Separated AU? Kinda? Except all of them are completely different from their actual ROTTMNT iterations💀
I’m gonna be honest I’ve never loved drawing Donnie for whatever reason so of course I had to make him pretty so I would actually want to draw him.
Storyline below!!!
Essentially this entire AU is: would if Draxum’s lab exploded and it messed up the turts?
So the story I’ve formulated in my head is like:
Basically the same until like. The whole “Lou Jitsu destroys Draxum’s lab bc fuck that guy” thing. The lab very much explodes.
Raph, being the biggest, shields his siblings (specifically his twin) from the blast to the best of his ability, which absolutely massacres his shell. Leo is the only one who got away without any serious injuries, Donnie straight up lost his arm, and Mikey’s legs are permanently messed up.
Splinter (understandably) thinks Raph is just straight up dead after that (he is not), and takes the other three turts so he can get them help, gets mutated in the process.
Raph is (somehow) not dead, and (somehow) manages to survive on the streets of the Hidden City on his own. His shell is absolutely fucked, but thanks to growing up around magic, he can use it pretty well. He ends up meeting Sunita, who teaches him how to talk, and her family takes him in for a while, but he’s so used to being on his own that he doesn’t really adjust well to being part of a family.
Meanwhile, the other tots are (mostly) safe with Splinter.
Because of the whole “twintuition” thing, Leo has grown up being super anxious all the time. He barely has any memory of having a third sibling, but there is A Feeling that he can’t shake. They’re constantly feeling super guilty about not being injured in the lab explosion since her siblings were so badly injured and it effects them every single day, so he becomes the leader to protect them. She’s super serious about all the ninja stuff, simply because he doesn’t want his little siblings getting hurt again, and this entire time they’ve been holding on to a tiny piece of red fabric that he’s had since the Incident. They don’t know why, but they’re very attached to it.
Donnie, being the absolute genius he is, managed to build himself an entire high-tech prosthetic arm. Because of course he did, he’s Donnie. He doesn’t come out of the messy ass garage often, usually only for missions or when Splinter tells him to. He’s been working on something to help Mikey with his whole leg situation for the past god knows how long. He hates getting dirty until it’s his garage/lab, then he’ll go crazy and get covered in oil and grime.
Mikey’s situation is a lil unique. He can walk around on his own most of the time, but sometimes his legs Do The Thing (his words. it just means they feel weird and hurt a lot), so he’ll need a knee brace or crutches or something for a little while. He loves graffiti, which is how he met April, and he’s also the one who goes out on his own most often, despite Leo constantly worrying about him. He’s the one who found Raph :)
Sunita is honestly just The Best. She’s been Raph’s best friend since they met, and has tried to help him at every opportunity. When he left the hidden city after finding out about that Draxum is on the hunt for him, she was worried sick, and ended up sending Mayhem after him, just to make sure he was okay.
April has been The Red One for a long ass time, because she thought green was lame since “all of the turtles are green” (ignoring the fact that Donnie is a painted river terrapin and therefore not green) and she wanted to be cool. Leo never really liked that whole thing because of the Hey I’m Super Attached to This Red Fabric thing, but they got over it eventually. She’s very much a big sister to the turtles, even though she was slightly weirded out when she first came across Mikey.
Cassandra is the other reason April wanted to be The Red One, she just wanted to match her girlfriend. Casey’s honestly just The Gayest person on earth, and does she care? No. She can kick ass and kiss girls and that’s what matters. She’s aware of the turtles but doesn’t hang out with them super often, so most of what The Guys know about her is just from April gushing about her favorite person.
Splinter has been trying to dad this entire time :,) he’s riddled with guilt and severe trauma, but he’s trying and that’s what matters. Every so often he thinks about the fact that he just left Raph in the destroyed lab and he cries a little bit (a lot actually) because his train of thought is “I could have at least buried him.” Being a rat isn’t the greatest either, but again, he manages. He doesn’t have any “visible” injuries from the Incident, but mentally he’s absolutely fucked.
Draxum is a bastard piece of shit (in this au) and I hate him (in this au). He went into hiding for a lil while, but then came back with a whole “I want my creations back” thing going on, which drove Raph out of the Hidden City. Raph remembers the most about the Incident, oddly enough, and the mere thought of being put back in a test tube makes him physically ill. Drax kinda gets his redemption arc but it’s in that really awkward “why the hell would I ever forgive you?” sense, like an abusive parent who realized they fucked up and tried to apologize, but you’re never going to forgive them because of what they did.
Raph actually got a cloaking brooch so he could blend in on the surface, but kinda hated it because he felt out of place anyway (because people are judgmental of people with scars/visible disabilities). When Mikey found him, he was alone in the sewer with the brooch off, shenanigans ensue.
And by shenanigans I mean Donnie and April now owe Mikey so much money because they were betting on whether or not Leo’s whole “guys we have another sibling somewhere I swear” thing was true or not.
