Chapter Text
Y’know, for things that caused so much trouble, the Guards really did sleep like angels. For creatures the Kraang called “pests”, they always did have such beautiful eyes.
It’d been two weeks, give or take, since Pet had first woken up in Prison, and night on this planet fell the same way every time: with the darkness always came the silence, that massive, informal yet universal sort of hush. The only noise being the sound of traffic and the Guards’ soft breathing. Their quiet snores, whatever twitched, mumbled mutterings snuck from their mouths. Light spilling in from the open doorway, moonlight in shades of violet, the snapper really couldn’t help but admire them, his long shadow cast like an omen over the Warden’s bedside- they looked so nice like this. So delicate. They had such pretty eyes… Eyes like the rest of the Guards all had, deep brown like pupil-black. Flicking about beneath the skin.
REM sleep. Some old, blurry tatter of a memory, some fragment of the Warden’s voice, it whispered, REM sleep, that’s what it’s called; your eyes moving around like that while you’re sleeping. It means you’ve entered a REM cycle. There came something like a scoff directly after. The dumb-dumb explanation is, you’re dreaming. Dreaming… Kneeling down beside them, kept eye to flickering eye, the snapper moved to lean his head against the Warden’s arm, their sheets; wondering what they were dreaming about. Wondering if he was in it.
(Wondering why he even cared at all.)
Inhale, exhale. The Warden’s chest rising, falling. Staying exactly the same. A steady pattern, like waves against a shoreline. The organs inside them filling and pulsing with life. Statue-still and staring, Pet mimicked the soft, even tempo of their breathing, as silent and as present as death- watching the softshell turn from their stomach onto their back. For a second, their fingers gave a violent twitch, and Pet flinched away, startled, before he settled back down again.
They weren’t waking up yet. No, he knew that now.
At this point, Pet had learned the difference between a sleep-twitch and a rousing-twitch. At this point, he knew the signs of waking: after the first few times he’d been caught Observing, he’d learned. The Warden was the warden and the Watchman was the watchman, but Pet was the Observer. He found he liked to sit and stay with the Guards through the night. Reveling in his newfound freedom, he found he liked to watch them sleep.
The twin Guards, the Warden and the Watchman. The softshell turtle and the red-eared slider- they didn’t like it when he Observed them. They startle when they wake. They’d tried to get him in trouble for it the first few times, going to the Attendant, trying to get him to stop, but the box turtle had refused to step in- saying, if he wanted to hurt you, he would’ve done so already. (The twins’ argument on the creep factor of it all had fallen on deaf ears as well.) Privately, the Attendant had told him, you’re only in trouble if you get caught, and even with his admittedly poor grasp of the Guards’ language, Pet knew what was trouble and he knew what was caught, and he knew himself to be neither of these things. He didn’t stop Observing the Guards. He just got sneakier about it: slipping in, staying all night, and disappearing at dawn. As long as he was careful, he could Observe them all he wanted.
Like right now, for instance.
The Warden. The softshell turtle. They were so unlike their usual, domineering self like this…so vulnerable in sleep. The Attendant was right. It would be so, so easy for him to hurt them, now, to reach out and break their fragile skin- but he didn’t. Gently, so very gently, Pet stroked their face with the back of his palm. Touch ginger and feather-light, he brushed his knuckles across their cheek. The Warden’s face shifted for a moment, maybe with confusion, before they relaxed again, nestling into him; letting the snapper peel up their eyelid with the pad of his thumb.
They always had such pretty, pretty eyes.
The Warden’s soft skin flickered under his hand. Their eyes didn’t glow like his did, and neither did the rest of the Guards’…something it felt almost silly pointing out, considering that seemed to be the norm here, not the exception. Pet was the weird one. He was the odd man out, with his eyes like sickly spotlights, burning yellow holes wherever he looked- yellow circles into the Warden’s sheets, their pajamas. Into the fine, soft purple of the fabric. Stalking forward, the darkness claimed any place he wasn’t immediately looking, crawling up the wall like creeper vines, laid like grasping hands at his back… Releasing the Warden’s eyelid, the snapper settled back into the warmish dark, perched at their bedside like a gargoyle. He wondered if anyone else had been privy to this sight before. He wondered if anyone else had sat in this silence.
Pet and the Warden. The two of them together, now, reenacting history- opposite yet parallel to how they had been. Predator watching prey. Something awake watching something asleep. Animals in the dark, observing each other like hypothesis. It’d been maybe a week since the Warden had stumbled into his Cell holding a syringe and all the power, and who was holding it now? Who was in control?
A sludge of thick, dark emotion began to wriggle its way between his ribs. Forcing its way inside, a roiling ball of feeling, a muck of contradiction, alien yet familiar…he couldn’t seem to force it down, this emotional amalgam. This cold, syrupy thing. A sense of lone-ness had settled over him like lukewarm water- not loneliness, mind you, but lone-ness, still; the feeling of being beside a warm body yet utterly alone. Beneath that was an odd happy-sadness. Beneath that, too, was an emotion that fell just short of pride… All of it held fast to some deep, blasphemous wanting- some envy, vague and indistinct. He wished he had eyes like the Guards all had. He didn’t like being the only one who was special.
Trying to scatter those thoughts away, Pet hit himself in the head with his palm, harder than he meant to. Crack. Almost immediately, the pain began to thud its way through his skull, but kind-of in a good way… It was soothing, almost. Centering. Trying to ignore it all, when the Guard beneath him didn’t stir, the snapper pressed himself up against the Warden’s bed- up against their sheets, their skin, their body. He didn’t like the dark. He didn’t like the night. Nighttime in Prison was always so lonely… It was times like this where he felt completely alone in the universe. Like he was the only creature in the entire galaxy still awake. Angling his head up a bit, Pet gave something like a cry or a whimper, and then fell silent. The indifferent stars above gave him no response.
Until, of course, they did.
You have us. The words resonating through him, Pet recognized his Master’s voice innately; his Master, the Kraang leader. Kraang Prime. Marelius. He always forgot the power of the Hivemind, the connection between them, until he was forcibly reminded- Master’s words reverberating through the gel in his eyeballs, through the pulp inside his teeth. Saying, you have us. Don’t forget that. We’re always here.
Of course, of course. The Kraang were here for him always, he didn’t doubt that; he didn’t dare. But still… It was just so hard, sometimes, being the odd man out, being the Prisoner- the thing with the spotlight eyes and the pupils like slits. The thing that needed Guarding. He was so alone… The Guards themselves were fine, he supposed, but they were all too Jekyll and Hyde to really count as friends, anyway, other than maybe the Attendant; candy in one hand and a syringe in the other. Friendly one second and deadly the next. They swung back and forth so violently, Pet had to wonder if literally any of them were stable. Never quite sure what he was getting.
He had to admit, the lone-ness bled over into loneliness, being the only Kraang in position.
Master must have sensed his trepidation, because He chuckled low and dark between them; answering like divine intervention. We can fix that.
The Key. Rearing back, straight up towards the concrete sky, Pet realized- he’d completely forgotten about the Key. He still had it hidden in his sleeping-pile. His secret, his beating heart, his ticket to salvation… He still had it stashed away in his Cell. Sparking with shame and panic, I’m still working on it, the snapper hurriedly explained; not daring to mention the Guards or their friendship rituals. I’m still working on it, I promise. I found it. I have it. There just hasn’t been a good opportunity to run. I’ll bring it soon, it won’t be much longer now- I promise, Master, you’ll have it, just a little more time. You’ll have it, Master, I swear, you’ll have your Key-!
Quiet.
The snapper shut his (metaphorical) mouth.
It’s alright, pet, his Master reassured; a smirk in his voice. I believe you. And I’m not angry with you… In fact, I wasn’t even talking about the Key.
Trickling in through the Hivemind, in through the golden link between them, there came a sliver of affection- a fragment of holy recognition. Sweet on his tongue, an acknowledgment. A gift. Like ambrosia, it burned wonderful and warm inside his chest. Churring happily, Pet drank it all down like water in a desert, but the Kraang’s blessing was gone as soon as he’d tasted it, gone as soon as it’d come; leaving him thirsting for it. Starving for it. Yearning, itching for another hit of that beautiful, beautiful attention. A shiver running through him, Pet realized that his Master must’ve known that he’d do whatever it takes.
I was actually referring to bite and blood, Master continued. Just as soon as Pet had settled down. That’s what the pest beneath you said before, wasn’t it? Our glory spreads through bite and blood.
So what? He didn’t get it. Chewing at the cracked skin of his lips, the snapper genuinely didn’t understand… Something that must’ve been obvious enough for his Master to pick up on, because suddenly all his senses were sharpened like camera lenses, focused on the Feeling of saliva in his mouth, the sabored yellow edges of his teeth- the Feeling of the relentless drumbeat in his chest. The red-pink blood all pooling, sloshing around inside his veins.
You don’t have to be the only Kraang here. You don’t have to be alone, his Master explained. If you’re jealous of their eyes, why not make them all have yours?
Worrying his lower lip, Pet began to tear the skin off in strips between his teeth. Tasteless little scraps of flesh. Licking his lips, he relished in the sting. For a moment, he imagined leaning forward and biting the Warden with everything he had, sinking his teeth DEEP into the muscle, seeing just how far his jaw could close around their skinny-strong frame… But there came no joy with the mental image. There came only apprehension with the thought. What he wouldn’t have hesitated to do a week ago, what now felt inconceivable: the Warden may never have been his favorite Guard, but he still didn’t want to hurt them. He didn’t want to hurt any of the Guards, really.
But both of them- the Guard and his Master- both ‘a them had said it spread through bite and blood, hadn’t they? And the softshell probably hadn’t meant their own. Maybe the only person Pet had to hurt here was himself. He felt more okay with that. Licking his lips again, pain was a taste, and it spread like spice, like a tang, out from the newly-raw flesh. If he Ascended the Warden right here- right now- what would happen?
I honestly forget. I haven’t seen a Fledgling give our Gift in forever… I suppose we’ll just have to find out, won’t we?
A beat of hesitation. Something like doubt brewing in him, low and uneasy; the thought that maybe this isn’t such a good idea… Some mixed-up, messed-up blasphemy, lurking in the back of his mind. The gall to question the logic of the Kraang. The snapper shifted uncomfortably. Slowly, gingerly, reaching out, leaning forward, he moved to cup the Warden’s face, using the pad of his thumb to peel open their eye again- retina still flickering about, stuck deep within a dream. Sitting there beside them, he watched them like a guard dog, like a security camera, waiting for something. Anything.
Draw blood, came his Master’s command, after what felt like forever. Pet obeyed without a second thought. Bringing his free hand up to his mouth, he raked his thumb across his teeth.
Another spark of pain. An old papercut reopened, a bead of pinkish-red welling up, spilling out across his fingertip; slick and shining in the light. Filling out the swirls in his skin. He thinks his lip is bleeding too, but it isn’t anything useful. (Unless, maybe, he wanted to kiss them. Which he didn’t.) Blood in hand, he hovered it out over the Warden’s face- their open eye- like the sword of Damocles. Pet swallowed thickly.
Ascending them, he asked. Is that an order?
No. Merely a suggestion, his Master replied.
As purple-tinged shadows waltzed the floor, the silence stretched on between.
After what felt like an eternity of quiet (but was probably only a second or two), the Warden shifted beneath him; expression twitching. Muttering something low and soft, too quiet to really hear. Attempting to pull away. Pet didn’t let them, but something deep and fragile stirred in his chest at the sound… The softshell was talking in their sleep. Turning his hand, he let the droplet of blood spiral down from his fingertip, collecting in the curve of his joint, painting a solid stripe of reddish-pink down to where thumb met palm; a candy-like swirl against his dull green skin. The snapper stared off with empty eyes into nothing.
He could do it. He could do it, right here, right now, and nobody would ever know how it happened. Nobody would ever know it was him. He could Improve them- make them Better. He could Ascend the Warden. He could make them Kraang. Turning his hand again, the opposite direction this time, Pet watched the droplet of blood trace back up his finger, flowing into the ridge of his nail; following the path of gravity. He could have himself a proper ally in the field like this. He could show the Warden such beautiful things… He could have the ultimate revenge, and this finger-full of blood was all it would cost him. He could do it. He should do it. He could do it, stop hesitating and just get on with it, right here, right now.
But he couldn’t. He just couldn’t, really- he didn’t want to. He couldn’t do that to them. It just didn’t seem fair.
Letting the Warden’s eyelid slip shut again, the snapper eased his grip on them- letting the softshell roll onto their side. Breathing deep, muttering unintelligible. He let them go. Licking the blood from his hand, the taste of iron thick on his skin- his tongue- Pet stuck his thumb in his mouth like a child.
In a strange way, he found he respected the Warden too much to forcibly Improve them. He found he respected the mutual air of distrust between them, the lingering shards of animosity; the grudges that still hadn’t quite yet died. He respected their weird little social games. The Guards had invited him into their space (if the Twins, more than a bit begrudgingly), so who was he to reward them with betrayal? What kind of monster would he be? More importantly, who was he to betray them now, without even the foggiest idea of an escape plan in place?
(He couldn’t do that to the Attendant. Maybe he could be talked into betraying the Warden, but he could never betray the Attendant- the box turtle with the wax-smudged gloves and the gentle, caring eyes. He couldn’t spit in the face of everything they’d done for him… It just wouldn’t be fair. He couldn’t betray the Attendant, so he couldn’t betray the Warden, either. The Guards all seemed to care for one another. They all seemed interconnected, in a way.)
Master would be disappointed in him. The truth hit hard, like a pound of bricks- like the first few drops of rain, coming down from Noah’s cloudless sky. Master would be disappointed in him. Master would be disappointed in his choice, he knew that already, he could feel it… But this sin, this disobedience, he found it felt strangely right inside. Like the compulsion to pick at a scab, to press on a bruise. In a weird way, there came a sense of satisfaction with the pain.
Bleeding finger still halfway in his mouth, Pet leaned back against the Warden’s bed again, nestling up against them; wiping the remaining red wetness from his lips. His other hand laid a gentle palm against their fragile back. The Warden stirred for a moment, but they didn’t wake. Running his hand across the scars there, the texture, he felt the leatherish skin stretched out across the surface of their shell, the grooves, the sharp ridges of their spine… The marks left by the Warden’s back contraption, what they wore almost every hour of every day. (Now that Pet thought about it, this might’ve been the first time he’d seen them take both that and their hoodie off to sleep.) After a moment’s tension at the touch, the softshell relaxed back into him, letting out an unconscious churr, and Pet mimicked the noise, tracing patterns up and down the skin.
Don’t worry, Pet thought. It’s okay. Rest for now… He’d protect this place. Maybe that wasn’t something he was s’pposed to be doing, being a Prisoner and all, but it felt important regardless. The Warden could sleep tonight. After another minute of this- the closest thing he and the Warden would ever have to a relationship, here in the dark and quiet- the snapper forced himself to pull away, curling up at the foot of their bed like the dog he was. Positioning himself between them and the door. Just in case. It was something he did for all the Guards- something he’d do for all of them, one by one, tonight. Even if he was the biggest threat to them here, it was good to be prepared, just in case.
(Make no mistake, not-Kraang: the Guards belonged to him. )
The floor was cold. Kraang eye open, regular eye closed, Pet curled up in on himself, cheek against his arm, tail around his legs; his own body, pillow and blanket. His pupils contracted into snakish slits. He deserved this. Disobedience shouldn’t feel warm. Sin should not feel right. He wouldn’t betray the Guards, so here was his prize- he’d endure the floor for the rest of these hours, maybe do his nightly rounds twice. All that before he’d let himself stagger back to his Cell and sleep proper, like he always did. Just another night in Prison. The cold concrete beneath would keep him awake. The click-click-click of the pest’s transportation system, the rumble of the world above, that would keep him alert.
As the seconds trickled by like sands in the hourglass, he just laid there, watching the moonlight trail across the floor… Still for what felt like an eternity. Even as the cold started to burn him, he just stayed there, watching. Waiting. Forever.
As the shadows danced and changed with the coming dawn, the lower lifeforms around him- beside him- inside him just breathed.
If you had told Leo a month ago literally any of this was going to happen, he wouldn’t have believed you. More than that, really- if you had tried to tell him anything about the Invasion before it actually went down, the slider would’ve laughed in your face.
Aliens. Seriously? Aliens? he would’ve said. Trying and failing to hold back a grin. That’s really the best you could come up with? Yeah right, he would’ve added, joking, pestering; chronically unable to give up a good bit. What next? Jupiter Jim comes and teaches us time travel? But he would’ve just scoffed and rolled his smiling eyes if you had even TRIED to tell him about Casey Junior. Sure, buddy…sure. Pink goop aliens. Scrawny, bloody orphan boys from the future. The actual apocalypse. Makes total sense. No, no, don’t mind me, he would’ve smirked, keep talking. I wanna hear this. I TOTALLY believe you.
Even if he had been listening, he would’ve played it all off with dumb jokes anyway. Aliens from the sky? That’s just New York for ya. Mikey opening a gateway between dimensions with his bare hands? Um, excuse me, but portals were more Leo’s thing. Donnie piloting a spaceship? Maybe in his wildest dreams. Raph captured, turned into some wild, thoughtless animal- no way! His big brother was invincible. Maybe Leo was a bit too laid-back on missions sometimes, sure, but c’mon, his tactics were totally fine. He didn’t screw up when it really counted. And besides, they’d been winning the majority of their fights, hadn’t they? Don’t fix what ain’t broke, brochachos. Things were going fine, no matter what Raph said.
If you had told Leo- that cocky, young, deathly irresponsible Leo- that his brothers would die and it would be all his fault, that Leo would’ve just laughed it off with a terrible joke and a lazy grin.
But things are a lot less funny when the government has your family at gunpoint.
“FREEZE! NOBODY MOVE! DROP YOUR WEAPONS AND FACE THE WALL- HANDS WHERE WE CAN SEE THEM! WE ARE THE LAW, COMPLY OR WE WILL SHOOT.”
Leo probably should’ve known their week of (relative) normality wouldn’t last.
It just didn’t seem fair, though… There’d been no warning that today would be any different from all the other days. There’d been no signs, no ill omens to heed. Even with the whole Quarantine situation, it felt like they’d finally managed to get a handle on things. (All the more reason, he supposed, for the universe to toss another problem their way.) Dad was paying attention to them, open and honest. Donnie had allowed April and the Caseys to start visiting, if only sporadically, since he was still hard at work on a cure. Mikey was getting his cheer back, bit by bit- and even if nobody truly knew what the hell was going on with Raph, the two of them spent all their time together, and they seemed happier for it. Raph- or whatever Kraang-thing he was now- almost happier than he HAD been, that first week or so after the Invasion. (And boy, wasn’t THAT a depressing thought.)
Leo meanwhile, had parked his lazy ass in front of the TV, Dad-style. On his phone, on their pirated version of Netflix; playing Lou Jitsu movies on the projector, playing video games in the arcade. Definitively NOT wasting the fact that he’d finally been cleared from medbay. Not that they could keep him in there before that, anyway… But still. It was nice to finally get the others off his shell. For the most part, things had actually been quiet, which was actually kind of surprising; Raph- or whatever was controlling him- hadn’t done anything too bad since they’d given him (it?) free reign of the lair. It certainly hadn’t gone on the killing spree Leon had half-expected. In the lull of activity, days settled back into something like normal (or at least, as close to normal as things could GET, in a situation like this.)
And yet.
He’d actually been having a pretty good morning- a rarity nowadays- when the world had decided to screw them all over. The slider on a snack pilgrimage to the pantry, April schooling Casey Junior on pop culture on the couch, Leo had actually been considering himself okay for once- so of course, it just HAD to be then that everything went wrong. It just HAD to be then that the EPF busted down the door.
Typical. Just typical. Boy howdy and hallelujah, does the Hamato family just adore the cops.
The EPF. What stood for Earth Protection Force, he’s pretty sure- the people who’d hauled off the Sister Kraang when all was said and done. Government, technically, not NYPD, but close enough. They’d sure acted like cops on the news. (Even if they were a lot more heavily armed now than they had been.) Their logo was a bald eagle… That was a detail Leo caught as the agents poured in, guns out; storming the lair in their shades and boots and uniforms. There appeared to be four of them in total, milky white and interchangeable. As one of them shoved April and Casey Junior backwards against the wall, Leo decided he hated all of them individually.
Glancing about the crowd- one hand in the air and the other on his crutch, the slider tried to clock which one of them was the leader- tried to analyze the pigs’ dynamic from where they stood. The closest one- definitely NOT the leader- insisted again, rather stupidly, HANDS UP. As the g-men manhandled the rest of his family into the room, any retort Leo could’ve given about everyone’s hands already being up shriveled and died at his lips.
At least he knew which agent was the leader now. It was the one holding the gun to Mikey’s head.
Wide, scared eyes meeting his, one look at the cold steel pressed to his little brother’s temple was enough to put an immediate damper on all Leo’s sass. One hand firmly planted on the box turtle’s shoulder, the other holding the gun to Mikey’s head, the leader-agent steered him into the living room ahead of everyone like some fucked up display; a centerpiece. Some darker, more strategic part of Leo’s mind whispered, they must’ve clocked him as the youngest. They need to ensure we cooperate. The rest of him roiled, shots of pure adrenaline adrenaline adrenaline pumping through his veins. Help Mikey. Save Mikey. The world was a blur of noise and movement and force as the agents marched on, uncaring.
Dad and Donnie. Mikey, held in place by the leader-agent. April and Casey Junior. Standing there uselessly as the agents paraded his family into the room, Leo’s eyes flickered between the guns trained on them, held in the agent’s steady hands- the cop-soldier humans watching their every move. The leader-agent gestured, and the subordinate agents forced his father and his twin backwards against the wall, right up next to April and Casey Junior. Roughly shoving their chests to the concrete, even as their hands were clearly up and visible. Raking his teeth across his tongue, Leonardo began to feel himself crackle with rage and panic.
“LISTEN UP!” the leader-agent yelled, practically in Mikey’s ear. As the box turtle flinched and whimpered, the other agents just adjusted their grip on their guns. “We have reason to believe that more than one of you is connected to the recent terror attack on New York. If you know anything about us, you’ll know we take this kind of thing extremely seriously.”
(What seemed like another perfectly normal afternoon in September, fresh with the hope of a new century. The world as they knew it, quickly broken on the wheel of fate. Dad’s stories about the smoke in the sky. The screaming in the streets. The frantic calls from his agent, asking where he was- how he was- if everyone was okay. The sound of emergency vehicles and fire, long into the night. What the Invasion must have looked like- sounded like- only with alien motherships in the sky instead of planes.)
Leo holds his tongue. Holds it both figuratively and literally- the pink flesh pinned between his teeth. But I fixed it. We fixed it and we saved you all, the slider thinks but doesn’t say.
His twin, though, can’t read the room, of course, because when can he ever- or maybe he could, and this was just a terrible choice- either way, shoulders raised, Donnie hissed, “You idiots have no idea what you’re doing.”
The leader-agent just fixed him with an unimpressed look. “We’ll be taking you in for analysis and questioning. We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” they continued, completely nonplussed. “We don’t want any trouble. Come quietly, and it’ll be easier for all of us.”
“But how did you get past my security system?!” Donnie insisted; trying to look over his shoulder at them. The words spat from his mouth like poison.
“There was no security system,” one of the subordinate agents replied.
“Oh, don’t you DARE give me that! I KNOW there was, and it’s practically unbreakable. I should know. I made it myself.” Scowling, the agent closest to Donnie forced him violently against the wall again, and Dad slapped his tail against the floor- the universal, silent sign for stop talking. Nobody else must’ve noticed, but for a second, the leader-agent’s finger twitched on the trigger, and every molecule in Leo’s body went on RED ALERT; but then the moment passed, and the softshell kept talking like nothing was wrong. “Not even the FBI could take down what I’d made.”
“Well, apparently the EPF did.” Hand still firmly set on Mikey’s shoulder, the leader-agent moved the gun slightly away from the box turtle’s forehead; still pointed at him, but no longer digging directly into the skin. The wheels in Leo’s head span desperately, trying to think of a way out- any way out of this situation. Donnie opened his mouth to keep arguing, probably the security system or something, but the slider cut him off. Stall, Leo. Stall for time.
“Where’s your warrant?”
The agent closest to him laughed. “Warrant? We don’t need a warrant. We’d need one to search a human home, but you ain’t human, are you?”
April’s head shifted a degree. Starting to speak, she got as far as “I’m a-” before their white hands and gray steel shoved her up against the wall again; pushing her roughly back against the concrete. Another universal sign for stop talking. He couldn’t see her face- apart from Mikey, Leo couldn’t see any of his family’s faces- but he’s pretty sure her glasses were pressed up against her forehead. He’s pretty sure Casey Junior grit his teeth.
Eyes flickering about, Leo took desperate stock of the situation. There had to be a way out of this. There had to be a way to stop this from happening. There had to be a winning play here, he knew there was, there had to be…he just couldn’t seem to think of it. But he had to think of something. His family was on the line. Seconds thickened out like honey, his system running slick with adrenaline, the great machine of Leo’s strategic mind- his faceman mind- began to tick and spin into overdrive.
Dad and Donnie. Leo and Mikey. April and Casey Junior. They had the numbers advantage, but numbers don’t mean shit when no one’s expendable- when any attempt at resistance could earn you a bullet in return. The Hamato family may be magic, but they weren’t that magic. Nobody could bring the dead back to life. Mikey was still at gunpoint, so he couldn’t do anything- Leo, useless with this stupid crutch, was similarly out of commission himself. (For a moment, the slider considered whether he could use it to knock out an agent before he got shot to bits. The idea unfortunately seemed unlikely.) Too many guns were trained on the others. Even if someone could call Casey Senior without the agents noticing, he doubted she’d be able to get here until it was far too late. Nobody else was in the lair… Everyone had a gun trained on them, rounded up and herded into the living room like cattle, everyone except-
Everyone except-
Oh no.
Oh shit.
The slider’s stomach dropped to the center of the Earth.
A quick headcount just confirmed what he’d already realized. There were one two three four five Hamatos here, other than himself- one shy of how many there should be. One of them was missing, and somehow, he hadn’t noticed. Somehow, he’d managed to forget. The agents still hadn’t found Raph. Leo tried to keep his face neutral, but on the inside, his thoughts ran wild with panic and speculation. Anxiety creeped like a cold hand up his plastron.
What would happen if they found him? What would happen if the EPF found him, their Kraangified brother, out of his mind with infection, probably not taking kindly to strangers in his house with guns? If they didn’t immediately end up killing him, would he be allowed to come along with the rest of the family? Where were the EPF even taking them, anyway? Some government facility, probably. Or maybe somewhere worse. That probably wouldn’t end well… Would they stick Raph wherever they stuck the Sister Kraang? Considering he was maybe the last Kraang zombie in New York, would they be wanting to experiment on him? Was that what the “analysis” was, just experimenting on them all?
Leonardo swallowed thick.
Somewhere outside of his own spinning head, Casey Junior and the agents were exchanging some words. Something something, have to believe us, something something, averted the apocalypse- to be honest, Leo wasn’t really listening. Too busy with the realization he’d just had. Too busy trying to make himself look inconspicuous. Did any of the others know what was happening here? Had any of the others noticed what was wrong? Maybe, like him, they were pretending they hadn’t realized on purpose… But no. That felt like wishful thinking. Leo had always been the best liar in the family. Other than the obvious guns in everyone’s faces, the others all probably had no idea the danger they were in.
There came a tiny noise from the hall on Leo’s right. Almost imperceptibly small, it came from one of the few places the agents hadn’t searched yet; and why would they? Everyone else was already here. It was a noise Leo probably picked up on because of paranoia, ‘cuz nobody else seemed to have heard it. At the very least, nobody else turned to look and see. Slowly, exceedingly slowly, Leo turned his head, trying to keep the movement natural- eyes wide, searching, staring into the almost-dark. He hoped to G-d he was wrong about this. He really hoped so, but the universe never gives him what he wants.
Because there, in that hallway, stood Raph.
