The crystal drops like falling fruit, great chunks of it thumping to the sand around her feet. With each gritty impact Donatello cringes, waiting for everything he has gained in the past hour to go up in a column of violet fire.

It doesn't, by some small mercy. April knows what she's doing. With one great bodily sigh she sheds the final weight of her volatile armour. Each dislodged shard leaves barely a mark behind, flesh sealing seamlessly behind it; her bare skin, pale as sculpted pearl, is decorated only by the faint cyan spiderwebs of mutagen-rich veins coursing just below the surface.

And nothing else. Donnie throws himself to the back of the van with a squawk of mild panic - though one not shared by April. Apparently certain human dignities died out around the same time as the species that harboured them . . . and April was only ever a tentative part of that classification, anyway. He finds a tan, dusty sheet with tattered edges covering a crate of scraps in the back of the vehicle and holds it open as he approaches her from behind, uncertainly calculating the logistics of applying it to her with six prehensile tentacles in the way. Their tips drift magnetically toward him, studying him with tiny glowing eyelets, but they part courteously down the middle once he's close enough, sweeping around to her front.

All through the dispersal of her crystal carapace, and even as he drapes the sheet gently over her bare shoulders, her body hasn't turned and her eyes haven't moved from the coruscant walls of her self-made prison. He dares to let his hands rest at the tops of her arms.

"It'll be all right," he encourages softly.

"I should tear it all down," she says, but the edges of her voice are dull.

" . . . Is that what you want?"

A tired puff of air leaves her. "Doesn't matter. Wasn't designed to undo it." She claims the edges of the sheet from him with decisive hands. "We should go."

April has fashioned the cloth into a haphazard toga by the time she climbs into the passenger seat of the van. The door shifts closed behind her - though Donnie doesn't see her touch it - and she draws her feet up onto the edge of the threadbare cushion, folding her hands grimly over her knees. Pink tendrils bristle awkwardly about the confined space of the cabin until Donnie takes the driver's chair. In his peripheral vision, he sees her take one last long, cool look at the walls of the Sharding Wastes in the surviving fragments of wing mirror glass.

He fires up the engine and heads for the only thing in the wasteland that counts as home.

The barren landscape rolls past in a desaturated blur. April watches it rush by without a flicker of interest, her head turned toward the window but her gaze fixed on some invisible point in the middle distance.

They don't talk.

There's a lot to say, but they say it with silence. Unspoken words cram themselves into every second of the journey, a nonverbal accord that hums between them, a thing alive. It feels right; it matches the pattern. Donnie can recall countless times that he and April talked until the sun came up, but just as many where they spent hours saying nothing, yet everything, attuned to one another's presence, comfortable in that simple shared experience. He hadn't been sure if that would still work, if the metal shell confining what may or may not be his 'soul' might thwart such a connection . . .

But something is there. Something that buzzes in his background processes, forgotten code that has been waiting for decades for the right input and now greedily sucks in the presence of April O'Neil as though the supply could run dry any second.

Although it's hard to read her, he clings to the possibility that April still feels it, too.

They speed by the first grey ruins of shattered vehicles. April's head bows. I've done things, she'd told him. Hurt people. Guilt and regret hadn't presented strongly at the time, but perhaps seeing her old handiwork is driving them to the surface. After a few more chunks of metallic carnage stream past she coughs, tentacles rippling, head spines quivering and one hand darting to her mouth.

"April . . ." Donnie begins, wondering just where to start on the plethora of problems that are not her fault.

"Air's different," she croaks in unexpected reply, and smudges a sudden streak of red from her nose.

The only thing that stops him from slamming the brakes is the percentage likelihood of sending them both hurtling through the fractured front windshield.

"The atmospheric change?" He forces himself to ease off the accelerator instead. "Should I turn around? Are you gonna be okay?" He doesn't even try to stop the panic that pitches his voice several hertz higher. He wants to laugh about it. He wants to laugh about how eternally hounded he is by turtle luck, and how goddamn unfair it will be that he kills April himself barely five minutes after finding her, simply by trying to bring her home -

A pale hand lands on his, instantly relaxing the death grip he's adopted on the steering wheel. Donnie can't feel it, can't feel the gentle touch of those elegant fingers. His head swivels, desperately seeking out the face of the owner to fill that yawning void of sensation, and April's large eyes are full of such commanding confidence that they almost pin him to his seat.

