Chapter Text
Leo woke up to a searing pain in his right forearm and a frigid sensation throughout his whole body.
Other than the debilitating pain, everything felt dulled in the now-familiar way he knew alcohol made him feel. He had a love-hate relationship with the sensation of being a simple passenger of his own feelings, thoughts and body. It was amazing to let go of all the grief, loneliness and shameful fury he was forced to carry, and let the mania and thrill of whatever he was doing wash over him.
He hated everything else about it.
The taste in his mouth, the odor, the loss of control. That which he resented the most though, was always what came after. The first five times he went home smelling of alcohol he was shouted at and berated by both Raphael and Donatello. After the third time, Leo stopped shouting back.
Where have you been? They would ask, only to receive no answer. Do you know how worried we were? They would demand and receive only silence. Do you understand what you are doing? Do you even care? Are you even listening to me? You are infuriating! Please say something! What are you even doing? Say something! They would question and shout and call.
Leonardo wouldn’t say a word. There wasn’t anything to say.
You look so good when you do not speak
After the seventh time not even Mikey had something to say.
The ninth time his father bumped into him, said nothing and looked away.
It nearly hurt.
After the eleventh night there was no one left waiting for Leo to come home.
The slider was perfectly aware that it was now his own fault that his brothers didn’t spend any time with him anymore. It was the consequences of his own actions: he was barely home, only occasionally spoke and didn’t initiate physical affection. Nowadays, Jun was really the only person that he had consistent contact, both emotional and physical, with. He was growing apart from his family and it was his fault.
It was almost liberating: no longer was his relationship with his brothers dictated by decision he hadn’t made himself.
He missed them infinitely, but the consistent distance was better than constantly hoping for their relationship to go back to what it was before because of the occasional positive interaction they had.
Leonardo pulled back from his thoughts by a particularly nasty wave of pain pulsing from his wound.
Which he should probably look into…
He tried to sit himself up, but was faced with an immediate feeling of dizziness, so he should probably add a concussion to the list of injuries. If he tried to stand up on his own it would probably take seconds for him to go back down crashing, so the floor it was. From the dim light in the room, he could see that he would need to crawl to the nearest wall in order to start taking care of the wound.
He flipped over, and very slowly, with only his left arm to help him, low-crawled with his plastron as close to the ground as he could manage without dragging it. The pain was clearing his thoughts, and by the time he had gotten his shell leaning on the wall, he felt completely lucid.
He looked down at his forearm. It was bad, not immediate danger kind of bad but in a “if I wasn’t genetically engineered I’d be fucked” kind of way. There was a bite on his forearm from what must have been a creature much bigger than him. It marked the back and front of his forearm, disappearing in the outer line of it. It was deep, but not deep enough to nick a neurovascular bundle as he observed, as he tested the movements of his own hand. It also hadn’t shattered his bones, which was weird considering the size of the bite, but incredibly lucky, because there was no way that he wouldn’t have gotten nerve damage from a bite that bad, no matter how much better protected his nerves were compared to a human.
In the end, he deemed, he would only need to stitch himself back up, monitor for any kind of nerve damage he could have missed and get himself pumped with antibiotics. He couldn’t remember what (or who) had bitten him and he wasn’t about to risk an infection. Leo could do none of those things in an unsanitary, unknown and unprepared environment. He needed to go to the medbay at the lair.
No one ever bothered the slider at the medbay, for it was his territory, just like the dojo for Raph, the kitchen for Mikey or the Donnie at his Lab. It helped tame their most aggressive instincts and gave them a sacred space to wind down.
Luckily, his swords were still on his sheaths, because it would have been extremely annoying to have to materialize new swords, especially with no proper object to channel it, he could have done it, but it would have been very draining, which was definitely not ideal with his current situation.
So, after wrapping up his wound tight to stop the low-grade hemorrhage, Leo forced himself to get up and slash a portal open. He stumbled into the lair in a particularly ungraceful manner and despite the fact that he had only been standing on his own for a few seconds, he could already see black spots filling his vision. He stumbled into the stretcher and immediately threw his body on top of it, landing only mildly off of it.
He gave himself a few minutes to let the numb feeling leave his limbs and then positioned himself more properly on the surface. God he definitely had a concussion. He couldn’t suture his wound like this and he most definitely would not be able to stay up for long enough to reach into the cabinets where he kept the syringes.
And although Leonardo was pretty sure he wasn’t in his right mind, he decided if he hadn’t already died of blood loss or a fever induced by infection, he probably wouldn’t die in the next couple hours it took for him to regain his bearings. The slider reached into the conveniently placed drawer near the stretcher and let his hand grab around it looking for the painkillers, every now and then bringing a pill bottle to his face to read the label.
After a few tries he found what he was looking for, downed two of the capsules and put the bottle back, organizing the drawer was a problem for future Leo. He immediately let himself fall back into what he was hoping was sleep and not unconsciousness.