Chapter Text
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“So, what's up next on the agenda for today, human boy?”
Casey looked up from his phone to shoot an unimpressed look at Leo's way. The two of them had just left Run of the Mill after being held hostage there for a couple of hours by Hueso. The skeleton had been reluctant to let them go until he was sure he’d fed the pair enough that they could feel their poor stomachs were on the verge of bursting as they walked along the sidewalk.
“ 'Human boy’? Really? You can't come up with anything more creative than that?” He stared into Leo's eyes, and while his face remained blank, he saw nothing but mirth reflected back at him. He sighed. “Fine. There's supposed to be a market up ahead that Dee wants us to go to 一”
“一 to better spy on us?” Leo suggested.
“Mm. Very likely. However 一 ” The slider perked up as the human's pace slowed to a stop and he pulled him in closer, leaning over to whisper his next words directly into the mutant's ear. “Markets are typically very busy places around this time, and it is very easy to get separated in them, especially when you would least expect it to happen, too.”
“Ahh,” Leo nodded, hoping (correctly) that he had caught the others' drift right. “So we should wait a bit just to lower their expectations of us before dipping on them to go and do our own thing.”
Casey smiled at him in a way that reminded Leo of his elder brother, and he couldn't have stopped himself from smiling back if he had tried. While it did disgust him a little that the mystery guy his best friend had been raving about for the last couple of months was his own brother, he was glad that the two of them had been able to create something so full of joy in a world so full of horrors.
“Exactly.” Casey's smile faltered just a smidgen, a strong sense of nostalgia washing over him as he remembered back to when his Sensei and he used to sneak around their base together and mess with everyone else.
“So,” Leo straightened up his stance so that he wasn't leaning on the other so much anymore and adjusted the strap of the backpack he wore, holding out his hand to the human. “Shall we go, then?”
Junior snorted before composing himself and reached out to interlink their arms together at the elbows, putting on a fake posh accent like some Edwardian gentleman. “Certainly, my dearest Nardo.”
Leo laughed along, and the two began moving forward, following the distant sound of a large crowd growing closer. “Oh, dear, don't let our old Donald hear you calling me by that nickname. The guy rarely shows us outright that he does care, and he tends to get quite possessive over his little tells that he’d come up with.”
Casey nodded in agreement and began recalling aloud some past memories of similar scenarios from his own childhood to the slider.
Such as that one time that Master Michelangelo had tried his hand at dating this one guy and ended up in a bad relationship with him. He hadn't seen for himself just what exactly Uncle Tello had done to the shark Yokai after he had walked in on the guy forcing himself onto the box shell, but the way that the Yokais screams had echoed throughout the entire base that day and the fact that he had not been seen after that, he could take a pretty good guess on how he'd ended up.
And if not that, then the way that everyone looked and acted differently towards and around the softshell after that confrontation definitely said that something horrible had happened.
He may have only been about eight at the time, but he still remembered how the softshells pristine (for the apocalypse with limited resources) white lab coat he always wore had turned a horrid shade of brown he'd grown familiar with for the rest of his life. No adult had wanted to be the one to explain to him what had gone down, but being born and raised during the end of the world, kid him had been able to put two and two together quite easily on his own.
Well, now that he was actively trying to look back on it all, he found himself feeling pretty damn glad that the Donatello he’d had to face upon his arrival hadn’t been the one hardened by the end of everything as they'd known it. Lord only knows he very likely wouldn't still be here if that had been the case at the time.
Leo laughed along loudly as he listened to Juniors reminiscing, agreeing wholeheartedly that Donnie very well had killed the guy.
Hell, given the environment was what it was, the softshell probably had even eaten some of the poor sod. The slider could certainly see himself doing the same thing, and his taste for blood wasn't as strong in his mind as his dear twin and oldest brothers were.
Casey looked over to him as the mutant threw his head back with a cackle while he watched one of the market performers tell a joke to the children, all huddled together around the man's feet.
His eyes caught onto the unnervingly sharp points of the slider's full set of flesh-tearing teeth and found himself silently agreeing fully with his statement. Having seen nothing but the softest sides of them all as they raised him, he would often find himself forgetting that the turtles really were all genetically engineered killers.
“Oh, oh, Junior, look over there!” Leo called out to him suddenly, breaking the human out of his reminiscing.
He turned his head to follow where the slider was pointing and smiled. “Does the royal highness wish to go over and rifle through the different boxes of shinies?”
“Oh, always. Casey, if I 一 and I do mean this 一 ever say no to being given something shiny 一” He turned to stare at the human with a surprisingly serious expression on his face for the environment. “ Stab me. And make sure that you do it a lot too, cuz it takes a surprising lot of effort more than you’d expect to keep any of us Hamamtos down for a decent amount of time.”