Or, well…maybe not stood. That was the wrong word. More like crouched, perched low to the floor like a leopard, stalking; creeping around in that weird, disconcerting Kraang-way he always seemed to move. The snapper’s eyes glowing like yellow headlights in the shadows. Sidling forward from that patch of dark, the thing in Raph’s body tilted his head.
The slider bit little crescent moons into his tongue. The hallway on his right wasn’t the longest in the lair. The darkness wrapped like a blanket ‘round his brother’s shoulders wasn’t really so profound. If the agent beside him were to look where he was looking- turn where he had turned- they’d probably end up spotting Raph immediately… But they didn’t. Nobody did. Nobody seemed to care what Leo was doing. No one seemed to care what great and terrible truth he’d just found. They were all too busy arguing, shoving or being shoved; the agents all trying to shut their captives’ smart mouths. Which, good luck. On a good day, he and Donnie could snark back and forth for what felt like hours. Though at the moment, Leo was only half-sure that his family’s distraction was a good thing… Fingers beginning to twitch on triggers, the slider watched the agents begin to aim seriously at everyone and everything except himself.
(As a middle child, Leo always had a special talent for fading into the background.)
The hallway. The situation. The agents. Raphael. About halfway down, the shadows dropped off into regular light and visibility. About halfway between Leo and Raph, there lay the room that held the exit ladder to the surface. Turning back to his family, Leo watched their possessed brother out of the corner of his eye, trying his best to keep his expression neutral; trying his best to seem cool and disinterested. Trying not to give the game away. Tilting his head the opposite direction, the snapper gave a confused churr, and Leo glanced back at him immediately, eyes wide. Trying to transmit a message through pure thought energy: NO. It must’ve worked at least partially, because as the snapper creeped forward again, this time, he was completely silent.
Another step forward. Another step closer. Cold and nervous, a bead of sweat rolled quietly down the back of Leo’s neck. If he could have anything in the world right now, anything at all, he’d have Raphael slink right back down that hallway, curl up in his subway car or his quarantine room, get under the blankets, and hide…but of course, Leo never got what he wanted. Why should he? Step by ginger step, the snapper continued to advance on the room. Glancing between Leo and the exit ladder.
Biting down a sharp peel of bitter laughter, the slider’s nails dug deep into his palm. It was perfect. It was all almost too perfect. The exit ladder. The way to the surface. The EPF agents, holding them all at gunpoint. Nobody had any way to possibly stop him… If there was ever an opportunity to make a break for it, this was it. And there was no way in hell that Raph- no, not Raph, the Kraang puppet, whatever was controlling his brother’s body- didn’t know it.
(It was ironic, almost. Funny in a way that really wasn’t. Other than his massive separation anxiety- and his every-other-kind-of-anxiety, stacked on top of that as well- Raph’s biggest fear had always been puppets. With how much the universe liked to toy them lately, it only made a cruel, cruel amount of sense that eventually he’d end up becoming one.
The pain in his hands a welcome companion, reliable in the sting, Leo loosened up his fists. Only because his nails threatened to break the skin.)
The exit ladder. The room that held it. Beams of light, trickling down from the surface. The proof of noon, painted across the hall on the concrete. Mikey had told them once, whispering in private, that he’d caught Raph sitting directly at the bottom of the ladder, staring straight up towards heaven, basking in the light; eyes unfocused and faraway, expression almost reverent. Staring straight up at the manhole above, shedding rays of daylight like a black sun. Hung there like a halo far, far above. Since then, he’d shown almost a suspicious lack of interest in it, in escape in general, like he was avoiding the way out on purpose… Like- what Mikey hoped was true, at least- he wanted to stay. A small victory.
Donnie, on the other hand, had been very vocal about doubting it. (And as much as Leo hated to admit it, he did kinda have a point.) What was more likely, really? That he wanted to stay? Or that their possessed brother was just waiting, anticipating, hanging around; counting down the days until that perfect opportunity? Waiting for an order, maybe. And here it came.
Leo felt nothing at all.
The ladder to the surface. The manhole-halo. The room to it had no door, only a doorway. Climbing that ladder was by no means a soundless task, but ever since the Kraang got to him, their big brother’s heavy footsteps had all but vanished- the snapper was quieter than he’d ever been. And it wasn’t just because he couldn’t (actually, truly) talk. His every move was eerily silent. Nearly invisible. Standing there partially outside himself, some strange non-emotion lingering between the scutes of Leo’s chest, he felt as though he was caught, idle, in the eye of the storm… Watching Raph- not Raph- creep down the hall. So sure this was it, the big escape, the way things went EVEN MORE wrong, he could see it before it even happened; playing out like a movie behind his eyes. His possessed brother, escaping out into the concrete jungle. A Kraang-thing, loose in the streets. Just another giant mess for Leo and his family to deal with. Yet another almost-apocalypse.
As the snapper moved closer to the exit ladder, hugging the wall, Leo braced himself for the worst.
But then Raph continued right past it.
Heart lurching painfully in his chest, the slider’s mind dropped into freefall.
But the rest of the world didn’t care. “No more talk. We’re taking you in,” the leader-agent ordered, completely oblivious; cutting off the rest of the family. Forcing them still and quiet against the wall. A nervous hush settled over the room. He hadn’t realized how loud things’d been until everyone was quiet… Until everyone and everything had been suddenly forced to stop. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.”
Leo’s pulse was a drumbeat, deafeningly loud in his ears. He didn’t understand. If Raph wasn’t taking the opportunity to get out of here, then what the hell was he doing? He just didn’t get it… It just didn’t make any sense. Slowly, subtly, carefully, Leo turned his head, looking directly at the intruder in the hall- finally tracing the line to what those yellow-pink eyes were actually looking at. The gun to Mikey’s temple. The tender flesh of the leader-agent’s neck. The strangers with weapons in the lair. His not-brother’s pupils narrowed into predatory slits. What Leo had mistaken for neutral curiosity, a look of complete and utter focus… Just like that, like an audible click inside his head, it suddenly all made almost TOO MUCH sense. With a sinking sort of feeling, Leo realized exactly what was about to happen. He just had no idea what to feel about it.
Not stopping for a second, the thing in his brother’s skin stalked forward, unnoticed, unblinking, into the light.
The leader-agent pulled out a walkie-talkie. Keeping the business end of the gun trained steady against Mikey’s temple, the action pulled away their other hand, the one they’d had sitting firm, a silent threat, on the box turtle’s shoulder- Leo’s little brother trembling as soon as it was gone. Vibrating in the agent’s hand, the device squealed with harsh feedback. The entire family left cringing, scrambling to cover their ears. At least until the suit leaned forward, bringing the radio up to his lips, speaking into the machine; saying,
“Bishop: knight takes rook. Reporting back to HQ.”
After a moment’s pause, there came a sharp burst of cruel static. Free hand tightening again, Leo’s nails dug into the flesh of his palm as he watched Donnie’s fingers twitch- flinching, so much in pain without his headphones. The noise too loud for his twin, too much. Drowning the air in a cacophony of static. The sound like an anguished scream. It settled down soon enough, though, and eventually there came some stern male voice from the other end; words crisp and precise, some omega-suit. Some g-man higher up the chain. Bluntly saying, “Understood. No further contact unless it’s a distress signal.”
The other agents gave curt nods. Leaning forward again, the leader-looking one brought the device back up to their lips. Responding,
“Yes, sir. Over and out.”
Cutting off yet another fit of awful noise, the leader-agent once again sheathed their radio. It covered up the sound of the snapper’s low growls. Cast in gold from the afternoon sun, Leo’s possessed not-brother was stood now maybe only ten or so yards away.
Something cold and dense in Leo’s heartbeat, the slider leaned heavily on his crutch; tension held like cards in his shoulders. A bit terrified. Something bad was about to happen. Something bad was about to happen, he just knew it, he could feel it…he could smell the danger in the air. Something was about to go very, very wrong. And it might go even worse if he even attempted to intervene. (Not that he wanted to do that in the first place, anyway. Not if it would put his family in danger.) Everyone he cared about being held at gunpoint, he guessed there was really no turning back now.
In a tiny gesture- as a final warning- as discreetly as possible, Leo turned and looked his not-brother dead in the eyes. Slowly, firmly shaking his head. Telling him, no; don’t do this. Turn the other way. In response, Raph- not Raph- just bent into a runner’s start. Eyes and pupils narrowed, the position just before the tiger pounced. The yellow sky at morning. The harbinger of the storm. The highlighter-bright sun settled over the EPF guys’ shoulders like the vultures come to roost.
In those final few seconds of (relative) calm, in the single heartbeat before everything happened, Leo was reminded of something- something Casey Junior had said once, offhanded. Now made disturbingly relevant.
The Kraang were ambush predators.
As quiet as an owl in flight, the snapper sprung forward, breaking out into a sprint; the look in his eyes screaming pure hunger . All at once, the hunt had started for real.
Leo’s not-brother pounced.
“JESUS CHRIST, WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!”
The world shook under the force of a roar.
And a billion things happened all at once.
As time slowed down to an agonizing crawl, the whole world becoming blurs of shape and color around him, everyone and everything began to flicker out of focus; bits of context revealing themselves, losing themselves. Like the framerate of the Earth was stuttering. Reality glitched and warped around him like a scratched DVD. People were up and then they were down. People were in one place, and then they weren’t… People were alive and then they were dead, and the slider just stood there oddly detached from it all. Blankly staring outwards.
Y’know, it might’ve been a blessing and a curse, in retrospect. It might’ve been a blessing and a curse that Leo was the only one facing outwards, now- the only member of his family not being held up against a wall at gunpoint. It might’ve been a blessing and a curse that Leo was the only one who saw it all go down. His mind blurry and faraway, the sole witness. The bystander. All of it drowning in the static, what buzzed loud in his skull like a bad connection. Even still, something in the back of his mind told him that it was good that he was the one seeing this; that all of it would be his burden to bear. Specifically him, and no-one else. That he was the one best suited for it.
And sure. Maybe Leo was never one for big words like dissociation or compartmentalization, but he knew full-well that it was his medical mind that was saving him- that it was the team’s medic in him, the kid who stayed up all night reading textbooks, that made this less abjectly terrifying than it should be. Not a scene that would show up in his (surely inevitable) nightmares. Heart pounding anyway, he leaned heavily against his crutch, the material beneath his fingers solid and firm and real. The violence in front of him just words on a page. Just diagrams, not humans; even as the hot, sticky blood seeped up to him, flecks of it on his crutch and on his feet. The gray concrete beneath them all was such a perfect canvas.
Standing there, the lone observer, for the next few minutes or so, Leonardo looked out and Saw what no one else did- ceaseless watcher, the only witness besides G-d and the Kraang. His nails dug little half-moon circles into his skin. Standing amongst the carnage, the slider just tightened his fists and Breathed.
Honest to G-d, cross his heart, this is what Leo saw.
One second, Mikey and the leader-agent were up and standing, and the next, both of them were on the floor. The box turtle in his shell, the g-man on the ground. The leader-agent pinned under all of Raph’s colossal, violent weight. Knocking the gun from their hand, the metal clattering noisily to the floor, the snapper grabbed them by the hair and slammed them backwards; again. Again. Harder. Hard enough for their skull to make a sharp crack against the concrete. Gasping, the leader-agent let out an involuntary grunt of shock and pain. Watching listless, Leo’s mind whispered to him, trauma to the occipital and parietal regions- completely and utterly detached.
Two of the other agents- the ones nearest to the rest of the family, holding them back against the wall- went to open fire. Raph swept low with his tail before they could; knocking the both of them off their feet. Hitting the ground fast and heavy. Two more targets on the floor now, lying prone, the snapper pounced, goring one of them with his claws. Bits and fabric and flesh in his nails, dark red splattered in pools across the floor. Leaning down, pinning the other, he closed his jaws around their neck. Sinking his teeth in, blood across his face, the snapper reared back and tore out their throat like an animal.
Directly after that came one of the loudest sounds Leo had ever heard in his life. BANG. The agent next to him, firing their gun. BANG, BANG, two more shots directly after- one of them from the agent with the bleeding hole for a torso. Everyone grabbing futilely at their ears, the sound echoed like an explosion across the concrete. One of the bullets bounced off the snapper’s shell. Another embedded into the wall, scarily close to April’s head- both her and Casey Junior flinched. One of the bullets, though, hit its mark, lodging deep into Raph’s plastron. Cracks running up his not-brother’s side, Raph opened his mouth, and the slider was pretty sure he was roaring in pain…not that he could hear a thing, anyway. The ringing in his ears was deafening. Overwhelming.
Thrown backwards against the wall- narrowly missing Donnie- the suit with the gashes in their chest slid down against the floor again. In the blink of an eye, the snapper had descended upon them. Like a shark to the blood. Literally tearing that agent apart. Like a wild dog, like something with many, many teeth. It was almost funny…Leo had never really understood the word carnage before now, but now he supposed he did. The snapper unleashed carnage upon the room. He tore that agent from the inside out, bits of red and sinew in his teeth. And there must’ve been a million slick, awful sounds as he did, but the slider could hear none of it- everything in his ears drowned out by one high, shrill note.
Y’know, it was interesting. Interesting and terrifying. Before now, he’d never thought about the power his older brother held in his body; the thick muscles beneath the skin, those claws…those sharp, pointed teeth. He’d been so gentle, so purposeful in his care, that not even the bad guys knew what he was capable of. Not even their family itself did.
(For a moment, Leo’s mind flashed to sewer tunnels and mud and fire- the version of his brother that came out in the dark and lonely. The instability that lingered just under the surface. The violence of a panic attack. Something that lurked, just waiting for their older brother to be in a bad place and left alone… Even for something they called “Savage” Raph, it never came anywhere close to this. Or maybe they just hadn’t let it get that far.)
Still disconnected from the world and himself, standing there, staring, the slider watched it all play out like a movie in front of his eyes. A horror movie. Or maybe a thriller. One that didn’t quite hit the mark like it was supposed to. Raising the gun again, the only agent still standing- the one beside him- kept their finger on the trigger, cold determination on their face. The business end of the gun pointed directly at his not-brother’s head. Aiming a bullet between his eyes.
The blood turning to snow inside his veins, Leo’s fingers twitched.
Working up all the energy he had, forcing every atom he’s made of to bend to his will, the slider swept out with his crutch, knocking the agent beside him off their feet; their weapon clattering to the floor from their hand. The sound getting the snapper’s attention. Pouncing on them now, the snapper was a whirlwind of energy and violence. Picking it up and holding it in his mouth, Raph crushed the gun in his jaws. Some of his own blood slipping out between his teeth. The ringing in Leo’s ears beginning to fade, there came the grunts and snarls of both human and Kraang, a great and terrible cacophony… After what felt like forever (but was probably only seconds), the snapper got the better of them, pinning them down; tearing in. Leo unmoving, the pool of blood and gore expanded out to warm the bottom of his feet.
Completely eviscerated, the agent’s twitching and thrashing eventually came to a stop. The pulse of blood from their wounds slowed to trickle from just how much they’d lost. As soon as the agent went still beneath him, the snapper opened his mouth; dropping the broken gun to the floor. It hit the concrete with an almighty clatter. Creeping over to the leader-agent’s side, crouching over them, glancing about, his gaze landed solidly on Leo. It was strange… Crouched there, Raph (not Raph) was smiling, but he also wasn’t- eyes empty, the expression as dead on his face as the bodies on the floor. The smile stretched too tight across his face. Cold and keen, like he didn’t know what the gesture meant; like he was a monkey, baring its teeth. Sharp and predatory.
In an instant, the whole world had gone quiet. In an instant, the world had gone so quiet, the slider’s own panting breaths felt almost as loud as the gunshots, like explosions across the floor… Pulse deafening in his ears, eyes wide, tearing them away from his possessed brother, Leo glanced from family member to trembling family member about the room; nausea subtly rising in the back of his throat.
The slider swallowed thick.
“O-Okay.” The first to break the silence, a bit precarious, Leo said, “Okay… Nobody- nobody turn around. Alright? Nobody look.”
Donnie’s voice was unsteady as he spoke. “Nardo…?”
“It’s okay. Just, um… Just follow me. Okay? Just follow my voice. Nobody look.”
Gently picking Mikey up, scooping the box turtle’s closed shell gingerly into his arms, Leo guided his family out of the room one by one; avoiding all the blood and gore on the ground. Trying to keep them from knowing what he knew. Trying to keep them from seeing what he’d seen. Dad and Donnie and Mikey in his arms, then the two humans, April and Casey Junior… Leading them out of that nightmare scene and down the hallway, he led them towards the bathroom- that and one of the abandoned subway tunnels, what they called the “big bath”. A pool of rainwater-runoff just deep enough to dive in. (After all, they only had one shower.) Whichever way, he led them towards a place where they could wash all the evidence off their bodies. Where they could wash all the blood away, theirs or otherwise.
Leaning heavily on his crutch for a moment, the slider hesitated. Thinking. Counting heads. There was technically only one more person left to go collect now, and that was Raph… Even if he wasn’t sure that really counted as a “person”. Even if he wasn’t sure that having his not-brother around people right now was such a bright idea in the first place. But still. Passing Mikey’s closed shell into Donnie’s arms, Leo knew full-well just how mad his little brother would be if he didn’t even bother to check, so check he would… Just to see what was going on. Besides, the ladder to the surface was still unprotected, anyway. For their own sanity, they couldn’t let the thing that both was and wasn’t their brother escape.
There was no other reason Leo wanted to go check on him. No other reason at all.
After making everyone promise to stay where they were, the slider journeyed back to the living room alone. Trying his best to stay calm and collected. They needed him to be the leader right now. They needed him to be the guy in charge… Breathing deep, he pushed the stress down and away, a gesture that reminded vaguely of Raphael. The knowledge of that twinged painfully in his chest. But he did not once look back.
(Leo did not once look back, not even as his little brother unfolded from his closed-up shell behind him. Blood that wasn’t his on his scales. Both voice and body still trembling, Mikey asked Donnie- “I’m not bleeding. Donnie, I’m not- I’m not bleeding. Whose blood is this?”
The softshell turtle just bit his lip and looked away.)
Back down the hallway. Back towards the nightmare scene. Back towards the room where everything happened. Marching on, leaving the rest of his family behind, Leo stood in the doorless doorway to the living room, staring out at the place in discontented awe- almost no square inch of the place not stained red. Bits of government agent were strewn about the floor like decorations. All of them were (thankfully) dead except for the leader-looking one, which came as a genuine surprise… Somehow still living, they crawled agonizingly slow towards their walkie-talkie; what they’d dropped to the ground at the start of all this. Step by curious step, the snapper followed close behind. Wide-eyed. Nictitating membrane up. Wordlessly stalking his prey.
Hobbling up to the device on the floor, Leo used his better leg to kick it further away. Further out of reach. The walkie-talkie skidded noisily across the concrete.
Pupils dilated huge, the snapper whirled around to face him, and Leo put his free hand up in mock surrender; swallowing thick again. Shoulders curled up small. As nonchalant as he could make himself, nodding towards the leader-agent, the slider asked his not-brother,
“So. You gonna finish it, or…?”
The snapper crouched over the leader-agent’s body like the deed was already done.
And it was funny, almost. Really, it was strange… All the violence had drained from his not-brother’s posture. His nictitating membrane gone up and down, all the bloodlust had emptied out of his eyes. Leo liked to go back and forth with his twin sometimes, talking about Raph’s behavior- trying to pin down what exactly he reminded them of. While Leo had always said a dog, Donnie argued that he was more bird-like, or perhaps closer to the reptiles they all originally came from. (Mikey, obviously, refused to participate.) And while the two of them could debate until they were blue in the face, it was moments like this that made everything clear… Their possessed brother refused to be pinned down. Raph- or whatever was controlling him- acted only and solely like Kraang. And that was the scary part about it. The unpredictability. Violent one second and playful the next.
Kneeling down besides his bleeding prey, Leo’s not-brother looked up at him and chirped.
“Hey.” A bit nervous, Leo’s hand tightened on his crutch; a fake smile twitching across his face. “You, uh- you done, buddy? You done with all…” with his free hand, he gestured vaguely to the entire room, “…that?”
Closing his eyes, smiling genuine, Leo’s not-brother chirped again.
“Okay. I’m gonna take that as…something.” Keeping his hand still up, the slider took a cautious step forward, towards his brother, and the snapper let him. Eyes opening again, his gaze was full of nothing but calm and joy and blood-like pink. “If I bring you back to the rest of the family, are you gonna behave yourself?”
The snapper gave no response.
A bead of leftover sweat trickling down the back of his neck to his shell, Leo glanced over his shoulder to the hallway behind. As soon as he did, there came a thick, meaty snap, and when he turned back around, his not-brother had his knee on the g-man’s neck, pressing down hard enough to break it- exhaling a sharp breath, Leo’s fingers twitched, uncomfortable. Heartbeat loud in his ears.
“Y-You’re… You’re kinda giving me mixed signals here.”
There came no further sound.
Looking down at his prey again, this time still and unbreathing, the snapper’s expression ran fiery with want. Jaw opening a little, tongue flicking, it was Raph’s body language, not the Kraang’s- it was alligator snapping turtle instincts. A surefire sign of hunger. Grasping one of the leader-agent’s limbs, the snapper raised it to his mouth, and Leo’s stomach flipped.
“HEY! No. Put that down. Don’t make me get the spray bottle.” Kraang or not, there was no way in hell he was gonna let his brother eat someone.
Exhaling something like a sigh, Raph followed his instruction. Putting the g-man’s arm down, he left the corpses where they were on the floor. Leo wasn’t scared of Raph- he could never be scared of Raph- but it was somewhat nerve wracking, this version of his older brother that was so unreliable to read. Even without a mindmeld, Raph had always been somewhat of an open book… But that was before the Kraang. That was before Leo ruined everything. That was before he-
Hold on.
Leo’s train of thought slammed on the brakes.
A mindmeld. The idea came like a bolt of lighting, like a static shock of common sense. A mindmeld. Holy shit- why hadn’t they thought of that before? Why hadn’t they tried that already? In retrospect, it felt almost exceedingly logical. It felt so comically obvious, it drew a breathless chuckle from Leo’s lips. Staring down at his possessed older brother, who was staring right back up at him in turn, the clearness of it all burned like a brand in his mind. A mindmeld wouldn’t fix things, sure, but it would help them understand, wouldn’t it? It would show them what in the world was going on behind those pink-slitted eyes. And yet somehow, they hadn’t thought of it before now.
As if sensing what he was thinking, there came a voice from behind him; interrupting his reverie.
“Sensei? I mean- Leonardo?”
Casey Junior.
Turning slowly around to look at him, the excitement clear in his body, a giddy grin spread across the slider’s face. It was only the visible nervousness in the human’s expression that reminded Leo he was standing in the middle of a crime scene.
“Casey,” he said, regardless. Probably looking deranged. Not particularly caring either way. “I think I have a plan.”
Casey Junior got rid of the bodies. Leo didn’t ask how. He didn’t want to know. As Mikey and Donnie used up all the hot water in the shower, they brought in April and Dad, and slowly- eventually- after the other two managed to get over the shock- they cleaned up the living room together; dipping sponges in and out of water that quickly turned brown. Wiping away all the red, turning the whole room gray again. (He didn’t think Raph knew what they were doing, but a couple times, Leo saw him pick up a sponge and splash it in the water. Maybe just to see what would happen if he did.)
Together, they did a fairly good job cleaning, though. By the time Leo’s brothers were out, they’d managed to make the scene of a quadruple homicide far less overtly terrifying. Hauling the snapper to the big bath downstairs, to wash him off, they practically pushed him into the water, and he basically just let them; pliable in his resistance. Back in one of those states where he was weirdly compliant. As they let him swim around for a bit, the family (plus Casey Junior- who counted as family, too, however new he was) huddled up on the concrete shore to convene.
“Are you absolutely certain this is a good idea?” Donnie asked, ever the spoilsport. His eyebrows were furrowed so much they almost came together in the middle.
“Yeah,” Mikey added, voice gentle, “nevermind the infection- are you sure this is gonna be okay for you, emotionally? Are you sure this is safe?”
Of course Leo wasn’t sure. Of course he wasn’t, but there was no way in hell he’d be letting his family know that. Playing up the faceman charm, he flashed them all a trademark smirk. “Re- lax, Raph and I ‘ve done this like a bajillion times before. What’s the difference?”
He must’ve put too much flavor in it, though, he must’ve put in too much zest, because he watched his twin’s face darken; as serious as the grave. (And what a morbid thing, after probably adding a few more bodies to the bottom of the East River.) Voice a low, angry hiss, Donnie told him,
“You know the difference.”
A chill ran like cold fingertips up and down the slider’s spine. Faltering for a second, smile wavering, he swallowed hard, and April shot a glance in his direction, sympathetic. Leo pretended not to see. “Well then, we should ask Casey Junior. How are our odds, bud? You got any Kraang-handling tips from the future?”
The boy hesitated. “Well…yeah. It’ll probably work. But that’s not what I’m worried about. The whole ritual can be pretty dangerous. You gotta be careful- if you go too deep, the Kraang might reach out and try to infect you. I’ve seen it before. N-Not that I could do any cool mind-reading stuff like my family, of course…”
“Let’s make a code word then,” April insisted. “Something to say when you need us to pull you out.”
“If I need you to pull me out,” Leo insisted right back; more confident than he actually felt.
“Sure,” she acquiesced, everything about her tired. “If. Let’s just make one anyway.”
The softshell fiddled with the goggles atop his head. For some reason, everyone’s gaze- including Leo’s- had shifted expectantly towards him. Startled, making an aborted move to pull them down, after a beat of silence, Donnie said, “Um- beacon. The code word should be beacon. Two syllables. Relatively easy to say.”
“Beacon, huh?” Shrugging nonchalant, Leo fought hard to keep the easy smirk on his face. Looking over at their father, who in turn was looking at their possessed brother, splashing about in the water, he rolled back his shoulders. “Eh- that’s good enough. The code word’s beacon. Happy now?”
April let out a sharp breath through her nose. “Yeah, yeah- happy enough.”
Hobbling over to the coping of the pool, Leo struggled into a kneel, leaning heavily on his crutch. His knees loudly complaining. The muscles gone stiff. Cringing, the slider grit his teeth and bared it. Reaching out his hand, trembling just a bit, he beckoned the snapper to him, fingers wiggling about in the water like bait; waiting for his not-brother to come. In maybe ten seconds, Raph- no, g-d damnit, not Raph- had swam up to him. Like the alligator his species was named after, only his eyes and his nose above the water. Staring directly at him. Childish curiosity in his eyes. Carefully, gently, Leo held out his hand towards his not-brother’s forehead, ready to yank it back like a matador; hypervigilant and yet trying to play it cool. Miraculously, no immediate threat came. Remembering all too well the power his older brother held in his jaws, Leo thought to himself, at least I’m not losing a hand… But for some reason, at the notion of losing a limb, some feeling organ inside him soured. Brow furrowed, he shook his head, trying to brush away the thought.
Raph. Not-Raph. Whatever the hell was staring at him now. Whatever the hell he was staring at right back. Leaned uncomfortably far forward, Leo pressed his hand against the snapper’s forehead, feeling the hot scales beneath his fingertips. A bit too hot. A bit concerning, but not feverishly so. Closing his eyes, the slider breathed even to calm his heart rate; already unsteady on both his physical and metaphorical feet. Reaching down to where his ninpo lived in his body. Palm steady, reaching out to where his older brother’s lived in turn.
He could do this. It was just a mindmeld. He could do this- he would do this. He’d done it before. Everyone was counting on him to succeed.
(A flash of forest. A long way down to the waterfall basin below. The sunset over the treetops, grief viscous and choking in the air. Tears running wet tracks down his older brother’s face.)
Like a TV trying to catch a signal- like a faulty connection, flickering with static- images danced in front of Leo’s closed eyes. Fantastical and feverish. Manic like a dream. Contextless and quaint, the ringing in his ears getting loud again. His head shot through with small, broken fragments of memory. Like he was reaching his hand deep into a bowl of broken glass.
