"Ya-me!"

April does her best to comply with her sensei's barked command, arms pinwheeling to catch her balance as she wobbles dangerously on one foot. It's a close call, but she finally manages to steady herself, right leg trembling faintly under the strain of holding the half-completed pose.

Intellectually, she knows that there's no way she can seriously hurt herself if she falls from the low balance beam. She's certainly fallen from higher places onto much less forgiving surfaces than the padded dojo floor, and has the scars and still-crusted scraped knee (thank you, Karai) to prove it.

Blindfolded, however, it certainly feels a lot more treacherous.

Master Splinter can move as silent as the stars when he wants to, so the faint flutter of cloth and drag of his tail across the wool carpet as he circles her is more of a politeness, as are the non-committal noises in his throat as he reaches out and adjusts the position of her fists.

"Tell me, Miss O'Neil, where are you, in this moment?"

"Uh..." The muscles in her lower back start to quiver dangerously. She hopes Master Splinter can't see how much she's starting to sweat under the blindfold. "Do you mean, like, physically? Or mentally?"

"Yes," he answers unhelpfully.

April chews over his question for a moment, decides to get the obvious answers out of the way.

"I'm in the dojo," she says. "About fifty feet down from the news stand on 40th and 7th. I'm eighteen inches from the end of the balance beam, facing north—no, northeast—about halfway through the Heidan Shodan kata."

"And your spirit?" Master Splinter prompts, though not unkindly. "Where is it?"

"Not here," she admits reluctantly. "Don't get me wrong, I want to be, but I keep thinking about my dad."

"Do not apologize, my child. While the ninja must maintain a strong awareness of their own self within the universe, we do not always have control of the places our minds and bodies linger. Even if it is impossible to compartmentalize, however, to separate the wantings from the beings, we must still remain aware of our selfhood. You have lost him, but you cannot find him if you do not know where you are. Your chi must become a fixed point in chaotic space, a home fire that you can return to at the end of a long night searching. Do you understand?"

April nods. Every muscle fiber from her ankles to the base of her neck scream out in agony. "Hai, Sensei."

"Good. Continue."

Relieved, she lowers her trembling foot, weight shifting forward instinctively in anticipation of the last pose before her turn, and tumbles off of the end of the balance beam with a grunt.

"Oh," says Master Splinter mildly. "And to correct an earlier misconception, you were actually four inches from the end of the beam."

April stumbles on the first step, her foot vanishing knee-deep into a deceptively solid-looking snowdrift. She teeters momentarily—hyper-conscious of Donnie's anxious bulk behind her, ready to catch her if she falls—before finding her center again. She shoves her brief embarrassment to one side, focusing instead on finding the next solid patch of ground before her.

By the fifth step she's gotten a better feel for the way the snow gives and crunches under her boots, has learned to hold her arms out and lift her legs high to clear the top of each drift rather than waste energy forcing her way through it. She can almost feel her sensei's ghost standing at her shoulder, watching and nodding faintly with approval.

"Wooo, lookit that! S'what I'm talkin' 'bout, Apes! Show that snow who's the kunoichi, YEAH!"

April can't help but smile behind her scarf. She shoots Michelangelo a quick thumbs up but keeps her attention set dead ahead. If she drifts from her heading even slightly this early in the game she could overshoot the wood pile completely. Already it's a struggle to stay oriented; without the meager protection of the porch the icy wind hits her like a wall, shoving her sideways and blurring what little she can see of the horizon.

The horrifying truth of it is that Casey could be anywhere. He could be that lump of snow on her left, or curled up on the top step of the back door, his knocks unheard and slowly weakening. She can't let herself dwell on it, though, or else she'll end up running in fruitless circles, so she keeps her focus on the one place she's certain he has been. Once she's there, and once she's certain Casey's not still there, then she'll figure out what she needs to do next.

