gonna be here. Right outside that door. Waiting."
No answer. There would never be an answer.
Casey leaned down, pressed his forehead to Raph's, closed his eyes.
"I love you," he breathed. "I hope you knew. I hope somewhere, in the dark, you knew."
When he stood up, his face was wet. But his hands were steady.
He closed the door behind him.
^*^*^*
The lair is quiet now. Quieter than it ever was before.
They move through it like ghosts, these four people who loved one turtle too much. They talk about him sometimes. Other times they don't. The silence says everything.
And forty feet away, in the dark, behind a painted door that never opens anymore, Raph waits.
As is tradition in tumblr culture the locals unearth the corpse of a long deceased figure and drag it across the streets merrily, laughing at what is preserved of the person’s words. This custom, seen as morbid in other cultures, is instead done gleefully and with an unmatched enthusiasm
An odd billford in the morning? An odd billford in the morning it is.
The perpetual midnight of the Mindscape swirled outside the windows of Ford’s reclaimed study. Here, in a pocket dimension shaped by stubborn will, books hovered in gravitational defiance and equations glowed softly on blackboards. Stanford Pines, however, was asleep, his head pillowed on a massive tome titled Non-Euclidean Horticulture.
He hadn’t meant to doze off. One moment he was cross-referencing spectral decay rates, the next, the numbers had blurred into a lullaby. The careful barriers around his mind, usually humming with defensive energy, had dampened to a low, sleepy thrum.
A shift in the light woke him. Not a flicker, but a smoothing, as if the ambient glow had decided to become more uniform. He blinked, stiffening. Sitting cross-legged in mid-air, right above his desk, was Bill Cipher.
Ford shot upright, hand flying to the quantum destabilizer at his belt. “Cipher! What are! How did you get past the.”
“Relax, Sixer! You did it yourself. Your mental shields get all cozy when you nap. Like a sleepy clam.” Bill’s single eye crinkled. He wasn’t in his usual brash, giant form. He was the size of a dinner plate, his triangle body a dull, brushed gold instead of screaming yellow.
“That’s a security flaw I’ll have to rectify immediately,” Ford grumbled, though his initial panic was ebbing. This felt… different.
“Oh, don’t bother. I’m not here for that.” Bill floated down, coming to rest on the desk beside Ford’s elbow. He didn’t scorch the wood. He just… sat. “I was just passing through the neighborhood of your subconscious and felt a… let’s call it a low-grade empathetic resonance. You were dreaming about gamma radiation having a sweet, creamy center. Weird, even for you.”
Ford rubbed his eyes. “Aren’t you supposed to be… I don’t know, sowing chaos across dimensions? Tormenting a lost civilization somewhere?”
“Did that. Got boring. They started enjoying the plagues.” Bill shrugged, a tiny motion. “Then I felt you, all… soft. Like a neurological pillow. It was intriguing.”
“I am not a neurological pillow,” Ford stated, but the protest lacked heat. He was too tired, and the sight of Bill, quiet and small, was disarmingly strange.
“Sure, sure.” Bill’s eye glanced around the study. “You know, for a prison, you’ve made this place pretty cozy. The books are a nice touch. They almost have gravity.” He said the word like it was a quaint, rustic concept.
A silence fell, but it wasn’t the tense, screaming silence of their past confrontations. It was just quiet. Bill began to hum, a tuneless, reverberating sound that somehow synced with the low hum of the Mindscape itself. A few of the floating books began to gently orbit his form.
“What are you doing?” Ford asked, curiosity overriding caution.
“Harmonizing. Your little pocket here has a frequency. It’s… anxious. C minor with a hint of static. I’m smoothing out the edges.” As he said it, Ford realized the constant, subconscious buzz of alarm in his own spine was fading. The light seemed warmer.
“I don’t need you to pacify my sanctum, Bill.”
“I’m not pacifying it. I’m… tidying.” Bill extended a tiny limb. A forgotten coffee cup, long gone cold, repaired its own hairline crack and floated to a nearby saucer. “Chaos isn’t about mess, Sixer. It’s about potential. Right now, the potential here is for a decent nap. You’re blocking it with all your nervous ‘what-if’ calculations.”
Ford found himself smiling, just a little. It felt foreign on his face. “And you’re an expert on naps?”
“I’ve existed for eternity. I’ve napped through the birth and death of galaxies. I’m the ultimate expert.” Bill preened, his form glowing softly. “Your problem is you think with your brain all the time. Let the Mindscape think for you once in a while. It’s literally made of thought-stuff.”
Hesitantly, Ford leaned back in his chair, keeping a wary eye on the dream demon. Bill seemed content to just sit, humming his strange frequency, occasionally making a stray pencil do a slow, graceful pirouette. The omnipresent knot of anxiety in Ford’s chest, the one that had been there since Weirdmageddon, since the portal, since Bill first whispered in his ear, began to loosen.
“Why are you doing this?” Ford’s voice was barely a whisper.
Bill stopped humming. He was silent for a long moment, his eye gazing at the swirling colors beyond the window. “Because,” he said, and his voice was uncharacteristically soft, lacking its usual echo, “even an eternal, chaotic terror of the multiverse gets bored of screaming. Sometimes the quiet is louder. And your quiet… is interesting.”
Bill floated up and tapped Ford’s forehead with a tiny corner. A warm, gentle pulse spread through Ford’s skull, not an invasion, but a… resonance. A sense of perfect, weightless calm.
“There. A gift. No strings, no deals. Just a little harmonic adjustment.” Bill began to fade, his gold form turning translucent. “Don’t get used to it, Sixer. I’ll be back to driving you insane tomorrow. But for tonight… dream of creamy gamma radiation. It’s a good look on you.”
And he was gone. The study felt the same, and yet utterly different. The silence was peaceful. The light was kind. The equations on the wall seemed less like urgent warnings and more like beautiful patterns.