A dark harbor. A statuette. A thousand heartbeats, drumming in time. The smell of blood, thick in the air. The island that held the Foot Clan’s portal frame- polluted waves hitting up against the rocky shoreline. A dull pain radiating from his eye, his shoulder. The taste of iron thick on his tongue. His lips. Everything in him screaming, don’t do this, turn back, stay away, the slider continued on regardless, his palm pressed flat against the snapper’s forehead; wincing in pain as he reached further and further in. So covered in spiritual cuts, he almost drew back. But his efforts weren’t in vain, though… Eventually they did pay off. After what felt like a millisecond’s too long a wait, he felt his brother’s ninpo catch like dry tinder, like a chemical reaction inside both of their chests- a tiny spark burning behind Raph’s plastron. Leo’s alit with blazing fire. Either way, he sighed, every part of him relieved. Saying, there you are, big brother. There you are.
As the two of their minds finally felt out a link, the images in his head became the world became perception became reality. Raph’s hand moving to cover his own, the real world melted away around him. Senses narrowed, the only thing that existed now was the connection between them- this shared space. The two of them completely alone in the universe. Alive as one entity.
Like a dam finally broken, Leo and his brother’s minds flowed into each other like milk into coffee; like the East River into the Atlantic. Like mentos into a bottle of coke.
Seeing without his eyes open, Leo found himself enveloped on all sides by a dark pink hallway. The walls and floors made out of Kraang flesh- wet muscle, writhing beneath. What felt like the Technodrome, when Leo had been in it. The air muggy and damp, tentacles slithering about beneath his already-wobbly feet. It goes without saying, really, that this isn’t what Raph’s mind usually looked like- that all of this was an overgrowth, a parasite. Calling out his brother’s name, there came no response, but deep inside, he could feel Raph’s- the real Raph’s- heartbeat, pulsing in the walls; the floor. Slightly out of tune. The gaze of a thousand eyes, burning into him from every angle. Unintelligible whispers loud and angry in his ears.
The slider bit his tongue. Determination set in his jaw, his shoulders, some unidentifiable, nerves-like adrenaline running cold like snow through his veins, Leo sunk his claws deep into the pinkish muscle, beginning to dig his way through- through to his brother. Ripping and tearing at all the Kraang gunk in the way. Pieces of it caught beneath his fingernails. The meat was disgustingly malleable under his hands.
Leo kept on digging anyway. Swatting back the urge to gag.
Digging. Digging. Lost in the motions of it, might as well call him the Shredder, ‘cuz Leo tore at the wall with everything he had- digging like he was dying, like the Kraang were attacking him personally. Which they were. Which they had, ever since they’d honestly thought they could take Leo’s big brother without consequences. Oh, no. No sir. They’d learn. They’d see. There wasn’t a thing on this earth he wouldn’t do for his family. If the slider had Raph’s jaw instead of his own, just to get to his brother quicker, he’d be tearing at the muscle of the wall with his teeth.
He didn’t have to wait long, though. All too suddenly breaking through the wall, pulling away a sizable portion of slime and rot, gravity tipped to throw him forward, and abruptly, the opposite wall had become the ceiling; falling down through the hole he’d made, Leo crashed into an ocean of color and light. Gasping on instinct, the “water” thick and honey-like in his lungs. Gluey yet breathable. (For a moment, Leo thought of that weird pod they’d found Raph in on the day of the Invasion. He wondered if floating around in there had felt something like this.) Regardless. His brother’s pulse echoing, vibrating through the water, the resolve in him still running hot, Leo paddled down, down to where the light was blinding; down to where his older brother was presumably being kept. Down to where the pink faded back into red.
Shutting his eyes, he kept his hand outstretched, ready for the snapper to take.
But then gravity flipped again. So obvious this time, Leo’s ears popped and his stomach flipped, he was suddenly falling, falling deep into his brother’s mind- landing hard in a memory. The impact forcing all the air from his lungs. His eyelids from over his eyes. Gaze blurry and unfocused, he was so dizzy, the world swept around him in waltzing circles… But as soon as he got himself in order, blinking hard, roughly shaking himself out, a cold dread began to set upon him.
Leo was pretty sure he knew exactly when this was.
The world was dark. Shadows crept around the concrete corners, what could either be considered late at night or early morning, the unsleeping city acted as a nightlight in the black; colorful light streaming down into the sewers. Neon against the moon and the starless sky above.
The faint glow of the TV from nearby. The sound of audience laughter. Their father’s snoring, asleep in his chair. What should’ve been reassuring, but wasn’t. Laid on his side on a mattress on the floor, half frozen stock-still, half jittering with energy, Leo watched it all play out through his older brother’s eyes- locked just behind Raph’s pupils, he lay there possessing the snapper like a ghost; a passenger in his brother’s body. Just along for the ride.
The mattress cool and soft beneath him, heavy eyelids fell up and down like shutters over the cameras of his older brother’s eyes.
The mattress. It was one of Donnie’s special-made ones, the ones they used for turtle piles, even if the only other person on it now was Mikey; whom Memory-Raph had enclosed in his arms like a plushie. The box turtle wrapped around him like a barnacle in turn. The slider knew exactly when this was. Leo had been sleeping in the medbay that night. Donnie passed out at his desk in his lab, April and Casey Junior had crashed together in Splinter’s room. The Leo of right now- the one in Raph’s body- not the one sleeping in a medical bed down the hall- felt guilt sink like a rock in his stomach. Oh, he knew exactly when this was.
Memory-Raph shivered. The box turtle had made himself into a burrito with all of the blankets. A cold breeze passing over the skin of his arm like breath, the snapper pulled Mikey closer, up against his chest, and their younger brother nuzzled him right back.
They hadn’t known what was going to happen that night. They hadn’t known that Raph was finally gonna lose his battle with the Kraang.
Dragging him out from his almost-sleep, there came a sharp jolt of pain from Raph’s eye. Infuriating and keen, like he was getting stabbed in the pupil; the ache pulsing in time with his heartbeat. (The heartbeat the two of them shared now, being of one mind.) A similarly sharp anxiety began to pool like liquid beneath his plastron. Swallowing thick, blinking hard, Leo could feel Memory-Raph trying to ignore it, trying to distract himself, laying shaky-still, staring at the wall- at least before a frankly alarming amount of blood began to hit the pillow beneath him. Tracing down from his eye socket. Detangling himself from Mikey’s arms, wrestling upright, on instinct, both Memory-Raph and Leo moved to palm their bleeding eye. To cup it gingerly in their hand. Replacing himself with a pillow- one of the ones without blood on it- the box turtle couldn’t seem to tell the difference. Pressing into it, Mikey muttered something sleepily incomprehensible.
The snapper struggled his way to his feet. It was surprisingly hard, even one-handed, which he’d done in training a million times before; rushing to his head, the dizziness rose so badly in him that he almost fell right back over. Barely stable on his own two feet. Leaning hard against a wall, Memory-Raph elected to just bite his tongue and bare it. Leo sighed internally in response. To think that Raph was the one always nagging them all to take care of themselves… Hypocrite, the slider teased as they began to walk. Step by step, stumbling towards the bathroom. Not even bothering to turn on the lights.
Hand still pressed to their ever-bleeding eye, Leo felt a liquid warmth begin to run in thin streams down his wrist.
The walk to the bathroom felt like an eternity, but one that passed soon enough. Not bothering to close the door behind them, the whole lair swathed in darkness, the dizziness in him hadn’t subsided a single bit- weakness running fuzzy in his limbs, Memory-Raph basically collapsed against the sink; bent over it, tightly gripping the sides. Panting heavy. Trying to catch his breath. Thick globs of blood dripping down from his eye and against the porcelain base. Vaguely, in his peripheral vision, he could make out the shadowy figures of the toilet and the shower and the towel rack, and he supposed it was a good thing to be aware of- without even looking up, he could tell that the mirror in front of him was wrong. He could see that none of the room around him was being shown back in his reflection. But something definitely was.
Combined heartbeat pulsing strange, there came a strained beat of hesitance. Still looking down, Leo blinked, and suddenly the hands clenched around the sink were his- the shell bent over the sink was his, his own body, his unsteady feet. All thin and striped and bloodstained. His palm and his wrist stained wet with iron-y red. Suddenly in control of his body again, like a lucid dream, the slider could feel the blood still drying on his cheek. Rolling his shoulders back, blinking again- blinking hard- moving to stand more steadily in front of the basin, Leo took a deep breath. He’d make himself look up on three. On three: one, two-
He forced himself to look up early. Forcing his head up and his eyes open, ready or not, he forced himself to look whatever was waiting for him dead in the eye.
As it turns out, face-to-face with the reflection in the mirror, what was waiting for him turned out to be Raph.
Leo’s brother stood in the dark. On the other side of the mirror- more like the divider at an aquarium than a reflective surface- the glass between them was a window into a pure black void, nothing and no one at all except for him. Nothing and no one at all except for the snapper, haggard thing that he was, and the emptiness that stretched on into forever all around. The two of them made eye contact, and neither of them spoke. It’s all in his head- their combined heads- and Leo knows it, but immediately, he ran a scan over his brother. Dark circles were painted under his eyes. Dry and flaking, tear tracks stained down his cheeks. Looking decidedly un-Kraangified, but the most tired Leo had ever seen him: the blood on him mirrored (hah) on his eye, his wrist; his expression neutral and dreamlike. Looking the definition of the word haggard. Strange silence hanging in the air between smoke. Hand shaking, the slider reached tentatively towards the mirror, and his brother’s reflection didn’t copy his moves. Didn’t move at all.
Brow slightly furrowed, as if noticing him for the first time, the reflection- the real Raph- looked out at him and said,
“…Leo?”
The slider’s heart leapt up like a spark in his chest. “Yeah. Yeah,” he said, all too eager, almost embarrassingly relieved; “It’s me. It’s me, Raph- it’s me. I’m here. Is that you?” It was a stupid question. One that he already knew the answer to. The two of them were mind melded, for g-d’s sake- nevertheless, his older brother tilted his head an inch, studying him. Moving his face a millimeter closer to the glass.
“Leo…” In a tone entirely too conversational for the interaction they were having, the snapper asked him, detached and unfeeling, “How are you here?”
“We- we mind melded,” the slider explained. Stuttering. Now that he thought about it, though, he supposed it made sense his brother didn’t remember that. “I’m here to help. I’m here to fix everything. Just tell me how to get you out of here.”
Raph merely shook his head at that; pale behind the mirror. “No. No, Leo, you can’t… You can’t be here. You know you can’t be here.”
“What d’you mean? Raph, what’re you talking about?”
“You aren’t real.”
Like a lightning bolt striking down upon the earth, a fierce jolt of pain shot through Leo’s eye. From g-d’s hand straight to the slider’s system, what his older brother must’ve felt all the time. What must’ve really happened the night the infection came back. Almost doubling over from the hurt, aching inside him, Leo’s mind flooded with a hundred images all at once: some crushing fear, a terrified kind of acceptance; himself and his twin and his little brother, all holding weapons. Sick, sinister smiles on their faces. Like they were facing a villain. Holding carnival batons like beatsticks. Swallowing back the urge to vomit, biting down the urge to scream, phantom touch trailed across him, feather light and sliming- desperate hands grabbing hold of the sink again, the pain ran through him like electricity.
His older brother’s expression in front of him remained unchanged.
“Raph-” cringing hard, reaching outwards, determined not to look away, Leo wheezed, “I’m here. It’s me. I swear, it’s me.”
“I really do wanna believe you, but you say that every time.”
Leo had no idea what the hell that was supposed to mean. Doubt falling heavy on him, like a crumbling building, there was no protector to stand above him now- no Atlas to hold the world for him, glowing a brilliant shade of matador red. Flashing like a faulty projector, the images in his head just continued. Snapshots of a hundred lifetimes, all lived alone. Strung up in sinew, again and again. Forced to explore the true meaning of hell. A pain- always pain- in his skull, his throat. Rows upon rows of pointed, yellow teeth.
Eyes wide and body trembling, Leo tried his best to stabilize himself. “C-Come on. C’mon, big brother, we need you- I’m here for you. I’m really here. We all are.” Feeling his ninpo blaze inside him, the connection between them flared like gasoline on a fire. Recognition finding a home in his older brother’s eyes. Regardless of his understanding, Raph shifted uncomfortably.
“You have to go. Even if you are real, Leo, you have to go- you have to go right now.”
“Not without you.”
“No, ” Raph insisted; dead serious. “You HAVE to. It’s not safe here, Leo. You gotta get out of here. Before they show up. Before they-”
As it turns out, Leonardo never got to hear what his older brother was about to tell him. He never got to hear what his older brother was about to say. Echoing from all around them, somehow coming from every direction at once, there came a horrible voice- what sounded like a cruel mockery of Leo’s own, tinged with Kraang; with mild insanity. Something so dreadfully Off about it, it immediately put him on guard. The other voice as cold and as dark as the grave.
(Caving to childish instinct, the slider turned around to check behind him- over his shoulder- but nothing and nobody was there. Nothing except the vague shape of the bathroom. The shadows stretching out like grasping hands across the lair. Turning back around, the slider swallowed thick. The voice was coming from the other side of the mirror.)
“Oh do-og~!” Cutting Raph off, whatever-it-was said, “I can hear your voice. I can smell you bleeding. I know you’re there, dog- who ya talkin’ to?”
Leo watched his brother freeze solid to the spot. Combined heartbeat contracting strange, he said,
“Leo, you have to leave. Right now.”
The slider blanched. “What the hell was that?!”
Raph opened his mouth to respond, but the thing with Leo’s voice- the Not-Leo, whatever it was- cut him off again. “You know I don’t like when you ignore me. Who’s there?”
Eyes flashing at Leo- the real Leo- expression terrified and insistent, the snapper’s large hands tightened into fists at his side. Stuttering, he replied, “N-Nobody. I’m talkin’ to myself.”
“Y’know, dog, I don’t think that’s quite true.” All too gleeful, a grin in its voice, that thing, Not-Leo, it said, “I think you’re lying to me.”
Stock-still with obvious terror, the snapper’s gaze trailed off into the middle distance. Watching, wide-eyed, Leo saw something begin to materialize from behind his brother’s shoulders, emerging slowly- ever so slowly- like a predator from the dark; long, spindly fingers curling around his biceps from behind. The thing’s nails digging deep into his brother’s skin. Overgrown claws and obvious bone. Kraang-ish and gaunt, a face peeked from around Raph’s side; grinning from behind the carapace. A single pink eye gazed at him through the hole he’d inadvertently made in Raph’s shell.
Leo and the thing made eye contact.
Swallowing down some nervous spit, what tasted like bile, a chill rose like a specter in him- his gut beginning to come unwound, his heart contracted painfully out of fear. Mouth slightly open, the slider stopped dead; staring out in pure disbelief.
The thing behind his brother. What stared at him from the mirror, from the hole in Raph’s shell. This warped reflection. Not-Leo. The creature, hunched over yet still too tall, stalking forth, step by step, from the endless void; Kraangified and barely recognizable, the slider’s doppelganger. What Leo- a mutant himself- could honest-to-gd call a monster. What looked like his skin draped loose over a nightmare. The hateful thing it was peeking out from underneath. Not-Leo. Whatever it was, it was far too skinny. It was far too skinny, far too keen, far too everything all at once- eyes pink with pupils like slits, its smile was too wide, too sharp. Its mouth held far too many teeth.
Eyes alight like the fires of hell, the thing stared at him. Salivating.
“Well, well, well…” it toyed. “What do we have here?”
The snapper’s jaw worked, but he did not speak. Gaze cast way out to no man’s land, Leo’s brother did not make a single sound.
“Cat got your tongue, huh?” Savoring the flavor of its next three words, Not-Leo, in its stolen voice, it purred through its teeth: “What a shame… You know I have to punish you now, right? You know I have to punish you for lying.” Stepping out beside him, gaze still trained on Leo, tilting its head an inch too far- what in real life would break something in the slider’s neck- the thing, Not-Leo, it continued, “You know I have to punish you for lying to me. And you know how much I just hate doing that.” By the playful tone smeared thick in its voice, that last statement was easy to clock as a lie.
The real Leo suppressed a growl in the back of his throat. Hissing, a heat rising in him to combat the chill, looking his fake double dead in the eyes, he said, “Get away from my brother.”
The brother in question just cringed. “Leo, please…”
“No, no. None of that.” Sliding one hand to the back of Raph’s neck, faux-affectionate, keeping its talons dangerously close to the edge of his fragile skin- an implicit threat- Not-Leo turned to him, and Raph went quiet. Quiet and still. The thing grinned like his brother’s possessed body had, over the corpses of those agents. Eyes empty. All teeth. “Tell me, dog…who’s this?”
Desperately wishing he had his katana to brandish, Leo retorted, “The guy who’s gonna get my brother out of here.”
“Leo,” his brother insisted, “don’t.” Shoulders tight, like he was expecting a hit, Raph’s gaze flickered to the side; fists loosened up into a form of mock surrender. Trembling so bad they were almost jazz hands, the snapper cut in, “No, don’t- don’t worry about it. He’s- he’s nobody. I promise. He’ll be gone soon. D-Don’t- don’t do anything. We can talk about this. Right? Please? Can’t we talk about this? I wanna talk.”
A brief puff of resentment rose like smoke in the slider’s chest. He was almost annoyed at that, but then he saw again the naked terror so obvious in his brother’s voice, and he understood what was going on far too well- this was just another gambit to protect him. One that wasn’t working, maybe, but an attempt even still. (He supposed he’d say literally anything that came to mind to save his brother in turn, if their positions were switched.) Raph looked at the fake Leo like it was judge and executioner. Like the snapper was a dog, used to being kicked; watching the arc as the boot incame. The idea of that terrified Leo in turn. His big brother, always so brave, so confident, facing down something that looked like Leo- facing down something that looked like Leo and trembling. The thought of that made his stomach twist.
“Raph.” A conscious effort to keep his voice gentle, he said, “I’m here. I promise. I’m here to rescue you.” When his brother just whimpered, Leo softened his expression. Professing, "Anatawa hitorijanai.”
(He wasn’t sure where those specific last few words came from, but in the turbulence of the moment, they just felt right.)
His brother’s gaze darted between the two red-eared sliders on the playing field. Like Raph was negotiating his own hostage situation, he whispered to one or maybe both of them, “Leo, please…” Definitely talking to the real Leo this time, looking haunted, his brother begged, “Please, just…just don’t talk back. Please. It makes them mad. It gets scary when they’re mad.”
The thing that wasn’t Leo somehow smiled even wider in response. Wide enough that the bones in its face creaked. Sharp teeth pressed together in a rictus grin, what in real life would be enough to break its jaw- like a cheshire cat, comically dramatic, the thing pressed its free hand against its plastron like it was offended. Insisting, “Now, who said I was mad? I’m not mad. I’m merely amused.” Tilting its head dangerously far the other way, Not-Leo tore the slider apart with its gaze. Saying, “Back down, dog. Let the pest speak. Its hubris entertains me.”
Cold sweat trickled down the back of Leo’s neck to the ridge of his shell. Suddenly far more unsteady than he’d been a second or two before.
“You’re… You’re gonna let my brother go,” the slider said, the confidence slipping from his voice. His demeanor. “You’re gonna let my brother go, a-and- you’re gonna leave him alone. You’re gonna get out of here and never come back.”
“Oh, am I now?”
Not-Leo sunk its nails deep into the skin of Raph’s neck. Directly next to his carotid artery. Beating under its fingers, which, strangely, were all bent at oddly precise angles- like the thing had a robotic structure underneath. Its hands reminded him too much of the Kraang mechs; specifically Kraang Prime. Metal plates cold like bone in its hands. Those talon-like fingers, sharp and grasping. Leo wondered if the resemblance was on purpose. Either way, the snapper didn’t even flinch.
(But he did whimper, though. Like a kicked dog. A small sound through his teeth: “Leo”.)
Straightening out to its true, impossible size, raising a single brow ridge, in what looked like one of Leo’s actual expressions but just wasn’t, the thing teased, “Pray tell…how do you plan on accomplishing that?”
The slider swallowed thick.
“I’ll- I’ll make you.”
“You’ll make me.” Suppressing a laugh, the thing snarked, “You’ll make me- how fascinating! How utterly fascinating. How incredibly, impossibly bold… If I were a little less taken in by you, I might as well call it foolhardy. But tell me, pest: what if, instead of that happening, I did- this? ”
With the appendage that wasn’t digging its claws into Raph’s neck, Not-Leo held out a taunting hand. Moving to snap its fingers directly in front of the slider’s face. Like it’d done what felt like ages before. When all four brothers had gone all-out in their final failure of an attack. His brother must’ve realized what was about to happen a split second before Leo did, because, as the snapper’s eyes went wide- using the very last of his energy, ninpo flaring like a dying ember in his chest- Raph shouted, throat dry and painful,
“LEO, RUN!”
But before he could even pretend to consider it, the thing snapped. And in the span of a blink, literally everything went wrong. The second that its finger met palm, a million things happened all at once.
His brother’s mindscape shifted under the Kraang’s silent command.
Lighting up with sparks like fireflies, energy swarming to its hands like locusts, the void began to hum an incessant, discordant tune. Strange and biological, like a chorus of insects; like one of Donnie’s machines shifting into overdrive. Static electricity, like a lightning bolt about to strike, ran through Leo’s veins like live wires. Buzzing directly underneath the slider’s skin. From somewhere deeper in the void, there came a barrage of sickly yellow chains, flying out and around his older brother- like Mikey’s, but similarly Wrong in the way Not-Leo’s whole existence was. Not yellow like gold and warmth and the sunrise over the city. Yellow like the bile readily climbing up the back of Leo’s throat. Lashing out from the nothingness, they wrapped around his brother’s plastron and dragged him violently backwards, back to wherever they came from; back to whatever horrors lay in the limitless black.
(For what felt like the hundredth time since he’d lost the Key, Leo’s big brother was pulled away from him. Forever just a hair’s breadth out of reach.)
Without so much as a scream- merely a sharp breath and an outstretched hand- the snapper was yanked off his feet and back into the void, like he’d never even been there in the first place. Without so much as a proper goodbye, Raph disappeared into the endless black.
And the two reflections were all that was left.
The mirror shattered outwards. The fragments a supernova of sharp, sparkling stars, the dust a cloud of rigid, angry insects- hand still up, Not-Leo stood there like the opposite of Moses, the red sea crashing down; deaf to his screams. LET MY BROTHER GO. This was wrong. This wasn’t how the story goes. The horde descended upon him regardless. Arms flying up to protect his face, moving solely on instinct, pieces of glass going clink clink clink against the bathroom ground, the divide between them was suddenly broken: as if an answer, the creature pounced through the mirror and threw itself upon him. The air filled with the smell of iron and wet decay. Struggling for a moment, caught off-guard, it pushed him back so sudden, so violent, the back of Leo’s skull went crack against the ground. Teeth rattling in his head.
Dizziness sweeping through him, the whole world waltzed in mad loops in front of Leo’s unfocused eyes. His mind-self- Raph’s memory-self- the whole lair itself was bleeding. He could feel it under his fingers, trickling under his shell. He could feel it seeping into the cracks in the tile floor. Not-Leo was bleeding. The whole world was bleeding. Maybe that was all the world was- hot blood, lifeblood, pouring out and out and out into nothing. Cars and subways and buses rushing through like white blood cells. Rushing through the veins of a city on the shore. (The plagues were all coming out of order.) Sucking in a breath of air, it wasn’t enough- all his screams came out sharp gasping.
Fuck “honorable fighting”. Fuck “the Hamato way”. His warped reflection pinning him to the floor under all of its surprising weight, bent over him, straddling him at the waist, Leo grabbed and thrashed and clawed at its eyes.
Large hands moving to grab him by the throat, the creature above him just grinned.
“THE GREATEST NINJA THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN!” Like a nightmare he couldn’t wake up from, Not-Leo’s mouth was far too wide and just getting wider, stretching, all-consuming, across its face- bubblegum blood bubbling up in its mouth, it leaked dark rivers down his chin. Pink tentacles began to worm their way past those sharp rows of far, far too many teeth- mocking, a ghost of the past, the thing told him, “You’ve got it with style!”
As droplets of the thing’s blood began to drip, drip down onto him, Leo thrashed, desperately trying to avoid getting it in his mouth; his eyes. Kicking, screaming, refusing to bite. Third eyelid up, even through them, he could see those pink irises focused entirely upon him, insanity so desperately clear in its eyes. The slider took in steep gulps of breath- one after the other- like he was going to say something, but he just breathed it all out. Straining to get away. The thing just leaned down closer.
“You know, I’m disappointed.” Its voice was everything, was everything- like he was an insect, like he was Abraham; like he was a butterfly, pinned to a corkboard in front of G-d. “No more smart words to say? Your brother screamed pretty. But you still haven’t. I think I’ll pry your jaw open by your teeth.”
Thrashing still, Leonardo clamped his jaw as shut as he could make it, but still, Not-Leo’s fingers came up, trying to pry at his defense. Its fingers were wet and sticky. So much so that the slider gagged without meaning to, stomach acid burning the back of his throat. Nose filled with the stench of Kraang.
“He isn’t yours anymore.” Leaning down ever further, pressed practically forehead-to-forehead, nose to nonexistent nose, Not-Leo’s skin was as clammy as a corpse. Drowning in the pink eternity of its eyes, the rosy blood tracing down its cheeks, the thing whisper-screamed: “He’ll never be yours again. He’s ours now. Our toy. You don’t know what love is, but we do. The dog does. It knows now. We taught it.” With a wave of revulsion, Leo realized it was talking about Raphael. “You don’t know love. Your petty, worthless emotion doesn’t even begin to compare. Love is complete submission. Complete devotion. Love is us telling dog to harm himself and he does. Love is making him bleed. That’s what love is. He doesn’t love you, but he loves us. And we love him. And guess what? We’re never letting him go.”
Working up all the saliva and bile in his throat, Leonardo opened his mouth just long enough to spit in the creature’s face. The bead of it hanging from his doppelganger’s top lip. Grin never faltering for a second, Not-Leo just licked the moisture off with its wormlike tongue; never once breaking eye contact. For his part, the slider heroically resisted the urge to vomit.
“Do you want to know how we broke him? How we used him? Made him ours?” Digging its nails into the slider’s skin this time, it was just as painful as he thought it’d be- tightening its grip, Not-Leo restricted his airflow (an odd sensation, considering he could feel his body in the real world still breathing). Leo’s pulse fluttered under its fingertips. “We could do the same to you. We could make you better. We could make you whole. Just ask our dog- ask what used to be your pathetic excuse for a brother. He’s certainly happier like this.”
One weak arm pulling free from underneath them, Leo swung upwards, attempting to punch his false double directly in the face. But Not-Leo caught his fist without looking.
“Ah, ah...don’t be so feisty. Not to your savior, bug. We could fix you. We could make you happy. We could make you part of something bigger- something holy. All you have to do is let us in.” Pinning his hand violently, painfully above his head, the thing grinned somehow- somehow- wider; its mouth at this point taking up maybe half of its face. “In fact…y’know what? I think I will. I think I’ll do it myself.”
Tilting its head back towards the starless sky above, Not-Leo reared back like a great animal, preparing its jaw to bite. Haloed by some strange, otherworldly pink divinity, the blood and the glass and the corpse-ish pallor on its lips, it was like a scene from a horror movie- wiggling up its throat like false tongues, there came a cascade of pink tentacles, pushing out of its mouth, out through the gaps between its teeth. His false double above him began to vomit up Kraang. The act gross and violating and holy. As it looked down at him though- pink eyes glowing, the rest of its face in shadow, a strange painting, its jaw so distended that at this point it just had to be broke- looking up at it in turn, Leo only had one thought.
Had its lips always been that shade of perfect, mask-like blue?
The cold and the dark set in from the corners.
And someone started to scream.
“BEACON! BEACON, BEACON- I WANT OUT! GET ME OUT OF HERE!”
A voice rang out through the connection between them. Screaming high and long. It took Leo a second to realize it was his. It just felt so unreal…like when he watched the agents die, there was a part of him just floating free behind his eyes; detached from the situation at large. Watching it all play out like a movie. All of it taking place behind some invisible screen. There were hands all along his physical body. Straddling him at the waist, Not-Leo’s hands were still wrapped tight around his throat. Leo could feel himself making words, shrieking sounds, yet he could also feel his lips pressing tightly shut- he could feel people tugging at him in all directions. Trying to separate them all, Leo and Raph and the Kraang in Raph’s body, Both physically and in the landscape inside their heads.
