[LN] Can't get to his heart through his stomach. The plastron gets in the way.

[spellitonce]

Well, her first unsupervised mission had gone well -- they'd located and rescued a couple more people for the fight against Kuk, none of them had gotten hurt, and there was a whole gaggle of scientists who were reconsidering their stance on how to react to aliens. Not bad for an afternoon's work. She'd turned the mutant turtles over to Jack and Bunny for the full run-down, unleashed Dipper and Mabel to go do whatever it was the two of them did in their free time, and worked the rest of her adrenaline out on her latest sewing project.

The end result was a new hat for Molly (whenever she got back home. If she got back home) and a sugar craving that she could indulge since the North Pole's usual occupant was technically more famous among his preferred audience for his sweet tooth than he was for his ability to stab things really well.

It seemed that she wasn't the only one in the mood for a snack. A whole bunch of snacks had been laid out on a table in the kitchen, all of them looking a little picked over. She blinked at them, then at the turtle half-buried in the nearest cupboard.

"Are you throwing a party or testing for poison?"

Comments

[othersdestructive]

"Ew, seriously?" He squinted at her eyes as if trying to see the grossness.

Then he sat back reflectively. "So has everyone been getting that stuff? Me and Mikey keep getting uses that aren't us's in our heads. Memories...feelings. Stupid catchphrases. I figured it had something to do with all the weirdness but still haven't figured out what."

[spellitonce]

Kind of hard to get a good look at her eyes when she was rolling them and putting her hand on his face to shove him away. "Not seriously, it probably just fixed my vision and got rid of them, quit staring."

She shook her head. "I haven't been getting other feelings or memories that don't belong to me or anything like that. I just sometimes get weird, passionate mood-swings about stuff." She frowned at him thoughtfully. "What year is it, back in your reality?"

[othersdestructive]

Raph just swatted her hand away in an equally playful fashion.

"2013, why?"

[spellitonce]

"There was a kids' cartoon about you guys in the early 1990's, I think. And a couple of movies. And maybe a comic book?" Nico shook her head. "Maybe you're getting alternate reality bleed over because you're just close enough to trigger the nostalgia value?"

[othersdestructive]

"Who in their right mind would make a kids' cartoon about us? That is sick. We're ninjas fighting crazy mutants all the time and people mutate all over the place in terrifying ways. Who would subject their small child to that?"

His mind was blown.

"Worst. Parents. Ever." He paused awkwardly as he remembered who he was talking to. "Comparatively speaking. You know, when compared to lots of parents, but not all parents."

[spellitonce]

"Wouldn't know." Nico smirked wryly at him. "My parents wouldn't let me watch it. It 'promotes violence and vigilantism and it's probably why that ridiculous Spider-Man creature is running around all over New York these days'." She shrugged. "I imagine they toned down any gore. Maybe gave you laser weapons and made the scary mutants fluffy and silly."

[othersdestructive]

Raph laughed again.

"Your parents, who were crime bosses, didn't let you watch violent cartoons. Wow. That is some kinda mental gymnastics there. Gold medal caliber stuff."

It was twisted. The fact that it was so twisted had him looking at her with even more interest and wonder. What kind of person survived their world being torn down and filled with that much contradiction? How had she dealt with all that confusion and still become the kind of person willing to throw herself in the thick of it to save the sorry behinds of strangers? If not for her and the twins, he and Mikey probably would've wound up dissected and kept in many separate little jars.

"I don't see how anyone could think laser weapons are less violent than bullets. They cut through even more than bullets do. I also don't get the whole stupid idea that violent cartoons somehow make kids violent. Is that some kind of surface world thing? Having it so it's socially acceptable to let your kids get raised by the TV and not teaching them anything? At all?"

[spellitonce]

Nico held up her hands. "Don't ask me to explain adult logic," she said. "It is incomprehensible and unlike our own."

Raph was remarkably easy to talk to, for a guy from an alternate universe and a life so different from her own. She doesn't know if she's just latching onto him because he's close to her in age and acts like it, or if it's because of the way he ran to his brother to free him before going after what he'd thought were potential threats. Maybe it's just because he knows when and how to say wow, that sucks like he means it. Whichever reason it is, she wasn't planning on coming up with an excuse to leave for a bit.

"Most adults on the surface think kids are pretty stupid, I guess."

[othersdestructive]

"That's not really adult logic, that's just stupid logic," Raph said. "People either delude themselves or they don't."

He crossed his arms. "So it's not adults and kids, it's two kinds of adults that people seem to grow up into. There's the ones that delude themselves and can't admit they're wrong and that their kids are smart enough to get stuff and the ones that actually have humility and because they do, they're right most of the time, and can fix it when they realize they're wrong. And they realize their kids are just younger, slightly more naive people."

