Phoenix Fall

a/n: A little drabble for the Prompts contest at . Written during the brief airing hiatus in Season 4, just after the Arena of Carnage. I'm kind of anticipating something like this happening in the show (which they're kind of implying will, but then they never go that way), but if they happen to go some other direction with it, well, whatev.  Futher events may negate this ficlet.  TMNT isn't mine and I make no profit from the use of the characters, which belong to Viacom/Nickelodeon.

“My, my, my my my!” the Fugitoid mused.  “Now, this… how splendid is this?  Miss O’Neil functions as a sort of… energy well.  In conjunction with the Aeon crystal, she can literally draw energy into herself from the universe, be it space dust, or, as you see, from the very stars themselves!  This is likely the same phenomena that powers her psychic blasts.  Fascinating, isn’t it?  Most likely why our friends the Kraang were after your friend… to use her as a perpetual sort of battery.”

“Uhhh, that’s great, Professor… but…” Leo asked concernedly, “…how do we get her down??”

The android professor took in Leonardo’s words, glancing at the turtle before returning his gaze to the spherical inferno surrounding the shape of the girl, hovering fifteen feet above them in the docking bay.  Tongues of yellow and orange flames flicked all around her, but did not seem to touch her, though the intensity of the heat, causing the air around her to roar and ripple, drove the turtles and their human companion further and further back.  Meanwhile, the stream of crimson light across the sky continued feeding into her from the red giant the ship was currently orbiting.  The walls tinted red as the star weakened from its original vibrant orange to a dying, bloody red, splotched with black, as April sucked its life into herself, seeming to feel no ill effects.

“Ah.  Right.”  He raised a robotic hand to the audiovocal display that was his mouth and called up to her.  “Miss O’Neil, I don’t suppose you’d consider putting the crystal down now?  Please?” 

April made no indication that she’d heard him.

“Red, c’mon… drop the crystal!” Casey screamed up at her, forced back another two steps as the temperature around her increased.  He exchanged a desperate look with Raphael, at his side.

She paid him no heed, staring down at the whirling object she telekinetically held.  The fragment of the Aeon’s Soul Star spun impossibly fast, end over end, between April’s hands. 

“April, stop!  Look what you’re doing!” Leo pleaded.  She looked up sharply at him, her eyes now featureless and glowing ember-orange.

“I can feel it, Leo,” she murmured morosely, though her voice boomed and echoed through the bay, somehow amplified, likely by the powers of the crystal.  “All the pain, all the suffering in the whole universe,” she said, emotionless.  “So much agony, remorse, sorrow, fear, anger, hatred, bigotry!”

“You don’t have to keep feeling it!  Drop the crystal!”

“No,” she declared ominously, speaking voice at a much lower tone than they were used to hearing.  “I can fix it… all of it!”

“April?” Donatello attempted, his voice weak, hoping to turn her focus toward himself instead of her source of power.  Michelangelo clung to him, terrified at what was happening to their friend.  No matter what they tried, she didn’t seem to be listening.

“And all I need to do… is re-form the universe!”  She missed the jaw-dropped expressions of her friends, gazing obsessively at the spinning shard.  “It’ll be easy… just tear everything down, then build it back up again, the way it’s supposed to be… the way where no one will feel hurt or need ever again!”

“You’re going to destroy the entire universe?!” Leo gawped.  “You can’t…!”

Raphael growled from behind him.  “Ohhh, no.  This stops, right now!”  He twirled his laser-sais once, then chucked both, followed by a fistful of good old-fashioned shuriken, toward the glassy spike.  None of the objects got remotely close to their target, melting and dribbling down to the landing bay floor beneath the fiery orb.  Raph swore under his breath and searched around himself in desperation.  “There’s gotta be something… we gotta get that shard away from her!”

April looked down to Leonardo with an amused little snort.  “Don’t worry, Leo… I’ll put it back when I’m finished with it.  Everything will be better.  Everyone will be happy.  Dad won’t be scared… Raph won’t be angry… Shredder won’t be trying to kill you guys any more.  It’ll be perfect.  I’ll make it perfect!”

This apparently struck a nerve with the hothead of the group.  Raph whirled back around to face her.  “So, you’d change who we are, and you think that’s going to make us happy?!” he snapped at her. “That wouldn’t be me!  That’d be some neutered… lobotomized version of me!”

“It wouldn’t be real, April,” Leo tried to reason with her.  “There needs to be balance in the universe; darkness and light; birth and death; night and day.”

“Chicken and waffles!” Mikey volunteered, and was immediately waved off.