To just add insult to injury, Not-Leo seemed to realize what was happening. Damn it to hell, damn all the Kraang to hell forever, tentacles retreating back down its gullet, the creature waved a playful goodbye.
The floor opening up below him, Leo dropped into freefall.
“…eo? Wa… …up. Can you ope… …eyes for me?”
The world a susurrus of hushed, worried sound, the endless dark snapped its jaws and swallowed him whole. The whole mindscape glitching, Leo could feel his family reaching in, with both their ninpo and their hands, trying to pull him out; feeling the resistance, like him and Raph were joined magnets, their minds came away messy and ripped in the middle. Like a piece of paper, torn in half. The slider fell for what felt like forever. Until the black faded into the vague, tawny brown of the back of his eyelids.
Gasping back to reality, Leo stared out with unseeing eyes. Everything fading in from black. Blinking hard, the world fuzzing back into focus from colors and blurs and shapes.
A handful of colorful blobs hovered above him. Green and orange and yellow, green and purple, green and brown and yellow and black- what eventually sharpened into Mikey and Donnie and April. Leo laying on his shell on the concrete floor, staring up at the ceiling above. A dull pain in his eye, his throat. Trying desperately to catch his breath.
“Leo?!” April’s hands clamped on his shoulders, his sister shook him violently, and he groaned. “What happened? Are you okay? You better start answering!”
The slider clumsily swatted her hands away.
The box turtle’s scarred hands grabbing his, pulling the slider sitting, Mikey asked, “What did you see? What happened?”
Leo opened his mouth but then closed it again. Break flapping uselessly. Trying to put the horror into words. There was nothing he could possibly say. No way to explain what he’d just seen. Cold dread coiling in his gut, he came to a horrible realization- that thing, Not-Leo, it was still in there, and it had his brother. That realization was far more terrifying than anything else could be. Breathing hard, Leonardo grabbed at his throat. Eyes wide and trembling.
Something wet hit the slider’s leg.
Turning to where it came from, his brother- his brother’s possessed body, half him, half Kraang- had playfully spat water from its mouth. Looking up at him with wide, innocent eyes. Only his eyes and nose above the water, splish-splashing around in the big bath like a child. Completely unaware of the horrors of his mind.
A hand settling on his shoulder, the slider nearly jumped out of his skin.
“Sensei?” Looking directly at him, Casey Junior with his big doe eyes, future boy said, “You okay?”
Leo just shivered.
The whole family was looking at him expectantly. His throat gone suddenly, unbelievably dry, there was no way to explain what he’d just seen- what was going on inside of Raph’s head. He and the snapper had always had a special connection before this, but now, it felt like Leo was the only person in the world who even had the smallest semblance of a clue what he was going through… And he supposed he was. The rest of the family had never even attempted a mindmeld- apart from April, technically, with Karai. With Gram Gram. But he wasn’t sure if that really counted.
Either way, his brother was in trouble. It was up to Leo now. As it always was. This was his fault, so he was going to get them out of it. It was time to be a leader.
Shuddering, forcing out words he never thought he’d ever say, looking Casey Junior dead in the eyes, the words tasting like ash on his tongue, Leo said,
“I think we need to get Draxum involved.”
Notes:
I SOMEHOW COMPLETELY FORGOT TO LINK THIS BEAUTIFUL PIECE OF ART BY ONE OF MY LOVELY READERS!!! it's so so so good, thank you so much!!
if anyone else makes me fanart, PLEASE SEND ME IT, i wanna see it so bad!!! thank you again!!!
Chapter 2: reach up
Notes:
erm. hello. let me list all the things that happened since i last updated this fic. since the last update, i've:
applied for and got into community college, got hired at two jobs for the summer, attending training for both of those jobs, actually attended the graduation for my terrible high school, got ghosted by one of my jobs (that was set up by the state government?? wtf), did my other job (apprentice at Wayfinder summer camp, check it out!), got briefly sick, recovered, celebrated my 18th birthday (i'm a legal adult now!) couldn't write, started community college, and had to do a bunch of work (that i'm still procrastinating). the ao3 author curse hit me HARD.SO. this was getting so unbelievably long i had to split it into two parts. which means there's gonna be a third chapter, which i didn't anticipate. whoopsie-doopsie. but anyway... yeah! let's get on with the show! i don't think there's anything i particularly have to warn you about, other than generally sadness/creepiness and emetophobia. stay safe out there y'all
EDIT: also, i forgot to mention that i don't really know how to write draxum. and that cassandra is mentioned, but she's still not here. sorry casey. you'd make the plot a whole lot harder. anyway, enjoy!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
His Cell really wasn’t so bad when you got used to it, but with all the people in here, Pet was pretty sure this constituted a fire hazard. Not that he got a say in anything in the first place.
Watching the Guards flitter about like insects, the snapper’s torso throbbed with a warm, dull sort of pain. Like pressing on a bruise. Monotonous in the ache. Curled up on his sleeping-pile like a dragon on its horde, he ran a hand over it, the soft fabric, the secrets he’d stuffed down, hidden away in the blankets beneath- he wasn’t comfortable having all these people so close. So close to his treasures. So close to his Key, what was for his Master and his Master alone. What was for the Kraang, what was for him, only him, and the praise he’d receive for fetching it- the Guards were good, yes, they were kind, but they had no idea how to handle something so precious. They would break it, surely. Dirty it with their hands. No. No, Pet would keep it. Pet would keep it safe. Safe from the Guards and their hands and their meddling.
The Guards. Those funny little creatures, what followed him around like carrion birds. In and out, this way and that, coming together and then dispersing… They floated together and apart again like waves against a shoreline; like amoebas in the dirt. The snapper followed their movement with tired, somewhat wary eyes.
The Guards. They’d bandaged him up, after the bad people were gone. After he’d reasserted himself on this barbarian planet’s food chain. One of the bad people must’ve landed a solid hit on him or something, though, because his left side had begun to burn hot like fire, and the bone over his liver- or maybe his intestine, maybe that was a bit lower- had cracks in it running up the plate towards his ribs… The bad people and their metal noisemakers had actually managed to hurt him. But Pet supposed the injury was better his than of the fragile, fragile Guards.
Y’know, It was actually kinda funny in retrospect. The adrenaline had covered most of the pain for him. Before the burning set in, honestly, it’d felt more like he’d been punched real hard in the side- and considering he’d taken all the bad people down so thoroughly, he’d been so covered in their pest-red blood, it was only exiting the Prison’s pool that the Guards even realized he was bleeding. Or, at least, the Watchman did. With the Warden’s help, they’d taped up all the cracks and slathered him in some gel that burned even more, but not like the Attendant’s fire had done, previously- they were trying to help him, not hurt him this time. The Guards had covered him in so many bandages, Pet actually sort-of resembled the Watchman, now; he and the slider all wrapped up in adhesive cloth.
Speaking of the slider… For one of the Guards he saw the most often, the Watchman would genuinely confuse him sometimes. Like earlier, when they’d put their hand on Pet’s forehead and made his skull feel all weird inside. What had that been? Or when they’d threatened the spray bottle over practically nothing. The bad people were already dead- just meat now. Spoils of war. And Pet hadn’t had lunch yet… He’d just been so hungry. But the Watchman had refused to have it, though. Refused to even consider it. And while Pet could fantasize all he wanted about ripping the flesh from the bone- tasting meat again, beautiful meat- he wasn’t anywhere NEAR crazy enough to try and disobey a direct order. He supposed he’d just have to wait for the Attendant to make dinner. Recently, they’d been giving him steaks as rare as they could make them.
(Pet could feel his mouth beginning to water, almost tasting all the fresh blood on his tongue. The prey-flesh in his jaws. All of that fresh meat. But he swallowed it all down, though, saliva and thoughts, like a good boy; thick and tasteless. Now wasn’t the time to be thinking about that.)
The Guards. All of them were here, now, and he meant all of them- all six from the first night he’d spent in Prison, plus a mystery seventh he didn’t quite recognize. People he’d honestly wondered if he’d ever see again, especially after the Warden began to rule the entryways with an iron fist. The dark-skinned human girl with the cat’s eye glasses. The sickly-looking human boy with the big, curious eyes, lily-white skin and the clothes that never quite fit: two that Pet had dubbed the Commander and the Soldier. They held themselves with a hard, battle-won confidence.
(Something he’d actually been thinking about earlier: the Soldier looked a lot like another Guard who’d visited, once. The two of them shared a striking resemblance. A very loud human girl, pale but muscled, one whom Pet had subsequently dubbed the Drill Sergeant- one who said she’d “come back when Red is himself again”. That had been an interesting visit, to say the least. She’d given him a box of Girl Scout brownies and a switchblade for his pile. As to be expected, the other Guards had confiscated the latter pretty quick- but it was the snapper’s gift, so he’d eventually stolen it back, and into his pile of treasures it went. It was actually somewhere beneath him right now. Somewhere hidden underneath his blankets. Since then, he hadn’t caught a glimpse of the Drill Sergeant once. He vaguely wondered if those two facts were correlated.)
The one Guard he didn’t recognize- the mystery seventh- Pet had ended up naming the General. A tall, broad-shouldered creature, with pink skin and the features of a goat; sharp, angular cheekbones and a serious air. Something like a satyr, but with eyes that scanned him cold and calculating. The other Guards seemed to hold themselves somewhat differently around them- the goat man and the Attendant talking back and forth, the Nurse clung anxiously to the side of their conversation. Something something, biological yet magically-influenced infection, something something, why didn’t you contact me sooner… Everyone talking all at once, gossiping in groups of three or four, it was hard to follow any of it at all.
At least, it was until the General strode forward and grabbed Pet by the face.
“Why don’t we see what we’re working with.”
One hand grasped tight around his jaw, squishing Pet’s cheeks together, the goat man squatted down on cloven hooves to get a better look at him. Eyes squinted, face inquisitive. Studying him with an intensely serious gaze. Blinking one eye at a time, staring at the wall, the snapper looked anywhere but the other Guards, purposefully avoiding the General’s scrutiny- their nails dug a bit painfully into the side of his face. Their eyes burned holes in him like cigarettes.
The cracks in the wall. Behind all the Guards. The texture in the surface of his Cell’s concrete. They were patterns Pet had given names to- familiar friends that kept him company through the long, dark quiet of this Prison-planet’s night. One of them he called the Flood That Drowns All Things. Another was the Judgemental Water Buffalo. It was a good enough distraction from the way the General was looking at him, at least; like a teacher at a failed paper. Like a project with subpar results. Turning his head experimentally in their grip, they studied him, a vague distaste in their expression.
“Be gentle with him,” the Nurse- the old rat- fretted from the side.
“He’s hardy,” the General responded; voice low and gruff. “I know my creations.”
Wringing their small, clawed hands, the Nurse continued, “You said you have brought your solution?”
The General huffed. “Obviously. Though I’m not sure why you haven’t managed to fix this… situation already. It seems relatively simple to me.”
Leaning against the wall with their arms crossed, the Warden piped up, “Oh, believe me- it’s not. I’ve made serum after serum, but all they seem to do is make him sick.” Expression souring, clearly squeamish at the memory, the Warden said, “D’you think that’s a side effect of the infection? Forcing a, um- biological reaction in order to protect itself? Inducing emesis? That whole situation?”
“Could be.” Gaze never once faltering, the General pulled at his chin with their other hand. Obediently, the snapper opened his mouth. Letting the goat man peer inside. “Hm. All the cuts inside Red’s mouth appear to be closed. That’s a good thing- this way, it won’t accidentally enter directly into his bloodstream.”
“Woah, woah, wait.” From next to the Warden, the Watchman waved their hand; the one that wasn’t holding on tight to their crutch. “Cuts? In his mouth? From what? When did he get that?”
Releasing Pet’s face, the General turned back towards the others. Seeming somewhat off-put. “Were you not aware of this before? They seem to be several weeks old. Healed up well. That would place their origin from sometime before he re-succumbed to the infection.”
Oh, yeah… Pet vaguely remembered how he’d gotten those. He vaguely remembered when that’d happened. Back when he was a Bad Dog, back when his Master was still training him, he’d ended up with some bits of broken glass in his mouth, and in response, his Master had ordered him to swallow it- when he’d started bleeding as a result, as the red (red, like what the Guards called him) began to spill down and out from his lips, Master had taken some of the blood from his skin and tasted it. That’d been one of the first few stages of connection between him and the Kraang.
The snapper communicated none of this information out loud- of course he didn’t, how could he- but for some reason, all the other Guards looked vaguely disturbed. Everyone staring at him and then each other, an unsavory silence took the room. Choking the air. Settling like a weight; like a spotter-less barbel, intolerably heavy. Taking a step or two closer, the Attendant tapped their fingers together in their black compression gloves, scanning Pet from tip to tail. Kinder than the General’s gaze had been, but no less thorough. He squirmed a bit uncomfortably.
Pushing themself standing again, the General turned back towards the Warden. Back towards the rest of the Guards. Saying, their voice level yet strangely genuine, “I can’t guarantee the effectiveness of this, especially considering how much you’ve already tried… However, my serum contains not only medicine, but also some elements of time-related magic.”
The Commander put one hand on her hip. “Translation into something everyone else can understand?”
“It’ll rewind his mindset to moments before the original infection took hold,” the General explained like it was obvious. “The combination of both science and magic might prove to be more effective.”
(For some reason, the Warden didn’t seem to be very happy about that.)
Shifting on his sleeping-pile, Pet blinked. His legs beginning to fall asleep beneath him. He didn’t really know what they were talking about, with serums and infections and all that, but he was almost certain they were gonna make him drink one of the Warden’s yucky concoctions again- those gross purple liquids in the little glass vials. What always tasted awful and made his head hurt. And just when he thought they’d finally stopped trying to fix him! So much for that, he supposed…
(It was times like this Pet honestly missed his big claws; his tentacle arm. He’d woken up in Prison without them. Missing, somehow. Amputated. He had no idea how or who done it. Scaring the Guards was one thing- and not something he took any particular joy from, for most of them, at the very least- but when he had his other Kraang weapons, more than just his nails and his fangs, he came off more threatening. Everyone was on a higher guard…no pun intended. The Guards all treated him more carefully. Nobody was brave enough (or foolhardy enough) to just come up and jostle him around like this. Or maybe this nonchalance was specific to the General. He wouldn’t know.)
Straightening to their full height, the goat man towered over the rest of the Guards. Saying a few more clipped, probably significant words Pet didn’t quite catch, he was too busy looking at the thing in their hand- what the General had just taken out of their pocket. A test tube full of clear liquid. Little pockets of air gathered in bubbles around the top. As emphasis for something, the General flicked it with the side of their finger, and the glass container made a dull clink; the solution sloshing about inside. It looked different from the Warden’s weird medicines, at least. Maybe it wouldn’t taste as gross. Maybe it wouldn’t make his head hurt this time. (Unlikely, but a dog could dream. Right?)
Turning their tincture over in their hand, the General continued to speak. “-not sure how long it’ll work for,” they said, the end of a sentence the snapper had neither heard nor really focused on. “Most likely a handful of hours. If you haven’t noticed, I’m not exactly in the business of un- mutating people.”
“That’s enough,” the Attendant insisted. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”
“Not so fast,” the Soldier challenged, voice a bit nervous. But that Guard always was. “We have to make sure he even gets it first. Didn’t you say he usually fights?”
The Warden snorted at that. “Oh, believe me- he does.” Metal hands pinning him down, trying to pry open his jaw- his mouth snapping shut, some of the flimsier ones breaking into pieces under the strain- the Warden cursing, at him, at the world. Memories of a not-so-distant past. Words thick with snark, the softshell put in, “Well, until he swallows, at least… But then it’s a fight with him just to keep it down.”
Sitting on the floor looking up at them all, the snapper blinked again. Swallowing some indistinct taste, what lay lingering in the corners of his mouth. Catching a yawn in the back of his throat, staring at the bucket the Guards had given him for his sick, sitting ever-present in the corner, he leaned back in his sleeping-pile, shaking himself out like a dog; stretching out all his limbs. Might as well get it done easy, this time. Might as well get this all over with.
Turning to the General, the Attendant put out their hand. Saying, “Let me do it.” The Warden tried to protest, but their two cents’ worth was resoundly ignored- all of it falling to the wayside. The glass thingy passing from Guard to Guard, the box turtle took a step forward; closer to the snapper. Their voice gentle. Shoulders open. Their body language intensely, obviously, purposefully calm. Bending down a bit, getting on his level, solution in hand, they greeted, “Hiya, Raphie. How ya feeling?”
Pet chirped in response.
“That’s good! I’m glad.” He hadn’t said anything in particular, but the Attendant gave him a soft smile regardless. Every-so-slightly tilting their head. “Can I maybe ask you to do me a favor? I need you to drink this, but I really don’t wanna fight you… I know it sucks, but it’ll make you feel better, I promise.” The snapper didn’t exactly know what he was supposed to feel better from, but either way, he mimicked the way their head had moved. Listening to his favorite Guard speak. “Can you pretty please go ah for me, so I can pour it in your mouth? I’ll try to make it quick so you don’t have to taste it. It’s medicine, so I think it’s pretty yucky.”
Bending down a bit lower, almost apologetically, the Attendant held up the General’s solution. The two of them pretty much now face-to-face. The liquid sloshing around, a bit gooey inside the glass, sitting there still, Pet stared at it, at the Attendant, trying to steel his nerve… This was NOT going to be fun. But the box turtle genuinely was asking him nicely; something none of the other Guards had bothered with before. And it didn’t go unnoticed. It didn’t go unappreciated. A little politeness went a long way, these days.
(Sometimes, Pet felt the Attendant was the only one who understood him. The only one to see him how he truly was- as anything more than a Prisoner, a creature. Sometimes he felt they were the only one to look at him and actually see the light in his eyes. But he supposed he was both of those things, anyway; a creature. A Prisoner. The odd man out. He supposed he was all of the above. An outsider.)
Gently taking the Attendant’s wrist- broadcasting as best he could that this wasn’t a threat- Pet guided their hand, the glass vial to his lips. Carefully opening his mouth, he took the rim of the test tube between his teeth. After a moment’s hesitation, flicking his head back, he swallowed the medicine like a shot, releasing the Attendant’s hand again, practically pushing them away: he’d tried his best to avoid it, but some of the liquid had still ended up in his mouth. On his tongue. Immediately, he was overwhelmed with the taste of sour-bitter, that awful base flavor that only medicine could have. Shivering hard, he twitched involuntarily, shuddering at the taste. Trying to banish it from his senses. Gross, gross, gross.
He was still in the process of shaking himself out when one of the Guards began to speak. “How did you do that?” the Warden insisted. Sputtering. Speaking up again. “It never… He never just lets you do it like that. He’s never done that before. That NEVER happens!”
“Well,” the Watchman attested, “it just did.” Grinning slightly, the slider elbowed their twin. Telling them, “C’mon, bro- it’s Mikey. Don’t question it. He’s magic.”
“Literally,” the Commander added. A smirk on her face. It faded after a moment, though, falling from her expression- gazing from person to person, she asked, “But, uh…now what happens? Do we wait?”
The Watchman shrugged. “Yeah, pretty much.” The main Guards drifting off, they began to collect by the Cell door. “We could put on a movie in the living room, if you want? That’s what we usually do. Or what we wanted to do, at least. I bet there’s a bunch that Junior hasn’t seen yet.”
Putting a hand up to silence them, the General looked disturbed. “Stop. You don’t remain in the room while he processes the solution?”
“Why would we?” the Warden responded. A bit hostile.
“Why wouldn’t you?” the General bit back. A lot more. “I thought you were a scientist. You’d willingly pass up on more data? Anything could happen, and you’d be none the wiser.”
The Warden pulled a face at that, but they didn’t necessarily disagree. The Guards continued to bicker above him, but Pet couldn’t hear. He was beginning to lose his focus.
Right on cue- like the medicine was listening- a dull pain began to throb through the snapper’s forehead. Thudding like a drum beat in his skull. Pounding in his eye. Like a dull blade, trying to carve its way out from the back- whimpering, Pet moved to cradle his head. To bury it, down against the cool floor and soft blankets. Trying to keep himself together. Keep himself normal-looking. The darkness began to creep in from the sides. But he was okay! Everything was okay… He could handle this. He could handle this.
(He couldn’t. He really, really couldn’t.)
The Guards all talking loud and fast, Pet dug his nails into his skin. Hard enough to leave little marks on him. Little crescent moons. He couldn’t really hear what any of them were saying, anyway, with all the ringing in his ears- the ever-growing headache: manageably, manageably, the whole world sang at him one shrill, unpleasant note. Like an angel, screaming at him. EEEEEE. Screwing his eyes shut, now, pulsing with hurt, the snapper swallowed thick; his spit still tinged with that awful medicine-y taste. Dread cold like ice inside of him, his heart beat heavy and meaningful in his chest. But he had handled it before. He was handling it, now. He was keeping himself together just fine.
Shifting, the snapper moved to press the heels of his palm into his eyes. Watching impossible colors bloom before him in the black. Falling over him in bunches like a stage curtain, collecting upon itself in layers, there grew a specter of anxiety within- a sense of impending doom. Biological yet baseless. Rushing through his blood like adrenaline. A buzz like bees under all the noise; a whisper of it’s over, it’s all over, creaking in his lungs. Whistling under each and every breath. Alright…so, maybe a bit less manageable than he thought. But what was another challenge, really? What was another forcible crack in his solid wall of fortitude? What was another glob of medicine shoved down his gullet? What was another attempt to finally shut him up? He was fine, really. He was normal. He was completely and utterly chill. He was fine… His cup practically runneth over with sheer okay-ness. Didn’t it? He runneth over. He runneth over.
(He runs, he runs, he runs, he runs, he runs, he runs, he RUNS- )
A gasp tore from his mouth before he could shut it. Before he could slam his jaw closed. From wherever the Kraang had placed their Gift- somewhere inside the bone of his skull, somewhere behind the gel of his eye- something began to writhe uncomfortably; digging its claws in like Pet’s own nails. Trying its best not to get torn out. Trying its best to remain where it was. Like a hangover, like coming down from a good high, the perpetual fuzziness in his brain began to recede, replaced by nothing but blurry noise and light and ache; something he knew he couldn’t let happen. A sign of infinitely worse things to come. For his own sanity, in the animal part of his brain, he knew instinctively, now, that he needed to fight: he needed to kick and scream and scratch and bite, to do whatever it takes. He needed to get rid of it, right away. He needed to sink back down into oblivion. And get rid of it he would. He wouldn’t let this just happen to him. He couldn’t let this happen to him. He just couldn’t- he’d go feral before he let it all fade. He’d lash out with claws and tongue and teeth.
But there was no need for that, now. Not yet, at least. Coming down clear as day through the Hivemind- clear as day, thrumming through the connection between them- his Master told him, in no uncertain terms, throw it up. A direct order. A divine command. Either way, Pet was already on the case. This had already happened a bunch of times before. He practically had a routine for it, by now.
Quick as a flash, reaching around all the Guards and grabbing the bucket, the snapper all but collapsed over the rim; his insides burning with urgency. Stuffing his fingers in his mouth, he tried his best to make himself vomit. His own biology rejecting him. Gag reflex pushing into overtime. But the Guards descended upon him like vultures just as quick- in the blink of an eye, they were tackling him; restraining him. Holding him down. Trying to pin him against the concrete floor beneath. Ripped from his mouth, the Attendant kneeled full-force on his dominant hand. The spit on his fingers, slick and shiny, began to rub off on the sheath of their kneepad. He struggled to no avail. The ground was cold and hard against his shell; his skin. Like the Guards’ nails- their hard-gripping hands- it almost felt like a pathetic excuse for an embrace.
Forcibly laying down now, the Guards all in a pile on top of him, the blood began to run pins-and-needles to his head. Stomach acid rising in the back of his throat, what hadn’t quite made it past his tongue, it sizzled in his mouth, filling it with a somehow even worse taste- coughing hard, plastron rising, falling, the snapper grappled with them, but none of the Guards did so much as budge. None of them even began to ease their grip. Everyone was talking. Everyone was screaming. Everyone was saying a hundred things all at once.
Somewhere above his squinted eyes, there swam the blurry shape of the Warden. Fuzzy around the edges, green and purple and black. Sputtering. Saying, completely open in their shock: “This- Has he been… Has this been happening the whole time? Has he been doing this on PURPOSE?!” There was rage in their voice- rage pointed at him- but Pet was too busy fighting the other Guards and their grip to focus or really care. “I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it! That, that fucking-!” The rest of their statement was so profanity-laden, even the snapper flinched. “I just can’t FUCKING believe it! This entire time- I just-”
“Told you so,” the General retorted; cutting off their rant. Technically correct, but the worst thing he could’ve possibly said. The goat man earning himself a dark, heated glare. The Warden opened their mouth again, looking like they were gonna say something- looking like, at this point, they were gonna do much more than just talk- but before they could do anything, the Commander caught their arm and pulled them away. Dragging them to the edge of the room. Practically out the door. The two of them talked back and forth in quick, hushed whispers. The Warden glancing periodically back over their shoulder, gaze stuck on Pet and the General, ambiently scanning over the rest; distracted. But man, if looks could kill…
If medicine could kill.
Pinned to the floor beneath pretty much everyone, the snapper thrashed about in pain and discomfort. Already beginning to lose his focus. Tears welling up in the eye that could produce them, he blinked back the moisture quick. Vaguely wondering, disconnected from everything and everyone: when, in the Warden’s mind, had he gone from it to he? Like what the Kraang had done, what felt like forever ago… But that didn’t matter now. Nothing mattered except the pain in Pet’s eye. The ball of hurt, steadily increasing in volume in his head- ramping up from a headache to a full-on migraine. It pulled at his focus. The throbbing in his eye socket; what sunk in, digging its claws into his skull. Drowning out everything else in a steady beat of hurts, hurts, hurts.
Which was just perfect, by the way. This was exactly what he wanted. What he needed right now. A real effective use of everyone’s time, here… Really, all of this was just great. Tugging at his arms again, the snapper’s nails dug hard paths against the concrete floor. Somewhere inside of him, a spark of anger lit in him like a flame… Jerking sporadically, trying to fight, he bit and clawed and hit at anything he could reach- which was not much, considering. He did not want to hurt the Guards. He kept this in mind, as his jaws closed around empty air again- he did not want to hurt them, but they were hurting him now, so this basically counted as self-defense. He did not want to hurt the Guards. He didn’t want to, but he would; if they’d just give him the chance. If they’d just give him the opportunity. If one of them would get careless, put some piece of their body in biting range- if one of them would just slip up, really, he’d give them all a break-
Something shifted behind him. Vision blurry, Pet felt the movement in the air. Everyone else holding him down- four or five different sets of hands on him- one of them was decidedly different; somewhat recognizable. Claws brushing against his temple, he flinched on instinct, but nothing happened. Their scent was familiar yet strange. Kneeling down on his sleeping-pile- what must’ve been hell on their knees- the Nurse pulled his head into their (definitely far more comfortable) lap. Keeping him still with a surprising strength, but also a certain tenderness.
“Shh. Shh, my son…” the rat whispered. Delicately stroking his cheek. Catching whatever stay droplets managed to fall from his eye. “It will all be okay soon. You’ll feel better than you have.” Threading the little end bits of his Prison-Mask through their fingers, their voice was gentle and encouraging. “This is already passing. Stay strong. It is already almost done.”
“Actually,” the Soldier cautioned, “this is just the beginning.” Their face a blur of pink and brown and black hovering somewhere above. “It’s probably gonna get a lot worse soon. I’ve never seen it happen with a Fledgling, but I’ve seen people turn back from regular Kraang zombies before- it’s never pretty.” The entire room falling into miffed silence (apart from Pet’s grunts and heavy breathing), pretty much everyone who heard gave him a flat, unamused look. To which the boy responded, “What?” Oblivious.
