[LN] [Locked to Mikey and Bunny]

[othersdestructive]

"It wasn't a big deal. Everything worked out fine and I had an out so I don't see what the problem is. All of you are making into a bigger thing than it needs to be."

After storming off from the argument with Bunny over Raph running off to get Winchester's brother himself, he'd dragged Mikey into playing a video game. In reality, he'd have preferred to be alone but he could tell Mikey had been bothered by the fact he'd run off alone and gotten injured so he mostly just wanted to show him his arm was okay enough to play video games with it.

The problem was Mikey was still harping on what had happened out of concern.

Rather than being annoyed at Mikey, Raph was trying his best to put Mikey's concern to rest while channeling his annoyance into kicking his butt at Mario Kart.

Comments

[bestnamer]

"I'm just saaaaaying. Buddy system."

Mikey had not yet identified that Raph's irritation ran deeper than mere complaining. Usually when Raph was in his worst moods, he went and ranted to inanimate objects, or punched inanimate objects. Vidja games were for mild irritation, so Mikey too was playing with aplomb.

"You know what they said, groups of three if Jack and Bunny aren't around. The two of us, and somebody with strong magic, like Mabel or Nico. And you went out without me! That's not right, dude. Santa's workshop is great and all, but a ninja wants to stretch his legs. Blue shell! Ohhhh, you are so WRECKED bro!"

[othersdestructive]

Raph made a frustrated grunting noise, then started firing off green shells rapid fire as Mikey's car got ahead, trying to make it so he ran into one.

"It was one guy and you were busy playing with the elves. It wasn't a big deal, okay? I handled it."

He handled it and that meant he could handle it in the future, even if those freaks that had messed with them showed up again. He'd be ready next time.

[bestnamer]

"Yeah but what if that Bendersnatch guy shows up again? Or the Trunchbull and Bloody Mary?"

Dodge dodge dodge. Mikey invoked the greatest law of video games, the one that stated the more wildly you moved your controller, the more effective your button-mashing would be. He nearly smacked Raph in the face with his flailing.

"Dude, I think when the Easter Bunny tells you to do something, you gotta do it. SANTA would tell us to do it. Master Splinter would definitely -"

[othersdestructive]

"Master Splinter isn't here," Raph interrupted, shooting Mikey a Look.

Raph's little car veered off the road and into a pit.

What a metaphor.

[mywarrenmyrules]

"More's the pity," Bunny drawled from the back of the room where he leaned in the door frame, arms crossed.

He locked eyes with Raph. "I have to talk to you."

[bestnamer]

Raph's tone, overlapped by Bunny's tone, made Mikey come to a decision real quick.

"Wow, uh, boy, is it break time already?"

He put his game controller down - slowly.

"Think I'll just, uh - go get some soda. Yeah. You guys want anything? Orange? Grape? No? I'll just get a range."

And he skedaddled, ninja-fast.

[othersdestructive]

Raph just rolled his eyes and stopped the race to set it on single player mode. Even if he had to endure a lecture, he clearly intended to not look Bunny in the eyes during it.

He kept playing, his button-mashing just a little more aggressive than warranted.

"There's nothing to talk about. It worked out fine but if you want me to be ridiculously over-cautious, I won't go out alone next time - even if I can handle something that easy. Problem solved."

[bringinghopewithme]

"Oh, well, in that case, guess I'll just hop on back home now that we've sorted that out."

Bunny used the lack of eye contact as time to roll his eyes too.

[othersdestructive]

"Yep, you can just hop on back down the bunny-trail, m'kay?"

Lecture over. Games now. Go away.

[bringinghopewithme]

"Look, if telling yourself that not going out alone is just to appease my sense of over-caution, whatever gets you to look before you leap."

There's no way it's that easy though. Absolutely no way.

"Meanwhile, out here in the real world, your pride isn't the most important thing on everyone's minds. That's what this is about, isn't it?"

[othersdestructive]

Yep, slamming those buttons extra hard was the way you were supposed to play video games. Sometimes controllers got broken. It happened.

It was close to happening now.

"It's not about my pride."

