ya_assemble | [LN] Beat of His Own Drums [Open]

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[LN] Beat of His Own Drums [Open]

As soon as the yeti finished that beautiful, beautiful brand spankin' new not liberated from the trash drum kit, Raph had swooped in and commandeered it, dragging it off piece by piece to the room he'd also commandeered as his own when he'd first arrived.

"You can make another one," he'd shot back at the pouting yeti, who'd sighed and gotten back to work as he stole the cymbals.

It was a Pearl Export kit. Not exactly top of the line but solid, had a good sound just like the real thing (talk about trademark infringement, right?), and most importantly of all, it was new. Like so few of Raph's belongings were. In fact, the only belongings he had that weren't, ahem, "recycled," were things April and Casey had given him. Everything else was junk scavenged from the surface by Splinter - and then by him and his brothers when they started going up.

New drums. Actual new drums. And a new cd player. And new cds. He'd managed to grab a few new things, actual new things. For the first time in his life, he was playing on a new drum kit.

All the "you have to save all of existence" stuff aside, this place rocked.

That was why he was in his room banging away, sometimes playing very recognizable drums beats by themselves, sometimes in time with the original music. If it sounded like he was crazy enthusiastic about what he was doing, it was because he was.

He'd left his door open out of a general lack of consideration for others, but the noise didn't add much more noise pollution to the busy workshop than there was - and at least he was good. Very good, in fact.

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"I can see that," Nico said with a nod. "I can't imagine how you guys managed in the winter, though. The first time we ended up in New York, we had to borrow coats and scarves and stuff from a church because we literally don't own anything meant for that kind of weather."

Even if they hadn't been abruptly teleported there via the hell inside Cloak's cloak.

"All four of us are mostly muscle and that puts out a lot of body heat. Between that and our shells holding it all in, we don't get cold easily and Donnie has - well, he had the lair all rigged up with a heating system. The flip side of that is in the summer, even if we did wear clothes, we'd have to run around naked because otherwise we'd be baking in our shells. Luckily the sewers are nice and cool and we mostly only go out at night so nobody sees us."

Raph picked up his comic again and stuck his tongue out at her.

"Besides, we're New Yorkers. We're naturally tougher than you avocado-worshiping New Agey California people. While you California people are 'cleansing'" - quotey fingers "- and eating your locally sourced vegan ice cream," he said it with great sarcasm and self-importance in his voice, "we grow up nice and strong by eating pizza that's actually good and not breathing in quite as much smog."

"Pretty big talk for someone in a city completely lacking in In-and-Out Burgers and Mexican food that isn't an offense to anyone with a mouth," Nico retorted, rolling her eyes at him and not sticking out her tongue. Because she was so much more mature than that. Neener. "Besides, the hippie-est vegan I know kicked plenty of Old Time New York butt, and zapped an alien commander straight through a tree about four feet across."

And now he wanted to meet her friends and the way he grinned when she told him about Karolina slamming aliens into trees made that clear.

But he wasn't finished yet.

"We don't need In-and-Out Burgers. We have a whole army of guys providing better food with names like Mario, Gino, Tino, Dino, Mario (because there's more than one), Antonio, Biagio, Bruno, Emilio, and so on and so forth. You can keep your little burger franchise, New Yorkers have a small army of Italian guys with names that end in 'o' that give us good food. And that's just one kinda food."

He put his comic down and added, "Also, it's survival of the fittest every day people walk outside because homicidal, human-hating cabs are always trying to hunt them down. Why do you think me and my brothers always travel by hopping across roofs? It's not just because we try not to be seen. And after they thin down the herd, only the strongest are left."

Edited 2014-12-10 08:53 (UTC)

Nico's friends were pretty cool. It was only natural that he'd want to meet them.

"My New York has much lazier cabs, then," Nico said, shaking her head. "Most crowded midnight drug run ever. I practically got elbowed into the portal inside the guy's coat."

She grimaced as she realized how that sounded. "Which is another thing we have less of in L.A. -- creepy dudes taking MGH to mug super heroines and get them put in the hospitals they work at."

Raph put the comic down again, suddenly.

"Okay, that's it. Tell the story." He waved a hand in a gimme gesture. "Fork it over. You can't just drop that you went on a midnight drug run inside a guy's coat and not tell the whole story."

Give him the story, Nico. Give it.

"Oh boy," Nico pushed her hair back over her shoulder. "Okay, so, for context, Cloak and Dagger are a couple of NYC super heroes we ran into the first time we ran away. Our parents grabbed them before they left town to get us help, and mind-whammied them to forget what we'd told them.

"After we ran away the second time, someone who looked like Cloak and had the same powers beat the crud out of Dagger on camera and put her in a coma. The other super heroes kicked Cloak around enough to rattle his memories of us loose, so he teleported out to L.A. to get our help. Chase and I went looking for drug dealers that might be able to get someone something like Cloak's powers."

