what to say

by leodoriya

Summary:

In the wake of Leonardo's worst injury yet, the turtles struggle to cope.

Chapter 1: i've no one to tell how i lost my best friend

Notes:

title is a lyric from the song "the frost" by mitski
what can i say? i like naming stuff after poetry
cw for a brief mention of vomiting starting on "that day, he did end up crying so hard he" and ending on "to which leo had a minor freak out"

“Stupid fucking Leo” Raph snarls under his breath, slamming the knife down on the carrot before him so hard he had to yank it out of the plastic cutting board with each slice, “Stupid fucking self-sacrificial stupid fucking Leo.”

“Idiotic” Comes Donnie’s soft voice mumbling behind him, sounding utterly exhausted, “Moronic. Half-witted. Imbecilic. Dumb.”

“Glad we agree” Raph rumbles through gritted teeth as he shoves the carrots into the boiling pot with a vengeance and allows himself a moment or two to revel in the daydream that it’s the Purple Dragons being cooked painfully into mush before moving on to the lentils.

“Dull. Foolish. Obtuse. Dim. Dense.”

“Hey! Are you two talking about me- woah, Raph! My poor cutting board!”

Raph grinds his teeth together so hard that lightning strikes of pain jolt up into his nose, turns to fixate Mikey with what he puts all his energy into being an absolutely lethal glare, and starts cutting carefully, filling his head with happy thoughts about slitting the throats of every Purple Dragon to ever breathe.

“Thank you” Mikey smiles, but it doesn’t meet his eyes. Seeing as none of theirs do these days, and Raph is absolutely unable to play therapist right now, he settles to heave a great sigh and look back to the lentils.

“We’re talking about Leo” Donnie mumbles.

For a moment, the only noise is the bubbling of the pot and the sound of the knife dismembering the lentils, hitting the cutting board with a light thump to complete every finishing blow, like the crack of a successfully snapped neck.

Then, extremely seriously, somewhat angered, almost betrayed, “I thought we all agreed we weren’t going to call him that.”

Raph goes utterly still at the same time as the atmosphere, hands freezing over the vegetable and mind freezing over the image of a Purple Dragon gazing up at him with wide, terrified eyes as he lifted the blade over him. Shame douses his anger like water to a forest fire, leaving nothing but the desecrated woodland behind it to revel in.

From a moral standpoint, calling a man with an intellectual disability from a recent head injury is just cruel. From a brotherhood standpoint, watching that man fall into a vicious sobbing breakdown every time somebody called him stupid no matter the context means that nobody, especially not you, can call him it.

But Raph had been angry, and forgotten, just like all the other times he’d called him stupid since his injury. Story of his life.

“Sorry” Donnie murmurs, sounding something other than exhausted for the first time in a month.

Kicked back into gear by an angry horse, Raph rasps out the same, the knife still motionless in his hand.

When there’s no immediate response, he slides his eyes almost shyly towards Mikey and takes in the tight-lipped, stormy expression on his face for just a moment before the guilt inside him grows so intense he fantasizes about killing himself in battle, but what is there left to say?

Raph isn’t Leo. There aren’t words in his brain to take back what’s been done, to settle Mikey’s face into something more recognizable, just like there aren’t words in his brain to soothe all of Donnie’s worries so he can sleep easy, and just like there aren’t words to make himself feel any less furious. There aren’t even words to make Leo feel better anymore, because Leo isn’t a guy that needs a loud talking to and then some gruff affection anymore, because Leo no longer had whirling thoughts he needed to hurl at something real until they fell apart anymore. Leo no longer understood why he was being yelled at all, he just understood that he hated it and somebody he loved was doing it when all he was trying to do was explain himself.

(Sometimes, laying down on the floor of the dojo as dawn rose, Raph waited with closed eyes and baited breath for Leo to come in and save him from himself, to hear out all of his tangled emotions and say something wise and needed in reply with his muscular arm lain heavy over his shoulders, reminding Raph of the unkillable strength of his big brother. Every time, he knew he wouldn’t come, but the only other option was to lie there and come to terms with that, and every time dawn rose and he finally remembered that Leo would never come for him again, he’d weep so hard he’d feel he was going to vomit and he’d have to bite down on his own hand to keep the noise of his sobs stifled.

Two days ago, Leo had arrived in the middle of said sobbing fit, and for a blissful moment Raph’s prayers had been answered, and this entire mess was over, but he took one look at that wide-eyed gaze, filled with confusion and worry in a way the Leo of before never would’ve had, because he already would’ve been across the room, eyes narrowed and thunderous with thought, and he just sobbed harder.

He couldn’t see a thing through his tears, and he couldn’t hear a thing over the noise of his own ragged breaths and desperately muffled wails, so when something soft touched his arm, he jerked and whipped around in terror, expecting to see his father staring at him pitifully.

But it was Leo, again, staring at him with those same wide, worried eyes, though he didn’t seem so confused, gently pressing one the stuffed animals Mikey had gifted him – his favourite one, a soft-furred dove he’d named Dove – into Raph’s arm.

Despite himself, Raph only sobbed harder, and then sobbed even harder as Leo pulled the stuffed animal back and titled his head this way and that before setting it down and wrapping both arms around Raph’s shoulders.

He still felt the same. He had less muscle mass, but that happened whenever one of them got badly hurt. He was still warm as ever, and he still smelt of Leo, and the hands against his shell had the same grooves they’d always had.

That day, he did end up crying so hard he vomited, to which Leo had a minor freak out and then herded him back into his bed. By the time they got there, though, Raph was too exhausted and dehydrated to cry, so he just laid there, limp and aching, as Leo brought him a glass of water and explained over and over to the rest of their family using his tablet that Raph sick, Raph sick, Raph sick.

“Well, you’re not feverish” Donnie declared, blinking lazily down at him through sagging eyes.

“I’m fine” Raph had mumbled, though he was still too worn to even attempt getting out of bed. “I just have a headache.”

“Raph sick” Leo repeated, looking firm with his tight lips and furrowed brows. “Raph sick.”

Donnie sighed, and for a moment met his eyes, and Raph watched as he understood.

But Raph didn’t want Donnie to understand. He wanted Leo to understand.

But to do that, he’d have to explain it in a way that didn’t just end up hurting the Leo of now’s feelings, and he wasn’t able to figure out a way to do that on a good day.

Donnie maybe, but Donnie had eye bags the size of Texas and a penchant for sighing and rubbing his eyes every ten minutes, so all he said to Leo was “We’ll keep him in bed for another day, and then we’ll check up tomorrow if he’s still sick, but he’ll be fine. I’ll give him an ibuprofen for his headache.”

Raph, for once in his life, accepted the bedrest without hesitation, giving Donnie a small nod.

Donnie gave a weak smile back as he rose to his feet, blinking rapidly for a worrying second as soon as he managed to stand.

Leo, however, wasn’t soothed. “How help” He asked, worrying his bottom lip with his teeth.

Donnie’s eyes flitted to Raph.

“I’ll be fine, Leo” He assured. “I just need to get some sleep.”

Both Donnie and Leo nodded, though only Leo moved, letting his tablet hang from the strap around his chest as he set Dove down by Raph’s side and pulled his sheets further over his shoulders.

Within his chest, Raph’s heart cracked and splintered, not for the first time, but there wasn’t water nor energy left in his body to cry.

“Come on, Leo” Donnie called quietly, reaching out to touch a hand to the crook of Leo’s elbow. “Let’s leave Raph to his rest.”

The frown on Leo’s face only grew in intensity, but he followed where Donnie led him with only one last glance over his shoulder and a “Sleep well.”

I wish he was dead, Raph thought desperately, and then found it in himself to cry.)

“Why are you mad at Leo, anyways?” Mikey asks, anger receding to the corners of his voice. “He hasn’t done much.”

“I’m not mad at Leo” Donnie defends, and, continuing on like a traitor, “Raph wouldn’t stop using the word- uh. That word. So I was giving him synonyms.”

Raph’s own body boils with the atmosphere. “This is why you need to start sleeping better, Don” He all but snaps as the embers of anger light within him before sighing as they die as soon as they’ve come.

“I just miss my brother, Mikey” He mutters, moving the knife in his hand down upon the lentils again as anxiety lights up his fingertips. “And I’m fucking pissed with him for protecting those strangers like that, putting himself in danger like that.”

“It’s what we do, Raph” Mikey replies, voice uncharacteristically angry and serious once more. “You would’ve done the same exact thing.”

Fuck, did he wish he had been there instead of Leo last night. The thought of being like Leo is a terrifying one, but at least in that alternate universe where he’d never be the same again he’d still have his big brother to cling to. Raph is just the angry brute, the fighter, the protector. Anyone can be that. Nobody could be Leo.

He slides the lentils into the soup with the back of his knife and sets his hands on the counter, gazing down at their surface.

“Yeah” He replies softly.

Once more, the only noise in the room is the bubbling soup. He should turn that down to a simmer now that all of the ingredients are in, but his hands are stuck pressed against the counter, just like his eyes are stuck staring at his own reflection, and his mind is stuck on self-loathing and grief so terrible some days he’s sure it will kill him.

Mikey sighs loudly, sounding almost as exhausted as Donnie. “I miss him too, Raph.”

“I know.”

“But he… he’s still Leo. He still likes ninjitsu and he still cares for us.”

“I know” His grip tightens over the countertop, heart breaking apart in his chest. “But he- I- he- I-”

Tears blur his vision, arms shaking beneath him. He releases them of their duty to lay one against the countertop and press the other against his eyes. “Fuck me, Mikey” He sobs. “Fuck me.”

Mikey settles a hand on his shell, rubbing soothing circles into the bone. Despite himself, Mikey doesn’t say anything.

What could he say? The only person who would know what to say doesn’t exist anymore.

Chapter 2: murder be thy name

Notes:

CW!! this chapter contains quite some gore (just blood, but quite a lot of it) but also near the ends contains real excerpts from different articles about the abuse/torture/dehumanization of people with (intellectual) disabilities historically and presently. please be advised. there is also a brief mention of nausea ("struggling to shovel mashed potatoes in his mouth through the persistent" and its safe to resume reading on "he couldnt muster up the energy to" <3)
title is from the song "murder! murder!" by american murder song

“Hey, Donnie” Leo asks, speaking in that soft, hesitant way he does when a movie’s playing, even though both of them have seen this movie hundreds of times before, “Do you think that all humans would be afraid of us if they saw us?”

Donnie turns away from the screen to look at him just as twelve-year-old George Bailey dives into the freezing lake to save his brother.

“I don’t know” He replies. “I mean, they sure do love making monster movies.”

“Well, yeah” Leo says sheepishly, eyes darting quickly to the opposite side of the room than Donnie and then back again as he does when he’s embarrassed. “But, um, the monsters always attack first in those movies. Plus, they can’t talk – they’re just animals. We can talk. We could talk to them.”

“Yeah, I guess” Donnie shrugs, “But they’d probably be scared by just the image of us – I mean, we’re the picture of all of their monsters. And you know what Dad always says – even if they weren’t scared of us, they’d most definitely experiment on us.”

Leo clasps his hands together in his lap and turns his gaze back towards the movie, and for a moment the two of them lapse into silence, listening to the voiceover of God continuing to explain George’s life to Clarence. Master Splinter had found this movie in an alleyway just a year ago, the disc blissfully clean from within its scarred packaging. At first, they’d watched it as a family, but Raph and Mikey had quickly lost interest due to the movie’s total lack of colour or action.

Donnie, however, found himself enraptured with the historical significance of the creation of the camera and movies. Everything else him and his family had ever seen had been in colour – DVDs of Sailor Moon and The Goonies piled up beside their elderly television – to the point where, to Donnie at the time, it seemed that every movie must’ve always been in colour. But here was a movie before him in black-and-white, and not for a strange stylistic choice but because at the time there wasn’t the ability to capture things on a camera in colour. At the time of the creation of It’s a Wonderful Life, did they even think it possible a movie could be in colour? What must it have been like to be a person back then, a human back then, and think that the miracle of being able to create a movie, to capture real human movement and sound on a flimsy piece of film and then stick it in a projector and have it broadcasted to an audience, could get no more marvelous, just to one day walk into the theatre and find that somebody had managed to find a way to do it in colour?

It must’ve made them feel like anything in the world could be possible. What wouldn’t Donnie give to create such a reaction amongst the world?

“I mean, but what about E.T? E.T was a monster who spoke, and they accepted him. Or Lilo and Stitch?”

“Only a small handful of people accepted them both times. The government and everyone else hated them.”

“Maybe that’s enough” Leo argues quietly. “I think maybe all it takes is one person to believe in you, and then the world can. I mean, if it’s only a small amount of people, those small amount of people do always win protecting the aliens in the end.”

Donnie shrugs, lacking a response. “I guess. That would be nice.”

“What would you do, if humans accepted us?”

“I’d make all the coolest inventions” Donnie smiles, “And I’d meet with all the coolest scientists. What would you do?”

“Have kids.”

“Have kids?”

“Yeah. It looks like fun” Leo smiles, rocking back and forth in his seat slowly. “I think it’d be nice to be a dad.”

“Huh. I guess so. That’s it?”

“Well, um, no. I’ve got to make money somehow. It would be super cool to run a dojo, once I’m a master. Maybe I’d write some books, like Sun Tzu.”

Donnie nods. “That does sound really cool.”

Leo nods back, wistful smile still curved across his face.

Donnie turns back to the movie and reaches for his glass of water on the table, picturing Leo as a dad in his mind, holding half-turtle-half-human hybrid children in his arms. The smile on his face, his faceless wife over his shoulder, the sunshine pouring through the trees over their picnic blanket. It fit him well, as did the image of Leo standing tall and broad in a dojo, surrounded by wide-eyed children, demonstrating this and that, and as did the cover of a book with Leonardo Hamato written in text on the bottom. Maybe Donnie would write books, too, on theories he’d made and inventions he’d made, sharing his genius with the world at large, just like Leo.

Something hot, thick, and metallic pools into his mouth, clogging up his throat as it slides into his esophagus. Without hesitation, he yanks the glass from his lips as he begins to hack up whatever sludge he’d inhaled, splattering red liquid all over his hands and the blood-filled glass.

Wide-eyed, he slams it down on the table and scrambles back, jolting as his hands press down on a wet and squishy couch with a squelching sound. Pulling his hands away and turning his wide eyes to the couch, he flings himself off of it at the sight of the blood-soaked cushions, the warm brown now a deep, dark red.

He turns to look at Leo, ribcage tightening around his lungs and shortening his breath, but the only thing there is Leo’s corpse, blood pouring down his head like a flood, catching on his eyelashes and dripping down onto his thighs.

Donnie gazes at his empty eyes and still chest and finds his own heart ceasing to beat.

He jumps as a hand settles on his shoulder, flailing his limbs as he pushes himself up into a position to turn and stare at the culprit from a semi-safe distance, chair clattering to the floor beneath him as he staggers back, fists half-cocked until he manages to blink the sleep from his eyes and finds Leo standing before him, hand outstretched and eyes wide.

Donnie settles a hand on the dining table, heaving for breath. Just another nightmare. Just another nightmare. Just another nightmare.

He flinches as Leo’s hand settles over his shell, but ultimately stands still as Leo rubs circles into it with his palm, focusing on pacing his breaths and heartrate back to a regular state while his arm trembles beneath his weight, the taste of blood rich on his tongue.

It’s not fair, he thinks bitterly, almost petulantly. It’s not fair that everyone else scolds me for not sleeping when they don’t have to see what I have to see. It’s not fair. It’s not fair.

Maybe this was how Leo felt, years ago when they almost died defeating the Shredder. Why did everyone else get to be upset at him for not being healthy, not moving on, when his brain tortured him with it at every turn?

The easy answer is that it’s not their fault like it’s Donnie’s. He’s the medic, he fixes injuries, and more than that he was there. He watched Leo get his head smashed in, watched his eyes roll back into his head as his blood (far, far too much blood) painted the cement floors and walls like a splashed paint bucket, felt the scream rip from his own throat as he sat himself down next to Leo and struggled to find the wound on his head from beneath the mess of red, red, red. He’d stayed up for days, tending to his wounds and staring at his comatose body in the bed, running through as many different futures as possible and praying to somebody, anybody, that his brother would wake up and be and okay. The blood was brown by the time Master Splinter took his hands in his and wiped it off with a wet rag as Donnie watched, body shaking but mind numb, in silence.

Still, every time he looked down at his hands, for a moment he always expected to see blood, no matter how many times he washed his hands clean.

The robotic voice of Leo’s AAC pulls him partially from his thoughts: “Everything okay Donnie. Only bad dream.”

Donnie hums in agreement, nodding as he continues to gulp in air greedily. “Yeah. Just a bad dream, Leo. I’m okay.”

“Breathe deep.”

Nodding again, he does as told, if only just to soothe Leo’s worries. Lacking much of his reason as he is, getting Leo not to worry about someone has become twenty times more difficult. Almost nothing had gotten done while Raph was ‘sick’ in bed, the entire family having to team up to keep Leo both away from Raph and calm at the same time, while Leo, stubborn as ever, spun around in confusion at both goals: Why was he being kept away when Raph is sick and always feels better when his brothers are around? (Did he do something wrong? What did he do? Why isn’t he allowed to go and apologize for whatever he’s done?) Why was everyone so focused on him when Raph was sick? (This is not the way it usually goes. Why isn’t it going the way it usually goes?)

The whole thing had resulted in quite a few breakdowns, as the family had begun to call them, as Leo’s ruptured emotional regulation abilities led to him lashing out at the three of them in anger and confusion, making warbled noises with his throat as he struggled to express his emotions with words he no longer had until in his frustration he ripped his AAC off of his chest and hurtled it across the room, hands twitching as he lumbered around for other things to throw and smacked anyone who tried to touch him.

Eventually, he’d calmed down, and had actually rather quickly begun to pick up the things he’d thrown and put them back in their proper spots, although he rejected being reunited with his AAC and afterwards spent the rest of the day curled up in his bed with the sheets over his head, making low, irritated groaning noises whenever one of them came to speak to him. They’d let him have his dinner in there.

Sitting at the dinner table in silence, even Mikey too tired to attempt to lighten the mood with conversation, Donnie knew he should probably feel irritated. Every forum to for people with family with intellectual disabilities talked frequently about the irritation of having to deal with their high needs and occasionally destructive tendencies, pictures of shattered electronics and walls smashed inwards littering every corner of the internet for those who lived with the intellectually disabled. But, sitting down and struggling to shovel mashed potatoes in his mouth through the persistent nausea in his stomach, he couldn’t muster up the energy to.

Leo didn’t ask to be this way, but Donnie had made him this way anyways. He’d been too slow, too distracted by his own fight and then too careless while running down to fight the Purple Dragons by Leo’s side. He’d grown cocky with all the victories they’d had, and all the close calls they’d escaped. He’d fallen like a fool into the belief that miracles were anything more than finicky, arbitrary strokes of fate.

And now Leo would never be a dad, even if he did manage to find love and procreate. He’s too dumb and too unstable.

And now Leo would never run a dojo, just as he would never become a master. He can’t learn new techniques, and his damaged hippocampus struggles remembering old ones.

And now Leo would never write a book. He can’t read or write, his AAC serves its purpose with descriptive pictures and the sound of words he recalls verbally.

And now-

According to the United States Department of Health and Human Services, 11 percent of all child abuse victims in 2009 had a physical, cognitive and/or behavioral disability and children with disabilities are almost two times more likely to be physically or sexually abuse or neglected than children without disabilities.^[3] In addition, abuse is typically more severe, is more likely to occur multiple times and is more likely to be repeated for a longer period of time.

Previous research has shown that some of the variables associated with higher risk of experiencing sexual abuse are living in residential settings or being institutionalized [17,18], being female [19,20,21,22], being a child or adolescent with intellectual disability [14], and having high severity of support needs [23].

Willowbrook was a state-funded institution in Staten Island from the 1940s until the late 1980s. The school was over its capacity in only a few years; in 1965, Robert Kennedy described Willowbrook as a “snake pit” with “rooms less comfortable and cheerful than the cages we put animals in a zoo.” The few changes that resulted from Kennedy’s visit were insubstantial and short-lived.

Crushed, Henry returns to his room. He takes a pair of scissors and for the first time removes the child's swaddling clothes. It is revealed that the child has no skin; the bandages held its internal organs together, and they spill apart after the rags are cut. The child gasps in pain, and Henry stabs its organs with the scissors. The wounds gush a thick liquid, covering the child. / The script is also thought to have been inspired by Lynch's fear of fatherhood;^[14] his daughter Jennifer had been born with "severely clubbed feet", requiring extensive corrective surgery as a child.^[20] Jennifer has said that her own unexpected conception and birth defects were the basis for the film's themes.^[20] 

Joseph Arridy ( /ˈærɪdi/ ; April 29, 1915 – January 6, 1939)^[1][2] was an American man who was falsely convicted and wrongfully executed for the 1936 rape and murder of Dorothy Drain, a 15-year-old girl in Pueblo, Colorado. He was manipulated by the police to make a false confession due to his mental incapacities. Arridy was mentally disabled and was 23 years old when he was executed on January 6, 1939.

Saul Krugman , funded in part by the U.S. Surgeon General’s Office, began conducting a study on hepatitis in Willowbrook – initially starting with an epidemiological focus, then shifting to a more involved study. Krugman intentionally infected 60 children at Willowbrook with the hepatitis virus by feeding them live samples of the hepatitis virus. Krugman “watched as their skin and eyes turned yellow and their livers grew bigger.”

And now none of Leo’s dreams would ever come true, because even if humans accepted them as monsters, they can’t even accept themselves disabled.

And every single piece of the blame falls squarely on Donnie’s slumped shoulders.

Notes:

sources for the article excerpts, in order (i did use the one about the willowbrook institution twice):
https://disabilityjustice.org/justice-denied/abuse-and-exploitation/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7921934/
https://sites.uab.edu/humanrights/2023/10/25/a-history-of-institutions-for-people-with-disabilities-neglect-abuse-and-death/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eraserhead
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Arridy

on a more fic-related note, there will be chapters more about LEO to come, iykwim. im just setting up how all the turtles feel. next chapter will probably be mikey, then leo. for now, donnie lovers come get yall juice.

also sorry if this is written weird. i have schizophrenia and it can jumble words up sometimes.

“actually coloured tv was available at the time of its a wonderful life it just wasn’t the cultural norm-“ shhhh he doesn’t know that

Chapter 3: crocodile tears

Notes:

cw for self-harm (no cutting or burning or anything just like, biting your tongue and using your hands to cause physical pain to ground you) and plenty of thoughts of violence

Anger never used to be an emotion Michelangelo was familiar with. Sure, he’d experienced it, just like everyone else on planet Earth, but never regularly. Even things that should’ve by all means aggravated him had a tendency to flow through him like water in a stream – quickly in, quickly out. If they lingered, it was not with anger but rather with something like fear, worry, or sorrow.

Now, it runs under his skin like blood, buzzing like threatened bees in his bones. Even as he sits down in front of Leo, who doesn’t deserve his wrath unlike his other brothers, his throat is hot with the liquid of sheer rage. There are no words in his mind to scream at him, his heroic older brother who’d only done what he was supposed to, but his lungs and vocal cords beg to anyways, howling in him like starving wolves; BITE! BITE! BITE! KILL! KILL! KILL!

He offers them the power of making him keep his mouth shut as he rips a blank page from his sketchbook with far more force than necessary, shaken by the pull of his boiling stomach that tells him released his tongue and teeth will only lead to him ripping his older brother’s throat out of his neck like a rabid animal.

(And worse, that when the blood pools over his tongue and down into his throat, he will relish in the taste of it. That where meditation and exercising until his body was numb and not thinking about it failed him, the copper warmth will drown the bees and the wolves and snuff the flames of anger. That he should be left alone in silence with his brother’s body and terrified eyes, barely able to remember why he would harm him in the first place.)

But after the page is set down, and Leo’s hand is cautiously curled around a paintbrush (the fat and long body far easier for him to learn to grasp than the skinny body of a pencil, Mikey learned in the absence of Donnie’s help), the act of speaking is inevitable – Leo’s eyes are curious and focused, looking into his. Before the incident, however, his eyes would’ve been sharper than the katanas on his back, gears in his head turning so fast that it made Mikey dizzy as he came to conclusions within minutes that would take most people days.

