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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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."

"That's normal, too." A pause. "Well, for people like us. That's probably not normal for everyone else. It starts to get where you wanna have a little party every time you don't get absorbed by an alien monstrosity."

Absorbed. Not eaten.

"Only if you did, you'd never get anything else done?" Nico shook her head. "Yeah, that impulse sounds familiar. Though our alien monstrosities rate pretty low on the absorbency scale."

"It'd be a never-ending party, that we'd only take breaks from to fight more ninjas or mutants or mutant ninjas, and then we'd be stuck in a never-ending cycle."

He added, "And you're lucky on the alien front." He shuddered visibly. "That thing was like something out of the movie 'The Whatsit.'"

One that Nico didn't have in her world. No, what she had was a little movie called 'The Thing.'

"I've never seen that movie, so the allusion's lost on me," Nico said. "I'm guessing it's sponge-y and brain-like though, since you just have the one alien species and you mentioned them being brains in robot bodies. Unless it was some other creature from where they're from?"

"That one was a giant shapeshifting tentacle monster thing that scuttled around on bug legs, and had a face and neck that split in half. It could absorb people and then their faces would show up on its neck, saying 'join ussss'..."

Raph's eyes were very wide.

"It almost got me by pretending to be Leo and then it did get me and Casey but April blew it up with her brain right after we got sucked in."

His eyes still very wide, he paused, thoughtful, as a whole bunch of things suddenly became clear.

"You know, when I really think about it, hiding out in a run-down farmhouse in the middle of nowhere was probably just inviting all this creepy horror stuff. We jinxed ourselves. The only choice of hideouts that would've been worse was if we'd decided to stay in an abandoned insane asylum."

"Things like that make me glad that my parents and their co-conspirators were all city people, so all their hidden lairs are far, far away from the horrible things that live in the woods," Nico said. "Good thing April figured that blowing it up would free you guys instead of just kersplatting you everywhere."

Edited 2014-12-17 08:27 (UTC)

"Yeeeeah she kinda didn't. It was pulling her in, too, and she did it on instinct. Which was still okay because if she hadn't, there would've been no one left to save us and we'd all have been stuck inside that thing. For good."

He nodded into his pillow a few times too many.

"I think I would've been okay with being splatted if that was the only other option."

"Oh."

Well, Nico would rather die than go evil like her parents, so it wasn't too far off.

"Then good thing it worked out like it did," she said. "I'm glad Molly's parents weren't explode-things-with-your-mind kind of psychics."

"So that strength thing she's got, that's psychic? I figured it couldn't be muscle mass, obviously, but I figured it's like in comic books where people are somehow freakishly sturdy and they don't ever really explain it."

Her being psychic would explain the glowy eyed thing though.

Edited 2014-12-17 09:50 (UTC)

"Maybe?" Nico shrugged her shoulders and smiled wryly. "The X-Men don't exactly put out dossiers on how mutant powers work; and since they keep trying to take Molly away 'for her own good' and 'mutant solidarity' or whatever, we try to avoid chatting. But just because her parents are psychics doesn't mean that she is. Magneto can manipulate metal, but he's got kids with super-speed and some kind of magic thing for their mutations."

"What do you mean they keep trying to take her away? What gives them the right? Are they working with some kinda social services?"

At least that'd make sense. Even if Nico and her team would probably be best off on their own, at least if it was social services their motivation would be concern over anything really selfish.

"As if. They used to have a school-slash-orphanage for kids whose parents kicked them out when they got their powers, but then almost all of them just...woke up one day without their powers. No one really seems to know why or how. Molly's one of handful who kept hers, so they think they have some right to her. Even though she has no interest in staying with them -- believe me, we asked her."

Nico couldn't help but smirk a little.

"She actually punched her mutant celebrity crush out through the doors of a church and into a snowbank for being a jerk, according to what she's told us."

Raph smirked. Good on the kid.

"So these 'superheroes'-" three-fingered hands were pretty good at quotey fingers because they actually looked like quotes "-apparently think kidnapping is perfectly fine? How do they manage that potentially medal-winning bit of mental gymnastics?"

Nico had to admit, she was a little jealous of Raph's mad skills with the quotey fingers.

"Dunno. Like I said, we try to avoid chatting with any of them, if at all possible. There's a reason I sling spells first and ask questions later, and all of those reasons are 'superheroes are dumb'."

"It sounds a lot like things are bad unless they do them and then it's perfectly okay."

He was still preemptively resentful of her world's heroes, without ever having met them, for some of them being celebrities for being heroes.

Fuuuuck those guys. Yes, he was jealous.

"Like you keep saying little stuff here and there and it paints a picture that I think would be a lot uglier if I saw the whole thing."

"Don't get me wrong, they're great to have around when the world is going to explode or something," Nico said. "Usually, at least. Before we found out about our parents. But pretty much everything I've seen out of them since has been stupid over-dramatic reality TV-style crap.

"Like, every single team in the U.S. basically got into a huge fight over whether or not people with super powers should register with the government, right? Well, they were so busy fighting each other that me and my friends had to fight a monster the size of a skyscraper. Plus the fun experience of my second go 'round at breaking into a government facility to rescue someone, and that time was more similar to time number three than number one."

Time number three being the one where she and Raph met, if he remembered that bit of trivia she'd dropped.

"And after that was all over, all their government-trained heroes were pretty much instantly mowed down by the alien invasion. So as far as I can tell, they're just chugging liquid stupid now."

"So, they got into a big fight and basically risked people's lives and let people die and some of them were working with the same government that had creepy labs. And then they didn't even train the people they forced into it enough that they could actually survive."

Raph was allowed to be disgusted when Splinter had trained the hell out of his sons (and April). He was allowed to be disgusted when he and his brothers went at alien invasions with slightly-enhanced near-human abilities and weapons from feudal Japan, typically managed to save everyone, and didn't even take credit for it.

Okay, so they'd lost against the Kraang in the big invasion but that was after already having stopped one before, and they planned to go back and face impossible odds anyway once Leo was better. And yes, the canisters of ooze had hit a lot of people during that one fight in the Kraang ship but it was a fight and sometimes you couldn't control what happened in a fight. It wasn't really out of selfishness and ego and stupidity so much as the fight just not going well. Everything that could have gone wrong had.

That robot'd had surprise butt cannons, after all.

"I think the worst we ever did - aside from losing against a whole invasion force when we were hopelessly outnumbered and outmatched in a situation where all our enemies teamed up against us and just about anyone would lose - was have a fight go bad in one of the Kraang ships. It was out of control, a hatch accidentally got banged open, and a bunch of mutagen canisters got dumped all over New York. And you know what we did? We went out just about every night and tried to hunt down every. Single. Canister to try to get them before anyone got mutated. It wasn't even our fault but we figured it was still our responsibility to try to make it right."

He was actually angry now.

"We fight aliens with ninjutsu and weapons that were the height of technology in feudal Japan and we held off one alien invasion and saved like hundreds of hostages without them even knowing we did it. How. How are they messing up that badly? Me and my brothers and Casey and April aren't even superheroes and we suck it at less than that."

And they got to be celebrities. That was what was burning his nonexistent butt the most.

"And some of 'em get to be famous for it."

So offended.

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cw: discussion of suicidal thoughts

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