[spellitonce]

"Something like that."

Nico shrugged and picked up a fritter-thing covered in powdered sugar from one of the plates on the table and nibbled on it. "I haven't exactly met a lot of the latter, so I really can't speak for them." She chewed thoughtfully for a moment. "Vic's mother seemed okay."

[othersdestructive]

"Me and my brothers have, weirdly, despite being sewer mutants, been in a position to meet a bunch of both kinds. Heck, Master Splinter and the Shredder are like examples of self-deluding stupidity and being a normal, sane person. Total opposite ends of the spectrum."

He crossed his arms. "Like, for instance, Master Splinter? Most of the time? He was always pretty calm and reasonable and talked to us like people and only did stuff like ground us or send us to the hashi if we wrecked the lair or did something stupid and dangerous. But after we faced the Shredder the first time, he destroyed us and it made sensei go crazy. It was the fighting equivalent of razing a village to the ground and salting the earth and we barely got away alive. So Master Splinter got so terrified of us getting killed he wouldn't let us go to the surface until we got better and kept drilling us until we were exhausted."

He went on, "But eventually, he realized he was acting crazy and stopped and apologized. See, he lost his first family to the Shredder so he was terrified we were going to die, too. But he knew that way of thinking, giving into that fear, was even more dangerous because it was making us too afraid. And he knew it wasn't right to ground us forever and take our freedom away just because he was scared. He could admit when he was wrong, so he did, and he did what was best for us instead of what made him feel better."

He nodded his head to the side, "Then on the other hand, you've got Shredder, who, before we were born, attacked Sensei and his wife - who Shredder had a thing for despite the fact she was happily married to Sensei - and blames sensei for the fact she died during it when he was the one that killed her. He goes on and on about it, about his stupid vendetta, and makes it out to be it's all Master Splinter's fault for making him angry. He doesn't even pretend he didn't do it, he just blames Master Splinter for 'stealing' her in the first place. The guy's delusional - he sees what he wants to see no matter how crazy it is."

He gave her a little shrug. "That's how people are. We've met a whole bunch of different ones that fell on both sides of the fence with all the trouble we've gotten into."

[spellitonce]

"Well, you already know about my parents," Nico said. "And the Avengers. I don't think I've ever heard an adult calmly and sincerely apologize to a kid. Even when it's something stupid or inconsequential, no apologies, just disapproving silence."

She took another bite of her fritter. "Maybe your universe has a higher percentage of adults who aren't stupid than mine does. It wouldn't be the weirdest difference between our realities."

[othersdestructive]

"Or it could be you just were unlucky enough to run into a lot of the rotten ones but what do I know? You might be right that there's an idiot adult epidemic where you're from."

He paused, as he considered something.

"How many normal adults do you deal with? These Avengers and all that, they're superheroes, right? Maybe that just attracts people that ego trip. Do they get to prance in front of cameras after saving the day or do they do things without getting credit like the rest of us vigilante types?"

[spellitonce]

"We try not to deal with adults at all, except for when one's behind the check-out counter when we're shopping," Nico said. "And the Avengers are -- well, were government-approved defenders of the country-slash-world. So yeah, they're not vigilantes, they get the cameras and the works. That guy who looks like a pile of rocks, he's a superhero too, with the Fantastic Four. The only ones we met who weren't complete tools were Cloak and Dagger, who used to be teen runaways themselves; and the Young Avengers, who are all dorks, but otherwise pretty okay people."

[othersdestructive]

"Well, there's your problem," said Raph. "The ones you're dealing with are probably all trumped up on their own importance. And that's how you get convinced you're always right. When everything you do is pretty much thankless and just gets you into trouble anyway, but you have to do it because you're the one that's there, that's something that never stops making you feel small."

He gestured with his hands. "Because it's just you standing between innocent people and whatever or whoever that's gunning for them and that means you have to admit you're wrong whenever you're wrong or you might mess things up. And if you do mess up someone might get hurt and nobody's going to clean up your mess but you."

[spellitonce]

A small, satisfied smile curled Nico's lips.

"Yeah, that sounds about right," she said. "But that doesn't exactly give us much opportunity to find any reasonable adults, even if we weren't already thrice burned on them."

[othersdestructive]

"Yeah, but it's not good to split the world up in little categories like that. People are people. There's good and bad. There are gonna be adults that are practically saints and kids your age that'll stab you in the back the second they have a chance."

Like the many times Karai had tried before she found out the truth. (And their fronts, she'd tried to stab their fronts.)