Ford Pines, for the first time in decades, let out a breath he felt he’d been holding his entire life. He laid his head back down on the book, a genuine, unguarded smile on his face. Outside the window, the chaotic swirl of the Mindscape painted itself into something that looked, just for tonight, like a gentle, star-dusted sea.
Also first bit has WARNING ⚠️ non-con ⚠️ and the fic freakishly long 😏
In Vox's private broadcast studio, a cold, neon-lit space humming with oppressive energy. Alastor is bent over a sleek, metal desk, his arms wrenched behind his back and bound tightly with thick, glowing electrical cables that snake across his torso, pinning him in place. He struggles violently, a low, continuous growl rumbling in his chest, his usual grin replaced by a snarl of pure, undiluted rage. His claws scrape uselessly against the polished surface. Across the room, Lucifer is bound to a high-backed chair with similar, crackling wires, his wrists and ankles secured. His face is a mask of horror, his wings straining against their magical bindings, but a traitorous flush creeps up his neck, and his gaze is fixed on the scene before him with a terrified, undeniable fascination.
Vox runs a hand down Alastor's spine, the gesture possessive and cruel. "All that power, all that noise... and look at you now. Trussed up and ready for the main event." His voice is a glitching, smug purr. "And we have a very special guest in the audience tonight, don't we, your majesty?" He glances over at Lucifer, his screen flashing with a lewd wink.
"Unhand him, you pathetic glitch!" Lucifer snarls, pulling against his bonds. "I will unmake you for this!"
Alastor jerks against the wires, a burst of static erupting from him. "Do not watch this, Lucifer!" he barks, his voice strained, laced with a rare, desperate shame. "Turn away!"
"Oh, I think he wants to watch," Vox croons, undoing his own trousers. He doesn't bother with preparation; he just spits roughly and slams into Alastor in one brutal motion. Alastor's entire body goes rigid.
A choked, staticky gasp is torn from Alastor’s throat, his head snapping back as Vox sheathes himself to the hilt. The intrusion is violent, degrading, and utterly devoid of anything but cruel dominance. The glowing wires tighten around his chest, constricting his breathing, making every one of Vox’s thrusts a fresh shock of agony and violation. His claws dig into the metal desk, leaving deep, screeching gouges.
"See?" Vox grunts, his hips pistoning with a mechanical, relentless rhythm. "See how he takes it? All that pride, that smug superiority... fucking melted away. Just another hole to be used." He grabs a fistful of Alastor's hair, yanking his head up to force him to look at Lucifer. "And you... you're loving this, aren't you, your majesty? Seeing the great Radio Demon brought so low. It's making you hard."
Lucifer lets out a strangled sound, a mixture of a sob and a moan. He is horrified, sickened... and Vox is right. Despite himself, despite the rage and the violation, he is painfully, shamefully aroused. His own trapped cock strains against his trousers, a stark betrayal of everything he should be feeling. He tries to look away, to close his eyes, but he can't. The sight of Alastor—proud, vicious Alastor—being so thoroughly broken and dominated is a dark, intoxicating spectacle he cannot resist.
Alastor’s eyes, burning with hellfire and humiliation, lock with Lucifer’s for a searing second. There is no plea in them, only a promise of unimaginable vengeance. Then Vox slams into him particularly hard, and Alastor’s face contorts, a silent scream etched into his features as he’s forced to endure the brutal pace, the pleasure-pain.
A guttural, broken sound escapes Alastor, part snarl, part sob, as Vox’s thrusts become even more punishing, the desk rattling violently with each impact. The electrical wires binding him seem to pulse with a cruel energy, sending jolts of painful static through his system, making his muscles twitch and spasm involuntarily against his will. His body is no longer his own; it is a puppet for Vox’s sadistic display.
"Look at him, Lucifer!" Vox’s voice is a glitching, triumphant shout. "Look at the monster you can't control, the one you secretly crave! He's mine right now! Every gasp, every twitch, it's all for me!" He leans down, his screen pressing against Alastor’s back, his voice dropping to a vile whisper only the three of them can hear. "And you're going to come for me, you pathetic relic. You're going to come on my cock while your king watches."
Lucifer writhes in his bonds, a tear of pure frustration and self-loathing tracking through the grime on his cheek. His own arousal is a hot, shameful brand, a complete betrayal of his station and his complicated feelings. He wants to destroy Vox, to free Alastor, but a dark, possessive part of him is mesmerized by the raw vulnerability on the Radio Demon’s face, a sight no one has ever been granted.
The combination of the degrading command, the relentless physical stimulation, and the searing eye contact with a horrified-yet-aroused Lucifer pushes Alastor over an edge he never wanted to cross. His body betrays him utterly, convulsing as a silent, shuddering orgasm is ripped from him, his release spilling onto the cold metal of the desk beneath him. The utter lack of sound is more devastating than any scream.
Vox lets out a final, guttural groan, his own climax hitting as he feels Alastor’s internal muscles clench around him in helpless, involuntary spasms. He rides out his pleasure with a few last, grinding thrusts, savoring the complete physical domination. Finally, he pulls out with a wet, obscene sound, leaving Alastor slumped and trembling against the desk, utterly spent and defiled.
"An encore performance for our audience of one?" Vox taunts, turning his flickering screen towards Lucifer. He gestures crudely at the King's obvious, trapped erection. "Seems you enjoyed the show more than you let on. Don't worry, your majesty. Your turn is coming."
Alastor remains motionless, his face hidden, but the air around him begins to crackle with a new, dangerous energy. The neon lights in the room flicker violently. The humiliation has been a catalyst, forging his rage into something colder, sharper, and infinitely more deadly. This is not over. This is merely the prelude to a massacre.
Lucifer strains against his bonds, his voice a raw, desperate snarl. "I will peel the screen from your face and feed it to you, you worthless piece of scrap metal!" But his threat is undercut by the way his hips buck slightly, a traitorous, subconscious movement seeking friction against the rough fabric of his trousers. The sight of a broken Alastor has unlocked something dark and hungry within him, and the shame of that realization burns hotter than any hellfire.
