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The rooftop was quiet, save for the faint hum of the Kraang supply ship docking below. Raphael crouched in the shadows, hands curled tight around his sai. Mona Lisa’s scales glinted in the neon glow, her eyes never leaving the crew unloading crates onto the pavement.
“There,” she whispered. “That’s how the Kraang keep their grip on this city. These… collaborators.”
Raph frowned, a familiar knot of unease tightening in his gut. He watched the scene below carefully.. a stark contrast to Mona’s stark pronouncements. The figures moving the crates weren’t the cold, unfeeling automatons of the Kraang robotic military. These were flesh and blood, their shoulders slumped with exhaustion, their faces etched with a weariness. They didn’t look human by any means but he saw humanity in them..
“Doesn’t feel right,” Raph muttered. “They are just… workers..”
Her golden eyes narrowed, losing their reflective softness and hardening into chips of cold conviction. “Workers who keep the Kraang alive,” she retorted, her voice rising with a dangerous edge. “That makes them enemies.”
They dropped down. The aliens startled, one stumbling back with hands raised. “Please,” he begged, voice cracking, already recognizing the red banded turtle in particular. “We have no choice. They— they control everything! I just take shifts to feed my children—”
Raph stepped backward, pulse hammering. “Mona—”
“Every crate they move could be the one that kills your brothers. Your family. That blood would be on your hands.” Mona hissed. She shoved him hard in front of her to take the first blow “They always have a choice.” Her words were a chilling announcement leaving no room for negotiation or simple empathy, a stark reflection of the brutal calculus of a war-torn world. Black and white.
Mona’s tail lashed, a swift, sharp crack against the concrete below them after a couple moments of silence. “What’s the matter, Raphael? Don’t tell me you’re hesitating.”
He is, that's exactly what he’s doing.. Hesitating. Acting like a hurt puppy, not a fearless honorable warrior that his girlfriend has thought of him to be.
The question hung in the air heavy and accusatory. He had seen too much death in his life. Far too many different shades of grey to ignore how complicated things are in the grand scheme of things. Karai being one of those shades of grey.
He knew the cost of easy answers, the innocent lives caught in between conflict but this isn’t one of those cases.. This is a case of moral superiority from a group of nomads who glorify violence with the excuse of ‘peacekeeping.’
Mona’s voice, sharp and certain, carried a conviction he rarely possessed, a moral clarity that cut through the fog of his own uncertainty.
“You’re loyal, aren’t you? Loyal to me… to your family? If you let them walk away, their crates will come back to the Kraang. Then when your brothers fall in battle.. when Michelangelo lies bleeding in the street it’ll be because you couldn’t do what had to be done now.”
“Be the warrior I know you are or be the weak link that gets your family killed.”
That sentence— burned hotter than anything..
Without another word the screams of the innocent grew loud in the cold air around them. Harsh dark reds and limbs scattered across the ground of the beloved city he grew to be protective of.
This is the day that Raphael lost all care for morality, for what’s right and wrong as his father taught him.
This is the day where he realized that to live is to risk it all. To be as selfish as possible because in war, innocence doesn’t exist. It will never exist.
This is the day that he came to the epiphany that like Karai he is a shade of grey. he, like his sister, had innocent blood on his hands that permanently singles him out from his relatives.
This is the day he acknowledged his feelings instead of hiding them away to never be seen.
The weeks that passed afterwards lead him into an abusive relationship with this woman several years older than his junior. This relationship would later crumble as he put no effort into continuing it and he quickly recovered from Mona’s betrayal afterwards.
Throughout this traumatic experience his mind was focused on someone else.. Someone he shouldn’t be allowed to have.