Now, his eyes are round, confusion swirling around within his focus and curiosity. It’s the way he used to look at Splinter when they were learning a new move – entirely trusting and excited for what was to come, but also at a loss at what the thing to come was. It makes Mikey’s stomach roll.

But, even then, the gears were turning, trying to deduce the answer before it was told.

They have to still be there, though. It’s impossible to remove somebody’s gears entirely, right? And no matter what the rest of his family may be up to, Mikey won’t give up on Leo. He didn’t give up on him when he went to Japan, and he won’t give up now. He won’t give up ever.

The gears are just at a standstill, halted by something jammed into the cogs. And while Mikey isn’t nearly as knowledgeable on cogs and jammed cogs as Donnie, he knows that something stuck can be unstuck one way or another if enough force is applied, if enough will is present.

And Mikey may have lost his peace, but his will is something he will let no thing take from him – unlike his other brothers.

He swallows roughly, imagining the collection of saliva from his mouth pushing down the ball of fury from his larynx and back into his stomach where it belongs with the rest of the acid within him. It doesn’t quite work, but it weakens it enough that he’s like 55% confident he won’t lose his mind on Leo for no good reason as soon as he opens his mouth. He never would’ve taken that chance before, but nowadays it’s as good as he’s going to get.

“A” He begins. “Do you remember how to write A?”

Leo blinks slowly at him, gaze uncomprehending. But that’s fine. All this is is physical therapy, is working carefully through the motions of walking after an ankle injury by painfully stretching out the sore muscles everyday until they won’t break again at the slightest pressure.

Mikey parts his teeth again, but before he can begin to lift his tongue, Leo’s eyes shift down to the page before him – something he’s never done in any of these sessions yet.

Mikey shuts his mouth, barely finding the courage to breathe as Leo furrows his brows, casting shadows over his gaze as it intensifies into something for once familiar to see, even if it is faint like an ember of a once great flame.

But an ember can set a tall fire to blaze once more if allowed to. Mikey sits perfectly still, terror making its stance amongst the anger that any distraction at all could break this pristine moment, this undeniable evidence of hope and that the older brother he knows and loves is still there, waiting patiently to be reawakened.

The sight goes on for maybe a minute, maybe an hour. Eventually, Leo turns a resigned, relaxed gaze up to Mikey, and slowly shakes his head.

Mikey could cry, could grab his other brothers by the throat and strangle them until they remembered that they loved Leo – or, at least, until they did actually love Leo.

Hatred and relief and love swell within him all at once, his body a mere cup about to overflow, about to shatter and burst. He pushes his tongue between his teeth and presses down to keep it still and remind himself of his presence in this moment as a person and not a vessel for emotions to overtake. The pencil is easy to hold in his hand, but his handwriting is still shaky when he sketches out the letter A on the sheet upside down in two fluid motions.

He leans back, curling his hands over each other in his lap. He squeezes them together until his knuckles go white and pain bursts through his fingers like small explosions, but it’s worth it as it ebbs away the fury enough to truly take in the sight of Leo carefully tracing over the letter with his brush without being instructed to for the first time, lip caught under his teeth and eyes daresay sharp and alive with focus.

It’s only when he’s done, when the letter is complete and Leo looks back up at Mikey with a look of pride and anticipation, that he releases his hands to press his knuckles against his mouth, stifling back both rage at how Leo would’ve been abandoned to his injury forever had he only had Donnie and Raph for brothers (who were meant to be smarter than Mikey in every single way, and yet somehow spectacularly failed to see hope once it hit them in the face) and enough love to raze New York City to the ground in minutes. His older brother, forever and for always, the one who didn’t give up, the one who didn’t die, the one who beat the odds.

For a moment, it almost doesn’t matter that it’s just Mikey and Leo against the world, because now it truly is Mikey and Leo against the world.

Notes:

im SO sorry this chapter came out so late. both of donnies and raphs chapters came to me like visions. this one FOUGHT ME, ironically enough. no one was more pissed about it than me, believe me. i was also finishing up grade eleven for the last two months, so it was just homework and homework and homework and homework. ive written so many fucking essays dude. BUT IM FREE!! until september i am free. so i FINALLY managed to sit down and create this chapter. i hope you guys enjoyed this chapter and didnt get annoyed by how many times i used the words anger, rage, and fury lol. thank you all for being patient with me <<<3333 i hope to churn out lots more chapters over the summer!!!!

https://youtu.be/UeW5HUPcCio?si=nWRZQAOOCrv90_23 <- shout out to this playlist for giving me the motivation to write this chapter and keeping me in the zone the whole way through!

Chapter 4: i'm so cold (let me in your window)

Notes:

cw for internalized ableism / meltdown?
title is from "wuthering heights" by kate bush

Leo never was one for stuffed animals, not even as a child. He held no interest in creating names and personalities for inanimate objects the way Mikey always was readily inclined to do, and, frankly, they tended to creep him out. Their glassy, soulless gazes made his skin crawl, their failure to ever truly match the animal they were designed to mimic making him instinctively hunch in on himself with the somehow overpowering sensation of the uncanny valley. They stood as disturbingly still as haunted dolls on Mikey’s bed, and he spent his entire childhood desperately wondering what could ever come over his brother to not only keep them so close to where he slept, but name them as well.

Yet, when Mikey first handed him the soft pigeon plush while he was still confined in the med bay, he found himself feeling none of that familiar discomfort. Rather, he found himself mildly enamoured with it, its beady black eyes somehow cute and its furry body wonderfully soft. He turned it over in trembling hands that were almost as hard to maneuver as his tongue, feeling like an ancient, well-rusted machine.

Mikey said something to him when he gave to him, he’s sure of it – remembers seeing his jaw move in his peripheral vision – but in time since his gift was given the words he told have slipped from his mind into the gaping hole where everything seems to go.

Nevertheless, he kept the pigeon with him dutifully, finding it oddly comforting in his new reality. As his family flitted about over him, stressed and weary, and words like permanent brain injury and intellectual disability were laid out like gunshots into them, the faux bird remained impassive. As the days went by and so did the endless tests and treatments, he found himself gripping onto it through each one, its presence under his palms washing him with a slight sense of safety and peace. Despite it, however, he found himself longing each time that one of his brothers or his father would reach out and hold him, the fear practically tangible in his mouth as Donnie did test after test and concluded after every single one that something was gravely, irreversibly wrong with Leo.

But, while they were present for the tests, none of them ever did, staring fixatedly at him as he struggled through each simple challenge, and gazing at him with endless grief and disappointment every time he failed to create a happy answer. Eventually, the longing turned painful, transforming into a beast with its neglect, going from whimpering sorrowfully at the lack of affection to screaming and clawing at Leo’s heart with each passing test spent scared and alone.

It grew far too difficult to keep the sheer agony to himself, and then words like damaged emotional regulation skills began to be spread around over his head. He had nothing to say in reply, nothing to tell them I need you except to reach out and beg with what noises he could summon from his throat, praying the only family he’d ever had would know him enough to understand.

But they were all too weary, and only ever stared back at him with either horror or resignation. If they did say anything, they spoke in soft, sweet tones as though he were a child, waving their hands up and down like he’s a wild animal. Is that all Leo is, now? An animal? An unwanted, slobbering beast chained outside to his doghouse at the end of the night, left to do nothing but stare longingly at the light pouring through the windows of his family’s warm home as their familiar silhouettes flitted about within it?

There is something, though. The stuffed animal, the soulless toy, settled with him in the dark. His last remnants of love, the only warmth to be held in the doghouse throughout every cold night. He’d named it Dove both because he didn’t know what else to name it and every other name he did try were quickly forgotten to him.

He holds it now, settled in the med bay while Donnie clicks away something on his computer. Their other brothers don’t stick around for the tests anymore, as now they’re mostly just to see the current limits of his capabilities, rather than to see if they can be fixed. Every single one is old news by now, every single one a nail in the coffin of his old self in the eyes of his brothers, every single one taking away one more inch on his leash tying him to the doghouse, every single one settling in his new role in the family as the unwanted other. Part of him can’t help but wonder at what point they’re going to drop him off and leave him to die once they realize he’s truly too far gone to ever be something similar to the brother they once loved, but most of him can’t bear the thought enough to think of it too deeply.

There are no words even to apologize for this existence in him, anymore. Sometimes, he tries to show it through his eyes, but his brothers barely look at him anymore enough to see, and every time they do the only thing in their eyes is grief and disappointment. Most of the time, he tries his best to emulate his old self, to show them that he’s still here and that he’s sorry for ruining himself with his mistake, but the actions fall through his hands like sand. Training is difficult, taking almost all the energy he has in a day just to even remember the movements he’s trying to learn. His brothers go easy on him in sparring, their movements slow and their eyes sorrowful, but it’s still too fast for him, and every time he ends up on the ground with them standing silently over him with wet, almost horrified eyes. The dojo has become an almost sworn enemy, a demon perpetually ready to remind everyone of everything that he isn’t anymore. But the old him liked the dojo, and being in there is one of the few times he’s present with his family like they used to be, and so he returns to it. Hopefully one day, if he goes there enough, his mind will return to him – at least enough to make him even slightly wanted again.

For now, though, he’s settled in a cot, tracing circles around Dove’s beady eyes. Whatever this test concludes, it’ll be the same as all the others, but at the very least, Dove will not be swayed. She has no recollection of who he used to be, no expectations for the current him that is. She holds no grief and no resentment. Should they leave him behind permanently, at the very least he will have her, his impassive yet loving companion. The culmination of the love his brothers once held for him before he was no longer himself.

The keyboard stops clicking. Leo switches to petting her head in the sudden silence, drinking up the soft texture of her fur beneath his palm. Soft sniffling noises emerge in the clicking’s place, but they’re not obtrusive enough for Leo to mind, so he simply continues to stroke Dove’s soft body.

Mikey used to have conversations with his stuffed animals, back when they were kids. He threw tea parties with them or made them into his superhero team, and affected funny voices for each and every one. Did he plan them out, or did they come to him intuitively? Same with their personalities, as well, did he create them or simply know them? He used to say stuff like Clark only likes green tea or Wanda doesn’t like being wet. Leo hasn’t a clue in his mind what Dove does or doesn’t like, nor her voice. Dove simply is, a lifeless entity of unconditional, unending love. She speaks no words and enjoys no activities except to be with him, even if he is stupid and violent.

The quiet sniffling turns into broken sobs. The agonizing noise makes Leo’s skin crawl with discomfort, his teeth grinding into in each other in vain attempts to cure it. He pulls Dove up against his chest, the warmth of her love and texture of her body helping to assuage his discomfort from his chest, though it remains crawling about his arms like ants. Despite it, the noises continue, hitting his ears like nails on a chalkboard. He presses his face into her fur, shutting his eyes tight as low whimpering noises whine out from his throat. Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop, make it stop, make it stop, make it stop. He fantasizes hungrily about reaching into his ears and ripping their internal mechanisms that make him hear things out of his skull. Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop, make it stop, make it stop, make it stop!

A chair slides with a loud, grating noise against the pavement. Leo’s breath hitches dramatically, caught in his throat as his heart hammers. He squeezes Dove ever closer, practically hunching over her as he all but wraps his body around her small form. Help me, help me, help me.

Footsteps slam into the ground and out of the room, luckily taking the sobbing noises with them. Still, the incredible discomfort remains, almost a tangible pain in his chest. He clutches onto Dove, crying softly and begging her for answers he cannot ask and she cannot give as to what’s going on and why he’s hurting. Yet, she remains, unmoving and comforting against his body and in his hands, soothing him with sympathy until, eventually, the silence of the room registers in his mind and slowly washes away the pain of the sobbing. His breathing evens out, his body relaxing around hers, and the whimpering tapers off into his own silence. He sits there for a few seconds longer once calm, however, projecting his gratitude into her and enjoying her solid presence. Once he’s felt her understanding, he lifts his head to find Donnie’s seat empty.

He blinks curiously at the empty chair. He hadn’t heard him leave – is the test finished? But even then, Donnie usually informs him of the results, even if Leo doesn’t entirely understand what those results exactly mean at first. Has he given up on even that? So disgusted and resigned to Leo’s current state of self that he’d abandoned even his usual practice of telling his patients the results before the rest of the family? Is Leo no longer a sentient patient to him?

Or could he not bear the sight of his once strong and stoic older brother breaking down over some noises? Did it revolt him so deeply that he couldn’t even be bothered to try to calm him down anymore, and rather left him to his pain? Has Leo finally reached the point where his brothers no longer see him as one of them entirely?

He settles his chin sorrowfully on top of Dove’s head. The room remains silent and empty. He watches the clock on the wall as the hours tick by until Mikey comes in, eyes hot with hatred and fists clenched. He doesn’t smile at Leo when he drags him out to dinner, where everyone at the table is as quiet as the room he was just trapped in.

When they send him to bed for the night, he curls his entire body up around Dove and wonders if tomorrow is the day leave him for dead.

Notes:

im SO sorry this chapter took so long yall!!! this was another chapter that fought me... and it didnt help that this was the last chapter until i had to write actual plot (im using the japanese novel writing style kishotenketsu to write this bc ive never written a longfic before) which i do not have a lot of experience with so i kind of got overwhelmed every time i opened my word doc. in the month its taken me to write this i have altered the formatting of my word doc and planned out every chapter of this fic (yippee!! ive never done that before but i just like, wrote down all the necessary chapters and left it at that pretty much). but this chapter HAUNTED me in everything i did so eventually i just said fuck it and forced myself to write it even if it didnt want to be written and i think im actually fairly satisfied with the result :)! and i really hope you guys enjoyed!!!!!! and again im SO sorry this took me so long... i am but a little guy... ;(

Chapter 5: my baby here on earth

Notes:

no triggers of note to me this time :)
title is from "my love mine all mine" by mitski. that song is so splinter i will die on that hill

Splinter’s family has never been unfamiliar with hard times. Even before there was war, there was famine, disease, and the ever-present threat of the human world above their heads. As much as it never ceased to hurt his heart to impossible levels, Splinter’s always been familiar with the sound of his children in pain, their tears and their moans. When Leonardo first got hurt, even though he fretted as much as he knew he always would, he’d figured this time was no different – his children were hurt, but with some help would quickly right themselves, and turn the devastation into strength and betterment.

Everything went as expected at first, as well. His sons sought him out for comfort and wisdom, and he sought them out to give them said comfort and wisdom. He wiped Leonardo’s dried blood from Donatello’s hands and sent him off to bed, read Michelangelo’s comics to him while stroking his head until he fell into a peaceful sleep, and held Raphael through the raging storm of his anger and fear. He even settled beside Leonardo’s bedside and took pleasure in the small smile that would stretch weakly across his son’s face every time he woke up enough to register his presence.

Whether it was delusion, desperation, or ignorance, until the diagnoses hit, Splinter was sure all would be well soon enough. Worry did knot itself within his chest, but he kept steadfast, meditating away as much of his fear as possible – because if there’s one thing he’d learned about fatherhood, it’s that when times are at their toughest children need a strong, reliable parent to help them through.

As such, when the diagnoses did hit, he kept it to himself, tucking away his worry and grief within his chest until he was alone at night. There, safe from the sight of his sons, he wept as quietly as he could muster, memories of the Leonardo that would never be again flashing through his mind’s eye. He cried until there was nothing left in him to do but sleep – and then it was morning, and he steeled himself with hope he stubbornly dragged out of all the little crevices of his soul where it sometimes likes to hide away. He dried the fur beneath his eyes with a cloth in the bathroom mirror, and only once satisfied with his appearance did he emerge into the Lair for a calming cup of green tea.

Leonardo would always be Leonardo, no matter what. He was Leonardo even when he was consumed with self-hatred and rage, and he’ll be Leonardo now. He’ll be Leonardo now, because no matter what happens, he will always be his son. His sweet, oldest boy. Even if he never spoke again, there was a time where Splinter thought he’d never, and that had never once swayed just how much he loved him. Even if he was never intelligent again, there was a time before even that, too. Everything may change, but the fact that Leonardo is his son will never. Even if he de-mutated back into a normal turtle tomorrow (though, please, no – there’s been enough trouble in his little family), Splinter would still dutifully feed him each day and pet his head each night.

But that doesn’t change the fact that something has been irreversibly altered in his family, and it doesn’t change the fact that his sons are taking the blow almost as hard as Leonardo himself is. Raphael has all but lost his truly passionate spark, swept away in the tidal wave of his grief. Donatello hasn’t slept a wink in weeks, and whether or not Splinter aids him in getting to sleep seems to have no effect on the eyebags that fight to drag his once lively eyes back into his skull. Michelangelo’s bright spirit has been deeply dimmed by his uncharacteristic anger, anger that reminds Splinter nauseatingly of Leonardo after his sons had nearly died defeating the Shredder.

Last time, he fixed that by sending him off to the Ancient One in Japan – but all of his sons are fighting for purchase in their minds this time. Could he possibly send all of them to Japan – would he be able to trust them to return safely? And what of Leonardo, how would he cope with the dangers the trip would throw at them, barely able to fight and unable to reason? Sure, his brothers could and would protect him, but every single one of them is so wrapped up in their own grief, each one barely clinging onto functionality. What of Donatello, dizzy and slow with sleep deprivation staggering up those treacherous mountains?

Perhaps he could go with them, but the journey would still be long and difficult, and while just what Leonardo needed before, his gut calls to him this time that another fight is not what his sons need right now. That what they need is a place to relax, to release their tensions with themselves and with each other like a blister about to burst. He’d purposefully prevented them from watching the news, commanding them to lie low while they adapted to the new state of their team. He kept training light, not just for Leonardo’s sake, who now needed to be carefully taught a move several times over to be able to do even just half of it on his own.

And yet, the tension remains somehow both stagnant and rising. As every day goes by and Splinter beholds his sons passing through their home and by each other like ghosts looking for the afterlife, something itches and twists in his gut to do something.

But what? He’s tried meditation, he’s tried talking with each of them individually, he’s tried talking with all of them at once. Yet, nothing seems to change, not even slightly. His sons only seem to curl deeper into their new dark worlds, lost and upset yet either unwilling or incapable of accepting his help the way they did before.

It twists and tugs at his heart like nothing ever had before, not even the death of his master. He’d seen it on telenovelas before, sons outgrowing their father, but had foolishly never assumed it would happen to him, not when they were all they had. Even when they had more than just their family, his belief still held strong – they were too close, too dependent on each other to ever be distanced in the way human fathers and sons could be.

But here he is, standing in an empty kitchen in a silent home. He used to wish for silence, used to beg for it from whoever was listening as his sons rampaged about the house while he was trying to meditate. Now, though, he finds himself desperate to hear their rambunctiousness again, desperate to hear their laughter and the sound of their running feet against the floor. Why had he ever taken their loud joy for granted? Why had he ever taken their trust in him for granted? Why had he ever taken anything for granted at all?

He’ll fix it. If it’s the last thing he does, he’ll return his sons to their cheerfulness and closeness. The only question now is how.

He sighs, turning to pull the teakettle from its spot tucked away in the corner of the kitchen. Curling his fingers around the metal handle, his heart fills with both fondness and heartbreak at the memories of holding this teakettle many times before with a little Leonardo on his heels, bouncing with the excitement of sharing tea with his father. At first, their time together was whimsical, his little boy content to rattle on about cartoons, comics, and the future – which was filled with dramatic, harrowing battles he would sometimes act out, but always ended with every single one of them safe at home at the end of the day, sometimes heralded as heroes by the human world for their good deeds and as such permitted assimilation. It wasn’t until their home first got destroyed that their tea times took on a serious turn, Leonardo rambling off battle plans and fears while pleading for advice. Splinter always gave it, though when he saw fit, he also gave a little to appease his heart – my son, do not underestimate the importance of relaxation and joy. Sit and drink with me, why don’t you tell me about that movie you love?

Their times together are silent, now. Even with his tablet, Leonardo says nothing, only staring off with a sorrowful gaze. At first, Splinter tried to question him on what was wrong the way he usually would, but once greeted with only the same silence tried to throw advice at the wall, begging for one to stick. If any did, however, Leonardo never gave any indication, only seeming to curl deeper into himself with each passing day. Everyday, seeming more and more like a stranger.

With the now-filled kettle now settled on the stove top, beginning to boil, he heads to the cabinets above his head for the cup and mug one. Luckily, when they had first planned out the kitchen together, they’d put them beside the stove for his and Leonardo’s ease while making tea. He reaches up, hand grasping the first tall one he sees – he’s going to need a lot of tea to calm his thoughts and heart today, just as everyday these days.

It isn’t until he pulls it down that he notices the image on its front – a painting of a woman sitting in a luscious green garden. A newspaper lays open on her lap while she reads it, body lain against a tall lawn chair. A brown dog curls up by her feet, peacefully asleep. Such a serene image – this is what his sons need. A place to let their emotions safely flow, close together and yet not haunted by ghosts of the past. But where…

He gasps. The farmhouse! How had he not thought of it before? How had such a perfect place slipped his mind? Fresh air and sunlight, free space to roam but a home to return to, activities to partake in to release pent up emotions…

He sets the mug on the counter, quickly turning away from the kettle to leave the kitchen – his tea will be fine, it always takes a while to boil anyways. This is far, far more important.

Luckily for him, he doesn’t have to search for long before finding one of his sons. Raphael sits sprawled out on the couch, watching wrestling on the television without a drop of his usual excitement. His heart wails in his chest at the sight, but he can’t pay attention to that right now.

“Raphael,” He calls, voice firm enough without intending to be that his son jerks up in an instant to stare at him with exhausted yet wide, red-rimmed eyes, “Go and gather the rest of your brothers. Tell them to meet me in the kitchen. I have important news for all of you.”

Notes:

kablamma!!!! two chapters in two days!!! i hope this one is good too its my first time writing a 2003 splinter pov...
https://youtu.be/03IAR5O07h0?si=zPm9Z7_uO3nYSWoq <- shout out to this playlist for not only being what i listened to for both chapter four and five but also for giving me the idea of splinter visually getting the idea of the farmhouse. this is what the mug's painting is based on

Chapter 6: i don't smoke except for when i'm missing you

Notes:

cw for self-hatred i suppose? nothing much to warn in this chapter either as far as i can tell
title is from "i don't smoke" by mitski

Growing up, Mikey never understood Raph’s anger. How it seemed to burn constantly within him, perking up at every slight annoyance and marring his brother’s face with a snarl without hesitation. Didn’t it ever get tired? Even Mikey’s energy and need for fun laid down and left him alone eventually. But Raph’s ire never seemed to tire – even when it seemed to, it was always simply lying low, ready to roar to life at the slightest touch.

Yet, Mikey had never feared him. How could he? His brother could shove him around, threaten him, but at the end of the day Raph was his best friend. He held him through nightmares and walked him down dark hallways hand-in-hand. He shouted at the monster in the closet until it ran away in fear. For as long as Mikey can recall, Raph had been his safe space, a spiked shield that would never fail to protect him against anything that came for him.

He hadn’t realized how much he’d taken it for granted until the weeks after Leo’s injury rolled by, and he found himself alone for the first time. Without him, the nightmares became suffocating, the dark hallways endless, the monster courageous and deadly. It slunk out from its home, hovering over Mikey with each passing night, and made a friend in him, filling him with the protective rage his brother rarely seemed to possess nowadays.

How could he leave you here like this? It growled. How could he leave me here like this? Mikey wept, weakly lurching out for anything willing to lead him through the dark.

In all of his lessons, Sensei had never prepared him for this. He had never taught him how to catch himself when the place where his brothers once stood fell empty. How could he abandon you like this?

How could he abandon me like this? He’d spent so many hours sitting by Leo’s hospital bed, at first waiting for his brother to wake, and then waiting to see how long it would take for somebody to come and get him. The beeping of the heart monitor and humming of the machines are burned into his brain, even if being there felt so agonizingly silent. He stopped muffling his cries after a week, but no one ever came. No one ever looked.

