The calamitous battering of gunfire seized Raphael by the throat and tore him from shallow sleep. His hands jerked up into the familiar contours of the dashboard and his foot was fumbling for the accelerator pedal before he could even find his voice. What finally escaped was a bark with edges rough as a rusty buzzsaw.

"Don, how many?! Positions? Artillery? Where can we -"

A quiet chuckle swept away his tide of urgent questions.

"Relax. We're not under attack."

Donatello's voice carried the wry smile that his static face couldn't, although when Raph swivelled around to stare at his brother, he couldn't see it anyway - just the angular silhouette of his jagged carapace, impinged at the edges by the burning glow of a half-dozen monitors. Donnie's attention was fixed solely on the screens as he calmly tapped away at the keys of the rig's computer console.

Temper bubbled up in the back of Raphel's throat, but something about the clattering rattle against the thick metal hull of the Shellraiser trapped the angry words sourly against his tongue. He tilted his head, ears keen. The hail was too steady, too repetitive for gunfire, and the more he listened, the more he realised the noise wasn't coming from the walls - mostly the roof . . .

He leaned forward suddenly, widening the metal slats that protected the front windscreen. A huge, goofy, stupid grin split his face in two and set his tired eyes ablaze. " . . . No way!"

"Yes, way. Equipment's waiting at the door for you."

"It's clean?" He was scrambling out of the driver's seat as fast as a mutant his size could manage, clumsy with giddy delirium.

"Clean as it's gonna get out here - already filtered a sample to check. It's safe."

"HOOOOOO YEAH!"

The holler devolved into rugged laughter, and between that and his heavy charge for the exit, the Shellraiser rocked with the force of an earthquake.

Donatello cast his brother only a mild sideways glance on his way out.

"Enjoy," he said quietly.

Outside he slammed into a thick sheeting wall of it, fat and wobbling droplets reverberating against his dark leathers. Raphael reached up to tear off his bandana, gazed up into the broken skies and let the rain crash down against his face.

It hammered through the grit and dust of the wasteland that had scoured itself perpetually between and over his scales like an unwanted second shell. He fumbled for the seams of his armour, his increasingly wet grip struggling to master the zips and fastenings that were already a challenge for his thick fingers. Sheer urgent desperation brought eventual success; pieces of his gear scattered to the floor behind him, his battle-scarred plastron, arms and shell exposed to the waist for the rain to devour.

The sensation consumed him. Had he even really breathed since the last downpour?

The horizon, flat and featureless, had become a drizzled and desaturated blur. For a heartbeat, Raphael could almost believe that nothing else existed beyond the little circle of dust where the Shellraiser was parked. The neon ruptures of their wounded sky were all but hidden behind the thick clouds roiling above, except to gild the soft edges and curls in fantastic colours.

And there was no sound but the steady thrumming of the deluge, the delicate trickling harmony behind him as water dripped through the orifices of the rig.

Raph took a moment. A deep, loud, slow breath, dragging in the damp clean air like a drug. At no other time would the wasteland be this peaceful.

But he wasn't alone. April was already out in it.

She didn't need any help looking unearthly, though the rain made a contribution anyway; it sprayed a silvery halo around her slender figure as she revolved in idle circles on the balls of her feet, arms outstretched. Her curling tentacles forming a whirling pattern that seemed to trap the eye.

Her hair had started to grow out, the sodden wet red locks at a length now that itched the amnesiac scratch ever at the back of his mind. Raph had found it an uphill struggle to make the memories of her stick; so many of her new edges were strange and alien, too unfamiliar for the hands of his mind to take a firm grip.

And some days she barely seemed to be family at all.

"What's her deal, Don?" he'd growled once, punctuating each word with a ringing hammer blow. It would take him hours to beat the dent out of the warped wall panel that had suffered her wrath that morning.

"Ask the Kraang." A little undercurrent of blinding rage had darkened his brother's voice. "They're the only ones who know what they did to her. She's just . . . having a bad day, okay?"

Hopefully, today was a good day.

"Hey, save some for the rest of the wasteland!" he yelled, testing her temper with a half-grin.

She turned slowly toward him. Through the misty miasma of precipitation she was beaming, her large eyes crinkled with the force of the smile. And that distracted him so much that he didn't see the ball of water amassed in her trailing hand until she had flung it right into his face. It burst like a water balloon and left him startled and sputtering, furiously slapping at his eyes.

She laughed, a delighted peal that shook her shoulders and softened her freckled face into something so familiar that it stung.

"Oh, you are so dead, O'Neil!" Raphael exploded, but his teeth were bared in a wide grin and breathy laughter was pumping from his barrel chest as he charged after her.

