Author's notes: I've had the first two pages of this one down for months, and only could finish it now. I don't know why. Funny how these things work out, sometimes… Anyway, have some Mikey and Raph turtle tot fun. You can never have too much of that.

Disclaimer: The TMNT and Splinter were created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, and they belong to Nickelodeon right now. I made the cover picture, so I guess I own it, though.

Reading the Colours

Master Splinter taught the turtles his mother tongue first; after a few years, however, he decided that, even though his children could never hope to have "normal" relationships with the people on the surface, it didn't meant that they should eschew all forms of entertainment and education the outside world had to offer.

Splinter spoke very good English, but knew first hand that nothing was better to learn a new language than hearing native speakers. He salvaged an old radio and some batteries, and apart from his books, this was their sole entertainment that didn't include ninjutsu or crayons for a long time.

The turtles did not seem to actually listen to the radio at first, but after Splinter spent time talking to them in English, with words and inflections that matched the disembodied voices from the box, they soon took to chattering away in both languages indiscriminately.

Then, when they were five or six years old, he started teaching them to read and write.

Unsurprisingly, Donatello loved this new activity immediately. He saw the words as jigsaws, the letters as pieces falling in order one by one until the result felt whole and made sense.

Raphael, perhaps more surprisingly, was very close behind. He already loved looking at the pictures in their few books and magazines; discovering that he could also make sense of the markings beside the images was a delight to him. He saw it as a challenge, and rose to it.

Leonardo proved a little more difficult. He was a very eager pupil, but it took all his already considerable focus to decipher words and sentences. For a long time long words eluded him; he knew the alphabet backwards, but still had to spell every word in his head long after Donatello and Raphael reached the stage where they could read without moving their lips. Eventually, with time and a lot of practice, he caught up with them.

Michelangelo had a somewhat different problem.

Try as he may, he just could not make sense of the letters, particularly the vowels. While Donatello questioned the usefulness of his second 'l', Raphael struggled to reconcile the 'p' and 'h' with the 'f' sound in the middle of his name, and Leonardo kept switching the 'r' and 'd' in his, Michelangelo's letters blended in his head until he could make neither head nor tail of anything.

The part of Splinter that had been Hamato Yoshi missed keenly Tang Shen's sweet patience during those lessons. Michelangelo had been just as enthusiastic about learning to read as his brothers had been, but as time passed and they moved on to more difficult lessons, the enthusiasm wore thin and turned to frustration and angry tears.

Then, one day, Raphael found Michelangelo in the room he shared with his brothers, lying flat on his plastron with a yellow crayon in hand, scribbling on a page of the book Master Splinter had used to teach them their letters.

The idea of reporting his brother to Splinter for defacing a book never crossed Raph's mind. Sensei would notice sooner or later; in the meantime, it kept Mikey busy.

"Whatcha doing, Mikey?" he asked evenly.

Michelangelo looked up at him a little warily, and gave an awkward shrug. "The letters needed colour. See," he added, his tone livening up a little, "this one's yellow."

Raph peered at the page. The big 'i' in the list of vowels now had a large yellow background.

Donnie might have said letters didn't have colours. Leo would probably have asked "why yellow". Raph plopped himself down next to Mikey and said, "Okay. How about this one, then?"

And pointed at the 'a'.

Mikey grinned.

"Easy. That's red." Enjoining gesture to word, he picked up the red crayon and started filling the not-quite circle.

"Red, huh?" It made sense, in a Mikey sort of way. Raphael grinned, too.

"I got two of them in my name. Figures that 'a' is red."

As Michelangelo looked at him curiously, he took a black crayon and carefully wrote out his name in capitals. "See? Here and here. Raphael." Mikey helpfully handed him the red crayon and he circled the two letters. "So. How about that one?"

Mikey scrunched up his face. "That's … wait, I know that one. It's … yeah, it's 'eh'."

"Yup. 'e'. We all got at least one. You have two."

"Cool."

"Here." Raph spelled out Michelangelo's name as carefully as he had his own. Then he looked pointedly at Mikey. "So, what colour?"

Mikey looked thoughtful. "I'd go with pink. But I don't have a pink crayon. Bummer."

"No big deal. Use that purple, it's almost pink anyway."

Mikey's face shone under his freckles.

"Dude, it totally works!" Soon he had coloured the two 'e's in his name and was gazing at the 'o', tapping the purple crayon against his chin.

"Well?" Raph asked. "Haven't picked the colour for 'o' yet?"

"Nah, I know that one's blue." He filled out the last letter of his name and stared at Raphael's name above. "You don't have one."

"Nope, just a lot of red and some pink. Leo and Donnie have two each, though."