Clenching his teeth hard enough to send a pang up his jaw, Pet’s hands twitched on instinct. Flexing out and then curling in. He may not have understood a lot of words in the Guards’ language, but he knew hurt… Oh, he knew hurt, and he knew it well. Well enough for the rising, aggressive panic in him to scream- entirely within the confines of his own head- YEAH, NO SHIT, SHERLOCK. The voice didn’t sound like his at all. Cold fear trickling in, mixing with the rage and the steady-building migraine already inside him, it was the perfect cocktail for a perfect shitstorm: a meltdown of utterly biblical proportions.
(I watch my ways and keep my tongue from sin; I put a muzzle on my mouth in the presence of the wicked/Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear unto my cry; keep not silence at my tears.)
Struggling hard against the ties that bind, the snapper’s nails turned inwards on his palms. Digging little semicircles into the muscle. Little curved marks, green on lighter green. His snaggletooth dug hard into his lip. Burning hot in his eye- every part of him feeling like it was burning, now- the tears overflowed from his non-Kraang eye and traced down his cheek, down towards the curve of his jaw; over the flap of skin and scales that covered his ear. Down onto the Nurse’s lap. Dripping onto the soft fabric of their robe. One clawed hand moving to wipe the wetness from his face, their touch was almost exceedingly kind, palm flat and cold against the heat of his skin… But it didn’t really help.
Listening to the blood rush inside him, Pet felt his pulse pound a steady beat. Like a metronome in his ears, ticking double-time. Loud as thunder, as lightning in his skull, loud as whipping wind, it hurt- everything hurt. The Soldier was right. Somehow, with every second, with every breath he took, it all just seemed to get worse. The snapper mewled in quickly-mounting agony. He’d almost forgotten about the pain in his side, the spiderweb cracks running up the bone, until the ache in him, now, called out to it; embracing each other like old friends. It joined with every other piece of dull, otherwise-ignorable hurt. Covering him in a thick layer of barbed-wire brambles. A medley of different flavors of pain. All a jumbled mess.
In the chaos, a jolt ricocheted up his nervous system. Something pressed exactly wrong into his side. Maybe by accident, someone put pressure on his bandages, the ones the Guards had wrapped him in before, making some noise about “protecting the fracture”… It didn’t hurt too bad, but he startled, anyway- one of his hands struggling almost free, it swung and made hard connection with what felt like someone’s face. Whoever it was made a noise, but didn’t fall back. Didn’t let up. Whoever it was, their grip didn’t loosen for an instant. The kind of strength that would be admirable, if it wasn’t being used against him right now.
(It wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t fair.)
On top of the cacophony, the maelstrom surrounding him, more voices that weren’t his swirled like a hurricane in his skull. Memories-that-weren’t-memories. Like smoke, pouring from the fire behind his eyes- things Pet was sure had never happened. Flashes of images, sounds. People talking. Saying, you are not alone- blue is the leader now- you don’t get it, Leo- can you repeat that from everything- I’m not giving up on him- took you long enough- is this Staten Island- hero moves are totally your style. A flood of voices, talking over each other all at once. A torrent of impossibilities. This couldn’t be real. This couldn’t be real. He knew for a fact that it couldn’t have been. Master said it was fake- that he’d made it up- so he must’ve. He must’ve. He refused to be a Bad Dog again.
(He couldn’t be a Bad Dog again. Please, G-d, please- he couldn’t be a Bad Dog. He couldn’t go through it all again. He just couldn’t.)
Tears blurred his already-cloudy vision in incomprehensibility. Lightning bolts cracking down through his head, his ribs- or maybe it was just how hard he was grinding his teeth- the snapper thrashed like hell, trying to keep his wits together; trying to comprehend a paradox. Like staring at an optical illusion. His mind wavered between contradictions, stuck between two minds: stuck between both and neither option at all. Two minds. Two personas. Two realities. The Guards’ medicine was trying to pull the Kraang away from him, but he was Kraang. His sanity came apart messy and torn in the middle. Like slime- like an oozing semisolid- he didn’t know where the Kraang ended and he began.
Feeling his mind bloom open like a flower, reality beginning to crumble in on itself, the whole world blurred into nothing and nowhere. Distorting into bleary nonsense. Sound and shape and silhouette.
The snapper clenched his jaw so hard, the tension registered separate through the pain. Which, considering the all-consuming ache, what gnawed in time with his heartbeat, was no easy feat. Alarm bells ringing in his head like for whom it tolls, Pet tore through the static, reaching out to the Hivemind- to the connection between himself and the Kraang. Hand out like he was drowning, scrambling, desperate, he’d hold on to anything to keep his head above water; he’d take literally anything to make this all go away. He knew they couldn’t do that- they couldn’t ease his suffering, not from this far away- but couldn’t they do something, literally anything at all? Maybe they recognized what dire straits he was in. He was lucky… He actually got a proper response this time.
Consoling him, whispering to him, Master’s voice came powerful through the madness; rumbling like thunder through this Prison-planet’s sky. Telling him, they can’t keep us apart forever. The statement phrased like a goodbye- but a temporary one. More like a see you later. Pet clutched with both hands onto the small, false comfort. Holding it close to his chest. He hoped so. He really hoped so. He really hoped they would.
The insanity reached a crescendo. A peak. The whispers, the flood of voices in his head had turned to screaming. The world swooped around him in wide, dizzy circles, something gone wrong in his inner ear- stomach rising like a roller coaster, his limbs went stiff. Buzzing with static. The Guards’ hands left him and came back like heavy, anxious butterflies. With some of his last coherent thoughts, he thought he heard one of them say, something something, seizure, and whatever it was, it made a lot of them respond with more shouting and more pressure… Colors dancing around in his vision, the yelling and heavy breathing and his pulse were like strange music in his ears. He could feel himself being torn apart at the seams.
But he keeps his composure. He keeps his composure. He keeps he keeps he keeps he keeps he keeps he keeps he keeps he keeps he keeps he keeps he keeps he keeps he keeps he keeps he keeps he keeps he keeps he keeps he keeps he keeps he keeps he keeps he keeps he keeps he keeps he keeps he keeps he keeps he keeps he keeps he keeps he keeps he keeps-
Rational mind dropping off into nothing, hysteria settled comfortably in.
(Cursed shall you be in your comings, and cursed shall you be in your goings/The Lord will send upon thee cursing, discomfiture, and rebuke…until thou be destroyed, and until thou perish quickly; because of the evil of thy doings, whereby thou hast forsaken Me.)
Losing himself completely to it- the madness, the noise- Pet did the only thing he could do.
He threw back his head and he screamed.
Of all the little changes Leo had woken up to after the Invasion (and all the not-so-little changes, too), one of the most maddening by far had been the hole in the wall of the MedBay. Mostly because nobody would tell him where the hell it came from. What the hell had happened.
It’d been three days. That’s what the others had told him, at least, once he was coherent enough to understand them- he’d been out of it for three whole days. An entire seventy-two hours had passed without him. Seventy-two hours of his family going on and monitoring his body and trying and failing to heal. Three days. It was even longer than that before he felt okay enough to try and move around again. Thanks to Draxum’s handiwork, he and his brothers were nigh-indestructible, but broken bones were broken bones, regardless of mutant genes. As a result, Leo got to spend a lot of time staring at the MedBay and rereading old comics, oh joy of joys; imagining what was going on with everyone else. Counting the rivets in the metal one by one. Reading far too deep into whatever interactions he did have with his family. Counting the rivets all again. Thin sheets clenched in tight, balled fists, he mulled over all the worst-case scenarios.
Studying- what was never that far away from him, now, a constant companion- the hole in the wall.
To be fair to everyone’s inexplicable vow of silence about it, he supposed it wasn’t really that bad a hole. Right on the border between dull and interesting, the slider wasn’t sure why it’d captured his imagination like this. About halfway up between the floor and the ceiling, hovering above one of the empty examination tables, maybe at head-height, whatever (or whoever) made it hadn’t actually gone through the wall all the way- in that, it was more of a particularly large dent than a proper hole. Wide and squarish-circular, it hung in the shape of a fist. A big fist. The light reflecting off it strange, it stared at him like some big, unblinking eye; watching him. Taunting him. Like Ahab’s white whale, a harbinger of death and despair in the night.
(If not that dramatic, though, then some piece of a larger puzzle, at any rate. Just another mystery Leo would have to piece together by himself. Just another question everyone else would dance around the answer to. Nobody wanted to talk anymore. Nobody wanted to speak. Unless it was about his recovery- all phony smiles and eyes that ached- nobody said anything at all of substance. Vaguely, in the back of his mind, he wondered if his family was trying on purpose to drive him crazy.)
But he digressed.
In some cases, at least, Leo knew for a fact it wasn’t just paranoia. He and his family and his city had gone quiet. Something in the air down here had changed. He couldn’t quite put a finger on it, but something felt different…beyond all the residual trauma, what was sure to linger, something just felt wrong. So strained and awkward, it felt like it was choking him. Wrapped ‘round thick and heavy like an x-ray apron, unspoken words hung in the air between them all like a sour note. Something had definitely changed. Looking back, maybe that was why Dad and April and his brothers and Casey Junior came around, visiting him like clockwork- maybe they felt the tension in the air. Maybe they already knew. It was a good thing for him, regardless… It left him far less time to stew alone in his thoughts like he would’ve done. Pretty much everyone had showed up to visit at some point except for Raph. A fact Leo hadn’t actually noticed at first, considering he’d been too much of a sad-sack to focus on anything except his own boredom and his own issues, but the more time had passed, the more glaringly obvious it’d been: Raph was either avoiding him or the MedBay on purpose (assuming the snapper was awake and aware enough to do either of those things). Raph was avoiding him, and for some reason, nobody wanted to talk about it.
It didn’t matter, though. It didn’t matter if they didn’t want to talk about it. It didn’t matter if they did. The slider was determined to get his answers through any means necessary.
(He wasn’t called the Face Man for nothin’. He could be convincing when he wanted to be.)
Y’know, looking back, it was kinda funny. Both times he’d managed to make someone crack, it’d been Donatello. For all of his “emotionally unavailable bad boy image”, something nobody was truly convinced existed, he’d always been a terrible liar… A trait that was as endearing as it was annoying. As amusing as it was deeply exploitable. Like back then, for instance. The first time he’d managed to do it, the first time he’d managed to get somebody to talk, it’d been when his twin had shown up to give him breakfast and painkillers. Dr. Feelings off visiting some of his other patients. Catching the softshell’s wrist, looking up at him, beseeching, Leo had asked him, Don-Tron, tell me honestly- is Raph avoiding me on purpose? Is he mad at me? To which his twin hadn’t really responded. Grasping his wrist so tight it clicked, Donnie looked away- his expression unreadable on his face. Staring dead-on at the hole. Responding eventually, he’s avoiding everyone. You’re not special in that regard. The statement both intensely worrying and at the same time an incredible relief.
No more answers forthcoming after that, unless he wanted to keep holding and twisting Donnie’s wrist forever, the slider was forced to let him go. As infuriating as it was, he could tell that was all his twin was willing to provide. The others all keeping their mouths shut, lips zipped tight, it was like an intentional effort to keep Leo out of the loop. Ostensibly in the name of his mental health- still, it was more than a bit infuriating. Donnie himself seemed ashamed that he’d spilled even that little…if the softshell was even capable of shame in the first place. Still. Still. The hands on the clock ticked like they couldn’t be bothered to. Time passed slow as molasses dripping off a spoon.
The second time he’d managed to pry some answers out of Donnie, it’d been much, much later. A couple days later. Maybe a week- what’d felt like much longer, like months in the sterile quiet. Leo beginning to carefully move around again. His feet unsteady beneath him, his knees radiating with aching, nagging pain. His new crutch supporting pretty much his entire body weight. Even then, Raph still hadn’t visited him, nor really gone anywhere near- according to everyone else, the snapper hadn’t left his room for anything beyond the bare necessities. Ever-elusive. (Though not for a lack of trying on Mikey’s end.) Apparently, nobody had seen him, REALLY seen him, since Leo first woke up… Their eldest brother practically a Bigfoot-level cryptid by now. He supposed it made sense, then, why they all talked about him the way they did. Namely, that they didn’t talk.
But it was different, the second time he’d managed to get Donnie to speak. When he’d cornered his twin for another talk. When he’d finally gotten his second mouthful of answers. It’d been late at night, then- because this wasn’t a daytime conversation. It’d been late at night, so late it verged on early morning- Leo up because of his own insomnia, Donnie refilling his ever-present mug of instant coffee. The both of them in a silent standoff in the kitchen, Leo had ambushed him with the question. If we’re not gonna talk about anything else, can we at least talk about this? Raph. The Invasion. Their mental states. The hole in the wall of the MedBay, generally in the shape of their older brother’s fist.
Standing there in the dark like shadows, only a few feet away from each other and yet a million miles apart, for a long moment, neither of them spoke. The whole entire world had gone quiet. The coffee maker hissing itself back to sleep in its place. Staring at each other, their eyes were just shaded holes in their bandana-less heads. Some part of Donnie’s battle shell glowed like a nightlight. Maybe that was a recent addition…he probably hadn’t taken his shield off since it’d been forcibly removed. Still. Leo didn’t say anything more, he didn’t coerce his brother, but he also didn’t look away- he stood tall and did not break. He didn’t show any signs of weakness. Hands closing around his mug of fresh-made coffee (what must’ve hurt like hell), the softshell backed down from the silent challenge to look down into it. Biting his lip.
It felt like an eternity before the stillness broke. Half-convinced it’d all been for nothing, just when Leo was preparing himself to turn back towards his room, Donnie had taken a step or two forward, leaning in, conspiratorial; looking around like he was making sure the coast was clear. Voice low and cautious. There was a long pause before he started actually talking, but at this point, Leo would take an explanation to anything. Anything… Where Raph had went. The silence between them. That g-ddamn hole in the wall.
And that’d been exactly what he’d gotten. A story and a secret, all wrapped up in one.
It’d been the morning after the Invasion. Everybody hurting, everybody tired, the sun had only barely risen on the day after one of the worst days of everybody’s lives. Leo unconscious on one of the MedBay cots, his brothers were all in a turtle pile together on the blanket-cushioned ground beside him. The box turtle had woken up early to make them all breakfast. Despite his hands still trembling and hurting, Mikey had turned to stress-cooking after the grand clusterfuck that’d been yesterday. (Which was honestly fair. Dad helped and all that, but Mikey cooking had always been a comfort thing for him. Hand injury or not, after what they’d been through, nobody was cruel enough to deny him that.)
Donnie was the one to wake up second. The sound and smell of food from the kitchen, turning over, blinking the rough sleep from his bleary eyes, he’d moved to wake up Raph, shaking his brother gently- what turned out to be a huge mistake. As soon as the snapper’s eyes had opened, he’d gone pale as a ghost. Pushing himself to his feet quick as lightning. Swearing like they’d never heard him, yelling, “FUCK! G-D DAMN IT!”, he’d swung a fist and punched the wall so hard it’d crumpled. Reddish tears running ruddy paths down their oldest brother’s face. Sobbing, it’d felt so real that time, nobody knew what the hell he was talking about, nobody knew what the hell he meant- a bit confused, a bit scared, Donnie (and then Mikey, and then April, and then the rest) had tried to tell him, it’s okay, you’re home now, but apparently Raph had just let the comfort wash over him. Absentmindedly wiping the wetness from his eyes. Telling them all, very blankly: I’m not letting you get my hopes up. But thanks anyway. Not even offering to fix the hole like he normally would. Instead choosing to pretend it didn’t even exist.
After that, apparently, the snapper had fled to his room. Sometimes leaving the door open, most times not. Laying in his bed and staring at nothing. Arranging his things into nonsensical orders. Reading anything and everything he could get his hands on. Writing furiously in a journal Mikey gave him, then scribbling it all out, only to write it all back down again… According to Donnie, he’d tried to ask him once, why’re you doing that, to which Raph had responded, I’m just tryin’ to pass the time- he stayed anywhere he could be alone, perpetually sort-of half-smiling. Telling them, no, Mikey. He doesn’t need help. He doesn’t want to talk. He doesn’t want to come to dinner that night. He’s fine. It’s all good. It’s fine. Something the rest of the family had just chalked up to trauma, as things started to settle down; uneasy, like one hand held out to feel the rain. He said he wanted to be alone, so they all just let him be. The snapper smiling at all who passes wide and fake.
He must’ve known the mask was slipping. Raph must’ve known, because everyone knew, and they were gonna ask him about it, gonna carefully broach the subject, but then Leo was awake- Leo was awake, and suddenly it was so easy to let Raph slip out of the room and out of mind. Intentionally fading himself into the background. (A feeling Leo knew all too well.) With another brother to focus the drama on, nobody had really sought him out since. A massive oversight. Though, the slider supposed, hindsight was twenty-twenty.
As Leo listened to his twin explaining, telling the story, a horrible realization began to creep its way up his spine. He’d had maybe two conversations total with Raph since the Invasion, if that- neither of which he’d been really in his right mind for. Once when they were driving back to the lair and he was on the verge of passing out. The other when he was drugged out of his mind on painkillers, his older brother standing by the bed- slurring up at him, d’you think this is real? To which Raph had responded, no. But it’s fine. He’s fine. Everything is fine. He doesn’t want to talk about it. He’ll see you later, Leo. Leaving the MedBay and his life in one fell swoop. Since then, he’d only seen flashes of his older brother in the coming weeks and days.
But things had gotten better. They really had. A tiny bit better, day by day, for all of them… It hadn’t been a dramatic change, sure, they weren’t living happily-ever-after- Leo knew he was still fucked up in the head, he knew this was trauma with a capital T- but it was real. This slow progress. This step-by-step progression. It’d been theirs. Like the sands in the hourglass, trickling down; the more the daylight burned, the more he felt himself nudging closer and closer to eventually okay. The more his family started to come out of their (metaphorical, not literal) shells.
So of course it all had to come crashing down eventually. Just his luck. Of course, it had to happen right when things were starting to become normal again- or, normal-er, he supposed. Normal-ish. Maybe Leo shouldn’t have been surprised about that. Maybe he should’ve seen this coming. Maybe he never wanted to see what the mask was hiding. Maybe this was one mystery he didn’t want solved.
Standing, now, in their makeshift quarantine space, the room in which they held the Kraang, what felt like a million years since it’d all gone wrong, all the things that Donnie told him went rushing through his head like a flood. Everyone huddled together in their hasty-made holding cell, yet Leo completely alone in the crowd. His crutch his only steady companion. Swallowing thick and mouth-warm, he shifted on his feet and realized: maybe he never wanted to see one of Don’s stories up-close and personal. Maybe ignorance was bliss. But it was too late for that now. It was far too late.
Because the Raph that lay on the floor in front of him looked fucking terrified.
The snapper was as still as death. Sweat and tears tracing down from his jaw, the seizure dying down into sporadic twitches, occasional spasms, in the midst of it, Casey Junior had moved Raph into the recovery position- turning him onto his side. The proper procedure for medical events like this. What Leo should’ve honestly been doing. He’d frozen up under the pressure, but Junior hadn’t…his other family must’ve taught him that. Back when he was still in the apocalypse. Leo dimly wondered who their medic had been. His big bro breathing deep and shaky, the family hovered around Raphael like flies to a corpse- a bad metaphor for that, actually. Something Leo didn’t particularly want to think about. Shaking his head hard, the slider shuddered stiff. Trying to dislodge the thought. (Bad mojo. Bad luck. Bad karma. His family, of all people, did NOT need to attract the evil eye.)
Claws scraping lightly across the concrete floor, the snapper’s nails turned inwards on his palms. His breath a hitching yet steady rhythm. Plastron rising and falling and rising again. Familiar eyes pressed tightly shut, his brow was knit in what might’ve been pain. Mouth opening and then dumbly closing again, though he’d had a seizure, Raph thankfully hadn’t bitten his tongue- maybe a quirk of Donnie-based medicine, his spit was dyed purple on his cheek. Blinking hard, their eldest brother peeked one eye open at a time: his regular eye, then the one that was still Kraang. The whole family waiting with bated breath, the air in the room was thin in their lungs. Everyone waiting for something, anything to happen.
But nothing did. For an amount of time that was genuinely worrying, Raphael just laid there, still and silent; both eyes open yet unfocused, glassy. His entire body trembling with the seizure’s aftershocks. Or maybe with fear. Or maybe just cold. Under everyone’s watching gaze, the seconds and the milliseconds stretched out and out into eternity.
The stillness- in Leo’s opinion- took entirely far too long to break. Uncomfortably aware of his own pulse, his own breathing, he could feel the impatience rising in him, restless, churning; insatiable in the quiet. The clarity trickling back all too slow into the hollow of his older brother’s eyes. Itching to move, to act, the slider forced himself still, regardless, he rooted himself to the spot he stood… Just in case something went wrong. His fingers tapped together in endless, anxious patterns. How could he possibly look away? After what felt like forever, Leo’s brother squinted, gazing up, finally coherent enough to look at someone and actually see them- mouth opening and staying open, Raph’s voice was hoarse from all the screaming. Barely even a whisper, the snapper asked out into the empty air,
“…Mikey?”
Relief crashed over the room like a tidal wave. That single word, that single name, it sent a tsunami, rushing; so strong it nearly bowled Leo over. Shifting, smiling, looking around, he held his crutch just that much tighter under his arm. Relieved excitement running through them all like an electric current. An unspoken solace fizzling in the air between. Almost too eager, stepping forward, crouching over Raph from where he lay, their youngest brother responded, “Yeah?”
“Pain meds. Want. Need. Now.”
There came a beat of silence.
To be honest, if the situation wasn’t what it was- if it wasn’t happening right here, right now, in front of them- it woulda been hilarious how quickly the mood soured. The reassurance all winking out of existence. The once-friendly current between them all sharpening into lightning in the air. After a moment’s hesitation, processing his words, all at once, everyone sprang into motion- everyone talking, everyone moving. Everyone all getting in each others’ way. Mikey heading towards the door, Draxum beat him to it, already marching back in with a bottle of pain relievers from the MedBay; a bit ironic, considering. Handing it over (to Mikey, of course: he was obviously the goat man’s favorite of the group), the box turtle struggled with the cap, eventually shaking out a few of the pills into his palm. Leo moved towards Raph- generally unsure of what to do- but Donnie held up his arm. Holding him back. The twins stood separate from the rest of the group. Maybe as a failsafe. Or maybe just hesitation. Typing furiously on his wrist computer, goggles down and flashing scientific nonsense, Leo watched the softshell scan their older brother again and again; Donnie muttering angrily under his breath. Almost too quiet to hear. I still can’t fucking believe it.
April and Casey Junior taking the snapper’s shoulders, with a bit of effort, the two of them gently shifted him up. Just a little- just enough to take the pills Mikey slipped into his mouth. As soon as they let go, he flopped back down onto Dad’s lap again. Raphael cracking the medicine between his teeth. Leo cringed at the sound (and the phantom taste. All that coarse, bitter powder on his tongue- blech). Fingers tapping together again, he watched their eldest brother groan, curling up in on himself; his system churning and processing the damage. Everything and everyone gone silent for what felt like eternity. No one except Raph dared to make a sound. Dad gently stroking the fabric of his mask, the soft angles of the snapper’s face, for what felt like forever (but was probably only a few minutes), nobody talked- nobody moved. They all just waited for more of those precious, precious words. Fragile proof of some enigmatic something.
Hands flexing in and out- curling up into fists, then stretching back out into high-threes- Raph’s eyes pressed tightly shut until they weren’t anymore. Turning his head, he moved to stare at the group, indifferent: the light all gone from his eyes. Expression unreadable and vague. Laying still and quiet. Apart from the steady rise and fall of his plastron, their older brother looked almost dead. G-d, again, something Leo didn’t want to be thinking about- skin itching, the slider moved himself directly into Raph’s point of view. Saying with a tiny smile, far more calm and confident than he actually felt,
“Morning, Raphie. How ya feeling?”
Pretty much everyone in the room flinched before anything even went down.
In an instant, all the color had drained from the snapper’s face. Maybe from just the sight of him, or maybe due to what he’d said- either way, the slider startled. Backing up from the reaction regardless. Skin a shade of pale, pale green, the sweat and spit and tears all dyed purple, stained wetly on their older brother’s cheek, Leo remembered the Other-Him all at once and all too late. The Not-Him. The Other Leo. What lived, a living nightmare, inside Raph’s head; waiting behind the mirror. The Kraang-Him. Or, at least, whatever version of him the Kraang had conjured up to torture his family. (Not that that was any consolation.) Leo had seen the thing up close. The creature, whatever it was, had held him down and bled on him. And it must’ve hurt his older brother, too… Raphael had just looked so scared. And Raph was never scared. Nervous, sure- frequently- but not scared. Not this openly. Not like this.
Speaking of scared. Arms wrapped tight around his head like him shielding it, the snapper retreated as far as physically possible into his shell; into the fabric of their father’s lap. Curling up into a ball as best he could. Tension holding his limbs ramrod-straight, his nails sunk deep into the fabric of his bandana. Digging into the skin underneath. Whimpering, in a tiny voice, he said, “No. N-No, please, not again… I thought we were done. I thought- you said- hadn’t we…?” He trailed off. “I-I really thought we were done this time…”
Dad trying and failing to peel Raph’s hands up- trying to redirect his grip somewhere else, somewhere his son’s own nails couldn’t hurt him- the rat ran a gentle hand down his shell in a gesture of comfort. “Red…”
“Please,” the snapper begged. Burying his face in Dad’s robe. “Please. Not them. Anything but them.”
Leo felt his heart rip neatly into two pieces. Probably what everyone else in the room was feeling, too.
(Thinking back to the blood in the bathroom, the void in the mirror, Leo remembered with a cold, sinking feeling all those sickly yellow chains. What had grabbed his big brother and pulled him out of reach; pulling him backwards into the dark. Maybe Leo wasn’t the only one the Kraang had twisted out of proportion. Maybe there was more than just his own double lurking in the endless black. Standing there, frozen to the spot with distress, not for the first time, the slider wondered what had happened to him. What went on when Raph had been alone, completely at the mercy of the Kraang.)
Both hands clasped around one of Raph’s biceps, right beside the hole in his shell, April poured herself over him. Demanding, “What’s wrong with him?” Thumb rubbing up and down one of his shoulder spikes.
“I told you,” Draxum bit back, unamused. “My serum would revert his mindset to moments before the original infection. The red one may not be entirely lucid.”
A shudder running through him, Raphael kept talking, bulldozing over the rest of the conversation. As if they’d never said anything at all. “I d-don’ understand. What’d I do wrong…? I’ve been… I tried…” He trailed off again. Presumably consumed by feverish, incoherent thoughts. “I already promised…”
“Promised what?” Leo asked, as gently as he could.
“T-To… T’ be yours.”
An awful silence took the room. He could’ve sworn it was impossible, but the slider’s heart managed to break into even smaller pieces; going from halves to fourths to eighths to sixteenths. His stomach dropping to the center of the earth. From somewhere nearby, Donnie made a choked, horribly distressed noise- more of a squawk than anything. April’s hands tightened from where they lay. Raph’s head turned inwards against their father’s chest, Dad pulled him even closer in his lap.
Standing there, stunlocked, swaying on his feet- useless, useless- the same old ache radiating up from his knees, Leonardo just focused on keeping himself breathing. Feeling sick.
“Raph.” The words spilling from his mouth like water, voice thick with desperation, Leo said, “Raph, it’s- it’s me. It’s us, buddy- it’s us. Your family. You’re home now. You’re safe.”
His big brother laughed, but there wasn’t any humor in it. Turned away, great shoulders shaking, he might’ve been crying. Might’ve been both. Almost too quiet to hear, he responded, “You say that every time.”
(It was set up like a cruel joke. Like the ones Leo learned to stop telling when he was small; where the punchline would just make people hurt instead of laugh. Something mean and ugly and taunting, sounding far too much like the Other Leo, it whispered in the very back of his head: shellshock.)
He shuddered. One of the only people in the room still left standing- almost everyone else either knelt down or sat at Raph’s level, him and Donnie and Draxum stood frozen, hovering over the snapper like a dark cloud- the guilt rose in Leo’s chest like nausea. Something bitter and acidic, sizzling in the back of his throat. If only the signs had been more obvious. If only Raph hadn’t sacrificed his escape pod for him. If only Leo hadn’t lost that stupid fucking key. The shattered pieces of his heart somehow still beating, still working beneath his plastron, the slider took a single step forward, his crutch clicking against the ground, and in response, his older brother flinched; grabbing onto Dad’s robe like a lifeline. Hands tightened in the soft fabric hard enough to tear.