It really wasn't, but he wasn't about to admit it was more about overcoming terror and feeling insecure about taking his brother out there after what happened. That would've meant having to admit he'd been scared and that he was being overprotective.

[bringinghopewithme]

"No? Then what? Just for the sake of adventure? Because if it is, believe it or not, I've been there. I know how that can call you out of your senses, especially when you've got a bunch of elders telling you not to do it."

If Raph started reminding him too much of himself he really didn't even know HOW he was going to argue him down from that. It wasn't like he was alive today because he played it safe and listened to his elders.

He tried to soften his tone as he focused again on the pride angle.

"But you're also good, best I've seen at your age, and I'm guessing you're not used to getting caught in that much danger. Tell me if I'm wrong."

No doubt Raph would.

[othersdestructive]

There it was. Bunny would be able to tell from his outburst.

"We deal with that much danger all the time," he said, jutting out what passed for a turtle chin at the rabbit. "The only reason they got the drop on us was because we didn't know what was going on or what kinda powers we had or anything! It's not gonna happen again - next time I'll be ready for them."

Next time they wouldn't even have a chance to hurt him and his brother. He could take them now that he knew everything that was going down.

He wasn't afraid and him going out proved he'd be able to brave it out even though what had happened had been so damn terrifying.

Later that day, at 1 am in the morning

[othersdestructive]

Raph had a lot of steam to blow off, as per the usual.

Where he'd been, on the farm, with all his brothers and April and Casey, was the best place for him to have been. He'd had his brothers and his friends, Leo was healing up so that eventually they could go back and face the Kraang, and they had all those woods to run around in.

It had been a good place for him to work through everything, over losing, over the loss of their home and his father.

Now he'd been separated from most of his brothers (who needed his and Mikey's help to take back New York), pulled into some stupid conflict to save the world (again) and there was a lot going on that he was having trouble dealing with. He and Mikey's close call, the weird things floating around in his head, having adult authority figures that weren't his father trying to tell him what to do without knowing the right ways to help him work through things like Splinter had...

It wasn't easy for him to deal with. So he was trying to get all that energy out by working out in the gym in the lower levels, jumping around through the obstacles and utterly destroying the mechanical enemies, working through quite a bit of rage and frustration, judging from the stabbing. And the yelling. The wound to his arm, now almost already healed, wasn't even slowing him down.

Re: Later that day, at 1 am in the morning

[spellitonce]

It was a little embarrassing how long it had taken Nico to say 'screw it' and go looking for Raph.

She'd heard about him going off on his own to get Sam's brother (kind of hard not to, what with the new guy running around the place), and wow had that ever been the stupidest idea ever. At the same time, she couldn't imagine how having everyone harping on it was going to help. Scolding certainly wouldn't have gone over well with her if she'd been the one who'd gone off for...whatever reason he'd gone off. So she'd spent entirely too much time wondering if he just didn't want to deal with anyone, or if he might want someone to not treat him like a dumb kid over it before finally deciding to hunt him down and find out.

She really should have guessed he'd be in the training room. No one got muscles like that without being some kind of gym-rat. Gym-turtle. Whatever.

Watching him tear through the robots wasn't what she had expected, though. She'd been too busy to really watch him when they'd gone to get him and Mikey out of the government lab, but here and now without that power-dampening collar...well, she wasn't really surprised he might think he could do a quick retrieval mission on his own. But she also wasn't going to get anywhere near him until he was done dismembering the training robots. She leaned against the wall by the door, crossing her arms underneath the red-with-snowflakes blanket she'd wrapped around her shoulders.

(What? She's at the North Pole. She might be inside a giant magic lodge, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's not cold to a girl who's lived her life in Los Angeles, California.)

[othersdestructive]

That was a lot of training robots that were going to have to be replaced. Fortunately, the yetis were adept at making and repairing them ridiculously quickly. Jumping from vertical wall to vertical wall, he tackled one of the hovering ones out of the air, slamming it into the floor with both feet and all his body weight behind it, then with a "GRAAAH!" he stabbed it multiple times in the head with his sais until its head was so much circuitry mush.