Casey chuckled, kind of 50/50 on how to feel in regards to the slider's statement, jokingly said as it was. His Sensei had made a similar comment to that after he had lost his arm, something that Casey remembered Uncle Tello had been very close to actually doing if Uncle Mike had not also been there at the time to remind him how Leo was already in enough pain and suffering as it was.
The two walked over to the stall still arm and arm before they got close enough to separate from one another. Casey went and stood off to the side with a look of boredom on his face as Leo moved to look over the table of odd little trinkets and bobs. The slider began to make some small talk with the old raven-like Yokai granny who manned the stall.
Junior shoved his hands into his pockets and turned his head to look around. He stared at all of the other nearby stalls until something of interest finally caught his attention, and he turned back just enough to call out to the other.
“Hey Lee, I'm gonna go over there and check out that, uh, place over there, kay?” The slider gave him a noncommittal hum, mostly ignoring the man who sighed and turned to start heading the other way. “Alrighty…”
~~~~
Leo shoved his hand into one of the little boxes in front of him, enjoying the feeling of smooth, polished rocks against his limey-green scales.
“Looking for something specific, are you?” The Yokai asked.
The mutant hummed and turned his gaze up from the box's contents. “... I guess.”
“Mm… a gift, perhaps? For somebody special, maybe?”
Leo caught the glint in her eyes and quickly looked back down at the assortment of trinkets. He felt as his cheeks heat up when his thoughts immediately moved to centre themselves around a certain white rabbit.
“... maybe… ”
The old crow watched his reaction and snickered when he started to fiddle around with the strap of his bag, looking anywhere but at her face. She turned and hobbled over to dig around in another box over on the other side of the table. “Oh, well then, I think that I might have just the thing that you need there, dearie. What kind of a gift do you think that he would like?”
“He一? How’d you know that it was a he I was talking about?” Leo asked, his head shooting up to stare at the Yokai with a lifted brow ridge.
The Yokai stared back, her eyes caught on the red stripes painted naturally over his own pain. His hand went up unconsciously as she spoke, feeling the scales of his face free of his mask, the original having been destroyed to nothing but scrap in the Prison Dimension and still yet to be replaced.
“Well, when you get to live as long a life as I have, you manage to pick up on a trick or two, my dear.”
The Yokai's explanation left much to the imagination. Leo was about to question her further before shaking his head and deciding against it. He watched her dig around in the box and thought of how to go about answering her prior query.
“Ah… well, an apology gift, I guess?” He rubbed his hand against the back of his neck and shrugged his shoulders. “I think that I might’ve done something to upset him, and he hasn't really texted me in like a week. I’ve asked him about it earlier this morning and he hasn't responded back yet, so I was thinking of maybe hunting him down later this afternoon to try and get some answers about it.”
“Ah yes,” she nodded her head, understanding what he was saying, “my dear husband was much the same as yours seems to be. Fickle-minded creatures, those men are, wouldn't know how to have a proper conversation with you unless you tied them down to a chair and forced the words out of them with a hot iron.”
Leo stared at her a little bug-eyed, nodding along more out of concern than in understanding. Did she just imply that Usagi was his husband? Ha, he thought, if only that were so. “Yeah… totally. ”
The old raven laughed, and Leo let out a nervous chuckle as well, playing along so as not to upset the elder. She pulled out a couple of random things before moving to dig around in a different box. A moment later and she hobbled her way over to a spot on the left, empty and dumped an armful of different little trinkets down with a loud and cluttered mess of noise.
“Alright, dear, come and pick out your favourite one!”
The slider stared at the Yokai before shrugging his shoulders and hobbling over to join her on his side. He gazed down at what his options were and hummed quietly to himself with a hand on his chin.
On the black tablecloth sat a few different objects, a few that he did not recognise immediately and a couple that he had absolutely no clue as to what they were. Must be something strictly familiar within the Yokai community, then.
There were a few different types of rocks next to some shiny crystals, something that he would definitely nab for himself, but not something that he thinks the bunny would enjoy. The Yokai gave off the aura that he had grown up living a bit more privileged a life than Leo had.
A fact that had annoyed him after he had learned of his father's life before he had had his unplanned for children.
Don't get him wrong, Leo did love his dad and could look back fondly on memories of his childhood, but that didn't change the fact that the slider (in all of his fourteen years old at the time glory) was allowed to feel a little stiffed after learning that his father was basically a millionaire and none of them had seen a cent of that money until rather recently.
Right next to the collection of rocks were some odd little shiny metal bits and bobs that had likely come from the humans up topside.