Flinching back in return, something like grief falling over him, Leonardo started, “Raph…”
“No. This ain’t…” Strong body shaking, the snapper reassured himself, “This ain’t real. You’re not him. This isn’t- None ‘a this is real.” Some broken noise pouring from his mouth, the laughter and the sobs all shook up together, his voice was tinged with something like hysteria. “I know that. I passed. D-Didn’ I? So we can go back to talking. Regular talking. Right? I-I’ll talk- I swear I will. I wanna talk. I wanna wake up now. I don’t… Please don’ leave me here. Please. Please?”
“Raph,” Leo tried, only to be cut off. Again.
“I just…” Voice breaking like a bone, the snapper whimpered, “I dunno what I did wrong.” Head turned to look over his shoulder, somehow staring dead-on at Leo, Raph’s pupils were splashes of wide, dark fear in the canvas-brown of his eyes. (Or, in one of them, at least.) Gazing out into nothing and everything, eyes glassy, he begged some impossible, invisible force, “Please don’ punish me. I-I’ll do anything. Please. Please.”
Another terrible silence settled over the room. Somehow worse than any of the other patches of quiet had been. It fell over them cold and heavy, like a school bus, like the titanium of one of Donnie’s less sophisticated machines- but it wasn’t something his twin could fix. It wasn’t a weight Raph could’ve lifted off of them, not even with all of his strength.
From where the human boy sat, Casey Junior and Donatello exchanged a serious look. Both unsure of how to help, the human’s hands hovering just above the skin. Something dour lingered in the air between. The whole world shrunk down into this room and this room only, perception zoomed in like a camera lens, nothing else existed except his family and the concrete; nothing else except them and the endless gray. The entire universe held like a bug in a jar. All of reality contained entirely within these four walls.
Knelt down in front of their older brother like an altar, Mikey practically shoved Casey Junior out of the way. Forcibly turning Raph around to face him, thumbs resting against his cheekbones, like a fragile thing, the youngest cradled his face in black-gloved hands. Like he’d shatter. Like a baby bird. Like some wild, scared animal. (Which, for the moment, the snapper legit kinda was.) Expression smoothed out into what the rest of the family called his “therapist face”- the box turtle telegraphing his every move slow and clear- Leo watched Doctor Feelings emerge from his cage; all calm and collected. Saying, so endlessly gentle,
“Raph. Raphael. Can you hear me?” The snapper nodded- almost too small to pick up on- and Mikey continued, “Okay. That’s good. Can you tell me where you are right now?”
Their big brother’s response came almost immediately. “With you.”
“And where’s that?”
A pause. This time, something like hesitation. Biting his lip, tearing at a spot that was already halfway bleeding, Raph’s eyes flickered around the room, looking away overly conspicuous- gaze going from Mikey to the rest of the family to the ceiling to the floor. Instantly, intensely nervous, he responded, “Wh-Wherever you want it to be.”
“You’re home,” Doctor Feelings corrected. “With us. The Kraang are gone. They’re not coming back.”
“O-Okay,” Raph shuddered. Clearly not believing it. Clearly just playing along. “If you say so.”
Mikey frowned. Hands twitching, tightening for a moment. His thumb stroking tenderly up and down their older brother’s cheek. He wasn’t the only one offput- Leo would’ve tried to help, would’ve offered to step in, at least, but he didn’t particularly trust himself around Raph right now. Not when he was like This. Not when it was partially his fault. (Partially? More like entirely, taunted that same voice; nagging in the back of Leo’s head. Teeth grit, he shakes it, trying to push the thought away. He’d torture himself about that later.) Black gloves still cupping the snapper’s face, Mikey ran them through some breathing exercises- in for three, hold for four, out for five- but they didn’t really seem to help. They didn’t really seem to do anything. Everyone crowded around their big brother, lying halfway prone on the floor, it was almost set up like a renaissance painting; like the four of them’s namesakes. It was almost beautiful. Almost.
“Please… I-I’ll do whatever you want,” Raphael pled and just kept pleading. No matter what anyone else put in. Repeating like a terrified, broken record, he said, “Please, just- please lemme out. Please lemme out of here. Please don’ hurt me. Please don’ leave me with them.”
Donatello and Casey Junior exchanged another serious look. Like the two of them knew something the rest of them didn’t- a conversation passing silently between. For a split second, as he watched, Leonardo felt himself snag with jealousy. Something like a bad idea, whispering inside him, it protested, that’s MY twin- but in another world, he supposed, a version of Donnie had been Junior’s mentor(? Uncle? Parental figure? Kid’s whole family situation remained extremely unclear). Leo supposed it just made sense he would’ve picked up on some of the softshell’s tricks over time. Learned to recognize some of his tells, at least.
But still. The box turtle bent low over their trembling older brother, Raphael splayed out in Dad’s lap like the other Michelangelo’s pieta, their younger brother kept insisting, this is real, this is really real, but it very obviously fell on deaf ears. Everyone could tell that Raph was just playing along. They could all tell he refused to really believe it. He refused, or maybe he was scared to- deliberately avoiding eye contact, the snapper fixed his gaze way off into the distance. Pointedly not looking at anyone or anything. Shoulders held tight, breathing deep and shaky, he murmured,
“…I wanna go home.”
Faltering, brow knit, Doctor Feelings faded away into regular old Mikey again. Open and vulnerable, like a soft spot in his plastron; heart on his sleeve, Leo watched the change in him happen in real time.
Face gaining back all its worry in an instant, the box turtle scanned their brother over. Calculating, some dark, unreadable emotion held close like cards to his chest. Mikey’s mind churned for a moment, thinking, at least before something visibly clicked behind his eyes- a literal lightbulb moment, light flowing into their littlest brother’s demeanor. An idea. Both characteristic yet unexpected of him, his next move was like 4D chess. An absolutely brilliant play.
Discarding all his faux-therapist training and effort- not Doctor Feelings, not Doctor Delicate Touch (and honestly, thank g-d for that)- Michelangelo leaned impossibly closer, pressing his palms somehow even firmer against Raph’s face. His scars lighting up with bright, brilliant gold. A surge of beautiful ninpo flowing between. Their big brother taking in a sharp, shuddering breath, the energy curled around his face like a blanket, Mikey asked him again, calm and clear,
“Raph. Can you feel that? Can you hear me now?”
The snapper nodded. Slow and small. Orange flecks glowing in his eyes like sparks; spinning, dancing in the air between them. Jaw slack, his face was painted with a shock like revelation. Looking up into the light. From beneath the stabilizer gloves, tracing up to his elbows, his shoulders, the box turtle’s scars wept gold like ichor; what must’ve hurt like hell on Mikey’s end. But their baby brother didn’t even hesitate. (Whispering in the back of Leo’s mind, there came something like the ghost of a memory. Casey Junior speaking low, his voice a mix of nostalgia and mourning- the most powerful mystic warrior the world has ever known. Something like Mikey’s voice, cheering in turn, mystic hands!)
It all proved worth it, though, in the end. The use of Mikey’s already-fragile ninpo. What they’d tried and failed with before already- what nobody would’ve asked of him, but he’d readily offered anyway. His hands all scarred and weak and trembling. Hissing breaths sucked in through gritted teeth. Because of Mikey’s efforts, the snapper looked up at their littlest brother and truly saw him; some abstract clarity rushing back into his eyes. Questioning, the same and yet entirely different this time,
“M…Mikey? Is that…?”
“Yeah,” he finished for him. A bit shakily. “It’s me.”
Raphael made the shape of words, but nothing came out of his mouth. Nothing but air. Shaking his head slightly, disbelieving, he searched the box turtle’s face above, looking for some omen, some undefinable something, some sort of sign; choking out, eventually- inanely- “It’s- I don’… Mike. Is that really you?”
“It’s me,” Mikey breathed out. Insistent. Reassuring. Reminding their brother, like a broken record, again and again and again- “It’s me. I’m here. I’m really here for you.” What would’ve sounded like a threat, coming from anyone else.
The snapper blinked quick. Fingers curling up in on themselves. Wetness gathered already in the well of his non-Kraang eye. Leaning hard into their baby brother’s touch, maybe not used to looking up at him, Leo knew all of their big brother’s tells, and he knew that right now, Raph was trying desperately not to let the tears fall- trying desperately not to cry. Puzzling out, “How’re you…? The Kraang. You broke through their- their thingy? Their barrier? The wall? Y-You’re… You’re here? You’re really here?”
“Yeah,” Mikey told him. “I did. I am.” Technically not a lie, but also very much not the truth. Casting a glance over his shoulder, he looked to Leo, first and foremost- neither of them knew what the hell Raph was talking about. And, looking around the room, it didn’t look like anybody else did either. “I’m here. It’s me.”
Biting his lip, Raph peeled at the skin; leaving a darkish little mark there. Snaggletooth digging deep into the soft flesh. “Then, ‘re you… Does that mean…?” He hesitated again. He just kept fucking hesitating. It really wasn’t that big an issue- it was really just his own anxiety- but every time his brother stopped talking, Leo worried that their time was up. That Draxum’s weird panacea had worn off, and the snapper would never say anything ever again. But that wasn’t the case. Not yet, at the very least. This time, as Raph muttered his next thought, voice fragile with hope, he dared to ask, “…does that mean you’re comin’ to rescue me?”
Leo’s heart stuttered painfully in his chest. The whole world knocked a bit off-kilter. Another memory whispering in his ear, this time of Draxum’s voice, almost tauntingly- it’ll reset his mind until just before the original infection took hold. Goat man really hadn’t been kidding about that, huh? Raking his teeth across his tongue, the slider breathed and tried to keep breathing. Relishing in the feel of it. The quickly-fading ache. It reminded him that he was still alive- that he was still here in this room, here on this earth. A bit unsteady, his chest seized with hurt at every heartbeat.
He supposed it was a good thing, then, that Mikey was the one doing the talking. Maybe he didn’t realize what Raphael was saying, or maybe he just had a really good poker face- regardless. While their big brother’s words ripped through the room, hitting like a missile, like a nuclear bomb, the box turtle didn’t think twice. Didn’t even hesitate. Assuring him,
“Of course we are! Raphie…” Delicately shifting himself away from their older brother’s face, Mikey moved to clasp one of Raph’s large hands in both of his. Thumb rubbing gently up and down the snapper’s knuckles. Promising him, a declaration, what apparently hadn’t already been made clear: “Of course we’re coming. We’d never leave you.”
That must’ve broken him.
Roughly gasping in a breath of fresh air, pushing himself upwards just enough, Raphael finally began to cry; almost hysterically. Practically throwing himself upon their littlest brother. Capturing the box turtle in a tight, tight hug. The force of his own sobs nearly choking him. Holding their baby brother crushingly close, like a teddy bear- like a lifeline- it was tight enough to make him squeak involuntarily, like a dog toy. The box turtle didn’t seem to care, though. Hugging him back as best he could, heaving his arms around their big brother’s plastron as far as they would go, Mikey’s scars settled back into almost-normal- dying down from glowing with magic to a dull, burnt yellow.
Sniffling, the snapper pawed uselessly at his face. Trying to wipe away a liquid that was still coming. Tears and snot and general wet. Like a flood, his voice so thick with tears it was nigh-incomprehensible, he whimpered, “I-I’m- I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, Mike, I’m so- You don’…” Just in case, the box turtle let their brother take the lead on the whole interaction, but Raphael couldn’t seem to get close enough; burying his head into Mikey’s shoulder. Curled up as small as he could make himself. Begging for forgiveness, but in a different way this time. “Please, I’m so- I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, Mikey. I broke. I broke.”
Rubbing a soothing hand up and down Raph’s shell, carefully avoiding the spikes, Michelangelo glanced around the room- silently looking for help. Gaze landing on Leo once again. But Leo had no idea what to do either. He had no idea how to handle this. Raph breaking down in semi-public was already an incredibly rare sight. (Sadly, if their older brother was currently in his right mind right now, he’d probably be embarrassed as hell. Not that having big emotions was anything to be embarrassed about. Doctor Feelings had beaten that sentiment out of them a long time ago. Or, at the very least, he’d tried.) Taking a step forward, the slider kept his free hand up in mock surrender, even if their older brother couldn’t see it- questioning, as calm and nonthreatening as he could,
“Raph… What d’you mean by that?”
“Th-They told me…” Gasping, the snapper sobbed uncontrollably between each breath. “They told me you were gone. Said I was- Said I was never goin’ home. Said you left me. Said you guys weren’t comin’ back.”
Guilt stabbed at Leo’s heart like the blade of his katana. He thinks if his chest hurt any more today, he was gonna have a fucking heart attack. They still knew nothing of those scant few hours, the time that Raph had spent alone with the Kraang- not even to mention That Whole Mess, he’d refused to speak in general to anyone about anything- but what they were seeing now painted a horrible picture. Leo wasn’t sure if he even wanted to know. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to find out. But he had to. For their brother’s sake. For Raph.
(It was all his fault that this even happened, anyway.)
Rocking ever-so-slightly back and forth, Dad and April and Mikey all collapsed together, enclosing the eldest brother in a hug. Cradling him like a baby; like a fragile thing. Intending to soothe. Gently shushing him, the box turtle repeated, like a mantra, like a comfort, “You’re comin’ home. We’re here. We’d never leave you behind, I promise. You’re safe.”
The snapper hiccuped. The tears barely even slowing. At this point, he’d end up crying all the moisture from his body. He probably was already well underway. “I wanna- I wanna go home,” their big brother bawled, sobbing openly: a complete and utter breakdown. What nobody had seen out of Raph in a long, long time. What everyone knew he made an effort to hide from the family, ever since they were kids. “I wanna- I wanna go-”
“You are home,” Michelangelo reminded. Casey Junior rubbing soothing patterns into the snapper’s arm from where he sat on the side. Closing the distance between them, Leo hurt too much to crouch down onto their level- it would be hell on his already-injured knees- but he rested a hand on Raph’s shoulder to make up for it; thumb stroking tenderly across his older brother’s spikes. Slow and a bit unsure, Donnie copied him a second later. Following his lead. Suitably awkward, Draxum hung at the very edge of the room, stepping out for a moment and returning with a box of tissues- kicking it in their direction, it was the closest to this emotional moment the goat man was willing to get. Regardless. “I’m here,” the box turtle reassured, as always; as always. “We’re here. Everything’s okay. You’re home.”
“You’re home,” Leo echoed, a whisper under his breath. What went lost under the commotion. Flying away from here, free. Maybe it was a reminder for his brother. Or maybe it was one for himself.
(Steep breaths filling the air like this- thick like steep emotions- the slider thought of himself fresh out of the Prison Dimension. Back when everything hurt and he felt like he was dying; like he was lost forever, floating in a void with his worst enemy. Had he looked this small, then? In the wilting fields of time that came after, had he looked this terrified? Rescue had felt impossible. So was the idea of ever being “okay”. The world felt dark and full of sharp, angry things. The air smelled like ozone and wet pennies. All of it had been blurry through the tears and dissociation, and Leo had only been in there with Kraang Prime for ten minutes- all three Kraang had their hands (tentacles?) on his brother alone for hours. Raph had seemed okay enough afterwards, apart from Literally All Of That, but it was only just now Leo realized there was no telling the extent of the damage. Whether it lived on the inside or the outside.)
The weeping dying down into a more manageable sniveling, after a few false starts, the snapper finally managed to pull himself away. Still lying halfway in everyone’s laps, suddenly a lot more rigid, Leo watched his big brother examine the box turtle, and then the rest of the family- face twisting with confusion. Stumbling over his words, the tears still streamed in steady tracks down from his eyes. “S-Sorry, um… I-I’m so sorry, but how’d- uh.” Usually so full and confident, when we went to speak, his voice was hoarse and infinitesimally small. “How’d we start talkin’, again? Are you here to…?”
“Yes,” Mikey reaffirmed, before he even finished the question. “We’re here to rescue you.”
“…Okay. That’s, uh…okay. But how did you…?” Hesitating again, drifting off, like he’d forgotten the entire first part of the conversation- and maybe he genuinely had- Raph asked again, “How did you get here?”
Reusing the logic their brother had already put down, Michelangelo repeated, “We broke through the Kraang-thingy.” Working off of what the snapper obviously already believed. In the very back of Leo’s mind, there came a whisper of Draxum’s voice, an unfunny joke, some bitter, acidic sort of irony- he may not be entirely lucid. Yeah, no shit, huh? Though maybe they should’ve expected this. Maybe they should’ve expected something even worse.
Raphael nodding slowly, Leo watched his big brother glance carefully about the room. Gaze flickering from person to person. Coherent enough to have his walls raised again. Studying the family through narrowed, tear-blurry eyes. Looking like a war was going on inside him, he told them all eventually- like a warning, like a truce- “You can’t… You can’t be lying. Okay? Not about this.”
Grasping at his hand again, Mikey squeezed his grip tight. Everyone in the family pile (except Donnie, of course) shifting themselves just a tiny bit closer in. “We’d never. I’m telling the truth. I promise.”
“You really promise? No tricks, no nothin’?”
Pulling his hand up, Mikey pressed their big brother’s rough knuckles to his lips. Whispering against them, “I really promise.” As serious as the grave.
Angling himself forward, leveraging the box turtle’s steady grip on him, Raph finally managed to heave himself up; going from lying prone to sitting. Upright and unsupported. Up in the middle of everyone. As soon as he did, Donatello pulled away. Somewhat understandable- the touch was probably getting too overstimulating for him. But nobody else moved a muscle. Leo especially. No one else dared pull away. His brother’s warmth was soothing against his palm- still beating, still breathing. Flush with blood beneath the skin. It was like holding the whole world in his hand. Like physical proof things were (probably, maybe) gonna be okay. Much better than the cold comfort of his crutch, at least.
Still.
Releasing their baby brother’s hand, letting it migrate naturally to his shoulder, Raphael wrapped an arm around himself like a seatbelt; sitting on his palm. Their big brother’s thighs held tightly shut. Big thighs enclosed around his wrist, his tail kept rigid and close to his body. It could’ve been nothing. It could’ve meant nothing. But Leo noticed that, and he didn’t stop noticing. The snapper still trembling, looking much smaller and weaker than he actually was, their brother’s eyes darted between: searching for something. Apparently finding it. Saying out into the empty air, talking to no one in particular,
“I… I-I’m sorry- uh.” Voice a croak, he tested the words like they’d backfire. Like one wrong move and they’d blow up in his face. (Honestly, though, no matter how incoherent his speech, it was a whole lot easier to hear now that he was upright. Now that his mouth was closer to Leo’s ears than the concrete.) Wincing, Raph forcibly pulled himself together; all ragged at the edges. What must’ve been really hard, especially considering the Kraang parasite still latched on his eye- what must’ve hurt. Leaching at the base of his cohesion. As though he hadn’t paused at all, he continued, “I-I… I did a bad thing.” Leo’s mind autofilled, sing-songy, I regret the thing I did. The slider shook his head. Unimportant.
“A bad thing?” Donnie deadpanned. Tone landed solidly between anger and sarcasm. Arms crossed, he leaned nonchalant against the wall behind. Asking, painfully blunt, “What could that POSSIBLY be? Let me take a wild guess… Is it throwing up all those cures I spent literal days on? And also wasting a bunch of really finite resources I’ll probably never get back? Wh- Ow! Nardo!” Leo whacked his twin hard with his crutch. Literally nobody needed this right now. This tone, this vibe, nor this energy.
“No,” Raph insisted, barely a second later. “‘S none ‘a that.” The answer coming almost immediate. The snapper maybe not put together enough to understand what Donnie was really saying. “It’s- It’s somethin’ else. Somethin’ important. To you. To us. I think. B-But I can’t tell you. They’ll get mad. They’ll hurt me.”
“Who’ll hurt you?” Mikey questioned. Doctor Feelings peeking out again. To which Raph answered,
“The Kraang.”
April still curled up, still bent in around him, the human girl responded, “Fuck the Kraang.” Their only older sister doing what only she could have done. Serving as a different kind of protector. A shield. Having to reach up, now, she moved to cup the snapper’s face in her hand; moving to take the burden of eldest sibling along with it. But that turned out to be a mistake.
Raph’s reflexes fast as lightning, his reaction like a flinch, he grabbed their sister’s hand and dragged it down; forcibly covering her mouth with it. The smell of fear hung thick in the air between. The snapper’s eyes gone wide as plates. Leo couldn’t tell his brother’s heart rate from here- he was half-tempted to reach up a little sneakier, press his fingers to the artery, and check- but it was almost certainly higher than it should’ve been. Sweat trickling down to the edge of his shell, all their hard-won calm disappeared in an instant.
Tone somewhere between mad, stunned, and terrified, Raph hissed, “You can’t say that.” An exhale through gritted teeth. “He’ll hear you.”
“Who’ll hear me?” April challenged. More than a bit hubristic. Prying their brother’s hand off of her, she held it idle against her leg in turn; fist grabbing at the fabric of her skirt, her tights. “The Kraang? They’ll have to go through us first. And I think I still got some leftover herbicide.”
The room waning into sudden, uncomfortable quiet, Leo paused for a moment. Swallowing stale. A patch of dry remained stubbornly at the back of his tongue. Hoping again that he wasn’t tempting fate, the slider added, “We already beat them once. I’m pretty sure we could do it again.”
(Not on purpose, as soon as he said that, him and Casey Junior caught each other’s eyes. It felt purposeful. It felt significant. It felt awkward as all hell. Leo didn’t know if he was lying or not. If what he was saying was at all realistic. If it was offensive, even, to a boy as many times an orphan as he had family- and all for exactly that reason. In another timeline, at least, they hadn’t beat the Kraang. They’d lost the war. But future boy said nothing in response to him. He simply turned away and scoured the dust on the ground.)
“But,” Mikey said with practiced cheer, expertly picking up the conversation, “You don’t have to worry about that!” Convincing him. Reassuring him. Always much better at this than anyone else was. Except maybe for regular, in-his-right-mind Raph. “They won’t hear you. We broke through their signal. Remember? We’re here for you. You’re safe.” He fed into the fantasy. The reality in their brother’s head. Feeding in.
That was the thing with delusions, though: especially those brought on by trauma or panic. You had to work with them, not against them. Establish oneself as a safe person, and then help dismantle whatever fake belief it was from the inside. The delusional party most likely wouldn’t trust anything else. Especially when things were this bad. Especially when they were this far in- Raph still literally, physically connected to the trauma like this. Separated only by the thin bandiad of Draxum’s cure. Leo knew all this for medical (and, more recently, personal) reasons. Their youngest brother probably picked it up through some Doctor Feelings-related activity.
Regardless. The snapper’s eyes flickering from person to person, human to mutant, he gazed from wall to wall to ceiling to floor; eyeing everyone and everything in the room with suspicion. Speaking slow, ginger and cautious, he picked each word, each syllable with care. Like the whole family were all wearing wires. Like his testimony had to be perfect. Saying,
“I don’… I don’ believe that. I don’ think tha’s true. Not nessi- not nessesar…” Their eldest brother trailing off, Donnie corrected him, not necessarily. To which Raph nodded. “Yeah, that. Not on purpose.” The Kraang parasite still attached to his face, pulsing (presumably) in time with his heartbeat, the snapper’s other eye twitched painfully. Informing them, “But it’s… I don’… I don’ think you should be sayin’ stuff like that. Just in case. I-I did a bad thing. And you gotta know. I gotta tell you.”
Leonardo sighed. Long and long-suffering. Images gone flashing through his head already- blood and guns and government agents. Symbols of eagles on torn-up jackets. What was technically a federal crime, a mass homicide; a horrible end to some of Uncle Sam’s finest. Raw, animalistic power. Draxum had made them to be soldiers against humanity, after all. As fucked as it was, Leo was kinda proud of his brother for it. Even if the big guy himself probably wouldn’t agree. They knew he was in there somewhere, now. And the Raph they knew would do anything to protect his family. Trying to spare him the guilt, the difficult conversation, what he knew was eventually coming, the slider told his brother,
“It’s okay. We already know. We were there when it happened.”
“No,” Raph responded immediately. “No, that’s not- You don’t…” Big muscles gone stiff, the snapper shuddered. A far-away look overtaking his eyes. “You don’t know. You can’t. ‘Cuz you’d be real, real mad at me.”
“Y’know, I- I really don’t think we would. Be that mad, I mean.” Genuinely trying his best to comfort- to be Mikey-like, to get a proper hold on the situation- Leo was far too uncomfortable to be any good at this. The jokes slipped out, despite his best efforts; what they always did when he didn’t feel secure. When he felt like he was stood on unsteady ground. “Nah… It was obviously self-defense. Am I right? Defensible in a court ‘a law, and all that. Uh-uh. Not guilty.”
The snapper blanched. Looking confused. “Self-def… What? No. No, it’s- it’s underneath the blanket.”
Weird metaphor, but okay. “We don’t have to keep talking about this,” Leo said, as soothing as he could make himself. Literally all of them had things they were keeping underneath the blanket, so to speak. “We can talk about something else, if you want.”
“No,” Raph insisted. More serious this time. “It’s underneath the blanket. Literally. I took it from you guys and I hid it there. I can’t- I can’t do it myself. I really can’t say. But you gotta.”
From where he still leaned against the wall, Donnie scoffed. Rolling his eyes dramatically. “Let’s just humor him.” A fair amount of things- mostly trinkets, mostly baubles- had been taken from the lair and added to Raph’s “collection” over time. Where he’d stashed away and hidden somewhere, apparently underneath his bed. (Made enough sense. Nobody messed with his weird blanket-nest-thing.) Sometimes, in his more addled state, he’d tried to give people their own belongings as gifts. But still. Barely concealing his rage, Donatello continued, “I, for one, am all for taking our shit back.” Leo watching his twin go on the defense.
(If only a testament to how out of it he was, Raph didn’t even chide the softshell for his language.)
Scooching around the rest of the family, looking decidedly uncool in the moment, Donnie marched towards their brother’s bed of blankets, yanking the sheets back with a dramatic flourish of his hand; sending a hundred things all clattering and clanking. Things falling on top of other things and scattering noisily across the floor. Donnie included, most people in the room flinched at the sound. (Pretty much everyone except for Casey Junior. Somewhat made sense, considering he grew up in the apocalypse.) As the blankets settled themselves like still rivers across the floor, for the first time, they got a look at Raph’s “collection”.
And to be completely honest, most of it was junk.
Screws. Bandaids. Lost buttons. Broken crayons. Old plates. An ill thought-out gift from the original Casey; a red-handled switchblade. Apart from all the other random shit in there, there were some things that’d gone missing around the Lair- most of it unimportant. Things from their rooms, their hangout spots. Things from Donnie’s lab- resources and pieces of tech all crushed. Another thing the softshell technically had the right to be angry about, even if it wasn’t helping at all right now.
There were some items of varying value, though. One of April’s old phone charms. A lot of drawn-on, written-on paper. Donnie’s limited edition Jupiter Jim action figure, what they’d gotten for him a year or two ago at Fancon; some of the less expansive, expensive crayon sets from Mikey’s room. Some of his original weights. Buttons and ribbons and a bag of Jolly Ranchers, a bunch of Leo’s shuriken (he knew they were his because he marked them in sharpie with an L), the key to the Prison Dimension-
The key.
The entire world stopped spinning in its orbit. Gravity did a barrel roll and took Leo’s stomach along for the ride. If it weren’t for his crutch, he maybe would’ve hit the ground. Maybe passed out. What would’ve been bad, but having to still stare at the reality in front of him was worse. All the air sucked out of the room like a vacuum, everyone took in a gasp or a choke or a breath between their teeth.
Leo shook.
“Holy shit. Holy fucking shit.”
Rolling innocently in the light, the key sparked a little from where it hit Raph’s leg. The carvings staring up at Leo like that stupid statuette hadn’t ruined everything. Like he hadn’t ruined everything. The silence came next dark and dangerous and quick. Everyone looked around but did not see each other. All they saw was pink.
