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Raph’s got an old fascination with things that most people would call weird, or frightening, or horrifying.
From a young age, he’s looked into the mirror, and he’s known to think oh look, there’s a monster. But a monster is only what you make of it, and with that comes the understanding that there’s two meanings of monster: those who look it, and those who act like it. The first kind is something he always wants to know more about, because somewhere out there, there’s more people like him, and he strives to have more of that connection, to live his life knowing that he’ll get to choose who will be at his side when he dies. The second kind can, from the bottom of Raph’s heart, go fuck themselves.
He’s not prone to nightmares. Sometimes he still gets them, but they’re fleeting things, leaving him breathless from a memory that lurks just out of reach, a scream dying out in his throat just late enough that his brothers are complaining about it. His mind gets a few hours to do whatever the hell it wants, and in the meantime Raph searches for things like those nightmares, if only for the thrill it gives him.
Dad’s not the best with internet safety. Raph’s not entirely sure that he knows the turtles have internet access, though.
Donnie starts stealing tech only a few weeks after they’ve started risking going to the surface, and only a few days after they’ve gotten permission to help Dad on small supply runs. He gets more daring at it by the third month, and it’s not a surprise with the benefit of hindsight, because an 8-year-old ninja is still a ninja, and Donnie had nothing better to occupy his time with. They go from a single tablet to separate cellphones within a year, and the only downside is that they still don’t know if they should risk reaching out to other people.
Another thing about Raph is that he has trouble sleeping. Their sleep schedule doesn’t align much with human society, from what he’s gathered, but his and Donnie’s are even more out of sync than the rest of their families. Raph can settle into bed with a book or with his phone or with anything, really, and it’ll feel like hours pass in only a blink.
It’s nearing three hours to Dad waking up when he stumbles upon something that yanks at his interest, demanding his attention. It stands out from the rest of the videos, dark black with haunted-looking eyes staring out from the abyss with stark white pupils. They speak in dull tones about people disappearing without a trace, and when Raph sees an image that sends shivers down his spine, he knows that he’s just found something interesting.
He shares it with Leo, or tries to. That’s what he did as a kid, because Leo liked training as much as he does and would always watch the same shows with him, but Raph hadn’t yet understood that they’d liked a lot of things for different reasons. It’d been a simple example of one of the many things Raph had found in his latest rabbit hole, but it had left Leo in one of his panicked states that none of them really understood yet, with shaking hands and his voice dying out.
Raph didn’t show Leo again, after that.
As he gets older, it becomes easier to appreciate that yeah, he’s definitely drawn in by blood and gore and the type of unsettling horror that leaves a sinking feeling in his gut. He can also understand that this is likely traumatising for him, but well, Dad’s said worse on one of his anxiety-driven rambles, and Raph doesn’t think that the trauma’s bad enough that he needs to steal meds from Splinter’s bottle any time soon.
He knows he’s a little bit fucked, anyways. Knows it because his brothers won’t shut up about it, because apparently punching a bag so hard that the rusty old chain snaps is a sign that his violent streak might be a bit more than a streak, and because randomly asking “wouldn’t it be fucked if I stood up and just noclipped through the floor?” is apparently something not everyone thinks about.
Who wouldn’t be fucked, after growing up in the sewers? Raph’s pretty sure that, without his family to keep him sane, he would have gone even further off the rails from fumes alone.
The monster in the mirror doesn’t look crazy at all, though. He looks like he skipped out on one two many nights of sleep, because he had, and maybe after a nap or two, he should try to rub the dirt out from between his scales, because the grime is setting in no matter how goddamn hard he tries to stop it. The monster in the mirror is just a guy, and the monsters in the stories are, too.
But then life keeps going. Raph becomes a teenager and feels his life flying by him faster and faster every year, and the monsters in the stories he searches for are always just fake little things, but the monster’s in Splinter’s have grimly set faces and a voice sharp like spikes. The monsters in Splinter’s stories glance at him in hallways or touch his shell without asking, and Raph still doesn’t hate that he’s the other type of monster, because he knows that he can be scary if he really wants to be, which is something people tend to forget.
Raph starts finding new ways to get out his restless energy, ways that don’t involve replacing the chain to the punching bag every other week, because somehow their entire massive family are all equally bad at finding a non-rusted chain, and he’s starting to think that maybe that’s because if the chain was good, he’d level up to just yanking down the ceiling or some shit. He practises parkour like he’s never practised before, and learns how to jump off impossible-looking heights without his brothers to help him up. He learns how to stalk the night, how to identify trouble, and how to scare it off. He feels like he learns much more than he does in school, but that’s neither here nor there.
One night, he’s glaring down at a mugger with his slightly bloodied fists clenched, and he realises that the victim leaning breathlessly against the wall beside him is glaring at him with a familiar face that he usually only passes in the school halls. He figures that he can have a bit of fun with them.
He rubs his chin, hoping that neither person catches him briefly opening his mouth to smear a bit of the blood on his knuckles against his teeth. He then grins over at the victim, watches them flinch, and feels a stupid amount of satisfaction at the reaction. They definitely didn’t notice he’d staged it.
Raph loves things that are horrifying. Sue him.
When he gets back to the lair that night, he wraps up his hands with the wrappings that used to be reserved for ninja training, and spends more time in the bathroom than is usually acceptable trying to erase the rest of the evidence of him going to town. He leaves his phone on the countertop, the white noise of his current favourite horror podcast droning in one ear and out the other, and he’d feel bad about listening to it without headphones if it weren’t for the fact he’s already double-checked that the rest of his family is asleep already.
Raph imagines a world even weirder than the one that he’s living in, with the monsters from stories lurking behind corners, and wishes a little bit harder for it to exist, just to prove to the rest of the world that they’re looking at it all wrong, that things outside of people’s understanding are only creepy because they’re stupid, and the world is more exciting than nerve-wracking.
It’s a shame that their family might be the only mutants out there to find. The second definition of monster is much less engaging.