Ten steps out Mikey shouts after her again, but the wind smashes all of the words together into one indecipherable string of vowels and muffled consonants. April risks a brief glance back, and is alarmed to see that the farmhouse is little more than a vague, dark mass behind her, a suggestion of structure in a world of swirling white.

Twenty steps out, another glance back. The farmhouse, her friends, the rest of the known universe, has vanished completely. Even the chain tethered at her waist seems to fade in and out of existence, the icy glimmer of metal trembling taught behind her for half a dozen feet before it, too, is swallowed the whirling blizzard.

And there's no denying that's what this is. A full-on blizzard, the worst she's ever seen. The snow is falling thick as static now, sticking on her pants and the dark sleeves of her coat until it's difficult to make out her own limbs in the complete white-out. April focuses on her breathing, the quick but unwavering thump of her heart in her chest, and does her best to ignore the disorienting sensation. She is a fixed point in space, a pivot around which the universe passes at her leisure. She can do this. She can do this!

"Casey!" she shouts. No answer but the howling wind. She loosens her scarf, choking momentarily on her first full lungful of icy air, but the shock of it only makes her bellow louder. "CASEY!"

Nothing. Nothing but the wind shrieking back at her, mockingly.

She's going to find him. She has to find him.

In some places the snow piles in drifts nearly waist high. April manages to clamor over the tops of some of the more solid ones—frantically consulting her mental map of the farmyard and trying to remember what stump or bird bath could be at its center and their general location relative to the wood pile—but others she has no choice but to carefully edge her way around.

Slow, too slow. How long as she been out here now? Not nearly as long as Casey. She squints against the stinging snow, wishing she had thought to rummage through her Pop Pop's things for a pair of goggles, and examines every lump and hollow for the edge of a black kerchief, the heavily-scuffed toe of a buried Converse sneaker. She flings her arms wide into the gale, hoping to scoop him out of the flurry of kicked-up powder, but her fingers close on nothing but air and—

Thwam!

"Fffffffuck!" Whatever she hit, it was hard enough to hurt even ice-numbed hands. April allows herself half a second to swear and shake the injured limb indignantly. Donnie must sense trouble—the chain jerks twice. You okay?

With fresh blood warming her throbbing fingers, she yanks twice in answer. I'm okay.

Carefully this time, April reaches out, feeling around for the hard edge of whatever it was she'd slammed into. Eventually she finds it—a solid circle larger than her hand suspended at roughly chest height, hard on one side and slightly curved on the other. Puzzled, she explores further, finds a metal strut jutting perpendicularly from a broad, flat surface, and with a jolt she realizes it's the van, almost completely buried in a gust-driven snowpack.

Hope, tangy and dizzying, surges through her. What if Casey is inside? While not an ideal shelter, the van would certainly provide protection from the wind and driving snow. She can just see him, teeth chattering, bare fingers fumbling with the nearly frozen latch, the relief on his face as the door popped open and he collapsed across the cracked leather seats to catch his breath and wait for a clearing in the storm.

Heart hammering louder than ever, April edges her way around to the lee of the van, where the snow barely comes up to the top of the tires.

"Jones!" She wipes the powder from the passenger side window with three quick swipes of her glove so she can peer inside. "You in there?"

The van is empty.

Disappointment is harder to dismiss than embarrassment, she discovers.

Okay. Okay. If she remembers right, they'd parked perpendicular to the house, with the nose of the van pointed more or less towards the barn. That means she's drifted off course slightly but is theoretically within a dozen strides of her goal. After working her way back around to the front driver's side corner of the van, careful to let Donnie reel in the slack as she goes, April checks her orientation against her mental map, adjusts her angle by twenty degrees to the left, and strikes off again, counting her steps as she goes.

...eleven, twelve, thirteen...

Just as she's starting to doubt herself , April spots a dark, irregular texture amid the otherwise featureless tundra. It's the wood pile.