No one ever looked. Besides Leo, who turned achingly blank eyes up to him once he could register his surroundings. Besides Leo, who twitched his hand in his grasp when Mikey lapsed into silence. Besides Leo, who was also waiting for them to come. Besides Leo, who now could do nothing but wait. How could they abandon him?

How could they abandon him? He’s their brother, their leader, even if he’s no longer capable of most of the things that made him Leo. But he still waits, he still leans close when Mikey leans in. When Mikey leans his head on his chest, he remains, and his heartbeat thumps rhythmically through his plastron, even if he doesn’t lay his hand on his head or ask him what’s wrong. They don’t love either of you.

They don’t love-

“Mike?” Comes Raph’s quiet, daresay hesitant voice. Hesitant to talk to Mikey. Why? Mikey hasn’t bothered him at all these past few weeks, hasn’t bothered him since he stopped caring about him. Maybe he’s glad for that, he always did complain about it.

Mikey glares at him, blinking the sudden hallway light from his eyes. His brother’s form is blurry in the blinding glow – Mikey can almost pretend like he’s got an expression of anger he wears exclusively when one of his loved ones is in pain. Heh, standing with the gold lighting up his back, he almost looks like an angel. If Mikey were still into playing games, he could pretend that he was stuck in a dark, dank prison cell, and Raph’s just busted open the door to drag him home where he’ll get placed on the couch and cuddled on all sides while they watch Star Trek.

But soon his eyes adjust, and Raph’s eyes are nothing but sorrowful. Weariness clings to his shoulders, and even though his hand is settled (delicately) on the doorknob, every muscle in his body seems to pull away from the darkness of Mikey’s room, all of his weight resting on his heels while he leans back into the hallway.

How could he?! How could he?! How could he?! How could he?! The monster screams, Mikey screams, over and over. Just like always though, Mikey’s begs go unanswered, the room silent as a corpse.

“What do you want?” He all but barks, the now-familiar anger in him almost comforting as it blazes within him. It’s the crinkled sheets in his bed after Raph has lain in it, the warmth in his hand after Raph has let go, the buzzing sensation of safety in his room after the monster has been scared away. He curls into it desperately, sobbing. Raphie, Raphie, Raphie, Raphie, save me.

“Master Splinter wants us to meet in the kitchen. Says he’s got important news” He grunts, feet shuffling almost uncomfortably on the floor. Mikey, ever the fool, waits with bated breath for his eyes to light up with the promise of a fight, or even with worry or love, but his eyes only seem to grow more sorrowful, his body wearier. Monster, his friend snarls.

Monster, Mikey snarls, voice breaking.

“Fine” He snaps, rising from his empty bed. What important news could there be? Are April and Casey finally back from vacation? Maybe they could talk some sense into his brothers, if anybody could. “I’ll be there in-” He begins, but when he turns back to the doorway, Raph is already gone, footsteps receding in the direction of Donnie’s lab.

His best friend wraps their shadowy body around him, hugging him as they warm him by stoking the flames of his anger within him, generously patching the cracks in Mikey’s heart with their own black flesh like onyx kintsugi.

Ever the youngest brother, Mikey needs no further convincing before shutting his eyes and leaning in.

Notes:

this chapter was written as a gift for my dear friend angelmichelangelo!! she wrote 11k words today so feel free to hit her up on tumblr (angelmichelangelo) and congratulate her!! i would also like to note how this past week i had an awful time with my cptsd, like got-bedbound-for-a-whole-day-swimming-in-and-out-of-hallucinatory-flashbacks bad, and i was out glamping with my family so i had like 2 coping skills up for use. however, im saying this bc that week wouldve been complete and utter hell had i not had angelmichelangelo/emmy :) she let me vent as much as i needed to even if it was about stupid shit and distracted me with the ninja turtles. so if you could, PLEASE go check out her fics here on ao3 (angelmichelangelo)!! she writes glorious angst, particularly of mikey but not exclusively, and LOVES to receive happy comments so if you have the time i implore you to go read a fic of hers that interests you and then leave her a comment telling her how much you loved it :)!! you can also thank her for this chapter because after she finished writing 11k words she gave me her writing motivation powers.

i hope you guys enjoyed this chapter!! it was hard lol my brain has been so exhausted for obvious reasons but i hope this was good food to you anyways :) feel free to leave a comment/kudos if you enjoyed!! i love to see you guys

Chapter 7: bad dog

Notes:

cw for that thing where you resent a disabled person for being disabled, ableist thoughts, cursing, breakdown/meltdown, physical violence, and depersonalization/dissociation
title is from "cop car" by mitski

Before the incident, the times when Leo would sit down in his lab and listen intently to his ideas, responding where needed, were borderline sacred to Donnie. Whenever he sat alone at his desk, the spot beside him felt uncomfortably empty, and when Leo got hurt, he was terrified at the notion that he may never experience them again. Now, with Leo at his side pestering him with the same questions about what exactly he’s working on, Donnie would give almost anything for him to leave. Even if the thought does lunge a fire poker at the ever-growing beast of guilt within him – he’s almost began to become numb to it, the sensation of horror at permanently disabling his own brother like a soul, settled into him with all the comfort and ease of Klunk getting in a box. In a world without his oldest brother to bounce ideas off of, to protect him, to take care of him, where the rest of his family are practically dead themselves, it’s the only thing that remains constant.

Still, his words are genuine as he apologizes to Leo for what feels like the millionth time, as his brother presses the heels of his hands into his eyes and releases a long whine.

It’s the worst reaction he’s had to his mounting frustration yet – his shoulders tensed up to his ears and his AAC device completely abandoned in his lap. Donnie watches with a strange sensation of something like resentment as Leo’s chest jerks up and down with his hitching breaths. Should he try to take the device from him before he throws it or drops it, or would the motion trigger an even worse breakdown?

“Okay” He begins, half to Leo and half to himself, “Let’s put a pin in this, yeah? Why don’t we go sit down on the couch?” And away from all my precious inventions?

Leo shakes his head harshly, digging his hands deeper into his eyes as he hunches down into himself. Another whine, lower and bordering on a growl, pushes itself out from his closed mouth.

“Okay…” Fuck me. “Let’s… um…”

Fuck me twice, he curses. Damn these nightmares.

“…Why don’t we go to your room? We can hang out in there.”

In response, Leo slams his fist down onto the table before him, scarily rattling everything on top of it. Donnie’s hands lurch out to steady them on instinct, heart pounding in his chest for a few seconds until his table has steadied. Maybe I should just grab Leo and place him away from all my inventions?

But he wouldn’t like that at all, and he’s still a person. Several sites and people said to maintain autonomy as much as possible, and only to react physically if something was dangerous. Does this count as dangerous? If he hits the wrong thing…

Donnie rises from his seat, moving towards the door as much as he dares while Leo is so close to his creations.

“Let’s go to your room, okay? Let’s just go” He all but begs. “Or-or we can go to the kitchen or the living room or the dojo-”

Leo stands from his seat at a speed like he’s been shot, and in almost the exact same action picks the chair off the ground and hurls it at the wall.

Luckily, it’s not any one near Donnie, but the motion still has him ducking down with his hands over his head and the cacophonous bang of it striking the wall makes him wince harshly. The original bang has nothing on the way his heart stops, however, when the noises of shattering glass and the sound of something else breaking reverberate across the lab.

He turns on instinct, cold terror grasping and squeezing at his heart with its skeletal hands. His eyes roll over the seen quickly for spilled chemicals and sparking machinery, but fortunately the broken beakers are empty and the only invention damaged is a wooden carving of a giant isopod.

Donnie’s stomach drops to the floor. No.

“No” He gasps, voice wet as he runs over to the fallen object. He shoves the chair pinning it to the ground off with a vengeance, praying, but the poor creature has been severed in half by it. Most of its many legs are either snapped in half or broken off entirely, and one of its antennae has been mostly shattered, the remnants of it lying in fragments on the floor.

He remembers when Leo had given this to him. It’d been two days before the incident.

The project had taken him weeks to complete. Wood carving was a relatively new hobby, something he’d picked up seemingly at random. He’d spent the first few days of it walking around with bandages on his hands, but luckily he’d defeated his need for perfection enough by then to keep going with it until eventually he’d made Donnie this.

It's the last thing Leo gave to him, and now it’s broken.

By that thing in his place, the hurt inside of him howls, spitting out the word thing like its rotten.

That thing you made him, it continues, but the guilt does nothing to quell the bubbling anger in his gut, hissing and popping like acid. His fingers ache as he digs them into the metal floor, eyes blurry.

The door slides open. “Yo, Don- Oh, Leo” Comes Raph’s voice, starting off tired before quickly trailing off into heartbroken.

Oh, Leo, he thinks mockingly, only partially aware of the noises of Leo’s sobbing behind him, the footsteps moving into the lab and towards the noise, Raph’s unusually soft voice as he nervously attempts to soothe him. What about me? He wonders desperately. I’m hurt, I’m hurt. Raph, don’t you care?

Raph had never been the best with emotions, but here he is, comforting Leo. Is Donnie not worth it to him? Not worth the effort of love since his sin? Can’t you see I’m sorry? Can’t you see it’s killing me?

Of course he can. Of course he can. But he’s mad, he’s mad, he’s mad.

I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to. Can’t you see?! Can’t you see how much I didn’t mean to?! Don’t you know me?! Don’t you love me?!

No. Nobody does.

Nobody can.

“Yo, um, Donnie?” Raph calls out hesitantly, “M-Master Splinter wants us all in the kitchen. Says he’s got important news. That’s where Leo and I are gonna be, okay?”

Something hot and bitter rises in his throat. Why bother? This isn’t a family anymore, not for him.

But why say no? Hasn’t he done enough? Isn’t following their orders the least he could do for them? They already hate him, the only thing being bratty would do would incline them to kick him out sooner, and as much as he doesn’t deserve them, he needs them. He loves them, he loves them so much it burns, so much he could scream bloody murder with the sheer agony of it. Even if they can no longer, will no longer, feel the same for him.

“Roger that” He responds, slow and emotionless, though he steals a few extra moments to listen to the sound of their footsteps receding, of the fading noises of Leo’s tears. He allows himself one final moment with the isopod, in the haunting emptiness of the room.

Only when all of his emotions have frozen over within him does he rise, bones heavier than iron as he guides the flesh puppet that is his body over to the kitchen, mind carefully blank.

Notes:

sorry about donnie bro is severely sleep deprived and currently in the trenches of ptsd. i am also really tired for no fucking reason and this chapter was weirdly difficult to write despite knowing what i wanted to do. but i hope this was enjoyable nonetheless! or as enjoyable as a chapter like this can be lmao.

i did get a comment about how somber this fic was the other day so im gonna warn yall here outright that i did make this fic purposefully easy for me to write since ive always struggled with writing multichapters (this is the first time ive ever gotten to chapter seven on anything!) and what i find easiest (and most fun hehe) is heavy angst. this story does have a happy ending! because i do often like comfort with my hurt. but i am not nearly done with these guys its like a cartoon where the villain has a giant hammer and hits the hero with it several times and doesnt stop until theyre flat on the ground even when theyve clearly broken several bones. this is all just the beginning of my wrath unfortunately, shit is going to get SO MUCH WORSE but dw ill reward them for it at the end. so strap in! and if you wouldnt like to the comfort will begin at the earliest at chapter sixteen and at the latest at chapter twenty-two, according to my chapter plan (which is extremely loose lol i just have which relationship im focusing on/major plot point there is jotted down. other notes come when i get there), so you are free to return when those chapters are uploaded ^^ <3<3<3<3

please leave a kudos and a comment if you enjoyed! i love hearing from you guys!! literally whenever i upload a chapter i have to fight myself not to just sit refreshing the ao3 homepage for hours lmao. <3

Chapter 8: put my heart where i could not reach

Notes:

cw for sort of ableist thoughts? and depression i suppose, also a very very light mention of dissociation. let me know if you find anything else
title is from "circle" by mitski

If somebody had told Raph years ago, or even just before the incident, that there would come a day when Mikey would shut up and leave him alone – verbally, he would’ve rejoiced. Even to Mikey’s face, he would’ve.

Secretly, though, he would’ve worried. He would’ve worried so hard it would eat him alive from the inside out like maggots to fresh food or rotting flesh. He would’ve lapped up every instance of Mikey’s voice afterwards like a man stranded in the desert, would’ve clung to him tighter than he ever had before, daring something to dare to take the light of his life from him.

But nobody told him, and so here he is, settling down at the kitchen table with Leo while harshly torn between the desire to gaze into Mikey’s weary eyes and beg him to come home and the desire to duck his head in shame. Shame that he’d failed, failed in the role Leo left behind for him, to see the signs before it was too late – and more than that, to fix them. To say something that would ease the grief off his shoulders, to hold him through the night, to anything.

But Raph never was the oldest brother, he never was the leader, he never was Leo. And now, sitting across from Mikey with the only noise in the room being Leo’s sniffles, the only thing he’s sure of anymore is that he’ll never be.

“Ah,” Splinter says mournfully from the head of the table, “I thought I heard the sound of something being thrown. I hope that nothing was damaged.”

Unsticking his teeth from themselves is a manual, painful task, that holds nothing on the sheer arduousness of using his tongue to form words. “Nothing we can’t replace, Master Splinter.”

The words are meant to assure, but even he can hear the hollowness of his voice.

Master Splinter hums, a noise similar in vibration to the sound he makes when pleased or relieved about something but whose comfort is stolen by the emptiness and sorrow that it now holds. An emptiness and sorrow they all hold, despite all they’d survived in the past. It fills every room of the house like a flood, dirty sewer water pushing its way through Raph’s throat and into his lungs. He chokes, flails his limbs in a desperate attempt to swim, but over the noise of the rushing water and everyone else drowning around him, he’s nothing but another piece of debris. Nothing but a piece of debris burdened with consciousness, burdened with guilt, burdened with the memories of all he failed to say. Burdened with the knowledge that he’d argued with Leo, on their last day together, foolishly believing that he’d still be there to resolve the disagreement with when they went home. Burdened with the knowledge that he’d snapped at Mikey to shut up and quit bothering him in the last moment he’d had with his brother as he knew him.

A better turtle would find it in him to apologize, would find it in him to fix the mess their world has become, would bring light back to his family’s eyes, would suck out the flood, would swim.

But Raph never was all that great at swimming. With all of his bulk, he’s always been better at diving – and even then, especially growing up, he’d required help from one of his brothers to drag him back to the surface once he hit the bottom and began to struggle back to air.

And for all his bravery, the sight of Mikey’s unnaturally intense eyes closes up his throat. How is he supposed to reach out when his brother is covered head to toe in spikes, ready to attack at the slightest movement? He would deserve it, he knows he would in the same way he knows that this is all his fault for being so stupid, for never once being enough. But the mere thought of being screamed at by Mikey is enough to push tears to his eyes. If he were to experience his punishment from Mikey, it would surely break him, and if this past while has taught him anything, it’s that Raph has never been good at picking up the pieces of himself and his mistakes.

And what a shame it would be, what a nail in the coffin of his role in the family both old and new, to break down in front of his youngest brother. What would the past Leo think of him, so full of chatter about how great he is and yet brought to his knees the moment responsibility is truly placed into his hands? What would Mikey think, to watch his once-strong older brother collapse under the weight of his words, to gaze up at the glittering surface of the water while sinking limply down to the bottom?

So, he sits with his eyes bowed away from Mikey’s piercing gaze. The person he once was barks at the cowardice of it, but it’s merely a whisper of bubbles in the distance.

“Where is Donatello?” Asks Splinter, the commanding way he used to say things like that swept away in the tide.

“Here” Donnie calls out blankly, ducking out from behind one of the kitchen walls and pulling a seat at the table next to Mikey. Raph pretends not to notice the way Mikey tenses, or the way that Donnie avoids looking at Leo for even a moment by swivelling his head towards Splinter and resting it on his palm, even though both actions make his gut twist nauseatingly. Do something, the old him snarls, say something!

Do and say what? He begs.

The old him does not answer.

Splinter clears his throat. “I am sure that all of you have noticed the poor state our family has been in as of late, and since I have seen no improvement in these past few months, I have decided that we will be going to the farmhouse.”

“Farmhouse” Leo echoes, and at Splinter’s nod takes a few seconds to slide and click through the pages of his tablet before landing on his next word, “When.”

“Tomorrow. We will pack up tonight and head out in the morning. I will help you with your bags, Leonardo.”

In reply, Leo fixes their father with a look caught halfway between distaste and relief.

“Why don’t we just make a list of things he has to pack?” Mikey snaps angrily.

“Because he can’t read, Mikey” Donnie mumbles into his knuckles.

Mikey’s head snaps towards him, the muscles of his jaw wound tight, “He understands pictures. We could draw it out for him.”

At that, Donnie’s tired gaze fades out entirely into the middle distance, eyes blinking slowly in lieu of a response.

“Michelangelo” Splinter reprimands softly. “It is probably best if there is someone there to aid him. I do not have much to pack myself, so it is no trouble for me.”

Mikey grinds his teeth together, and Raph’s heart bleeds at the sight. In the corner of his vision, Leo fidgets anxiously with his tablet’s protective case, flipping it on and off a corner.

“Fine” Mikey mutters, shoving himself up into a standing position with more force than necessary. “I’ll get started on packing, I guess.”

Splinter’s tail lashes once, but otherwise he shows no response, merely watching their youngest trail furiously out of the silent kitchen. It isn’t two seconds that Mikey’s been gone until he extends a hand down to Leo, beckoning “Come, my son, let us get started on packing up your things for vacation.”

Despite his furrowed brow and stormy, wet eyes, Leo takes his father’s hand, and for a brief moment Raph is alone with Donnie until he, too, gets up and leaves without a quip to give.

The water rises up to the roof, stealing away any potential air pocket that he had, and in the solitude of the kitchen, Raph whispers to himself permission to go still.

Notes:

hnnghhh sorry this is late guys my sister introduced me to "what we do in the shadows" and i spent five straight days binge watching it and i am still struggling to remember that i am in fact a literate human person who has thoughts and hobbies and not just a vessel for medias to run through. i hope this is good i have a headache rn that the advil i took before writing this did not touch and i recently ran out of iron supplements for my anemia so yippeeee i am so tired. anyways, if you liked anything about this chapter please do let me know and if you didnt please have mercy on me. i love hearing from you guys and im so sorry this update took so fucking long. good news is my sister picked up more iron for me today so i should be able to get back on that grind soon enough. <3 thank you so much for reading.

Chapter 9: to dream

Notes:

cw for thoughts of death, internalized ableism, and a very brief mention of nausea. feel free to lmk if i missed anything else!

Because he can’t read, Mikey.

The words echo and bounce around Leo’s skull, painfully branding themselves into every corner of his brain, of his flesh, of his soul, as though they’re aflame. The tone of disappointment rings in his ears like a gong being banged over and over again.

It won’t be long, now, surely. It’s probably what the entire vacation is about, an excuse to drop this broken, irreparable Leo off on somebody else’s doorstep. He’d figured before that they would just shove him out the door and lock it behind him, but maybe he’d underestimated their disgust. It would be easier to die out there, too, in a world prone to elements and food dependent on Leo’s ability to remember what’s edible and what isn’t.

The thought makes his chest cave open like a sinkhole into vast, empty darkness. A freefall with nothing at the end of it but certain, painful death. And despite himself, or maybe just despite who he used to be, terror swells up within him like the steam of a boiling pot, trapped under the lid of his flesh. Please, he’s desperate to beg, the need screaming with fear inside of him, please, don’t!

But his tongue remains stiff and unusable, unable or unwilling to form words that he once spoke so easily, so easily that it seemed almost ludicrous to him that there were people who couldn’t. He can’t even write them notes telling them I’m still here, have mercy, I love you, I’m sorry. All he can do is tap away at the symbols on his tablet, too few to express what he truly means and yet too many for him to remember which symbol-less ones are which word.

Master Splinter stops in the middle of the room, turning to look at him with a small, weary smile, “Have a seat on the bed, my son. I will give you something to keep you busy while I pack your things.”

For a moment, Leo considers fighting, the ghost of the boy he used to be whispering fragile words of stubbornness into his ear. But the breakdown from earlier clings to him still, flooding his bones with lead and making his bed look so impossibly comfortable.

He all but collapses down into it like a puppet with its strings cut, headache pulsating behind his eyes to the thrum of his heartbeat. The sheets welcome him in a way no one else will ever again, cushioning his fall and soothing his exhausted body like honey to a sore throat. His allows his eyelids to close and doesn’t bother opening them when something is placed beside his head.

How many times had he lain here like this before, aching and exhausted, and yet poring tirelessly over his failures and his plan for the next mission? His mind had always felt like a storm, thoughts and ideas spinning around him constantly, trapped in the whirling tornado of his consciousness. Only meditation had slowed them down enough for him to reach up and grab them one by one.

It’d made it so difficult to sleep. At least once a week he would give up after laying sleepless in the dark for an hour, and would crawl out to follow the sound of tinkering and the low hum of music to Donnie’s lab. There, he would set his own thoughts aside to focus on Donnie’s project until behind him his mind had settled – or, he would bounce them off of Donnie while Donnie bounced his own thoughts onto him. Thinking of it now, he’s not sure how he ever managed to keep track of their conversations when they had so much going on.

Something clatters to the ground, and the quiet yet constant noises of Splinter bustling about his room silence entirely.

Then, a sigh. Leo listens languidly to the sounds of a small shuffling of fur and then a muffled crack and a soft whimper of pain from his father.

At it, Leo’s stomach drops and flips nauseatingly. He tenses on instinct, rustling the sheets beneath him. The world has always been cruel to him, since the day he was made, but especially so nowadays it seems the universe itself is hellbent on digging its claws into every single wounded crevice of his body. Hasn’t he been through enough? Could he have anything, even a moment, of reprieve, of comfort, of daresay even joy?

But that is not the destiny of Leonardo Splinterson. He’d always felt growing up that something great was waiting for him, that he had a far greater purpose than just a monster in a sewer, but no matter how many times he saved the world, he continued to dream. Worlds of safety, accomplishment, freedom, and ease danced before him in the darkness of night like the ballets he sometimes snuck out to watch. The sight of them swelled up within him like the violins, and in the morning he found himself capable of fighting on.

But what worlds can he dream of now? There are no worlds for the intellectually disabled, merely grey-walled asylums and sympathetic yet tired eyes. There is no lover waiting, there is no home waiting to be owned by him alone. The only greatness that awaits him now is the great abyss of death.

Perhaps execution would be an act of love, both to themselves and to him. An act of mercy disguised as an act of cruelty.

Yet, the idea sends his sends his chest tightening enough to strangle him with terror. Perhaps it’s his own stupidity, but he doesn’t want to die, even if there’s nothing left for him to live.

Perhaps it’s just animal instinct, but in the absence of the storm there’s nothing to muffle it as it shrieks like a banshee within him, rattling every wall of his brain with a fevered desperation: DON’T LET ME DIE, DON’T LET ME DIE, DON’T LET ME DIE.

He lurches up, a gasp tugging at his throat. It dies when he takes a moment to blink the false stars from his eyes, head spinning, rebirthing itself as several shallow, heaving breaths.

He presses a trembling hand to his still-aching forehead. He can’t die, he can’t die, he can’t die. But how can he prove to them that he doesn’t deserve to die? How can he prove to them there’s worth in keeping him alive?

Once the stars clear, he finds himself staring at his bookshelf. He hasn’t touched it since he awoke. A faint, silvery sheen of dust coats his once-beloved books, almost making them look shiny when it catches the light.

His eyes fall upon a book he could recognize anywhere. The words on the spine have long become senseless to him, but the curve of them over the red cover is something he could recall in his sleep. The Art of War.

Because he can’t read, Mikey.

Of course. It would be kind-hearted yet intelligent Donatello who would figure out the mercy of sending him to death. It would only be him able to put aside his heart and decide what’s best.

A smarter man would probably listen, would understand the vast expanse of Donnie’s intelligence and loyally bow his head to the chopping block.

Leo grabs the book of the shelf with a determination he didn’t know he still carried. If Donnie’s the one deciding to kill him, then the only thing he has to do is prove to Donnie that he’s worth it – and the one thing that Donnie admires most in the world is intelligence.