Raph is very unwilling to talk at first, but eventually he’s like “I mean this is my brother so I may as well talk to him yk?” But also doesn’t want to be found just yet.
Sibling bonding time :)
Raph is very concerned about Mikey’s legs giving out and tries to heal it with magic (it doesn’t work). Mikey is very concerned about Raph’s shell, but it’s healed now, just weakened and misshapen.
At some point Draxum’s bounty hunters find Raph, but unfortunately Mikey is there, so Raph’s first instinct is to protect him. Raph gets very injured, Mikey manages to escape the bounty hunters and drag Raph along with him.
Everyone is now freaking out
That’s all I got for now. So here’s some lil notes n stuff about The Guys
Raph
Alligator snapping turtle
The tallest and (technically) oldest
Leo’s (slightly older) twin. They’re from the same clutch of eggs
Doesn’t really care to define his gender identity or sexuality. Truthfully he doesn’t even care about what pronouns people use for him, but he just tells people he/him to keep it simple
Instead of sais or tonfas, he uses improvised brass knuckles
The team medic! He’s good at improvising if need be, and is very no-nonsense when it comes to his brothers’ taking care of themselves. This man singlehandedly improved Donnie’s abysmal sleep schedule
Still talks in third person sometimes, mostly when he’s having a bad day, a panic attack, or dissociating
Fight or flight is almost always on, he has a problem with hoarding food because of how he grew up
Never really learned any proper fighting techniques, he just goes for whatever opening he sees
Very quiet. He still has pretty bad anger issues, but he bottles it up until it’s too late and he gets a little silly in fights (Leo has called an ambulance for a Foot Clan soldier at least twice now)
Leo
Alligator snapping turtle
The second shortest, but also second oldest
Raph’s twin
He/they/she. They spent so long worrying about her siblings that he never stopped to figure out her gender. They don’t know what to call himself, but defaults to “man liker” because that’s the closest thing he can come up with
Classic two katanas(?) I don’t actually know what kind of swords Leo has outside of the odachi in Rise
So incredibly the leader. She takes it very seriously, since his siblings getting hurt is his biggest nightmare
Insanely anxious, constantly. If they hadn’t gone through so much meditation training they would be having nightly panic attacks
The last time they had a meltdown it was because Mikey’s chronic pain acted up so bad that he couldn’t walk for about a week, and Leo was terrified that he would never walk again
Makes the shittiest dad jokes to try and cope, but it doesn’t work. Humor is Mikey’s thing. Tries to distract herself with projects instead. Doesn’t work either, that’s Donnie’s thing. Meditating for hours and hours doesn’t work very well either. That’s Splinter’s thing. He can’t figure out what his coping mechanism is, and that just adds more stress to their life
Freaks out over the tiniest stuff
Hates eating mushrooms because of the texture
Donnie
Painted river terrapin
Second tallest, only a few inches shorter than Raph
The middle child
He/him, much like Raph though, he doesn’t really care. Sometimes he calls himself “triple A” because he’s agender, asexual, and aromantic. He doesn’t care about relationships but thinks it’s kinda cute how happy April is when she talks about Cassandra.
High tech bo staph and his tech, specifically his prosthetic left arm
The smart one. He hoards bits of knowledge that are probably useless, but also ones that are very useful. His toolbox looks like a nightmare mess, but it’s actually perfectly organized in his mind
Very quiet and slightly antisocial
He’ll obsess over the tiniest detail of a project and then never finish it
His prosthetic arm actually has five fingers so he can better work with tinier objects. It also has an added bonus of any handprint-activated things made by/for him only working for him, so it keeps his siblings out of his stuff
Ambidextrous
Mikey
Western painted turtle
Shortest. Tiny lil baby
Youngest and acts like it. His siblings know no peace
He/they. Turns out being stuck in bed because your legs hurt so much gives you a lot of time to think about your gender, and this lil fella figured out he was transmasc.
Still has his nunchucks, but now they’re bedazzled
Tries to walk even when his legs Do The Thing because “it only hurts after like 5 minutes guys I’m fine”
Sews patches onto the fabric parts of his knee braces, doodles on the plastic/metal parts
Tries to be super agile and do cool tricks while fighting, but leg pain is unfortunately a bitch
Very serious about safety when it comes to graffiti. He gets upset when April doesn’t wear a respirator mask when working with spray paint
I wanna get this writing right someone please tell me how chronic pain affects people I crave knowledge
That’s basically all I have so far. I’ll make lil notes like this for the non-turtle characters at some point
sunset duo my beloved <3 separated!raph would be super impressed with mikey’s artistic skill (and kinda jealous)
also, they got raph some sick lou jitsu merch because he’s a huge fan, much to everyone’s surprise
turns out raph only knows lou jitsu because of the battle nexus. he always heard about how unstoppable lou jitsu was as a nexus champion, and once he saw old clips of the human in action, raph became pretty star-struck. (imagine his surprise when he finds out there’s a ton of old movies starring his battle nexus idol that are just lying around the lair!)