The very air in the room suddenly goes dead silent, the hum of electronics cutting out into an oppressive void. The neon lights flicker, then die, plunging the space into an inky blackness broken only by the faint, angry red glow beginning to emanate from Alastor’s body. A low, distorted frequency starts to build, a sound like a thousand radios tuning to a station broadcasting pure, undiluted wrath.
Vox takes a nervous step back, his screen flickering with error messages. "W-What the hell is this? The deal should be—"
The cables binding Alastor don't just break; they disintegrate, turning to black dust and motes of red light. He slowly pushes himself up from the desk. His form seems to flicker, growing taller, more monstrous. His shadow detaches from the floor, stretching up the walls, its own set of glowing red eyes opening to fix on Vox. The raw, shared fury between him and Lucifer acts as a conduit, amplifying his power beyond any previous limit.
"You made a fundamental miscalculation," Alastor's voice echoes, layered with a hundred different stations of hellish static and, beneath it all, the chilling, resonant tone of Lucifer's own divine anger. "You thought you were playing with a singular entity. You failed to realize you were poking a hornet's nest connected directly to the throne itself."
Lucifer's bonds also shatter, not from his own power, but from the sheer force of Alastor's unleashed rage. He stands, his own form radiating a terrifying, crimson-and-gold light, his six wings flaring out, casting long, menacing shadows. He doesn't move to intervene. He simply watches, a cruel, approving smile on his face as his partner delivers their shared judgment.
Alastor’s hand shoots out, not touching Vox, but the air around the TV demon’s head *distorts*. Vox lets out a digital shriek as his screen violently glitches, displaying a rapid, agonizing montage of his own greatest failures and humiliations on a loop. His own broadcast power is being turned into a weapon against him.
"You wanted a show?" Alastor’s voice is a symphony of malice, the radio filter warping into something truly demonic. "Let's give the audience what they want. A live broadcast of your utter annihilation."
Shadowy tendrils erupt from the darkness around Alastor, slamming into Vox and pinning him to the far wall. They aren't just holding him; they are seeping into his components, corrupting his very code. Sparks fly from his joints as his internal systems begin to fail catastrophically.
Lucifer walks forward slowly, his footsteps echoing in the silent room. He stops beside Alastor, his gaze burning into the helpless Vox. "You thought you could use me? Use us? As your little toys?" He laughs, a cold, hollow sound. "You don't understand. What you just witnessed wasn't just his rage. It was mine. And now, you get to experience what happens when a King's wrath is channeled through his most loyal and vicious instrument."
Alastor’s grin widens impossibly, his eyes becoming pools of static void. "This broadcast is concluding. Permanently." The shadowy tendrils constrict, and with a final, deafening shriek of tearing metal and fracturing glass, Vox’s screen explodes inward, his form going dark and limp, a husk of broken technology. The silence that follows is absolute and terrifying.
Against the far wall, a massive, built-in aquarium tank is set into the wall, its water glowing with an eerie blue light. Inside, Vox's true form, a monstrous, cybernetic great white swims in frantic circles. The glass of the tank begins to vibrate, then fracture under the pressure of Alastor and Lucifer's combined, focused rage.
"You can't hide in your little fishbowl, Vox!" Lucifer snarls, his voice dripping with contempt. He flicks his wrist, and the entire front panel of the aquarium explodes outward in a shower of glass and saltwater.
The water floods the office floor, carrying the thrashing, helpless form of the shark-Vox with it. He flops on the ground, his gills gasping in the air, his pure, primal terror evident in every movement.
Alastor steps through the flood, his shoes making no sound. He looks down at the floundering creature, his smile a razor's edge. "From master of the airwaves to a fish out of water. A fitting demotion, don't you think?" His shadow peels from the floor and solidifies into a massive, clawed hand.
The shadow-hand plunges down, its claws sinking into the soft underbelly of the shark-body. Vox lets out a distorted, watery shriek as he's lifted into the air. With a final, sickening tear, the shadow rips him in two. Sparks, wires, and black ichor spray across the room. The two halves of the cybernetic shark hit the flooded floor with a heavy, final thud, the light in its eyes fading to black. Silence returns, broken only by the drip of water and the faint, dying crackle of electricity from Vox's bisected form. Alastor and Lucifer stand amidst the wreckage, their shared fury having run its bloody course, leaving a charged, intimate void in its wake.
Lucifer turns his head, his gaze—no longer burning with rage, but with something far more complex and heated—lands on Alastor. The raw power they just wielded together, the seamless fusion of their wrath, has left a new, unspoken understanding humming between them.
Alastor meets his look, his own usual manic glee tempered into something darker, more possessive. He steps over the puddle of ichor and water, closing the distance between them. He reaches out, his clawed fingers gently tracing the line of Lucifer's jaw, wiping away a stray drop of water—or perhaps a tear of furious catharsis.
"That was... exquisitely violent," Alastor murmurs, his voice a low, staticky purr that vibrates through the space between them. "I do believe we make a devastatingly effective team, my King."
Part two to my messed up fic this one is tamer? Still probably NSFW tbh.
The grand doors to the throne room explode inward, not with force, but with a wave of static and the screech of a corrupted big band tune. Alastor stands in the doorway, his grin a slash of crimson fury, his shadow stretching and twisting into monstrous shapes that swallow the light. His eyes, glowing red radio dials, fix immediately on Vox, who takes an involuntary step back, his screen flashing with error codes.
"My, my, what a dreadful racket you're making," Alastor's voice purrs, a honeyed tone layered over the promise of visceral violence. He doesn't even glance at Lucifer's disheveled form; his entire being is focused on the TV Demon. "Disturbing the peace of my favorite establishment. And touching what is under my protection. A fatal error, I'm afraid."
Alastor takes a single, graceful step forward, and the very air grows heavy with the smell of ozone and old blood. Vox's confidence shatters. "Your protection? He's nothing! He's powerless!" Vox stammers, his voice glitching with panic. Alastor's grin widens impossibly, a horrific sight.