Perhaps he never could be as smart as he once was, but by the same token, his brothers love him – or, at the very least, they loved who he used to be. That is a fact that he’ll never be able to forget.

He can prove to them their oldest brother isn’t dead. He’ll learn to read this book again, pull buried memories up from their grave. He’d had the whole thing memorized, once upon a time, the pages peppered with his own notes and stickered with blue tabs. He’ll learn to read every single word in this – and maybe even write a few more of his own. He will, he will, he will. He’ll prove to them that they don’t have to kill him.

When Splinter returns to his room, carrying a black duffel bag half-filled with objects he doesn’t care to identify, he shoves the book in it and levels his father will a look that dares to tell him to remove it.

It’s a look that months ago would’ve made his father level him with a disappointed look back, but now, once the clouds of shock clear from his face, the only thing that shines through is tentative yet bright hope.

Notes:

hehe!! >:). also idk if you guys have noticed but i added four more chapters of comfort for you guys!! i felt bad and also worried that the ending would be too rushed... so i gave you more :D. ive also started reading this book called "disability intimacy" by alice wong in hopes of improving the representation of this story. tbh i did not expect this to get as popular as it did... most of my fics get like 5 kudos per and im cool with that. i still have this fic saved in my documents as "ithinkofyouallthetimeoneshot" lmao. i just wrote it because i was having a shitty day and reading this whump fic trying to get some easy dopamine and instead it was just not hitting so when it threw in some casual ableism as a plot point it was just kind of my breaking point. but my whole philosophy with art is "do not say anything if you could not have made something better" so whenever i get pissed at art i just write what i wanted to see. but when i finished the first chapter it was like "nuh uh. i am not a oneshot" and i was so tired from chucking all of my anger at it i was just like yeah sure ill make you a longfic whatever this is an interesting concept. and then it got popular and i was like shiiit i should probably start reading up on disabled people. bc all of my experience with disability comes from direct lived experience (had a disabled mom growing up, have a disabled brother, was disabled myself for a few years (was in special ed until eighth grade, needed a cane to walk between the ages of twelve and fifteen, was basically housebound for several years due to my ocd/ptsd), dated a disabled girl for four years, have mostly disabled close friends, worked with some intellectually disabled students) i havent actually like... read up on it. so i bought this book to help me portray the experience better!! its a collection of essays by disabled authors about their experiences with intimacy/tenderness/love. others ones i have on my tbr that i encourage you to check out as well are "disability visibility" by alice wong, "care work: dreaming disability justice" by leah lakshmi piepzna-samarasinha, "demystifying disability" by emily ladau, "the collected schizophrenias" by esme weijun wang, "disfigured" by amanda leduc, "supporting positive behaviour in intellectual disabilities and autism" by tony osgood, and "broken" by madeline c. burghardt. do let me know if you have any suggestions for me!! or suggestions to stay away from. :) <3

back to the chapter - i really hope you guys enjoyed this! it took me a little bit bc i ran out of my antidepressants but THEYRE BACK and such you have a chapter! i really wanted to get one more out before school started up again because obviously thatll be keeping me busy. so if this fic goes un-updated for a while do not fret!! i will be returning as soon as possible im just slaving over homework lol. but this fic will continue to be a priority for me <3 as always i do encourage you to let me know what you thought of the chapter... i love hearing from you guys :D. receiving a comment is like the highlight of my day. <3

Chapter 10: nightmares

Notes:

cw for fainting, fear, slight nausea, and general fic-typical angsting. lmk if i missed anything else!

Donnie had stopped sleeping to stop the nightmares, but even in the absence of sleep they persist behind his waking eyes in new, daresay worse forms.

Or form. He doesn’t know when the daydream first snuck up on him like a snake in the garden, these days everything blends together like seasonings into soup. He’s only barely aware of himself as his hands lift his packed bags into the Battleshell, and the memory of coming here to have something to do instead of just repeatedly shaking himself awake at his desks is quickly fizzing out like sand through his hands. Good. There’s no use for memory nowadays, no use for anything at all. He has failed everyone who mattered the most to catastrophic levels. There will never be a point to him again.

But for some strange reasons, he lives, and unlike poor Leo, as long as he lives, he thinks – and as long as he thinks, he dreams.

In it, the night air is cool around the rooftop he and his brothers are perched on top of. They’ve grown taller, and when Mikey twists his face into the light of the billboard Donnie can see the shadows of smile lines just beginning to form along his mouth. The most noticeable thing about the dream, though, is that when Donnie looks upon any of his brothers, the only thing he feels is a rush of affection.

“Ugh” Mikey groans loudly, elongating every single vowel and consonant of the word as he swings his head backwards, “This is so boring.”

“It’s not meant to be entertaining, Mikey” Leo says before Mikey can propose anything, “It’s a stakeout.”

A smile twitches at Donnie’s mouth at the same time a shit-eating grin splits across Raph’s; “A stakeout for what, exactly, Fearless?”

Leo ducks his head away from them, quickly hobbling an embarrassed look into a poor scowl, but in the city that never sleeps the shadows of the night do nothing to hide the way his cheeks darken. “Just… villain activity. You know.”

“Uh-huh” Donnie nods, allowing his face to fall into the wry smile it’s been begging for at last. “Though I can’t help but notice we’re suspiciously close to that girl’s apartment.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about” Leo replies in an instant, glaring pointedly down at the loud rush of traffic below like it’s personally wronged him. The myriad of lights glowering back up at him, however, do absolutely nothing to hide the way his blushing deepens dramatically. He pulls his lip between his teeth but releases it within the next second, entire body as tense as a bow about to fire.

(So much of Leo used to be like that, doing something instinctually and then pulling back before the consequences of it could take hold.)

Mikey makes an obnoxious oooh noise, pulling his face back from the onyx sky to give Leo his own Mikey-patented shit-eating grin.

“You shut up” Leo lifts a hand from the edge of the roof to wave him off, though his tenseness travels into him enough that Donnie has to lean back several inches to avoid a rather painful-looking smack upside the head. “It’s just-”

He cuts himself off with a soft gasp, palms digging into the concrete as he careens over the side a smidgeon off from what he’s fully capable of.

Mikey gives a gasp of his own, much louder and bordering on an excited shriek as he all but launches himself off the side of the building, just barely hanging on by his fingertips and his own sheer dumb luck. “Where is she?! Where is she?!”

Donnie lurches forwards, grabbing him by the lip of his shell and dragging him back to his safe vantage point with relative ease. “I don’t think falling off the roof is a good way to get her to notice us, Mikey.”

“We’re not trying to get her to notice us” Leo gripes at the same time Mikey exclaims, “Hey, if she’s a good girl for Leo, she’ll save me!”

“Save you from falling off a roof? She’s not superhuman, dimwit” Raph scoffs.

“She could be! And-”

The billboard ahead of him, currently playing a picture of a smiling model next to some enthusiastic bubble text, chooses this moment to practically explode with brightness, beaming directly into his eyes until the only thing he can see is white. He closes his eyes tightly against the burn, but it presses on with a Leo-like stubbornness, turning his eyelids into a watercolour show of pink and orange. In his ears, the noise of his brothers’ chatter turns to a high-pitched, incessant ringing, but he can’t feel his hands well enough to cover his ears. Where am I?

Cold. He’s cold. There’s something hard pressing against his head, against his arms, his shell, his legs. His entire body is tingling with pins and needles, his ears still ringing, but slowly sensations trickle in: A stabbing, pulsating headache spreading out from every inch of his brain, even leaking into his jaw and teeth, making his eyes feel like they’re about to burst out of their sockets entirely; the all-too-familiar feeling of bruises forming along his elbows and knees; tight soreness clustering in his shoulders; a three-fingered, calloused hand smacking his cheeks, sending waves of lightning-hot pain shooting out into the rest of his skull; the distant, muffled noise of someone calling his name, sounding almost like he’s being beckoned from the surface whilst sinking underwater.

Muscles. He has muscles. Running firmly underneath his flesh, curling around the bones of his neck, jaw, face. Muscles he can move. Muscles he has always been able to move.

He can feel each individual one stretch as he pulls his head away from the hand, pain sparking up his neck like embers off a campfire, settling into flames of aching along the expanse of his neck, spreading like a wildfire across his muscles until they’re licking, practically kissing, the raging waves of his headache.

The hand, cruelly, chases him, and in his weakened, confused state, it catches him easily, hitting him again and again and again and-

“G’t off” He forces past tingling lips, jaw crackling with the movement. “St’p.”

Luckily, the hitting stops. The ringing begins to cease as well, fading away back into his head as the sound of his name intensifies; … nie! Donnie! Donnie!

“Donnie! Come on. I know you can hear me. Wake up!”

Mikey. It’s Mikey calling him. The usual anger remains ever-present in his tone, but underneath it currents something Donnie can’t quite place, something he recognizes in his chest but not in his head. Fortunately, it doesn’t make his chest tighten up with guilt and grief like everything does these days. Rather, it releases it by at least a quarter, taking enough of the concrete weight of his chest for him to breathe deeply for what feels like the very first time. He’d forgotten how good air tastes once his lungs are filled of it, what it feels like to be full.

“There you go, there you go” Mikey continues, rage cracking down for a moment into that other strange comforting thing. Except it isn’t comforting. It’s making him nauseous, making the weight in his chest return to crush back down on his lungs, pushing all the delicious air out of him, ensuring it’s never to return. Stop it, stop it, stop it, please. I’ll do anything.

“Open your eyes for me, Donnie. C’mon, c’mon.”

Are his eyes closed? The light is digging into his skull with the claws of an angry mother bear. He didn’t mean to kill her cubs, he didn’t, he didn’t, he didn’t. Please, please, please. He’s so sorry. He’s so sorry. He’s so sorry.

The light continues stabbing. Why would it stop?

“Donnie!” Mikey calls, louder, almost shouting, but while he regains some of his anger, the uncomfortable emotion also grows tenfold, making his voice ripple with something like… something like fear. Something like sorrow. Something like… worry?

That’s impossible. Donnie’s brothers don’t worry for him anymore. Especially not Mikey. Out of all of them, Mikey knows the best what he’s done – or maybe he’s just the least afraid to show it. He knows who’s responsible for Leo’s injury, for his disability, for the destruction of their once indestructible family.

The older, one-armed, grim, dead Mikey flashes in his head. You can’t change the future. Even if it can be altered.

Why couldn’t it have been me? He wonders selfishly, desperately, despairingly. Why did it have to be my fault? Why do I have to be here?

Because you were made evil, and therefore you must be made to suffer.

“Donnie!” Mikey all but screams, but it isn’t like his usual girly, almost playful one. It’s deeper in tone, something rushing underneath it that makes a deep sensation of wrongness shoot up Donnie’s spine like a lightning bolt.

Donnie’s eyes snap open like he’s been electrocuted, torso jerking upwards despite the pain. His heart picks up a rapid pace in his chest like a drum in a metal band, sheer terror crawling up his throat like a thousand startled spiders.

The light doesn’t stop punishing him, but he blinks the blurriness from his eyes and persists through the headache until, eventually, he can place Mikey before him. He scans him up and down, looking for some sort of injury, and when he doesn’t he turns instinctively to the room, forcing his eyes to get accustomed to the light so that they can locate any dangers. “Wh’t’s it? What is it?”

“It’s that you fainted!” Mikey yells, voice lowering in volume from his scream. Before Donnie can think of a reply, Mikey’s hands lurch out to hold onto his head like it’s in danger of falling off, yanking it to face him. Donnie stares, bewildered and still trapped in that uncomfortable space between alert and asleep, into Mikey’s wet and terrified eyes. For a long moment, the two of them just sit there, inches apart, while Mikey’s eyes search through Donnie’s like he’s trying to see his soul. Eyes unmoving, he jerks one of his hands off the side of his head and upon the back, feeling over every surface of his skull.

When he finds nothing, his entire body drops like a puppet with its strings cut. His hands pull off from Donnie’s head, and within the next second he collapses backwards, shell banging loudly against the metal exterior of the tank.

He inhales shakily. Exhales deeply. Leans his head into his trembling hand.

“I thought you’d hit your head” He whispers, voice quivering intensely with both terror and exhaustion.

Donnie swallows roughly. He has to say something, has to fix this.

“I’m sorry that I worried you, Mikey. It’s not… I’ve just… I’ve just… I’ve just been having trouble sleeping lately, I guess. I’m okay. I promise.”

Mikey’s eyes open like Donnie stabbed him, snapping towards him and filled once again with that now-sickeningly-familiar anger.

“Why don’t you ever ask for help?” He snarls, voice striking and shaking with a level of sheer fury that Donnie didn’t know he was capable of. His burning eyes trail up and down Donnie’s figure, meticulously scraping over every inch of his face. It doesn’t matter how hard he searches for the source of Donnie’s flaws, though. He could peel him raw and discover only what Donnie hated to know – that he’s simply wrong. That for all of his intelligence and desperate desire to be do good, it’s the curse of his birth to get those he lets close hurt, to be unable to save somebody when it matters most. There’s just something innately, truly evil locked in his DNA, unable to be changed no matter how hard he tries (and he tried, he tried, he tried, he tried, he tried.)

After he finds nothing and receives nothing, the rage in Mikey’s voice only grows. “Do you go until you drop just to hurt me? Just to hurt Leo? You know how he worries.”

Donnie slides his gaze over to the floor in defeat, staring at the scars marring the floor, some from them and some from before. All relics of a simpler, happier time, a time Donnie ruined with his own selfish, idiotic hands. What right does he have to ask for help? But still, he craves it, waits in his moments of knowing self-destruction for the brothers he knew to come in and tell him to go to bed. Waits for his loving brothers to realize what’s wrong, to put two and two together, and tell him it’s not his fault. Waits desperately for moments like these, where his brothers will worry for him again, where his brothers will love him again.

But here he is, collapsed and aching on the floor of the garage after fainting, and the only thing Mikey growls out before getting up and walking away is “Fuck you, man, fuck you.”

Notes:

i hope you guys enjoyed this chapter!! school is kicking my fucking ass so the amount of brainpower i have to write is... not stellar. but i do really hope this was good to yall anyways and satisfied all your angst needs :) <3 anyways, a few things!

1) im gonna stop replying to every comment on this fic. i like to, because i want to make sure you know how much i appreciate y'all, and i do like forming bonds with my readers. however, since school is kicking my ass, i just do not have the energy for like... anything. i do what i need to do to not go insane and thats about all i can do. i will reply (eventually...) if you ask me a question!! but after spending all day in my overpopulated school trying to get good grades by participating and friends by talking to people i just do not have the social battery... i hope that that is alright with you all and you all still know how much i appreciate you all <3 i remember every person who comments on this fic!

2) on a brighter note - i have some more education recommendations! i usually read about 1-3 books per month, and october is a themed month for me, meaning i only read books that have one specific thing in common. october's obviously goth/horror books. so i went out and found some goth/horror disability books for me to read! and i found three: "wickedly abled" by sumiko saulson, "the spirit bares its teeth" by andrew joseph white, and "demons of the body and mind" by ruth bienstock anolik. :D

3) since i am a chronic annotator... ive decided to start putting quotes i find particularly notable from the disability books i read just in case y'all cant read them for one reason or another. the current book im on is "disability intimacy" by alice wong. please forgive my quoting skills... its been a while.
"[Requiring care work during the pandemic's] helped me to start to think about care as an antithesis to violence of all sorts. In-home care is just one facet of that."
"I dream about some sort of structure where a lot more people around me are able to provide me care. Not just three to six [Personal Assistants]; like fifteen to thirty community members who are with me long term. And they all live in a world where they have the time, energy, and resources to do that... really speaks to the value of people spending time taking care of each other."
"The right not to work is an ideal worthy of the impaired and able-bodied alike."
"When we think about intimacy from a disabled person's perspective, it's more than [warmth or a long association]. It's a very deep affirmation that it's okay for us to live. It's okay for us to be who we are and take up our space in this society. We are loved and valued and worthy of intimacy with each other."
"By ableism, we are not simply talking about ableism in isolation or in silo, but we recognize how racism shapes ableism, how ableism enables sexism, and vice versa."
"Across the country, disabled parents lose custody of their children, get reported to Child Protective Services on specious grounds and/or denied the right to form a families based on ableist assumptions of who is fit to parent... Once, an agent arrived at my front door to assess the baby's health and well-being. Upon seeing that I am disabled, however, the focus quickly shifted from an inquiry into an uncomfortable surveillance laced with the agent's assumptions and biases that I had to interpret and defend against."
"Whenever I go to lift [her foster daughter], [her foster daughter] instinctively arches forward to offer an assist. She's expertly attuned to my functioning. It's remarkable to see this in a newborn, because it demonstrates an understanding that her survival depends on that arching and on my response."

4) i saw my grandfather yesterday for my mother's birthday. he'd gotten a custom wheelchair, so he didn't have to hobble around on his walker or his uncomfortable hospital one. i haven't seen him so happy in years, able to move around with us with minimal pain. it cost him over $4k. in the united states, disabled people who rely on the government for money to eat, be warm, live, etc, are only allowed a maximum of $2k in their bank account at a time, lest their funding be cut. if they're married and their spouse is ineligible for the funding, though, they are also considered ineligible for funding. this forces many disabled people to get divorced in order to get things like insulin and food at the same time.

anyways... always feel free to leave a comment or a kudos if you enjoyed this!! i've actually really been enjoying both writing this and getting to educate people... its making me think (amongst other things) that id like to be a professor after im done with schooling. so, thats fun :). take care of yourselves <<33

Chapter 11: weren't we the stars in heaven?

Notes:

cw for distress, general fic-typical angsting, cursing/crassness, threats, and verbal shutdown (the common term for this is “going non-verbal” however that is an incorrect use of it. non-verbal is what leo is - never able to speak. to go from being able to speak to being unable to speak is to experience a verbal shutdown. non-verbal people don’t like it when mouth-speakers as people like me are called clog up their spaces/tags with their stuff. the more you know!). lmk if i missed anything else <3
title from "anything" by adrienne lenker

Mikey pointedly avoids Donnie for the rest of the morning, but no matter how hard he tries his eyes keep wandering back to him when he forgets to hold them still. They trail traitorously up and down his brother’s form, taking in the slump of his shoulders, the shaking of his hands, the exhausted hopelessly in his eyes and the bruise-like bags sagging beneath them. Despite his better mind, the sight makes worry spike in his heart, and it’s only when it crawls hot and begging to his throat does he realize he’s staring and wrench himself away, lighting the gasoline of love within him with the lit match of his memories to turn it into anger.

He slides himself into the car next to Leo in the back, trying to focus on the way Leo blearily allows himself to be helped and strapped in by Splinter, his eyes tracking every movement a second or two too late but sparking with distaste and the ever-familiar glint of stubbornness once he appears to register the help he’s being given. But by the time he leans himself forwards and begins to lift his arms, the job is complete, and Splinter is settling down next to him, elderly hands slow and trembling as he pulls the seatbelt over himself. Mikey’s throat is too full of oil and fire to speak, his teeth somehow melted to each other while his vocal cords char to ash within him. Is this what Leo feels all the time? No wonder he has breakdowns. Mikey would too, if he were able – or unable.

Leo turns his gaze down to the buckle of the seatbelt, and within the next two seconds has his hands upon it, pressing the red button down with way too much force than necessary.

It begins to slither back into wherever they come from when Splinter grabs it with practiced ninjitsu speed, pulling it back down to the buckle. “This is very important to keep on, Leonardo. We don’t want you to get hurt.”

Leo’s face twists into a dramatic frown, brows furrowing deeply enough to cast shadows over his eyes. Before Splinter can get his hands off Leo’s seatbelt, Leo clasps his back around it, forcing through Splinter’s spindly fingers to hit the button.

“Leonardo!” He barks, snatching it up before it can retract again. Leo seizes it over Splinter’s hand, making a low whining noise.

Splinter tugs on the seatbelt unsuccessfully. “Leonardo.”

Leo tightens his grip, whining again.

Splinter’s face pinches at the edges, wrinkles deepening. “Leonardo” He repeats, tugging uselessly once more. “Leonardo, you are hurting me. Let go.”

Another whining noise, longer, more desperate.

“Why doesn’t he like the seatbelt?” Raph questions tiredly, twisting around in his seat at the front to watch the scene.

“I don’t know” Donnie sighs, removing his own seatbelt as he too turns to watch the scene. “Maybe he doesn’t like being restrained?”

Or maybe he just wants to put it on himself. Ever think of that, O great genius Donatello? Ever think of something as batshit crazy as that?

“It’s not that restraining.”

“Maybe it’s the texture.”

Leo whimpers, tugging the seatbelt upwards.

“Should we put something softer on it, then?” Splinter wonders aloud. “Would that help, Donatello?”

“Maybe. We could put the couch blanket on him. That might be too hot, though.”

“It’s fall” Raph mutters, barely loud enough to hear.

“We could put the thin one on him” Splinter muses. “That one is quite soft.”

You’re all fucking idiots, Mikey seethes. But he’s stuck to the seat, body wound tight like a toy with its wind stuck.

He shifts his gaze to Donnie instinctually, trying to convey his thoughts through his eyes.

But Donnie doesn’t even seem to notice, staring blankly ahead at Leo with tired eyes, blinking slowly. “That should work, yeah” He breathes.

“Okay” Splinter nods. “Leonardo, let me go. I will go find you something to cover up the seatbelt.”

Leo whines again, but after a moment or two hesitantly releases Splinter’s hand, settling it back down on his own lap.

“Thank you, Leonardo. I will be back soon.”

The seatbelt releases, retracting into the… retractor thingy. Splinter hops out of the car and hobbles off at a rather surprising speed for such an old rat.

Leo, on the other hand, doesn’t immediately pull the seatbelt back over himself like Mikey suspected. Instead, he rubs his hands up and down his thighs roughly, making soft whimpering sounds.

Donnie bites his lip and turns around in his seat, staring pointedly ahead through the windshield.

“It’s okay, Leo” Raph soothes. “Splinter’s gonna get you a blanket to cover up the texture, and it’s gonna be okay, okay? You’re gonna be fine.”

Leo shakes his head harshly in response, raising his hand to his mouth to dig his teeth into its heel, letting out another low, sorrowful whine that pulls at Mikey’s heartstrings. Such a weak, young, frightened sound, like a kitten backed up against a wall. How is this his older brother? He wonders despairingly. His uncrushable pillar of strength, his guide through the night, all but weeping in the back of a car over a seatbelt.

But Mikey’s still trapped in his own body, muscles almost entirely numb to him. If he moves, he’ll surely kill somebody – and the person nearest to him is Leo, whose been through enough.

Raph, however, is not. He unclicks his own seatbelt and clambers between the front seats to land before Leo, gently laying his fingers over his. “It’s okay, Leo” He whispers shakily, and then swallows, hobbling together his composure. “It’s okay, Leo. I promise. I promise it’s okay.”

About a month before Leo got injured, April and Casey came to announce that they’d be leaving in two weeks for a vacation in some distant country Mikey no longer remembers the name of. April had put her hair in braids, and he was studying them up and down struggling to figure out which style they were. He never did find out (the only types of braids he knows are fishtail and French and he’s never bothered to look up other ones – or even those ones, for that matter. Is a fishtail braid one that ends in two sections like a fish’s tail? That’s so sick. Man, why couldn’t he have had hair and also been born a girl? It would’ve been so awesome), but it was a fun activity to do to keep his attention on the room and not on the superhero movie he’d been in the middle of watching when April and Casey had interrupted it for their “important announcement.”

Anyways, he does remember them saying that they’d be gone for up to several months, and not to worry if they didn’t call or were unable to be reached because the place they were going to didn’t often have connection. They said they’d call or text whenever they could, but they didn’t know how often that would be. They’d said more after that, but his mind had caught onto that and spun it around inside his brain at top speed until all the adults had gone and he was able to spit it out at his brothers.

“She’s definitely gonna come back pregnant” He’d remarked only half-jokingly, and then rapidly ducked to avoid Raph’s hand swinging for his face just for the motion to slam him straight into Leo’s backhand. He staggered backwards with a yelp, rubbing his jaw ruefully as the loud lectures of his older brothers caught on each other in his brain, leaving their arguments distorted and muddled with only occasional words sticking out.

