AU post: Retromiwagen

[sroloc_elbisivni]

CONTINUITY: Rise

SUMMARY: post S2 AU. Draxum and Donnie create a retromutagen that Splinter uses to return to human form. The extended Hamato clan, alive and in hiding from the Foot, are extremely suspicious of the sudden reappearance of a man claiming to be Hamato Yoshi. Sixteen-year-old Hamato Miwa decides to take the initiative and investigate for herself. She didn't expect to find new, green cousins, but they're not going to stop her from sticking around to get training from the infamous black sheep of the family.

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Ficlet 1

[sroloc_elbisivni]

Uncle Yoshi is the family ghost.

Not the actual family ghost—they have lots of those around, because as Oba likes to say whenever the kids are helping her clean the shrine for chores, not even death can stop the Hamatos from fulfilling their duty to the clan. But those ghosts are spoken of respectfully, remembered well, and occasionally called up for advice on where exactly the good tea service got hidden during the War.

Uncle Yoshi is only spoken of in whispers and mutters and on the groupchat Miwa has with her cousins, the adults trailing off their sentences into ominous silences whenever someone is caught skipping training or ignoring their chores. Or whenever the sake comes out after dinner at the gatherings and the adults think they’ve got privacy to brag and argue about recent missions and tease each other about who’s still the best at this or that, and someone brings up one of the Dangerous topics. Uncle Yoshi is like an unquiet specter, haunting their family with the prospect of not just failure, but cowardice. Running away. Selling out the family legacy to make movies and disappearing without a trace.

They are, Miwa thinks, pretty good movies, and the groupchat agrees with her.

Miwa seems to get more of those ominous silences where Uncle Yoshi’s name should be than anyone else. She’s not sure why. She works hard at her training, she keeps an eye on her younger siblings, she’s diligent with her schoolwork, and she never skips out on her chores. But whenever she asks why she’s the one who has to go get an extra training session, or why family visits always seem to mean her putting on her nice clothes and sitting in with the grownups while her little cousins go play hide-and-seek, she gets those same kind of ominous silences. So she worries, and she makes it a habit of asking herself, What would Uncle Yoshi do? until it feels like he’s her friendly guardian spirit, just for Miwa, not like the ancestors in the shrine who she has to share with all of her cousins and all the grownups besides.

Usually whatever she comes up with as an answer to the question is not what she actually does. Until Uncle Yoshi comes back from the presumed-dead after thirteen years and all the grownups have a big family meeting about what exactly they’re supposed to do, and Miwa isn’t allowed to sit in but she’s more than sneaky enough to eavesdrop on the roof and listen to them worry about fraud and deception and an impending infiltration.

When the infiltration still hasn’t happened after a month—when they’ve been watching for this stranger claiming Hamato Yoshi’s name and Lou Jitsu’s estate to make the first move—Miwa asks herself again.

What would Uncle Yoshi do?

Sometimes she asks herself this and doesn’t know for sure, but in this case, she knows that running away to America is exactly what Uncle Yoshi would do.

Re: Ficlet 1

[onallofyourdays]

I still love this so much. I think the thing that stands out to me most about this, on this particular read, is that "thirteen years"-- when you wrote this, we were still in S1, I believe? And then in S2 we learned that he got kidnapped ~30 years ago... What are your thoughts on the timeline now that we've seen the whole series?

Re: Ficlet 1

[sroloc_elbisivni]

ah, man, I think what I MAY have been thinking (don't quote me on this) was that even when he was in the Nexus, he was still able to like...write home? and he only pulled his full disappearing act after mutating.

i think thirty years is MAYBE too many years for this au to swallow reasonably. i might drag it down to, nnh, twenty years total? twenty three? no more than ten in the battle nexus, but definitely well before miwa was born.

[onallofyourdays]

Okayokayokay. Entry-level parts of this au. The one that stands out to me is, of course, the boys adapting to their dad suddenly being HUMAN. Like, that's SO WEIRD. He looks different, the "suddenly not getting pounded into the dirt by species dysphoria on the daily" has gotta be a real attitude-changer, and... having reclaimed his life... the CONCEPT of these boys attempting to live in a real house like normal humans do. Even just little things, like... bedroom doors, what the fuck.