You could make this place beautiful

by GibbousLunation

Summary:

Every day is not actually hard, despite what the crumbling buildings and apocalyptic shimmer might imply. The world doesn’t end every day, not in whole parts at least. Some days, Leo wakes up and has actually slept more than four hours, and the status reports are all green, and the Krang have moved out farther away from their home base. Some days, everyone returns from their recon missions in one piece, and living is less a promise he makes and more a thing he does.

Some days, Leo actually sees both of his brothers at the same time.

OR: To Leo, home has always been a sewer drain and a section of old abandoned stone bricks that gets far too hot in the summer and draftier than anything in the winter.

It’s a place he goes and a place he carries. It’s always been somewhere he knows best.

Notes:

• For taizi.

I've been working on this thing that was supposed to be a tiny little twin fic, for what feels like a million life times. It has spiralled beyond my control so immensely I no longer have any sight of what it was supposed to be.

This is a big waxing poetic fic about houses. Take from that what you will.

As always, this would not exist without tai. I would have floated right up into the sky if we were not two otters holding hands.

Chapter 1

‘This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful’

---

 

The first time they’d all gone topside, the big age of ten weighing squarely between Leo’s shoulder blades, he remembers looking up at the sky and thinking that he could fall upwards right into it. 

 

It just seemed to go on forever, from pink to blue to deep black space. Nothing in between. He’d had to grab Raph’s hand just to make sure he didn’t trip and float off right into the center of the big nothing hanging above them. 

 

Mikey had been ecstatic, all sparkly eyed and thrilled bouncing, climbing on their shoulders to reach up even higher. Donnie buried his nose in his welded together tablet, but Leo caught his eyes rounding out at the clouds and the birds, too. Raph hadn’t seemed to mind all that much though. 

 

Leo figured that’s what happened when you were tall and brave like Raph always was. The spaces up above didn’t seem so large. 

 

Dad told them to be quick and keep their wits about them, gathering them all around a corner into a dark alleyway where only a sliver of the sky peeked through down at them while he picked through the nearby bins, leaving Raph in charge. Leo’d thought maybe Raph’s disinterest was because of that, big responsible things. He couldn’t look up because he had to keep watching them. 

 

“You can play,” Leo told him with a nod, still holding his hand, trying to make himself taller and more serious. “I can watch. There’s lots of sky for you, too.” 

 

Raph crinkled his eyes at him. “Aw, I know buddy. It’s not going anywhere, I can look later.” 

 

The thing was, Leo wasn’t sure he even liked it. The open big blue up there just seemed cold, far away. He’d squeezed Raph’s hand harder. “It’s okay, I don’t want it either. I won’t look with you.” 

 

Raph gave him one of his baffled-fond looks, the kind he usually reserved for Mikey, and said nothing. He patted Leo’s head quietly, and they watched out for their brothers together until the sun set all the way behind the buildings. 

 

He hadn't floated off, because his hand was in Raph's, and Donnie had looked over and told him he'd gotten a new level in Spyro, and he promised Mikey he would do coloring books later, too. There was nowhere else for Leo to be.

 

 

 

 

To Leo, home has always been a sewer drain and a section of old abandoned stone bricks that gets far too hot in the summer and draftier than anything in the winter. It’s also a pile of blankets dad found that have extra fluff, and a cup of cocoa he makes just right the way no one else can. The feeling of displaced air as someone settles into a couch seat beside him, the easy echo of a quote known by heart by three other voices around him. 

 

It’s a place he goes and a place he carries. It’s always been somewhere he knows best. 

 

He knows how things go up top, probably for April one day; moving out, leaving cities and building new homes wherever else. If he’s honest, he’s never cared much for anything that was only his. Call it a hallmark of dad’s parenting style but everything that was his was also his brothers. He never wanted anything different. 

 

He’s one half of a whole, one part of a fifth, and always, always there when they need him. He doesn’t mind. It’s good like this, perfect even. He makes sure there’s somewhere to come back to.

 

 

---

4

Leo’s head snaps towards his brother. The dilapidated warehouse rings with telltale noise of metal against hard plastron, and his heart drops approximately fifteen floors down after his baby brother before he can follow it. 

 

It’s a bad hit, he can tell just from the noise. The impact hit hard enough to send Mikey rocketing through a stack of crates— Leo’s heart is absolutely rattling against the backs of his teeth at the way Mikey hasn’t even made a noise. 

 

“Mikey’s down!” Leo shouts, leaping over the heads of two organic, pulpy robots and sliding into a skid before he’d finished speaking. He sweeps the feet out from the larger one attempting to corner them, and tackles it— sliding his blade all the way through its plating until he hears a sputtering shock from inside it and it stops moving. 

 

He does the math. 

 

They’re not outnumbered, not yet, but they’re going to have to be quick about this. The fighting’s going to attract human eyes no matter how abandoned this area is, the goof of the week who made these weird half robot creatures hasn’t turned up yet, and the sky has gone a strange shade of purple around them. There’s a feeling in the back of Leo’s teeth that has him on edge. 

 

Odds are tilting with every second. 

 

Mike’s not back up yet either. It’s a giant red flag in itself they all feel. Raph’s shoulders square, moving front to head off the newest batch of bots steamrolling through the lab door, Don’s hands tighten on his bo.

 

Leo’s job is to get Mikey back on his feet, bandage whatever he can and get him out of here. 

 

“There are two more entrances, getting scans that they’re calling for reinforcements. We’ll cover,” Don says, flat and even and spelling out tension louder than anything else. He nods.

 

Leo leaps across the last barrier and crashes to the ground at his knees. His hands are already fishing bandages and gauze from his belt, he’s cataloging the damage before he lands: Mikey’s out cold. Head tilted backwards and face slack; there’s a nasty bruise already beginning to swell across his cheek that answers a few more questions in as much as it makes his chest ache in sympathy. He’s breathing, though, and he hates that he even has to think it. 

 

Leo pats at Mike’s good cheek gently. “Hey— hey, Mike, come on buddy. No time for a nap, hm?” Mike’s head lolls towards his prodding, not so much as a shift in his eyelids. He shoves his fingers against Mikey’s pulsepoint. 

 

Constant and loud, just slowed. Unconscious. Alright, fine , he can work with that. 

 

Something is different about this fight in a way he can’t pin down; they move too fast for one thing, there’s so many of them. This doesn’t scream Hidden City regular goofball like they’re used to.

 

They don’t usually get knocked down either; Mikey’s the hardest of his brothers to hit on a regular day, no one can land a tag on him in practice when he’s going all out. They don’t usually let Mikey get knocked down at all.  He can’t feel anything wrong in Mikey’s neck, but what if— 

 

He closes his eyes, feels for a second in that distant ninpo connection space he’s built— Mikey’s light is on, he’s there. It’s not the end of the world, not yet. 

 

Right, Leo breathes out. No time for panicking . Leo has made himself a vault of any medical information he can get his hands on over the years, the discoloration on his cheek is normal for a bruise, nothing’s hot to the touch. Nothing’s swelling in Mike’s neck, but he’ll have to look up more symptoms when he can to make sure nothing's strained or fractured. Just to be safe. 

 

“Guys, there’s more of them — how’s it looking, Leo?” Raph calls. There’s a loud crash somewhere in his direction.

 

He tries for a lighter tone and misses it by about five yards probably, “Angie’s gunna have a helluva headache later.” 

 

Don flips his staff, smacks one of the creatures clear across the room with just a touch more force than usual, and rolls his shoulder out afterwards. He looks over at Leo with a twitch to his jaw. Ah, Leo thinks. Okay. 

 

Whatever this is, it isn’t their usual level of bad. His plans shift. 

 

He knows logically that none of his brothers are actually related, they’re all different species of turtles, duh, obvious, but that was silly stuff. They chose each other, and kept choosing each other, and that was what he built everything else from. That was the real thing, like stardust at the center of the universe and all the fairytale ramblings he’d read out loud to Mike when he was small and still convinced that the only thing that could keep him safe from the shadows were his big brothers. Universal constants and all that. Big math. 

 

He also knows that he and Don have always had this thing they do. He can meet Donnie’s eyes across the whole lair and instantly just know within an inch of absolute certainty how the next five seconds were about to play out. 

 

Raph called it their ‘weird twin thing’, Leo just figured it was all probabilities and physics. One mixed up complicated soul, two weird freaks of nature; too much brains and beauty to possibly stay in one single turtle-person so it had to go somewhere else, too. You could put Leo in a crowded room with a blindfold and spin him around, and he’d walk out of there dragging Don by his elbow in two seconds flat. 

 

They just worked like that. Magnetic poles or some other nerd thing. 

 

Right now, meeting Don’s eyes, it rolls over him; the heavy  wave of absolute gravity-welling surety, underneath the pinwheeling realization that they’re out of their depth. There’s him, and there’s his twin, there’s their baby brother they need to get home, and their big brother fighting the world to give them this split second moment. 

 

The variables have always been more in their favor. 

 

A cocky grin slides across Leo’s face before he can second guess anything else. There are three escape strategies outlining themselves in his mind in highlighter shades that make him think of home, all in order of probability of success, subsect with style points Mikey would holler over if he was conscious enough to. 

 

We got this , he thinks, because this is their baby brother. The world could end right now and they’d get him through it. 

 

Don nods slowly back, the furrow to his brows smoothing out. Leo knows with that same blindfold-crowded-room certainty how the next five seconds will play out. He closes his eyes. 

 

One: The itch of Don’s specific mystic Hamato ninpo infused magic tingles at his beak like a sneeze before his brother pulls it through from that ether space. He’s conjuring enough to take down a whole army, and not just a swarm of robots the Foot goons had scrambled their greedy little beady eyed paws on. Not that Leo could fault him. 