As he’s always done once in trouble, he’d turned hopefully, desperately, to Donnie – and had caught him exactly where he wanted him; face scrunched tight with barely restrained laughter and his hand pressed against his mouth, poorly concealing the smile beneath it.

“Hey! Look! Donnie agrees!” He’d yelled out immediately, pointing strongly in Donnie’s direction, as was his youngest brother right. It’d worked as hoped, both of his brothers stalling their yelling to check if they needed to lecture Donnie as well.

Donnie’s entire body jerked with a hacked out chuckle. In response to his body’s glorious betrayal, he’d spun around and hunched over, knuckles going white as they tightened against his mouth. His breath came in shallow, inconsistent gasps.

Leo tsked, putting his hands on his hips. “I thought better of you, Donatello” He scolded, shaking his head.

“I didn’t” Raph bit. “Younger brothers are always crass, evil little fucks.”

Leo looked him up and down wryly without turning his head. Raph kept his disappointed gaze fixed securely on Donnie.

Donnie removed his hand from his mouth, hyperventilating. “I mean-” He began, his voice reedy and breathy, and then promptly cut himself off by bending in half and wheezing with laughter.

Raph gave him a small bap on the back of the head. “I thought you were supposed to be the smart one.”

“I thought you were expecting this” Leo commented dryly.

“I a-a-a-m” Donnie breathed, “I mean, th-think about it. Several months. All a-alone. It’s…!”

Raph hit him again.

“Mikey!” He called, twisting around as much as he can to look at him. “Help!”

“Remember, Raphael” Mikey began dutifully, putting on his best Splinter voice, “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”

Raph spun around to look at him (haha, success!), revolted. “Are you quoting fucking Ted Lasso at me? Are you quoting fucking Ted Lasso at me in a Splinter voice?”

Mikey stared into the molten lava of his brothers eyes, and came to the dreadful realization that he had thought none of this through as an intuitive sinking sensation kindly let him know that he was about to get his ass beat into oblivion.

So, he did what he did best – he turned and ran, screaming at the top of the lungs as Raph’s footsteps thundered behind him. “I’m gonna get you, you punk!”

“Run, Forrest, run!” Donnie howled joyously behind him.

He doesn’t know how long he ran for, dashing laps around every open corner of the lair, avoiding aerial attacks and other dirty chase tactics from his cheat of an older brother. Eventually, though, Donnie comes running ahead of him, gesturing wildly in the direction of his lab – “This way, Mikey! Follow me!”

Raph howled something unintelligible behind them, but Mikey didn’t hesitate to race after his other, far better, far smarter, older brother – as any man with a brain would.

Donnie brought them into his lab, striking the button to close the door so fast that Mikey had to do a(n absolutely sick if he does say so himself) slide maneuver to get in without giving himself a concussion.

He lay there, panting, as the door clicked down on the floor – and instantaneously came the sound of Raph’s fists banging against the metal. “You can’t stay in there forever!”

“You can’t stay mad forever!” Mikey yelled back.

“Yes, he can!” Leo had shouted at the same time Donnie remarked a little ruefully, “Yes, he can.”

“Yes, I can! And I’m gonna get your ass, Michelangelo! You too, Donnie! I’m gonna get both your asses and beat you into dust! You hear me?! I’m gonna-”

“Boys!” Splinter yelled, slamming his cane against the floor with a loud thud, and there came the end of that – because nobody was willing to be the one to repeat what Mikey had said to Splinter.

But he remembers looking back at Donnie then, and meeting his eyes, and even with Raph chasing them down or Splinter lecturing them for a sin none of them could recount, they were alight with life and joy. Now, looking at them, the only thing they carry is a haunting emptiness, as though his brother is nothing more than a corpse reanimated by some kind of science but left without a soul – and most notably, without a heart. Because if he had even just a quarter of Donnie’s heart and soul, he would’ve noticed Mikey’s pain by now, would’ve came and held him, helped him, anything. He’ll take anything at this point, anything to remind him that all the good memories he has aren’t just lies or things forever gone in the blink of an eye, in the swing of a bat.

But Donnie does nothing, and neither does Mikey. Silence and hatred are the only things they share, now, the stillness of a corpse and the hollow uselessness of an empty gun. Just memories, them two, frozen dolls possessed by the fragile spirits of the brothers who once lived in their heads. They both just listen as Raph – their loudest, angriest brother – kneels and practically begs their oldest brother in a quiet voice to calm down. Their oldest brother that once scolded them for making crass, immature jokes, their older brother who once guided them through hellfire and back with only minor sweating.

Perhaps they’re all dolls. Perhaps the only thing they all share now is the rotten stench of death.

Notes:

i feel like i always apologize when i post one of these chapters but i do apologize again this time for the quality... i am unfortunately currently in the throes of a pretty fucking rough depressive episode. like i've barely gotten out of bed in two days because my body feels way too heavy to lift and i have no motivation or energy to fulfill bodily cues like hunger or thirst. i faked sick yesterday so i could take a mental health day and it literally wasn't hard because i didnt have energy to do anything other than lay in bed and stare off into the distance. took a several hour nap and was still tired when i woke up. wasnt gonna work on this but my friend told me that getting something done would help the episode, even if its just something little. and usually updating this fic gives me lots of dopamine... even though i know that this is not my best chapter. i just really don't have the energy to make it good. i hope that you all understand and please no constructive criticism for the moment i am ah... sensitive.

on another, better note, i realized that i had only given you guys non-fiction recommendations last time! which is not everyone's cup of tea. SO i went out looking for some fiction and i found some! (also found some more non-fiction as well!)

romance: the match - sarah adams (epilepsy), bingo love - tee franklin (comic, idk), something more - jackie khalilieh (autism), i fell in love with hope - lancali (physical, terminal)
fantasy: the winter knight - jes battis (autism), six of crows - leigh bardugo (physical, mental)
contemporary: sara and the search for normal - wesley king (mental), true biz - sara novic (deaf)
sci-fi: accessing the future - kathryn allan & djibril al-ayad (multiple, short story collection)
non-fiction: beautiful people - melissa blake (physical), a life impossible - steve gleason (physical. this one i find particularly interesting because the author cannot move nor speak, so he wrote the book using an infared keyboard that tracked his eye movements!), falling for myself - dorothy ellen palmer (physical), making a home - jen powley (physical), the future is disabled - leah lakshmi piepzna-samarasinha (idk)
historical non-fiction: a world without martha - victoria freeman (intellectual), beryl - dustin galer (physical)
poetry: act normal - nancy viva davis halifax (idk but i think intellectual/mental), phantompains - therese estacion (physical)

ones i find particularly notable (besides ALI) are:
- "beautiful people" which contains the authors "thirteen truths on disability" aka a sort of activist handbook from what i can gather?
- "making a home" which is about nursing homes and disabled people, and how the disabled author created an alternative to dreary nursing home for her fellows
- "a world without martha" which explores the author's experience of having her sister institutionalized in the 1960s
- "beryl" which is a biography of disability activist beryl potter

anyways, your quotes as promised!

"Sometimes staring out the window, longing for so much more, is still a place of freedom. Because the longing for so much more means not accepting the little they've given you."

"The fact that people believe disabled people don't deserve love and shouldn't be seen as sexual beings is so confusing to me. Are we not human beings with feelings? When you prick us, do we not bleed?"

"... normalize and celebrate disabled bodies..."

"One of the ten principals of Disability Justice, defined by Patty Berne and the Sins Invalid family is:... isolation ultimately undermines collective liberation."

"If it's a choice between being able to pay for a caretaker or to have an accessibility device that they need to do their research, their decisions have been made. I think about that being a choice all the time."

"I always make sure to ask if they need accommodations or to just offer accommodations before they even ask... I always offer people headphones; I always offer people a room where they could make more noise or turn things up if they need to without making them ask for it."

"There's something so valuable in not only imagining others into a space, but also learning and building towards making that happen... this awareness of others - created through and because of their absence..."

"One of the foundational elements of ableism is a fear of vulnerability, a desire to push away and ignore what reminds us of helplessness."

"More community-driven research, activism, services, and funding are needed, as are more positive representations in media... there are people like us, we are not bad or doomed, we are okay, we even have reason to celebrate."

anyways... if you enjoyed please leave me a comment or kudos! promise im not fishing or anything by telling y'all im depressed i just wanted you guys to know why this chap wasnt great.

Chapter 12: bury me in your memory

Notes:

cw for depression, brief suicidal ideation, blood, and a rabid raccoon. lmk if i missed anything else!
title is from "goodbye, my danish sweetheart" by mitski

The earliest memory Raph can recall takes place before they had a lair at all, back when Splinter was the tallest, strongest thing in the world – and when the world itself was nothing more than just him, his family, the tall walls, the gurgling cess of the sewers, and the occasional pieces of trash or sewer animals that popped up along the long journeys they frequently took in their search of a permanent home.

Why Splinter was so fixated on that, Raph never understood. As far as he was concerned, he already had everything he would ever need with him at all times: his family.

Except for the first time he didn’t.

It was late when he woke up, Mikey snoring loudly next to his head and Splinter’s warm chest pushing into him with each of his deep breaths. Leo’s head was pressed against his thigh by Splinter’s leg, as before they were too big to Splinter always had them sleep protectively encircled by his body, blowing soft puffs of air onto his scales from his nose.

At first, he couldn’t tell why he was awake, twisting his head from side to side as he blinked blearily, searching mindlessly for what had woken him. As far as he could tell, the nook they’d decided to rest in looked exactly the same, and the only sounds in the sewers were the regular ones – the quiet rumbling of pipes around them and the indecipherable, muffled noises of the human world above.

Yet, there was something tickling at his gut, tugging at his brain with an unusual urgency that something is grievously wrong, something he has to fix right now.

On instinct, he stretched out the leg Leo wasn’t cuddled up to, seeking the only brother he couldn’t immediately feel – and found empty air.

He shot up, a nauseating mixture of fear and confusion bubbling in his throat. Luckily, he didn’t have to look far before he found him – standing just outside the nook, staring fixatedly at something Raph couldn’t with the same expression on his face that shows up nowadays at nineteen whenever he’s trying to figure something out. It’s the same expression Leo used to have – intensely focused eyes, a small frown, lips tucked slightly into his mouth, furrow between his brows – whenever he was working through a plan or a puzzle. For Donnie, however, his almost always comes whenever he’s trying to figure out how something works or how to fix it.

The sleeping members of their family (besides Mikey) twitched a bit as Raph moved, rising up into a crouch and crawling over them to get to Donnie. Walking was rather new to them, then, and Raph was the worst at it. If his brothers hadn’t started doing it, Raph strongly doubts he ever would’ve even tried. The world felt safer if he took to it on two legs. But his brothers did try, and all of them have always hated to be left behind, so he staggered hesitantly to his feet before Donnie could see him crawling. Donnie was the best at walking, always invested in chasing down new items, in picking objects up and inspecting them with his hands, of reaching up for more things to learn and explore.

He was, however, like Raph, not the best at talking. Mikey and Leo took to talking like fish to water, practically obsessed with turning their thoughts into tangible dialogue. Raph, and he presumes Donnie, had never seen the point – what use was words when you could perfectly convey what you wanted with movements? They’d never needed language before, why would they need it now?

And so, as Leo and Mikey ran off into their own worlds of communication, they left Donnie and Raph alone to share the silent understanding that was their mother tongue.

Raph settled his hand on his shoulder curiously. In response, Donnie raised his arm and pointed at the thing he was facing, the thing hidden behind the walls of the nook.

Following the motion lead Raph to a raccoon sitting a good few feet in front of them. At first, staring at its grey back, he couldn’t tell what was so interesting about it – raccoons are uncommon in the sewers, but not impossible.

Then, it twisted around, and Raph was suddenly incapable of noticing anything else besides the excessive drool foaming and dripping from its mouth, creating small puddles at its feet that darkened the floor. Its head bobbed up and down shakily as it struggled to turn and look at them with listless, foggy eyes.

Dread twisted in Raph’s stomach, throat tightening, but he didn’t move from Donnie’s side.

With difficulty, the raccoon finally locked its eyes on them. A warbled snarling noise emanated from its mouth, lips twitching uncontrollably over its yellow teeth.

As it lifted its front legs to move towards them, though, it seemed to forget how to move its hind legs as well, and promptly collapsed onto its side the moment it tried to shift into standing, shaking.

Raph’s immediate instinct was to go back to the safety of Splinter, was to wake him up and show him this scary, sick creature, and let him deal with it while Raph and his brothers stood safely behind him.

Donnie’s instinct was different; he broke away from Raph’s hand and moved towards the fallen animal, reaching out his hands to touch it, to help it. Donnie had always been inclined to generosity, for better or for worse.

In this case, it was for worse, as the raccoon whipped its head up as soon as Donnie was near enough, swinging at him with an open maw and a growl.

It seems to Raph that he was there before a second could pass, wrenching his brother away and placing himself resolutely between him and the beast at a safe distance from its teeth. His body moved without any sort of command, before he could even register what was going on.

But the raccoon’s teeth clamped down on empty air. But the snarl continued as it bobbed its head around, looking for them.

The familiar, warm love in his chest flared and rose into something burning and deadly, a weapon coming to life within him. Touch him, it threatened as he bared his teeth at the diseased animal, touch him, I dare you.

The raccoon barked as soon as it laid eyes on him again – a deep, relatively quiet, hoarse noise – and then again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again. Spittle burst out of its mouth with each rapid jerk of its chest, leaving dark splatters on the floor between them.

Raph, with his minimal language skills and protective instincts running wild, did the only thing that made sense to him and barked back – a much higher-pitched, louder noise that echoed across the sewer’s empty walls.

For a moment, the raccoon went silent, hazy eyes staring at him with an almost stunned expression. In the next, the barking picked back up again, louder and at an almost feverish speed as it fought to get its wobbly, half-frozen legs underneath it.

Raph dutifully barked louder back at it, as much as he could, until Splinter eventually emerged from the nook, took one look at the situation his sons were in, and practically dragged both of them back to the sleeping pile. Their father didn’t rest that night, keeping a watchful gaze and ear over the opening for any more rabid animals. Raph knows this because he was awake too, resting his head and his arm over Donnie’s shell as his little brother drifted off to sleep. The burn remained within him, smaller and quieter but remaining still, filling some previously empty part of himself.

He’d thought of that memory a lot, almost uncontrollably, in the days after Leo’s injury, watching Donnie bend over to mend him. It’s been a familiar sight ever since they turned fifteen, but there was something different this time, not in the way his hands shook ever so slightly but in the way he seemed to stare with the eyes of a corpse. In the way he let the blood rot on his hands before ever seeming to realize that it was even there, in the way he flitted around the lair like an amnesiac ghost, going through the motions of their day-to-day with robotic motions and empty eyes.

He’d seen it on the day Leo was injured. He’s worn that memory over so many times in his head that if it were a stone, it would be smooth, stretched it out over and over again, trying to find forgiveness for his fault. But it never comes.

There never comes a moment in that memory where he stays by Donnie’s side, as he’d always done in fights, instead of rushing off to beat on some random brute, body buzzing with the all-consuming need to fight, to feel that dizzying rush of adrenaline. He’d rushed off, foolishly trusting in fate to keep his brother safe with nary a second thought, foolishly trusting that a fight as menial as that would leave all of them unscathed.

There never comes a moment where he’s there to stop the assailant from striking Leo, there never comes a moment where he’s there before Donnie, or even with him. In every single one, he hears Donnie scream, whips around in terrified fury, and finds his younger brother cradling Leo’s bleeding head, hyperventilating. In every single one, he rushes over, ready to fight with all he has to remove this awful scene from existence – but the emptiness has already begun to sink into Donnie’s eyes. Leo’s grim face, just as he remembered it except for now covered in more blood than scales, lays unmoving on top of his limp head, eyes shut in an almost sleep-like manner.

In every single one, he never gets to say goodbye to any of his brothers – not to Leo, not to Donnie, and not to Mikey. In every single one, his love of fighting, born of his purpose to protect, destroys its own mother, leaving him alone in the wreckage to do nothing but stare at the blood soaking his own hands, unable to find peace in the simple explanation that he left purely because he wanted to. Not to save another brother, not to protect another brother, but because he wanted to fight, because he didn’t want the (addictive, he curses) thrill of battle to die off as the gangsters he was helping Donnie with fell.

These days, the sheer guilt of it all makes him wish he’d never been born at all, that something had crushed him in his egg before he ever got the chance to hatch.

Beside him, Donnie makes a soft grunting noise, breaking him from his stupor as he turns to watch his brother stagger backwards under the weight of a suitcase. His hands lurch up to take it from him on instinct, but his eyes drift unconsciously to those accursed deep bags sagging underneath Donnie’s eyes. He should’ve been there, should’ve been with Donnie when Leo got hit, should’ve seen it first, should’ve stopped the bat before it ever struck, should’ve, should’ve, should’ve.

He truly is nothing but a dog these days, trapped in a tiny metal cage and dragged around in exhaustive circles by his cruel masters.

Donnie stumbles back in response, eyes flashing darkly as his limbs tense around the bag. “I got it” He mumbles waspishly, jerking away from Raph’s hands, still lain open in offering between them, like they’ve got sais in them.

They remain there, even after Donnie has stalked off to the house, steps faltering a few times as his weakened, sleep-deprived body struggles under the weight of what he’s holding. But Raph remains still in the lawn, watching him numbly as the hollow rot in his chest spreads further like an earthquake, tipping every content that made him Raph down into its hungry abyss.

But who’s he to care? The only thing that really made him Raph was his ability to protect his brothers from harm. Now? He’s just some terrible accident of a boy, a ghost unable to move on eternally doomed to roam the deteriorating hallways of his beloved home – equally incapable of fixing it as he is of leaving.

His hands collapse down to his sides, and he shivers as the wind bites coldly at his empty palms.

That was the last bag, he remembers emptily. It’s time to go inside.

Notes:

IM BACK!!! pleased to inform y'all that i am NO LONGER DEPRESSED!! turns out i wasnt suffering from a depressive episode at all but some equally unfun mental exhaustion coming from erm. accidentally locking myself in a non-stop panic attack for three weeks and deciding the best option with that was to just flat out not react to it. bc productivity babyyyy. so yeah after that my entire body kind of crashed and then i got sick for a week so. don't do what i did. you may have been punished as a child for displaying signs of fear/sickness/injury but while they did that "to ensure you can survive in the real world" it will actually. not do that. so take care of yourself babes! im trying to rn. its weird and bc of my fuckin childhood its wildly stressful i keep thinking someones gonna come in and punish me every time i lie down. but no one does. so hopefully eventually ill get used to it. <3 i hope this chapter was worth the wait my brain is still recovery from my whole productivity shenanigans BUT i am so pleased to give you all your chapter twelve!!!!

FIC NOTE: letting you all know that leo will not be cured of his disability by the end of this fic. i wasnt gonna let yall know, but my dear friend angelmichelanglo has been receiving repeated comments on her TBI fic about how sad the readers are that mikey isnt cured by the end of the fic. and while we both love to receive comments those ones are... unpleasant to see. a disabled person's happy ending comes when they're happy, not when they're no longer disabled. the two are not oil in water. sometimes life will take things from you forever. and yet you will persist. your world will be destroyed and you know what? you'll find happiness again. even if that thing never returns to you. you'll find happiness again. itll just be in places that you never looked before.
if you're interested on knowing more about this particular subject, i recommend:
"my body is not a prayer request" by amy kenny
"being mortal" by atul gawande
and this video essay: https://youtu.be/kdWyGYqgmmU?si=c3Sw6beg2GBj5kns

on a happier note, if you enjoyed this chapter please do leave me a comment or a kudos!! i do not mean to discourage you all by stating that above, i just wanted to educate some more and also have my own personal boundary set. i hope you all have a lovely day!!!! <<<333 currently in the midst of uni/college prep atm (which is wild as someone who became suicidal at the age of eight… like i still remember so vividly being told the only thing i’d ever be was a homeless junkie. it feels very overwhelming but in a good way. like “me and the sky” from come from away. but anyways yeah prepping is taxing me) so the next chapter may take a little longer than usual... :( BUT it shall come!!!! <<<<<333333

Chapter 13: to your joy, i tether

Notes:

TAGS HAVE CHANGED IN ORDER TO TRIGGER TAG, BUT NOW CONTAIN SPOILERS.
besides from that... cws for this chapter contain fear, harm against animals, blood, suicidal thoughts brought on by internalized ableism, and depression
title from "not a lot (just forever)" by adrianne lenker

They’ve only been at the farmhouse for a few days, and already Leo’s sure he’s going to go mad.

If the mother-henning his family’s been giving him was bad before in the sewers, it’s downright intolerable now. There seems to be not a single thing he can do in this place that doesn’t require some sort of supervision from his tired father or moody brothers. He tries to keep his upset within him, the way he would back when he was better, tries his hardest to let it flow through him like a river over stone as Splinter always says. But it wounds him deeper than the Shredder ever has – it’s extraordinarily difficult to prove his worth when nobody allows him the slightest chance to show any at all and beyond that he’s not a child. But this is worse than being a child – as a child Splinter permitted him to run around nearby sewers, to train alone, and while his brothers frequently hung out with him they were more than willing to give him solitude. Now, there’s not a second given for the exploration that defined his entire life.

In the end, he snaps anyways, and is supervised and babied more heavily in response. Staring at his tablet fills him with a deep contempt, a symbol of all his misery within him – and yet, no matter how long he tries to in the mirror, he can’t speak anything more than small noises that always just bring a worried family member to the door – up until Raph thought the situation was Leo failing the mirror test, and after fruitlessly arguing with Raph over it for an undetermined amount of time Leo swung around and shattered it with his fist. Apparently, though, that did not show that he knew a mirror was a piece of reflective glass and instead was a display of stress at a stranger.

The pale bandages wrapping around his fist catch the glint of the moonlight as he tiptoes outside of the door, careful to ease the creaking door into opening and closing so that not even his father awakens to it. The cold night air hugs him like an old friend, welcoming him back into the world he’s been severed from. The farmland at night smells the same as it did back when everything was good – the wet grass and dew from yesterday’s rain, foul manure from a neighbouring farm, and the delicious fading smoke of a neighbour’s barbecued steak. One would expect it to be quieter, but though it does lack the distant noises of farm animals and their farmers, its full to bursting with the endless music of crickets and the occasional cry of an owl. With his eyes closed against the night, he can almost see every single blade of grass and leaves both fallen and clinging in his mind’s eye as a cold wind sweeps through the forest floor and creates a symphony of whispers from every one of them calling him back to his home.

His footsteps are almost entirely silent against the groaning deck and stairs as he clambers down them. If his family were here, they’d likely try to help him down – something about the deck being old and the part of his brain that controls his balance being somewhat damaged. But now, he’s free to reach his hands over the railing and feel the brush of the overgrown grass against his fingertips, feel the lightning of freedom it sends through his fingertips and up to his brain, allowing joy that is virtually non-existent nowadays to burst forth within him.

As he nears the forest edge, the dark trees loom over him the way Splinter did back when he was a kid – strong and kind. Their low branches brush against his scales as though trying to heal the scar that mars his scalp with gentle kisses like a mother as he passes through into their domain, the leaves of the bushes tickling at his heels like excited hands lurching to see what he’s been up to since he’s been gone. Before him, the pale moonlight spills through the cracks in the trees’ leaves, but as he ventures further through it those gaps get smaller and fewer, leaving an almost endless expanse of sheer shadow stretching out before him. A burst of affection explodes in his chest at the sight – he’s finally come home.

He doesn’t know how long he wanders, eyes quickly adjusting to the darkness as the moonlight slowly disappears before the cry of a startled meow breaks through the lullaby of the night. Instinctually, he twists around to look at the noise and finds before him the dark shapes of an owl taking off with a small cat.

He may be unable of performing well in battle, but he’s still a trained ninja living by a strict code of honour. Within a second, he’s leapt up and promptly tumbled down onto the forest floor with both animals, earning a few stinging scratches from the owl for his attack before he successfully wrenches the poor cat from its talons and it takes back off into the night with a distasteful screech.

