Chapter Text
It’s a slow, quiet night—inasmuch as anything in New York City ever really gets slow and quiet. Mikey and his brothers are in Sheepshead Bay, loitering on Ocean Avenue Bridge, watching ducks sleep on the water, waiting for something to happen.
Donnie’s shoulder bumps Mikey’s companionably, and Donnie doesn’t scoot away when Mikey leans into him. Raph is humming under his breath, something that sounds like a record sensei might have used to play in his room. Leo’s sharp eyes are as watchful as ever, scouring the darkness for any hint of danger or threat, but they come back to gaze over his brothers regularly. His steady attention feels like a warm blanket.
At twenty-five years old, it’s easier for them to sit together like this than it ever was when they were fifteen. They were young when they learned what they still had to lose. Kids should never be forced to figure out the hard way not to take family for granted, but Mikey thinks they bore those lessons as gracefully as any kid could.
When he was eighteen, Mikey nearly lost an arm. He still has the ugly, ropey scar. It was a mission gone catastrophically wrong and he doesn’t remember much of it. He had such a high fever from infection that it stole weeks worth of memories, burned them clear out of his brain.
Donnie told him later that Mikey had talked in his sleep. That he had apologized a lot. That he’d begged his brothers to tell him what to do, that he’d do anything, if it would make them like him again.
“You don’t have to do anything,” Donnie had told him, red eyes round and grave, voice stricken. “Why would you think that?”
Mikey hadn’t known what to say. Donnie was so smart. If he couldn’t see it—the way they were crumbling and coming apart and barely knew each other anymore—then Mikey, the weakest link on the team, certainly wasn’t qualified to tell him.
Something must have shown on Mikey’s face, because Donnie got up from his chair and climbed into the infirmary bed right next to Mikey like they were children again. He didn’t say anything else, but he put his arm carefully around Mikey’s wounded side, and if he let go he didn’t do it until after Mikey fell asleep. When he woke up, Raph and Leo were there, too.
After that, things got better. Mikey’s arm gets sore when it rains, and sometimes the muscles spasm and seize up, but he doesn’t regret the scar in the slightest. He would be happy to lose a limb to pay for more comfortable nights like this one.
Abruptly, Leo’s posture goes stiff, and it sends a ripple of alarm through the rest of them.
Then there’s a sudden interruption of light. It’s like a tiny, localized dawn in this corner of Brooklyn alone. A glowing circle hangs over the pier, spilling warm yellow across the water and the boardwalk.
Mikey’s senses go to war with themselves. Obviously, historically, random portals are no good. His head knows that. But his heart is soothed by it, the way he feels when Raph is late coming home from patrol and he finally walks through the door.
It’s golden and gentle and it feels like family.
His brothers are tense, but they haven’t sprung into action yet. No one’s speaking. They must feel it, too.
As suddenly as it appeared, the portal begins to close, as benignly as a poppy folding up for the night. When it’s nearly half its original size, about the length of Mikey’s arm span in diameter, a body hurtles through it at a literal break-neck speed, hitting the pier hard enough that the wood splinters.
Mikey catches the barest glimpse of green and blue and it’s all he needs. He flies off the bridge like he was shot from a cannon, his brothers’ shouts snatched away by the wind.
The glowing circle is nearly gone, taking the light with it, but Mikey can see just fine in the dark. In less than a minute, he’s on his knees beside the body, taking it in.
Green skin striped with yellow and red, armored plastron cracked in a way that Mikey intimately knows speaks of a crushing wound, enough blood around the mouth that it could easily be from either a bitten lip or internal damage, a blue mask wrapped around bruised eyes—eyes that are open, gazing through the last fingers of fading yellow light right at Mikey.
This interdimensional stranger must be in a world of hurt, but they still manage to scrape together a smile.
“Took you long enough,” the turtle says. He sounds like a kid. Mikey’s heart is in his throat. He can sense more than hear his brothers fall in around him. It makes him feel a little steadier. Carefully, he takes the striped turtle’s hand.
“Yeah, I’m here,” he replies softly. He’s thinking of the farmhouse, of those scary months when Leo was this broken. He’s trying to be brave for this little turtle the way his siblings have always tried to be brave for him, but he gives himself away somehow.
As easily as Donnie had that night in the infirmary all those years ago, the striped turtle looks right through him. His fingers tighten around Mikey’s with what might be all the strength he has left in his body.
“Don’t be scared, Michael,” the kid says, as warm and bright as the portal that sent him here. “It’s all over now.”
Then his hand goes limp and those expressive eyes slide shut.
Mikey’s next breath shudders in his chest. Someone touches his shoulder but he can’t bring himself to look up.
“We gotta help him,” he says.
“‘Course we do,” Raph says. His hand on Mikey’s shoulder tightens. “Let Donnie take a look, okay? Then we’ll get him home.”
Mikey is twenty-five years old, and he should have outgrown this kind of thing by now, but he still finds himself turning to Leo. All his hope is in his eyes, the way it probably was back when his arm finally healed enough that he could be let out of the infirmary for a few hours, and his whole family was sitting around the dinner table for the first time in almost a year, waiting for him.
And Leo doesn’t let him down, because Leo never could.
“We’ll help,” Leo says. He doesn’t smile, but he gazes at Mikey so fondly it doesn’t matter. “It’s what we do.”