ya_assemble | [LN] Dangerously Genre-Savvy [closed to Nico]

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[LN] Dangerously Genre-Savvy [closed to Nico]

"Inspector!" Rafa cried out, as the Inspector's ship crash landed in the purple jungles of Khalafross. Clad in his traditional animal skins, he was an imposing figure, even despite the fact that the Inspector was taller than him. "The danger light blinks! Rafa can see with the eyes of the ship! Our most hated enemy comes for us: Blorgons!"

Native to the planet Tumantis, Rafa was one of the Tessujex, a subgroup of the people known as the Suveteem. In the Inspector's adventures, he had discovered that the Suvateem were actually descendant of a crashed space exploration survey team. (Their name, in fact, was what "survey team" had devolved into over the centuries). The Tessujex had evolved from the animals on board that had accidentally been exposed to mutagens during the crash and developed human intelligence. (Hence the name Tessujex, a twisted version of the words "test subjects.")

After the Tessujex were used as slave labor for centuries, the Inspector was responsible for making the Suveteem realize that the humanoids among them were not the superior species they'd once thought they were and that their claim that they were descended from the gods was false, the Tessujex finally had a chance of being treated equal in their society. After that, Rafa, one of the Tessujex's most noble warriors and resistance fighters had declared that he would follow the Inspector to the end of time until the debt could be repaid, especially if it meant the Inspector could teach him the ways of peace after a lifetime of battle.

"We must leave! Quickly! And fight them in the jungle. Rafa knows the way!"

They had no way of defending themselves on the ship and there was no way to repair it while the Blorgons were on board.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The shack had rusted tools hanging from the walls, and a strange little bottle of something sparkling and green on what looked like a homemade altar surrounded by flowers.

The terrible monster was hovering over him, its body comprised of disgusting looking gook, plant roots, and even live earthworms. Raph managed to position himself so he could kick it in the stomach with both feet from the floor, knocking it over, and then he tried to inch worm away, but the creature got up and hurled a pitchfork so that it stuck in the ground just inches from Raph's face, making him screech a terrified screech. Then it started to drag him back by the vines that were wrapped around him, causing them to grow into the floor to tether him there.

It was like something out of a horror movie, a helpless victim being dragged to some remote and horrible torture den, screaming as they were chained to the floor.

Raph thrashed against the vines, still clearly terrfied, and the monster bent over him a plant-root hand grasping over his face and doing...something to it, that made him scream even more in pain and fear.

Nico's first impulse was to take a swing at the monster with the branch she'd picked up off the ground (she must have picked it up, it was there in her hand. Strangely smooth and clean for something she'd picked up off the forest floor, but it was in her hand...)

But no, this was a memory, wasn't it? She couldn't defend him from the monster, because she hadn't been there. Instead, she skirted around it, reaching out to touch him.

"Raph, this is just a memory."

Or something. She still wasn't entirely sure she wasn't dreaming.

"Raph, look at me, I'm here!"

When the creature withdrew its hand, it was finally clear what it'd done to him. Somehow, it had implanted strange roots and growing vines in Raph's skin - and they were spreading, worming their way in and growing all through his flesh. Strange grass-like growth was spreading with the vines, moving over his face and shoulders, creating moss-like growth over his shell. His drivesuit was missing in this little memory scenario, making the grotesque changes abundantly clear.

The creature left the shack, slamming the door behind it, taking the pitchfork with it. Raph desperately tried to rip the vine up from the floor or off of himself but found it wouldn't budge.

As soon as Raph had judged it was gone long enough, he managed to work his mouth free of the vines and started screaming. He clearly was so lost in this he didn't see Nico because he was calling out for his brother's help instead.

"LEEEOOOOOOO!"

Calling out for his big brother was instinct. It was rare that Raph was ever this terrified but now that he was, of course he was yelling for his older brother first. No matter how much they'd butted heads or argued, Raph knew how much Leo cared about them all, how much he tried to keep them all safe.