"Don't," she orders. "Keep going. I adapt."

The slitted irises flit down to her extended hand and the confidence falters; she retracts it with an awkward jerk, as though someone else had put it there.

The sky begins to burn a deep indigo as the daylight recedes, but its phosphorescent trauma stifles any chance of a truly dark night. It narrows the world's palette to one of dark pastels and teal undertones, staining the dense silhouette of the Shellraiser with unnatural hues. Donatello brings the salvage van to a rattling stop alongside the vehicle; April leans forward in her seat, luminous eyes absorbing the sight with faint, almost hungry recognition. Perhaps the angles and curves beneath the post-apocalyptic fortifications are familiar - or maybe his aesthetic style is just that iconic.

A broad shape separates suddenly from the darkness clinging to the side of the rig. Donnie catches the wary flash of very inhuman teeth between April's jaws before his brother's coarse greeting reaches them, and understanding pens them back behind her lips.

"You brought me a present?" Raphael slaps on one of the rig's emergency sidelights and scours them in a circle of stark white halogen. "Aww, you shouldn't have."

He's wearing a long-suffering half-grin and his sunken eyes are bloodshot. Priorities that were queued by distance from the target suddenly propel Donnie out of the van to scan Raphael with all the urgent remnants of concern . . . but if his brother's breathing is a little heavier than usual, his heart rate registers as reassuringly normal. He decides to belay the in-depth medical, opting instead to match Raph stride for stride until they meet in the middle with a jarring clasp of opposing hands. It almost takes his arm off.

"Actually, the real present's inside," Don says glibly, quirking his head toward the windscreen of the van. The green eyes gleaming there in the gloom defy his cue for just long enough to be awkward - then, to his relief, the passenger door swings open and April moves slowly into the light, deigning to walk on foot like a mere mortal. Her tentacles coalesce into an ever-rippling train behind her, shrinking her silhouette; a deliberate manipulation, he suspects, but there's little that can detract from the faintly luminescent mohawk of short tendrils running down the centre of her skull.

"Raphael," he announces, going to the the effort of a few theatrical adjustments to the levels of his audio, and a full sweeping gesture of his arms. "May I reintroduce you to Miss April O'Neil?"

Raph draws in a loud breath through his nose, and puffs it out again. April steps just close enough that she doesn't have to adopt a 180-degree jawline angle to drill her eyes into his face, and then waits there, fingers flexing warily at her sides. Will there be some sudden thunderclap of recollection? A staggering sequence of flashbacks after which Raph cries "April!" and drags her into a bearhug?

Donatello guesses not, because his brother shuffles tentatively on his feet and offers just one particularly uncertain "Hey."

April must have steeled herself for that disappointment, because not a glimmer of it shows in her face. Not much of anything shows in her face. She nods slowly instead, something in Raph's hesitant demeanour causing her well-trained appendages to relax into a wider fan behind her. "He was right," she says, blinking up at him. "You got . . . big."

"Yeah, well you got . . ." Raphael spreads his hands helplessly, shaping a vague circle meant to encompass everything about her. "Uh. I admit I don't remember the specifics? But I'm pretty sure you got something."

Her mouth twitches. A smile lurks there, frail and infantile. "You could say that."

Raphael gingerly extends a hand with a span that, Donnie calculates to the millimetre, could encapsulate and crush her head. April takes it in both of hers, pulling with those comparatively tiny doll hands to close the distance between them - and give herself a lazy lift into the air, where she glides up and wraps her arms about his barrel neck, face quickly buried in the dark leathers of his armour.

A quick intake of breath from Raphael. A weak pat of his giant hand to her back, flinching whenever it brushes against those alien tendrils, but persevering regardless. He glances down at the alien-woman-shaped necklace he has acquired, and then over to Donnie with his jaw suddenly agape.

"Whu- she floats."

"Eh, she floats," Donnie handwaves, antennae at a casual slant to confirm it is No Big Deal. "Just go with it."

