Meiolaniidae

Three blocks from home, fueled by shitty beer and the fact that the temperature was hovering somewhere in the low teens, they’d made the decision to cut through an alleyway and shave five minutes off their transit time. It was a matter of perspective. What were five minutes worth? At this point, everything, because now Foggy was very sober and regretting all of his life choices, especially the one to take this shortcut, while staring at a knife being waved in his face.

Regretting all of his life choices sounded remarkably in his head like his mother yelling at him. Go figure. What were his options here? The other end of the alley wasn’t too far off but Foggy didn’t like his chances of being able to bolt with Matt in tow and not immediately get taken to the floor, possibly with more holes in his fragile corpus than he started the night out with. There was no way he’d come out victorious in any sort of punch-up, either. Not in general, and especially not with a weapon in play.

And while Matt may have had some training, 1) this was not a controlled workout in the ring with his brothers, this was an actual asshole with actual hostile intentions brandishing an actual knife; 2) there was more than one actual asshole -- there were, in fact, three of them and they all looked about as well-intentioned as the first guy (good fuck, three people to roll two half-drunk grad students, one of who was fucking blind; Foggy would consider that extremely sad if he weren’t fearing a sudden and painful experience at the hands of that overkill in his immediate future); and 3) Matt’s right wrist was still splinted from earlier in the week when he slipped on a patch of under-salted ice and also nearly cracked his head open, so that even if by some miracle Matt could normally handle himself against three guys, armed, while blind, he’d be working with a disadvantage.

Beside him, Matt had gone stock-still. Like in spite of all of these incontrovertible facts, he was gearing up to throw hands anyway. Foggy squeezed his arm to quell him, feeling the tension running through his body even through the thick coat he wore. “Easy,” he said, though whether it was more to Matt or the muggers was up in the air. “We don’t want anybody to get hurt. I’m gonna get out my wallet, all right?”

“Watches and phones too.” The guy gestured with the knife. Foggy’s eyes tracked the movement, even as he released Matt’s arm and slowly reached for his pocket. “You too, man. Or you deaf as well as blind?”

Oh Jesus. Foggy risked a sideways glance and -- yeah, okay, Matt’s expression very clearly said that he’d just dropped the concept of de-escalation from his personal worldview. He wasn’t generally a belligerent drunk, but he was stubborn even when stone cold sober, and the few longnecks he’d downed were absolutely setting his ass down on the “fight” side of fight-or-flight. Fuck. The other two muggers crowded up around the first guy, jeering, and Foggy said quickly, “Matt, come on, it’s not worth it.”

“Yeah, I’d listen to your friend, Matt.”

Foggy couldn’t stop himself from glaring as Matt bristled even more. He yanked out his wallet and held it up, pondered tossing it to Knife Guy at an awkward height, maybe get him to fumble it or at least distract him for a moment so they possibly could, in fact, make a dash for the other end of the alley -- he’d drag Matt if he had to, apologize for it later--

--but he didn’t get any time to enact his half-assed plan. A series of other things happened instead:

Matt’s head snapped up all of a sudden and he stiffened. Then he was yanking Foggy backwards away from the knife, grip strong and unyielding. The guy holding the knife opened his mouth to protest or say something else presumably just as useless.

Something dropped behind the group of assholes, further blocking off the mouth of the alleyway. Multiple somethings, silhouettes bulky in the light from the street.

A familiar, Brooklyn-accented voice said, “Wow, rollin’ a blind guy. So big. So brave. Way to go, you. Tell me, what did you all do to deserve your kneecaps, lately?” The assholes whirled around, attention pulled away from Foggy and Matt. One of them yelped, a sound of sheer surprise.

“Frogs?!”

“We’re turtles!” Brooklyn roared.

And then there was a series of complicated crunches and shouts of pain.