(Leo’s mouth goes dry at the corners. Typical. Just typical. Maybe he should’ve seen this coming.)
Notes:
thanks for reading!!! i'm trying to get out the last part of this before the new year, but....i'm not counting on it. F. thank you for your patience everybody! and thank you especially to my brother/beta reader, whom i especially adore. <3 good night/good morning/good afternoon wherever you are! be good to each other :-)
Chapter 3: reach out
Notes:
oh. my. gd.
i swear i never believed in the ao3 author's curse before now, but... as you can see, it hit me HARD. literally so much has happened. i'm 19 and live in college dorms now. i got top surgery. i am on a very different life trajectory than i was at the last chapter's publication. and for some reason, i just COULD NOT write this. i still can't write it- i speedran the ending just to get it out to you guys, because you deserve it, and i need to be less of a perfectionist and just write the damn thing already.
for those who have been waiting all this time: thank you for sticking around. i hope you enjoy what happens next.
TRIGGER WARNINGS FOR SELF-HARM IN THIS CHAPTER. not done in a suicidal way, but in a "pinch yourself to check if you're awake" way. except with a knife.
take care of yourselves!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
It’s really a shame Leo wasn’t on way, WAY more painkillers than he already was. Maybe it would’ve made this next part easier to bear.
None of it felt real. The slider’s fingers twitching up against his palm, his crutch, none of it felt real- the whole world flopped over, went belly-up, and abandoned all sense of logic or reason. It was stupid. A bad twist in a telenovela, one he didn’t know he was staring in. It didn’t make any sense. But it was real. It was real, and Leo had to deal with that. (Lucky him.)
His family’s stares hung at the edge of his perception. Wet eyes flashing with a plastic-y sheen, the force of their gaze itched where it met his skin. Everyone was looking in his direction. Him and Casey Junior. Like they knew how the hell to handle this- this, this nuclear fucking bomb their eldest brother had dropped between them. The room searched Leo for answers, but he had none to give. He hadn’t a fucking clue. For once in his life, he had nothing to say.
Like it hadn’t almost ruined all of their lives, the key to the Prison Dimension lay innocently against the concrete. Still and inoffensive, stashed away in some feverish horde, set amongst a scattered variety of less important things- like it hadn’t almost ruined things past the point of no return. Like it hadn’t almost caused the fucking apocalypse. The stone was dark and impassable in front of him. Its shadow seemed to stretch out impossibly far across the floor.
Raph had tried to tell them he did a bad thing. He tried to tell them, and they hadn’t believed him, and maybe he was out of his mind, but he was right- fuck, he was right. It was quite possibly the worst thing that could’ve happened. This was the worst possible timeline.
(No it wasn’t. That wasn’t true. That literally wasn’t true- Casey Junior was living proof of it. They’d prevented the actual Worst Thing from happening. The actual Worst Possible Timeline. Just barely, but they had. A dizzy sort of nausea circled in his gut.
Note to self: even in jest, “bad timeline” references weren’t funny anymore.)
Still, though. Still.
Still.
Leo’s heartbeat thudding loud in his ears, he found himself locked in a staring contest with the statuette on the ground. That stupid fucking rock. He hated the immediate reaction it drew from him- from his family. He wished it had a crotch so he could kick it in the dick. It was stupid, but Leo found himself almost scared to blink first. Almost scared to look away. Like it might make a move- any sudden move- and their hard-won peace would be ripped from them. In a manner involving lots of pain and blood.
The slider’s legs gone weak beneath- the injured one, especially- gravity sweeping in circles all around, his head spun on his shoulders like a top. Leaning hard on his crutch, Leo desperately tried to keep himself standing. This was maybe the loudest quiet in a room full of people he’d ever heard in his life.
(Except for maybe when they’d fled the city. After their original Lair had been destroyed, during the return of Shredder. No adults, no Splinter, and especially no Gram-Gram: just Raph and April, the two biggest siblings, trying to keep everyone together. Trying to keep things from completely falling apart. Trying to plan a return attack slash rescue mission, what everyone knew was probably a hopeless last stand.
Or maybe it was on That Day; the worst of their lives. Everyone stuffed together in the Turtle Tank, Future Boy and the three of them still remaining, speeding off to try and fail to save their older brother- no turtle left behind. The slider had been restless, then… Grip tight on the tsuka of his katana, gazing out into everywhere and nowhere, Raph’s blood still half-dried on his plastron, the ghosts of his own screams rang loud in his ears. Fists beating against the lid of a glass sarcophagus, he sped out across the water, further and further away from his brother- his brother who was hurt- his brother who was powerless, who was cracked in the shell, who was utterly alone- desperate, getting faster, the Foot’s ritual island getting tinier and tinier, disappearing from view, he felt himself screaming and hitting, pooling full of adrenaline, loud as the blood rushing to his head past his ears-)
Leo had given up his escape pod for that thing. And after he’d still failed- again, again- Raph had given up everything in turn to save him from his own stupid mistake. His big brother had been prepared to die for him without a second thought. Later, when things were at their lowest, Leo had been prepared to die, too: if that’s what it took to fix things. Big brother, hero moves are totally your style.
But then they lived. They both lived. Somehow, impossibly, everybody lived. Whether Leonardo deserved it or not, he’d been given a second chance. And maybe things weren’t good, exactly, maybe things would never be the same, despite it all, everyone was okay. They were safe. It was over. The war was over. That’s what Donnie and Doctor Feelings tried to beat into him, at the very least. Maybe Leo would never let his guard down completely- he’d learned HARD from that mistake- but recently, he’d been feeling… Well, not great, but less like objective shit. Which was an improvement. Things were actually starting to get better, as impossible as that seemed. They were making the best of a bad situation. Lemons into lemonade, and all that.
Even when Raph re-succumbed to the infection-
(blood in the bathroom, sheets in a pile; Mikey’s hands glowing, pressed to the writhing, fleshy growth unfurling from Raph’s already-injured eye; bleeding pink, twisting in the socket, the air between them held in the strangled shape of a scream)
-even after they’d suffered yet another loss from the Kraang, he thought they’d managed to get the upper hand at this. They’d wrangled the situation into submission, no matter how bad things seemed. Kraang or no Kraang, Raph more-or-less trusted them now. He both literally and metaphorically ate from their hands.
But here it was, anyway. The proof of their failure. What stared up at him without eyes or a face, still managing to mock him in silence: laying there on the floor like a discarded toy, infuriatingly indestructible. The key. Hidden away like just another trinket, down in the depths of their brother’s blanket-nest-situation, gone unnoticed for what might’ve been days or weeks- like none of it had even mattered in the first place. Like the victory they’d won- that Leo had nearly killed himself trying to ensure- had been a lie this entire time.
Typical. Just typical.
Chalk it up to good ‘ol Hamato Family Luck™. (What they’d given a trademark and everything.) Maybe Leo should’ve seen this coming… It was bound to happen sooner or later; the next big drama. The next thing to disturb their fragile peace. They were all familiar with it by now.
This family can never have anything nice.
Throat gone desert-dry in an instant, Leo floundered; knocked painfully off-kilter. Leaning heavily on his crutch. Drowning on dry land, lost in the moment’s entirety, the slider tried to keep a steady hold on his breathing. In, out. In, out. Don’t have a panic attack. That would be supremely unhelpful. Voice croaking hoarse, tongue sticking tacky and dry to the roof of his mouth, the only thing he could think to say was,
“Raph… How did you-?”
“I dunno,” his brother cut him off. “I- I dunno. I…” Shaking violently in place, Raph enclosed himself in a pathetic sort of half-hug. Already on the verge of tears again. Saying directly to the floor, looking anywhere and anyplace except their eyes, “I dunno. ‘M sorry. ‘M really sorry.”
What was obviously a lie. Obviously a lie, and the entire room must’ve known, but nobody called him out on it- the dunno part, not the sorry part. Anyone with working eyes and ears could tell that Raph was sorry. He was sorry, and he was fucking terrified. But it wasn’t like anyone else could’ve done it. It wasn’t like anyone else could’ve taken the key and hidden it under his bed- or his blanket-nest-situation. Spread across a trove of stolen treasures, Raph had more to say than that, and everyone knew.
But they didn’t press any further on the subject. Everyone- or, at least, Leo- knew well enough to leave it mostly alone. Because how could they? How could they?
Apparently, Donatello could.
“It was you.”
Startling, Leo whirled around to face his twin. To anyone else, Donnie’s emotion would probably be unreadable- completely flat in his tone, on his face- but Leo knew better. A complex idea clicking together like puzzle pieces behind his eyes, stood in the corner ramrod-straight, the slider knew all too well the calm before the storm. It might’ve been him who responded, or it might’ve been Raph or Dad or anyone, asking,
“…What?”
And there it came. The eruption of Mount Saint Softshell. The ignition of a righteous, smothered fury- all his middle child anger- Donatello practically exploded with reprimand,
“It was you!”
Pushing his way through the crowd of anxious relatives in the room, Donnie’s hands wound tight into fists. Stood over their brother with a look that could kill, venom thick and palpable in his voice, the rage in him stoked like a furnace- out of control, like a grease fire-
“That day I woke up in your room. You broke into my lab,” Donnie realized. “You turned off the security system, didn’t you? That’s how the EPF got in. That’s how you got the key. Something as paltry as the U.S. government didn’t best me- you deactivated my security measures! I can’t BELIEVE you!”
Leonardo opened his mouth to interrupt- not exactly sure what he was gonna say, just trying to keep the peace- but his twin steamrolled any and all resistance. Not nearly halfway finished with his rant.
“Do you even understand how stupid that was? Are you cognizant of what you’ve done? No- don’t answer that,” Donnie groaned. Spitting even more venom. “Of COURSE you aren’t. You dumb-dumb fucking idiot… Gd damn it, Raph. This is more than just the EPF and the Kraang. All that time, all that energy I spent making cures for this- not even to MENTION all the resources I used for each prototype- you’ve been wasting them on purpose?! D’you- D’you even understand how bad this could’ve been? D’you understand what could’ve happened if- If I…”
Faltering, running out of verbal steam, Donnie huffed, stomping his foot. Stimming loud and hard. He threw up a hand in frustration-
-and their older brother flinched. Raph braced his arms like a shield in front of him, like he was expecting a blow; like he was expecting to be hit. What he’d done a hundred times before during a hundred different battles. But they’d never seen it from this angle. It’d never been like this.
Everything and everyone stopped dead in place. The light fell around them like a renaissance painting, the dust in the air dancing, drifting past, for a fragile moment, there was a perfect, pin-drop silence. Shocked- hesitant- caught off-guard, the softshell turtle slowly retracted his hand. Forcing it back down at his side.
Maybe it was ninpo they didn’t fully understand yet, or maybe it was a twin thing, but for some reason, in that single, solitary moment, staring at his other half, Leo could’ve sworn he heard Donnie’s thoughts. I thought I was failing you. Ergo, I was failing myself. In the real world, the softshell remained deathly quiet and deathly still. After a hesitant second, a cautious heartbeat or two where nothing came, Raph lowered his arms a bit; daring to peek up at them. Still shaky. It was only then that Donnie continued,
“…I could’ve killed you. Don’t you understand? I could’ve killed you.” Going pale, swaying on his feet, Donnie seemed to only just realize that himself. “Oh Einstein. I could’ve- I could’ve killed you.”
Jolting forward about a half an inch, Raphael made an aborted motion with his hands. Almost like he was gonna pull Donnie into a hug, but then decided better of it. That almost hurt worse than anything else.
“Well,” said Draxum, whom literally everyone had forgotten was still here, “You didn’t.” Stood behind the general procession, detached as always. “That’s a fact of the matter. And you called me in eventually, which was the right thing to do… Though I can’t begin to fathom why that wasn’t your immediate course of action.”
Given a convenient target for his ire, Donnie’s hackles raised a bit; going from mostly deflated to a puff or two of air in his chest. “I- I wanted to prove I could fix things myself.”
“How very touching.” The goatman rolled his eyes. “I’m glad that you were given the opportunity to waste everybody’s time.” Mikey frowned up at him from his spot on the floor, and April kicked the yokai backwards hard in the shin, to which Draxum grumbled, course-correcting, “Regardless… I’m not sure how long my solution will last. I’m not sure how lucid the red one is, nor how long he’ll remain that way. So perhaps you’d like to spend your time with him more productively?”
Leo actually sorta agreed, but Donnie just scoffed. “Oh yeah? Like how?”
“Like not scaring him half to death, is one thing!” Draxum swept out with his arm, and Casey Junior ducked as not to be hit. “I told you- it would rewind his mindset to shortly before the original infection. Your mystics, your ninpo, they’re based on your connection to each other and the Hamato line. So far, I’m not seeing much connection going on here. Mostly intimidation. Am I wrong?”
That was… actually shockingly good advice. Leo considered him, Baron Draxum, the guy who threw him off a roof- now maybe the only sane man in the room- and Donnie balked. Saying, “We’re- We’re trying.”
The goatman raised a single eyebrow. “So act like it.”
There came an awkward beat of hesitance. Everybody hungry, everybody tired, everyone waited for someone else to speak- not wanting to be the first to break the quiet. It held for a fragile eternity, thin and see-through like a soap bubble. Until it broke. Mikey asked, suddenly suspicious,
“How easy is it to turn off the security system, anyway? If Raphie was sick and able to do it.”
“That- That doesn’t matter,” Donnie defended himself. Badly. “He shouldn’t’ve done it, even if he physically could. It’s a clearly-labeled button. In my lab that is supposed to be locked. I’m not… I’m not intimidating. I’m not trying to be.”
“Oh PLEASE,” Mikey huffed, completely ignoring the back half of Donnie’s sentence. Scarred arms still cradling their brother halfway in his lap. “You seriously made a big red button and expected this family NOT to press it? Come on.”
I thought you knew us better than that, Leo doesn’t say. What loses form somewhere between his mind and his mouth. He says nothing, and the moment passes, and the opportunity is gone.
Mikey had a point, though. Even Donnie could admit to that, it seemed.
They had him on the backfoot, now. Sentences were kinda like sparring, Leo knew that better than anyone, and that wasn’t a parry- Mikey struck true. Leo watched his twin go visibly reeling. Draxum stood in the corner with his shoulders squared, strong and tall and sure of himself like no one in the room; striding forward, pushing his way through no man’s land, the goatman picked up the key. Turning it around and around in his palm.
“If you’re going to play so fast and loose with it, perhaps I should be in possession of the artifact.”
At the same time his twin gasped NO, Leonardo put in, “Fuckin’ go for it. Get that thing the hell out of my house.” The spotlight swung back around onto him, and he couldn’t seem to center himself nor censor himself nor even care. “I’d be happy if I never saw that hunk ‘a junk again for the rest of my life.”
The softshell opened his mouth to respond-
-but he was cut off by a low, hollow growling noise. Everyone’s heads snapping (hah) in Raph’s direction, the snapping turtle curled one arm over his stomach; lying, almost instinctively,
“…‘m not hungry.”
To which Leonardo barked out a laugh. Instinctively as well. He couldn’t help it- he laughs when he’s nervous, and this was fucking nerve-wracking. Always at the most inopportune of times. “Bro,” he said, “that was your STOMACH?” Tone forced jovial, a rictus grin twitched its way across his face. “The volume on that one was almost impressive, big guy… We should really get you something to eat. It’s actually been a while since any of us ‘ve properly eaten- right gang?”
The slider looked back. Looked around. No one immediately jumped to disagree with him.
Honest to a fault, Casey Junior shrugged. “I had a bag of chips earlier. Plus some water. That’s a meal where I come from.”
“That doesn’t count,” Mikey butt in; almost offended. Of course he would be, as the self-appointed chef of the group .”I should really get cooking already. It’s almost dinnertime. I don’t think we even had lunch- did we? What time is it? What DAY is it?”
Donnie checked his wrist-gadget-thingie. “It is approximately 5:47 PM. On Tuesday the fourteenth. Oh- well, now it’s 5:48. Still Tuesday, though.”
Tuesday. Was that the day of the EPF raid? Had that only been this morning, or was it yesterday? A hundred years ago? His grip on reality was already tenuous. Time since the guns were out had been a blur of cleaning things: the living room, their bodies, their minds. Everyone waiting for Draxum to get here and help. All that dark, dark blood gone circling down the drain.
“We’re having linner, then. Lunch/dinner,” Mikey continued, similarly full of false cheer. “Whatever I make you guys, and you don’t get to complain.” Beneath the obvious play at normality, April sighed. At least I don’t have class tomorrow. Rubbing up and down their older brother’s arm, brushing a gentle hand across Raph’s spikes, Mikey seemed determined to forge the silence. “Can we get everyone outta here and into the kitchen, please? Or at the table, preferably. It’s way too stuffy in here. I think we oughta cool off.”
Gravity tilted for a moment on its axis. Everyone lurched unconsciously towards the door. Mikey’s voice calm but firm with absolute authority, Leo smothered a pang of something like jealousy in his ribs. How was his little brother so much better than him at the whole Leader Thing, even pinned beneath a semi-conscious Raph? It wasn’t fair. Though he supposed he had Mikey’s Doctors, et al, to thank for that.
Everyone getting in each other’s way, everyone very suddenly realizing this fact, they all stumbled out the door single-file: Dad and April and Casey Junior. Going first to make room for everybody else.
Draxum stayed behind for a second. Expression severe- uncertain how much he was genuinely upset versus how much he was just regularly like this- he passed the key back into Donnie’s hands. “I’ll be returning tomorrow to follow up on this sorry situation. I hope you’ll have come to understand each other and the circumstances better by then.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Leo interrupted; practically pushing the yokai out the door. Desperate to dissipate the lingering tension. “You heard the man. Out with you. Shoo. Shoo!”
Baron Draxum exhaled sharply. Nostrils flaring like a bull’s, ears pressed flat against his head, the goatman turned on his heel and practically disappeared; out the door and out of their lives again. Probably relieved to be dismissed from the family drama. Unos, dos- he was gone without a tres.
Either way, Raphael still hadn’t moved. Still hadn’t stirred. Mikey wriggled, attempting to stand up- attempting to get out from underneath him- failing- pushing uselessly at his shoulder, remaining trapped beneath their eldest brother’s colossal weight.
“Um- Raphie-” he said, “I need to… I need to get up now. Can you let me up?”
The snapping turtle just whined. Laying there dead in place, like dead weight, he turned and buried his face into Mikey’s chest; otherwise doing nothing else. A couple spider hands emerging from Donnie’s Battle Shell, grabbers of reinforced titanium, they poked him- prodded him- tried to peel him off the floor and onto his feet again. A noble but futile endeavour. Leaning heavily against the wall, as well as whatever would hold him up, Raph slumped as soon as the hands pulled away. Hissing out a pained breath through his teeth. The bandages around his plastron stained through with pink.
Oh, right. The bandages around Raph’s plastron. Fragments running in fractal patterns from where the EPF’s bullets hit: not too critical an injury, though it bled a lot on the surface, but also nothing to play around with. Every time Leo’s eyes caught on the cracks, he felt a spasm of murderous rage.
He was glad Raph killed those agents. Even if Raph himself probably wouldn’t be, once he was coherent enough to realize what he’d done. But the EPF had held Mikey at gunpoint- which means they’d forfeited their rights to life and limb right there on the spot. Leo kinda wished they’d died even more violent.
That probably wasn’t good news for his mental health, but what else was new? Besides, he had far more pressing matters to be concerned about.
Speaking of-
“What’re we having for linner?” Leo followed his brother, intentionally obnoxious. Trying to ignore Donnie’s spider hands and the two humans holding Raph up behind them, on their odyssey to the kitchen: Leo barely able to support his own weight, not even to mention someone else’s. But he wanted to be where Casey Junior was. He wanted to slot himself beneath his big brother’s arm and feel the pressure, whether or not Raph actually needed the help. But he couldn’t. For what felt like the billionth time since he’s started needing it, Leo cursed his stupid fucking crutch. Not hating the actual object itself- it was mad useful for getting around- but the symbolism of this entire shitty situation. “Should probably be something quick, considering.”
“It’ll probably be sandwiches,” Mikey admitted, like that was some sort of crime. “They’re quick, easy, and- if we still have that turkey I bought- relatively filling.” He gave a weak smile. “Protein, baby.”
The slider tried his best to match his little brother’s grin. What flickered on both their faces like dying candlelight, trying to ignore it all, he said,
“Sounds good to me.”
A wave of people went crashing into the kitchen. The place immediately flooded with noise and light and life. The family like liquid, they flowed to fit their container: several stools and chairs and such scattered about the room, nearly everyone collapsed into the nearest available seat. Almost taking his helpers down with him, Raph sat on the floor instead. Shell leaned back against the counter and the cabinets. Closer to Mikey and the oven than to anything else. Knees pressed up against his chest, Raph’s arms locked around his legs.
“Raphie…” Mikey cooed, almost patronizing. “You sure you don’t wanna sit anywhere else? Like maybe a chair?” Still in the process of slicing the bread, his voice kept even, like he was speaking to a toddler; or to a wild animal. Probably closer to what their older brother actually was.
The snapping turtle just shook his head. “Nuh-uh. This ‘s- This ‘s a trick. You got mad at me. Last time. You hit me,” Raph stammered. “Said I should know my place. Said I don’t deserve a seat. Dogs sit on the floor.”
A sigh punched its way from Leo’s throat. They’d barely gotten anywhere, and they were still making backwards progress. He couldn’t help it- him and Mikey and everyone who heard melted with sympathy, or maybe closer to pity. What just seemed to make Raph more uncomfortable. Leo could relate. This was the worst kind of attention… Especially for the strongest among them, the brother who was the biggest, it was excruciating to be seen as weak.
“We’d never hit you,” said the box turtle. “Not for that. Not for anything.”
“…sure,” Raph responded. Eyes wide and disbelieving. Shoulders tense, glancing from Mikey’s face to his hand back to his face again, Raph swallowed, feebly. “Whatever you say.”
Mikey followed his gaze, and so did everyone else. Their youngest brother still had a firm grip on the bread knife. Pointed in Raph’s general direction, the snapper’s eyes kept trained on the edge. Mikey dropped the blade like the handle caught fire, what went clattering to the floor, suddenly disgusted by the thing in his hand- Raph flinched, hands jolting to cover his face. Like someone would pick it up and start swinging. And maybe they would. Leo braced, shell leaned against the wall, and tried to swallow every horrible thought that came. Every vile implication. He could feel his heartbeat; his ninpo curling in his chest.
Beacon. Beacon. Beacon.
“…I am going to set up the living room,” Dad announced, after a long moment of nobody saying anything; all the while beating a hasty retreat. “Lou Jitsu marathon. Lots of blankets. Lots of pillows. Very good. Very soft. You all keep doing- whatever you’re doing. Movies make everything better.”
Leonardo cursed under his breath. Coward. Dad was right- movies DO make everything better- but it was also a transparent excuse. An easy escape from the room & the tension. Though he probably shouldn’t have expected any better. Donnie got it from Dad, and maybe Leo did too- the whole “being uncomfortable with emotions” thing. Everybody shifting, no one knew what to say. All the adults now, only the kids left now, no one knew what to think. The so-called “coherent” ones were quickly losing their hold on the situation.
Still curled up defensively on the floor, Raph shuddered, as small as he could make himself; eyes gone vague and unfocused. The snapper gazing out a million miles away, saying to everyone and no one,
“Is… Is this real? What’re we… How did we get here? Wha’s happening?”
“We’re having linner. Lunch/dinner,” Leo responded. Not entirely meaning to. What just came spilling out of his mouth, unbidden. “This is real. It’s okay. Everything is okay. We’re here. It’s all good.”
Raphael nodded slowly. Small-ly. Head ducked against his knees. Trying to keep his body language chill and open, Leo took a couple steps forward and (casually, carefully) sat himself on the dining table. Knee loudly protesting this action. Biting the hell out of his lower lip. The snapper’s jaw worked, chewing on sentences left unsaid, and everyone watched the gears in their brother’s mind turning. (There’s a joke to be made there- something like there’s a treat, when does that ever happen- but it’s not funny. This isn’t funny.)
Leo itches somewhere deep beneath his skin.
“Here.” Mikey pushed a plate into Raph’s hands, piled high with a nice-looking sandwich. “Eat. It’ll make you feel better.” Turning back and resuming the rest of the family’s food, he tossed over his shoulder, “If you want more, just tell me. Don’t be afraid to ask.” It was honestly impressive how fast he could pull this all together: Chef Mikey in his element.
The snapping turtle straightened- winced- went stiff in an instant, hissing out another pained breath through his teeth. Clenching the plate in both fists, he stared down at his heavily-bandaged side. “Why does…? Raph’s ribs hurt. Why d’they hurt?”
“Long story,” Leonardo sighed. “You got some cracks in your plastron that we had to wrap up. From doing something dumb to protect us, as always.”
Raph hummed. Saying nothing, but communicating clear as day: that sounds like me. Unfurling himself and all his limbs, gingerly, balancing the plate on his lap, the snapper held the sandwich to his lips but did not eat. Waiting for everyone else to get theirs. What was either a very sweet or very paranoid gesture. Or maybe both. It didn’t really matter. It didn’t matter, anyway.
As soon as Mikey gave Leo his plate (actually second in line), the slider took a large, exaggerated bite out of his sandwich; staring at Raph all the while. His gaze returned by large, hesitant eyes. Eventually, their older brother began to eat for himself, what started out slow but gradually demolished the whole thing- the entire family far hungrier than they realized. Without even asking, Mikey filled up Raph’s plate again. Again. Servings of pretty much pure protein. Good. Donnie said something about the Kraang being a literal parasite- if that was true, their brother needed all the nutrition he could get.
For a long, long moment, no one said anything. Mikey having distributed everyone a plate, they all just took a minute to focus on eating; refueling their bodies and their minds. Pretending this was normal. Everything was normal, and there was no Kraang, and this was just a regular family linner. One where everyone just so happened to be shaken, injured, or both. But everything was fine. The illusion was helped, at least, by the fact that it was genuinely good- the food Mikey gave them. Especially for something made so quick. Leo made sure to toss a couple compliments, both genuine and self-serving, his little brother’s way.
(Lord knows this family needed more positivity. Especially Mikey. Especially as of late. The box turtle had been keeping everyone sane since the start of this whole fucked up situation.)
Eventually discarding his empty plate, Raph tucked his arms around his knees again, peering over his own great form like a wall between himself and the world. Muscles gone tense then slack then tense again. Eyes wandering back out into the middle distance. Their biggest brother looked up at Mikey and Leo and the rest- what must’ve been a novel angle for him- less confused, but still seeing right through them; picking nervously, almost compulsively at his scales and his spikes.
“Where…” Shuddering hard from the lingering adrenaline, Raphael swallowed thick. Trying to keep his body still. Said body refusing to obey. “I need t’… I gotta… Where’s the Key?”
“Irrelevant,” Donnie cut in. What Leo knew his twin meant to be (at least somewhat) reassuring, but came out sharp and flat. “You don’t have to worry. The key is safe.”
The snapping turtle just shook his head. “No. No, I need t’- I need to…” Faltering, his turned inwards to bite at the skin, Raph rocked in place. He didn’t know what he needed to do. Nobody did. “They’ll- They’ll get mad at me,” he said. “If I don’t have it. Bad things’ll happen. They’ll- They’ll make me…” Trailing off, he swallowed thick again. “I need t’- I need t’ have it. I gotta prove t’ them… I need t’ hold it in my hands.”
Implications upon implications, there. None of them pleasant. None of them good. Leo shuddered in turn, a strange coldness gripping his heart- imagination quick to color in all the awful details.
The weight of a metal claw against his plastron. A rush of motion; a hard connection with the ground. Pain, sparking. Again. Again. Both of them came out of That Day sporting an ugly necklace of bruises: Kraang Prime liked to play rough. All the bastards did. Not-Leo. Whatever other abominations the Kraang had made and set upon them, laid laughing in the dark. Leo thought about the way Raph kept his arms between his legs. Bloodshot eyes and tentacles in his teeth, he thought of the obvious hole in his brother’s shell.