A memory flashed, like it so often did in the Drift, light and fleeting, the image of a young Raph - a turtle-boy, not a human boy - clinging desperately to some sewer pipes over a large and dangerous sewer drain. He'd slipped when they'd been playing hide and seek, slid down one of the pipes they weren't supposed to go down, and he could barely hold on as the waters churned below. He was scared - like actually, really, really scared.

"LEEEOOOO!"

And he came. Of course he came. He was always there when they needed him.

"Raph! Where are you?!"

"I'm down here! I slipped! There's a big drain and the pipes are broken and I can't climb up. I'm slipping!"

"Raph, hang on!"

"Already doing that, in case that wasn't obvious!"

"Use all that energy you're using for sarcasm for hanging on!" Leo called out sardonically, and thudding noises came from above, as if he was banging a bent pipe out of the way. "Mikey, gimme your kusarigama!"

He'd come skidding down, hanging onto the chain, grabbed Raph, and helped him scoot up, inch by inch, as Donnie and Mikey helped by pulling up the chain.

"I've got you, little brother, we're almost there."

"LEEEOOOOOOO!"

As the growth took over, threading its way through his skin, Raph curled up in pain on the dirt floor of the shack, weeping now, terrified over changing like this into something unknown. He closed his eyes tight, tears squeezing out and dripping down his face, and then opened them again, revealing that they'd turned into something even less human.

They were now a glowing light green and he was clearly losing himself, less and less aware of what was happening or where and when he was.

"S - sensei!" The word held layers of meaning, and one of them became clear because he said it aloud. "Dad!"

The upside to his worsening fear was that he wanted someone, anyone, to help him, to comfort him. Which meant Nico would now find that she could touch him.

Edited 2014-12-27 23:53 (UTC)

"Raph!"

The branch she'd picked up hit the ground with a metallic thump and she dropped to her knees to cradle his face in her hands. They were in uncharted waters here -- this wasn't like any incidence of chasing the rabbit that she'd ever heard of. She had no way of knowing if this was a memory or a dream or if it could actually kill him because it was some combination of both or neither. She didn't know what to do.

Squeezing her eyes shut, she pressed her forehead to his and desperately grasped through her mind for something, anything that could help. There was a foggy idea somewhere beneath her memories, something...

This was a real memory. Neither one of them was dreaming or making it up, this had happened to him; he wasn't a human dude, he was a mutant turtle.

And she wasn't a girl orphaned in a Kaiju attack and adopted by a Jaeger pilot. She lost her parents to sea monsters years before she was even born.

"I'm here, Raph," she said, opening her eyes and gazing unflinchingly into the glowing green of his. "I'm here. You're gonna be okay."

Outwardly, he was turning into a monster. It was thematically appropriate considering the little conflict in his head.

"There's something wrong with me," he said, his words shaky. Looking into her eyes had ensnared him - in a good way - reeled him in where she could hold him tight and keep him from flapping around in the wind.

"Even with this, even with...everything -" Tentacle monsters and mutants and pain and loss and constant, relentless fighting, all of it flashing where she could see "- I love this life. But that's not right, it's not supposed to be like that."

She saw him in battle, felt what he felt: exhilaration, rage, straight up blood lust. Vindictive pleasure over hurting his enemies. Oh sure, he was happy that it helped people and a lot of his ruthlessness and rage was rooted in love and protectiveness and a desire to protect his own - whether it was his family or his city or his world - but a lot of it was just that he liked kicking people's heads in.

He tore off a robot's arm in the memory and jammed it through the door handles.

"That'll hold 'em!" He turned to see his brothers staring. "...What?"

"You. Are seriously twisted," said Leo.

"Thanks!" chirped Raph.

He pretended he was happy with it, with himself, and he was. But no matter how much he tried to pretend it was okay, it ate him up inside, knowing that he shouldn't be happy with himself. There was a flash of him freaking out on the roof of a building, before his fight with Casey, venting his anger by just...breaking things. For pretty much no reason.