From where he’d been shoved behind Matt, Foggy got a good view as Matt raised his cane and smashed it over the head of the guy who’d been in Foggy’s face. It didn’t seem like the sturdiest of weapons but it landed like it had some heft to it, staggering the asshole long enough for Matt to drop the surprisingly intact cane and follow it to the ground. He whirled to take the guy’s legs out with a low spinning kick, only to collapse with a hiss as his right arm buckled where he’d used it to brace his weight.

“Matt!”

Foggy’s cry was echoed by multiple others, but Matt was already swinging his legs around in a balletic swirl that popped him back onto his feet in the next second. He lashed out in a kick that took the guy he’d dropped in the temple so hard it flipped him over and sent him into a trash can; the guy collapsed, obviously out cold. Matt loomed over him, fist clenched at his side, winding up for another kick with an expression Foggy had never seen on his face before. After two and a half years, he’d witnessed Matt in all sorts of moods -- upset, angry, coldly disdainful -- but never this snarling raw fury. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know Matt had a temper, but this was like a stranger wearing his best friend’s face. Matt landed his kick square in the guy’s ribs with an audible cracking noise, drew back for another one.

Foggy’s heart was still pounding, but no longer because he was being held at knifepoint. “Matt...?”

It was like his voice broke through a dark cloud that had settled over Matt. His expression cleared, uncanny rage swept away by a near-frantic concern, and he immediately turned to Foggy. All of a sudden he was his friend again, the unconscious man dismissed from his awareness. “Are you all right?” Matt demanded. “You didn’t get hurt?”

Foggy reached out to touch his shoulder, or maybe to steady himself against the mood whiplash. “I’m fine -- Matt, are you all right?”

“I’m fine, you’re sure you’re okay?” He seemed a second away from giving him a pat down no matter what Foggy said.

“Yeah, not a scratch. What the hell was--”

“Matt!”

The call from behind Matt drew Matt’s attention away from him and had Foggy’s gaze flicking up past his shoulder. It took a moment for what he was seeing to properly make its way through the churning adrenaline and remnants of alcohol in his system, and then he felt his brain palpably crash to a halt, leaving him a dial tone and one thought: Never drinking IPAs again.

Because the Brooklyn-voice’s claim from earlier was right: those certainly were turtles. Four giant, humanoid turtles. Dressed in a variety of winter gear, sporting narrow cloth masks across their eyes and an assortment of weaponry. Was the blue-clad one carrying a friggin’ sword? Two friggin’ swords, Foggy amended hastily. He glanced at Matt in reflex, trying to gauge his reaction to being rescued by giant turtles, before his still-rebooting brain caught up with him and reminded him that Matt had no idea about the impossible nature of their rescuers because, duh, you idiot, Matt couldn’t see them, so how would he even know--?

Except they had called Matt’s name.

Except the blue one with the swords was swooping forward over the unconscious forms of the three very shit-kicked muggers. “Matty! Are you okay? What happened to your wrist? Donnie, come here and check him!”

Except the worry on Matt’s face had drained away, leaving behind something that hovered between annoyance and gratitude.

“Oh my god -- Leo, I’m fine.” Matt turned to face the -- Foggy was still struggling with this fact -- the turtles, so Foggy could no longer see his expression, but he did notice Matt’s shoulders rise and fall as he took a few deep breaths. When he next spoke, he sounded less like he was about to vibrate out of his skin, more generally put out but with an underlying warmth. “I’d have had them all except for this and the knife they pulled on Foggy,” he said, waving his splinted wrist. Then he actually planted his hands on his hips. “More to the point, what are you doing here? Christ, it’s fourteen degrees out, what the shell are you even doing out in this weather?”

“Hey, we’re dressed for it.” That was the familiar-sounding Brooklyn guy, in a red mask.

“And we’ve got HotHands!” The orange-clad one pulled one out of the pockets of his oversized coat to demonstrate. He had, Foggy noticed blankly, two fingers and a thumb. “Mmm, toasty.”