"It's weird that you'd split it up as an adult-kid thing when it's a people thing. Everyone winds up an adult someday - if they live long enough."

[spellitonce]

"Yeah," Nico agreed, looking down at the table. "If they live that long."

She wasn't sure she expected to.

"I suppose Chase made it through his eighteenth birthday without going completely 'round the twist," she said. She smirked again. "Though I'd hardly call him a saint."

[othersdestructive]

"One of your friends back home?"

Raph was interested now in the kind of people she surrounded herself with. That said a lot about people, the kind of people they had loyalties to.

[spellitonce]

"Yeah," Nico said, glad for the subject change. "He's one of the original six of us who ran away the first time; I've known him forever. Not always the smartest guy around, but he's fast on his feet and surprisingly good at getting us out of trouble. He used to be our wheel-man, but we needed to adjust to a few new things." Like his sort of falling out with the Leapfrog, and him learning how to fight with Old Lace.

"I know he's got my back, but wow can he ever cram his foot in his mouth sometimes."

[othersdestructive]

"So there's six of you? But you said 'original' so there's more now? And what, you all just ran off from it and decided to stick together?"

He kept picking at the deserts and popped some kind of chewy fruit bar in his mouth.

[spellitonce]

"There's seven of us now." Nico's fond smile drooped. "Three are people we've picked up since we ran away the second time."

Raph can do the math.

"Me, Chase, Karolina, and Molly," she ticked the names off on the fingers of one hand, then moved to the other. "Victor, Xavin, and Klara." She lowered her hands.

"Alex died with our parents, when he revealed that he'd thrown in with them the previous year." She blinked furiously, eyes hot. "Gert was murdered a few weeks ago. Because some morons thought it would be a good idea to play with my parents' magical crap and brought Alex's dad forward from the past."

[othersdestructive]

A friend of hers died a few weeks ago - a friend that she'd run away with after her biological family let her down.

Raph knew what it felt like the lose family but the emotional impact of her situation snapped into place with crystal clarity. The expression on her face, it was like that moment after Leo went down with the Technodrome, when they'd thought...

His brothers, Casey, and April - who both might as well have been part of the family now - were all he had left. And losing any of them now would hurt more than ever, especially after the rest of his world - and his father - had been taken away. That was what had happened to her. She'd lost her parents in one of the worst ways she could (not like Splinter, who'd always been a good parent and a good person) and then lost one of the only family members she'd had left. And from the look of her eyes, she was still in a world of hurt over it.

Though Raph was often outwardly tough and aggressive, sometimes teasing and callous, those who knew him best knew what that was covering up. He did feel for other people, he did care about other people, and if he liked who someone was, that came so easily. And once he was in someone's corner, there was no stopping him from having their back.

He owed Nico and the twins his life and how they'd acted during the rescue alone, saving him and Mikey, was enough for Raph to think they were good people. Good people didn't deserve to suffer or have to deal with loss or grief.

So, awkwardly, enough that Nico had time to tell him not to if she wanted, he reached out a three-fingered hand and gave her a pat on the shoulder.

"I'm sorry." He shook his head. "Here we go right back into things sucking again."

It needed to be said. Just like her, he didn't really know what to say, but acknowledging the suck of it was a good place to start.

"But listen, you've got your friends you have left, and if they survived all that crap with your parents and the government and these Avengers, they'll be fine 'til you get back to them. And me and Mikey? We're gonna do all we can to help end this and get everyone back. That weird Bond villain guy was making it out to be that we were some big threat - I guess maybe because lots of people believe in us because of all those movies and TV shows."

He withdrew his hand. "So what I'm guessing is we'll be heavy hitters at this whole myth thing and now that you've got us at your back we'll do all we can to get us all back home. We're tough enough even without magical myth powers and with how tough you guys are, too, this Kuk guy doesn't stand a chance. You'll be back with your friends in no time."

It seemed the best thing he could say, reaffirming that he'd help her get back to the friends she had left.

[spellitonce]

Nico inhaled deeply, wrapping her arms around her ribs and pulling her shoulders in as though she didn't trust her own bones to keep her from flying to pieces.

She didn't trust promises much anymore. Too many of them had broken on her since she'd discovered what kind of people her parent really were.

"I don't want to talk about this anymore," she said finally.

[othersdestructive]

"Yeah, no, sure."

Understandable. Very understandable.

"Hey, uh, why don't we go do something stupid, huh? This is Santa's Workshop, they've gotta have some video game systems or stupid movies to watch - you know, to give to the rich kids."

It was a joke. Because in most universes "Santa" seemed to favor the wealthy when it came to presents. He had a feeling that this universe was a little bit different, though, but he hoped the joke was still funny.