"Since I got pulled here, I keep having this nightmare. I think it belongs to one of the other me's but it feels...right. Like it fits me, too." She could see it now, flashing around them in black and white and red. "Where I just fight...everyone."

Every single one of his enemies, all of them, and every time he killed them all. Every last one. The Shredder was always the last and his death was always the most brutal. Then blood-soaked and crowing in victory, Raph died atop a pile of his enemies, exhilarating in his own death.

"People aren't supposed to want this," he said, still looking at her in the eyes, voice raspy. "What does it say about me that aside from losing people, the thing I'm most scared of is that I'll run out of people to fight?"

What was scarier was how...okay he was with it all. Yeah, it bothered him, but not in a 'I feel empathy, I don't really like hurting people' way. It was in a very cerebral, logical 'Why is it I do all this and never second guess myself?' way.

Edited 2014-12-30 06:47 (UTC)

Nico managed to stop herself from recoiling at the glimpses she got of Raph's life, and the glimpses she got of how much he enjoyed the ugliest parts of it. Barely, but she managed to keep a hold of him.

What was she supposed to say to that, though? What could anyone say in the face of that much violent exhilaration?

"Dreams aren't literal," she said, because she'd killed her parents in a dream once. It hadn't been bloody; but with her magic, it wouldn't have had to be. She couldn't bring people back to life, but she could kill with a word. "Neither are nightmares. Not even here, I don't think."

She licked her lips, staring into his eyes and willing herself not to blink.

"I don't know what it says about you, but I don't think it makes you a bad person. If you were, you wouldn't worry about running out of people to fight, because there would always be people to fight if you didn't care who you fought."

Her parents hadn't cared. Alex hadn't cared who he'd kill if he'd succeeded in his plan to help them.

"If you weren't worried about it, I'd worry," she said. The corners of her mouth kicked up briefly in a weak smile. "I'm still here, right? I'm not scared of you. I know monsters."

Maybe that was true. Sensei had never treated him like he was a monster. Sensei even said he'd been similar when he was younger.

And he'd settled, hadn't he? With a family, even. Twice over. He'd become a quiet, gentle man with an impish sense of humor and boundless self-control.

It scared him, thinking about what might happen if things changed, if their never-ending battles stopped, but maybe she was right. Maybe being scared of that, maybe not taking it as a given that he'd take all that out on innocent people meant something. Because he wouldn't right? There was no way he could ever go kicking people around that didn't deserve it. The fact he was worried about who he was and his place in the world came with the given that he would never be someone that hurt the wrong people for the wrong reasons.

Maybe he didn't have to feel all soppy empathy all over the place to be a good person. Maybe just having that little voice of "hey, it shouldn't be that easy for you to do that" was enough. If he was a little twisted, at least he (mostly) directed in the right directions.

"Maybe you're right. This place, whatever it is, it's - it's messing with our heads."

It was digging in deep, digging down to the fears that were far under the surface, in the places he wasn't usually conscious of. But now that those fears had been unearthed it meant they could be put to rest, too.

Where she touched him, the vines and roots started to shrivel and fall away, spreading away from her hands in a wave in a way that seemed less like her touch was killing them and more like they were rotting, parasitic things and her touch was something life-giving. They choked and died and healthy green flesh and hard shell appeared in their place.

He blinked once, twice, and his eyes faded back to their usual clear green. He was still staring into her eyes, not quite ready for the moment to end and the way he looked at her made it clear that yes, he did care what she thought of him, quite a bit.

"Nico, I - uh -"

He wanted to thank her, especially since she'd just seen some of his most intimate thoughts and fears and managed not to flinch or do anything but treat them with sensitivity, but he didn't know the words.

Nico heaved a sigh of relief when Raph's eyes faded to their usual bright-but-not-glowing green and smiled.

"Yeah," she answered, just as vaguely, before sobering again. "We should-- We should try to get out of here." She rose to her feet, brushing dead plant matter off of her long red skirt, and offered Raph a hand up. "I don't particularly want to hang around for round two with your reality's most terrifying compost heap."