He was fast, for an old turtle; he hurtled heavily through the rain, a huge dark titan looming out of the damp haze. Any attempts to catch someone who could defy gravity were doomed to failure from the outset, of course, but April played the part - skittishly running from him on foot, and only snaking into the air when his broad arms were just about to encircle her. He would miss, and stagger, and then she'd take that split-second of evasion to channel the rain between her hands and fire another potshot at him.

It was infuriating. It was invigorating. And when Raphael finally came to a halt, hands on his knees, chest heaving and water pouring off every edge of him, April attacked him with an elegant hop and threw her arms around his neck. That she was a little breathless was a tiny boon for his injured pride, but the embrace was the better remedy. The soft, fuzzy feeling that came with it was a balm for ills he didn't even realise he had.

" 'S a good day," he allowed, letting one hand gently cover April's back in return. She squeezed him tightly before gliding up onto one of his broad shoulders and taking a graceful seat there.

"A miracle," she agreed softly, one hand alighting on his head and sending a warm flutter through his chest. She was gazing contentedly up into the clouded sky, pupils broad in eyes half-lidded and her weird mohawk of alien spines pressed flat to her head. They perked up again in curiosity when Raph began to trudge back to the open door of the Shellraiser.

"Y'ain't wrong." He dislodged her with a rough but affectionate shake; of course, April drifted off like a mote of dust rather than fall, tendrils fanning about her, and hovered curiously over him as he began to drag out the two empty, rust-bitten barrels Don had dropped just inside the entrance. Empty, at least, but for the various funnels and miscellaneous smaller containers stuffed hastily inside them - everything from questionable old tupperware to reappropriated gas canisters. "So we can goof off later. Right now, we need to be catching this miracle."

April's eyes trailed from the equipment to the Shellraiser door, and languished there.

". . . Where's Don?"

"He never comes out when it rains," Raphael eye-rolled. "Complains about moisture in his servos, or somethin'. Honestly, I think he just prefers to let me do all the heavy lifting. But, hey, I got you to help me out now! And if it works for drenching me, maybe we can use your alien mojo to get these filled quick -"

Raphael stopped. He eyed the damp trail leading back inside the vehicle with a gruff sigh.

His raincatchers weren't gonna get set up by themselves.

The monitors swirled and swarmed with meteorological information; weather fronts and air temperature readings fed by the myriad sensors festooned within the Shellraiser, all overlaying the maps Donatello had painstakingly compiled of the known wasteland terrain during his decades of exploration. What lay before him, bathing him in lurid screen light in the dim cabin, was a technical marvel the likes of which was a priceless rarity in their ravaged world.

It went, like most of his scientific achievements, largely unappreciated by the few people who saw it.

Not, in April's case, by choice.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" he asked anyway, without turning around. His fingers were at the keys, hammering out calculations she knew from her long but strangely-faceted memory would be incredibly complex. Once, she might have asked him to explain. Sat with him and studied and learned and ambitiously fought to keep up with his razor-sharp mind, impossible as the task might be. Now there was a constant alien storm at the back of her skull that chewed technical details to unfathomable pieces and spat them out as irrelevant to her, while his intellect ran on high-spec Kraang-powered processor cores at speeds she could barely comprehend.

"From the readings, I think we've got about four hours of this if we stay put. It looks like the weather front's moving towards the Arid Sea. We can chase it to the edge if we need more time to -"

"Come outside," April said firmly.

One of his antennae twitched. His head canted just enough to the left for her to see a sliver of purple there, bringing her into his peripheral vision. "No need! Analysing the chemical compounds in these water samples is three days' work on its own and if we ever want to trace the source of the rainwater -"

"You should see it."

"Nah." Donnie shrugged, casually tapping a small monitor to the right of the console. "Got good enough visuals from the exterior cameras."

"It's not the same." She moved towards his chair. Her bare feet made soft, wet scuffling sounds against the rig floor. "You can't miss this. It feels so good out there."

"I'm sure it does."

The dry reply gave her pause. April came to an uncertain halt, water dripping audibly from her sodden skin and garments, pooling uncomfortably between her toes. She'd missed something, something important. Something she should have known better. Confusion, frustration made the storm a little louder between her ears, and she wasted a precious moment trying to beat it back down to an annoying buzz.

The flurry of his metal fingers against the keys of the console had escalated, harder and faster, a furious tattoo.

"You can't feel it," she ventured.

The tapping stopped.

"No. Of course I can't. Do you have any idea how many sensors I'd need, and how sensitive they'd have to be, just for me to simulate how rain 'feels'?"