 

There’s a flash of blood on the ground that’s burnt into the backs of his eyelids, because his little brother had gotten hit so hard by a powered up robotic fist he’d cracked his head on the cement when he’d crashed backwards.They were going to get pizza afterwards, and now the biggest bandage in Leo’s bag wasn’t covering the entirety of the wound on Mikey’s head. 

 

Donnie could level the building and Leo’d cheer him on. 

 

Which led to— “Raph,” He calls without turning his head. “Tello incoming, on your left.”

 

Two: Don’s always had a protective streak, a sunspot in a countryside mile long for Mike—- he shows it different in wholes and parts from the way Raph douses them all in overprotective concern, or from how Dad cares. Something about the opportunity to big brother someone who absorbed it so easily, maybe, the way Mike didn’t understand the technical knowhow or the jargon but would sit and kick his feet while Dee worked anyways. 

 

Don’s about to dive in front of Raph to smack down the hand of righteous fury on anything walking through the door, and he’s also pulling the security protocols with them. Door locking, mechanisms and all.

 

Three and four: Leo has his brother’s unconscious and tiny self tucked carefully into his arms like the world's most precious cargo and is ready for when the alarm sounds buzz painfully to life around them. 

 

The resounding crash– boom of Donnie Tech slamming fury into the earth itself hits a half-micro-moment second later, and it’s enough time for Leo to have found the manhole cover he’d spotted on the way in just through the garage slash unloading dock, and kicked the cover off with more grace than he feels. 

 

“Raph! Vamanos , that’s our curtain call pal.” 

 

Raph’s used to Donnie and Leo’s catch and release in sync step, but there’s still that flash of surprise in his eyes as he blinks at the both of them. He’s moving though, because of course he is. The dug and carved worry line in his forehead is raging as he glances at Mikey, at the red on orange staining the back of Mikey’s head no doubt, but there’s easy trust there too. 

 

Five, and final: Leo passes Mikey off to Raph who absolutely caves and carves himself into a parenthesis around their baby brother, because he’s a big guy who’s built all of who he is around being the softest place for his family to land. And Leo waits. 

 

Don still has his hackles raised; the steel doors slam shut and leave the cavernous warehouse space eerily quiet with only the tin of the alarms echoing elsewhere. His expression is flat and unbothered as Leo puts his hand on his shoulder, but he knows his twin better than anything. 

 

“Raph’s got him,” Leo says. “Whatever this is? We’ll figure it out. We gotta go home first, though.” 

 

A sigh works its way through his brother, all the way up from some dark place in the middle of his chest, and his grip on his staff slackens ever so slightly. He meets Leo’s arched eyebrow laden gaze with a shrug. 

 

“Classy exit as always, I’d say.” 

 

The fifth second is to hold his hand out, and wait for Don to take it.

 

 

 ____

They don’t realize what it is at the time. That the purple of the sky is heralding so much more— that they’d already lost the first battle even after Mikey woke up warm and safe at home. They think it’s all special effects, a new movie, and all it takes is one over-confident push before the consequences are too large to handle.  

 

He remembers losing dad the way he remembers bad dreams. It’s all floaty. Sense memories. Candles and Raph’s shaking hands on his. Cold stunned silences. The worst part is that the city starts collapsing before they can bury him with all of his favorite things, the worst part is that they don’t get a body to bury at all. 

 

Somewhere between then and now, the world picks itself up on its tiptoes and cracks itself right in half. Despite its best efforts, Leo hangs on for the whole thing. Years later, in a burrow far below the city streets that have been mangled beyond repair, he hangs on. 

 

The thing about getting older that they never tell you about, is that it becomes less about finding things. Like there are less things in the whole world to know, less things to be yours. You grow older and you shave off parts of yourself to make it easier to breathe, and you lose and you lose some more, and the only things left behind are things with dents in them from how hard you refused to let them leave. 

 

Leo thinks most of his life is like that. He thinks he’s just the kind of person that loses important things, which probably means he shouldn’t have them at all. 

 

Age old adage by the time they’re living in bunkers and dirt covered hideaways but he’s always found himself a little empty on his own. He’s the worse half of a whole, a fifth wheel on a speeding car, but he’d rather be that then nowhere. 

 

He used to have a home that was a place, he thinks. He had a home that was brick walls and sewer pipes and somewhere to return to. 

 

He tries his best to make himself something that stays. 

 

___

He finds Casey on a Tuesday. He knows it’s a Tuesday because they set the patrol schedules early on into the invasion, and because it’s Raph’s birthday on the Friday. They haven’t had calendars that held any meaning in the last year and four months, but Leo keeps track anyways. 

 

He’s grateful that most of Hidden City survived; the Krang didn’t seem to care much for mysticism at first and entirely missed its existence for a good tenuous few months. The kick flip into the apocalypse would sting that much harsher he thinks without the way the yokai all pulled together the moment there was danger. 

 

The objective he has is to find out the new Krang drone schedule without being caught, and find anything possibly cool enough to give to his big brother for his eighteenth birthday. He’d been planning on taking him on a trip, before all this. 

 

It sits weird in his lungs, still. The hard divide between before and after that his life has become. Before: sneaking pizza from Hueso’s restaurant, laughing with Mikey as they ran across rooftops and argued about video games, sprawling on the floor of Don’s lab in his favorite bean bag chair. 

 

After: convincing Don to take enough of a break to eat something even though he’s too afraid to blink unless any of his sensors trip, pressing himself into walls around open doorways in case his big brother hears him and thinks he has to pull himself back together. Deciding which people are expendable enough to come with him on a supply run through Krang territory. Pretending it isn’t all Krang territory. 

 

They don’t really spend a lot of time on any of this in the movies, he notes, wryly. The part after the end of the world happens. It’s a lot of digging through trash and rubble to be fair. Not glamorous. 

 

He hefts a slab of concrete back, pushing it away from a half crushed doorway, and speaks into his wrist band. “Where did you say the stash was? Not picking up a lot out here.”

 

“There was an E Z mart right where you’re standing. Footage shows the building falling but no raids in the area— they should have a cellar.” Don replies, bored in the way that means he’s multitasking in impossible ways. 

 

“Right,” Leo sighs. “Course I get the ‘moving entire buildings job’. This really feels like more of a Raph thing.” 

 

“Hey, you’re the one who wanted to go into questionable territory. You said, and I quote, ‘easy peasy, lemon squeezy, you won’t even know I’m gone,’ and then tackled me, remember?” He says in a complete deadpan.

 

Leo glares at his wrist, not that Don can see it. “That was a terrible impression.”

 

“The caffeine shortage hits us all in interesting ways.” 

 

He shoulders through another collapsed wall, shuffling into the gap until he finds a smaller opening. There’s a room in here, more or less entirely untouched beyond the coat of dust in the air. He whistles. “Dee, we have got to get you into home reno. You’ve found a beautiful fixer upper in here.” 

 

“Walking distance from Central Park? In this economy? I’ll take it.” 

 

Leo steps gingerly forward. It’s a convenience store, alright. Most of the items have been knocked off the shelves and whatever's left of the freezers has to be positively foul, but he can see some canned things strewn about. There’s even animal crackers back there for Mikey. Score. 

 

Near the back by the counter, there’s a few photographs even still hanging on the walls. He can see through the dust a few smiling faces, a dog and a lake. This was somebody’s store, Leo realizes with a pang; he wonders if they’ve made it into their tiny community somehow. If they’re Krang soup elsewhere. Not for the first time, or even the thousandth time, he wonders if they could have stopped this somehow. If they’d known how bad it was, then. 

 

“Anything usable?” Don’s voice crackles through. Leo shakes himself, squinting through the dim. 

 

“Got a couple of preservatives, I think there’s a first aid kit back here and—” he blinks. A tiny figurine of a frog on a motorcycle. “The most perfect birthday present for Raph I’ve ever seen, what are the odds?”

 

Donnie’s sigh hisses and pops at him. “Yes, an essential item on this perilous quest. A tiny creature on a motorbike. That wasn’t sarcasm, sorry, he absolutely needs that.” 

 

Leo grins, swiping it off the counter and scooping into his belt pouch. “The look on that guys face, he’s going to freak out—” 

 

The walls creak, Leo freezes. For three seconds his heart stops as he waits for the ceiling to drop right on his head with Krang seeping in at every corner. Shit, he thinks aggressively. His patrols are out in a nearby location, keeping an eye on the drone pathing. There’s no backup he can even get to without— 

 

A cough follows. “Dammit,” a voice rings out. “Element of surprise, ruined.” 

 

Leo blinks. Recalculates. “Hello?” 

 

Don’s voice cracks through, Leo muffles it. There’s a collapsed back end section he’d noticed on his way in, where the staff room likely had been. There’s a shelving unit sideways across it that he realizes must have been dragged over, in hindsight. He steps towards it gingerly. 

 

“Is…. is someone back there? Are you hurt?” 

 

“No,” the voice meets him. “I — well, yes. Actually.” 

 

There’s something familiar about the brusqueness of it. A part of his brain lights up at the note of bull in a china shop force to the raspy words and— he pokes his head around the shelf. 

 

“Casey?!” 

 

She waves up at him, tiredly, crouched within a pile of scrounged blankets and bandages. “Turtle.”

 

Cassandra had gone missing three months into the invasion's start. She’d gotten a distress note, an old friend of a friend supposedly, and they’d gotten ambushed pretty severely. Leo’d lost his arm, and Raph had lost his best friend. They’d tried searching for her for months. 