April may only be wearing a literal rag, but as she is framed in the entryway it suddenly strikes Donatello how inadequate the Shellraiser is. How unfit for her presence, let alone to become her place of residence. She deserves a mansion. A palace. A planet.

A dimension.

And the numbers click together, and a subroutine cross-references every data point on the Kraang and outputs the obvious conclusion - that was their intention. Raphael will - if all goes well - never get to see her as Donnie has, vibrant and dangerous and bleeding pure power in that tiny pocket of fledgling Kraang living conditions that she conjured for herself. Even if it hasn't killed her, returning to Earth's atmosphere has . . . reduced her, somehow. Contained her. The figure that walks into the Shellraiser is a nuclear blast trapped inside an eggshell.

Sadly, dimensions are in somewhat short supply. Donnie settles for kicking off a thread on how to optimise space in their humble abode with a plus-one of April's unique attributes, and it ticks along in the background as he follows her inside.

April exudes a quiet focus, padding her way through the rig's boxy compartments to the front of the vehicle. Her fingers are slightly outstretched and her tentacles coil and undulate behind her, but her eyes aren't inclined to wander the interior; whatever senses she's using to check the place out, Donnie suspects eyesight isn't among them. She's barely two feet into the main cabin when her crest of head spines stands to abrupt attention, and she makes a decisive beeline for the driver's seat - or rather, just slightly left of it, where a faded pattern in red, white and blue is almost lost to the poor lighting.

Donnie plots her course before she can complete it, and groans.

She flips up the hockey mask as if the morbid trophy sitting underneath it had been her real target all along. The tips of her fingers alight on the skull, and if there is no expression on her face then there are untold layers of it in the quiet way she says: "Hey, Jones."

And the guy has been dead for several decades, which makes it all the more reassuring when Donatello registers an irrational little pang of envy and resentment. The little things, you know, that make you feel alive.

The Shellraiser creaks beneath an urgent flurry of Raph's heavy footfalls, and his brother's solid weight bumps into him from behind. "Hey, be careful with that!" the turtle barks. "It's rigged to blow. You touch that button, we'll be a crater in thirty seconds."

April considers this for a moment, calm and still. She slowly begins to nod.

"It's what he would have wanted," she admits.

"So when were you planning on telling me?"

He finds himself the subject of Raph's lamp beam, its harsh glare sucking all the colour and tonal detail from the crates and supplies that litter the back of the reclaimed salvage van. Donnie turns toward the front cabin, where his brother has evidently abandoned his cursory loot search there, one thick arm folded over the back of the driver's seat and a wary expression defined in high contrast by the edges of the white light that touch his gruff face.

Don doesn't even ask. He simply tilts his head, his antennae skewed at a quizzical angle.

"That she's half-Kraang!" Raph hisses.

"Oh. Sure." Sometimes, Donnie really misses the ability to roll his eyes. "On her mother's side, I think."

"I ain't kiddin' around! Is it, you know . . ." The beam of the industrial lamp recentres, rather pointedly, on Donnie's battered, defective shoulder. "Safe? I got eyes, Don. You've been roughed up. Storm do all of that to ya?"

"She didn't realise it was me," he hammers out in defiance, and predictive analysis tells him that any attempt to figure out how much of that statement is, in fact, the truth, will probably cause a slew of runtime errors. "April remembered me the way I was before - she couldn't know! She's been all alone since the M-Bomb, Raphael. Imagine that. Imagine it. Everything she is, the Kraang have done to her. She's a mutant, just a mutant - a victim as much as any one of us."

A pixel-perfect memory flashes; April's face suffused with wrath as she spits the words Kraang machine at him.

" . . . And I'm pretty sure she hates them more than both of us put together," he adds grimly.

The light flaring across his visual sensors makes it difficult for his greywashed nightvision filter to pick out Raph's face, but Donnie hears the slow, dragging inhalation, the deep and dubious bassy sigh. He tries a different approach.

"How did it feel?"

"What?" Surprise is thick in Raphael's reply.

"When she hugged you, back there."

A brief silence. The lamplight drops, repointing mercifully at the floor. " . . . Nice. I guess." The old turtle's huge silhouette shifts in a big shrug, and the crinkling of shadows around his face betrays the heavy drawing of his brow. "I don't remember her. You know that, right?"

