Chapter Text
The box turtle fell to his knees. Grief shaking his shoulders and a pastel explosion lit up the dark sky.
Humans would look at it with hope. The nightmare was over.
For them it was.
For Mikey it had just started.
For his brothers it had just begun.
For his whole family the world was falling down.
His brother was gone. How was he supposed to get over that?
Just this week they were laughing and joking just the four of them. Like they normally do.
Now it was just three. They were never meant to be three. Just four.
The turtle’s vision was blurry as he looked at the fading beautiful explosion fading. “You promised,” He croaked weakly. Sobs racked his small body. “You promised!” He yelled at where his brother last stood.
“Hey Mikester,” The blue brother peaked in his orange brother’s subway cart. “Today was ruff, uh?”
The ‘Mikester’ rub his eyes quickly, “Y-yeah it was, Leo”
Leo smiled softly at the younger turtle. “What’s up?” Mikey went up to open his beak but his brother poked him in his side, “And don’t you say the sky or a ‘buttload of humans’ that’s my line and you know it!”
Mikey let out a wet laugh, and the other’s smile feel, “Seriously what’s wrong?”
“I-I-I” Mikey struggled, he was normally good with feelings but he was overwhelmed. It was Leo though and he always knew how comfortable the orange one.
Heh. Funny isn’t it? Orange and blue? There complementary colors they work better together. One without the out would be a bland picture.
Leo rubbed Mikey’s shell when pulling the other close, “Today was scary. Uh, Angelo?”
Mikey let out a sob as he nodded in Leo’s shoulder, “Y-yeah.”
“Wanna talk about it?”
“N-no.”
“Okay.” Leo didn’t press, “Wanna sit here?”
“Yeah.”
So they did and they stayed like that until who knows how long. Each turtle soaking up the comfort the other provided.
“We could have died.” Mikey muttered weakly looking up at the blue masked turtle as a tear leaked down his soaked face.
Leo gave him a wet smile, “Yeah?”
“The Shredder wanted to kill us!” Mikey’s shoulder’s shock, “He wanted us dead! What if we died? What if I died? What if you died? What if-”
Mikey’s thought halted and a hand on his face wiped away his tears, “I’m not gonna lie.” Leo started, “We could have died, but what would happen if we didn’t fight the shredder?” Leo never treated him like a baby, unlike Raph. He didn’t sugarcoat the hard truths.
He does make promises he can’t keep.
“He would have won.” Mikey said with a sniffle.
“And then where would we be?”
“Dead…”
“Yeah! DEAD!” Leo waved his arms around to lighted up the mood, “Along with the hole yokai population!”
Mikey let out a wet snort at Leo’s drama.
“What would the world do if I wasn’t in it?”
“Probably be better off.”
“HEY!” Leo put a hand over his chest. “I’m wounded Mikey!”
Mikey giggled and tried to get away from Leo’s finger attack to his ribs. Leo rapped him up in a hug, and place his head on top of Mikey with a soft hum.
“But for real. None of us will die on my watch and definitely not on Raph’s”
Mikey ducks his head, not that much comforted but Leo’s statement.
“Hey look at me Mikester,” Leo said turning Mikey’s head towards him gentle, but his eye’s wander away from the striped turtle blue and brown eye. “Look at me in the eye, bud.” Mikey stubbornly stared at anything but him.
“Please.”
It was so soft and quite Mikey’s eye’s snapped to his most reckless brother.
“Is there more to this?”
“Yeah. ‘Bout you.”
Leo let out a small hum encouraging him to keep going.
“I don’t want you to die.”
“Me? What about Donnie or Raph?”
“Raph would probably protect us and it would be his fault because he baby’s us.”
“We would be broken though.”
“Yeah…”
“And the DonTron?” He poked the younger one.
“He would died by a expulsion in his lab or something but he would have a way to put his brain in a computer and have multiple copies just in case one gets destroyed.”
“Sounds about right.”
“But we would be permanently broken if you died.”
“The glue of the team would still be there though.” Blue said elbowing Orange.
“But you're the glue that holds me together, and you always know when something’s wrong.”
“I’m just good at reading people!”