 

Oh, the frogcycle combo is getting so replaced. Leo shoves the shelving unit to the floor, scrambling in towards you. “Case, I— where are you hurt? Oh my god, we thought you were dead . Where have you been hiding?” 

 

She breathes out, it could be a laugh if it wasn’t so relieved. “As if these aliens could kill me that easily. I fought against all of you enough without dying.” Leo could point out that they were never trying to actually kill her, but, well. Moot. “It’s my leg,” she gestures down. Leo can see a splint haphazardly wrapped around a swollen mess of an ankle. 

 

“Patrols spotted a kid I was chasing after, I distracted them.” She says it proudly, chin tilted up and all— Casey had really taken to the hero thing after everything else. Probably too far, if Leo had anything to say about it. Diving head first into rescue missions without a backup plan was sort of her default. 

 

Leo backtracks, pauses. “A kid?” 

 

There’s another shuffling noise as the mess of blankets lifts up. An impossibly small toddler crawls its way out, chubby hand first. Casey lets it grab her finger without even looking. “This,” she hefts the kid up onto her lap. “Is Casey Jones Jr. Say hi, CJ.”

 

The tiny human blurbles at him and stretches its arms up at Leo. “What,” he manages, it comes out more as a laugh. “You had a kid? ”  

 

She rolls her eyes at him. “ I didn’t have him, obviously, I found him a week ago. But, well. His parents are… gone. So, he’s mine.” 

 

Leo’s still staring. “He is not.” 

 

“He— of course he is?” 

 

“He can’t be?” 

 

Casey scrunches her whole face at him. “What legal procedure of finder's keepers shall I go through to prove it? Oh, wait.” 

 

Donnie’s voice filters in, because of course it does. “She’s got a point there.” 

 

The tiny kid, Casey Jr., giggles at him, reaches a pudgy, tiny human hand and grabs for Leo’s fingers, too. For a single moment, he thinks that the suns rolled back out from whatever clouded place it left them under, that maybe this is the moment the tide turns back in their favor. Maybe this is when the world stops taking from them and starts giving back. 

 

He picks Casey Jr. up with one arm and grins. “Well, he’s sure stinky like you.” 

 

“Hey!” 

 

 

Raph cries when he sees her, large shouldered, metal armed Raphie bent all the way over to pull her into the fiercest hug Leo’s seen in a long time. He blinks over her shoulder at Leo like he’s ever been able to explain the impossibilities of knowing Cassandra Jones once in the past four years. 

 

Casey Jr. is everyone’s darling, instantly. A baby in the middle of a battlefield who giggles at everything and wants to be held by anyone who will take him up on the offer. It’s like their first miracle in what already feels like a long line of losses. He thinks for one whole moment to himself that maybe he is cut out for this leadership thing;  a damning nail in his own coffin right next to Raph's.

 

 

Which is to say, it doesn’t last long. 

 

 

Losing Raph had been an abrupt thing; it hadn’t happened on any specific mission, or a grand stand against the Krang the way it should have gone. He’d been here, loud and bright and carrying the world on his shoulders, and then.

 

Nothing. 

 

April said Raph had taken a bad hit, that he’d seen the beam heading straight for Cassandra and he’d just moved without thinking. The sole saving grace in all of it to him is that Raph didn’t have to live with knowing that she’d still gone anyways. 

 

He's not sure he's grateful. At the age of seventeen he becomes the Resistance's only hope, it's entire future. He's not sure how any of them can't see how he's one third hollowed out already.

 

 

---

3

 

Every day is not actually hard, despite what the crumbling buildings and apocalyptic shimmer might imply. The world doesn’t end every day, not in whole parts at least. Some days, Leo wakes up and has actually slept more than four hours, and the status reports are all green, and the Krang have moved out farther away from their home base. Some days, everyone returns from their recon missions in one piece, and living is less a promise he makes and more a thing he does. 

 

Some days, Leo actually sees both of his brothers at the same time. 

 

There is constant stress and unknowns in everything they do. There’s watching the world collapse piece by piece and fighting tooth and nail to keep the parts that are yours whole and losing that anyways. There’s also tiny fractions of moments where Casey smiles at him the way he used to look at Dad when he learns a new trick, or Donnie snort laughs into his breakfast, or Mikey has enough energy to spin April around the room, and it feels like hope and home tangled up into one in a way that burns all the way up to his cheeks.

 

It’s worse, honestly, that not all days are bad. 

 

It’s hard to exist like this most days— breathing out around the missing holes in their hearts that just widen every year, struggling to find an opening or a way out for any of them, watching Casey Jr. grow up and worrying constantly, loudly and viciously if they’re doing any of this the right way. 

 

Wild, really. To have to live through the unthinkable. To have the hardest day of your life and still get up afterwards. It didn’t feel like strength, most days. They move forward because they have to, because there’s no other choice. Maybe Leo can convince himself that it’s enough, sometimes. 

____

 

He’d known Mikey wasn’t doing well for a long time. 

 

The kid probably thinks he’s hiding it— he smiles just as big as always, happily eats his meals with the rest of them in their burrowed out cafeteria, pats all the little ones on the shoulders and hangs their cracked and faded drawings up on the walls like they’re at a gallery. Leo’s been on Mikey patrol since he was three years old, though, and he knows his brother is an awful liar. 

 

To anyone else, he probably looks the same as always, and to his credit, there’s a lot going on. There always is. Leo’s attention has to be pulled fifteen directions at once just to keep them moving forwards for another two minutes. If it weren’t him, and it weren’t them, maybe he could have snuck off with it for another few months. Years, maybe. 

 

If Raph were here, Mikey probably wouldn’t be trying to lie at all. 

 

Leo knows, though. He’s pushing his food around more than he’s eating it. He leans on the tunnel walls when he thinks no one’s looking. He told April that he had to turn down a patrol shift, and had the stunning lack of awareness to even try and ask her not to tell Leo. Of course she had, because April is their sister first before she’s a commander. 

 

There aren’t so much clues as there are blatant holes in their usual flow; cracks in the dam that only get larger the more you look. 

 

He pushes himself too hard— Mikey is a kid who’s now a man who wants to reach all the way up into the night sky and pull stardust straight down for all of them. He thinks he can one man army the world because he can, and he could, but it’s also killing him. Leo knows it is, even if he hasn’t seen the numbers. 

 

Don won’t show them to him, but he knows they must be redlined and highlighted in bold. It sits sideways and funny around his heart to be on the outside of the loop. 

 

Don doesn’t usually cover for anyone other than him. 

 

“Haven’t finished the scans yet,” He’d said, rubbing at his temples. “Iron deficiency is at an all time high right now though, we’ll shift his rations around.” 

 

Stretching his shoulder before they dive into a Krang battle, far out on the north wing. “You know Michael. You try getting him to take a sick day.” 

 

Washed pale with the blue and purple light of his screen, flicking through a thousand monitors faster than Leo’s eyes can track. “Inconclusive, but I’ll fix it.” 

 

(It should have been the first alarm of many, Donnie admitting out loud that he didn’t already have a halfway working theory.)

 

Leo has a vague dream of reaching for his brother and being met with only sand, falling right through the gaps in his fingers, until he’s standing alone on a cracked pink piece of earth, and there’s nothing else for him. 

 

He wakes up to the thought that he’s never actually been alone his whole life, that he might start soon. 

 

Their five has already become a three. He’s had the worst day of his life twice and it carved clean through him. The idea of Mike going is unthinkable, but so was dad, so was Raph — Maybe the universe thinks its’ being kind this time, giving him warning signs like this; it’s not better like this, though. He can’t help like this, his ninpo has been a rough and tumble dry air gasp since the first fight with the Krang years ago, and worsened over time. 

 

He doesn’t know how to help. 

 

He’d thought the world had ended several times over before they’d lost Raph; every step after felt that much more like forward momentum on a conveyor belt. The worlds ended and left them with the dust and the mires, and all they have left is Leo.

 

Before the heaviness can fully percolate in his mind, seeping in like a sludge across his teeth as he goes, he’s reaching up towards the wall between him and Donnie’s room. Knock tap tap. Tap knock tap. Tap.  

 

A pause. Knock knock knock. Knock tap knock. 

 

He breathes out. 

 

They don’t have a sleeping time these days, they take shifts and always, always make sure the alarms are up— Donnie’s sleep schedule is even more of a mystery than Leo’s, but they stay functioning despite it. Whatever thought is keeping Leo awake today is tied between them, clicking away at both of them enough for this at least. That heartbeat staccato they’ve always had pulls him out of bed. 

 

Da-dum da-dum

 

“ - hey, dum dum. You planning on just lurking in my hallway all evening?”

 

Leo blinks up, his twin hasn’t even bothered looking over from his desk chair, just waves an arm at him from over his shoulder with their usual simple hand sign for ‘close the door, dipshit’.

 

His mouth twitches into a smile without his say so, also the usual. “Thought you could maybe use the outside breeze, blow all the nerd dust off this place. Jeeze , Donnie, have you even moved since yesterday? How’s about taking one of those mysterious naps you always claim you have.” 

 

Donnie makes a non-committal vague sound. “Hark, the hypocrite doth approacheth, be warned all who dwell within.” 

 

Leo traipses his way across the room after dutifully clicking the metal door behind him. He leans his weight on the back of Donnie’s chair, dropping his head forward so his bandana tails sway in front of Don’s eyes the way he knows he hates. 

 

“Ugh, Nardo,” Donnie complains. Classic. “You know, keeping a consistent uptime of 99.999% across the entire network from here to New Jersey is an actual constant monitoring job. It’s not just ‘annoy Donnie until he pays attention to you’ time.” 