The bitterness in his voice caused her stomach to tighten, although her mind was still grappling with why. "Can you remember it?"

"I remember everything," Donnie said in a tone that could get no tighter without snapping. Then he buckled, sinking a little in his seat. He began to swivel it, inch by hesitant inch, around to face her. "I mean, I do, but . . . it's complicated? Remembering sensations, but not having the senses that received them anymore. There's this weird disconnect. Everything feels . . . second-hand. Like I saw a recording, instead of . . ."

He yanked the chair back toward the console with a suddenness that sent April's tentacles snapping up into a threatening train. Donnie planted his frustrated fists on the computer's surface and sighed. "It doesn't matter. It's not a big deal. I'm okay."

He wasn't okay. A long time ago April would have felt that before she even walked into the room, but Donnie was just a cold void to all her extra senses now. The inadequacies - on both sides - gnawed at her. It wasn't fair.

"I'm sorry," she tried.

The simple words stole a little of his stubborn shell from him; his head dropped closer to his plastron with a quiet mechanical whine, ears sinking to his carapace.

April hated that dejected posture at a visceral level. A familiar impulse crept up through the maze of distractions in her mind. She closed the gap between them with a single firm step, and laid a palm gently on his shoulder.

He quirked his head, fixing her cynically with the corner of his glowing visor. "You know, I can't feel that either," he said wryly.

April retracted her hand as if he'd spat lava on it.

"Oh, come on, I didn't mean it like -" Donnie finally turned away from the console, spreading his hands in apologetic appeal, but the gesture died and they fell limply to the arms of his chair when he saw April's wide, mournful eyes.

"Look, April . . . Don't worry about it. I'm fine. Go on, get back out there. Prancing around in the rain is for people with skin, and, y'know, nerve endings in said skin."

April studied him quietly for the length of two particularly indolent blinks - long enough to be awkward, but also for the peace of a decision made to relax her tightly-clenched jaw. She smudged rainwater from her nose, and - to Donnie's frank confusion - paced over to the adjacent wall. A darker rectangle of metal hung there, sitting flush against the panelling.

He'd made it for her, almost as soon as he could scrounge materials for it; a fold-down bed shaped out of an old truck panel and welded with sturdy hinges to the wall. Lumpy foam ripped out of some well-preserved vehicle seats had been covered with worn leather and meticulously fastened to the inside to form the best post-apocalypse mattress she was likely to get. There was a thin sheet for the cooler wasteland nights - and, most interesting of all, the curved shelf affixed a few feet up the wall from the bed, lightly padded with remaining foam. April had stared at that one for some time before Donnie had gestured to her drifting alien appendages.

"For when you're sleeping. Somewhere to . . . Well, I figured it would be better than the otherwise inevitable encounter with Raph's elephant feet," he'd explained meekly.

She flipped the contraption down and sat on the mattress with an air of finality.

"April." Donnie's head had tracked her across the room and now he leaned forward in his seat, the crook of his ears giving away his exasperation. "You don't need to sit with me. I said I was fine."

"You're lying."

His antennae arced up so sharply that she was surprised they didn't let out a jet of steam behind them. "So now you think you can sense how I feel? Convenient."

"Don't need to. My ears and eyes still work."

"I -" Donatello threw up his hands, making some strangled noise that was almost half-machine. "We average two-point-seven-five years between clean rainfalls! Don't waste it - get out there!"

"No." There was no irritation in her voice, but she had made up her mind, and rippling subharmonics reinforced the point. Donnie flinched back in his seat, but the reaction was brief - soon he was pressing forward again, the magenta strip of his gaze burning desperately at her.

"You were having fun," he pleaded weakly. "I saw you, on the cameras. That doesn't happen enough. You looked amazing, I . . . It was beautiful. You looked happy. Please, go back outside. I promise I'm okay."

But April only tilted her head to one side, and narrowed her eyes like he should have known better.

"You're upset. You're alone. I can't be happy if you're either of those things."

"Stop."

Donatello drove his feet a little harder into the ground with each step. Certain expressions of frustration might be unavailable to him now, but that one always worked a treat. It served the additional bonus purpose of carrying him more quickly away from her, the hovering presence falling further to the edge of his rear proximity sensors' reach.

"Donnie -"

"I'm not a basket-case, April. I told you I was fine and I'm gonna prove it to you!"

He marched across the threshold of the Shellraiser and out into the unrelenting downpour. The din against the Shellraiser's hull jumped alarmingly close to his speakers and drowned out April's reply - drowned out everything, in fact, with an audio assault of white noise so complete that he halted after only three long, slowing strides.

