ya_assemble | [LN] [Locked to Mikey and Bunny]

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?"

Edited 2014-11-12 11:24 (UTC)

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.

"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.

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."

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."

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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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.

"Yeah," he said. "Control."

He had gotten what he needed. Despite his brain slipping into that wild mortal terror place like it had in the lab, he found that it'd slipped right back to where it needed to be in the fight against Winchester. He'd proven to himself what he needed to and done it alone like he needed to, to be sure that self-reliance was still functioning properly.

That was a lot easier to damage than his ability to work with a team, the little clockwork inside his head. Teamwork wasn't his favorite thing in the world but as long as the people he was with were competent it wasn't that hard. The gears in his own head? They were a little harder to maintain.

"Anger's usually the one I have the most trouble with so it's the one I'm most used to dealing with. Fear's usually never that hard - I don't scare easy. There are only two things that have ever really given me the willies. One was a giant cyborg cockroach that had it out specifically for me since I'd tried to squish it when it wasn't giant. Which -"

At the height of a push up he briefly shuddered, visibly, making his deep abiding loathing of cockroaches clear.

"And the other was a giant mutant plant monster that dragged me off into the woods, infected me so I started turning into this...mindless plant-thing, and then drained the mutagen out of me. Nearly killed me."

Donnie'd had to work on him all night to restore him back to normal.

"And I challenge anyone to get dragged into a creepy shack in the middle of the night by a nine foot tall swamp muck monster with glowing eyes and a pitchfork, and not be a little spooked. It even had the bottle of mutagen that it mutated from on an altar with candles and flowers around it. Like it was...I don't know, worshiping it or something."

He finally stopped doing pushups, after doing quite a few of them, and plopped over to sit down, idly twirling a sai around in his hand.

"Total horror show. I've seen multiple horror movies with that set up."

There was literally no one alive that could go through something like that and not be terrified. Especially since he hadn't known if his brothers would even find him - or whether or not it might get them first before they could. He'd been tethered there to the floor like a dog, slowing feeling himself changing, his mind slipping...

It had been scary.

And strangely, it was easy to admit that to Nico when talking about his fear had been nearly impossible with everyone else. It just seemed like she got it. And like she was actually willing to listen instead of just verbally prodding him over how moody he was like his brothers would have.

"And then there was that lab."

Edited 2014-11-12 14:11 (UTC)

"They're lucky more of us haven't gone out looking for control," Nico pointed out with a wry twist of a smile. "It's not like any of us volunteered for this party."

She moved away from the wall to sit closer to him, tucking her feet under the blanket with her as she nodded in agreement.

"I'm pretty sure I've seen that movie," she said with a shudder. She knew she had to handle this with some finesse. Guys like Raph aren't typically all that comfortable talking about their feelings, she probably wasn't going to get another chance if she screwed it up now. But it was definitely easier than she would have expected to get him to talk, kind of like how it had been easier to talk to him earlier than she would have expected.

She scraped her fingernails lightly across the floor for lack of a better thing to do with the hand that wasn't holding the blanket closed.

"Yeah. That wasn't the first place I've seen burned to the ground, but I can't say I feel bad for having had a hand in it."

"I'm fine now anyway. I did it, it's over, nobody needed to make a big thing of it."

Raph stopped twirling his sais to put them both back in their holsters and then flopped onto his back in typical teenage fashion, ie with a sigh.

Only to find that the hard floor made things a little difficult for proper flopping. Too wobbly. It was possible to change the floor's softness for training to various levels but he'd opted to leave it nice and hard for his training.

So he wobbled slightly and then sighed again and flopped over in his front, resting his head on his arms as he laid there on his stomach.

Having a shell totally cramped your style when it came to flopping backwards dramatically. Sometimes comically.

Edited 2014-11-13 07:42 (UTC)

Nico tried not to laugh, she really did. She might not have succeeded entirely, but she did manage to restrain herself to only two gulps of an unmistakable laugh. But after his Raphael: Terror of the Training Bots and This Is Just How I Do Push-Ups routines, the wobbling had been pretty undignified looking.

"Elegant," she said, entirely unable to swallow her grin.

Edited 2014-11-13 08:02 (UTC)

"One of the hazards of having a shell," he said defensively. "And like normal people are any more graceful."

He propped himself up just enough to reach out a hand, then poked her in the forehead with a single finger and just enough force to make he flop over.

Nico shrieked in surprise as she went down, throwing an arm out to catch herself. Unlike the ninja in the room, her falling style is all-natural and mostly flail.