 

Leo rolls his head to the side, blowing a raspberry half to piss Donnie off further. “As if you don’t have several automated AI assistant mini Donnie’s doing all your nerd thinking for you, nerd.” He leans back, swinging himself up onto Donnie’s desk instead and swiping his brother's mug from his hand in one move. 

 

There’s nothing in it but water these days but, yanno, hey. That’s getting harder to come by, too. They’ve gotten good at pretend. 

 

Donnie pushes his chair back, crossing his arms. “Well. Duh, obviously.” Leo arches a brow at him, and Donnie rolls his eyes. “Congratulations, you’ve obtained twenty minutes of uninterrupted Donatello’s Famed Attention until the next scheduled maintenance. Whatever will you do with this prestigiously awarded treasure.”

 

Leo grins. “We never just hang out anymore.” 

 

If it was possible for Donnie to roll his eyes harder, Leo’s sure he would— actually, the mini Donnie icon on the screen manages to roll its eyes too. Another feat of science unlocked. Leo sips at the water, feeling for a moment all over fond and… quiet. It’s nice to pretend they have the luxury to goof off, for however many moments that they can scrape together. 

 

Something blips on Donnie’s screen, it looks like a heart monitor for a second before Donnie swipes it away.

 

The moment passes. 

 

“Are you going to make me call you out? You know I hate doing that.” Don says, after a moment.

 

“Nah,” Leo sighs, putting the mug down. “It’s… I know you don’t want to tell me, which you know. Ten times out of ten, historically, has never meant I didn’t figure it out anyways, but. I also know it means it's bad. Whatever’s going on with him, I mean.”

 

Donnie’s brow twitches, he makes a show of flipping through various screens on his wrist pad for a long moment. It’s not a hard shut out, at least, or a misdirect. Leo thanks the lack of sleep, the fact the Krang drones have been encroaching on them more and more every day; their inescapable and constant gravity pull that locks both of them in constant step, even with so much distance and responsibility between them these days. He can still feel it, the ba dum ba dum . Like Donnie’s furiously clicking at his keyboard in another room. He always can. 

 

His twins shoulders drop. “He asked me to stop doing scans.”

 

Mikey is many things, has always been many things; bounce off the walls larger than life, filled to the brim with ideas and optimism and self-love that’s jam packed in his tiny frame, blunt and direct when needed. He’s not always been able to swallow down the overbearing mother henning of three overprotective brothers, but it had gotten softer over the years. Those brilliant baby blues had always managed to pull threads and weave stories out of his families jumbled up lack of words despite anything else, and he could read them all as plain as day when he wanted to. 

 

He never argued about Donnie’s chips and trackers when the world fell apart. Never fussed over Leo’s need to be louder and more attention grabbing on the field. When Raph had been— with Raph, Mikey let himself be scooped and tutted over in ways he’d hated before everything. 

 

He knew what statistics and numbers and logs meant for Donnie, he knew . If he was pulling that away…

 

Donnie worries in his own closed steel door barbed wire way; Leo's seen him down three coffees in the span of five minutes without flinching just to keep his eyes open another few minutes, just because April asked if he was around, more times than he can count. He’d split second invented a bunch of goofy high tech color coordinated tools for them because he was ‘through-gritted-teeth’ concerned they’d get hurt. 

 

He doesn’t say he worries, he’d never deign to speak about how he feels unless absolutely end-of-the-world level necessary (ha), but he shows it all the time. It probably helps that Leo’s intrinsically been able to read Don since they were toddlers, that he can feel it in the quiet place he feels all of them. There’s other things: the way he convinces himself that he exists to make and fix and work despite how much Leo tries to remind him that he’s a person, too, the way he can’t handle emotions on bad days but will fish out their favorite reruns or sit in the room with them even if they aren’t speaking. 

 

He’s also, much like all of them, physically incapable of saying no to his baby brother. 

 

The kids like kryptonite, really. Trained up for good and evil somehow right under their noses.  Something about growing up under Raph’s watery-eyed kitten-gentle worrying and dad’s brand of aggressive-lovingly-non-aggressive support, along with Mike’s childhood issues of breaking every bone in his body had raised an absolute sunbeam of a hellion. Mikey had always been everyone’s weak spot. The sun rose and set in those big blue eyes, and you grouched and grumbled and thanked the stars in the sky for it every second of every day anyways.

 

Leo’s hands tighten on the edge of the desk. He struggles, not for the first time, to piece this reality together with the one that had them all snuggled up together on Saturdays watching Jupiter Jim reruns. 

 

He’s tempted for a moment to ask how bad it is. Thinks of the strange onset of wrinkles forming at Mikey’s eyes that seemingly appeared overnight. The way Casey pouted all last year when Uncle Mikey suddenly stopped wanting to play ‘razz the tazz’ with him. It’s nauseating, the way time keeps deciding to ebb away and towards them in intervals. The way death keeps taking. 

 

“There has to be something,” Leo says instead. If it sounds like begging, he knows of anyone his brilliant twin will understand. If there isn’t anything, they’ll find it anyway.

 

Their job has always been to keep Mikey safe and whole, it was their first job, before anything else. When Raph had the flu that one awful winter, or when he went through the sewers with dad to find more blankets, or when he said be right back, that was their job together. They’d been so good at it, even with this long and awful stretch of be right back hanging over them, they’d kept Mikey okay through the end of the world. 

 

Hadn’t they? 

 

Don’s fierce gaze finally snaps over to him. “There is. I’ll make sure there is.” 

 

Tell me what to do , he asks with everything he has left. He’s so tired of this, has been for years if he lets himself think about it for even a moment— the part of him that hasn’t let go of what they once had is banging around in his chest. It’s naive, he knows, but he doesn’t want to lose anything else. 

 

Leo kicks himself off the table, taking one step towards his brother before it feels too much like the worlds falling out from under him again. Just the reality of it, pressing in unending small ways. Raph would know what to do, he thinks, and he misses his big brother more than the sky itself every moment of every day but today it’s a black hole right there in their floorboards. 

 

Don holds him out of it like he always does, without even thinking, but it’s different lately in spite of that. His brother, with all his big beautiful cold logic words, not telling him the whole truth isn’t abnormal. It’s just that Leo can usually see the shape of it anyways, it’s just that he’s not sure when Don got so good at lying to him. He’s not used to being on the outside of this, but there are still universal constants. Things fall down because of gravity, the earth still spins on his axis, and Leo is one half of two parts.

 

His home is two brothers where it used to be three, but Don keeps it standing anyways. 

 

“Leon,” He says, no hint of a waver in his voice. “Trust me.” 

 

He puts a hand on Donnie’s shoulder and squeezes. “Always.” 

 

___

“Case!” Leo shouts, voice running raw with panic. Shit , he thinks, and has a split second to dodge under the arm of a hulking Krang bot. He loses track of Jr. for a heartstopping second. 

 

“I got him!” Mikey yells back, somewhere to his left. 

 

The familiar burn-sting of his ninpo fills the air. An equally familiar tangle of relief and dread crashes through Leo with it. “Casey, I’ll make you an opening!” 

 

Leo can’t hear Don over the comms. He swings up the Krang’s arm, running across its shoulders before slicing the cable at the back of its neck. Better vantage point up here, as it's crashing. There’s April, back to back with Angel, shouting orders to anyone nearby that’s still up and moving, Mikey, splitting hellfire to make an escape runway for Casey.  No Donnie. 

 

Before gravity catches up with him, he closes his eyes and — ah .  

 

There. 

 

Donnie sidles up to Leo right as his feet touch down. In sync, ready. An array of Donnie Tech sprawling out around him. 

 

“Nice of you to join us,” Leo says with a smirk, falling back into a ready stance, shell to shell as easy as anything. “We were being awfully rude hosts to our guests.”

 

Don rolls his shoulder, tapping at a screen. “Heaven forbid we’re anything but pleasant. Allow me to give them a nice. Warm. Welcome.” 

 

There’s a holler from April as an array of launchers drop from the ceiling. Several security doors slam shut in the distance. Protocol’s ringing out robotically after them. 

 

Donnie’s trapping them in here— Leo grips his katana harder. Good. 

 

He’s not sure how the Krang pinpointed them, exactly. There’d been a signal of some kind, some errant blip April hadn’t been able to explain; maybe Leo already knew, though. He’d woken up with a feeling of unbalance centered deep in his chest like a long stuck illness, that sense of keyboard clacking electric fizz in the back of his mind gone strained and odd. He knows Donnie did something to piss them off, just as much as he knows Leo will drag them all through this if he has to take on the ‘Drome by himself. 

 

It’s their usual stick in bifurcated parts: if Don pulls them into shit, Leo gets them out. They take turns. 

 

He has three working plans folded into the back corner of his brain before the Krang bot in front of him has even stopped sparking. 

 

The facts are: The Krang are in their home, pouring in through the gap in their tunneled out roof like an infestation, and Leo needs to stall for exactly four more minutes for the first round of escape pods to return. April and Angel have quarantined the armory, Leatherhead is tackling the biggest ones by the gap in the ceiling, and Don’s been shoving tech into odds and ends and boobytraps since before the portal had finished creating itself a decade ago. They have Mikey as their failsafe, Casey is still moving. 

 

The odds are looking up. The drumbeat of his heart says otherwise. 

 

The roof above their heads trembles ominously as more bots swarm in. Scales tipping. Leo has moments to categorize the creak in the support beams above Mikey’s head, and the limp in Casey’s run. 

 

Mikey spots the beam first. He shifts his stance and kicks out a spin in a perfect circle without breaking his hold on the fire wall around him. 