She took a step back and her heel tapped against something metal. As she looked down to see what she'd kicked, confusion bubbled up from somewhere inside her.

"Oh," she said softly, almost distractedly. "That's...mine."

It looked like the Staff of One, but not the Staff of One Raph had seen her carrying around. This one was simpler, with a larger gold sphere on the tip, split in halves to reveal a stripe of silver lining, and the circle on top of that didn't have any jewel accents. Nico stooped to pick it up, still frowning at it like she wasn't sure what it even was.

"Anyway," she said, finally pulling her eyes away from it. "We should go. I think we're in some weird shared consciousness or something, let's just try really hard to imagine an exit and get going."

"Yeah. And then we'll go back to...whatever that was."

Giant robots. And other weird stuff like they were in a bunch of movies.

He briefly glanced over at her staff, wondering if the change was something to worry about.

"Why's your staff look different?"

"Less sure how to get out of that," Nico said, frowning. Giant robots didn't strike her as particularly myth-related. "We definitely need to... Huh?"

She glanced from Raph back down to the Staff. "No, it's always looked like this."

"Why are you acting like this, Mom? This isn't you! You...you take me to church every Sunday!"

"Faith's a complicated thing, sweetie. But if you believe anything, believe that this is going to hurt me much more than it hurts you."

Nico shook her head vigorously to dismiss the memory before it fully reared up around them. The lines of the Steins' backyard lab around them blurred away instead of growing more detailed, washing away the sight of Nico's mother retreating from her daughter in confusion as Nico's body absorbed the Staff of One for the first time. Except...why would he have thought it looked different?

She looked down at the Staff again and dropped it with a surprised yelp when it began to change in her hand, transforming into something more like what Raph recognized. It hovered in the air, glowing an icy blue instead of Nico's usual magenta, and whirled around until it leveled at Nico.

"...No. NO!"

Blue flames exploded from the Staff, slamming into and through Nico and dragging her back through a ragged black hole in the shifting remains of the shack and workshop. The Staff of One followed.

"NICO!" Raph screamed as she disappeared, and barely a half second after she was gone, he was pulling out his sais and jumping through the hole after her, all caution thrown to the wind.

No way was he letting this mindfuck drag her to some dark pit like it'd done to him without trying to drag her back out again.

He landed in a better-lit-than-you'd-want-it-to-be dungeon -- and it really was a dungeon. Stone floors with grating in them, stone walls without window, a thick door of heavy wood with a barred opening, and many lovingly cared-for instruments of torture. Fortunately, the only fresh blood in the room trickled from Nico's mouth where she'd bitten herself trying (and failing) not to scream. Tears and snot streaked her face along with the blood, though none of them seemed to have stirred anything like compassion in the old woman dressed in white and red miko robes who was holding the Staff of One on Nico with an expression of boredom and distaste.

"I won't have my great-granddaughter live at the mercy of her humanity," she told Nico as Nico struggled against a dozen cat-sized gremlins, their teeth and talons passing through her clothes to dig into her skin. "I can make you better. Or kill you, if I'm wrong about your potential.

"What do you say?" she asked, raising the Staff as it glowed blue again. "Do you think you're worth the wager?"

Nico raised her head, gritting her teeth in a snarl. This old hag thought she'd give up? That she'd die here, a lifetime before she'd ever been born? That she'd leave Molly and Karolina and all her friends trapped here because she was too weak to take what belonged to her?

Her life. Her power. It belonged to her.

"Hit me," she hissed, her eyes flaring with a red light strong enough to show through the Witchbreaker's Staff's overwhelming blue, and screamed her rage and pain and defiance as the Witchbreaker did just that.