Then he crouched there, panting in a way that was almost feral, before spotting her in the doorway. Whatever anger was there faded quickly as he saw her, in a way that helped offset how ridiculously ferocious he'd been seconds before. It was just like how his brother had immediately been a calming influence when he'd almost killed the scientists.

Maybe he was angry, but he at least seemed fairly adept at channeling it the right places and letting it wash away around people he was friendly with. Enough that he didn't even seem all that ashamed of someone else seeing that anger.

"Hey," he said, hopping off the chest of the bot. "You're up late. Nightmares about killer clowns? Did they get you with the popcorn gun?"

[spellitonce]

Nico scoffed, rolling her eyes. "Yeah right, that movie and only that movie gave me nightmares. I just wasn't tired tonight, and I was bored, so." She shrugged and gestured with her hands like a magician displaying the results of a trick. "Here I am."

She dropped the presentation to wrap the blanket around herself again. Stupid Pole.

[othersdestructive]

"You're not here to lecture me, too, are you?" He raised an...well it wasn't really an eyebrow. It's possible he didn't even have any under the bandana, but it was an eyebrow muscle, moving the mask in a way to suggest he would've been raising one if he had it.

"Because I am done with all of that 'this is about your pride,' 'you don't have anything to prove' horse hockey."

Not finished his workout, he twirled his sais in his hands dropped to the floor, doing pushups with the handles, the pointed ends pressed dangerously against his forearms.

"It's not like I have a death wish and everything went fine."

You know, bandaged arm (with a ninja bandaid over the bandage) aside.

[spellitonce]

Nico was going to assume that he didn't have eyebrows under his mask, considering that he didn't appear to have hair anywhere else, so eyebrows would just look weird.

She scoffed again. "Yeah, I came all the way down here to wait patiently for you to finish destroying a bunch of robots so I could--"

The snark stopped coming as her expression twisted into one of incredulity.

"Okay, now you're just showing off."

[othersdestructive]

Raph shot her a dirty look, as if to say 'Perish the thought.'

"This is how I do pushups," he insisted, and the fact he was hardly breathing hard at least backed it up. "I don't need to show off, I'm just that impressive without trying."

[spellitonce]

Did you see Nico rolling her eyes at you, Raph? Because so much rolling. All for you.

"Anyway, you've probably already heard all the reasons it was a bad idea, and I'm not the boss of you," she continued their original conversation with a shrug. "If you'd talked Molly into it, we'd be having another conversation entirely, but that didn't happen, so we don't have to have that scream-fest. I just thought you might want some company that wasn't treating you like you were a dumb kid."

[othersdestructive]

"I wouldn't bring a little kid into something like that," Raph said, as if irritated at even suggestion of the possibility. "The only person I risked was myself and everyone needs to just -"

Oh wait, she was actually trying not to treat him like a dumb kid.

"Not treat me like a dumb kid."

He glanced up at her in a way that suggested the sentiment was appreciated.

"Nobody else gets it."

[spellitonce]

"They really don't," Nico agreed, leaning against the wall. "Jack's over three hundred years old, and I don't even know how long Bunny's been around. But their thing is kids; I doubt they remember what it's like being a teenager. So they're just...auto-you-are-a-kid, and it's dumb."

[othersdestructive]

"Those freaks out there nearly killed me and my brother in a way Sensei warned us against our whole lives. A way we hadn't even been able to able to imagine enough well enough to be scared of it."

He kept doing his pushups.

"Mikey was playing with the elves. He deserved some time not thinking about stuff. And they don't get that I'm a ninja. One of the most important things to a ninja is coming home at the end of the day but one of the other most important things is winning the fights in your own head."

[spellitonce]

It was the first reason that resonated with Nico the most. The latter made sense too, but the closest thing she had to a battle-cry was "try not to die". Going into a fight she'd already won in her head was almost alien to her -- and not the alien she'd grown up with. 'Giving Mikey a break' though, that she could understand.

"Makes sense to me," she said. A pause. "Did you get what you wanted out of it?"

Since if he didn't, he probably wasn't going to stop doing things like that until he did, and she might need to convince him to at least give her a heads up before he left or something.