Some random old bottle caps, a paper clip bent a bit out of shape, a couple of coins, 一 pound? Or euros maybe? 一 and an odd bit of scrap metal that looked unsafely sharp around the edges. Not enough of his interest was being piqued by that pile, so he moved on to the next and the next, his face fixated in as neutral an expression as he could keep up so as not to offend, until something caught his eye and he paused.
Fixing his gaze on a small, green stone that he didn't recognise, a little voice in the back of his mind trilled happily as he moved to run a finger over the semi-rough, polished surface. The feeling wasn't something he would have normally sought out, but something told him that it would do very nicely as a gift for his bunny.
The old raven saw him reach out, and her eyes widened briefly at what he had picked before quickly hiding her surprise as he looked up at her.
“How much for this one?” He asked.
“Oh, that old thing? Well, I say that you can just take it 一” she saw him about to protest and shook her head defiantly. “Don't try and argue with your elders, child, it is rude. In fact, I do believe that that one happens to be one in a pair.”
Leo opened and closed his mouth, feeling like a fish out of water as he gave in and silently watched the elder as she moved back to shuffling her feathers through the boxes. A few seconds later, the raven hopped back and placed down another stone of similar shape next to its counterpart, urging him to pick both of them up.
Leo looked from the raven to the rocks, and back again and held up his free hand. “But I can't just take it for free, this is a market, I gotta buy it 一”
The Yokai rolled her eyes at his protest and picked up another rock. This one he did end up recognising to be a Hemimorphite rock carved into the shape of a rose and quite a pretty one, too. Enough so that the slider couldn't find it in himself to try and protest against it.
“Well, alright then, you stubborn child,” the old bird croaked, “if you must be something annoying about it, then you can buy this and then maybe the other two might slip into your pocket magically. Who knows, really, anything seems to be possible these days.”
Leo gaped at her before snapping his beak shut at her offhand comment about catching flies and just nodding along in agreement. “Yeah, okay.”
He 一 a tad reluctant 一 reached into one of his pockets and felt nothing inside. He clicked his tongue and moved to pat at each of his other pockets one by one, and found himself confused when they were all much the same way.
He looked wide-eyed up at the old crows' expectant gaze and offered the woman a bit of a sheepish smile. Holding up a finger, he gestured for her to wait a moment while he swung his backpack around to hold it to his chest and rummaged amongst the contents inside of it.
The Yokai raised an eyebrow and huffed, growing more and more impatient the longer that the turtle took to produce some coinage. A figurative bead of sweat started to roll down the side of Leo's face as he began to search in spots that he had already looked in thrice now.
He could feel himself only growing more nervous by the second and felt as if a thousand different pairs of eyes were boring holes into the back of his skull from all angles as he stopped looking in the bag to stare towards and into the passing crowd.
His eyes scanned over face after face, pupils shaking as he felt his heart start to pick up its pace. His movements grew more frantic by the second as he failed to locate his human acquaintance. He opened and closed his beak, trying to pull his voice out from behind the dam of his anxiety to say something 一 anything 一 to the raven Yokai.
About how the human had his money, about how he had forgotten that he had even given it to the other for safekeeping, about how he didn't know where the other had gone off to, about how 一
“一 much?” A voice asked.
Leo's head snapped over to the source, and a blob of deep purple and white met his blurry eyes. He blinked a few times to try and clear his vision and paused at the white rabbit that now stood right next to him.
He stared at her face, having to tilt his head down as she was right about half a foot shorter than him, and thought to himself that she held a bit of a resemblance to Usagi before his gaze moved further down to follow along her arm and saw what it was that the woman was pointing towards.
His eyes widened a fraction more, and he felt his vocal cords shrink further when his beak opened to protest. The granny stared at the Rabbit with a winged hand on her chin and a contemplative hum in her throat. An agonising second more and she gave the newcomer the rocks total, the woman paying without question.
The raven picked all three rocks up and placed them into a little velvet baggy and pulled the drawstring shut before tossing it in the rabbit's direction. A hand from the man next to her shot out and grabbed the small bag in a tight fist, making sure that it didn't come close to hitting the woman in the face like it would have.
The rabbit threw him a quick side-eyed glare and turned to the slider. The smile on her face faded as she took in the young Kappa's shifty appearance and his avoidance of eye contact despite clearly having something to say to her, and she let out a sigh. She dropped her shoulders and loosened up her ‘Holier Than Thou’ persona 一 much to the chagrin of the man next to her, and sidled up to the mutant, speaking to him in a volume just below loud enough to be heard over the crowd.