Edited (dialogue taken from Runaways 2.29 by Joss Whedon) 2014-12-31 06:04 (UTC)

Torture. She'd mentioned she'd been tortured during one of their intimate little talks but it was an entirely different thing seeing it. That rage Nico had gotten a glimpse of earlier came out to play, as his eyes narrowed dangerously and he pretty much went straight for the Witchbreaker's throat, trying to stab her in the neck with one of his sais - but he passed right through her.

He let out a roar of rage and frustration when he realized he couldn't attack her, then turned to Nico, figuring that just like breaking free of his memory trappy thing had been dependent on him, Nico's probably depended on her.

Putting his sais back in his belt, he ran over to her, reaching out for her - and found that he couldn't touch her either. He clenched and unclenched his hands fitfully at his sides, hating how helpless he was to help her. Her screams were like sharp metal nails raking against the back of his skull and seeing her face covered in blood and snot and tears made it feel like something was trying to claw his heart out.

He wasn't someone that could easily handle helplessness when he wanted to help somebody, especially when it was someone he cared about.

"Nico, listen to me, this isn't real! I know it feels that way, I know how real it feels, but it's not. Real. You don't have to be afraid of this anymore!"

Edited 2014-12-31 07:18 (UTC)

He'd have to shout pretty loudly to be heard over her screaming. The Witchbreaker was relentless, but so was the growing fury in Nico's voice, even as she screamed her throat raw. Mercifully for both Nico and Raph, the memory ran like wet ink, blurring ahead to what was clearly another significant point.

Specifically, the point where the Witchbreaker's own Staff of One slammed her against one of the stone walls, and the blue glow keeping Nico suspended in mid-air vanished. Nico collapsed to the floor and crumpled under her own weight. For one moment, two, three, the room was still and silent but for ragged breathing.

"When blood is shed, let the Staff of One emerge."

Nico rose from the floor like something undead as the Staff of One (finally) pushed her upwards as it (finally) escaped from her chest. Her legs almost gave out again, but she staggered and kept on her feet. When she raised her head, her eyes were still glowing, more magenta than red now -- and this time, so were the scratches on her face. As her injuries healed, Nico stood more steadily, and the simpler version of the Staff of One that Raph had seen first in the shack morphed into the one he'd seen in Nico's hands the first time they'd met.

The Witchbreaker groaned as she too regained consciousness, and Nico bared her teeth in a furious snarl as a raspy laugh emerged from the old woman.

"You should have killed me, you stupid girl."

The Witchbreaker reached for her Staff, but Nico planted one booted foot on it and brought her own to bear.

"I don't think so," she croaked. "That would be a mercy. And that's not what you wanted for me, was it? Get up.."

A light the same color as still burned in Nico's eyes raised the Witchbreaker up off the floor, holding her in the air like Nico had been.

"You're an old, old lady," Nico said, her voice smoothing out into something cold and unforgiving as a knife at midnight as her magic healed her scream-torn throat. "And I bet you've been doing this sort of thing for a long, long time. You've gotten really good at dishing it out." The glow in Nico's eyes flared. "Let's see how you take it all back."

Spell cast, Nico turned on her heel and left the room. It was going to be a long time playing out, and she didn't want or need to supervise it. Her magic was singing under her skin, and she had a lot to do today.

Edited 2014-12-31 08:17 (UTC)

It had blurred. That meant - it meant it had gone on. There was time that had to be skipped in this horrible vision.

After Nico's spell - her curse - Raph only cast one fleeting glance back at the screaming old woman and far from looking disgusted, the look her shot her way was one of vindictive satisfaction. Raph was not really one for mercy and in his eyes, the fact she was still breathing enough to scream was mercy enough. It was more mercy than he'd have shown.

Heck, this was a situation where even someone like Splinter or Leo might've decided someone needed to be taken out of the world. Especially if they'd thought good and hard about all the blood and torture tools in this room.

Without any further hesitation, he ran out the door after Nico, chasing after her, tugging at her elbow to slow her down so he could face her. He wanted to grab her up in a hug but after seeing all that, seeing her so shackled down and helpless and raw, he wasn't sure she'd be up for him really touching her.

