#iabb

April studied his face for a moment, hyperaware of the way they were running out of time. The hounds were still closing in, Mikey needed her, and the portal wouldn’t stay open forever. She had to send Casey through now. But her chest ached with the longing to pull him into a hug and fix everything herself.

“Here,” April said, reaching for her pocket in a split second decision. “I have one more thing for you before you go. Something to remember us.”

“Watch out!” Mikey’s raspy voice called out urgently from the ground. April and Casey turned in unison, ready for a fight. April’s hands fumbled and suddenly the war was gone, the noise was replaced by a rushing sound in her ears, and worst of all Casey Junior and Mikey were gone. April reached out desperately in the direction she had come from, calling out desperately for her remaining family.

A spectral, three-fingered hand reached back, glowing the same color as the portal around her. The fingers stretched closer to April’s hand and she strained to reach back. As it grew closer, the color turned purple, a bit brighter from the contrast. Then it shifted and was a faint crimson among the wash of orange portal. April refused to look away even as her eyes watered with the brightness of the portal. The hand kept reaching and shed red for blue.

A painful sob built in April’s chest and she strained as hard as she could against the invisible force pulling her through the portal. She couldn’t parse out her thoughts enough to understand why she needed to reach that hand so desperately, but she strained to anyway. Something in the back of April’s head whispered that if she didn’t reach the hand, she was going to lose something irreplaceable.

Her fingertips were centimeters from the hand when it changed color again, sprouting two extra fingers and taking on a distinctly human shape. The blue gave way to green before the spectre lunged forward at the same time as April. Incorporeal fingers latched onto April’s wrist as April willed her fingers to make contact with the glowing green figure.

Familiar warmth and comfort surged in April’s chest and she exhaled shakily. Somehow, it felt like getting her family back.

April tumbled through the portal faster, the glowing orange surging brighter before everything abruptly went dark.

--

Waking up was excruciating. Not because April was in pain – she was actually pretty numb – but because she didn’t wantto wake up. There was a heaviness weighing on her eyelids that came with a good, long, overdue slumber – a full body reset, as her mother used to call it.

April missed her mom. She missed her brothers, New York, a home cooked meal, the movies – hell, she even missed school. April missed the ambition she had felt for her journalism classes, the things she had wanted to do, to write. It had all slipped from her grasp, wrenched away with the end of the world.

Her brain felt fuzzy, now that April was slowly beginning to accept that she was awake. Her thoughts felt both puzzle pieced and hyper-focused all at once. There was a soft, rhythmic beeping coming from nearby, and it was as familiar as it was annoying. April’s recent memories were blurry when she reached for them, leaving her to guess at events. Knowing herself, she probably took a hit during a mission and ended up in the med-bay. Again.

Donnie and Mikey were never going to let her hear the end of it this time. They had made that perfectly clear during her last stint here.

Sighing gustily, April shifted experimentally as she tried to pinpoint where her pain was. This was far from her first go-round, so she knew to proceed cautiously with her motions as she started digging for the right memory to fill herself in. But moving greeted her instead with a numb ache throughout most of her body, a sensation more like over exertion than injury – which was weird.

“I wouldn’t move too much if I were you. You’ll pop the stitches, and they’re pretty perfect as they are, if I do say so myself.”

April hummed, eyes still closed and sighed again, pushing the air out through her nose.

“How bad’s it?” Damn, even her tongue felt sluggish. She was also struggling to identify which brother was talking to her. What the hell happened? It was rare that she was this out of it, even after being knocked around. April liked to think she was better at bouncing back than this.

“Not as bad as we thought, in all honesty. You must have taken a pretty hard hit to your abdomen, and it was probably bleeding for a while before everything caught up to you. Thank your sympathetic nervous system for that, I guess.”

“Sure thing, Don,” April muttered. Her thoughts were still scattered, and where she still couldn’t recognize her brother by voice at the moment, she did with vernacular. April had never heard Mikey say ‘sympathetic nervous system’ in her life.

“Uh,” her brother spoke, much closer than before. “Wanna try that again?”

Try what again? Did April miss something? She wracked her brain for a hiccup in the conversation and came up with nothing.

Damn it, she was going to have to open her eyes now, wasn’t she?