 

His hands light up. Chains whip in every direction and stick fast in an invisible well of space-time — Casey dives forward before the first parts of the ceiling cave inwards. 

 

He can’t pull the stunt he’s about to pull, Leo knows. Not without injuring himself more; the tactician in his brain screams that a downed Mikey tilts this war irrevocably against them, that the Krang know this, that this was planned on their end in some horrible way. 

 

Leo tries to wrench a portal in their direction, but his connection to all things mystical has been failing him for a long, long time. His hold on portals is unstable at best, and Don’s already moving. 

 

Don spares a single glance over at Leo, brows drawn flat.

 

He swallows down the strange dread in him: Leo knows exactly how the next five seconds will play out.

 

Five: Don will shove his battle shell in the way of the falling debris. It’s reinforced titanium— it can lift a few rocks, but possibly not a full Krang bot. Donnie’s not worried about that, he’s thinking about giving them time, only. Time Leo will make sure he uses. 

 

Four and three: Leo will keep the portal open because it’s his family, it’s always been for his family. 

 

Casey will be shoved through first. Leo will have bought enough time for Donnie’s counter protocols, and they’ll be humming to life around them as Leo pulls Mikey through after. 

 

Two: He’ll fall two seconds behind Donnie. They’ll jump into finish off whatever attention Dee has drawn.

 

One: He’ll— 

 

He— 

 

Donnie doesn’t throw his battle shell. He steps forward instead. Leo startles so hard he nearly forgets to try and portal Casey out at all. 

 

“Shelldon, go time. We’re setting thrusters to full,” Donnie says, tersely to his wrist. 

 

Leo doesn’t catch the staticy reply, his portal fizzles out— he thinks about Casey’s stumble-run and grits his teeth harder, willing it to stabilize. A gloved hand pokes through and he yanks it, misses whatever Donnie says next. 

 

It’s— Leo feels vaguely out of time, unreality stepping him outside of his skin even amidst everything. He’s always known exactly what Don’s next move was, always. 

 

Donnie catches his eye for a second, in the middle of frantically typing. Leo’s heart drops through the floor and into the blackhole beyond. 

 

“Tello, no— ”

 

The roof breaks, Casey trips forward into him— there’s not enough time for him to grab Donnie and make him stay the fuck put but he tries to anyways— 

 

A flash of light hits him as Mikey finishes his spell, his firecracker energy popping and whizzing around the room more uncontained than ever. Leo spares a glance at his baby brother, at the way his arms are glowing again through the portal, and— Oh god. 

 

God. 

 

He can’t go after both. 

 

“Dee—” He tries, all desperation and no finesse, cracking right through him like lightning. Don doesn’t flinch, there is a shift behind his eyes Leo knows is not guilt. A counterfeit acceptance, something like resolve filling in the spaces between, and shit, Leo thinks, teeth bared and ready to claw the whole world apart to prevent this from happening, that’s so much worse. 

 

Don flicks his visor down, “Be right back.” 

 

He moves, Leo’s outstretch hand swipes through nothing. 

 

The next five seconds are blank. He’s not sure how he exists through them.

 

Chapter 2

2

 

Mikey wipes out all of them once he realizes what happened— a big starburst supernova of bright orange fire, and every Krang in a five mile radius falls silent and still. It cracks all the way up Mikey’s arms and behind his eyes, and Leo has to watch the Lego bricks of his baby brother fall completely out of place for a heart stopping few days until Drax can show up. 

 

“He shouldn’t have lived through that at all,” Draxum had said, holding Mikey’s painfully bandaged limp hand in his large one. “Be grateful that he’s even here.” 

 

Because Mikey isn’t going to be the same after. Because whatever well of mystic energy he’d whiplashed through himself had siphoned off decades and he’s aged faster overnight than he has in years. 

 

Leo can’t find it in him to feel anything more than desperate relief. To still have his brother at all, to not be left alone. 

 

There’s no sign of Donnie anywhere. 

 

Leo can’t feel him; that clicking keyboard next room feeling has always lived just left of his heart. There’s suddenly so much empty space inside him, he doesn’t know where to put all the grief. 

 

He’s not dead, he can’t be. Leo would know, he would , he’s just— he’s not here either. 

 

It doesn’t help the gnawing void in him that April’s eyes are always red rimmed, that Casey looks at Leo like a star two seconds from collapsing inwards. It doesn’t help that his baby brother hasn’t moved in days. 

 

When he closes his eyes, he sees a living room. A TV propped high up on the wall, buzzing gentle static, in front of a pillow piled couch waiting for the night to start. It’s a living room in a house that’s always warm, that’s sometimes dim, that is always full of noise. It’s a place that’s in a home, and it’s theirs. 

 

There are doors to his left and right that he knows aren’t locked. He knows those rooms aren’t empty, that the big door to his right is dark and still now, but never ever empty. He just can’t go in anymore. 

 

He’s always been okay to wait out front for them. 

 

April sits at his side as much as she can; he can’t find it in him to do much of anything but breathe until he knows if— until he knows about Mikey. She steps into his role as much as she can. He doesn’t know how to tell her how grateful he is for the small moments of reprieve, he doesn’t think he has to tell her either. 

 

Casey hasn’t left Leo’s side, sliding himself under Leo’s arm whenever he can like he’s watching Leo struggle to take another step— it feels like that, so he lets it happen. Only when it’s just them though, or April with that worried-fond-heartbroken mix of emotions bright in her eyes.

 

They don’t have to worry. He’s still holding Mikey’s hand; the sky is big and full of noise but there’s nowhere else for him to be. 

 

It is hard to watch Mike like this— the overhead lights wash Mikey’s cheeks clean out, making him look angelic and frighteningly carved out of limestone as he sleeps on, even with the strange lines and wrinkles by his eyes he never had. 

 

Once upon a time, in another life, he’d had these tiny freckles forming, just barely there crayon spots of yellow. He’d picked them up after a trip out to April’s aunt’s cabin, the first time. Mikey had called it basking, he’d claimed up and down that Donnie said they’d needed it, and convinced them all to sunbathe on the roof for a few hours. They’d never been able to do it right before— the sun doesn’t hit quite the same in the dingy back ends of the New York City streets. 

 

Leo tries to breathe steady and slow. The freckles are gone now, swallowed up by the world they’re trapped in like everything else, but they’d popped up like daisies waiting for the first signs of spring so easily before. A whole starry sky, just from a week up in the woods, wasn’t that a thought. 

 

They should have gone to the woods more often. They should have taken Mikey all the way up there and never let him fight again. 

 

“Here, Sensei,” Casey says softly, like he’s too afraid to be any louder in this room where the steady beep of the monitor echoes back at him. He’s holding a ration bar out at him, eyes dark and haunted in a way they shouldn’t have to be at all at his age. 

 

It’s funny. Casey’s turning sixteen this year. Mikey had been his age when everything fell apart. 

 

Leo takes it with a smile he knows doesn’t reach his eyes. “Thanks, kid.” 

 

“You should eat it,” Casey settles in beside him, shoulders rolled forwards to stare at him imploringly. He knows him too well, it’s more of a bargain than a request. If you eat, I won’t ask. I won’t point out the fact you’re awake, I won’t tell Uncle Tello, except. Ah. Well.  “He’ll need us for a bit after, right?” 

 

For a bit, because who knows how long they’ll have him either. Leo nods, forces himself to take a tasteless bite and not think about the texture. 

 

“Baron said that he should wake up soon.” 

 

Leo nods again. “Any second now. You know your Uncle Angie, he hates missing out on things.” 

 

The monitor beeps around them, Leo clenches his good hand just to watch the bones shift underneath. He wonders if he gets to stop, one day. If he can just, stop.

 

Casey shifts slightly in his chair, looking over at Mike with a troubled frown. “Can I help?” 

 

Oh, his kid . Leo’s heart twists in sharp angles. He breathes out, pushes his hands flat on his knees and leans back. “You know, when he was a kid he could go all the way into his shell. He ever tell you that?” 

 

Casey’s eyes are big and earnest. “Yeah, he said. It was the second safest place in the world.” 

 

“Hm,” Leo snorts, suddenly horrendously uncomfortable with the amount of grief and love piling in decks of cards inside him. “Yeah, well. Sometimes we couldn’t get him to come back out after. He hated horror movies, but he’d stay up with Don and I and watch them anyway and try to pretend he wasn’t freaking out the whole time. Course, middle of the night he’d hear something outside the door and lose his mind.” Leo has many memories of Mikey jumping into his bed, rambling a mile a minute with half-formed panic about sharks or tornadoes. 

 

“Would wake up with a shell for a brother the next day, and nothing in the world could get him back out.” 

 

Leo shakes his head fondly. 

 

“We’d have to put him on the couch and bundle him in blankets and bribe him with his favorite thing for hours until he’d come back.” 

 

Casey smiles. “He always told me that was the first place.”

 

“Hm?” 

 

“He said his shell was the second safest place,” Casey shrugs, looking over at Mikey’s sleeping form with a tiny smile. “He said right there with you was the first.” 

 

Ah. Leo swallows hard for a moment, eyes burning. “Yeah, well. I’m here now, little brother.” He leans over and scoops Mikey’s hand into his carefully. “Don’t keep Casey waiting too long, hm?” 

When Mikey finally blinks his eyes open, two weeks have flickered by. They’ve scrambled their remains to their back up tunnel network, gathered whatever supplies and tech they could and patched up whoever made it with them. They’re a sinking ship, the waters are dark and choppy, but they’re not sunk yet. He tries to hold onto that. 

 

Mike’s blue eyes are hazy, glazed over and far away but they loll towards him anyway. 