"Nico, stop! Stop! We gotta get you out of this!"

Before this horrible memory could drag her into even more old hurt.

The burning glow of the magic in her eyes snapped off when he spun her around as if he had thrown a switch. When what occurred in this memory had actually taken place, her magic had just submerged itself under her skin and she'd come back to herself the same way someone woke up on a day they didn't need to set an alarm clock. This was more a wake-up by cold-water dousing.

Oh God. He'd seen that.

She cried out and flung the Staff away from her, dropping to the floor and burying her face in her hands so she wouldn't have to see what he thought of what she'd done. It was the cowardly way out, sure, but she couldn't face him right now. She couldn't bear to see the disgust he must be feeling with her.

The passageway dissolved, transforming into a whirl of memory snapshots. Not chasing the rabbit again, but other things she'd prefer people not see.

Nico standing contemptuously over an older man and woman, pulling the Staff back after casting a spell. The woman was openly weeping.

Nico dragging Molly away from a burning building while Molly dug in her heels and protests, pointing back the way they'd come.

Nico in winter gear, planting a kiss on a startled-looking blond boy before he angrily shoved her away.

Nico slinging a spell at the same boy before being attacked by a featherless deinonychus as Molly was grabbed and dragged into a van.

He watched it all, face impassive, mostly just to see what she was afraid of, why she was hiding her face. As each vision flashed, he didn't need to see the whole situation to understand what they were about. Their minds were literally hooked together through the Drift, which probably wasn't actually real but whatever magic was behind this little adventure made the link real enough.

He felt them as if he was the one that had lived them, her feelings, but filtered slightly through the lens of what his own would've been facing the same things. It all bled together in the Drift, especially since so much of it was rooted in something Raph understood intimately: protecting one's own.

- they'd have to watch as events played out, unable to say goodbye to the daughter they knew they were going to lose, after setting up so many to die, playing games with their lives, after trying to kill the whole world, after launching their daughter into the same life that got her killed by being evil -

- despite not trusting him (her?) Raph had still decided to go back for Xavin, because protecting your own wasn't the only thing in this world and 'your own' sometimes had to be extended to new people if people you loved loved them -

- confused and exhilarated over surviving, he just wanted comfort, wanted to feel normal things, wasn't thinking, didn't mean to hurt Gert, why did he always run to the arms of the nearest warm body? Was there something wrong with him? Was it -

- it was always a mess and these were supposed to be his friends but they kept doing this, getting caught up in their own drama and he shouldn't have kissed Chase, what if something happened to Molly, it'd be all his fault -

Guilt and shame and guilt and so many normal, normal feelings. Lost feelings. The kinds of feelings someone had when their whole world got upended and they thought they were a worse person than they actually were.

"Nico." Raph knelt down next to her and pulled her in for a tight hug. His voice was soft. "Oh, Nico."

It wasn't disappointment, it wasn't accusation, it was sadness over how sad she was and she'd feel it practically radiating off him, his wanting her to be happy. He held her with no hidden motives, nothing he wanted from her, just beaming out all he wanted to give, comfort and security and friendship and kindness and understanding.

"What'd I tell you before? I was right, y'know. You're so normal. Mixed up feelings from a mixed up life and you don't even realize how okay that is, do you?" his voice was incredibly gentle. "It's alright. You've got nothing to hide and nothing to be ashamed of."

Edited 2014-12-31 10:00 (UTC)

Nico held her breath, trying to will herself away from here or, failing that, just vanish. If she hadn't been so drained from reliving that memory, she might have had the sense to stay on her feet so she could run -- but where could she run here, where their minds were linked?

Then he crouched down and pulled her into a hug and she dared to part her fingers and peek.

"It's not okay," she said, muffled by her hands. "I'm not supposed to be like that. I'm gonna turn out like--"

She bit her tongue, but there were things that you didn't have to say out loud when you were locked in a mind-share with someone.

--my parents.