He wasn't really sure what he'd been expecting. Bar their first post-apocalypse rainfall - when Donnie had stood outside and let the water drum hard against his metal exoskeleton, and felt absolutely nothing - he had spent every infrequent occasion since sitting in the Shellraiser, analysing it instead of experiencing it.

Because he couldn't experience it, not the way April or Raph could. Hearing the droplets batter his frame was the best he could achieve. He tilted his head skywards and they shattered against his visor, turning the rectangle of his visuals into a blurry, streaked mess in seconds.

Like he was just . . . looking out of a window.

A single window in the dark box that he'd been trapped inside since the M-Bomb, with every sense that wasn't missing entirely muffled by featureless walls that blocked any real contact with the world outside. Being inorganic meant being infinitely cold and distant and hard-edged, and even the memory of anything soft and warm was incompatible with his hardware.

But the noise . . . the crashing barrage of it bouncing against his metal walls was so loud, it overpowered everything else. Gave him a mesmerising background against which to amplify his long list of sensory deficiencies, every stabbing reminder that he was not alive. And while his processors thrashed and ground away for answers he could only stand in silence, a mute machine without human words. They slipped away from him like his senses had, useless vestigial things from a life belonging to someone else, until there were only the numbers, ones and zeroes and zeroes and ones and -

Pale fingers crept across his vision, sweeping away excess water. April's huge eyes loomed into view then, ebbing concern, the slit pupils wider than usual and quivering anxiously in her alien gaze.

"Donnie?"

This close, he could map the detailed constellations of her freckles. His arms twitched at his sides; he wanted to smash his way through that 'window'. He wanted to feel April's gentle hands either side of his face as she drew it down, away from the sky and back to earth. He wanted to feel the soft puff of her breath instead of seeing it creep as mist across his visor. He wanted to hug her in the rain like Raph had, and feel her organic, living, thriving form between his arms. He wanted to feel his face aching as he laughed with her in those gold-dust moments when she laughed at all. He wanted . . . he wanted . . .

He wanted.

Machines didn't want. That would have to be enough.

Not far away, Raphael stood with a hand on his hip, watching him with the beginnings of worry in his sour expression. And of all the things Donatello wanted, explaining a complicated existential crisis to his brother was beyond the bottom of the list. Raph's blissful, unquestioning acceptance of him as his 'real' sibling was an anchor he couldn't afford to lose.

"Yeah, I still don't see what all the fuss is about. Guess I should get to work on installing some wiper blades, huh?" he said, and his synthetic voice didn't tremble at all. He lifted his two forefingers close to his visor and made the appropriate alternating swipey motions.

As she was still hovering in front of him, April reached up to still his hands with her own. Her thin smile told him she saw right through the ruse - but it was a genuine smile nonetheless.

"The only thing you two need to get to work on is helpin' me out," Raphael complained, obnoxiously loud. "April! Time to earn your keep, sister."

The rain began to thin.

Every container they could spare was filled to bursting with precious water, sealed for storage and loaded into the rig. It was Raphael who ascended to the Shellraiser roof first, laying flat on his shell up there with the dissipating dregs of rain lashing down on him. April and Don followed, and soon all three were supine beneath the weeping heavens, watching the clouds above move on.

A comfortable silence enveloped the trio, enduring as long as it took for the rain to dwindle to sporadic drops. The miracle was passing over them, and soon the wasteland heat and dust would roll back in and parch their world all over again.

"Maybe it could snow next," April said, with a plaintive little twist to her voice. "I miss snow."

Raphael chuckled wryly. "You don't ask for much, do ya?"

"I don't know," Donnie said cheerfully. "When the atmosphere finally corrodes away from the pressure of the disrupted Kraang terraforming, there'll probably be a nuclear winter before we all freeze to death. Might get some then."

Raph's groan was worldweary. "Geez, Don. I'm officially renaming you Downertello."

"Aw, it's just a theory. I have thousands," Don offered by way of weak apology. "Besides, if it makes you feel better, we're probably still several hundred years away from anything like that."

"Yeah, no. That doesn't make me feel better, bro."

Between them, April shuddered. The convulsion rippled not just through her body, but the idle tendrils splayed either side of her. Donatello propped himself up suddenly on one elbow, ears horizontal in repentance as he laid an apologetic hand on her shoulder.

"Sorry, that was a jerk thing to say. I didn't mean to -"

"It's not that." Her eyes rolled open, blinking softly against the last few spatters of rain. "Let it end again. I'm not afraid. It's just . . ."

April sought out Raphael's huge, calloused palm with one hand, and Donnie's cold fingers with the other. Her grip was fierce when she whispered: "No matter how it happens, we're staying together this time, okay?"