“A homeotherm’s best friend.” That mild comment came from a turtle wearing a purple mask with a long staff on his back peeking around his shoulder and hip. “What happened to your wrist?”

It wasn’t just the Brooklyn guy. All of them sounded familiar; Orange, for instance, had a distinct California drawl. Not to mention the names that had been dropped. Matt's ease with them, their familiarity with him. He’d been privy to a dozen conversations just like this over the course of the last three years of being roommates with Matt, whether on the phone or through online video calls -- and those had always been held with the webcam on the other end disabled. Because Matt was blind, Foggy had thought, so there was no need for his brothers to activate their camera in order to make it a proper face-to-face call... but what if that had never been the reason for lack of video at all...?

No way. No fucking way.

“Matt...” Foggy said, very slowly, “when you said you were adopted...”

Interrupted where he’d been explaining his spill to the group, Matt rotated halfway back toward him, prevented from fully facing him by another three-fingered hand on his shoulder. He looked torn between exasperation and a fond smile. “Yeah. This is not the way I’d have chosen to formally introduce you to them, Fog, but... these are my brothers.”

“Hi, Foggy!” Mikey.

“Hey.” Leonardo.

“Yo.” Raphael.

“Hi.” Donatello.

As Foggy stared at the voices he recognized coming from wholly mind-blowing visages, Matt added, now deadpan, “I got all the looks in the family.”

“Hey! We all know I’m the cute one, Matty, not cool!”

As Matt got dogpiled -- turtlepiled? -- by Mikey, Foggy blinked twice. “You got adopted by... giant talking color-coded turtles?”

“Well, technically by our human friends but he was ours first.” Leonardo had sheathed his swords in the interim and now sounded very serious, even as he used the grip he’d kept on Matt’s shoulder to tug him toward his chest. Matt actually leaned into the touch, a smile softening his mouth as Leonardo added, “We called dibs.”

“Yeah, we licked him, he’s ours,” Mikey said cheerfully from where he was hanging off Matt’s back, which elicited a disgusted face from everybody else, including Matt.

“Gross, asshole,” Raphael grumbled.

“I’m fairly sure we didn’t, given he was a walking biohazard at the time.”

“It was a metaphorical licking, Donnie--”

Foggy looked between all of them, trying to figure out what to say. Where to even begin. “I have,” he said, “so many questions.”

Leonardo nodded, once again serious. “I’m sure you do, but let’s not talk out here.”

Matt sighed. “Meet you at April’s?” he suggested.

“That works. Take a cab!”

“Leo...”

“Just take the cab, Aka-chan,” Donatello advised. “He’ll be unreasonable all night.”

Foggy had never seen Matt scrunch his face up like that before. He looked like a pissy kitten. But he acquiesced with no further protest: “Fine, we’ll take a cab.”

“Thank you,” Leonardo said. “I’m too young for my bandana to go grey.” Foggy’s face must have done something as he added, suddenly uncertain, “It -- it’s a joke. Because we don’t have--” He dropped his face into his hand. “Ugh, never mind, I’ll leave the jokes to Mikey.”

Raphael snickered. “Prime division of labor, Fearless.” He stepped around Leonardo to twist a knuckle against Matt’s cheek. “See you at April’s, kiddo.”

And then they were gone, leaping to the fire escape overhead from a standing jump and flowing up toward the roof in a flutter of coats and bandana tails. Four giant-ass turtles should not have been able to move that quickly or that silently, Foggy thought. It just seemed wrong.

“It’s still fourteen degrees out!” Matt hollered after them. “Go underground!”

“Teach your granny to suck eggs, little man!” Mikey’s voice floated back.

The sigh that evoked from Matt was distinctly aggravated. “Bakappa,” he growled. “Then again, if they don’t succumb to biology and freeze to death on the way, they might actually beat us there.”

Foggy blinked. Huh. “So they really are turtles? Cold-blooded and everything?”