 

“Hey, buddy,” Leo tries to smile, smoothing his thumb across Mikey’s forehead. “You awake?” 

 

Something struggles behind his baby brother’s eyes, a flash of clarity as he frowns slightly. A desperate attempt to grab footing that crashes over into quiet heartbreak.

 

“Hey,” Leo soothes, curling all of himself around his littlest brother. “Hey, I’m here. Okay? I’m right here.” 

 

Bless Mikey for everything he is, for carrying this massive swirling spark that locks him constantly in step with the unknowns every moment of his life, because Mikey doesn’t burden him with the difficulty of reliving the past week even for a second.

 

He blinks slowly. “He went with Raph, didn’t he?” 

 

Leo chokes down the myriad of grief that constantly lives within him, amplified impossibly now, and nods. “Yeah,” He whispers. “He went with Raphie.” 

 

The words hit Mikey like an all over weight, he breathes out like there’s no air left to breathe back in. “Okay,” He whispers, and grabs Leo's hand. 

 ___

They make it through the next year on the backs of a thousand promises to people that are no longer with them. It doesn’t mean anything, it means everything also. 

 

The red line that had been trending down before falls into a freefall without Don to upkeep the systems thoroughly, but he’d shown Casey enough that the kid dives straight into repair mode whenever needed and they staple things together. Badly, but, enough. 

 

Leo feels like he’s dragging a hundred pound weight around by the bones of his ribcage every single second, it’s hard enough to get up let alone command and think and fight but he has to. He can’t wallow with that great big empty maw of missing. 

 

He doesn’t actually believe that Don’s gone, not really, but there’s work to do.

 

Donnie has (not had, not had) a reason for everything he does— he’s not a strategist by nature, but there’s a plan underneath, a variable he’s controlling and testing for and hypothesizing around. Besides, Leo saw him. 

 

The world has ended, the remnants are vaguely shaped puzzle pieces that fall in and out of line in intervals, but Leo knows his twin. Much of their dynamic included Leo dragging Don into his deranged situations or Donnie blowing something up that got them there anyways, and Leo getting them back out after. Donnie had a plan, and whatever it was required him to be in the Technodrome somehow. Leo just needed to play his part and get them back out of it. 

 

Donnie’s not gone, he’d know because the storm-howl wind of it would gutter him right out. It’s not any easier to think of him as alive and scared. Alive and wishing he weren’t. Maybe it’s worse to imagine that he’s waiting for Leo to figure out whatever puzzle piece he’d left behind, the trick question to switch the emergency escape lights back on. 

 

(He tries. The weeks Mikey was out, he spends three days trying to fight April into letting him charge in anyways. Would have walked himself all the way to the Krang tower, too, if she hadn’t grabbed his face with both hands and told him she wasn’t ready to lose another brother yet either. 

 

He lies awake every night chasing that fizz-pop computer-clacking noise through the dark, waiting for the moment it cuts out. Dreading every heartbeat with eyes wide staring into the nothing.

 

It’s hell; to be here when his twin is somewhere he can’t follow, to be one half of a whole missing part.

 

To be Hamato Leonardo is to be a waiting room, to be a step right before a free fall. In the back of his mind, he exists in semicolons and margins and hallways that have gone silent and still when no one was looking. He’s always there, that living room, waiting. The lights are dim, it feels like home. There’s another locked door where there has only ever been a welcome invite.)

 

The giant missing shape of Raph is stronger than ever in the days that follow. 

 

When Mikey can barely stand on his own, and winces with every motion like every part of himself hurts; when the alarms blare on and off in terse, long moments and everyone holds each other's hands in the dark waiting for the sound of rumbling footsteps that don’t come; when he wakes from half fevered dreams of being somewhere with laughter and the wind across his face and sees the dirt-dark grime of their hellbought present tense. 

 

(He misses him, it hurts to have it be so simple. He’ll never be the same for all the missing he carries.)

 

Leo’s never been the oldest brother. He’s never wanted to be. The world took and took from him and the only thing it ever gave him back was a mantle he can barely stand to look at.

 

“Hey bro,” Mikey slides up beside him. He’s standing in the middle of their command room, or whatever passes for it these days. There’s a map in front of him filled out with red x’s. Twenty minutes earlier he’d been giving a speech about camaraderie and tomorrows and hope. He’s not sure he can hold onto any part of himself for a single second longer. 

 

Mikey puts a hand on his shoulder. He breathes out and leans into it. The sky is still wide, but there’s still one doorway open, still one light on. He can hold himself down as long as he has to, as long as he has to.

 

“Miguel,” Leo adopts a fond and chiding tone, half instinct half pretend, the way they’ve gotten good at. “Are you supposed to be wandering around, or am I about to get a ping from Jr. and tried as an accomplice?” 

 

“You might get a ping or two.” Mikey giggles softly— it’s not as loud as it should be. Leo tries to be anything but unendingly grateful that it’s here at all.

 

Leo feigns a long suffering sigh, only slightly ruined by the smile he can’t seem to wipe off his face. Something only Mikey seems to be able to bring out of him lately. 

 

He’s… tired, he realizes. More than he’s ever been in his entire life. It’s starting to feel like a slow glide into an empty finish line— even if they win, he’ll still have a half empty house. He has to keep going, he knows he does it’s just. Hard. 

 

“I need you to take care of yourself, Mike,” Leo says, caught in another sigh and more somber than he means to admit. 

 

“I am,” Mikey says easily. “I’m looking after my brother, too.” 

 

Leo tilts his head towards him, something wry spinning between his joints and heart muscles. “Me? Come on. I’m always okay. Worry about yourself, maybe, huh?”

 

Mikey hums, taps his chin and tuts. He leans in close like he’s inspecting something in Leo’s eyes, frowning slightly. “Ah,” He exclaims, after a moment, and pokes Leo’s forehead. “There it is.” 

 

“There’s… what. My charming good looks?” 

 

“You have a Leo Chasm, you know.” 

 

Leo stares, face twitching into a smile despite himself. “ Hoo boy , fighting words. Are you saying I worry too much, little brother, is that what this is? Your long winded way of saying I need a break?” 

 

Mikey leans back, hands locked behind his shell with a grin. For a moment, he looks younger again. Impish and sparkling. “It’s my way of saying you’re a good leader.” 

 

Huh. A good leader, right . He’s only gotten a little over half his people Krangified. Lost half of his family, too, but sure. He supposes they’re still here fighting a battle they can’t win, if that counts as good. 

 

Mikey points a finger in his face again. “I can see you overthinking, you know. And I’m telling you, I’m not the only one that thinks so.” 

 

Leo swats his brother's hand out of his face, with a twisting gut. He tries not to think directly about notes the way his brother's arm shakes just from the few seconds he had it lifted. “Uh-huh. I see your sucking up, sir. None of this is going to get you extra rations, I’m telling you that right now before you pull the big guns.” 

 

He gets a giggle from his brother again, life is worth living. 

 

Leo turns, leaning on the table to look directly at Mike. He’d cross his arms but the big one is bulkier, hard to maneuver. Taking stock for a minute, there are several assessments he can pinpoint in a handful of seconds; years of being the family go-to emergency medic flaring up all at once. Mikey’s leaning on one leg, he’s not standing up straight; his hands are locked together to hide the way they’re shaking. He looks washed out, still, this many weeks out from the last incident. It makes his scant traces of a good mood evaporate, that sinking reality creeping in at the edges behind it.  

 

Last one. Last one last one.   

 

“You gotta stop using your energy so much, sunshine.” He says, softly. He’s not sure he’s used that nickname in years.

 

Mike’s smile fades, he looks at the floor instead. “There’s a lot of people that need my help, Leo.” 

 

“So? What– you juice yourself out and you’re not going to be able to help anyone. You know this.” 

 

Mike’s beak twists. “I know. I promise, I know. I’m not trying to—  I’m trying to be careful. It’s hard, when there’s so few of us left. I keep thinking that there’s… more that I could do. If I could push that much more, I could stop him from—-” Mike swallows. “I’m not supposed to use the time magic, Baron told me. I just know, if I could. I could bring them both back.” 

 

Them back, he says. He figured Mikey would know if Donnie was— maybe he can see him, in that mystic place. Maybe Leo’s been the one holding onto nothing this whole time and leaving Mikey to deal with his denial along with everything else. He doesn’t want to ask. 

 

It doesn’t feel like Donnie’s gone, it feels like he’s left the room for the moment. He said be right back.

 

Mike looks over at Leo, eyes shining bright. “How am I supposed to do nothing, when I know they’d never have stopped trying for me?” Mike’s voice is hoarse, like a whisper made bright. “I gotta make sure I have you, at least, right?” 

 

Oh, Mike… “Yeah, I get that. You have me, Mike. I promise you do,” Leo breathes out, tries to form himself into a person again. “Don’t lose yourself, though. I need my razzmatazz guy just as much, okay?” 

 

Mikey nods, a sad lilt to his face. “You know we need you, too, don’t you?” 

 

It’s not a barb, not really. It rings rough though with the sheer fact it’s an old argument, echoes of insomnia and bad eating habits and circular discussions at the kitchen table. The way Leo’s built off paper mache and vinegar these days and his family has always seen what was under it anyways. It makes them both wince.

 

There’s not enough space for Just Leo here anymore, there hasn’t been for a long time. Somehow Mike always seems to find him in the rubble anyway. He’s not sure anything would exist beyond the title he carries anymore if Mike didn’t keep dragging it back to the surface the way only he can.

 

“Why didn’t you tell me,” He finds himself asking. “Baron told me, while you were out. That it’s---” He can’t finish the thought. Killing you, he means. That you’re dying . It’s silly, anyways, he knows why. 