She pulled her hair back over her shoulder again, twisting it in her hands. Edit, edit, edit, gloss over some of the more horrible bits and the part where she couldn't keep her stupid lips to herself.

"We found a guy with a portal in his coat. Turns out the guy with the drugs did his dealing between dimensions and was a fanboy of our 'rents. Chase managed to convince him that they weren't actually dead, and that we were doing their work for them; so we got a name and enough information to trace the guy back to the same hospital Dagger ended up in." She grimaced and stuck her tongue out. "Super-creepy. Fun fact, that's the trip where I used 'hellfire'. Not on the creep, sadly, just to get Spider-Man to back off."

And then Pusher Man got murdered by the Kingpin, who took pictures of the whole thing. Seriously, she was getting emotionally invested in never going back to NYC again.

Edited 2014-12-11 11:40 (UTC)

Raph looked at her in rapt fascination as she told the story.

His takeway:

"What kind of stupid superhero name is 'Spider-Man'? I mean, it's kinda obvious. That'd be like if I called myself 'Turtle Man.' It's stupid."

He and his brothers did refer to themselves as "ninja turtles" on occasion but that was what they were. They didn't have any weird codenames or make a team name out of it or anything.

"Cloak" and "Dagger" weren't that bad, at least, in Raph's opinion. Especially if they were a duo.

Edited 2014-12-12 08:12 (UTC)

"I'm pretty sure he's just a guy with spider-themed powers," Nico said. "It's not like he's some kind of spider hivemind pretending to be a person. All codenames are pretty dorky; ours were too when we used them."

Then, before he could ask (because she knew he was going to ask):

"I was 'Sister Grimm', which was my instant messenger handle. Molly was 'Bruiser' or 'Princess Powerful'. Chase was 'Talkback', Gert was 'Arsenic', and Karolina was 'Lucy in the Sky'. Alex didn't use one. Like I said, they were pretty dumb."

He laughed. Of course he laughed. The idea of codenames at all was slightly ridiculous to him.

It was gentle, though. Far more gentler than it was with his brothers and Casey. A bit more like how he joked around with April.

"Did you also have a me-space with 'welcome to my twisted mind' as the title? Like, you know, fifty billion other teenagers?"

"Nobody's 'welcome' to my twisted mind." Nico tossed her head. "My blog was strictly friends-only."

She hadn't logged on since they ran away the first time. Her online friends probably thought she'd died or something.

He flopped backward, chuckling and vindicated, propped up against his pillow with his hands folded over his chest.

"You are just so...normal." He added, "You know, magic staff and superheroing aside. That's always funny to me. April's the same way, once you get past the psychic powers and the fact she's probably part-alien."

Casey was not normal. Casey was a hyper-aggressive weirdo, and that was why he was pretty much Raph's best friend.

"If your definition of 'normal' includes a psychic probably-half-alien and a witch, you're using a very different dictionary from everyone else ever," Nico said.

She hadn't felt 'normal' in...well, ever. She'd always felt that there was a wrongness, like a puzzle piece that someone was trying to make fit in a spot that was almost-but-not-quite right, like something was missing. Strangely, she'd found some sort of peace deep inside when she found out what kind of people her parents really were, but after her run-in with the Witchbreaker, she was wondering if she should have questioned that more.

She shook herself a little, picking up her sewing again and stabbing the needle through the cloth a couple times.

"Please, do explain how 'normal' I am."

"Like having a blog. And talking to people online. And coming up with edgy sounding internet handles." He added quickly, worried that maybe she was taking it the wrong way, "It's not like an insult. Normal doesn't mean boring. It's just -"

It was difficult to put it into words.

"One time we had to rescue April at her school because she was being chased by an evil robot and, well, that was the first time we were ever in a school. But she went to school almost her whole life."

He couldn't seem to find the words for it.

"We didn't really talk to people before we met April and Casey and it's always surreal talking to people who do - or did - normal kid and teenager stuff." He smirked slightly. "And it's even funnier when you know they can do things like blow up stuff with their brains."

It wasn't so much that he didn't see her as strange as he apparently saw himself as someone much more not normal and was amused by the difference in frame of reference.

"I didn't think you meant 'boring'; I just never felt normal." Nico shrugged one shoulder, not looking up from her sewing. "I don't know, I guess maybe no one ever does."

She chewed on her lower lip and steeled herself, finally managing to pull her eyes up from her hands.

"But yeah, it is kind of funny how few people who seem normal are normal."

Raph, who'd been leaning back against his pillow, sat up and pulled it into his arms, leaning sideways on it and shifting so he was propped there on his side, looking over at her.

"How come?" he asked. "How come you never felt normal?"

His expression was gentle, as if all he wanted to do was understand, to know what she thought.