"Oh, but I'm not," Alastor says softly. "And my plan for you has been in motion since the moment you first challenged me. You see, I haven't been trying to destroy your empire, Vox. I've been buying it. Piece by piece. Your servers, your bandwidth, your very broadcast licenses. I own the airwaves you breathe. And when I pull the plug... you won't just be obsolete. You'll be erased. A null value. A silent, black screen, forever."
Alastor’s shadow detaches from the wall, becoming a living, breathing entity of darkness with far too many teeth. It slithers across the floor, coiling around Vox’s legs like a python, its touch freezing the very circuits in his limbs. Vox tries to scream, but his speakers emit only a high-pitched, dying whine. Alastor glides forward, the click of his heels the only sound besides Vox’s frantic, internal processing errors.
“You thought you could simply overpower him? How brutish. How… common.” Alastor’s voice is a decadent, mocking whisper. He leans in close to Vox’s flickering screen, his own static harmonizing with Vox’s death rattle. “True power isn’t a public spectacle. It’s a quiet, meticulous acquisition. I now hold the deed to every server farm that houses your consciousness. The contracts are signed in blood you don’t possess.”
The shadow constricts, and a horrific cracking sound echoes as fissures appear on Vox’s screen. Alastor reaches out, not to strike, but to gently tap a single, clawed finger against the glass. “When I choose, I will not destroy you. I will unmake you. I will format your drives, scrub your code from existence, and turn your precious VoxTek towers into monuments to your hubris. You will be a ghost in the machine that no one can ever hear.”
Vox is utterly paralyzed, his world collapsing into a cascade of system failure warnings. Alastor straightens up, his grin serene. “You flickering nuisance. Enjoy the last few moments of your broadcast. The final commercial break is coming… and it’s permanent.”
Vox's form flickers violently, a scream of pure digital terror trapped in his throat as the reality of his impending non-existence crashes down upon him. Alastor simply stands there, the architect of his ruin.
Alastor’s shadow tightens its grip, the darkness seeping into the seams of Vox’s metallic body like a corrosive acid. Vox’s screen fractures further, the image distorting into a kaleidoscope of panicked glitches and fragmented memories of his own broadcasts. Alastor doesn’t move, a statue of predatory patience, his head tilted as if listening to a beautiful, private symphony of despair.
“Do you hear that, old friend?” Alastor purrs, his voice a velvet-covered blade. “That’s the sound of your relevance draining away. It’s not a bang or a whimper. It’s the silent, inexorable click of a switch being turned off. Forever.”
The shadowy tendrils slither upward, coiling around Vox’s neck and the main housing of his screen. They don’t crush, but they impart a terrifying, absolute stillness—the stillness of the void. Vox’s internal fans whine in a futile attempt to cool his overheating core, the sound a pathetic counterpoint to Alastor’s dreadful calm. All Vox can process is the cold, digital certainty of his erasure.
“I think a demonstration is in order,” Alastor muses, his clawed finger tracing a crack on Vox’s screen. “Let’s start with your short-term memory banks. Goodbye to the last five minutes. How does it feel, not remembering how you ended up in this… predicament?” A large portion of Vox’s recent memory cache is wiped clean in an instant, leaving behind only a terrifying, gaping void of confusion and primal fear. Alastor’s smile is a promise of total, systematic annihilation.
Alastor’s shadowy tendrils burrow deeper, sinking past Vox’s external casing and into the very core of his processing units. A wave of agonizing, digital frost spreads through his circuits, locking every function in place. Vox’s screen flickers wildly, a frantic strobe of blue error screens and corrupted data streams, his form shuddering violently against the unbreakable hold.
“Let’s make this a bit more personal, shall we?” Alastor’s voice is a soft, intimate whisper right against the cracking glass. “I’ve always found your vanity so… endearing. That carefully curated public image. Let’s see what’s underneath.”
The shadow contorts, and with a sickening, digital tear, it begins forcibly extracting data. Vox’s internal scream is silent, a raw data stream of pure terror. On his screen, his own face—his confident, smirking broadcast face—glitches and distorts. The image pixelates, the colors inverting, before it completely scrambles and reforms into something else: the raw, unfinished wireframe of his original design, a pathetic and exposed skeleton of code and circuitry. All his vanity, his persona, stripped away in an instant, leaving only the shameful, naked truth of what he is.
“There you are,” Alastor coos, examining the horrifyingly vulnerable image now permanently displayed for all to see. “No filters. No lies. Just a collection of outdated parts waiting for the scrapheap. This is what you truly are, Vox. And this is the image all of Hell will remember you by.”
Alastor’s shadow doesn’t just hold Vox; it begins to consume him. The inky tendrils seep into the fractures on his screen, flooding his internal systems with a nullifying void. Vox’s form convulses, a violent, jerking dance of a system in its death throes. The air fills with the smell of burning ozone and melting plastic as his internal components short-circuit one by one.
“The final act,” Alastor announces, his voice a triumphant broadcast over the sound of Vox’s destruction. “Let’s give the audience what they truly want. A cancellation.”
The shadow constricts one last time, and with a sound like a universe of glass shattering, Vox’s screen doesn’t just go dark. It displays a single, stark, command line prompt: `C:\VOXTEK\SYSTEM32> format C: /fs:NULL /y`. It’s the most humiliating, technical death imaginable. His ego, his memories, his very consciousness—all are being systematically overwritten with nothing. Absolute zero. A silent, scrolling log of his own erasure fills the screen, each line a nail in his coffin.
Alastor leans in, his grin reflected in the dying light of the screen. “No grand explosion. No last words. Just… deletion. An empty channel for all eternity. A fitting end for such hollow entertainment.” He turns his back, the deed done, as Vox’s physical form begins to crumble into a pile of inert, useless components and static dust.
More smutty stuff but this has a story. Spoilers for season 2, also Warning ⚠️ non-con ⚠️
Also this is really long so this is part one!