Blinking against the crusty, glued-shut feel of her eyelids, April squinted against her already poor vision at her brother hovering over her.

Her heart stalled in her chest when she finally recognized the colored blobs and markings smearing together a rough approximation of a face. Everything came rushing back to her the way a brick hit someone in the head. The final fight, the portal, leaving Mikey and Junior behind only to be dumped at the feet of her family from the past. Then feeling exhausted and pained before blacking out.

“Leo?” April croaked, immediately trying to coordinate her arms to her will so she could sit up and reach for him. “Oh fuck, how long was I out?”

Leo stopped her before she got very far, his breath hissing out of him in alarm.

“I just told you not to move! You’ll start bleeding again!” Leo’s arm stretched out of April’s view before his blurry hand moved closer to her face and settled something across the bridge of her nose. “Here, we found these in your jacket. And obviously I’m not Donnie, so I didn’t set a timer or anything, but you’ve been unconscious somewhere between 48 and 72 hours.”

Everything around her slid into focus, sharpening through the lenses of her glasses as Leo spoke. She processed everything he said, but she stayed silent, and still couldn’t bring herself to look away from Leo. The logical part of her knew this was real, but the frantic big sister in her refused to blink away, in case Leo disappeared again.

“You keep looking at me like that,” Leo said, trying for faux pouty and missing the mark abysmally. At least, April easily saw through it. Someone less knowledgeable on Leo-isms might have bought it. Instead, she saw the discomfort and uncertainty in the line of his shoulders and heard it in the pitch of his voice.

Her chest tightened and April huffed a shaky laugh.

“Sorry,” she said by way of explanation. “Everything is kind of fuzzy right now. If I promise to listen to you, can you help me sit up a little?”

Leo studied her for half a heartbeat before he snapped on an easy smile and went about getting April settled in a reclined position so they could actually have a conversation.

“I guess the pain meds are doing their job, then,” Leo commented as he checked April’s stitches. “If everything is feeling fuzzy, that is.”

Ah. That was it.

“I’m not used to them anymore, I guess,” April chuckled, rubbing the bed sheet in her lap between her fingers. Shit, had sheets always been this soft?

“What do you mean?” Leo asked, pulling her attention back to him. April looked up and shrugged one shoulder casually.

“It was the apocalypse. We didn’t exactly have the best stash of medicine, so unless it was life threatening, most of us made do.”

Leo stared at her for a heartbeat, two, before nodding and muttering, “badass.”

April laughed and immediately regretted it.

“Ow,” she groaned as Leo laughed at her. “I’ll punch you if you do that again.”

Leo looked at her the way Mayhem used to when he had a paw next to an object that was about to end up on the floor. April had a very clear vision of spraying Leo in the face with a water bottle. She pointed a finger at him instead and raised one eyebrow threateningly. Leo held up his hands in surrender, giggling like the little shit April knew him to be.

God, she had missed him.

“Alright, alright, I won’t. Promise.” April half believed him. “Oh, do you want to see the guys? They’ve been bugging me about when you were gonna wake up.”

April smiled, face softening with fondness. “Yeah, sure.”

Leo turned to leave but stopped at the sudden frown on her face.

“What?” he asked hesitantly.

“Have you told me yet? Or…wait. Other me? Mini-me?”

Leo snorted a laugh and looked delighted at her use of ‘mini-me’. April let him simmer in his mischievous delight, overwhelmed and overjoyed by the vibrancy of his presence.

“Have we told her about the buff apocalyptic grandma version of herself who has been unconscious in our med-bay for the last few days? No,” Leo said after he collected himself. “Raph and Donnie wanted to after you collapsed, but Mikey and I held them off. We figured it might go over smoother if it was you explaining the whole thing – especially since wedon’t even have the full story.”

April squinted at him from over the rim of her glasses and raised an eyebrow again.

“You didn’t want her to yell at you, did you?”

Leo looked affronted for all of two seconds before he dropped the act and spread his hands wide.

“I mean, of course not! How the heck are we supposed to explain any of this? She would have probably blamed Donnie!”

April grinned, wide and genuine. Leo knew her well.

“I’m surprised you actually managed to keep Donnie from telling mini-me anyway. I thought he would have snitched on you all by now.”