Another snapshot memory: Nico, standing in an empty club, wiping her blood onto a mirror she held in her hands, hoping for some way to bring back a stupid dead boy who wasn't worth much but hadn't deserved to die. Instead, her reflection rippled and resolved into that of her mother.

"You'll always be one of us, Nico."

"You gave extremely karmically appropriate punishments to a serial torturer and two psychopathic crime lords that wanted to mass murder all life on earth. And you were a little too loose with the lips and the hormones, whoop de freakin' doo."

Still holding onto her, he looked her in the eyes.

"You're nothing like your parents. Not even a bit. Look, your however-many-greats-grandma? Evil. It wasn't even like you just wished torture on her, you wished the harm she put out in the world on her. If she hadn't been such a horrible person, the spell would've just made it rain puppies or something. As for the Yorkes, what you did to them was perfectly fine, and you know why?"

He gave her shoulders a squeeze with his hands before pulling her back into a full blown hug again, face to face.

"They were willing to mass murder more people than Hitler. This isn't even like one of those internet arguments where someone unfairly compares someone to Hitler all heavy-handed trying to win the argument through the debate equivalent of a sledgehammer. It's actually a perfectly reasonable comparison. And did Hitler deserve worse than he got? Heck yeah. They were lucky that was all they got. They were worse than Nazis. They hated everybody and were so selfish they didn't care what happened to the whole world. Even without managing to, y'know, end all life on Earth, they still killed how many innocent people?"

He touched his forehead to hers, sifting through the context that he'd absorbed.

"How many innocent girls?"

"...Twenty."

Not to mention everyone who'd died in the explosion they'd set off while Nico was leaving the Witchbreaker to her fate, or anyone else they'd killed in the near-infinite amount of time they had access to with their time machine. But she'd done the math and there were twenty girls who'd walked into the Wilders' basement and come out corpses -- and nineteen of them hadn't even been that after the Gibborim were through with them. Nineteen girls that their parents -- her parents -- had excised from reality for money and power and immortality for them and/or their children.

"...I planned it, though," she whispered. "After I wiped Mr. Wilder's memories and sent him back, I sat down and I planned what I'd do the next time we met any of our parents again. I didn't do it because they were bad people, I did it because they hurt me and I wanted to make them pay."

"Yeah, welcome to being human." A pause. "Says the giant talking turtle."

Still touching his forehead to hers, he shook his head slightly. "Do you think I wanna kill Shredder because he helped aliens invade my planet blah blah hero stuff or because he killed my dad and beat my brother into a coma? That's not even getting into how many times he beat the snot out of me, my brothers, and Sensei before all that, or how he kidnapped Sensei's daughter that I grew up watching him mourn over and raised her to hate him, or how he killed Sensei's wife."

He shrugged. "I hate the guy. As much as someone like me can hate. My brothers hate him, too, even Mikey and Leo - and Mikey don't have a hateful bone in his body otherwise. Even Mikey's ready and willing to stomp him. That's how it works, there's no way you can untangle the personal stuff from the big picture - and the personal stuff doesn't change the big picture. The Yorkes, your parents, your other friends' parents, would've ended it all. Every little kid on the face of the Earth. Every decent parent, every good cop, every firefighter, every brave soldier, every honest lawyer, every person that was fearless enough to stand in front of a tank at a protest against some evil dictator. Every pizza parlor, skateboard park, piece of art, every song, everything and everyone. They were willing to burn it all. And the fact it was personal was because they were willing to burn you too, were willing to mess with their own kids - and that just made 'em more deserving of horrible consequences."

Edited 2014-12-31 12:28 (UTC)

Nico chuckled weakly at his little joke about a mutated turtle commentating on humanity, but she couldn't maintain a smile beyond that.

"When we fought those witches over Halloween," she said, "the one I fought said there was a darkness in me. She said I should be on their side."

She'd hissed and spat at the idea of course, but the words had still been spoken. She'd been trying to figure them out for months.