Edited 2014-12-13 04:00 (UTC)

"I don't know," Nico said, looking back down at her sewing. "I mean...your average suburban girl doesn't react to getting stabbed in the chest with "I'm surprised I lasted this long", does she? And this was the night I found out my parents were evil, before we picked out our dorky codenames. Before we even told Molly what we'd seen our parents do."

Oh. Oh. That made his heart hurt. Where had that come from? How had she squirmed her way in so quickly that her saying something like that could cause that kind of ache?

"Were you sad before that? Like, depressed?" Raph asked gently. "That's normal for a lot of teenagers. When I was younger, I -"

And he stopped there.

He'd never wondered how he'd survived so long, never thought about sad things like wanting to be gone. But he had spent time troubled by the fact that no one would notice someday when he and his brother and Splinter were gone. Because they'd never notice they were there.

"It wasn't the same thing but I...I thought about some stuff sometimes."

Except instead of being sad or wondering how he'd lasted so long, he'd always been so, so angry, so moody and brash and cranky. Something that had gradually changed when he and his brothers had been allowed out and been able to make friends with April and Casey.

Edited 2014-12-15 07:37 (UTC)

"I didn't want to die or anything," Nico said quietly. "I wasn't really depressed either, I don't think. I just...everyone always says that teenagers think they're immortal. I never did."

She realized she was wringing her sewing project in her hands and quickly spread it out, smoothing it down over her lap. She wished she'd thought to bring the Staff of One with her when she'd left her room to investigate the sound of drums -- it wouldn't warp or tear under her fingers.

Raph wanted to reach out and take her hand just like before, but resisted this time, not sure if it'd be welcome. He couldn't keep doing that, being touchy-feely. For one, he wasn't exactly a touchy-feely guy (or so he liked to tell himself) and for two, he didn't want to overstep any boundaries.

"Maybe you're right that no one really feels normal. Or maybe it's just normal to feel a little lost sometimes."

He certainly had. Which had been the motivation behind just about every one-sided conversation he'd ever had with Spike.

"Like when I was younger -" Wait, was he talking about the kind of stuff he talked about to Spike to another actual person? Okay, so maybe he was. It felt...okay to. Like talking to Spike, except she talked back, and wasn't insanely possessive.

"My brothers are all pretty happy people, you know? You've met Mikey. There was this point when we were younger that we realized there probably wouldn't ever be a place for us up on the surface. Donnie dealt with it by throwing himself head first into all his tech. Mikey just bounces his way through everything and keeps thinking we'll be accepted somehow. Leo just focused on our family; he has the rest of us and that's good enough for him."

It went unspoken, for a moment, how he'd dealt with it, as he tried to find words for it.

"Wasn't so easy for you, huh?"

It seemed like every time she and Raph talked, they both ended up revealing parts of themselves that they wouldn't talk about with anyone else. Heck, the only other person Nico had ever told about what she'd thought when her mom stabbed her was Alex, right before she kissed him for reassuring her that they were going to live through the confrontation with their parents, as long as they stuck to the plan -- and that ought to tell her how bad of an idea this was. But she'd been the one to get them here, so she ought to get them through it, too.

"No. It wasn't." He went on, "The world didn't seem so bright, you know? How could it be when we knew we were gonna have to spend our whole lives in the dark? And my brothers, they never got me. They tried, but I felt like no one understood me. I used to - I used to talk all the time to my pet turtle, about all the stuff I couldn't tell anyone else."

Yes, he'd had a pet turtle.

"You--"

Nope. Nope, not a good tangent to take this conversation on right now. Besides, it was probably like having a pet monkey or something. As long as it wasn't, like, one of their siblings that hadn't been mutated. That would definitely be weird.

"It's good you had someone to talk to," she said instead. "I had my online journal, mostly because my parents would have snooped a paper one."

"Yes, I had a pet turtle," picking up on the question before it was asked. He grinned slightly. "I found him when I was seven. Someone flushed him down a toilet when he was a baby."

Which meant that, yes, a seven year-old Raph had gone running with a little soggy baby turtle to his rat-dad and done the puppy-eyed 'Can I keep him? Pleeeease?'

"But I also had Sensei, too. Even if I didn't always realize it at the time." His face fell slightly. "But that always makes it easier. You know, finding people that understand you. And, I guess, learning to understand yourself. That's what he always helped me with. So maybe the feeling lost is normal but the getting unlost is too."

Nico's first thought had been that Raph had smuggled his pet into his room and tried to hide him from his family, but thinking about what she knew about him and his family, it was more likely that he'd gone running to ask permission. Which was pretty adorable, all things considered.

"Yeah," she agreed. "I haven't really struggled with it so much since we ran away again." She shrugged and smirked a little. "But then, I did end up in a position where I'm fighting cowboy werewolves and old guys whose nostalgia and magic amulets turn them into monsters the size of buildings, so my continued survival is actually something of note."

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cw: discussion of suicidal thoughts

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