Leo’s playfulness dipped at her comment, brow furrowing in thought. “Yeah,” he said, glancing to the side. “I'm kind of surprised he hasn’t either. Maybe he actually agreed with me for once.”

Leo ducked out to find his brothers after he said that, leaving April with her IV and her thoughts. Donnie not informing present-April was surprising, but far from the first thought on her mind. She tried to imagine how pre-apocalypse, decades younger, and not-yet-a-commander April would react to…this. It was hard to recall everything she had been doing when the world ended. She had definitely been in school…but what else? Her memory was so stocked up with safe routes of travel, escape plans, battle tactics, patrol schedules, headcounts, and a hundred other things she suddenly didn’t need anymore. What had pre-apocalypse April worried, wondered, and dreamed about?

Where had her memories gone? Had she really allowed them to become so buried that it took effort to get them to resurface?

Taking her glasses off, April set them in her lap and dug the heels of her hands against her brow bone. The pressure was grounding, and April pressed more weight into her hands, blowing out a shaky breath.

She couldn’t stop thinking about how she wasn’t supposed to be here.

But you’re here now, the voice in April’s head reminded her. And the whole family is here – together. You are not alone.

April placed a reverent hand over her sternum, fingers shaking minutely. Some things were still familiar, at least. Picking her head up and putting her glasses back on, April pulled in a steady breath through her nose. She held it for a moment, and then pushed it out slowly. She could only move forward from here.

Not like she had much of a choice.

“April!” Mikey crowed as he burst into the med-bay, eyes bright and wide – his smile even brighter and wider. “You’re awake!” He moved to jump on her bed and was caught mid-air by a mechanical arm from Donnie’s battle shell as he followed Mikey into the room.

“Probably not the best idea at the moment,” Donnie said flatly. The arm set Mikey back on the ground with an absent pat to the head as Donnie moved around April’s bed to the machines beside it.

“Right,” Mikey grinned sheepishly before bouncing onto the foot of the bed.

April smiled at them and shook her head with a fond chuckle.

“It’s good to see you, too, Mikey.”

Mikey beamed as Donnie stared critically at the numbers displayed by the machines beside April. From what April could recall, he wasn’t yet well versed in the medical field. But he understood what constituted ‘normal numbers’ on a machine.

“Leo said you’re doing a lot better,” Donnie commented briskly, not looking at her. “And not to completely ignore that fact, but you promised us a lead before passing out. I haven’t been able to get very far in my search without your information, so sooner rather than later, if you please.”

“Donnie,” Mikey said chidingly, shooting a glare at Donnie’s back.

“No,” April said, straightening up as much as she could against her pile of pillows. “He’s right. If you have something for me to draw on, I can show you what the key looks like. As for where it’s at, I’m as in the dark as you are. We never knew where it came from, just what it looked like and what it could do.”

“The picture will suffice,” Donnie said, producing a pen and paper from somewhere. “I can get started right away.”

April was halfway through drawing the key out when Leo and Raph entered the room. Both of them looked tense when April glanced up as they walked in, and they failed spectacularly at hiding it. She ignored them for the moment to finish the drawing.

“Here,” April said after another minute, holding the sketch out to Donnie. He scooped it up from her hand with a nod and was gone seconds later. Something about that interaction stung, but April didn’t have the words to put it into the open. In the moment, where stopping an apocalypse took precedence, it also didn’t matter. April tried to make her heart understand that. The silence in the med-bay stretched and chewed at April’s insides as her brothers stood around, refusing to look at her or at each other.

Finally, Mikey leaned forward, eyes sparkling and voice bright.

“What was our family like in the future?”

April’s gaze shot to her little brother, wondering why that had to be the first question. She supposed it made sense, though. Either way, what was she supposed to tell him? How was she supposed to tell them? Should she even tell them? The truth wouldn’t serve them, it would only hurt them, would only terrify them into recklessness.

Steadying her resolve, April smiled at her brothers, a carefully constructed thing that neither told the truth nor gave her away.

“What kind of question is that, little man?” April said, her voice strained but jovial at the same time. “We stuck together – just like always.”

She had gained Raph and Leo’s attention by answering Mikey’s question. Raph’s expression was hard to understand, but there was something that looked like relief in his eyes. Leo on the other hand, looked quietly unconvinced.