Explain that away, Raph. ~~Please, explain it away.~~

"Maybe what her hagginess picked up on was your anger. Or your pain. Maybe it was your doubt over your choices. Maybe it was that you see yourself as bad sometimes even though you're not, like it's something you can't escape." A pause. He bobbled his head back and forth as he considered something else. "Or maybe it was the fact you carry around a giant kind-of-obviously-evil magic staff and dark magic passed down from your evil parents. The vibe I've gotten from your whole blood magic shtick is that the magic itself is a little wild, maybe something bad people could make bad uses of."

He stared her in the eye. "But you get to choose what to do with it. The anger, the hurt, the magic, all of it. Having it in there doesn't make you bad. Everyone's got that crazy mix of stuff inside them, even if not everyone has the magic part of it."

He licked his lips, trying to figure out how to say what he wanted to say. "When it comes to choices, Sensei always used to tell us that the first rule of being a ninja was to do no harm." Dramatic pause. "Then the second rule was that if we had to do harm that we should do lots of harm. He taught us it's okay to hurt people sometimes and it's even okay to kill them sometimes. It's okay to be angry and even sometimes okay to act on it if you don't let it rule your whole life or make it so you make mistakes in a fight. It depends on which people you go after, when, and how, but sometimes it's the right thing to do. Sometimes people deserve it and if there's nothing else out there that can drop the hammer on them, it's left to whoever's just...there."

He gave her a small smile. "And if there's one thing my very brief and complete disaster of turn leading my brothers taught me, it was that it's hard being the one in the spot to make those calls, and, unlike you, I was even trained at this stuff. Having to make 'em can sometimes feel like anything you choose has to be wrong. But that's just 'cause you're you're not ready to make 'em and you're not the kind of person that's ready to carry that weight, not because those choices are actually wrong. People like my brother are the ones that can live with those choices better 'cause they know themselves better than people like us. All the feelings and stuff that make it hard to judge if it's the right choice are things people like him can push aside to see the closest thing to truth."

He shook his head again. "But there is no single truth. There's...there's a lot more greys than people like to admit. There isn't even a way to handle everything you had to handle that would've been objectively right because morality ain't like that. It's not like Space Wars where doing things out of anger makes you turn evil and there's always one right, perfect thing to do."

His hands slid to her upper arms to rub them comfortingly. "With all the pain and suffering those people put into the world, they deserved some kinda awful thing back. You're not a bad person for making them feel some of what they put into the world, and when you were one of the people caught up in that great big tidal wave of pain they created you had even more of a right to nail 'em to the wall for it. And it's even more understandable when you did most of that right after being horribly tortured so you were riding high on that pain."

Now it was time to bring it all home.

"So, basically, I think Witchy whats-her-face was a blowhard working on your self-doubt and the fact you have creepy blood magic that she probably sensed and wanted on her side." He gave her a small smile. "Now, you can take her word for it, when she knew you all of three seconds and had good reason to mess with your head to try to lure a powerful witch over to her side. Or you can take the word of the guy that's been hanging out with you almost every day since he met you who's currently hooked into your brain right now and isn't getting overwhelmed by any evil pouring out."

He shrugged. "Your call."

Edited 2014-12-31 13:05 (UTC)

Wow. That was quite a bit more than Nico had expected. She smiled at him, and this time it didn't go to pieces after a bare few seconds. Then she looked away to wipe at her eyes.

"Well," she said, "I suppose that makes sense." A beat, another, shyer, smile. "Thanks."

He wrapped his arms around her, hugging her as tightly as his shell would comfortably allow.

"Listen, I can't say you're the toughest person I've ever met because I haven't met that many people so it wouldn't really mean anything. But what I can say is I think you're one of the toughest people I'm ever going to meet. And I'm glad I met you. And I think you've dealt with all this stuff a whole lot better than you realize."

A pause.

"In other words: you're welcome."

Then, without even thinking about it - or rather, without over-thinking about it since this was all taking place in their heads - he pressed a gentle, comforting kiss to her forehead.

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cw: magical torture

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