In his arms, the tiny cat presses up against him, mewling softly. It can’t be any more than a few months old, able to be held with just one of his hands – and yet, its out at night alone deep in the forest instead of back in the barn where it probably belongs.

Except its not plump or soft-furred like the barn cats Leo has run into in his time at the farmhouse. He can feel each ridge of its spine and each curved rib just by holding it. Even on the parts of it that are uninjured, its fur is patchy and thickly matted.

He has to bring it home. It’s so small, injured, hungry, and alone. It’ll die out here.

As he maneuvers it closer to his chest, its hind legs and tail fall limply behind it. It moves its front half constantly, however, adjusting itself in his grip and snuggling itself closer to his plastron. Despite its injuries and its hunger, once they’ve settled into a comfortable position the kitten begins purring as loud as a motorcycle.

He rises from the ground, looking back out into the dark forest – but every tree looks the same. He whips his head from side to side; which way did he jump out from again? Every way is an identical cluster of shadowed bushes and trees.

At once, the once-loving branches of the trees become sharp and deadly, the bodies of their trees looming over him menacingly like the Shredder about to strike him while he’s down. The sinister bushes work to hide predators from him – wolves and cougars trailing the scent of his blood dripping onto the forest floor and staining the bandage on his hand. The song of the crickets make him borderline unable to hear the movements of any oncoming hunter, and the hoots of the owls are nothing more than bad omens that predators are circling the lost and injured two. With how big he is, he’s dreadfully sure he would make an excellent meal – he can almost see the wolves picking his flesh apart bit by bit the way they do to deer on the television until he’s nothing more than bones on the ground.

The wind rushes through the forest again, making the leaves and grass whisper ominously of his terrible demise like vengeful ghosts surrounding him – and perhaps there are vengeful ghosts looking upon him hungrily. All of the warning folktales about malicious spirits he’s heard from the Indigenous take place in forests at night, after all.

Behind him, a twig snaps.

Without another thought, he bursts forth in a run in the opposite direction from the sound. The forest flashes by him in dark blurs, the song of the crickets overcome by the noise of his own heartbeat pounding in his ears. Gradually, the moonlight returns – and makes everything it catches on look like an eye peering at him through the shadows. He only runs faster – up until his foot catches on a rock and he slams into the ground with a THUD that makes the bushes and trees rustle as multiple tiny creatures rush away from him and owls fly out of their perches into the speckled sky. He hits the ground shoulder-first and releases a terrified yelp at the same time the cat yowls, beginning to writhe in his arms.

He presses it closer to his chest even as guilt blazes with him – he can’t let it out back into these dangerous woods. If he could, he would apologize, but he can’t, so he just shushes it softly and hopes it understands.

But he doesn’t have enough time for either of them to recover from his fall before loud, heavy footsteps rush towards them. “There you are!” Comes Raph’s voice, caught somewhere between mad and terrified, “I’ve been looking for you everywhere! Why the fuck are you in the woods?!”

In response, Leo bursts into relieved tears – his brother is here, he can take him and the cat home now, away from this terrible place.

Raph, however, curses at the sight before kneeling down before him. He reaches out a hand to Leo’s head, probably to give the same comforting scalp scratch they’ve been given their entire lives – and promptly flinches back likely at both the feeling of Leo’s blood against his hands and the pathetic mewl that escapes from Leo’s mouth as his wounds are prodded.

He ducks his head down, nose pressing against the kitten’s soft neck, trying and failing to pull his tears back into his head as his stinging wounds throb agonizingly. All he wanted was a walk in the night, an independent walk that he always used to take whenever they came here. A moment of silence between him and the stars that had been stolen from him the night he missed a duck.

Can nothing good ever happen to him? Can he never get even such a simple joy as a walk in the woods without being wounded by an owl and then getting terrifyingly lost?

Perhaps it really is a greater mercy to kill him, if this is all there is left for him. These days, even his fear of death wanes at the strength of the sheer shame of his inabilities and of the damage they’ve done to his family. Perhaps it would be so much easier for them if he was dead – they wouldn’t have to look upon his shameful distress, wouldn’t have to take care of him as he lost even the most basic of abilities.

It’s not like death is a true end, either. Death is just a separation of the body and soul – they could call upon him in meditations, and he would come. More than that, there could be no greater Heaven than wherever his brothers lied, even if he can no longer partake in their joyful excursions.

But he can’t do that now, and if he can it’s only with assistance. At least as a spirit, they wouldn’t be burdened by him and he wouldn’t have to be burdened by his disability. His injury would probably be cured in death, wouldn’t it? Or are the consciousness and the soul so deeply intertwined that even in death, his stupidity would persist?

A familiar, warm hand cusps the side of his jaw gently. “It’s okay” Raph soothes in an uncharacteristically soft voice, “You’re okay. I’ve got you.”

Or, it would be uncharacteristic. More and more these days Raph’s softness has become more frequent than the harshness Leo had known his entire life. The harshness that had always pushed Leo to better than he was, the harshness that forced him back to his feet when he fell.

Has even Raph, arguably his most stubborn brother, given up on Leo getting better from here? Is his disability, his weakness, the only thing capable of pushing Raph to his knees?

He’d never figured himself important. He was the leader and the oldest brother, sure, but he’d always held the silent inclination that if he were to drop dead one day, nothing would change. But here he is, as good as dead, and his family has crashed to pieces around him at the loss of who he used to be.

He’s destroyed them. Destroyed Raph’s passion, destroyed Donnie’s peace, destroyed Mikey’s joy. He’s lost himself and stolen everyone else with him, and he can’t even apologize in either word or action.

How scared must Raph feel, holding him as he falls apart? How lost?

How disgusted?

He can’t even tell him what he’s upset about, can’t tell him how sorry he is. All he can do is wail until there is nothing in him left to weep, and then give his exhausted body into Raph’s reaching hands to be all but carried back to the farmhouse where the windows cast beams of golden light out onto the darkened grass, where he can see his annihilated family pacing back and forth across the rooms with enough passion to wear holes into the floor.

He presses the cat closer to his chest, lapping up the comfort it gives him as it rubs its head onto his plastron and purrs. By the feeling of the familiar intuitive dread pooling and hardening in his stomach, it’s all the comfort he’ll get for a while – and he’ll take it anything he can get in order to piece back together some semblance of the strength his family once relied on him for.

In this new, horrible reality, what is facing his family but another battle to be fought?

Notes:

ive been considering adding tags for a while bc like... they're important trigger tags but also spoilers. but eventually i decided it was more important to trigger tag than to like... idk protect the integrity of the spoilers? hopefully if im a good enough writer the content will still bang without needing to be surprising. i think thats how that works. anyways!! i hope this chapter is okay!! i have unfortunately been in the throes of a bad mental illness flare up which always make it difficult for me to write coherently. but i love writing this story so i hope that it still makes sense and scratched some of your angst itches!! anyways yeah shits about to get JUICY. we've kind of been in the "rising conflict" part of the story for the past little while so >:). i hope you guys are as excited as i am!! even if im going to need to bold and underline that "angst with a happy ending" tag... its coming dw!! these dudes are just really bad at communicating so i gotta beat at them until they have no other choice hehehehehehe... >:)

ALSO!! SO SORRY i forgot your quotes last time!! was in that weird space between finishing one book and picking up the next. these ones are from "a life impossible" by steve gleason (the previous ones were from "disability intimacy" by alice wong).

"Only the admission of ignorance can open us up to fresh knowing."

"The experience with the faith healer curbed my pursuit of alternative healing. I was reminded of a story a doctor told me about a family where the dad was diagnosed with ALS, and the children said that he spent four years chasing his tail trying to find a cure, but he never woke up to watch the sun rise. So, what would I do with the time I had left? I planned to fully live - and watch the sun rise."

"Practicing with Kyle the day before had been frustrating because I'd been attached to the expectation of catching a fish. That broke me open. The suffering made it easier to sacrifice any expectations, and simply enjoy this hallowed ground. I gave myself to this process."
"There were a lot of organizations pushing for a cure to ALS, but hardly any working to help people live with ALS. I saw this as an opportunity to create disruption and positive change in the 'marketplace.'"

"I want to be able to help ALS patients lead better lives. So many of them, when they get diagnosed, stop living the sort of full life that they should still be able to live... They don't have the resources to do it. I hope to be able to help some of them do the things they love to do. I refuse to give in to the disease. If I can help others do the same, I would be very happy."

"... other people see a situation that is wasted or worthless or tragic and the people of a community can take that tragedy and turn it into something heroic... where people say 'Oh, Steve, this is such a tragedy what's happened' with my diagnosis. Then I'm driven to say, 'What can we do to turn that tragedy into heroics?'... My message to you is that despite what other people say about our situation, we can take this and turn it into something inspiring and impactful to all the rest of the world."

"It won't be easy, but it can be awesome."

"No tree can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell."

"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."

"Resilient people do not bounce back from hard experiences; they find healthy ways to integrate them into their lives."

"Add up all the good things we have in our life and then subtract all the things we assume we're entitled to. What's left will correspond very closely to our level of gratefulness."

"While modern culture works to deny or distract people from the reality of death until they are forced into it (which is too late), [his wife] and I had no intention of sheltering our kids from the truth of living with ALS. Recognizing the truth and beauty of our mortality can be a doorway to living a better, more fulfilling life."

"I believe that when you're suffering, especially deeply suffering, it's vital to seek ways to help other people, and the world. Everyone needs help in some way. I'm not necessarily talking about helping poor, homeless, addicted, or terminally ill people. All people need help. People need plumbers, architects, musicians, astronauts, philosophers, and artists. Seek ways to help people in a way that is meaningful to you and invigorates you."
(personal note on this: struggling with bad episodes always makes me suicidal. but i dont want to do that, i want to live and fulfill my dreams and all such. so my current reason for living is that it always despairs me when hurt/comfort fanfics never reach a conclusion. so thank you guys for your comments and love, truly, bc on really hard days i sit there and i go "my readers deserve the complete fic i promised them. i'll stay to keep writing for them. <<33)

Chapter 14: the end is here

Notes:

cw for suicidal thoughts, depression, mild gore, and mild medical procedures. lmk if i missed anything else
title is from "i know the end" by phoebe bridgers

Leo is stupid.

This is true now, but it was also true then. It was true before the injury, when he had the conscience to know that he’d regret blowing off his excitable younger brother when death came for them all – especially in the unpredictable, deadly world they lived in. It nudged him whenever his littlest brothers constant movement and chatter turned to the annoyingly persistent buzz of a fly in his ear and he snapped at him or left just to be able to think, it pawed at him when he denied his brother company to go meditate or read. Yet, yet, yet, he continued. He continued because, as leader, he sometimes had to deny his brothers frivolous joy in order to ensure they were always safe no matter what. He continued because somewhere along the way, somewhere within the bloodshed and the fear and the violence, he had begun to view himself as a leader before a brother – because Mikey had brothers. He had two, in fact – he even had a father. That meant it meant little for Leo to slip through the cracks, to become nothing in his pursuit to give them everything, to painstakingly pull his own wants and dreams from his heart and settle them in a dark corner of his bookshelf where the blood and organ-skin that held it stained the scratched wood and painted the edges of his books on battle strategy.

He wiped it all clean until he could barely see it and hoped no one else could too. They didn’t need to know he struggled – they’d only try to turn Leo from leader back into brother, and surely, surely, that would kill them. If Leo wasn’t wound up, always watching for threats; always aware of every whisper of danger, of every possibly diseased rat or slightly unsteady bookshelf; they would all most certainly die.

And in the end, they mattered far, far more than he ever will. What is an oldest brother without younger brothers, and beyond that what is an older brother if not a protector of his younger brothers? Nothing. In both scenarios, he’s nothing at all.

A younger brother is what makes an older brother. A crew is what makes a captain.

Without those things, they are nothing. Without his brothers, Leo is nothing.

So, he walked alone. He shouldered the weight of the sky so they could cloudgaze. He laid himself down over the ravine so his brothers could awe at the beauty of the rushing river within it. And he would do it again, at every point he could, just for the privilege of hearing their laughter, of seeing their smiles.

He’d run through all the worst case scenarios a million times, at least. They were his silent companion, a never-ending noise, and they were his best friend, they were his lover. In the night they tucked themselves into his bed and he pressed his head into their chest, allowing their horrific tales to wash over him. He had to be aware – at all times, he had to be aware. That was his sworn duty as leader, his birthright as the oldest brother.

And yet, in none of all the thousands of stories he committed to memory, he never once imagined that his absence would cause them pain. Sometimes, when he dared himself the forbidden peace of imagining his own death, he pictured it’d even be a blessing – they wouldn’t have to worry about him anymore, wouldn’t have to deal with him anymore. Overall, Leo was an object – he lead, he lead, he lead, and he lead. That was it. Death meant the end of use, and the end of use meant chucking out the junk that had once been something vital to be destroyed. He even fantasized with pleasure about how happy Donnie would be to finally get a true peek into their insides as he peeled apart his corpse piece by piece, and stared at the shadowed shapes of his katanas for a long moment while thinking about how Donnie’s excited ramble would sound as he explained all the things he learned about their biology through his corpse.

But first, they needed to be safe – and Leo, he knew, was integral to that safety. So nothing ever happened, no plan was ever made, it was just his secret fantasy for when they were safe (if they ever were).

Online, he’d see stuff all the time telling him that suicide was not the answer, that he wasn’t alone, and when he was diagnosed with PTSD Donnie very solemnly, and a little shakenly, spoke on the rates of suicide in people with PTSD, and every member of his family made him collectively promise that he would tell them if he ever thought about something like that – and he would. He’s just not suicidal, he has no plans and has no intents to make plans – its just one of those silly desires, like the ones sung out in frail tones by the dreams he shelved. Equally as unimportant and frivolous.

But now, sitting in the living room of the farmhouse struggling to keep up with all the noise and movement going on above his head while Splinter carefully stiches and bandages (and rebandages) his wounds, he can’t help but regret his cardinal choice.

It has to be a silly thought. There’s no other way – what he did was integral to his family’s survival. Wants don’t matter in the face of needs, and his brothers needed to stay alive and safe above their desires for his company and his desires for their company.

But Mikey’s face is twisted in uncharacteristic rage, teeth bared like an animal and face wrinkled like an oni. He’s been like this for months, a furious animal in the flesh of a boy that was once the embodiment of a Golden Retriever spitting and hissing at all who come near. He doesn’t talk about comics anymore – and for the life of him, Leo can’t remember his favourite one. Did he ever know it or did his disability take it from him? He didn’t even know that this beast lied within his brother, but it must’ve, it must’ve, and maybe he couldn’t stopped it if he was paying attention.

But he wasn’t. He was watching the sky to make sure it didn’t fall, he was watching the shadows for malicious figures. Maybe he would’ve known, if he had settled down to play video games with him, if he had listened to his rambles about comic books without getting annoyed. Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe… Isn’t that the question he’s asked for his entire life? Maybe if I had been better, maybe if I had been better, maybe if I had been better.

But he wasn’t. He never was. He was a scared little boy who stretched up his arms to hold up the sky not knowing that he needed his arms to hug. Would it have even fallen if he wasn’t holding it up? Maybe – it seems to have fallen anyways, and all he did was do the thing that was supposed to keep it up; sacrifice himself.

Mikey storms off upstairs. Leo tries to crane his head to follow him, to figure out what set him off, to figure out what’s going on beyond all the noise and pain, but his father stops the movement with a touch of his paw and turns him back towards him so he can keep bandaging his head.

Leo whines, but Splinter just shushes him softly. Defeated by the sound of Mikey rushing upstairs, he moves his eyes up to his two other brothers, equally as damaged.

Will he ever get the chance to play video games with them again? To listen to Raph crack a witty remark, to behold the unbridled joy in Donnie’s eyes when he discovers something new or finishes a project?

Donnie turns to look back at him with exhausted eyes that see straight through him, like he’s nothing at all now that he’s not their leader nor big brother.

“Do you need help, Father?” He asks in a monotonous voice.

“I would like for you to come check the stitching” His father replies a little breathlessly, “My hands aren’t as steady as they used to be.”

With a nod, Donnie approaches, moving his body like its nothing more than an unwanted puppet – and as he does, Raph slinks off into the shadows and up the stairs, quiet and subdued in a way Leo never once imagined he could even begin to be.

He’s lived for years absolutely certain that it was the right decision to make himself nothing for them, but now in the silence he can’t help but notice the painful hollowness in his heart.

Notes:

hrrghh i hope this is okay life has been eating me alive for the past like. month. i wasnt actually planning on working on this at all while i caught up on schoolwork and life stuff because holy shit dawg but then i got home today and my mom was like "so. we're probably gonna have to put down your childhood cat soon" because he like... he cant really walk or stand or lie down anymore. hes been pretty wobbly and thin for a while, but he could walk and jump and climb stairs and eat and stuff. but lately he's seemed to have lost control over his hind legs, and he's so wobbly that he keeps collapsing into things while walking in a straight line. so anyways after bawling my eyes out for several hours on end i decided i needed to like, do something so i tapped into my beloved Grief Fanfic and made my good boy leonardo suffer. i hope it isnt underwhelming that leo missed out on the argument... ill try to tap into that in the next chapter but this one just. it went this way and also i kind of needed to just wax poetically about sadness for a hot minute. so. yeah. i hope you guys enjoyed this, i thought it was a pretty good character study considering the circumstances. if you enjoyed feel free to leave me a comment or kudos those are always awesome. take care of yourselves <3

quote time. these are from "a life impossible", "beautiful people", and "accessing the future." im sorry but i dont have the energy rn to type out big quotes so theres not that many... but i do have more that ill try my best to give yall next time!

"Through adversity, we find our heroes."

"Most people, I find, are afraid to talk about disabilities are afraid to ask questions. They don't want to get it wrong, so they choose silence, thinking it's a better and more respectful way to go. The only way we get disability wrong, though, is by not talking about it."

"I'm not a person with 'special needs' because my needs as a disabled person aren't special. They're needs. Period. Framing them as 'special' implies that they're optional, a bonus, or an add-on and views them through the non-disabled lens where the needs of non-disabled people are 'normal' while the needs of disabled people are 'abnormal' - a binary that just further 'others' the disability community."

"Those who prefer 'person with a disability' want you to see the person before the disability, while others prefer 'disabled person' because to them, it's impossible to separate the person from the disability - the two identities are inextricably linked. When in doubt, don't be afraid to ask disabled people about which one to use. Trust me, we won't hesitate. And while some may prefer 'person with a disability,' that doesn't mean they think disabled is a bad word or that they get outright offended when others in the disability community use it."

"Chances are, I will never feel entirely at home in a world where my needs for accessibility are often dismissed as 'special treatment', 'laughable', or even 'cheating.'"

Chapter 15: darkest hour

Notes:

cw for death, descriptions of ableism + nazis, blood, slight self-harm
lmk if i missed anything else! this is one of the heaviest chapters so buckle up and stay safe my beloved readers <3

The sky is pitch black and completely starless when you arrive, rain pattering gently against the windows of the elderly farmhouse you’ve been summouned to. Luckily, you do not have eyes to be adjusted, and as such find easy way through the thick pine trees surrounding the house.

You slip in through the crack between the front door and the floor, and as soon as you get in behold the people before you on instinct: One, your charge, an elderly bipedal rat mutant collapsed against the floor of the kitchen, life wavering before you like a shotty signal; and a bipedal turtle mutant sat on the couch, currently in the process of peeling bandages off his hands to wrap around a skinny paraplegic kitten purring on his lap.

You can tell from his eyes that he’s one of your children. Not in any literal nature – you didn’t make him. But over the decades, as the intellectually disabled have been abandoned and murdered in droves for the mere crime of existing, demoted to something lesser than even the animals by their own species, you have come to grow deep fondness for them. You have come to dedicate yourself in what ways you can to being the love they never had – you’d come to know this when you realized that the motion of your hands lifting their soul from their body was the gentlest touch they’d had since they were infants.

You’re not here for him, though. Not yet, at least.

You bend down over the rat’s prone form, and take the first tether to life in your clawed hands. As per usual, once you touch your soul to it, the vision of this dream of his explodes in your mind’s eye.

Four turtle mutants, nearly identical to the one you saw on the couch – his sons – cuddled up in one massive pile. Even in deep sleep, they look content, the ghosts of smiles from the day before clinging to their faces.

The rat – Splinter – lays a soft blanket glowing with the warmth of just being taken out of the dryer. As he lays it over them, his sons stir but do not wake, waking up just enough to quirk a smile and burrow closer to their brethren.

With one smooth motion of your claw, you sever it in twain. The soft, white thread, thrumming with gentle heat, rots within seconds, growing grey and still just before disintegrating into the aether. The soul’s presence outside of the body begins to steady.

You take the second one in your hand.

One of his sons – the one you saw before, your child. Leonardo, the rat’s soul tells you.

Leonardo. Without a tongue to test it out on, you test it out in your mind, rehearsing how to let it roll from your soul to his when you come to fetch him. Leonardo. Leonardo. Leonardo.

The names of your children are nearly infinite, and yet you remember them all. You would sooner rip yourself to shreds, to nothing, than forget them.

You began viewing them as your children in 1939, when the Nazis initiated the T-4 Project with intentions to purge those unworthy of life as they called them. The project lasted six years, up until the end of World War 2. In that time, you reaped over three hundred thousand people involuntarily euthanized by doctors in psychiatric wards, asylums, and nursing homes. They did not inform the families of the victims before doing so.

Physical pain draws you back to the present, a much happier present – the dream’s natural warmth is beginning to burn your hand.

Leonardo. He is sitting down at a table, reading The Art of War. A genuine smile rests over his face, eyes glowing with joy as he skims over the words – capable of reading quickly, but savouring each one like water in the middle of the night.

The book in the dream glitches, growing fuzzy and indistinct. What books would Leonardo read, Splinter wonders, if he did not carry the weight of the world on his shoulders everywhere he went?

You slice the thread before he can figure it out. Judging by the knowledge bestowed upon you through it, he likely never would’ve. Leonardo is a lot of things, but a boy willing to partake in desires that didn’t serve his family in some way he is not.

What books will I put on your shelves when I build your afterlife? You wonder curiously. He’ll tell you when you reap him, of course, but love is a thing that refuses to be swayed by something as frivolous as logic. Or will I not put any at all? Perhaps this is your father’s dream, not yours.

His joyous face rises in your mind again, burning and thrumming like a dream. I can’t wait to see the smile on your face when you achieve your dream.

You take the next one.

Leonardo and another boy – Raphael – locked in a sparring match. They’re smiling, overjoyed by the close presence of the other in one of their favourite activities, even as the passionate fire of competition blazes in their eyes.

You sever it, and the image disintegrates with the dream. Shall I connect your room to the dojo, then? If you like that, I know many people you’d love to befriend.

The next one: A different boy – Donatello – grinning widely as he shows off his latest invention, another thing that Splinter’s uncertainty over causes to waver and glitch, a blob of static before an entity. He looks well-rested, which is important for some reason.

The final son – Michelangelo – pouring over a new comic book, completely enraptured. Loose papers covered in beautiful sketches of superheroes, monsters, grandiose battles, and humorous interactions between characters surround him like a sort of summoning circle. These, too, are blurry, but the image of Michelangelo’s smiling eyes is vivid.

You’ll certainly give it to the man – in every single dream you pick up, they’re all pertaining the joy, safety, and success of his sons. The only dreams he has not related to them are a handful about the happiness of two humans – April and Casey.

The only one that pertains to himself is of a man, Japanese with sharp features and yet impossibly warm eyes. He pulls Splinter into a tight hug, and in his ear tells him that he’s so proud of him.

As you sever it, you make a note in your head: Deliver to Hamato Yoshi.

A horrified shout breaks the peaceful silence of the boy’s quiet shuffling and the soft rain. You jerk up, but there’s no need, one of the boys – Donatello, if your memory is correct, which it should be after seeing his face so many times – collapses to his knees and takes his father’s throat in his trembling hands, feeling for the pulse beat while murmuring the name Father over and over like a desperate prayer.

