Work Text:
The room spun. His fur was wet. His head pounded. The stone beneath his cheek was cold. Splinter struggled to put the fragments of sensation together, his eyes squinting open against the throbbing pressure behind his temple.
Where–
Shredder. His boys, screaming as he's thrown into the fast-moving water, unable to do anything but watch as he’s sucked below. His vision going spotty, his chest burning, his lungs convulsing as he fought the instinct to breathe, breathe, breathe!
A smooth, warm tail wrapped around his arm, drawing him to the surface, pulling him out of the water. A glimpse of a silver figure. Blackness.
Consciousness.
Splinter pushes himself to his feet, arms and legs trembling. His eyes squeezed shut as his head pulsed with pain and his vision faded, but he remained standing, taking deep, steady breaths despite the way his lungs protested.
His sons– the lair. They had to be in the lair. His first step almost crumpled beneath him, but the next was stronger, and the next. Stumbling, one hand trailed along the sewer wall, left, left, right, straight, he leapt the turnstiles, sliding to a halt in the entryway.
The lair was empty. Limp Kraangdroids lay where they’d fallen, beside their heads or limbs. The floor was singed by blaster bolts, furniture overturned. The TV glowed a soft blue, blinking on the paused frame. The kitchen counter was sticky with spilled soda, the fridge behind it dented.
There were no turtles.
"My sons?"
The words were swallowed by the room, snuffed out by the weight of the silence. There was no response.
Splinter forced his frozen limbs to move, taking long, lurching strides as he hurried to his youngest's room. "Michelangelo?"
An unmade bed. An old pizza box hidden beneath a stack of comics. Toppled action figures.
No Michelangelo.
With each empty room and desperate cry of his son's names, his panic grew, his movements became more frantic. Where are they? Why would they not wait for him here? Were they looking for him? Were they hurt? Were they–
Splinter collapsed to his knees in the empty dojo. Washed out by the silver light of the moon that trickled in through the vent above, the room was cold and barren and the smoke blotted out the moon above him, the stench of burnt flesh choking him, and the strangled sob that echoed off the stone walls was alien to his ears, and he knew he had to get out of here, even if he couldn’t rationalize why. His claws scrabbled at the stone, his shoes skidded on the dirt, his sons screamed his name, his daughter wailed, he had failed again, he has lost his family again.
Why didn’t he keep them in the sewers another year? Why didn’t he leave New York, bring them with him somewhere rural, where Saki would never find them? Why hadn’t he stayed with them?
Every twitch of movement sends a pulse of pain through his head, but Splinter is running, Saki’s laugh echoing in his ears, chasing at his heels. His feet pound against the sewer floor, nails scraping the stone.
Leonardo.
Raphael.
Donatello.
Michelangelo.
Miwa.
Tang Shen.
They are all gone. My fault. I should have been stronger, I should have fought harder, my fault my fault my fault–
He trips, stumbles to his hands and knees, and keeps going, bounding on all fours.
Animal. Rat. Beast.
(Even a rat would protect its children. You are something worse.)
He rounded a corner and slid to a stop at a dead end. He was lost. He couldn’t breathe. The realization that he had no idea where he was, in the sewers he knew like the back of his hand
(which ones?)
inundated his overwhelmed mind, and something
snapped.
His skin crawled
His fur prickled
Fabric shredded beneath his claws
A hiss echoed
He was alone.