 

Mike understands instantly, of course he does. It’s the thing they don’t talk about— they spend so much time not talking about it the gaps in between would fill their own storybook. 

 

“It wouldn’t change anything,” Mike says. “It’s not like an injury, or… or a spell. I didn’t want you to bench me. I want to help.” 

 

Leo wants to say he wouldn’t have, Mike being their glass canon meant they couldn’t afford to, really. He knows what he means, though. The smaller crash and grabs, the recons; Mikey loved taking Casey Jr. on any ‘field trip’ he could, and Leo wouldn’t have risked it if he’d had proof of what he’d already suspected. 

 

Leo takes him in for a moment, the sheer horrific fact that there’s only them left of their four. Halved, right down the center. Yeah, he thinks, knowing how the math is supposed to play out. I would have kept you home. 

 

He’s really only into this whole hero business because the planet happens to be where his family is, anyways. He’s never really had to deal with the idea of saving it without them. There’s the core forming at the center of himself, the one that’s been rolling and stretching inky fingers farther and farther upwards into his throat the past few years, months, weeks: he’s not sure he cares about a world none of the people he loves are in. 

 

There’s a truth hanging between them, the shape of it is a dead tree with gnarled roots stretching right up into the dying sky. Leo thinks he’s spent a long, long time trying to walk away from it, only to end up right back where he started.

 

How long do you have left, he aches to think it. How long before I’m alone. 

 

Instead, he leans towards his baby brother and wraps his good arm around him. Tries to memorize the feeling of him, bright as the sun, right there at his side. 

__

And still, life moves forwards, an inch at a time. He feels every second of it like he’s crawling forward with both hands in a desert. 

 

The planning room of their new hideout is small— it wouldn’t have housed even half their group before, none of them acknowledge the empty spaces around them as much as they can— Leo stands in front of them with his chin up in spite of himself. 

 

“We’re running out of options,” Kendra says, a hint of panic beneath her usually flat expression. Leo knows the feeling. “The Krang have found four of our back up locations by accident just in the last week. We can’t wait around for them to find this one, too.” 

 

“We don’t even know how they found us the first time,” Repo adds in. 

 

“You’re right,” Leo says, the room falls silent. Once upon a time, the feeling of being so looked up to would have been pure gold in his veins. It weighs on him now. Every step weighs on him. He could sink right down through to the middle of the planet and out into empty space, if he let it.

 

Leonardo is paint over a rusted metal can, more smoke and mirrors than a person with half his soul outside his body, and he rolls his shoulders back to hold up the sky even higher anyways. He imagines himself taller, broader, ready to ask the things he has to, of people who’ve already given him everything they can. 

 

“We don’t have time. We’re running out of ammunition, and people, and supplies hit the red line three weeks back. They’re getting closer. There’s no surviving this by hiding,” He turns to them, points up high on their scrabbled together map. “Somewhere in there is the key to closing this whole thing down. We know it exists. We also know,” His voice wavers, he imagines steel in his veins, in his words. “My brother wouldn’t have jumped in after them for nothing. They have a weakness, they’re not all powerful.”

 

Hueso steps forward. “We don’t know if he found it, though, do we?”

 

“He did,” Casey cuts in, all sharp eyes and squared jaw, too. He knows his uncle, it reads all over like protectiveness, like absolute surety and soothes something in Leo too. Leo knows he did, in the same intangible place where his heart once sat, and nods back. His brother always had the answer, he wouldn’t have given up until he proved it.

 

He turns back to the crowd. “We just have to get it the rest of the way back. We’re only going to get one shot at this, we don’t have the manpower to go for another run if this doesn’t play out.” 

 

Everyone in the room watches him silently, eyes shining. It’s not fear in their eyes but understanding. The unspoken words threading through them all. He’s conjuring a final thought, some sentiment about being the world's greatest hope before sending them all off to their deaths most likely.

 

He breathes out, chases that click-clack whirr in his mind all the way to that closed door in his mind, just to check, to be sure that they’re not chasing after a dead signal. That there’s something left of his twin there to rescue. 

 

Tap.

 

He thinks abruptly of when they were kids, and he and Donnie finally got brave enough to split off into their own rooms. Well, more like Don needed the space for his desks and his gears and parts, and demanded his own room. Leo’d never really had a need for a space of his own, it just seemed like a big stretch of empty. He had this embarrassing need tangled up in him to constantly exist in his brother's pockets and would have stayed right there with his twin forever, but he’d filed it all down just in case and agreed. The fuzz of the silence around him rang angrily in his head with nothing to soften it seemed like a punishment rather than a reward. 

 

He’d thought he’d hid it well then, too. Funny. 

 

The walls between them weren’t solid stone like the rest of the place. Plywood covering what had probably been an attempted expansion gone wrong right there between their bedrooms. Don had pulled up his clunky computer after night one, sat them both down in the glow of its screen, and said ‘now you can annoy me all hours of the night.’

 

Tap tap tap tap. Tap. Tap knock tap. Tap. 

 

Leo’s eyes snap open. The lights in the room flash red. “Leo— Don’s room, now, ” April’s voice crackles overhead. She sounds terse, some unnamed emotion brimming over even through the speakers. Everything stops. 

 

For an awful, heartsick moment Leo thinks in fill in the blank spaces. Mikey hadn’t joined the planning, because he’d been tired lately, because they’d had to take down a drone that was sniffing around too close as quick as possible and needed his mystic powers for it. Because Leo hadn’t benched him like he promised he wouldn’t, like he should have anyways. 

 

For a moment, he’s all lines and no color. I’m not ready. 

 

I’m not— I don’t want to be alone. 

 

Between one second and another he’s at the door, crashing through as if he portalled himself over. Maybe he did, he can’t remember anything other than the sudden certainly he was the guttering out candle in the hurricane after all. 

 

It almost doesn’t register that Mikey is standing there— the relief crashes through so intensely he has to lock his knees to stay upright. 

 

“Leo,” Mike says, soft and wondering. His eyes are red, Leo notes with confusion sputtering through between everything else. There’s a small smile on his baby brother's face that makes it ramp up ten times louder. April’s hand lands on his shoulder just as Casey pushes through the door after him. 

 

Everyone’s here, his heart is… 

 

“Oh,” Casey gasps. Leo realizes they’re all looking at the screen like he’s on a delayed feed— he hasn’t been in this room in months, it’s harder to believe himself that Don’s out there when he sees his room empty and still like it never was. But there’s a screen up, green and flickering, and a red dot pinging back at them. 

 

Mikey lets out a shaky laugh. “We have a signal.” 

 

“That’s not all,” April hands Leo a scrap of paper. There’s a downloaded image on it, something made of one’s and zero’s and amalgamated together. 

 

“Dee sent back a signal, from inside the ‘Drome,” April continues. “I don’t know how he got it but, Leo, this must have been why he went. There’s — he’s connected to it somehow, the big ship. He found out how to break it from the inside. The notes say that if we steal this, we close the portal.” 

 

Huh, Leo thinks. A rectangle, with an inscription and —- he remembers this. A fight with the Foot from lifetimes ago, when leadership was still hanging fresh and barbed around his neck and he’d been aching with this electric need to prove he could handle it all the way Raph always did. 

 

‘Good leader’, Mikey’d said. To think this had always been on him. 

 

“We can fix this,” Mikey says, shaky with something cautiously close to relief cutting through his words. “If we get there, we can send them through and close it. The hivemind will fall apart, won’t it? Don figured it out.” 

 

As per usual, DonTron , Leo thinks to himself, wryly, absolutely crushed through with relief and guilt and awareness of all the non empty doorways in his life. You just had to steal my moment. 

__ 

 

He and Raph hadn't always gotten along the best. Leo had gone through a bossy phase in the ripe old age of seven and decided that Raph never played his games the right way. It had bothered him in some back brain, too young to know the impact of anything beyond bedtime, type beat when his big brother cried over things like broken toys and ripped blankets. He only knew Raphie didn't get mad and chase Leo around like the bad guy was supposed to, that he fussed over Mikey when he was being a baby about falling over instead of running ahead with him. He wasn't fun anymore. To serious and worried and older to let Leo bother him the way he'd used to.

 

To Leo, it was the sun and moon and all its stars the day he finally convinced Raph to play tag around the kitchen table. Precious gold he was nervous about letting end too quickly. He remembers Raph's wide eyes peeking above the slats in their slipshod table at him as Leo danced underneath the chair legs and around the counters giggling. He remembers that he'd been excited to have Raph all to himself for five minutes. All of his attention, like a currency he couldn't help but hoard.

 

"Can't get me, Raphie!" He'd giggled through the gap in his front tooth. "I'm fast, like Sonic!"

 

"Stop hiding, doofus," Raph had called, half exasperated and half playful. That was more halves than he'd gotten in a while, he wanted to take it and stretch it out as far as it could go. He blew his tongue out at him, a big pink raspberry. Something shined in Raph's eyes as a smile cracked across his face back; gold, lottery ticket. Picnics in the sewer grate slats to Leo.

 

"Oh yeah, Leon?" Raph laughed. "You might be fast, but I'm... Stronger!" And charged through the chair towards him, lifting it up with one hand out of the way. Leo shrieked with laughter.

 

He kicked at Raph's chest, scrambling out of his arms as he tried to tickle him. "Nuh uh!" He gasped between peals of laughter. There, spotted his escape. Leo sprang up onto the kitchen counter, feet kicking at the drawer handles for grips all the way up. "I'm even taller now, means I'm the strongest!"

