Work Text:
“Leo!”
Hamato Leonardo had endured a lot of pain in his life.
He had get cuts in battle thousands of times. He had sprained both ankles, his shoulder and his wrist (though not all at the same time) and had hit his head very hard. More recently, he had been electrocuted and bruised all over his body. He had nearly drowned once.
Leo thought he knew what pain was.
He was wrong.
Nothing he had ever felt compared to the pain that now gripped him.
And yet it seemed distant, as if something was preventing him from feeling it at all. He opened his eyes slowly, though he felt a tug in his ribs that told him that this act alone must hurt like hell.
He was floating.
No. He was moving.
There was a bright light in front of him, which seemed to take up everything around him, and his body was heading straight for it. It radiated warmth and comfort, and for the first time Leo realized that he was very cold. But that light seemed to want to help him. It was as if a small but insistent voice was telling him that everything would be all right as long as he reached her.
Suddenly he felt a feeling in his chest, a familiar tug. That feeling that always seemed to come when his brothers were in danger.
Yet, where were they? Despite the barrier that lessened his pain, Leo's head still felt light and his eyes couldn't focus properly; he could only see the light.
This time, another voice spoke to him, but this one came not from the light, but from his own head. It spoke to him in an authoritative yet pleading tone, a tone he usually saved for his brothers when he really needed them to do something. He made sure he heard her.
“Don't go into the light.”
So Leo looked back.
There they were.
He recognized April's flat, and then his brothers huddled around something. It was then that he saw himself. It was him, bruised and dirty, his right leg turned at an unnatural angle. There was blood on his arms and face, and his bandana was stained with something dark that he couldn't recognize. There was a trickle of blood running down his neck, but the cut did not appear to be very deep. He had two thicker cuts on his plastron that followed the same trajectory as the first.
The memories came to him like a whirlwind and the realization of what was happening like a tsunami.
He was dying.
He looked back towards the light, which suddenly didn't look so warm and pleasant. If he reached it then he would not be able to return, and it was approaching at an alarming rate. He had to stop, he had to get back to his body.
Frightened, he forced himself to swim against the current. He didn't touch the ground, he didn't even know where was up and where was down, but he didn't care in the slightest. He began kicking and flailing his arms in a desperate attempt to push himself against whatever was pushing him.
Despite the numbness in his body, he managed to gain ground. The only thing that filled his mind were his brothers. He couldn't leave them alone, not after being separated from Splinter. He couldn't leave them, more importantly, he didn't want to. He didn't want to go into the light, no matter how much pain that might cause him. It didn't matter. He couldn't be separated from them. He wanted to keep caring for them, protecting them, loving them.
He wanted to keep laughing with them, he wanted to keep supporting them, teasing them from time to time. He wanted to read comic books with Mikey and play video games with him. I wanted to keep hearing Donnie talk about his experiments, and see how his prodigious mind carried them out. He wanted to keep training with Raph, to keep leaning on him when he needed it, no matter how many times they fought, because he knew his brother would help him. He wanted to see his father again, and Karai too. He wanted to keep teaching April everything he could, and go on patrols with Casey. He wanted to go back to his room. He wanted to keep training until he was perfect, as close to it as he could be. He wanted to save New York. He wanted to re-watch all the space hero episodes and finish the book he'd left halfway through. He wanted to turn sixteen.
He didn't want to die.
He kept fighting against the light that was calling him. It was slow going, but he was moving forward. He was almost there. Just a little more... he stretched out his hand...
BANG.
He hit something. It seemed like an invisible force that wouldn't let him pass. Something like a wall. But he was so close, less than a meter away from his own body, that up close looked even worse. His brothers were all around him, but they didn't move. It was as if time had paused.
Unable to go any further, the current began to drag him back.
"No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no..."
NO!
In a last-ditch attempt to save himself, Leo kicked again, pulling his arm back and turning his hand into a fist. He hit the invisible wall as hard as he could.
An instant later, it broke.
And the pain came back with full force.
In a second he was back in his body, and his narrowed eyes could barely make out the red of Raph's bandana.
If he had thought that what he had felt before was pain then there was no way to describe what he felt now. It was ten times worse, in an almost unbearable way.
Before the darkness swallowed him once and for all, the light still travelling along the sides of his vision, lagging, as if it dared not come any closer, Leo managed to make out the voices of his brothers.
“He's still breathing.”
“Dude, his shell is cracked!”
And he couldn’t hear any more.