"Casey, I'm here! Casey!" She works over every inch of the wood pile, scraping back snow and kicking at every human-sized lump. She circles around it twice, lifting the chain as she goes to avoid getting tangled, widening her search slightly with each pass before conceding that he isn't there.

It's a bitter pill to swallow, but she chokes it down resolutely, reminding herself that she'd planned from the beginning for this to be the true start of her search. She knows Casey, knows that he'd never be one to do the sensible thing and stay put near a prominent landmark in the event that he got lost.

After all, this is Casey Jones, the boy who who leapt gleefully into his first fight with a mutant. The boy whose trigonometry homework is ringed with elaborate doodles of a taller, stronger, always-masked version of himself, who calls her Red and steals her makeup wipes when he thinks she isn't looking, whose palm sweats whenever he holds her hand even as he shrugs off battle-lost teeth with a shrug, who's worn her body while she wore his, who gets her even when he says he doesn't. She knows him. She knows him.

April closes her eyes to the storm, to the cold, to the fear, makes herself focus on Casey, the echo of him that seems to linger in her peripheral vision whenever they spend time together. Casey has this... this glint to him. Silver and sharp as a blade for the most part, but jagged at the ends like a skate that's been dug hard into rough ice.

It's hard to stay focused as the wind pushes at her, screaming and tearing at her clothing, but slowly, slowly, she starts to sink. Endless white fades to grey, then black, and the numbness in her toes and fingertips spreads slowly across her body. Distantly, she can feel two distinct pulls at her waist. She ignores them, teeth gritted against the interruption to her concentration. Where, where...

There. It's dim, distant, but unmistakable, like the far twinkle of a star on a foggy night. Two more pulls at her waist, frantic, stronger. She answers them, not wanting to be pulled back from that glint, not now, when she's so close, when it feels like every atom of her body is honed to its frequency.

Chain behind her, glint ahead, April staggers on, past the wood pile and towards the tall, dark smudge that is the edge of the woods. Casey must have gotten turned around and mistaken it for the house, not knowing that each step he took carried him further and further away from his goal. He must have—

The chain yanks her to a hard stop. April tugs at it, annoyed, but it doesn't give another inch. Donnie's pulls feel almost apologetic, now. That's it, she can almost hear him say. That's all there is.

She gropes ahead of her, frantic, but Casey's still out of reach. How far, she can't tell. Maybe one step. Maybe ten, maybe fifty. The smart thing to do would be to wind her way back to the house, careful to keep his position fixed in her mind, and upend every closet looking for anything they could use to make her tether longer. Maybe stop by the van on the way, grab the jump cables from the back. Rip the lacings out of all of the shoes, tie every sheet they haven't ripped into bandages together into a long chain, cut the cords off of the tv and all of the lamps. Anything. Donatello would probably make her sit in front of the fire to warm up before letting her back out again, might even try to argue that she shouldn't go back, let him or Raph or Mikey go, it's okay, they can take it, they may be nearly-naked reptiles but they're ninjas, they can take it, they'll—

The metal chain is like a belt of ice around her waist, even through her thick coat. It's a struggle to undo Mikey's expert knot, her fingers numb and her gloves stiff with ice. "Come on," she pants, the damp wool of her scarf sour with dripping snot. "Come on..."

The knot loosens, slips free. Left hand fisted tight around the handle of the kusarigama, April carefully unwinds it. The first loop gives her an extra two feet of chain, the second another two feet. When the last of it finally slips free, she takes a final half-step into the storm, stretching ahead of her as far as she can. The wind kicks up a fresh blind of snow, and there's no doubt that if she dropped the kusarigama now she'd never find it again. She might still find Casey, but what good would that do either of them?