Leo turned as the other got closer and tensed up. She held out a furred paw for him to take and smiled gently, speaking again as Leo attempted to read her lips over the buzzing in his ears. “Shall we go, then?”
The slider just stood there, and the rabbit gently pried her arm underneath his own stiff one, carefully coaxing the mutant out of the crowd. She waved at the merchant, who shared a knowing and slightly pitying look with her.
Finding a quaint little cafe with not a lot of people inside, she guided the younger to sit down in a quiet corner with a quick order for the Yokai, following behind her to go to the counter and buy something. She gently pried the crutch from his hands and leaned it against the table, and pulled his bag off next to place it underneath.
Sitting down in the seat next to him, she rubbed a hand over the back of his clothed shell and waited quietly for his shaking to subside.
Luckily, his breathing had not quickened enough to risk him hyperventilating himself into unconsciousness, but his mind had locked his body into moving on autopilot. He stared down unblinkingly at the clean surface of the table, and his eyes watered a bit, unsure if it was because they were getting dry or because he just wanted to let go of his defences and cry. He sucked in a deep breath and forced himself to blink as his little, ahem, episode, finally started to fade away.
Not feeling as if he were ready to say anything, though more out of embarrassment at having had other people see him act like that, he just stared down at the table.
The man came back and placed a small plate down in front of him with a soft clink. Leo looked up at him and saw that he seemed to be some kind of black and tan coloured canine Yokai. A doberman, he thinks.
The dog stared down at him with a hardened gaze, and Leo flinched, turning back to the table. He caught sight of the plate and stared. The lady rabbit swung her head around to shoot a glare of her own at the dog before she turned her attention back to Leo and saw the subtle confusion on his face.
“Ah, I do suppose that you have yet to have met me properly before, right? My son isn't the most talkative little creature either, though, so I wouldn't try and hold it against you.”
She continued to rub absentmindedly at his shell while she talked, staring down at Leo in such a comforting and motherly way that it was beginning to make his scales crawl.
“How are you now? Are you feeling any better yet? Do you think you have calmed down enough to make the walk to the car, or would you prefer to just sit in here for a wee bit longer? Do you 一 Ace, pass me that cup 一 would you like some of this water to sip on?”
“Mm…” He didn't trust that his voice would work for him at the moment, so he just nodded and accepted the cup with a croaked out hum, before he paused with the cup pressed to his lips. “... son?”
He croaked out, and the rabbit Yokai just smiled so very motherly towards him, giving him a nod of her own. “Yes, I am Usagi’s mother. You can call me Ishi, sweet. I believe that there is a conversation that the two of us desperately need to have.”
~~~~
Leo stepped out of the sleek black car with a dazed expression on his face. He moved a few steps from the curb before startling as the door slammed shut behind his shell. He turned his head around to look at the source and met the glaring eyes of the Doberman bodyguard.
The two made a moment of uncomfortable eye contact before the window rolled down. Usagi's mother 一 Ishi 一 leaned her head out and tsked at the Doberman.
“Ace,” she chided, “that is enough out of you, you're acting almost as immature and annoying as my children are.”
The bodyguard reacted in a way that only a dog who knows that they had been caught doing something they shouldn't have and avoided looking at his boss’s way. Leo would have laughed if his brain wasn’t still feeling off from earlier. Ishi coughed into her hand, and with a soft smile, she turned her attention to the slider.
“Now dear, I have a few things to take care of before I can enjoy the coming show, so what I want you to do is go and find my son and then the two of you can go and make your way up to the family observation deck 一 or whatever it is called…” She waved her hand as the proper name deluded her for now, “do you understand?”
Leo gulped slightly and nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Mhm, right,” she grumbled, giving up for now on trying to get the youth to drop the formalities. “And I want the two of you to talk things out, alright? That stubborn little fool never knew when to pull his head out of his arse and it was a real pain when he was just a wee thing, so I can only imagine how much worse the little bugger has become with age.”
Leo just nodded along, not saying a word for lack of faith that his voice wouldn't crack. The two shared their goodbyes, and she rolled up her window as the Doberman hopped back into the front with the driver.
Leo watched after the car as it drove away, his face so clearly reflected back at him in the smooth paint that he could see the worry in his own expression as easily as if he were looking into a regular mirror. He spun on his heel and tipped his head back, gazing up at the colosseum that played host to the Nexus fights in front of him.
Breathing in and out carefully, he made his way over to the front entrance to go inside and begin his search for the most recent pain in his ass of a man. The list of questions to ask him when they met only grew longer with each agonising step he took, moving further into the bustling crowd. It appeared as if half of the hidden city had gathered here to watch as the modern-day gladiators performed in the arena.