“It wouldn’t work,” Leonardo continued.  “The whole universe would stagnate… no one would ever make anything new if they were content: art, or music, or technology…  Without hardships, we can’t learn or grow!  No one can!”

April stared down at him with her lamp-eyes, blinking sedately.  “…I’ll fix that.  It’ll be fine, you’ll see.  I can make it better!  Wait and see!”

As Leo searched for further logic to appeal to her, Don pushed Mikey off of himself, setting his jaw and stepping forward, to the edge of tolerance of the blistering heat radiating off her, the sun behind her nearly consumed.

“April,” he called, his voice wavering with evident heartache, “please…”  He paused until her focus was entirely on him.  His eyes watered from the extreme heat, or perhaps it was something else.  “If you’re going to destroy everything, consume everything in the universe to use it as your own building blocks, devour all the good in this existence as well as the bad, then please… please… Destroy me first.”  The girl flinched, taken aback.  She gaped at him in stunned silence as he went on, his tone bitter, “…because I don’t want to exist to see the woman I love become a monster.”

“Don, what’re you doing?!” Leo shouted at him.

“Donnie… I—” April began, words catching in her throat.

He said nothing more; simply closed his eyes, let his head fall to his chest, then raised his arms out to his sides as if to put them around the ball of fire before him, to literally embrace his fate.

The girl’s jaw quavered, working open and closed as she struggled for words.

Don startled slightly as a hand fell firmly on his shoulder, but he refused to move.  He assumed it would be one of his brothers’, attempting to pull him away… but it wasn’t.

Casey stood beside him, face void of both his usual charming smile and determined scowl.  Instead, he bore a look of calm but saddened resignation.  “Me next,” he said lowly and linked elbows and fingers with Donatello, who looked up briefly to give him a flat grin.

“Casey…?!”  April gasped, becoming less sure of her course.

Raphael was next, stepping up behind his best friend and his brother and wordlessly laying his arms over their shoulders.  He gave a short, curt nod to affirm his decision.

Mikey and Leo then joined the three of them, naturally, and the Fugitoid, not to be excluded, took up position behind the last two brothers.

Frustration and confusion fluttered across April’s face as her best friends faced her, asking to be killed… asking her to kill them… right before she obliterated everything in existence.  Her expression snapped into a stubborn scowl.  “Seems like the only thing that needs to be destroyed…” she growled triumphantly, “…is this thing!”  She poured all the power she could into the crystal fragment still hovering and spinning between her hands.  It made a high, keening noise as inordinate amounts of energy rushed into it, and it shattered into a billion fragments of shimmering dust.

The globe of fire around her disappeared, the energy evaporating as if it had never been there, and the light of the nearby star returned.  Her lips curled into a satisfied smirk at the result, then swiftly changed to one of surprise as her telekinesis gave out, giving a startled yelp as she fell.

Donnie was there to catch her.

She looked up into his eyes as he set her lightly to her feet.  He treated her to a hopeful little smile.  She dissolved into brokenhearted sobs, curling against his plastron.  “I’m sorry!  I’m sorry!  I swear I didn’t know it would do that!”

Don’s gentle arms enveloped her as he crooned comfortingly in her ear.  “Shhh, it’s okay now.  Everything’s all right… you stopped in time.”

How she adored him… She’d nearly turned the universe to dust on a whim, and yet he was here, comforting her, when she’d nearly made a monumentally critical mistake.  She puckered her lips and tilted forward to kiss him, resting her arms on his biceps, and—

“Ow!  Ow—ah-ah-ah-ah!” the turtle yelped and winced at the touch to obviously tender skin, and April noticed how warm his arms felt.  Hot, even.  She gasped and let go as she looked at his face, noting the decidedly pink cast over his olive-green skin.  She’d mistaken it for a very full blush, but…

Casey ducked into view around Don’s side.  “Heya, Red.  Thanks for not destroying us with your mind and stuff,” he said flippantly.  April’s eyes widened.  The boy’s face looked like a freshly steamed lobster.

“Ohmigod, you guys are really sunburned!”  She tried to make apologetic gestures without touching either of them on their burnt skin.  “I’m so sorry!”

The Fugitoid stepped over, assessing the damage.  “Yes, you do all look a bit crispy around the edges.  Too much direct exposure to ultraviolet radiation from Miss O’Neil’s… sphere of influence, if you will.  Nevermind… a couple of hours in the restoration sauna ought to fix you right up!”

Don sighed a little as the Fugitoid led he and Casey away.  “I never could get an even tan…”

“ ‘s like my dad always said,” Casey quipped, throwing a playful glance back at April, “ ‘s not easy getting close to a hot chick.”