Mikey shrugged helplessly. “You also my favorite so I’m a little biased,'' the orange one admitted in a mumble.
Of course, Leo picked up on it, “So I am your favorite!”
“What?”
“Me and Donnie had a bet going.”
Sounds about right.
Leo looked down at his sibling with a smile and spoke in a soft hushed tone that was so unlike Leo, “Death is a friend we can’t stop ourselves from meeting. People can try to stop or make their lives longer, other accept their fate to soon.”
“Me and our brothers won’t die in battle, maybe it will be in our sleep when we are old or one of us will finally give Raph a heart attack, and lack of sleep gets to Donnie, (maybe too much caffeine). Then you die of lack of nutrition because you only want to eat pizza. I die because I portal to the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Mikey hit his brother hard in his arm.
Leo yelped, “Okay! Okay, no more death jokes!” Mikey started to think Leo had an interval timer going off in his head.
Leo sighed dramatically, “What I’m trying to say is we’re too stubborn to died in battle and the shredder didn’t stand a chance after we got our mystic mojo back!”
“What if there’s someone we can’t face?”
“We face them anyway! If not us nobody would do it, but if we do it people already know we defeated the Shredder so we could use that on our job applications to try to get some back up you know?”
Mikey nodded mutely with a small smile on his face, “I’ll get to decorate it so it catches the eye with my razzmatazz?”
“Obviously!”
They state there is a natural silence setting over the two. One of them wasn’t quite finished talking though. They seemed like they never were.
“I won’t die on you, because I’ll have my brother’s back me up, okay? And if I’m in a fight that I can’t win on my own I’ll call for backup.” Leo reassured the ‘big man’. “ I’ll at least see you’re 18 birthday AND your 21st so we can get drunk together!”
“You promise?”
“I promise and swear on Karai that I will live to your 21 birthday. In top condition so we can get drunk together and Raph won’t be able to get in mother hen because we’re 21 well I would be 22 but those are just numbers!”
Mikey laughed, not a wet one from before but a real laugh, “Donnie would kill you if he heard you say ‘just numbers’!”
Mikey yelled up to the sky hoping Leo could hear him, “You PROMISE me!” He wanted Leo back. He didn’t want him to die.
He needs to get out of that portal.
And Mikey was gonna make it out of the prison dimension even if it was the last thing he did.
Mikey stood up tall and raised his hand up straight in front of him and he begged for the Hamoto’s to help him out here because he really didn’t know what to do.
But Mikey just pushed all of himself into the portal, all his mystic energy and his mind was consumed with the thought of creating a portal to get Leo back.
He felt a spark in his fingertips.
He saw the spark in front of him.
Felt felt more the same time he saw it.
He was doing it! He was going to save Leo!
He heard his brothers gasp beside him and felt their hands on his shoulder and he spared a glance up at them.
Raph was determined, a rock unmovable.
Donnie’s eyes had hope, a leaf fluttering in the wind but refusing to fall.
Mikey’s face was one of pain and grief, but relentless anyways. Like an ocean beating against hard stone.
The portal opened.
Raph first saw what was on the other side and collapsed the stone shatter after one to many beatings.
Mike next saw and refused to believe it for one second the ocean was still at high tide.
Donnie’s hope flicker out of his eyes and tears start to come again, the leaf falling out of the wind.
Leo’s limp broken and bruised body floating in the low gravity of the prison dimension.
“Grab him,” Mikey said weakly, he was able to hold the portal open much longer than the pain in his arms.
He also saw something moving in the shadows..
“His gone Mikey.” Raph said cold and final.
“No he’s not! Someone grab him!”
The red of the Kraang's eye stared at him from a millisecond of a moment and he charged towards the portal.
Mikey gasped as he stumbled backwards, the portal blinking out of existence.
The ocean was a low tide giving up the fight.
There was nothing to fight for.
“He promised”
Raph broke at the sight of his littlest brother whispering quietly over and over and over again. ‘He promised’
A broken sob racked through the red snapper’s throat. He couldn’t protect him.
The soft shell started at where the portal was. He's only half a shell. The other half locked away to die.