The slider bit down hard on his tongue. The pain was grounding. Eyes screwed shut, shaking his head, Leo tried to lose the phantom sensations: tried to banish the horrible thoughts that came. Leo tried to stop thinking entirely.
(Tried. Failed. Story of his life.)
At the same time Mikey turned to their oldest brother, probably going to indulge him- the snapping turtle still curled up small & pathetic on the floor- Donatello interrupted,
“Absolutely not. No way in hell.” Hesitating in turn, everyone pivoted in his direction, and Donnie paused for a moment, taken aback- until he realized why the attention was suddenly on him. Scoffing, his temper flared but thankfully didn’t reignite. “What? Why is everyone looking at me like I’M the bad guy?! We have direct proof that Kraang- full or not- can’t be trusted with the key. And having it wouldn’t make Raph any happier. It’d just give him new things to spiral about. Would be better if we simply removed that variable from the equation. Out of sight, out of mind.”
Most of the family just stared. Silence lingering stale and awkward between.
“Hey- Donnie-” Leo attempted, not actually disagreeing.
“I mean- It’s not like I’m trying to make him upset on purpose. I’m not trying to be contrarian,” Donnie paved over regardless. The longer the softshell turtle kept speaking, the more obviously his Emotionally Detached Bad Boy Persona™ began to crack. “It’s just- It’s science. It’s the hypothesis I’ve drawn based on the evidence so far. Why does nobody get that?! We’ve been screwing around, acting like fools- I’m doing what I can! I’m trying so damn hard!”
“Donnie,” Leo tried again.
“I-I can- I can get him a plushie from his room. For him to hold instead. If he needs something,” the purple one kept on babbling. Like the world would end if he stopped. “Just- Just not the key. C’mon, guys… We can’t give him that.” There was an underlying message to their middle brother’s words, one Leo hoped he wasn’t the only one to pick up on: don’t you dare accuse me of not loving Raph. Donnie’s fear & sorrow burned hot like rage because anger was an easier emotion to process. “…We already know what would happen,” he said, eventually. “If it fell into the wrong hands. Frankly, I’m not eager for another almost-apocalypse.”
Leonardo opened his mouth to respond- to tell his brother it was fine, they hadn’t assumed anything, no one was attacking him- but the words wouldn’t come. No sound passed his lips. Swallowing, shaking his head, Leo went to try again, but he was cut off before he could speak: Raph stating, from his spot on the floor- almost entirely nonchalant-
“…I’m bleeding.”
Attention whipped back to their oldest brother. It appeared he most certainly was.
In the literal thirty seconds they hadn’t been keeping an eye on him, Raph managed to snag the bread knife Mikey dropped and cut a litany of shallow scratches across his skin. Staring at the pink-red blood welling up like its very presence was a surprise. Like he hadn’t expected that to happen. Pinkish-red on green. Pretty much the entire family shifted, agitated.
“I’m bleeding,” Raph said again. More sure this time.
“Shit-” Leo noted, breath catching in his chest- “You are.” Surging forward- forgetting he was sitting on the dining table- nearly falling off- a lance of pain speared through his bad knee, and the slider blanched, taking a moment to settle himself. Casey Junior appearing at their brother’s side before anyone else could get there, anyway. Something like apocalypse survival instincts. Plucking the blade from Raph’s hand, Junior wrapped a loose amount of bandage around the wounds, superficial as they may be; quick enough to be halfway done before the snapping turtle could even think to react. Either way, Leo felt himself boil with a confused, anxious fury. (Maybe he understood his twin’s reaction better than he thought.) “Why did you do that?” he asked, almost whining. “What the hell made you think that was a good idea?”
“Dunno,” Raph answered; brutally honest. Looking and sounding dead. “Wanted t’see what would happen. Wanted t’see if this is real.” They waited for him to say more, but nothing else came.
“Well- Don’t,” Leo told him. “Don’t do that. Nobody wants you to do that.” Some face man he was- floundering, the slider clawed around for a halfway-decent response. “This is real. Don’t you remember? We told you, earlier. We proved it to you. You believed us.”
Leo’s big brother looked up at him with entirely glassy eyes. “‘S that right…?”
Expression gone faraway again, gaze cast way out into the middle distance, Raph’s body went slack, probably not on purpose; detached from the world and all its contents. Utterly checked out from the situation at hand. Probably dissociating- it was a look they recognized on their brother from before the Invasion. From before the Shredder, even. (And wasn’t that depressing.) The snapper blinked, once- twice- head jerking, he looked at everyone and everything like he was seeing it for the first time.
“Whuh… Wha’s going on? Where are we?” Raph asked again, for the third time since the pink had faded from his eyes. “What’re we doing? What IS this?”
There came a tentative beat of silence. Everyone expected someone else to speak, so nobody did. They all just stood there stock-still, gaping at each other like stunned animals.
April O’Neil stepped up to bat. Reaching out, bending down to Raph’s level, she smoothed a gentle hand across their older brother’s- her little brother’s- bicep; knelt beside him, holding his arm. His OTHER arm and his OTHER side. The one Casey Junior wasn’t currently patching. The snapping turtle flinched when her touch first came, but then he relaxed, leaning into it like only Dad or April could make him without shame: vanishing through his walls like a magic trick. Leo couldn’t pretend he wasn’t at least a little jealous. Standing firm (or kneeling firm, he supposed), their best and only sister smiled at him, saying so, so sweetly,
“It’s okay. You’re okay. Just relax, big guy.” Slowly- clearly telegraphing her every move- April shifted to cup his cheek, and Raph let her. Nuzzling into her hand, he reached up gingerly to cling at her wrist. “I got you… We’re here. We’re here for you. Okay? Anatawa hitorijanai. It’s like I told you, earlier- if anyone wants to get t’you, they gotta go through us first.”
The snapper hummed low under his breath. “But I don’t want them t’ go through you at all.”
(Ironic. Deeply fuckin’ ironic. Still sat useless, Leo felt his heart spasm like a misfire in his chest. That it was Raph, of all turtles, to be the one to say it- I don’t want them to go through you. It was the peak of irony. It wasn’t funny in the slightest. Leo felt like he had to puke.)
April just huffed out something like a laugh. “Y’know what? Fair.” Both hands moving to cup either side of his face, she stroked a thumb across his cheek; careful to avoid all the Kraang Growth Yuck. “I feel you… I don’t want this family to get involved in any more bullshit for a good long while. But we both know that’s not how it works. Right now, we’re gonna watch a bunch of Lou Jitsu movies and appreciate the fact we’re still standing. Does that sound good to you?”
Raphael nodded. Focused entirely on her, sniffling like a little kid. Their biggest brother looked up at April like he looked at no one else- like, as Leo was realizing, with no small amount of horror- the three younger brothers must’ve looked up at him. All open and honest and exhausted. His voice came out small, and for such a big, boisterous guy, that was terrifying.
“…Yeah. Yeah,” he said. “Raph’s good with that.”
April smiled at him- took in a breath, leaning impossibly closer- went to speak- but before he could, there came a sharp cough from behind.
(Interruptions upon interruptions. It seemed no one was able to wait their turn today.)
Everyone wheeling around towards the intruder, everyone keeping one hand on their weapons, there stood a figure at the door: what revealed to be Dad, hands up in mock surrender. Leo watched his whiskers twitching, peeking around the frame. Uncomfortable as always with anything involving emotion, their father announced to the rest, with trepidation,
“Eh… The living room is ready. If you all are done with the chatter.”
The tension between them deflated limp like a balloon. Everyone went shifting awkwardly in place. April straightened, rolling her shoulders back, pushing herself up off the floor; stood tall as always. Brushing the imaginary dust from her skirt, she took control of the room again- both hands gripping the authority & the attention. What came off near effortless. (No wonder Junior’s timeline knew her as Commander O’Neil.)
“Okay. Okay,” she declared, “That’s good. It’s just like I said- it’s movie time. We’re gonna watch ‘til we drop. Comfort movie marathon. Okay? We’re gonna have a big ‘ol turtle pile sleepover, just like when we were kids. Thanks, Splints… We’ll be right there.” Keeping her voice and posture level, April turned back to her constituents. Breathing steady, ordering, “C’mon, guys… Get up.” She held out a hand for Raph to take. “Let’s go. I’ll let you pick the first movie. Or, I’ll force your brothers to go with whatever you choose.”
“But only if it’s good,” Leo joked from the sidelines. Compelled to prove he was still there. Compelled to add something, literally anything to the conversation.
“Blasphemy!” their father argued, still hovering at the door. “ALL Lou Jitsu movies are good!”
Raphael glanced about from him to her to him. Gaze landing solidly on their sister’s outstretched hand, slowly- carefully, like it might be a trick- the snapper reached out and slid his palm into hers, letting April step back and pull him standing. Surely working with her, attempting to balance himself on unsteady feet, because there was no way she could've pulled that off by herself. Raph stumbled, and the two humans slotted themselves beneath his arms again immediately; April & Casey Junior moving to keep him standing, all the while the three younger brothers remained just out of reach.
If that wasn’t a metaphor in action, Leo didn’t know what it was.
“C’mon,” April beckoned, and the sentiment echoed. “Let’s go be.”
The snapping turtle just nodded heavily; silent. Looking down at the two humans, trying very hard to keep himself standing, Raph let them carry him forward by the armpits like ambulant crutches. (Which Donnie had tried to make once. But he’d never bragged about it or done a grand reveal, which probably meant it’d been a colossal failure.) Leo stayed behind for a moment, trying to get his own crutch steady beneath him: watching them go. Hesitating. His family disappeared ‘round a corner and off into the wild unknown. Leo watched his big brother be led into a brave new world without him.
Raphael turned away and didn’t turn back.
The sight was uncomfortably familiar.
If there was any silver lining to this shitty situation, at least Splinter really had done up the living room nice.
Leo couldn’t remember the last time there’d been a pillow fort in here; nevertheless a mattress in front of the projector. Probably since the last time they’d been in mortal peril. Since the last time the world had almost ended. Since they’d been old enough to put food in their mouths (or, theoretically, Raph could handle it) and Dad had completely checked out of their lives, at the very least. But now there were pillows and blankets and Genius Built™ soft things, and sat proudly there was one of Raph’s oldest stuffed animals: a ratty old teddy bear with a ribbon around its neck. What Leo knew to be named Buddy. The snapper stepped forward and collapsed into it, and the family let him, and their big brother clutched his plushie like a lifeline to his chest. Leo eased down beside him, at a particularly leanable-looking section of fort, and April took a seat against Splinter’s armchair. Everyone else soon followed suit.
Eyes locked solidly on the ground, remaining entirely silent, Donnie made sure to place a cushion under Leo’s bad knee. Here and then gone again; sat as far away as possible while still remaining in arm’s reach. Leo went to thank him, but his twin had his battle face on, guard raised, and the words shriveled up and died in Leo’s throat. Casey Junior had it handled, anyway: sat loosely between the pile-in-progress and its satellite, the family settled into groups like an archipelago. All of them circling Raph like the mainland. Donnie with Casey, April next to Splinter, and Mikey & Leo at either of their eldest brother’s sides.
As Dad sifted through their horde of DVDs and VHSes, as soon as everyone was settled generally in place, they all looked to Raph for comment- who just mumbled, play whatever’s easiest. Absolutely no one was satisfied with this response.
“C’mon,” Leo goaded, nudging him; leaning against him. The closest the two of them could probably get right now to a hug. “You don’t wanna waste this. It’s your pick, for once… And we can’t even make fun of you for it. Be for real. You GOTTA have a preference.”
The snapping turtle just chewed his lip. Snaggletooth dug deep into the skin, Leo became all-too-aware of the pressure they were putting on his choice. Like a shameful admission, like he knew it wasn’t what they wanted to hear, he said,
“…Raph wants to watch Jupiter Jim VII.”
Donnie perked up, suddenly re-invested in the conversation. “Y’mean, Atomic Losses?”
“NO!” their father interrupted, still turned away. “It HAS to be a Lou Jitsu movie!”
Raphael flinched hard at the raised voice, head ducking, and Leo cursed sharp under his breath. It was so magic, he was half-convinced it was ninpo: the way Dad could be so good at times, and then conjure the exact wrong thing to say. “No, it doesn’t,” Leo told them. “It literally doesn’t matter.”
“I’d be up for that,” Donnie continued, as if nobody else had said anything. “The Atomic Lass backstory movie? Or anything with her in it. I vote yes. I’d be up for watching that.”
“Of course you would be,” Leo scoffed; what he hoped came out fond.
“Um…” Casey Junior shifted, looking distinctly uncomfortable, “I don’t- I don’t know if we should be watching that one, actually. Atomic Losses. I dunno if that’s a good idea. My family had that one banned from base movie night. Said it hit too close to home. Said it brought up too many bad memories.”
Leo balked for about half a second, but then remembered what Atomic Lass’s backstory actually was. She inherits the title from her older brother, Atomic Man, when he stays back to hold off an alien armada, saving her and the galaxy at large in a noble, dramatic sacrifice- and yeah, on second thought, they weren’t gonna be watching that. No matter how dope the special effects in that iteration happened to be.
“What about Jupiter Jim Pluto Vacation 4?” April suggested, slyly. Not only one of her favorites, but the one that infamously always put Raph to sleep. And their eldest brother could use some sleep. Especially as of late. Still attempting to be placating, mostly to Splinter, she said, “Maybe we could switch back and forth between Jupiter Jim and Lou Jitsu movies?”
Their father just scoffed. Chin tilted skywards, avoiding all of their eyes- uncomfortable but not uncaring- Dad pushed that particular DVD into the projector, ending all debate; collapsing back into his beloved armchair. Cranking up the volume before anyone could speak. To which they all settled in for the long haul, getting more comfortable in their place: waiting for the screen to flash and then lighten. Waiting for the static in front of them to take form and shape. Leo wedged himself beneath his big brother’s arm, partly to use him as a weighted blanket, but mostly to keep him from falling forward- this movie also being infamous for Raph breaking something with his unconscious face. Leo prepared to keep his brother upright. He prepared to (quite literally) shoulder some of his brother’s weight.
But Raph didn’t go slack, even a little bit. Raph didn’t close his eyes. The Kraang parasite maybe didn’t even blink. He stayed completely rigid, not complaining about his skipped turn, which is how they knew he was out of it again- completely apathetic, in this house that held movie-picking rights as sacred. Raph just kept staring at the screen like it owed him money, and Leo shifted impossibly closer, finding Mikey doing the same thing at Raph’s other side. Both of them huddled in, like any second their brother would up and disappear.
The movie marathon just barrelled onwards. Uncaring of all petty, mortal things.
They got through Jupiter Jim Pluto Vacation 4 and then Jitsu for Justice, and then several episodes of various TV shows, and then they just kept going: shoveling more and more content into their eyes and ears, more discs into the projector, long after Splinter had passed out snoring in his seat. April took charge of the steady stream of distraction. Bright colors and loud noises. Escapism served at its most raw and basic.
Leo glanced over between epic battles at the rest of his family. Donnie was still wound tight, clutching the Key like a stress ball in his fists. Dad fast asleep in the chair behind them. April stubbornly kept her eyes on the projector, like focusing hard enough would make the rest of the world go away. Casey Junior seemed content with the mindless entertainment. Leo glanced back towards his younger brother, and he and Mikey passed a sliver of worry between. They all just kept sitting there, staring, completely silent.
It felt like an eternity before anything happened outside the screen.
“How…” Raph’s voice was scratchy and rough from disuse, and the snapper coughed hard and tried again. “How long’s it been since we last seen each other?”
Leo swallowed thick. It tasted like bile. “We see each other every day, Raph.”
“No. No,” he said, “I mean- How long’s it been since it was really you? How long… How many years since the Kraang got me?”
“Months,” Leo corrected, suddenly desperate to do so. The slider washed over with a cold, terrible feeling, and he remembered Not-Leo and the tentacles in his throat, and he shook; running his mouth like always, like it’d chase the horrors away. Like it’d banish the thick, uneasy tension. “It’s been almost three months since the Invasion. Two and a half since you got sick again.”
Raph’s brow furrowed. Slowly, subtly, he shook his head. “No. No, that’s not… That can’t be right. You sure? Raph doesn’t- Raph doesn’t think that’s right. Felt way longer.”
Donnie muttered that’s a fallacy under his breath, but other than that, no one spoke. Leo combed his skull for some sort of response, but came up entirely blank. Leo had no idea what to say. Momentary panic shot through him, and the feeling twisted like a whirlpool in his gut, and Leo couldn’t articulate exactly why. Nobody else said anything. Raph just stared at the movie in front of them, claws tangled in Buddy’s fur, holding the plushie to his chest like a precious thing. Leo nuzzled himself impossibly closer, plastron to plastron, and tried to take comfort in the steady pattern of his brother’s breath.
Entirely to himself, Raph wiggled Buddy’s little arms and legs like it was dancing in his hands. Making the plushie wave, he cooed, “G’night Asa.” Repeating slower, “Good-night Ay-sah.”
“Who’s Asa?” Mikey asked, offhand.
Raph’s hackles raised like defensive ninpo. His lips curled back into a snarl. “Don’t call me that.”
“I wasn’t,” Mikey soothed, pressing against Raph’s arm. Cooling the tension before Leo even processed it in time to flinch. “It’s okay,” he said, “You’re okay. You called your bear that, so I was just- curious.”
The snapper looked down at his bear like it’d betrayed him. “…Raph didn’t say that out loud. And- And it’s nobody. ‘S not important. Doesn’t matter.”
That was maybe one of the boldest lies their brother had ever told, and nobody believed him, but it wasn’t worth the fight. They let it go, and they all just lapsed back into long, hesitant silence- letting the seconds slip through their fingers like sand, putting on movie after movie.
With how many it’d been since they’d started, Leo had truly and genuinely lost count. He watched the light scatter and then darken, following the setting sun, indicating just how far they’d carved into this gentle night: it’d been a crazy fucking day. This family maybe didn’t have normal days anymore. How long had it been, actually, between each huge Event? I totally get Raph, Leo’s mind quipped at him, this shit sure feels like it lasts a lifetime. Leo kindly told that voice in him to shut up and go away.
Surprisingly- or maybe not surprisingly, even a little bit- Donnie was the next to fall asleep. Usually they had a rivalry of who could stay up the longest, but the softshell couldn’t run forever on caffeine. Key still in his fist, Donnie had shifted at some point to lie on his stomach, head resting on the soft, plush arms of his hoodie- and as Donnie was wont to do in situations like these, he crashed. One second awake and glaring, the next completely slumped over. (Leo jolted for a second, but then his twin snored, which meant an obvious intake of breath.) Along with their eldest brother, Donnie could really use some sleep. He probably hadn’t slept since the last time he’d passed out. Those eyebags were getting gnarly.
Leo would’ve laughed, would’ve suggested they take a marker and write something on his face, but after a couple of minutes, when he looked back, April had fallen asleep too. Cheek leaned against Splinter’s armchair, glasses pressed up against her forehead, what would surely leave a mark in the morning, her mouth slightly agape- she was probably tired from her college classes, but the sight had Leo wondering how late it actually was. He was too out of it to get his phone and check the time.
All he knew was that it was dark. The projector was their only source of light now, which Leo hadn’t noticed before- the world had gone dim around him, and he was too preoccupied with the movie marathon to notice. Or he was dissociating. Either was a probable explanation. He looked around, Casey Junior manning the projector now, and even Mikey was beginning to blink slowly at their brother’s other side, the box turtle cuddling Raph’s arm like his very own teddy bear; breath evening.
Leo probably couldn’t sleep even if he wanted to. He wasn’t tired at all. It was so strange, being an insomniac like he was, watching everyone struggle and lose the fight- except Raph, of course. Usually one of the first to fall asleep, but not here, not now: still staring absently at the screen, peeling strips of skin from his lip with his teeth, he was bleeding a little bit, right at the cupid’s bow, and Raph passed his tongue over the wound. Probably relishing in the sting. Leo knew how that felt. They both craved stimulation. Other than the sounds of the movie marathon, the world was far, far too quiet.
Raphael reached out casually, Mikey still clinging to his arm like a koala, and easy as anything, he took the Key from Donnie’s hands. The softshell’s expression and fingers twitching in his sleep, but otherwise not reacting. Still dozing on. Leo kept his eyes locked on his older brother and the object in his hands, but the snapper just turned it over, like he was seeing it for the first time- Buddy moved to sit in the crook of his elbow, he said,
“So… the Key. If all ‘a this is real, and someone threw it in the ‘Sound… They wouldn’t like that?”
“No,” Leo responded, barely a murmur. “They really wouldn’t.”
Mikey hummed, leaning hard against their eldest brother; eyes halfway shut already. “We’re gonna do that t’mmrow. M’kay?”
It was a highly unrealistic fantasy, but Leo snorted, “Hell yeah.”
The snapping turtle glanced over his shoulder. Still looking very, very out of it, examining the reality he found himself in, Raph asked them, “And that… That exit. That one goes to Queens?”
“Y-Yeah,” Leo answered, swallowing again. “Across the bridge.”
“Mm…” Raph turned back towards the movie, back towards the family, both asleep and awake. “Okay.” He shifted, putting the Key on the floor in front of him, holding Mikey under his arm and Buddy in his hands; shoulders curled in, like he was trying to make himself small, he said, “Raph missed you guys.”
Mikey mumbled under his breath, in a final spot of coherence, “We missed you too, Raphie.”
Leo added, entirely too quick and entirely too earnest, “We really did.”
There came a long, long pause, and Mikey finally went slack beside them, breath shallowing, and Raph waited until he was definitively asleep before moving or speaking; big brother instincts still somewhat at play. Halfway through another episode of something- Casey Junior having been putting the last few on, since they’d been otherwise occupied- like a secret, Raph told them, Leonardo and Casey Junior, the only members of the family still up and awake,
“I like you two better than the other guys. You guys are nice to me.” Leo very intentionally does not think about what his brother means by the other guys. He doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t want to think. “I don’t wanna go back,” Raph told them, childlike and innocent. “Can I stay here?”
Leo cleared his throat, conjuring up his best Leader Voice. “You aren’t going anywhere. We’re here. We haven’t left. Okay? We’ll give you some of Donnie’s medicine in the morning, and you’ll feel a lot better. We’ll be right there the whole time, making sure it actually stays down this time.”
Raphael huffed out a humorless laugh. Fingers tapping in endless, anxious patterns, claws turned inwards, he dug little semicircles into the skin. “You say that all the time. You never stay with me.”
“Well, we will this time.”
They both looked to Casey Junior, who hadn’t said anything yet, ostensibly a neutral party, and Future Boy either didn’t notice or pointedly ignored their gaze. The two of them hesitated in turn, long enough that the slider was running over his options to break the silence, but then Raph said, deadpan,
“I die in the future.”
Leonardo and Casey Junior flinched like there’d been a shot. Shoulders going ramrod-straight, the human finally looked at him, asking,
“How do you know?”
“It’s- Something like memories,” Raph told them. “Something like bad dreams. Like- Like the opposite of Deja Vu. Something I experienced, but didn’t experience. It was but it wasn’t me.”
Leo’s face twitched into a rictus grin. “Now you’re starting to sound like Dr. Suess.”
The snapper didn’t react to that. He just said, “The- The Kraang got me. More than once. But the last time, there was metal, and the Technodrome- there was a big explosion.”
Casey Junior went somehow more pale. “That… That isn’t too far off. How did you-?”
“I dunno. I dunno,” Raph said. “I just- I don’t know what happens next.”
Leo wants to say something, but he doesn’t get the chance, and maybe that’s good, because he has no idea what he would’ve said, anyway- voice perfectly level, Casey Junior explained,
“Well… When I was little, not having you around- Sensei told me it made everyone “get their shit together”. Made everyone really understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Because they relied on you a lot, and they didn’t realize how much until- well. Until you couldn’t support them anymore.”
Raph listened to the story, utterly enraptured, and Leo began to wonder if this was a good idea. Their eldest brother already had a Complex about this sort of thing. (Not that Leo was judging. Everyone had a handful of Problems and Issues in this family.) Casey Junior just continued,
“You and a bunch of other people became the rebellion’s symbols to fight for. You kinda became a figure of legend. Raphael Hamato, eldest brother, strongest of all of us… Tank with a heart of gold. The last good man in the apocalypse.”
Raphael blinked. So did Leo, but his big brother beat him to the punch, asking,
“They really said that about me?”
“Yeah,” said Future Boy, “They did. I never really got to know you, but stories about you and how you saved the rebellion were passed around a lot. You really inspired a lot of people.”
There’s an all-too-familiar gleam in the snapper’s eye, and Leo’s stomach flipped. “Don’t tell him that. Don’t make death sound all glamorous. I want my brother alive.”
“S’okay,” Raph reassured, wrapping his other arm around Leo’s shoulders. Spreading his arms like wings around both of his younger brothers in reach. “I’m here. Aren’t I? Raph’s not going away.”
It was his own words thrown back at him, and Leo felt how sour it was from the other end. Point taken. Even though both times, he and Raph were probably genuine. They kept sitting together, movie marathon or not, and the silence that came was softer and more gentle than any of the ones they sat through before.
The snapper spoke up, eventually, the type of honest you can only be while facing away from each other, focusing on something else, sitting in the dark.
“Raph’s sorry, Leo. Raph really loves you.”
Leo blanched. His older brother’s love had never been in question- there was the stench of cleaning products in the living room and the dried blood under Raph’s fingernails to prove that- but, “Sorry for what?”
“Everything,” his older brother said, in a rush. “Raph knows he’s been a lot of hassle lately. Raph knows he’s not been good. Raph wants to be with you, but not cause you guys trouble.”
“Hey,” Leo told him. “We’re Hamatos. Trouble runs in the bloodline. If we don’t find it, it finds us.”
Raphael laughed, a little more genuinely this time. Sighing, he said,
“I love you, Leo.”
Feeling his lips curl into a sheepish smile, Leo told his brother, “I love you too.”
Casey Junior shifted somewhat awkwardly, and the two of them both tossed a smile his way; enough to tell him no harm done. Raph’s arm flexed, and all of them knew he would’ve reached over and given Casey Junior a noogie if he could, and that was true family acceptance. But as it was now, his arms were full of plushie and Leo and sleeping baby brother. The human relaxed a tad in his place, smiling back at him.
In the middle of the storm, all was quiet. The world around them and the howling circumstance went blissfully silent, and the three of them who were still awake sat together amongst the rest of the family, all of them safe enough to rest; gentle enough to not be awkwardly quiet. Leo took note of every small sound, every feeling, every tiny detail, and tried to commit this moment to memory. Where things were neither good nor perfect, but as okay as they possibly could be. If this was the silver lining, Leo would be draping this memory around his neck like a tennis chain. Keeping it like a picture in a locket.
For now, at least, they were together. And they were okay. And they would keep on watching movies, on and on into the night.
Pinpricks of light came in through the manhole cover far above. Leo didn’t care if they were stars or street lamps. The city buzzed above and around them like a hive, and the rumbling of the subway rocked them to sleep like white noise; punctuated by the sound of cars in traffic. Leo didn’t think he could sleep in a palace that didn’t have his brothers and the people and the world softly rolling with noise around him.
Leo took a moment to appreciate the weight of his brother’s arm, and the sensation of his pulse. His brother’s Finally At Rest Smell. If anything, for moments like this, Leo was happy to still be here.
It may have been a crazy fucking day, but it was a really beautiful night.
Notes:
who's asa? what happens when draxum's serum wears off? what's really going on in raph's head? find out next time in quarantine part 4, coming to you- well, hopefully sometime in the next decade. but i make no promises.
thank you so much for reading. this took a LOT of effort out of me, and i've literally been in the quarantine writing mines for an entire year plus change. i didn't do a second draft for the very very end because i realized i was just going to rewrite the exact same paragraphs for the next month, so if you see any errors: no you don't.
big shout out to the Kraang Raph Alliance tumblr group, whose lovely words and overwhelming patience gave me the motivation to finish this. thank you to the ones who have been here since the very beginning (you know who you are!) and the people that hopped on along the way. and, of course, the biggest of thank yous to my amazing brother, who i could do absolutely nothing without. you are the best part of me.thank you again! see you next time! remember to get vaccinated, wear masks in public spaces, and treat yourself with kindness. see you later! :)
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