I am a learner driver in a sea of chaos and mayhem

i can only imagine this would work if the threat of both draxum and big mama were neutralized. i think in this universe, draxum's life of crime caught up to him much sooner than it does in canon, and he's imprisoned for his unethical experimentation when the turtles are still little-- raph maybe around six or seven, mikey around four or five. once splinter learns of this, he pulls every string he possibly can to 1) get cloaking crystals for himself and his family 2) cut a deal with big mama to ensure his children's safety.

after spending about a week or two in the sewers fucking drilling the cover story into the children's heads ("remember, mikey, what do you do if people start asking you too many questions?" "CRY!" "good boy!") he very nervously brings them up to the surface, armed with an elaborate story to explain his disappearance and new children and a shitton of forged documents. there was so much fucking paperwork, christ. (also, it turns out the blue one is biologically female? but he does not have the mental space to deal with that so they all just keep calling him leo, and he's totally fine with that. so.)

and he collects ALLLLLLL the royalties, babey.

(the kids are kids, and definitely slip up occasionally or do... weird shit. but, luckily, since they're small children, people pretty much just chalk it up as "oh, these kids have such wild imaginations.")

eventually, enough time passes that the brothers just kinda... forget that they were ever actually turtle mutants who lived in the sewers. coz, like, that's crazy, right? they're pretty sure they just imagined all that stuff. they weren't turtles, they were PRETENDING to be turtles... and people give them weird looks sometimes when they bring it up, so they don't.

overall, they THRIVE on the surface, to no one's surprise. they are, in fact, secretly genetically engineered super soldiers, actually. and they are crazy good at, like. so many things. especially martial arts! they compete at a national level on the regular, in addition to a shit ton of other extracurriculars (ballet, art, basketball, and cooking for mikey, swimming, basketball, gymnastics, and theatre for leo, dance, gymnastics, and swimming for donnie, not even to mention all his academic stuff, basketball, wrestling, and swimming for raph...)