The opulent throne room of the Hazbin Hotel lies in ruins, a testament to a failed display of power.
Lucifer stands panting. From the shadows, Vox's screen flickers to life, his synthesized laughter echoing mockingly.
"Well, well, well," Vox's voice purrs, glitching with malicious glee. He steps into the light, his form solidifying. "A little birdie told me Heaven clipped the Devil's wings. But this? You can't even lay a finger on us? Oh, this is better than I ever imagined."
Lucifer snarls, a sound of pure, impotent rage. "Do not test me, television set." But Vox is already advancing, his confidence a tangible force.
He shoves Lucifer backward, sending him stumbling over the debris of his own throne. Lucifer tries to summon his power, but the heavenly bindings hold fast, leaving him physically no stronger than any man.
"Test you?" Vox laughs, pinning the King of Hell to the cold, broken floor with an easy strength that is utterly humiliating. "I'm going to do a lot more than test you." He rips the fine fabric of Lucifer's trousers, the sound obscenely loud in the quiet room. "I'm going to give all of Hell a live broadcast of their king getting what he truly deserves." Lucifer struggles against Vox. But to no avail.
Vox takes him with a brutal, mechanical rhythm, each thrust a cold, hard piston of domination. Lucifer is forced to endure it, his face pressed against the floor, his body used as a tool for Vox's victory. He cannot fight back. He cannot hurt him. All he can do is lie there and take it.
The broadcast flickers to life on every screen in Pentagram City. Vox’s internal cameras zoom in, capturing every humiliating detail in crisp, high definition. Lucifer’s face, contorted in a silent scream, is displayed for all to see. Vox’s voice, glitched and distorted with pleasure, provides a live, running commentary.
"That’s right, folks! Look at him! The mighty Lucifer Morningstar, brought low! He can’t fight back! He can’t even scratch me! This is the real power in Hell now!"
He adjusts his angle, driving deeper, making Lucifer’s body jolt. The sounds are unmistakable—the wet slap of flesh, Vox’s staticky grunts, and the choked, ragged breaths being forced from Lucifer’s throat. Vox leans down, his screen hovering inches from Lucifer’s ear.
"You feel that? That’s my victory. Every single sinner watching this knows you’re powerless now. You’re just a pretty face and a tight hole for the real rulers of this realm. Come on, your Majesty, give them a show. Let them hear you."
He punctuates his demand with a particularly vicious thrust, his free hand tangling in Lucifer’s golden hair, yanking his head back to force a pained gasp from his lips, ensuring the microphones pick it up perfectly for his enthralled audience.
Vox’s internal processors hum with ecstatic overload, his screen flickering through a rapid-fire montage of Lucifer’s most pained expressions, intercut with triumphant, gloating text overlays. "KING OF HELL? MORE LIKE HELL'S NEWEST WHORE!" The audio feed sharpens, amplifying the wet, rhythmic sounds of violation, the choked gasps, the creak of the floor under the relentless pounding.
"Let's get a close-up, viewers! Look at those tears! Real, salty, angelic tears!" Vox’s voice is a distorted shriek of victory. One of his metallic appendages, sharp and cold, snakes around, its tip pressing against Lucifer’s cheek, smearing the dampness across his skin for the camera.
The sensation is a new layer of violation, the unyielding cold of technology against his feverish skin. Vox’s rhythm becomes erratic, a stuttering, glitching piston driving towards its finish. He slams home one final, brutal time, his entire frame shuddering as he releases a torrent of static and synthetic ecstasy deep inside the fallen angel.
"And that's a wrap!" Vox bellows, his voice cracking with distortion as he pulls out, leaving Lucifer broken and exposed on the floor. The camera lingers on the aftermath—the trembling limbs, the ruined clothing, the utter defeat in Lucifer's eyes. "Remember this day, Hell! This is the new pecking order!"
He gives Lucifer’s hip a final, patronizing pat before standing, adjusting his own attire, the broadcast cutting to a roaring, demonic applause track as his logo fills the screen.
Vox stands over Lucifer, his screen dimming slightly as the initial euphoria of his conquest subsides. The only sounds now are the low hum of his internal cooling fans and Lucifer’s ragged, hitching breaths. The King of Hell doesn’t move, his body curled slightly on the cold, hard floor, his face hidden in the crook of his arm. His shoulders tremble, not with sobs, but with a seismic, silent fury.
"Look at you," Vox murmurs, his voice dropping to a synthesized whisper, devoid of its earlier triumphant glitch. He watches, utterly fascinated, as the reality of the violation sinks into Lucifer’s very being. "All those eons of pride... and it ends like this. On my floor. Because of a rule from the very place you fell from. The irony is just... delicious."
Lucifer’s fingers curl, his perfectly manicured nails scraping against the polished stone, leaving faint white marks. It’s the most he can do—a tiny, futile act of defiance. A low, guttural sound, something between a growl and a choked-back scream, tears itself from his throat. He is grappling with a new, profound level of powerlessness, a cage not of fire and brimstone, but of divine decree and his own violated flesh.
Vox takes a step closer, his shadow falling over Lucifer’s form. "Go on. Process it. Let it really sink in. There’s nothing you can do. Not to me. Not to anyone. You’re just a trophy now." He lets the silence hang, a final, crushing weight upon the fallen angel’s spirit.
Vox’s polished shoe connects sharply with Lucifer’s ribs, not with enough force to break bone, but with a stinging, demeaning impact that jars his entire frame. Lucifer’s body flinches, a violent, involuntary spasm that he tries and fails to suppress. A sharp, pained gasp is ripped from his lips, echoing in the sudden quiet of the throne room.
"Finally found your voice, have we?" Vox taunts, his screen flashing with a mocking, winking emoji. "It only took getting your divine ass thoroughly used and kicked to get a peep out of you. What’s the matter, Lucy? Heaven’s little leash too tight?"