"I know. But she remembers you."

"Yeah . . ." Inadequacy reigns supreme in that weak assent. "It's tough, you know? She's family. She belongs here. I know that. But I don't feel it yet. It's been the two of us for so long, I just . . . it's gonna take some getting used to, I guess."

"Look, Raph . . . " It's impossible for him to be genuinely tired in any sense that an organic might understand, but still he perches on a crate as though gravity has doubled on every groaning mechanical joint. "April's been through a lot. I can't guarantee this will be easy or, uh, predictable, but I promise this'll work out. So maybe go easy on your gritty wasteland Batman impression around her?"

Raphael snorts, and Donatello knows a victory when he generates one.

"We're back, April," he announces loudly, because it seems both kind and wise not to startle a traumatised friend who also happens to be a powerful alien bioweapon. Behind him, Raph slaps the button to close the hatch on the plummeting temperatures of the wasteland night. Their little beat-up home is quiet aside from the hum of his computers from the cabin . . . and the lingering debate that follows them from the salvage van like a bad smell.

"We should just siphon out the fuel and transfer it to the Shellraiser," is the hill his brother has currently chosen to die on.

"You know there's always loss involved in that," he counters, taking full advantage of the fact that his voice can be modulated with a patience he absolutely doesn't feel. "It's not optimal. Trust me. The math adds up. The Shellraiser's a bigger fuel hog, and it makes more sense to just use the van. You have enough water rations for three days of work plus the return trip. There's enough fuel in the tank for us to take the old girl out to at least two promising wrecks I saw, and make it back here, even factoring in weight from a typical salvage haul. I know the exact locations, and with their vectors heading for the Sharding Wastes the chances of us finding more fuel anyway -"

"That's if she don't crap out on you halfway to the first one, and then we gotta lug the thing back to the Shellraiser - in pieces. Did you see the state of that chassis? Rust's all that's holdin' her together! I dunno, man." Raphael huffs. "You're lucky you didn't have to ask April to get out and push. My gut says we're testin' our luck."

Ugh. Donnie can crunch the numbers all day and come up with a dozen optimum strategies adjusted for various priorities, but his brother will never entertain anything that goes against his 'gut'.

"I'm sorry, Raphael; remind me where your gut went to study mathematics and advanced statistics?"

"That's the opposite of what your gut's for, brainiac."

"Then it's a good thing I don't have one anym-"

He stumbles right into a nest of snakes sprawling across the floor of the main cabin. How he manages to avoid stepping on one of those resting pink tendrils is . . . well, a matter of machine-quick reaction times as much as miraculous chance. He takes two hopping steps through the gaps between them to a safe spot closer to his computer console.

They radiate out from the figure hunched below the mocking pale rectangle of Casey's mask, face buried in her arms and knees drawn tightly to her chest. She doesn't stir.

Raphael eyes up the web of tentacles for a safe route into the cabin. It's clear that neither of them wants to be first to step on one.

"She sleeps, then," he grunts, sounding a little surprised.

Donnie stares at her, neck servos all but paralysed into malfunction. " . . . I guess she does."

Raph trudges gingerly into the cabin and heads for a storage trunk wedged into a recess in the wall, making a notable but largely pointless effort to avoid loud footsteps. "Hope you're factoring extra water rations into that amazing math of yours. And what does she even eat? I might have enough supplies for the both of us, but I dunno what she likes."

"She's a person, Raph," he chides, mildly amused. "Not a weird stray animal we just adopted. Tomorrow, I'll ask her."

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow, April will still be here. And maybe even every day after that. The landscape of future projections generated somewhere in the threads of his processors takes a sudden shift, tripping over this new, incredible variable. A stale, monotonous outlook is flooded with unexpected colour and contours. Countless hours of new data to analyse right there, something with the invigorating flavour of near-organic hope . . .

" . . . Hey, Don? You good, bro?"

His brother's sallow eyes bore into him. Donnie absently rubs his injured shoulder, and considers how it might be part of the shrinking pool of immediate things that are not okay.

" . . . Yeah," he says, and calculates a good chance that he means it. "Yeah, I'm good."