“Sort of.” Matt picked up his cane and chivvied him out of the alley, past the other two prone forms. Vindictively, Foggy hoped they’d be passed out long enough to come down with frostbite. Just a little. Maybe a finger or two. “It’s complicated.”

Foggy could see that. “Yeah, I’ll bet.”

It only took a moment to hail a cab. The first part of the ride was spent in silence, interrupted solely by Matt dictating texts to and receiving replies from his mom (“Foggy found out about the guys and we’re all on the way to your place to talk about it. You might want to order pizza.” “Is everything okay?” “Yes, we’re all fine, I just wanted to give you a heads-up that you’re about to be invaded.” “Okay, Matty, love you. :cookie emoji: :sparkle heart emoji: :kiss heart emoji:” “Love you too.”). In spite of this lovely exchange, Foggy watched as Matt’s expression grew tenser and tenser as the blocks slipped past outside, like his internal spring was being overwound like an abused pocket watch. Foggy sort of felt the opposite; someone had taken a hammer to his worldview and now his own springs and coils were shooting off everywhere.

“... so...”

Matt graced him with a faint, tight smile, but didn't respond. It was as if, away from the protective vicinity of his brothers, he was expecting to be given the third degree. Truthfully, Foggy had no idea what to say because once again, he had no idea where to start. There were too many questions crowding for space in his head. In an effort to relieve some of the pressure, he seized on the next thing that elbowed its way to the front of the queue and blurted out, “Aka-chan?”

“Uh.” The nervousness cleared. From his taken-back expression, whatever Matt had been expecting Foggy to ask about, it obviously wasn’t that. “It’s a nickname Mikey came up with in a fit of whimsy when I was fourteen. A pun.” Wait, was that embarrassment? “Aka-chan is a cutesy way of saying ‘baby’ in Japanese, and akai means red, so...” He gestured vaguely toward his hair, blushing. “It’s usually just ‘Aka’ unless they’re worried or want to be obnoxious, so, tonight, Aka-chan.”

“That’s adorable,” Foggy declared, electing to focus on this part of Matt’s family history over giant talking turtles and also, distantly, I almost got mugged at knifepoint. Technically, he had gotten mugged at knifepoint, just not successfully -- wait, nope, not thinking about that right now. “How have I not heard that until tonight? You’re the red-headed baby of the family.”

“God, don’t I know it. He started up after we finalized my adoption.” Something softened the embarrassment -- memory, perhaps -- and Matt released a slow breath and actually smiled, more abashed now, definitely less tense. “Kind of a ‘welcome to the family’ thing. I didn’t want anybody calling me ‘Matty’ back then and everyone else had a nickname except April.” Fit of whimsy, Foggy’s ass. He was willing to bet Mikey had workshopped that for weeks. “They can call me ‘Matty’ now, it’s okay, but every so often, I still get ‘Aka-chan’.”

“They love you,” Foggy said. “Leonardo was... really concerned about you.”

The grimace that crossed Matt’s face was one Foggy had seen on Theo many, many times, always while their mom was fussing over him. “Get into one incident when you’re fourteen, never live it down for the rest of your life,” he grumbled. Absolutely the baby of the family, Foggy decided. “Leo worries. He knows I can handle myself but he’s the eldest, so he says it’s his God-given birthright to worry about his younger brothers, and I, by a wide margin, am the squishiest.”

“Speaking of handling yourself,” Foggy said, thinking back to that lightning-fast takedown in the alley. He leveled a look at Matt that, for all he couldn’t actually see it, he seemed to feel, straightening up under his scrutiny. The apprehension returned to his face. “You don’t just ‘train a little’ with your brothers, do you.”

Matt winced. “I -- ah. No.”

Sliding his gaze to the driver up front, Foggy dropped his voice. “So, blind kung-fu master?”

Matt cleared his throat. “Ninjutsu, actually,” he said, delicately.

“Oh, of course. How silly of me.” Then Foggy blinked twice, hissed, “You’re a ninja?”

“In training,” Matt sighed. “So, so much training...”