Leonardo, drawn by the shout, appears behind him in almost a moment, cat-less, confused, concerned, and dripping blood from his hand onto the kitchen floor.

Donatello lays both his hands on his father’s chest, starting CPR. Before you, Splinter’s soul, untethered to life by the death of every dream, melts from the shape of his body into a formless sphere that you take gently in your palm.

As Donatello’s hands slow, realizing quickly that his father is completely deceased, you take an empty jar out of the pocket of your black cloak and store the soul inside.

Donatello gasps. You take one step back but promptly pause as he whips around to address your son – “Why didn’t you call me when he fell?!”

In response, Leonardo blinks down at him in bewilderment, eyes wide and shifting slightly from side to side as he tries to comprehend the situation before him.

Tense silence stretches between them for several long seconds, and you wait for the moment Donatello snaps, for the moment he fells Leonardo in a rage at his lack of ability to not only notice his father’s collapse but also to know what to do about it and you carry him into the afterlife with his father.

But it never happens. Instead, Donatello slowly folds in on himself, pulling his hands over his eyes and digging his nails into his scalp so strongly that you watch as small buds of blood flower out around them.

He gives a shuddering gasp that makes him sound so young. How old are these boys? You wonder sorrowfully.

Donatello’s voice interrupts your musings as he sobs out; “This is all my fault.”

Ah. Perhaps you were mistaken on the state of this family – perhaps you’ll be taking his soul home instead of your child’s. Or both.

You don’t have the time to stick around and figure it out. Your duty to the rest of the world is calling you, and with the irritation of unsatisfied curiosity you tuck the jar into your cloak and head back out of the house in search of your next harvest.

Notes:

sorry about the experimental writing the chapter demanded to be written this way... also i hope its in general good ive been struggling with some health problems that have made writing/focusing difficult. i have some blood tests and an ecg scheduled that i hope in some way will fix my problems but in the meantime i hope that the quality of the chapters is still enjoyable!! or as enjoyable as a fic this angsty can get... anyways whooosss ready for these boys to learn the sacred ninjitsu art of talking about your emotions!!! (i say, very obviously hiding the mental breakdowns im about to make these boys suffer behind my back) (but then comfort!!! comfort... soon... i have comfort located at chapter 21 at the earliest so um.... its closer than we were at on chapter 14!! :D). in other news: my cat is now dead (rest in peace, jinx) and i'm seventeen years old. i got a new book on disability i didnt know existed for my birthday!! its called "the man who mistook his wife for a hat" by oliver sacks. its a non-fiction book by a neurologist describing the cases of some of his patients. the title is taken from a case of a man with visual agnosia, which means he can't recognize objects by sight alone. things you never notice to be grateful for, huh? i also found a few documentaries on disability such as "suffer the little children", "crip camp", and "tell them that you love me" because i made my capstone centered on disability. i cant remember the others right now but they're easy to google :).

anyways, quote time! sorry there isn't a lot, i took a bit of a break from the heaviness of disability reading to read other things after the death of my cat... but i should be back to it soon! hopefully. these are from "beautiful people" and "accessing the future."

"My dream is to live in a world where saying 'she's disabled' is as common and nonchalant as saying 'she's a redhead.'"

"[A short story in the collection] even goes as far as to question what defines a disability in a future that considers grief to be disabling and thus something to be gotten rid of."

"Disability is located, not at the site of the individual, but at the site of the culture and society. When we imagine an accessible future, the question is not how should any one disabled person change to fit (or, even worse, be eliminated from) that future, but how can society adapt to that person and all people."

Chapter 16: of monsters and men

Notes:

cw for suicide attempt, a corpse, and ableism

Something is wrong with Splinter, and it’s all Leo’s fault.

That’s about as much as Leo has managed to grasp in the past… however long it’s been since he’s been standing here over Splinter and Donnie’s prone forms.

He rolls the two partial conclusions around in his head, trying to understand the technicalities like a miner trying to break open a geode. Unfortunately for him, though, he hasn’t got any sort of tool to help, and is stuck struggling to crack it open with nothing but his teeth and disobedient fingers.

Something is wrong with Dad and it’s my fault, something is wrong with Dad and it’s my fault, something is wrong with Dad and it’s my fault…

It’s probably related to how he’s on the ground. That would make sense – when Donnie snapped at him, he’d said something about Leo not calling him when Splinter fell. Did Splinter fall? That would explain why he’s on the floor. Okay, that’s a start…

Wait. Donnie had said something else as well, something about this all being his fault. But why would he yell at Leo if it wasn’t his fault – and on top of it, if it isn’t his fault, why does he feel the sharp maws of guilt ripping at his chest?

But at fault for what? For not calling Donnie when Splinter fell.

But he didn’t know Splinter fell. He’d forgotten Splinter was still downstairs by the time Donnie’s yell sounded. How is that his fault?

Damn it, he needs that cursed tablet. Where did he put it?

He wanders off – just for a little bit, he promises himself. He just needs to find his tablet so that he can ask Donnie what’s wrong, and then he’ll be able to fix it. He doesn’t even allow himself to be distracted by the kitten on the couch, despite how much he immediately desires to pet them on sight. See? He’s still good at being Leo.

He finds it rather quickly, sat offline on the coffee table. It opens his AAC with the same touch that turns it on, and he spends the time spent rushing back to Donnie skimming through the Questions section.

Ugh, all these symbols look the same to him! He doesn’t have the time to try and figure out exactly which one is correct, his brother’s upset now and therefore he has to fix it now.

He presses a button. “What.”

That works. What’s wrong? What do I need to do to fix it?

Donnie peers at him through his fingers with wet eyes, hiccupping, “What do you mean what?”

He doesn’t know how long it takes him to find wrong, but by the time he has Donnie is no longer looking at him, back to burying his head in his hands over their father. “What wrong.”

That isn’t… entirely correct. But Donnie’s smart – he’ll figure it out.

Before him, Donnie stills.

“What’s wrong?” He echoes incredulously, lowering his hands to stare at him with bewildered eyes, “What’s wrong?”

For lack of anything better to do, Leo nods.

Donnie’s startled gaze falls into horror, and he shoves himself hastily away from him with his hands, shell slamming loudly against the cupboards. His wide eyes bore into Leo’s with a bafflingly familiar expression – it’s the expression humans fix him with when they first lay their eyes upon him.

He doesn’t understand why it’s there, but he does understand that his younger brother’s in severe distress, and that therefore, as his older brother, he has to fix it.

He takes one step closer, and Donnie presses himself tightly against the wooden cupboards. “Don’t” He gasps, “Don’t come any closer.”

Leo freezes, but whines lowly. I just want to help, it hurts me to see you so distressed – please, tell me how to fix this.

Donnie leans his head in his hands, swallowing desperate, shallow gasps of air. “You don’t-You don’t know what’s going on. It’s right in front of you and you don’t know.”

Leo nods, pulling his hands into fists and then releasing them again to ease the frustration the statement sparks within him. You’re right, I don’t know! So tell me!

But Donnie just continues babbling, staring at the floor with distant eyes, “You used to beat me at chess, every time. You knew the ending of every movie as soon as it began. We could never watch murder mysteries with you because you were always right about who the killer was. You…”

He sobs. Leo rocks back and forth on his feet, torn between respecting his brother’s wishes by staying still and rushing to his side to hold him in his arms like he used to, to rub his hand up and down his shell and press his head beneath his chin protectively.

“You hated stuffed animals. I hated how stoic you were, how insistent you were on pushing through your own pain. And now you always let me know. You always let me know you’re pain because you can’t help it, you can’t hide it, you can’t, you can’t, you can’t…”

He pulls his knees up to his chest and buries his head into them. “Do you remember,” He mumbles into his kneecaps, “When we were kids, and we were watching It’s a Wonderful Life? You asked me if all humans would be scared of us, and I brought up how much they love monster movies. And you said that the difference between us and monsters is that we can speak and they can’t.”

He nods.

“You probably don’t. But-But I’ve been thinking about it lately, and it’s- that’s all you are now, isn’t it?”

He pulls his face out of his knees, tears streaming down his face. “You’re an animal, Leo.”

Ah. He understands the problem.

He takes a step back, eyes flitting around the kitchen until they land upon the dirty knife resting in the sink. This’ll do.

It only takes a few steps to be stood before it, but it feels like an eternity. Time slows and ceases to exist, the world outside this house which stores the only people that will ever matter disintegrating into nothing. The space between him and the sink is endless.

His shaking hands don’t feel like they belong to him as he reaches down and grabs the pretty wooden hilt. It’s just like his katanas. It’s just like his katanas.

This is for the best. He is causing his family active pain by continuing to exist in this feeble state – how can he curse them with more time with him? How can he damn them to take care of him?

His usefulness has been spent, and useful is all Leo is.

There will be no last words, none spoken from his tongue. His last words were spoken months ago, when he rushed to save another and missed one dodge. He doesn’t remember what they were.

He bares his right wrist, the one possessing the empty hand, before the sharp edge of the knife.

His arms traitorously freeze, fear squeezing his hammering heart to death in his chest. Isn’t death something he’s always craved? Why is he so scared? Why can’t he just move the knife down?

His brother’s faces flash in his head. He’ll never be there to see if Donnie ever goes to university, if Mikey ever publishes a comic, if Raph ever will grow out of his anger issues. He won’t be there to behold them as they become, to watch as his hard work protecting and nurturing them pays off. He’ll never be there for anything again. He’ll never feel the first breeze of fall again, never see another episode of television.

You’re an animal, Leo.

He may be stupid, but he can translate that: You’re not my brother.

He rears the knife back and, without another thought, dives it into the veins of his wrist.

Notes:

... happy new years everyone!!! to celebrate i would like to point to the happy ending tag and then to the fact that this is NOT tagged mcd. <3
(also sorry this took so long.... i was pretty depressed after my cat died and got really into transformers to cope. also cut my own hair in the bathroom mirror but that's besides the point. BUT i wanted to give you guys a new chapter before 2025. and its still only 10pm here so it counts!! may the new year be fruitful for all of you!!!!!!!!! <<<333)

Chapter 17: i hope we both die

Notes:

cw for copious amounts of blood and violence, ableism, choking, and the ongoing suicide attempt. lmk if i missed anything else and please try to miss my head when you shoot me for what i wrote in this <3
title is from "no children" by the mountain goats

Mikey has always been a heavy sleeper, but according to Splinter he’s also always been the most intuitive of all of his brothers – and so, when he jerks awake in the middle of a perfectly peaceful night to an intense sensation in his stomach commanding him to go downstairs, now, he listens.

The sobbing is the first noise he hears as he descends the stairs, pushing him to take them three at a time until he arrives on the downstairs level, gazing at the kitchen from the living room with wide eyes.

Three things assault him at once: The sensation of his gut instinctively curdling at the aura of death in the air, the sight of Donnie curled up against a cupboard bawling his eyes out, and the pungent scent of blood.

He doesn’t get to choose which one he focuses on, or maybe his soul does instead of his mind. His eyes land on Leo, face twisted in pain as he staggers a few small steps back from the sink, one hand flapping in distress.

Only one hand flapping in distress because the other is occupied by the knife buried in its wrist.

He crosses the distance between them in what feels like one bound, grabbing Leo’s wounded arm in his and moving his mouth like a fish as his brain struggles to catch up to the sight before him. How did this happen? What on Earth does he do to fix this? There are veins in the wrist, important veins, probably arrythmias or whatever those big fancy ones are called that Donnie’s always prattling on about whenever they get stabbed.

Donnie. “Donnie!”

Managing to catch Mikey by surprise, Leo yanks his arm out of his grasp and stumbles backwards until his back clatters against the cupboards. Mikey watches with a hammering heart as he shakes his head wildly.

“What?” He breathes, mostly to himself, before his mind catches up with his body and remembers that this is Leo he’s talking to – stubborn, self-sacrificial Leo.

“No, no” He approaches sternly, even as Leo bares his teeth in defiance at him. “We’re not doing this. You’re injured. Let me help you-”

He lurches forwards to make a grab for him, but Leo (typical fucking Leo, he snarls internally) pushes off the counter with his uninjured hand and lands himself behind Mikey.

Familiar anger bubbles in his stomach as he spins around, sparse patience rapidly deteriorating as the fact that people slit their wrists to kill themselves flashes in his head. “Was getting a fucking brain injury not enough for you, Mr. Hero? You wanna die too?”

Tears leaking out onto his face and one hand shaking like a leaf as it hovers over the wound in its brother, Leo nods.

Every molecule of air is sucked out of the room at once as every single piece of the world dies except this place, this moment, these people. It dials into intense detail now that it doesn’t have to focus on anything else, and suddenly while staring into his suicidal oldest brother’s crumpled face Mikey’s aware of every drop of rain hitting the windows, the way the cat’s yellow eyes look green in the glow of the kitchen light as it watches from its place on the couch, every single one of his and Leo’s quick breaths, the rapid pulsations of his heart.

There’s a calendar hung against the wall beside Leo, one whose picture for November is the painting Ophelia by John Everett Millais. It’s Wednesday the thirteenth, Splinter’s elegant handwriting crossing out the days. Behind Leo’s head, he can see the analog clock ticking, ticking, ticking away, unbeknownst or perhaps uncaring to the disaster occurring before its face. It’s 8:17PM.

“It’s okay” Donnie says quietly, making Mikey flinch harshly, but he doesn’t dare take his eyes away from Leo. A child’s voice in his head, his heart, his soul cries over nightmares over being alone, and of crawling into Leo’s bed when he awoke from them to feel his big brother’s strong arms wrap around his shoulders, pulling him close and murmuring; “I’ll never leave you, Mikey. Ever. And I won’t let anything happen to Donnie or Raph, I promise.”

Donnie continues, voice trembling and hysterical, “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He doesn’t know what death is. He doesn’t understand it. Not at all, not at all, not at all, he’s too stupid.”

He laughs, a haunting and humourless cackle of a howl like a hyena’s that sends chills up Mikey’s spine. “He’s too stupid, Mike! His fucking brain is- He’s a fucking animal! A beast! He doesn’t know what’s going on anymore than that cat on the couch does! He-!”

He doesn’t get to finish his sentence, because in watching Leo’s facial expressions as Donnie ranted he’d come to realize what exactly pushed Leo to attempt suicide. The sheer rage of betrayal that floods every single system in his body is greater than anything he’d ever even imagined. He can taste it on his tongue, fire exploding up into his mouth at the realization that Donnie, his Donnie, did this.

It wasn’t that he wanted to hurt him, it wasn’t even that he intended to hurt him. To him, he was aware of what Donnie had done, and then he was furious, and then he was on top of him.

The scene isn’t in detail anymore, it could be any time of day, any day of the year, any weather overhead, a crowd of thousands or only them in the room. The ceiling could be caving in overtop of their heads and he wouldn’t notice.

He can barely see the blood on his own knuckles as he crashes them into his brother’s still-laughing face, can’t even smell it in the air. The only thing he can smell, taste, see, is the fury of betrayal.

“YOU-” He begins, trying desperately to find something to release this anger, to annihilate that traitorous grin breaking apart his brother’s face. But there aren’t words in the English or Japanese languages to describe this agony, to pack it all up into one singular punch.

His panting breaths are as loud as the blood rushing in his ears. As he rears back and slams his fist into his brother’s nose this time, Donnie’s head snaps sideways and his face gives a loud CRACK, blood exploding out from his nostrils and painting the floor – but even that doesn’t silence his laughter.

“THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!” He decides on at last, pulling his fist back up and smashing it into Donnie’s eye, and then into the lines of fragile teeth along his gaping mouth – SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP!

He does, stopping Mikey’s punch with his own hand to pull his face back up to look at him with both eyes and respond, “I know” with a tearful, half-toothless, bloody smile, about two seconds before he inhales either one of his own knocked out teeth or a glob of blood and starts choking.

Notes:

*ducks behind cement wall* um i wanted to thank d0minoeffect for giving me the idea of a brawl between these two way back in chapter seven but now im worried that if i do the assassins yall are gonna send after me will also be sent after them so um. just sending an apologetic thumbs up in their general direction before i have to run off into the distance and post chapter eighteen from a distant country in a cave.

(november 13 was the day my cat died, btw. he didnt die at 8pm though he died at like 6:30? thats also the day before my birthday so uhh yayy the more you know ig. it was not a super fun birthday even though i got to skip school and go book shopping but yk. its getting easier. it is. anyways, the other day i was in the psychiatrist's office and he told me something that was so like crazy that ive been sharing it with like everyone i know bc i had to go sit down for a hot minute just thinking about it afterwards but he was giving me cbt and he looked at me and without breaking a sweat said "you hate yourself because your brain could come up with no other way to process the things that happened to you other than to convince itself that you somehow deserved them." anyways i hope that helps anyone else with a traumatic past bc i was living under the assumption that i was just born broken but instead no i was just born into a shitty living situation. its also really good angst material methinks. anyways enough depression i feel like all i do is bum yall out over here even with my authors notes so uhh some good stuff that happened was i got a bunch of super cool stuff for christmas!! i got this giant book on nature from the smithsonian!!! and i got these black platform shoes with blue roses on them!!!! and i got this absolutely gorgeous copy of dracula by bram stoker and some indigo gift cards its awesome. its all very awesome. and for like literal weeks ive been struggling to muster up enough courage to ask out this really cool girl in my class so thats probably fun news for yall even though its only a little bit fun for me haha. shes great though she wears band tshirts like iron maiden and chappell roan and shes on like three different sports teams and she weightlifts and shes only looked my way like once ever but hopefully i can manage to actually ask her out instead of just thinking im gonna do it and then proceeding to just stand nearby and do nothing besides smile nervously and try to not come off as a major creep by the fact that whenever i zone out i find myself staring at her and i really hope she doesnt think im some creep but like you guys would get it if you saw her shes real pretty. i dont get why other people arent staring at her like i feel like its impossible. anyways. i hope you guys are having a great time and hopefully a new chapter will be up soon!!)

Chapter 18: yin and yang

Notes:

cw for blood and fic-typical angsting. lmk if i missed anything else!

“THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!”

Raph is out of his bed and in the hallway before he’s even registered that he’s awake, the barking elderly hardwood frigid against his feet, though for once he barely notices. He barely even notices Leo rushing up the only staircase until he barrels headfirst into him, unable to slow his momentum with what little time he had to know he should.

He curses at the same time Leo gives a short, pained shriek. Even in Leo’s current… state of being… the noise sends a bolt of lightning down his spine, awful and painful. He barely notices the ache in his palms and arms as he haphazardly catches himself on the creaky railing, whirling mind focused entirely on the sound of Leo’s rapidly receding footsteps.

Down the stairs sounds the muffled noise of fighting, finally audible from his perch at the top of the staircase. Did someone break in? If they hurt Leo, he’ll-

He’ll what? Do the exact thing that got them into this whole situation in the first place?

His stomach turns, and he can’t tell whether it’s from the loss of Leo or the loss of his identity.

Down the hall, Leo’s quiet sobs echo down the walls. That’s what he should be doing. His brothers – or, well, Mikey at the very least – can fend for themselves.

He turns around, ignoring the hollowness in his chest as he moves away from the fighting and towards the noise of his brother’s tears. “Leo?”

At his voice, the crying silences with the quick finality of a throat being sliced. The arteries of his heart wrap around each other in fear, and he picks up pace at the same moment his heart does. “Leo? What’s going on? Are you hurt?”

A low whine from the room April and Casey usually share is the only response. He turns into it without hesitation.

The room is empty, but luckily for him his ninjutsu stays sharply tuned as ever, allowing him to pinpoint the soft sounds of Leo’s quick breaths from where they shoot out from underneath the bed.

Relief and worry war inside him as he crosses the distance between them – on one hand, at least he can do a semi-decent hiding job in a pinch, and on the other, if he’s got wounds the sheer amount of dust and dirt underneath that bed is definitely getting them all kinds of infected.

He kneels before the side of the bed where the breathing is the loudest. “It’s just me, Leo” He announces gently, “It’s Raph. I’m going to lift this up, okay? I just wanna check up on you.”

Leo, of all things, hisses at him, a low sound that none of them have made since they gained consciousness. As it startles Raph into stillness, however, the part of his body that remains amphibian knows how to reply, crawling up from the pit up his stomach and clawing at the back of his brain in order to inform him that he now has two choices – back off or prepare for a fight.

At it, the old Raph, the one he’d thought died with Leo on that fateful night, rumbles as its tugged from hibernation like a bear at the sight of spring. Here they are, at last, in the way they were born to be, hiking their shoulders and bearing their teeth at each other. It strikes him, now, that they’re like oxygen and flame. The Raph that fights cannot exist without the Leo that fights back, just as life cannot exist without death, joy without sorrow.

He does the only thing he can do – he hisses back and flops down onto his stomach so he can be eye to eye with Leo as he lifts the bedsheet dividing them.

Leo’s wet eyes glower back at him, a familiar resistance sparkling in them that Raph hasn’t seen for months. Unfortunately, his eyes are nearly instantly pulled away from his brother’s and down to the puddle of crimson blood staining the wooden floorboards and all the dust bunnies underneath it.

“The fuck?” He blurts instinctually, horror curdling in his gut as he follows the drip of blood to Leo’s wrist. It gushes out almost unbridled despite the knife obscuring its way, pulsating out in great waves like the ocean.

Leo yanks it back at the same moment Raph lurches his hand out, wriggling backwards and hitting the back of his shell against the bed with a thunk.

Raph struggles and fails not to wince as his palm claps down on the warm pool of his brother’s blood, but with his old self yawning and stretching within him manages to turn it into a snarl that he fixes Leo with – I’m going to love you, and I dare you to try and stop me.

Leo, as self-sacrificial and stubborn as ever, glares back with the same expression.

He tells him as much, “You self-sacrificial, stubborn piece of shit. Give me your hand.”

The realization Raph just had seems to hit Leo then, brows relaxing as his eyes widen in surprise.

Raph uses the moment to his advantage, grabbing his injured wrist by the arm and pulling it towards himself, out of the filthy shelter of the bed. For his part, Leo gives a small yelp and attempts to jerk his hand back, but Raph holds his arm tight with one hand as he uses the other to put pressure on the wound, wincing as Leo lets out a cry at the sensation. “Sorry, bro, but I can’t let you bleed to death.”

As the words leave his mouth, he awaits Leo trying to tug his hand back some more or maybe huffing at him in annoyance, but instead ends up jumping out of his skin as Leo slams his free fist down on the creaky floorboards and gives a deeply frustrated yell.

For several heartbeats, Raph just sits there, trying to wrap his head around why Leo would make such a noise in response to being loved. Is that how he always felt when they would try to help him, and he just masked it with a stoic expression and a belligerent huff or two?

Raph grits his teeth, and, as is his duty for his part of their equation, digs his heels in; “I love you, Leo. Whether you like it or not, I’m going to help you. You’re my brother. I’m going to help you if I have to drag you kicking and screaming to a first aid kit and pin you down while bandaging you up.”

For another several heartbeats, Leo is silent, the wrist between them still in Raph’s ever-tight grip. Then, he shuffles himself forwards until his head pokes free from his hiding place, gazing up at Raph with bulbous, frightened eyes. It’s the same expression Mikey used to give them when they told him there were no monsters underneath his bed, the look of wanting so badly for something to be true but feeling in your gut that it isn’t, begging to be told otherwise.

If Leo had ripped Raph’s plastron off his body and torn his heart out of his chest, it would’ve been less painful than seeing this. “I promise” He replies, voice breaking. How long had his brother felt that he didn’t love him? How long had he let him live that way?

Months. That’s the answer. Months. Months he spent missing a version of Leo he had known forever in the face of a Leo he could’ve been getting to know now.

“I love you,” He repeats, failing to keep the tears out of his voice, “I love you. Intelligent or not, I love you, and I’m… I’m so sorry that I let you think otherwise.”

For a heartbreaking moment, Leo studies him in the way Mikey did when he got older, trying to peel back his sureness to see some sort of alternate truth underneath.