Shit.

“It wasn’t always easy,” April admitted, ensuring her tone turned more genuine. This part was true, after all, so it wasn’t as hard to do. “But we stuck together and survived as best we could. We even lead a small resistance.”

Mikey’s eyes were shining with awe, and April felt a pang in her gut over it. Clearly he didn’t understand the weight of her words. He could only imagine the horrific future April had endured through the lens of imagination and movies. April hoped it would stay that way this time around. She would do everything in her power to make sure Mikey never had to live the life of the brother she left behind in her future.

“We sound so cool! Were we cool? What were we like in the future?”

Something metallic and bitter swelled against the back of April’s tongue with the question.

“Yeah, you guys were pretty cool,” she said, voice soft and gaze trained on her fingers resting in her lap.

April looked up, smiling as best she could and trying not to wince at the ache in her cheeks with the unfamiliar action.

“You were especially cool, Mikey,” April said with as much sincerity as she could manage. Again, that part wasn’t a lie. But she had to sell this, had to appear unaffected so they wouldn’t pick up on the pieces of the truth she wasn’t ready to talk about. She forced her body to relax against the pillows and shifted her smile more into smirk territory, pulling forward the self-assured older sister they were expecting. “Your magic was incredible, and besides being able to send me back in time, you could also fly.”

“What?” Mikey screeched, leaping up from the bed with wide eyes and whirling on Raph and Leo. “Did you hear that? I can fly!”

“No fair!” Leo cried as he pushed away from the wall he had been leaning on. April’s statement seemed to have temporarily banished whatever tension was brewing between Leo and Raph. Plus, now Leo was distracted with this revelation and wasn’t staring at her like he could see right through her. Small victories. “What about me? What was I like?”

Ah. Here’s where April faltered. He could not know any piece of this truth.

“You were pretty cool, too,” April said through her teeth. The words tasted like sulfur. “Mikey was the only one who could fly, but you were fast, and good at thinking on your feet. It was amazing to see it happen in real time.”

Leo looked impressed with himself as he and Mikey started comparing future feats, taking guesses at what they could do. April met Raph’s eye over their heads and she had to stifle a laugh at the eager, curious expression he was giving her. “You were big, big man,” April said as he ducked around Mikey and Leo to stand closer to her. “There was a year we thought you might not stop growing, actually. Then you would use your ninpo and you looked like a giant. It was pretty sick, if I’m being honest.”

Raph whirled on Leo and Mikey, joining their friendly shouting match about how cool they were going to be in the future. April sagged back into her pillow mound with the attention off of her and watched on silently. In some ways, reality had set in – but in other ways she still wondered when she would wake up from this dream. It was all too good to be true – a second chance, time to figure out a plan, her family safe and whole. April wondered when the other shoe would drop, and how far-reaching the effects would be.

She glanced away from her brothers, eyes tracking down to her hands in her lap. April felt the same from before she went through the portal, if not numbed by the pain meds. Everything felt the same…but she worried anyway. Would time travel have changed anything about her? Was she going to fade away from this timeline like in movies when she started to fix things? Curling her fingers shakily into the palm of her hands, April exhaled quietly. No matter what happened to her, so long as she saved her brothers and the world, April would do anything.

Eyes shifting back to her brothers, April’s lips twitched into a smile. They looked absolutely ridiculous as Raph held Mikey off the floor while they collectively tried to figure out how to make Mikey fly. April wasn’t sure she could make this last, but she would try.

You’re here, the voice in her head whispered, a sudden and soft reminder. This is real.

April’s smile softened, the tension in her shoulders uncoiling as she reclined further into her pillows. She laid a hand over her chest again with a quiet acknowledgement and fiercely hoped she could see this mission through.

Donnie appeared in the doorway to the med-bay, knocking sharply on the inside of the doorframe to gain their attention. His brothers’ chattering faltered as they looked around at him curiously. April looked up as well, expression turning wary almost instantly. She hated the expression on his face, the conflicted furrow to his brow and the attempted apathy in his eyes.

“We have a visitor,” Donnie said flatly. “Or more specifically, you do.” His gaze tracked to April and she raised an eyebrow curiously.