"Heh. Figures. Leo always wears blue, and 'o' plus 'a' or 'e' makes purple, right?"

It wasn't really a question. Michelangelo had trouble with letters, but out of the four turtles he knew his colours best.

Raph found it surprisingly easy to follow the Mikey-logic.

"Right. And 'i' plus 'a' makes orange."

"Awesome, I got a rainbow in my name!"

"Not really. What about the 'u'?"

Mikey's grin faltered, and he frowned slightly.

"What's that one look like?"

Raph wrote a big 'u'. Mikey's grin came back immediately.

"Oh, that's green, bro. Easy."

"Nice." Raph picked up the black crayon again, and soon the 'u' was joined by other letters. "See? T.U.R.T.L.E – 'turtle'. Double green and a bit of pink. Or, y'know, purple."

"Nah, it's definitely pink."

"Okay."

Mikey shifted on the ground, then flopped over Raph, one arm draped around his shoulders, still peering at the page, now a lot more colourful than it had been. Raph didn't mind. No matter how annoying his brother's hyper behaviour was sometimes, chilling with Mikey always made him feel good.

Besides, he didn't like how down his little brother had been lately over the whole reading business. Mikey was starting to know his consonants pretty well, but he remained stuck on the vowels, and without vowels, there was no way to spell anything in the English language.

Meanwhile, Mikey was chewing on the black crayon looking very serious.

"Raph?"

"Yeah?"

"You know Master Splinter calls us 'my sons' sometimes."

"Yeah, he does that."

"Is it the blue one or the green one?"

Raph had to glance at the page to remind himself which letter was the 'blue one' and which was the 'green one'.

"Oh, that's 'o' – blue. If you put a 'u', though, you've got the sun."

"Hey, that's kinda neat."

"Here, try it."

Mikey eagerly picked up both crayons. He and Raph scribbled away for the better part of the afternoon.

That evening, Raph brought the alphabet book to Master Splinter. He explained how Mikey saw the colours in the letters, and showed him the words his little brother had written all over the page. Master Splinter thought for a long time, looking at the squiggles and the rainbow of colours that practically covered up the entire white space on the paper, stroking his long thin beard.

Raph shuffled a little and looked up anxiously at his father.

"You're not mad, are you, Sensei? I know the page's kinda ruined, but we all know how to read now 'cept for Mikey, so that makes it his book, right?"

"Owning an object does not give you the right to damage it," Splinter answered in an even voice, peering at him closely. "But no, I am not angry. Why are you showing me this?"

"Well, I thought that … y'know, Mikey's dumb but he's not stupid. I mean … If the letters have colours in his head, then maybe it can help him learn how to read for good."

Raphael was an interesting picture: a mix of self-consciousness, uncertainty, and defiance. He rocked back and forth on his feet, looking like he couldn't decide whether to stand with his hands behind his back or cross his arms.

Splinter gave a slow, warm smile.

"That is an excellent idea, Raphael. Thank you for bringing it to my attention."

Raph cringed. Usually, mentioning something had to be done meant volunteering to do it.

"I can't teach him to read, Master Splinter! You're the sensei, not me!"

"And I would not ask you to," said Splinter seriously. "I'll be keeping this book. Go get Michelangelo, please."

"Ookay. I mean – hai sensei."

It took some time to convince Mikey that he would not be punished for defacing the book, and he was self-conscious and sceptical at the idea of using 'his' letters' colours in reading lessons.

To his surprise – and maybe, admittedly, Splinter's as well – Mikey soon made much more progress than he had so far. The process was still long and difficult, but the colours seemed to clear something that had been an obstacle. Little by little, Mikey caught up with his brothers, and the letters' colours left his notebooks to return to his head. He still did not read as much as his brothers did, though.

Then, one day as he was scavenging for food and reading material, Splinter found a pack of comic books someone had thrown away with the garbage. When he got back, Michelangelo took one interested look at the comics and skimmed the pages curiously; then something lit up in his eyes and he seized as many booklets as his arms could carry to read them in their room.

Mikey's father and brothers soon stopped worrying about his ability to read as he trailed after them reading aloud every comics down to the very last speech bubble.

Every good thing had its downside, after all.

THE END

Vowels have always had colours for me; I don't know why and I have no idea why this letter matches that colour, but the 'a is red', 'i is yellow' and so on thing comes straight from some weird part of my brain and I thought it might match 2012 Mikey's world view. It makes words look interesting when I indulge in it, anyway :o) For the record, I don't remember much of that period (it was, what, twenty-seven years ago?), but I'm told I had the hardest time learning how to read. I was the last one in my class for a while in that respect. The colours didn't help, though. And then a few years later I was reading more and faster than anyone else in my class. Go figure …