The abrupt move from the vertical to the horizontal also sent her feet out like some kind of counter-balance, but unless Raph was too pleased with his witty rejoinder to pay attention, he'd probably avoid getting kicked in the head.

"Ow!"

"See, and you don't even have a shell to mess with your center of gravity. So graceful."

Neener neener neener.

He went back to resting his head on his arms on the floor.

Edited 2014-11-13 08:25 (UTC)

"Jerk," Nico retorted, without much heat, pulling herself back upright and wrapping herself in the blanket again. The only other indication that she might agree she had that coming was that she didn't try and kick him in the head again on the way back up. (That, and she would have failed again anyway. Because only one of them was a ninja and it wasn't her.)

They're at a turning point here. She can either stay silent and he'll either respond to her taunt with one of his own or also sit there silently until one of them gets bored. Or she can start up a new topic of conversation.

She dragged her fingernails along the floor again.

"So, you remember how I said I only got magical training a few days before I got dragged here?" she said, not quite daring to look him in the eye. "Well, it was mostly because my multiple-times-great-grandmother was an evil old hag."

He was still resting his head on his arms but he turned his head to look at her, absorbed in what she was saying.

"What'd she do?" he asked softly.

"Strapped me to the rack she kept in her creepy little torture dungeon and spent an afternoon zapping me with her Staff of One, mostly."

Nico tried to say it breezily, like it didn't bother her all that much. Like it was just another oh, my family's evil, there's a shock event in her life. It didn't come out that way of course; since she wouldn't have ducked questions from her friends about the Staff's new appearance if it had just been one of those. She tightened her grip on the blanket and made a sound that was almost a laugh.

"Plus you know, blah blah blah, I'm an embarrassment to the family name, a few tidbits about magic she never actually explained, and very little on what's apparently an ancestral weapon rather than just something the Gibborim gave my mom when she sold her soul to them."

She wasn't actually carrying the Staff of One with her, for once. She'd left it back in her room. She was suddenly seized by a powerful urge to go check on it, to make sure that Molly or one of the elves or Yeti hadn't wandered in and started poking at it. She raked her nails across the floor, focusing on the sound and the sensation of it to keep herself from up and fleeing immediately in pursuit of that urge. She might not be the best at dealing with her own vulnerability, but she knew an excuse when she felt one.

"So you had her, like, trying to pick you apart. But instead of physically, she was doing it magically and through pain. Geez, that's rough."

He reached out his hand for hers, the one raking her nails against the floor. It was just a pat-pat. He didn't hold on long. Enough for that person-to-person solidity and intimacy while trying to make it not uncomfortable.

"I'm never gonna get that. People thinking they can treat other people like things, opening them up however which way they think they have a right to, making them vulnerable. That's what it comes down to. Making people feel vulnerable and just...taking that from them. Them feeling safe and having everything closed off inside themselves."

He'd been looking at the floor as he talked but finally looked up at her.

"Yeah," Nico agreed softly. "One of the things I did learn is the more pain I can take, the more powerful spells I can cast. At least when I'm not in an alternate universe where the rules are different."

She knew so little about that thing. It lived inside her chest back home, and she only knew maybe half a dozen things about it. She scratched at the floor again before curling her fingers into a fist.

"Some people are just evil," she said. "I hope I never understand it."

She really, really did.

"I'm never gonna get it, but I want to understand it so I know how those people think so I can get rid of them more easily. There's no way we'll be able to do it until Mikey and I get out of this place, Leo heals up, and we take back New York somehow, but if we could just outsmart the Shredder somehow, for once..."

He needed to be gone.

"Sometimes I wish I could get enough of a handle on it all, to always know it'd be the right choice to take someone out. Like to clean up the world. Get rid of all the people like that. But it's gotta be all...complicated."

Nico just shook her head.

"Maybe you can work something out," she said. "All things considered though, I don't think I should risk it."

She'd found out that the evil running through her family tree was at least a century old, after all. She just hadn't been let in on the family secret until someone else had caught on and set everything up for her to trip over.

"I can tell you that 'cleaning up the world' never ends well, though."

"I know. It's just wishful thinking."

Heck, he and his brothers hadn't even managed to take down the baddies when it was nice and black and white. The Kraang and Shredder's forces were too strong for them. What was he even talking about with wishing to take on the more subtle evils in the world?

"Why don't you think you should risk thinking about it?"

He wondered if she meant all the stuff with her family. Because that would've been strange, if she thought she was somehow more suspected to evil or something just because her family sucked.

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