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

"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.

Nico sighed. This was why she didn't really talk morality with people outside of her friends.

"Seems like it doesn't so much run in my family as gallop, wouldn't you say?" she asked rhetorically. "If you've got a family history of alcoholism, you might not want to go out and grab that first beer. I might just be predisposed to get things twisted in the morality department." She shrugged. "Seems better not to risk it if I don't have to."

"Morality's not genetic, though. Maybe being a psychopath might be. That's a thing nobody knows yet, right? I'm not that up on my science. But it's pretty clear that's not a problem with you."

Not with how shaken up she'd been in that room in the lab with the...remains. That horrible, horrible room. He'd seen the look on her face.

That had required empathy and that meant she had it.

"Your parents raised you up different than them, right? You said you weren't even allowed to watch violent cartoons. And you have empathy. It's understandable you'd not want to think about it but not wanting to because it's not pleasant and feeling like you're at greater risk of being bad are two different things."

"Maybe not today," Nico said. "But next year? Five years after that?? Maybe the groundwork's already laid and I need just the right kind of bad day to decide everything needs to burn. Maybe I just need the right person to end up in my power. The right excuse."

Maybe it had already happened. She wrapped her blanket more tightly around herself.

"It's my head. I get to choose what risks I take with it."

"You do. That's your right. It's just..."

He didn't like that she seemed to think she was a time bomb.

"That way of thinking about it sounds like something that has to be hard to live with. Thinking you're a time bomb waiting to go off. It sounds like it has to be scary."

He peered over at her.

"Even if you do always stay away from thinking about that stuff to be safe - which is fine, it's understandable if it makes you feel safer - it'd be good to see it for what it is. Evil's a choice. It's a bunch of choices. And darkness is something that's in everybody, so at the very least, don't think you're somehow at a bigger risk than anyone else. It almost sounds like you think there's a part of you that's already rotten and that's not how it works."

He shrugged.

"Just look at me."

"Better to think I'm a time bomb and be wrong rather than thinking I'm not and being wrong."

Nico cocked her head to the side, frowning at him.

"Just look at you how?"

He was silent for a moment, as if wondering if he should even be honest about it. But hey, she'd bared her soul a bit, it was only fair he did the same. Besides, she'd seen him fighting. She'd seen him almost take a knife to those scientists in front of little kids.

It wasn't really giving away anything she hadn't already seen.

"Good upbringing by a really good father, right? And from when I was little, I was this little tiny ball of rage. Always picking fights with my brothers, always getting really vicious. I still sometimes let my temper go completely out of control. One time I kicked my brother in the back of the head when he wasn't looking just 'cause he beat me in training. And we're not talking when we were kids or anything, this happened a few months ago. Another time I lost my cool and almost -"

He paused.

"I almost put a sai through the head of the guy who's now, like, my best friend, I guess. Because I got mad at him during a fight the first time I met him. And that's all when I shouldn't be that way. I got hugs when I was a kid, I had a dad who loved me and taught me right from wrong, who was always trying to help me with that anger and it just...I don't know. It comes from nowhere and I don't know why. I might never figure out why, but one thing I do know is that I might need just the right kind of bad day, too."

He went on, "Because that's how everyone is. For everyone, all it might take is one bad day. That's a scary thing and everyone has to deal with it the way that's best for them, but you're not like some bomb waiting to go off either. Or...well, if you are, it's not different from how lots of people are."

He looked at the floor now, not really wanting to look her in the eye. "If someone raised in a good way by someone good can turn out like me, then it isn't just where you come from or how you were raised. Or from genetics - all my human DNA comes from Splinter and none of my brothers are like this. Anyone can be bad and anyone can be good."

Edited 2014-11-15 08:11 (UTC)

Nico stared down at the floor as well, less because she was horrified by what Raph had said and more because he'd just bared something secret and personal to her and she couldn't reciprocate. She could tell him what had been done to her, but she could make her lips move to spit out what she'd done in retaliation.

She didn't think having evil parents meant you had to be evil. Her friends weren't evil; Molly was sweet and would never do the kinds of things her parents had done, Karolina and Xavin tried to stop a war their parents had started, Victor was doing everything he could to make sure he wouldn't become Victorious, and Chase had proven that the only life he was willing to sacrifice -- even to bring Gert back -- was his own. Gert hadn't been evil either, she'd been all too eager to shine a light on all of the evil already in the world.

Really, it was just her. There was something wrong with her.

"Well," she said finally, "if it's something you're worried about, maybe we can look out for each other. While we're here."

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