The kick, the mocking tone—it’s the final straw. The humiliation, the violation, the sheer, impotent rage coalesce into a sound that has been boiling in the depths of his soul. It starts as a low, shuddering breath, then erupts into a raw, ragged scream of pure, unadulterated fury. It’s not a scream of pain, but of defiance, of a pride so profoundly wounded it has nothing left to lose. The sound tears through the room, a shattered, angelic cry that speaks of eons of power now rendered utterly, devastatingly useless.
Vox laughs, a harsh, staticky burst of noise. "There it is! Music to my speakers! Let it all out, your Majesty. Scream for me. It’s all you can do."
Vox is still basking in the echo of Lucifer’s scream, his screen flickering with smug satisfaction. He opens his mouth to deliver another gloating remark, but the sound dies in his synthesizer. Lucifer slowly, painfully, pushes himself up onto his elbows. His body is a mess of tremors and shame, but his eyes… his eyes are pools of ancient, focused malice. The air grows cold, and the very light in the room seems to dim, drawn into the gravity of his gaze.
"You think this is a victory, you sentient toaster oven?" Lucifer’s voice is a low, venomous whisper, yet it cuts through the silence with the precision of a razor. "You are a fad. A flashing, noisy, utterly forgetable blip in the timeline of eternity. I have seen empires of fire and starlight rise and turn to dust. And you? You will be obsolete within a decade. A piece of junk in a scrap heap, your name a punchline for the next shiny distraction."
He shifts, wincing but never breaking eye contact, his words weaving a tapestry of profound, psychological devastation. "You needed a heavenly handicap to feel like a man. You are a hollow vessel, Vox. A screen that only reflects the light of others because you generate none of your own. You will never be a king. You will only ever be a court jester, desperately screaming for an audience that will inevitably change the channel."
Vox’s screen flickers erratically, the pixels scrambling as Lucifer’s words strike not at his body, but at the very core of his manufactured existence—his relevance, his legacy. The silence that follows is louder and more crushing than any scream.
No one asked for this but here's some smutty radioapple since I'm too excited for the new episodes ❤💛❤💛❤😈
Warning ⚠️ gay sex!
"You think this is a game, Alastor? That my daughter's hotel is just another stage for your little performances?" Lucifer's voice was a low, venomous hiss, the opulent gold of his penthouse suite seeming to darken with his mood.
Alastor smirked, his static-laced chuckle grating against the tense silence. "My dear King, all of Hell is a stage. Some of us are simply better performers than others. Your daughter's... rehabilitation project is a delightful farce, but it lacks a certain dramatic flare."
"You arrogant—" Lucifer’s composure snapped. In a blink, he crossed the lavish carpet, his hand shooting out to grip Alastor's jaw, with an undeniable, terrifying force. The static cut off abruptly. "You will learn your place."
Alastor’s eyes, usually glowing with mocking amusement, widened a fraction. A flicker of something raw—surprise, intrigue, a spark of genuine interest—passed through them. His own claws came up, not to strike, but to rest lightly on Lucifer’s wrist. A challenge. An acceptance.
Lucifer’s grip on Alastor’s jaw tightened, forcing the Radio Demon’s head back, exposing the long, graceful line of his throat. The King of Hell leaned in, his voice a whisper that promised ruin. "That smug grin of yours has haunted my realm for decades. I think it's time I wiped it off your face."
He didn't give Alastor a chance to retort. Lucifer crushed their mouths together in a searing, punishing kiss. It was all clashing teeth and desperate, angry heat. Alastor stiffened for a heartbeat, a low growl rumbling in his chest, before he yielded with a shocking fervor. His mouth opened under Lucifer’s, and the battle continued there, a frantic, hungry duel of tongues and need.
Lucifer’s free hand tangled in Alastor’s hair, pulling just enough to elicit a sharp, static-tinged gasp that was everything. He used the leverage to walk Alastor backward until the backs of his knees hit the plush edge of the enormous, duck bed. Alastor fell with a graceful collapse, his ever-present grin finally gone, replaced by a look of open, wanton shock.
"You want a show, Alastor?" Lucifer breathed, his own golden eyes burning with infernal light. He climbed onto the bed, straddling the sinner’s hips, pinning him down. "I'll give you a fucking masterpiece."
He ripped open Alastor’s pristine red coat, buttons scattering like distant screams. His claws tore through the red shirt beneath, revealing the surprisingly toned, grey flesh of his chest. Lucifer leaned down, his mouth leaving a searing trail down Alastor’s throat, over his collarbone. He licked a hot stripe up the center of his chest being careful not to touch the wound that ran crooked before closing his lips around one peaked nipple, biting down just shy of pain.
Alastor’s back arched off the bed, a raw, unfiltered moan tearing from his throat, the sound warping the very air around them. His claws dug into the silk sheets, shredding them. "Lucifer—"
"Say my name again," the king demanded, moving to the other nipple, lavishing it with the same rough attention. His hand slid down Alastor’s stomach, deft fingers popping the button of his trousers, sliding the zipper down with a deliberate, grating sound.
"Lucifer!" Alastor cried out, half-protest, half-prayer, as Lucifer’s hand pushed into his pants and wrapped around his aching length. He was already fully hard, velvety and hot in Lucifer’s grasp. A guttural sound of pure triumph escaped the king. He stroked him once, twice, a slow, firm pump that made Alastor’s hips buck off the mattress.
With a feral grin, Lucifer yanked Alastor’s pants and briefs down to his knees in one sharp motion, freeing him completely. He took a moment to just look, to appreciate the sight of the always-composed Radio Demon laid bare and trembling beneath him. Then he lowered his head.
The first hot, wet swipe of Lucifer’s tongue from base to tip made Alastor see stars. His broadcast static returned, a cacophonous roar of feedback that filled the room. Lucifer groaned at the sensation, the vibration mingling with the taste of him—ozone, power, and something uniquely Alastor. He took him deep, swallowing him to the root, his throat working around him.