There is none. There is only the guilt that he had become so lost in his grief that he had forgot there was still somebody waiting for him. Somebody who tried his best to comfort him while upset, somebody who fretted over him while he was ill. There is only the desperation to remove the injuries he had inflicted on one of the most precious people in his life, somebody irreplaceable regardless of their mental state.

In the end, there is only them two, ying and yang, life and death, joy and sorrow, functioning for eternity in response to the other. There is no gang war, no destiny, no power, no disability. There are just two baby turtles, gazing at each other as the human instinct for family trickles into their reptilian brains and thinking I think I love you. Do you want to love each other?

Yes. No matter how the hundreds upon thousands upon millions of universes out there try to spin them, the answer is yes. I love you too, and I want to spend forever as your packmate, as your family, as your brother.

Leo must realize this too, crawling one-handed out of his hiding place and wrapping his free arm around him, pressing his head against Raph’s the same way he did when they first awoke – and just like then, Raph presses back without hesitation. I’ll love you forever. I’ve decided it, and I dare anyone or anything to try and change my mind.

Notes:

ik im shocked too!! i wasnt expecting the comfort to come this early but the fic demanded it!! thats just how the story crumbled, so yippeee!!! as you guys can tell im very normal about the raph and leo bond. yup. super duper normal. and i hope my fellow normies got their kick out of this chapter (*cough cough* slady *cough cough*) because i had SO MUCH FUN writing it. genuinely i think this was the most fun ive had writing in a LONG TIME i was shaking my fist and grinning and shit. so i hope you guys enjoyed as well!!! please leave a comment or a kudos if you did i love those theyre like the greatest things ever <<33 and i hope you guys appreciate not being left on a cliffhanger this time lol. well get back to the boxers next chapter <3 and in regards to the stuff i was yapping about before, the girl and i went nowhere bc i realized i was doing this thing i do where i make myself have a crush on somebody when im sad in order to experience positive emotions. oh and my bloodwork/ecg stuff came back normal, so thats neat! unfortunately i will be going into my tough semester in a week, the one thatll have me studying in my spare time (currently ive got english/spanish/psych which are all of my easy classes. and then theyre going to beat my ass with biology at 8 in the fucking morning and math. luckily im not talking precalc but its still math which i am extremely bad at. BUT ANYWAYS WHAT IM TRYING TO SAY IS updates will probably get slower as school gets heavier :(( but ill still be trying my best to give you guys the chapters yall deserve!!). i hope you guys are having a wonderful day and that this made it better!!

Chapter 19: to remember your name

Notes:

cw for blood, severe dissociation, murder (kind of), ableism, and fic-typical angsting. lmk if i missed anything else!!
title is from "i dont smoke" by mitski

The world, to Mikey, is nothing more than an amalgamation of arbitrary shapes and colours as he climbs the stairs, feeling like a ghost watching the zombie of his body move – except that it seeks Leo, not brains.

That’s what this all was for, right? Leaving his brother on the ground there, choking, it was all for him, right?

Right?

He feels nothing. His chest is a hollow cavern, his soul a statue being covered by moss. The world before him is a bleak video game he’s playing on the couch back at the lair, while his brothers, healthy and happy and normal, putter about behind him.

Reminds me of What Remains of Edith Finch, he thinks detachedly as he pauses, pushing gently on the controller to shift his head from side to side. Where’s his brother? This part reminds me of Resident Evil.

There are noises coming from the room April and Casey take, noises that he can’t really identify, but noises nonetheless.

He wanders into the room, fretting distantly about running into some blood-soaked monster pressed against the wall of the room, waiting to attack. He doesn’t have any medicine on him – or actual weapons, for that matter.

When he does, two characters look up, lines of code instructing them to pull up their heads and stare at him when he enters the doorway.

“Mikey?” One of them, Raph, says, sounding surprised and concerned. It isn’t subtitled.

He blinks, and Raph is before him, cusping his head in his hands and asking him what’s wrong and where’s Donnie and why is there blood on your hands and-

Stop, he begs, stop.

“Okay” Raph responds soothingly. He wonders distantly whether he said that out loud.

Raph’s hands slide down from his face to his hands. “C’mere, buddy, come sit down.”

What other choice does he have? His brother is going to die and it’s all his fault.

My brother is going to die and it’s all my fault.

His chest jerks with a hitching breath, the screen suddenly blurry. Is there something mucking with my TV? I should call Donnie, then.

A strange sound echoes through the room, strangled and small like the cry of a deer.

Something strong and warm envelops him, wrapping around his shell. A familiar chin rests on his head.

“Raph?” He hears himself ask, voice tiny and cracking.

“Yeah, Mike, I’m here” Comes Raph’s voice, soft and gruff and strong, reliable and dependable.

The deer-like noise comes again, and only now does Mikey realize it’s coming from him, bursting out his chest as all of his pent-up emotions and desires bubble over through his mouth like foam. He’s upset and his brother is comforting him. He’s upset and his brother is comforting him.

He reaches up, feeling the hard body of Raph’s shell under his fingers, his hands rising and falling with every breath his brother takes.

This can’t be real. Raph hasn’t held him in months, not since Leo’s injury. Unless…

“Are we dead?” He croaks.

“What?” Raph replies, incredulous.

“Are we dead?”

“N… No, buddy. We aren’t dead. You aren’t dead. We’re okay.” He pauses there, for just a second, before continuing, voice suddenly sharp, “Why do you say that? Are you hurt?”

“No” He shakes his head, maybe just to remind himself that Raph is holding him, to feel the hard bones of his chin and the rough sensation of his scales against his head. A sense of reality trickles slowly into his mind, gently melting away the barrier between him and the scene before him. “You’re… holding me.”

 In the silence that stretches on after that remark, Mikey adjusts his head so he can press his ear against Raph’s chest, listening to the rapid pulsations of his heart. Despite how fast it is, he finds his eyes drifting slowly close, hazy memories of turtle piles splayed out before him like photographs over a table. He always liked to curl closest to Raph in those piles as a kid – he was the biggest, the strongest, and Mikey could feel it in the way his heart beat loud and strong in his chest. Being held by Raph had always indicated safety, for nothing could get past him.

He’d forgotten what this felt like, to be safe. He’d forgotten what it felt like to not have to watch his own back, to not have to fight alone.

Raph’s arms tighten around him. “Of course” He says at last, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world that he would hold him, as though Mikey hasn’t been alone for what feels like years.

Ah. He understands what’s going on now.

“I love this dream” He declares softly, opening his eyes and holding onto the edge of Raph’s shell so that he doesn’t wake up. In the morning, he’ll be strong for Leo, he’ll be what Raph was meant to be. For now, he’ll enjoy this recess from the nightmare his life has become for all it can offer him.

The comfort ends when Raph abruptly pushes him off, though still holding onto his shoulders with a nigh painful grip, to stare into Mikey’s eyes with a serious, daresay worried expression. “Did you get hit with something?”

A bat swings and strikes Leo over the head, splattering blood over the walls and destroying everything his family has in one fell swoop. “Are you asking if I have a head injury?”

“I… Do you have a head injury?”

“No” Mikey replies honestly, but Raph still removes his hands from his shoulders to inspect. Mikey lets him, moving compliantly this way and that – he hasn’t been tended to like a baby brother in so long. This is still the best dream he’s ever had, even if Raph is ignoring him – because that’s what older brothers do. They’re stubborn and headstrong, willing to go through hell and back for the family following them. At last, something in his life is familiar.

“I missed this” He murmurs, and the hands on his face freeze. He pays them no mind, there’s a sob building in his throat as memories of Raph rise to a crescendo in his mind, memories of comfort and safety. “I missed you.”

Before he can register that the fingers on his head have fallen, he’s being yanked back into the hug by familiarly muscular arms, squeezing him against Raph’s plastron – hard, strong, unbreakable, and shaking, trembling and hitching as it inhales.

Something wet falls over Mikey’s head – but it can’t be raining, they’re indoors. Right?

A sob sounds overtop him. Somewhere close by, Leo whines fretfully.

Whines? Why would he be disabled in this dream, if this is a perfect world?

“I’m sorry” Raph apologizes, crying in earnest now overtop him. “I’m so sorry, Mike. I’ve missed you too.”

“Why is Leo still disabled in this dream?”

“Because you’re not dreaming, Mikey” He replies, and there’s some familiar fire returning to his tone for the first time in months, a bull swinging its horns and daring Mikey to challenge it. “This is real. This is real, and I’m sorry, and I love you.”

This is real.

Mikey pulls his head away to look at the clock against the wall. A clock will always look strange in a dream, portraying times that don’t exist and such.

8:22.

He blinks, waiting for it to mutate.

It stays the same. 8:22.

Donnie on the ground. Leo with a knife in his wrist.

8:22.

Donnie choking on the floor, writhing and twitching as he fights and fails to pull air into his lungs.

8:22.

He was so furious he’d left him there to die.

8:22.

A bo staff swinging against an enemy attacking Mikey, That’s my annoying sibling!

A wry grin. Blueprints laid out on the table. Please, Donnie, please!

Alright, alright!

A body collapsed on the floor of the garage, sending terror straight into his bones. Not you, Donnie, please, I can’t lose you too.

Blood on the ground. Blood on his fists. Donnie’s hiccupped noises of strangulation, fingers flexing uselessly against the tile.

Donnie’s wide eyes, rolling over to his. Help me, help me.

You killed Leo, he thought. You’re not my brother. I have no reason to save you.

His eyes. Help me, help me. His eyes. Mikey, get out of my workshop! His eyes. Mikey, come check this out! His eyes. This is the letter A, Mikey. Can you repeat that back to me? His eyes.

They’d glazed over after a moment, lost in pain or perhaps realizing that Mikey wasn’t going to move.

He’d left him there to die. He’d left him there to die.

Oh, God.

8:23.

“I killed Donnie.”

Notes:

hnnnghhh i hope this is good yall im SO sorry this took so long my cptsd spent like three weeks or something beating me into the fucking stratosphere and combined with how difficult this chapter was to write bc of mikey's dissociation i just kind of broke on it. if it makes yall feel any better i think ive only spoken to like three of my friends in weeks lol ive just been surviving my brain. nearly attempted again BUT I DIDNT so im not counting it as having broken my two year no attempt streak. also i dropped bio bc it was killing me dead so now i just have math and psych so thats fun. ANYWAYS GOOD NEWS sorry for being such a negative nancy all the damn time >:\ ive been accepted into two universities so far!! so thats fun :) i hope you guys are having a good time!! feel free to tell me about it in the comments, i love hearing about peoples lives (which is why i tell yall so much about mine. im always kinda disappointed whenever the author is vague about their life i like watching their life unfold as the fic does). and if you enjoyed please leave me a kudos or a comment those are my lifeblood!! hopefully the next chapter wont take as long but no promises i am EXHAUSTED... but eventually it will come. <3

Chapter 20: whale fall

Notes:

cw for animal death, suicide attempt, the ocean, talk of decomposition, and near death experiences

Miles off the shore of New Hampshire, a whale dies.

It is old and tired, its bumpy grey skin freckled with scars - maybe from sharks, maybe from rocks, maybe from ships. Donnie was never much of an ocean guy.

He watches from the side, feeling oddly peaceful for someone who is far from shore with no memory of getting there. He should be scared - he may not know a whole lot about the ocean, but he knows enough to know to be scared of it. Whatever scarred the great beast before him could definitely kill him if it so desired.

But he’s not. Somehow, he trusts that nothing will attack him. Somehow, the awareness that the great blue sea is almost entirely empty for miles around him doesn’t bring forth fear but calm. With the water submerging his head, he can hear nothing of the world above, he does not exist in the world above. There is no corpse at his feet, no ghost of a brother standing over him, no fists on his face. There is nothing. There is only the whale.

Before him, it writhes, struggling to propell itself towards the surface, tail lashing - but it is too old and too tired, it no longer has the youthful energy to pull itself up for air. Donnie can see the exhaustion in its distressed eyes, the way it yearns for rest even as it struggles to the surface. He sees the moment it realizes that it can’t, where at last the fight bleeds away and it shuts its eyes, body going still.

Slowly, like snow, it falls, giving itself back to the sea, back to its mother to for the last time be pulled against her chest and carried off to bed.

Donnie watches it. He should swim up to the surface now. That’s where his brothers are.

The thought of his brothers makes his chest tighten. The thought of Leo, who he couldn’t save, the thought of Raph, who left him, and the thought of Mikey, who beat him.

This is it, he realizes now, like dew sliding over leaves. This is death.

He pulls his gaze away from the whale to glance up at the surface. Several feet above him, the sunlight glitters. If he just kicked his legs a bit, reaching out his arms, he could breach it, could feel air pull into his lungs and the warmth of the sun on his face.

But that would be all. What does he have left to return to? He has failed everyone, and now for his sins they have killed him. His brothers, the ones who he’d known since the day he hatched, the ones who he trained with and played with and fought for.

They were all that he ever had. They are all that he will ever have.

He descends, following the whale as it sinks. It’s not hard - he’s a turtle, he was born to swim. Maybe not born to swim to the bottom of the ocean, but to swim nonetheless.

As the sea darkens around him, nervousness spikes in him - the pressure down here is enough to crush him to death no matter which species he is - before he remembers that he’s already dying, or perhaps already dead.

Is the afterlife just this? Just swimming downwards into the dark while what are probably decades or centuries pass above your head? How long has he been down here? Are his brothers happy yet?

Around him, the world turns pitch black - then, stars, moving through the void. He pulls his eyes from the whale for a few seconds to watch as bioluminescent, alien-looking creatures make their way through the abyss, barely sparing him and the whale a second glace as they follow the light shows of prey and predator.

Still, he never stops following the whale. Maybe this is some sort of guide to the afterlife, seeing as he woke up to it, though he assumed that a guide would, well, guide, would tell him about the afterlife as they walked him there, and not just fall silently into the abyss.

Eventually, they reach the sea floor. The whale hits the ground softly, but creates a wave of sand in its wake nonetheless. Donnie settles down next to its head, watching its lifeless face as he waits for the next step.

As it continues to do nothing but be dead, anixety wriggles in his chest. Did he make the wrong decision? Is he now stuck at the bottom of the sea forever as punishment?

Movement, in the whale. He jerks to look at it.

It’s… a tiny creature. Lots of them, in fact, crawling into the whale’s flesh. His first instinct is to chase them away - leave my friend be, he wants to bark, let him rest - but something keeps him still, keeps him watching as several different creatures arrive, pulling the flesh from the whale’s bones.

Quickly, its body becomes a feast, its resting place a party of what seems to Donnie to be hundreds of deep sea creatures, each consuming a different part of its corpse. Each repurposing a different part of its corpse.

With what they have eaten, they will live, will breed, will continue to ensure the world keeps spinning in their own little ways, a thousand hands working in tandem, each taking on one small job, making death into life.

And isn’t this the truth for all things? A body is buried underground and the bugs consume it, and the birds consume the bugs, and the people consume the birds. Then, then cycle repeats, over and over again, neverending.

Everywhere, in every biome, in every world, death is not the end of life but rather a part of it, a beginning of something new. The worm that eats the eye of the grandfather is the worm that the chicken feeds to her young that the pregnant woman eats for her dinner. Nothing lives without death. The two are inseperable.

There is no end to life. There is no beginning to life. It simply is.

A familiar voice, muffled by the water but audible nonetheless, crying out in terror, “Donnie!”

Raph. He looks up. The world is entirely black above his head, save for the starlight of fish. With how busy this spot is at the moment, it looks almost just like the night sky.

“Donnie!”

I’m not dead, he realizes. I’m dying.

Then, an uncontestable knowledge from deep within his soul - he still has the time to swim to the surface. He can still return to his life, to his brothers.

“Donnie, please! Please, I need you!”

He’s never heard Raph sound so scared before, so close to tears.

He doesn’t know that death is not the end. He doesn’t know that there is still life to live after Donnie’s death, after Dad’s death.

After Leo’s injury.

But Donnie still has the power to tell him. He can still save him from misery, can save them all from misery.

A familiar green hand pushes its way through the dark, straining to reach for him. “Donnie!”

He pushes himself off the ground and swims up to meet it, leaving the whale, this world, this peace, behind. He’s got better places to be than the afterlife.

Notes:

HI GUYS JUST LIKE DONNIE IM NOT DEAD!!!!!!!! IM ALIVE!!!!!!!!! THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH FOR YOUR THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS I HAVE MANAGED I HAVE SURVIVED!!!!!! i hope you guys enjoyed this chapter <3 and now im going to get into what the fuck happened in my life bc if i were you id be mad curious
so, basically, my older brother lives with my mom and i now bc hes homeless bc he attacked his dad on christmas day and his dad kicked him out and he didn't go back because he was scared that he would kill his father because of how much he hated him. as you can tell he is uh... something. so, he got real pissed one day bc he was sick and mom kept "putting the pressure of fixing [himself] on [him]" by asking him if he would like tea or stuff. so in response he went on a rampage through the house, destroying everything in sight including a hockey stick, a shirt, our sisters wicker laundry basket she got from grandma, and the things that hold our pictures onto the walls. then he blasted loud ass music about how he was a lost cause right next to my fucking bedroom and it was literally like midnight and i had school the next day. anyways, so after that whole thing in the morning i was like "fuck this. being homeless cannot be worse than this" so i ran away from home and then my mother found me and was like "if you leave your brother will kill himself" and i was like fine ok i dont want him to DIE i just want to like feel safe in my own home (contrary to popular belief. this family thinks i hate his ass and want him dead bc when i tried to move out to my dads he was all IM GOING TO KILL MYSELF and everyone was like "wow leodoriya. how could you do this to your own brother" like I DID NOT INTEND FOR HIM TO DO THAT I JUST WANTED TO LEAVE and then we went to like stop him from killing himself and he looked at me and went "i dont know why youre here considering this is all your fault" like MOTHERFUCKER I NEVER SAID THAT I WANTED THIS ALL I SAID WAS THAT I WANTED TO MOVE IN WITH MY DAD but anyways i digress whatever this family is always in need of a villain it was just my turn then) and not have to worry about my mother being hurt when im not there to protect her. BUT he's going off to mexico tomorrow and should be (FINGERS CROSSED) moving out in june. and graduation is also soon!! so hopefully there should be more updates. i hope that i can get this done before i go to uni in september bc ik ill be busy as all hell then. love you!!!

Chapter 21: come taste the sunsweet berries of the earth

Notes:

cw for talk of suicide
title from "colors of the wind" from pochahontas

This is real.

The realization crashes into him like a freight train as he watches Raph rush down the stairs to go help Donnie. To go save Donnie. From what Mikey did.

The world falls into reality around him like a tsunami, as though earplugs have been ripped from his head, sleep torn from his mind. This is real. Everything is real, from Raph’s hands cradling him to Donnie’s body on the ground to the fact that he left him there to the knife in Leo’s wrist to Splinter’s corpse to the all-consuming anger to the misery of his brothers to-

He flinches as a hand settles on his shoulder, jerking over to find worried, curious eyes staring into him. He has looked into these eyes a thousand times, has been held by this very gaze his entire life.

But now, there are no words to accompany it. There is no inquiry into if he is alright, no gears turning quickly behind them to figure out what’s wrong. They don’t dance around him, taking in every little thing that could be contributing to Mikey’s distress - they just stare, fixated, on him, waiting for him to give the answer, to show the wound voluntarily.

Before him, it is and isn’t his brother, and it lands like stones in his gut that this too is real. Leo has a permenant injury. He has lost the brother he knew and all the hopes he had for their future together forever.

Of course. Why would Donnie give up if he saw a sliver of a way that it could be solved? Donnie’s Leo’s brother too, he would’ve cut his own heart out of his chest if it meant saving Leo. He did all that he could do - he returned Leo to them alive.

But Mikey had always been more heart than brains. He believed in Santa the longest, believed in miracles the longest.

He sobs. Leo keens in response, because that is all he can say now. This is all he has left.

Still, familiar arms wrap around his shell, pulling him to Leo’s chest. The bandage around his wrist scratches against his shutes, because Leo had tried to kill himself. Leo had been so convinced that they didn’t want him in this form that he’d tried to kill himself.

Mikey had spent so much time searching for a cure to his own grief that he forgot that Leo was the one dealing with it. He had spent so much time doing nothing but drilling it into Leo’s skull that he did not want this new version of him. They had spent so much time doing nothing but drilling it into Leo’s skull that they did not want this version of him.

Leo had tried to kill himself. He had thought it better for them if he was dead. He had almost lost him on top of losing who he used to be. He had almost lost, forever, hearing his heartbeat as he lay against his chest, feeling his hand petting his head, seeing his eyes light up with joy or look at him with love, having his smell fill his nose.

Gently, he pulls away from the hug, fighting to swallow back his tears. He has to say this. He has to.

He forces himself to focus on Leo’s eyes - concerned and afraid - as he cups his head in his hands. “I love you.”

He inhales shakily, watching as confusion and then forlorn acceptance stirs in Leo’s eyes, pulling his gaze away to look melancholically at the floor. “Not just-not just the old you though” He specifies hurriedly.

Leo’s eyes jerk up like he’s just told him grass isn’t green. Mikey’s heart wails in his chest. “I love this you, too, I love-” He chokes on his own tears, forces them back, and keeps going, finding strength in the way Leo fixates on him with a kind of hope he hasn’t seen in months, “I love you much you care for Dove, and I love the little noises you make when you’re curious or pleased or, or, y’know. They’re like birdsong, and-and we don’t get to hear a lot of that in the sewers. It’s nice.”

He inhales, and it’s a little steadier this time. Leo is looking at him like he’s hanging on to every single word, but more than that, he looks… okay. He doesn’t look upset, he doesn’t look scared, he doesn’t look downtrodden. Mikey wouldn’t go as far as saying that he looks happy but he looks, for the first time in months, like he isn’t miserable.

He’s the one who’s injured, whose pride was lost on the battlefield forever, but even though he’s not cured, even though Mikey hasn’t yet taught him how to read again, he’s okay. He’s okay with it because Mikey loves him.

Because their strength had never lied in their prowess on the battlefield. It had never lied in ninjitsu, or meditation, or anything like that. All of that was merely an offset of their core strength, feathers on the body of the bird of their love.

Mikey had forgotten. They had all forgotten.

“You’re nice. I love you, and that’s a promise.”

At his words, Leo’s eyes soften around the sides, a smile curving at the edges of his lips as a new expression settles on his face.

Oh. That’s what has made the way Leo looks at them so unrecognizable. It’s not that his injury left them emptier, but that for this whole time he had been looking at them like he didn’t recognize them - and why would he? Mikey doesn’t recognize them either - or himself.

But now, his gaze has changed back to the way he used to look at him. At last, he recognizes him, and it strikes Mikey that for once, he isn’t angry.

He isn’t sitting across from his brother, in rehabilation for an injury. He isn’t looking at his brother, broken and in need of repair. He’s just looking at his brother, and his brother is looking back at him.

They’re going to be okay. The knowledge comes not from his head but from his soul, unable to be doubted. They’re all going to be okay. They have each other.

For the first time in months, Mikey smiles from the heart, and for the first time in months as well, Leo returns it.

Mikey stands up, pulling Leo along with him. “Come on, let’s go downstairs. I have to go apologize to Donnie.”

Notes:

this isnt my fave chapter but i was sad today so they... *checks notes* DONT suffer? anyways, WHOOOSSS READY FOR THE HAPPY ENDING BECAUSE ITS COMINGGGG WEVE REACHED THE COMFORT PART OF THIS FIC

Notes:

i read a whump fic that treated getting a severe disability as a fate worse than death and it pissed me off so bad i wrote this fic so three cheers for spite i guess

EDIT: since this fic is gaining traction, i’d like to point out that i am merely an ally to intellectually disabled people. while i do hope this fic spreads awareness, i would like to give you all the tumblr accounts owned/ran by intellectually disabled people that taught me what i know to write this fic:

@pixierainbows (i receive most of my information from this account, most to all of leo’s symptoms are based off this person)
@zebulontheplanet
@five-thousand-loaves-of-bread
@one-in-a-cocomelon
@birdofmay
@gwydion-aacblog

these are not of course the only places you can find intellectually disabled people speaking about their experiences and so forth! these are just the ones i have learned from. 💙