「ABSENCE」 TMNT 2012

10; Old News

    "Okay, thanks. Bye, April." Donatello clicked off his phone and dropped it into his belt, then looked up at each of the brothers surrounding him.

"So . . ." Mikey drew the word out, unsure of what to say. In fact, none of them were sure. The news was so sudden. It had been two years since they'd last heard from their friend, and now they were faced with the possibility that he was still alive.

    Leonardo shifted his weight from one leg to another, Donnie reached his hand to the back of his head absentmindedly, and Raphael stared blankly down at his feet. They'd buried the idea of Casey ever reappearing again long ago, and now the old hopes were up from the grave. They were caught off guard. This was unexpected.

    Leo drew in a breath, letting his crossed arms drop to his sides. "How do we plan to find him, Donnie?"

    Don was on full alert now. "Well, we'll have to think this through carefully. The last time I tried to track him, the signal wouldn't pick up, so I assumed it was either broken or someone had disabled it. Casey wouldn't be smart enough to turn it off by himself, so if that was the case, it would've had to of been someone else."

    "Jeff was the one who delivered the message," Raph reminded, "so that's got to mean Shredder has something to do with this."

    "Right," agreed Leo, folding his arms overtop of each other again. "In fact, maybe Shredder's had him this whole time!"

    Mikey frowned. "But why would he wait so long to reveal that to us?"

    A lightbulb seemed to switch on over Don's head. He opened his mouth and shook his index finger as he struggled to form the idea into words. "Unless . . . unless Casey's been in hiding and Shredder recently found him!"

    The other brothers' eyes widened as they grasped this concept. It made perfect sense. Casey had been on just as bad of terms with Shredder since he'd gotten involved with the turtles. He was just as much a threat as the mutants were.

    "But why hasn't he contacted us? If he went into hiding, he should've come back to let us know he was still around," Leo pointed out. The others nodded, as they were all thinking that same thing.

"Do you think he had the chip with him then?" Raph wondered aloud, carefully, so as not to voice anything too presumptuous.

Don rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Perhaps. That would explain a lot of things. The disappearance of both Casey and the chip, for one."

"I thought we destroyed it." Leonardo looked from one brother to the other, searching for an explanation their guilty expressions. He groaned and smacked his palm to his forehead. "It didn't get destroyed, did it?"

"No," they all replied in unison.

"Why?" He waved his arms around exasperatedly as he spoke. "Why did you guys save it? It was the source of so many problems for us, and now this new one comes up. That's why we agreed to get rid of it in the first place."

"The chip" was a simple USB drive and was, at one point, a central data collection point for all of Shredder's personal files and documents. It was always under a tight security enforcement, but unfortunately for him, Donatello had been perfectly able to decode every precaution and snatch the chip before Shredder even knew that anything was amiss. When he did eventually find out what had happened, he took every step imaginable to get it back. Obviously, the storage device contained sensitive information that he would obviously rather the turtles not know about, obviously.

It had been two and a half years, and the warlord still hadn't been reunited with his precious files. But he no longer cared. It didn't matter that he never saw it again. That drive was old news; a thing of the past. Those plans had long ago been discarded and replaced with a new batch of deliciously malicious ones, fresh out of the oven that is Shredder's mind. With some help from his trusty right hand man, Jeff, who stoked the fire a little bit. But just a little bit.

Mikey shuffled his feet and rubbed the back of his neck. "Well, see, Don said there was this secret code thing all like . . . encoded."

"And he didn't have enough time to figure it out before you decided to throw it out," Raph added.

Leo raised his hands. "Woah, woah, woah! I didn't just decide to throw it out. I suggested it and then we all voted to get rid of it," he corrected, spinning his finger to indicate all of them.

Mikey nodded, acting like he agreed, but he was just trying to be a good younger brother. "So Donnie made a fake looking disk for you to blow up, and kept the real one so he could figure out the code."

Donatello looked away nervously. "I was positive there was something I was missing."

Leo was silent. He didn't appreciate his direct orders being ignored. But he also trusted Donnie and knew he wouldn't disobey without a good reason. "Well . . . did you ever find anything out?"

Don sighed. "No. I was so close to solving it. But then it just disappeared one night. I remember looking for it and practically tearing this whole lab apart. But it wasn't anywhere."

"Do you think Casey took it then?"

"It's likely that he did. He knew we didn't actually destroy it, and he was asking a lot of questions about it at one point."

Raph laughed. "Yeah. Really bluntly, too. He didn't do a good job of hiding his curiousity."

"But why would he even need to take it?" Leo wanted to know. "I mean, he's Casey Jones. What would he do with a flash-drive?"

Donnie lifted his shoulders in a shrug. "I have no idea. Although I wish I did."

"Casey's hard to understand." Mikey clicked his tongue.

Raph tapped his fingers against Don's desktop. "Maybe he thought it was a movie you downloaded."

Don shook his head. "I never tell him about my work, even if it's as small as an illegal movie." Leo quirked an eye ridge, and Donnie shook his hands. "Not that I download movies illegally!"

Just then, a soft beep emitted from the black laptop sitting on the corner table. All eyes turned to stare at it as it continued to beep steadily. Donatello walked over to the table and lifted the laptop, then input the password. The screen lit up, and he searched the menu for the source of the noise. In a few clicks of the mouse, he came cross a startling find.

"Guys, get over here," he told his brothers. They shuffled over and crowded around him, peering over his shoulders to stare at the blinking, red light dotting the screen.

"No way," Raph breathed out.

"What? What is it?" Mikey demanded. He couldn't see past the three larger brothers blocking his view of the laptop.

Leo turned around. "Mikey, Casey's tracking signal's back on."