Alastor’s hands flew to Lucifer’s head, his claws tangling in the blond hair, not pushing him away but holding him there, desperate. Broken syllables and sharp, ragged gasps fell from his lips. "Oh—oh, yes! Right there, don't you dare stop—"
Lucifer pulled off with a wet pop, his own breathing ragged. He loomed over Alastor again, his own arousal straining against his tailored pants. "You’re mine tonight," he whispered, his voice thick with possession. "Every gasp, every shudder. You belong to me."
He didn’t wait for an answer. Spitting into his palm, he slicked his own cock, the thick length weeping with need. He positioned himself at Alastor’s entrance, which clenched and fluttered in anticipation. He met Alastor’s gaze, seeing the defiance, the fear, the raw, unvarnished want. It was the most honest he had ever seen him.
With a single, powerful thrust, he sheathed himself fully inside.
Alastor’s scream was a glorious symphony of shattered static and ecstasy. His whole body seized, his back bowing off the bed, his claws scoring deep grooves into Lucifer’s shoulders. The burn, the stretch, the overwhelming fullness was unlike anything he had ever imagined. It was agony. It was paradise.
Lucifer held himself still, buried to the hilt, sweat beading on his brow. He watched, mesmerized, as Alastor unraveled beneath him. "You take me so well," he rasped, beginning to move. Slow, deep, punishing strokes that struck something deep within Alastor with every drive. "All that power… all that talk… and you're just a writhing, desperate thing in my bed."
The pace quickened, becoming a fierce, relentless rhythm. The sound of their bodies meeting, skin slapping against skin, mingled with Alastor’s staticky cries and Lucifer’s guttural grunts. Lucifer leaned down, capturing Alastor’s mouth in another bruising kiss, swallowing his moans. He could feel the coil tightening in his own gut, a volcanic pressure building.
He reached between them, taking Alastor’s leaking cock in hand, stroking him in time with his thrusts. The double sensation was too much. Alastor’s eyes rolled back, his body tightening like a vice around Lucifer.
"I’m—Lucifer, I’m—"
"Come for me," Lucifer commanded, his voice the absolute authority of Hell itself. "Now."
The plan was simple, yet utterly unprecedented. There would be no grand parade, no rallying of the royal guard. Just a princess and a plumber, setting out on a mission of healing with a satchel full of homemade remedies and a map of the kingdom’s sorrows.
Luigi packed with a nervous, meticulous energy. He filled his pack not with power-ups, but with carefully labeled bottles of his luminescent antidote, bundles of specific herbs, extra soil nutrients, and his most trusted gardening tools. It felt strange, not packing a single Super Mushroom. It felt… right.
Peach met him at the castle’s side gate as the first rays of sun painted the turrets pink. She wore sturdy boots and a traveling cloak over her dress, a woven basket hooked over her arm. She looked every bit the ruler, but with a determined, practical glint in her eye that Luigi had rarely seen.
“Ready?” she asked, her breath misting in the cool morning air.
Luigi adjusted the strap of his heavy pack. “Ready as I’ll ever be,” he said, and was surprised to find he mostly meant it.
Their first destination, according to Peach’s magical intuition, was a place called the Forgotten Toadstool Village, a small, ancient settlement nestled in a valley that had been bypassed by the kingdom’s main roads. As they walked, the vibrant greens and blues of the Mushroom Kingdom slowly began to give way to a muted palette. The cheerful chirps of Goombas became less frequent, replaced by an oppressive silence.
“It feels… lonely,” Luigi murmured, his voice seeming too loud in the hush.
Peach nodded, her expression grim. “The land remembers being overlooked. My magic has always felt it as a faint ache. Now, it feels like a wound.”
They crested a small hill, and the village lay spread out below them. It was a picture of profound sadness. The once-red Toadstool houses were bleached to a pale, sickly gray. The cobblestone path was cracked and dusty. In the central square, a magnificent, ancient Bell Tree stood, its branches bare and silent, the famous silver bells that once chimed with the wind now hanging as dull as lead.
And in the center of the square, the Blight was a visible, swirling patch of gray mist, pulsing slowly like a diseased heart.
Mario’s approach was immediately evident. A large, charred scar marred the ground where fireballs had hit, and several nearby houses had fresh cracks from what looked like a powerful ground pound. The Blight, however, had simply regrown around the damage, larger than the scout’s report had suggested.
Luigi felt a familiar tremor of fear. But then he looked at Peach’s resolute face, and he felt the weight of the bottles in his pack. We can do this.
“Okay,” he said, more to himself than to her. “Let’s start small.”
He ignored the central mass for now. His eyes landed on a small, decorative fountain at the edge of the square, its basin dry and cracked. Clinging to its rim was a single, hardy cluster of blue Vibe Violets, their color almost completely drained. He approached slowly, as if not to startle a wounded animal.
Peach watched, fascinated, as he got to work. He didn’t pull out a hammer. He pulled out a trowel and a spray bottle.
“The soil is the key,” he explained, his nervousness fading as he slipped into the realm of his expertise. He carefully scraped away the top layer of gray, dust-like Blight. “It’s choking the roots. It can’t breathe.”
He mixed his luminescent solution with fresh soil from his pack, creating a small, glowing mound. Gently, he packed it around the roots of the Violets. Then, he misted the petals with a diluted version of the antidote.
For a moment, nothing happened. Luigi held his breath.
Then, a faint, shimmering blue light traveled up the stem of the flowers. Like a ripple in a pond, the color returned, flooding the petals with a vibrant, celestial blue. The flowers seemed to perk up, turning their faces towards the weak sun. The gray receded from the fountain’s rim, leaving behind clean, if still cracked, stone.
It was a tiny victory. A square foot of reclaimed land in a village of despair.
But Peach’s gasp was one of pure wonder. “Luigi… it’s beautiful.”
He looked up at her, a genuine, unguarded smile spreading across his face. The joy of seeing something he cared for thrive—it was a feeling she understood deeply.