"Casey Jones, you jerk!" Of course there's no answer. Her left hand slips two inches down the handle, her right hand prods another two inches of snow. "Do you even want to be saved, asshole? Do you? 'Cause I'm literally at the end of my rope, here!" She laughs, frantic. If she lays down, she can stretch her body out and kick that snowdrift five feet ahead. It certainly looks like an ungrateful, spindly, self-aggrandizing piece of—

"Ow," groans the snow directly beneath her left boot. "Tha' hur's..."

She kicks him twice to be sure she's not hearing things ("Stoppit, stoppit, owww! Jesus!") before yanking frantically on the chain, three pulls then two.

It feels like an age before two blanket-shrouded figures emerge from the blizzard, bent low against the wind and working their way hand over hand like they were climbing straight up the side of a building instead of crossing less than 100 feet of flat farmyard. April's managed to dig most of Casey's torso out of the snow, but with one hand clinging desperately to their only lifeline and the rest of her slowly turning into ice it's hard going. One of the turtles—she can't make out exactly which, maybe Raphael judging by the breadth of his shoulders—pulls him the rest of the way out and flings him over his shell in a fireman's carry. The other turtle wraps thick arms around her, clucking sternly when he realizes she's untied the chain, and hoists her out of the snow.

"I can walk," April protests, ignoring the fact that her legs feel like two giant popsicles.

"Sure you can," says Michelangelo, the orange of his mask just discernible under the snow caking his gear. "Doesn't mean you gotta."

He does, however, allow her the dignity of a bridal carry.

Donatello is waiting for them on the porch, tablecloth pulled tightly around his head and shoulders and hopping from one foot to the other to stay warm. He immediately goes into triage mode, and the ease with which he slips from anxious worry to clinical detachment would depress her if she wasn't so fucking cold.

Mikey refuses to set her down anywhere but directly in front of the fire, and after Donnie's quick one over ("Count backwards from fifty in increments of seven. Hold out your wrist so I can check your pulse. Squeeze my fingers. Harder. Harder. Wiggle your feet. I'm going to pull off your boots now. Can you move your toes? Can you feel it when I pinch you here? What about here?") he starts to help her peel out of the rest of her wet layers.

"Sorry," he says once she's down to just her thermals and undershirt. "Doctor's orders. Gotta get completely dry." He turns his head and holds a thick blanket up to give her privacy as she struggles with the clasp of her sweat-soaked bra, then wraps her up burrito style and expertly puts her wet hair up in a towel. It should feel weird, but it doesn't. Maybe it's just the adrenaline crash finally catching up to her. April is too tired to feel anything but tired.

At least she's not the only one getting the naked treatment, though Casey's debriefing is slightly hindered by the fact that he's still clinging tightly to an armload of wood.

"G-got l-l-l-lost," he chatters, wincing as Donnie pries open his fingers and eases the kindling from his grip. "S-s-s-s-saw th' s-storm, get-t-ting wors-se, 'ought I could g-get one m-more l-l-l-l-load. Wind ch-changed direct-t-tion, got t-t-t-turned ar-r-round..."

"Disorientation is also common in the early stages of hypothermia," Donnie says, his flat "medic" voice faintly edged with guilt. "We shouldn't have let you go out in that before we knew exactly how bad the storm was."

"N-n-n-n-no, sh-sh-shit, Sh-sherlock. B-b-but hey—" Casey grins at them weakly. Thin lines of blood ooze down the cracks in his chapped lips. "—'least I know what n-not to do n-n-next time we need wood-d-d for th' f-fire."

Donnie's mouth thins. Mikey ducks his head, mumbles something about tea, and vanishes into the kitchen. Raph can't seem to stop staring at the raw, peeling flesh of Casey's fingers. His eyes are round, round, and the snow melting off of his dark, heavily scarred skin makes the green glisten like worn marble.

"Nobody's going back out there," he rasps. "We'll burn the furniture if we have to."

April wants to make a joke(Hey now, the plaid isn't that bad...) but her voice feels frozen in her throat. The wind howls hungrily down the chimney, and the fire, as if sensing danger, shudders low in its grate.