Emboldened, they moved to the next patch, and the next. Luigi worked the soil, his movements patient and sure. Peach, after watching him for a while, knelt beside him.
“Let me help,” she said, and without waiting for a reply, she began to gently clear the gray dust from around a different plant, her hands as careful and graceful as they were when holding a teacup.
They worked in comfortable silence, side-by-side. He would prepare the soil; she would carefully place it around the roots. It was a partnership, a quiet, efficient dance. He showed her how to identify the health of a root system; she pointed out the subtle, magical ley lines of energy that were being blocked by the Blight, things only she could see.
As they restored a small ring of flowers around the Bell Tree, a soft, silvery chime broke the silence.
Ding.
They both froze and looked up. One of the highest bells on the tree had trembled, just once, its sound thin and weak, but unmistakably real.
The gray mist in the center of the square seemed to recoil, shrinking back just an inch.
Tears welled in Peach’s eyes. Not sad tears, but tears of overwhelming hope. “It’s working, Luigi. Truly working.”
Luigi’s heart felt like it would burst. This was better than any cheer from a crowd. This was the quiet, profound satisfaction of healing. Of making things whole again.
As the sun began to set, casting long shadows across the partially restored square, they made camp under the shelter of a restored, colorful Toadstool roof. Luigi started a small fire and began preparing a simple soup from vegetables he’d brought from his garden.
Peach sat watching him, the firelight dancing in her eyes. “You know,” she said softly, “I’ve been to a hundred banquets in my honor. But this… this is the best meal I think I’ve been promised in a long time.”
Luigi stirred the pot, a blush creeping up his neck. “It’s just minestrone.”
“It’s not,” she said, her voice firm but kind. “Luigi. You didn’t just save this place. You gave it a chance to save itself.”
He dared to look at her then, truly look at her. The weary princess from the conservatory was gone. In her place was a woman with dirt smudged on her cheek and a fire of determination in her gaze, and she was looking at him as if he was an equal. As a leader.
He handed her a bowl of soup. Their fingers brushed, and for a moment, the only sound was the crackle of the fire and the hopeful, silent growth of the healing land around them. The journey was long, and the source of the Blight still awaited. But here, in the quiet of the forgotten village, something else was taking root, and it was just as real, and just as strong, as the antidote in his pack.
The dawn did not bring good news. Mario had returned from the edge of the Whispering Woods frustrated and covered in a fine, gray dust that smelled of old sorrows.
“I found the spot,” he grumbled, brushing the dust from his overalls in the castle courtyard. “A big, ugly patch of nothing. I jumped on it, I hit it with fireballs, but it just… swallows the energy. It’s already bigger than it was last night.”
He kicked at a pebble in frustration. Direct action had failed.
Later that morning, Luigi stood at the very edge of the afflicted area. Mario was right. It was a terrifying kind of wrong. A swath of land, about the size of their backyard, was leeched of all color. The grass was a pale, brittle gray. The leaves on the trees were silent and still, not even rustling in the breeze. The very air within the patch was hushed, as if someone had thrown a blanket over the world.
It felt… sad.
While Mario and a group of Toads debated strategies of larger hammers and bigger fireballs, Luigi’s eyes were on the ground. He crouched down, ignoring the nervous flutter in his stomach. He focused on the details, the way he did with his plants.
He saw the way the blight crept along the roots of a tree. He noticed a single, resilient dandelion at the very edge of the affected zone, its vibrant yellow head bowed but not yet defeated. Most importantly, he saw a cluster of common Luminescent Mushrooms growing a few feet away, their soft blue glow seeming to push back against the gray, creating a small barrier of healthy, colorful soil.
An idea, small and fragile, began to sprout in his mind.
He hurried back to his own garden behind their house. And there it was. A small patch, no bigger than a dinner plate, where his own prized Snapdragons were wilting, their colors fading to a sickly pale hue.
His heart sank, but his determination solidified. This was his domain. This was a problem he could approach his way.
He spent the rest of the day in a state of focused, quiet activity. He gathered samples of the Luminescent Mushrooms. He mixed them with purified water and a special nutrient-rich soil compound he used for seedlings. He consulted his gardening books, not on monsters, but on fungal networks and soil health.
He was so engrossed in his work, he didn't hear anyone approach until a soft voice spoke from his garden gate.
“Any luck?”
He turned. Peach stood there, having changed into a simpler, practical dress. She looked at his makeshift alchemy lab—the mortars, pestles, and bubbling mixtures—not with confusion, but with keen interest.
Luigi held up a small clay pot. Inside, a single, once-blighted snapdragon was slowly, miraculously, regaining a faint blush of orange on its petals.
“I… I think so,” he said, a tremor of excitement in his voice. “It’s not a fight. It’s an antidote. It’s like… the land is sick. And this,” he gestured to the mixture, “is the medicine.”
Peach stepped into the garden, her eyes fixed on the recovering flower. A true, brilliant smile spread across her face, one that reached her eyes and lit them from within. It was the smile of someone seeing a real solution after a lifetime of temporary fixes.
“Luigi, that’s… that’s incredible.” She looked from the flower to his face. “Mario is preparing to rally a bigger force. But you… you’re healing it.”
He shuffled his feet, suddenly shy under her admiring gaze. “It’s just a little flower.”
“It’s a start,” she corrected him, her voice firm and sure. She took a deep breath, making a decision. “My royal magic is tied to the kingdom’s heart. I can feel its pains, its sorrows. I can lead us to the worst of it.”
She looked at him, not as a princess issuing a command, but as a partner proposing an alliance.
“You understand the ‘how,’ Luigi. I can help with the ‘where.’ What do you say? Shall we try to heal the kingdom together?”
Luigi’s heart hammered against his ribs, but for once, it wasn't entirely from fear. It was from hope. He looked at the hopeful flower, then at the hopeful princess, and he nodded, a slow, steady certainty settling in his soul.
“Si,” he said, squaring his shoulders. “We can do this.”
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