 

Leo reached his arms all the way up, as high as they could go--- he still couldn't reach the roof, where the cord for the big hanging light trailed off into stone.

 

"Is that how it works?" Raph laughed, standing with his hands on his hips. He was silly, he was only two years older, it wasn't that much. He always stood like dad did anyways, his silly brother.

 

"Sure is!" Leo crowed back, his eyes scanned for another prize, a way to prove he was even taller.

 

Their kitchen had an old fridge back then; dad fished it from a dump when they were babies, back when they were siphoning power from the old grid and hoping no one from the city would notice. It was an old thing, lopsided on one side. Creaked when the door opened and when it wheezed into different stuttering cycles. It wasn't as tall as the cupboards around it, so there was a gap at the top where dad hid his cookies.

 

It was the tallest place in the kitchen. Leo's eyes lit up. 

 

"Hey---" Raph started, something concerned slipping in behind his playful stare. Leo didn't want that, though. Raph never played his games right, he always put rules in where they didn't belong and never had fun, not in the real way. They'd been having fun, Leo would prove they could have more fun.

 

He shot towards the fridge before Raph could stop him, leaping to the top of it in one bouncy lurch. It creaked, something shifted.

 

"Ha!" He called, standing shakily on top. He could press his palms all the way into the stone at the top now. They were cold and rough against his fingers, just like the part above his bed. "I'm the tallest now, so you have to do what I say."

 

"Leo, I don't think you should---" Metal groaned loudly under him, Leo's hands slipped.

 

Leo had two seconds to watch real fear creep into his brother's eyes before he fridge tipped right over. He was too high up, he'd thought. He wondered if he'd break his bones the way Mikey did when he fell too hard. He wondered if Raph would never play with him again.

 

He fell into something warm, the metal croaked again. "Woah," he said, confused.

 

Raph stared down at him, big eyes watering in the way Leo hated. "You okay, Leo?"

 

"Yeah," Leo said, shaky. There was something funny to Raph's voice, his neck prickled. "I'm okay."

 

"Good," Raph smiled, his smile looked weird too. Leo scrambled back a step, all uncoordinated tiny limbs.

 

He turned his head slightly, not taking his eyes off Raph. "Dad?" He called, over his shoulder. 

 

Leo realized the entire fridge had fallen to the floor, unplugged and all. There were pieces of plaster pulled out from behind it. Raph was sitting awfully close to it, Leo couldn't see his leg. "Dad! Papa!"

 

"It's okay, buddy," Raph said, softly. Like Leo was the one who was hurt, like Leo hadn't done something stupid. A few tears fell slowly from his big eyes. "Raph will be fine. Doesn't even hurt."

 

"Dad!" Leo yelped, top of his lungs. Donnie poked his head in at the noise, looking all over startled.

 

"I broke it!" Leo cried, looking over at his twin and back. "I was... I was playing, and Raphie told me not to---"

 

Mikey appeared over his shoulder, and slapped his tiny toddler hand over his mouth. "Raphie got hurt!" He gasped, and burst into tears. Leo had been angry, he thinks, in front of the scared. He'd wanted to cry, too, but Raph was already. He didn't understand why Raph was looking at him like he was sad for Leo and not himself.

 

Dad appeared in the hallway, squinting like he'd been in the dark too long. His expression dropped into concern, then painful fear. "My sons, what--?"

 

It was me, Leo had thought, bright bold letters. I messed it up, I broke Raph. He won't want to play ever again.

 

"My fault, dad," Raph laughed, wheezily. "Clumsy."

 

"No, I--" Leo started, and Raph put his big hand on Leo's knee. It shut him up.

 

"My fault," Raph repeated. "I was in the way."

 

 

__

 

In another world, in another timeline, maybe this is when they finally win. Maybe it’s the ‘backs against the door, chips are down’ underdog song-swelling score that gives them the edge that tips the whole thing over. Maybe some unknowable deity finally decides to stop taking and lets them eke out a victory from the threshold of death's door. 

 

It's a nice thought. He’s got one part of his four left in this world, though; the variables don’t add up as nicely in their corner anymore.

 

The plan starts to go awry almost instantly— April gets split off with Leatherhead and Mikey, a meteor crashing through their trajectory and forcing her to make a sharp left that immediately swarmed over. Their group takes a valiant stand to get into New York City proper that starts making headway, before it buckles and collapses under the weight of just how many Krang there really are, pouring through the seams of their world. 

 

He’s got back ups to his back up plans, except when he manages to portal up into a flying drone the way they need, he spots a new type of Krang bot emerging from the shadows. Something larger and sharper, focused directly on Casey. 

 

The thing is, Leo’s old. He may spout parables about hope and optimism as much as breathing, but there’s a thread that he’s always known. Something about growing up sharp and sudden at the age of seventeen with the world falling to pieces right underneath your feet; reality was like poison, half the time. He’d already been infected. 

 

He remembers when Cassandra had crash landed back into their lives that he'd joked about the toddler being the future protagonist. Something about the end of the world vibes and a random kid who lit up the whole world all on his own. 

 

‘We should call him The Chosen One,’ he’d joked, because anything related to Cassandra Jones was going to rock the world right down to it’s shaky knees. ‘The Ender of Worlds, Bringer of Peace. Case 2.0.’ 

 

They’d all given up a lot to make sure Casey never so much as took a scratch, if they could help it. Took turns ensuring that the worst of the world never seeped into him more than it had to. He wasn’t there for their de-Krangifying attempts, or when they’d lost Raph. They smiled the most for him, because of him. 

 

Ah , Leo thinks, watching the bot lock its sights on the back of Casey’s head and making twenty split second decisions in the span of a heart beat. Maybe he understood Raph better than he thought he did. 

 

“Sensei!” Leo flutters back in with the sound of Casey Jr’s voice. There’s hands on him, patting nervously at his arm like there’s nowhere safe to touch. He feels… He doesn’t feel. There’s too much to think about if he lets himself sink into the pain of it. He’s breathing, it’s more than what he meant to happen. 

 

“Can you— are you with me? We need to move ,” Casey pleads, and it jolts Leo back into himself.

 

“Yeah,” He manages. “With you, kid.” 

 

They’re still on the field and Casey’s still in danger, Leo forces his eyes open. To the left, far off in the horizon there’s an explosion. Three colours shoot up into the night air — green, red, and purple dust like watercolor against the burnt sky. Distress signals, all across the horizon from every direction, bursting like confetti across the battlefield. 

 

That’s it, then. 

 

He thinks, despite himself, of a home in the ground strewn full with stuff. A makeshift family that never went too far from where he could see them. Catching strips of sunlight against his scales through sewer grates, the world beyond theirs even farther underground. It seems desperately unfair, suddenly, that all Casey had was parts of something that had been bigger than the whole world itself. 

 

“Bad dog!” 

 

Mikey . Leo blinks up— his brother’s ninpo is a wildfire out on the plains. It’s bigger and brighter than anything, just like it always has been. For a moment, Leo almost smiles. 

 

The spots on Mikey’s arms don’t light up, though. There’s something in his eyes when he looks back. Oh, Leo swallows once. Roughly, impossibly.

 

He’s spent so much time worrying about being alone. It’s hitting him, now, that he would never go anywhere his brothers weren’t. That the burden of being the last might not have been his all along. 

 

“Mike,” He calls, pretends he sounds brave and easy going, the way Casey needs. Pretends these aren't his last words to one of the only pieces of his heart left on the earth. He’s sorry to ask, he’s so sorry all the way to the bone, but—  “Need a do over.” 

 

Bless Mikey’s heart for never making him explain any more than he has to, not once in this whole fucked up world. 

 

His baby brother’s eyes widen, expression leveling out into a nod; he takes the death sentence in stride, a command and a promise all in one. Mike knows, in the way he’s always known what his brothers have needed, and sees the other side of it. 

 

He leans in and ruffles Casey’s hair, and gives him a lighthearted “watch this,” and Leo’s never loved his baby brother more fiercely and fully and entirely heartbreakingly than when he unquestioningly gets to work, pulling back the layers of the world with his hands. 

 

All the while, Casey looks between them both with that same steady eagerness as always, ready to help. Ready to jump into hell with them. Not this time , Leo thinks. 

 

“Still got a ninja’s greatest weapon,” He tells Casey, who’s worried watering eyes won’t leave the bloody wound at Leo’s side, and keeps tracking back to his hissing inhaled breaths. He presses the words in like a thank you he’s not sure Casey can hear anyways. Casey smiles, shakily, unsure. 

 

Leo steels himself, thin coat of paint over rusting, cracking apart metal. “When you get through, find this. It’s the key, you’re going to go right back to the day they stole it.” He shoves the binary print out Don sent them into Casey’s hands, picks the photo he’s carried with him out carefully and hands him it too. “Find April, she’ll get you where you need to be.” 

 

“Master Michelangelo, your arms ,” Casey gasps. 

 

Leo puts his good hand on Case’s shoulder, thinks about all the times he’s lifted him up to screw in lightbulbs on the ceiling, all the stories and training, and times this bravest little human boy radiated nothing but trust and love and faith. The times he fell asleep right on his shoulder, or swallowed down a cry, or stubbornly gave his rations to the elderly members of their community. It takes a village to raise someone with a heart as big as Casey Jones Jr. 's, Leo just hopes he won’t have to watch it break. Our little hope, he thinks. 

 

“Case?” He squeezes the kid's shoulder, makes him look up at him rather than at his bleeding side. “You’re going to love it there.” 

 

Casey’s expression breaks open, confusion to something shy of anger, to raw fear and comprehension. “ Sensei , no—” 

 

“Remember you’re not alone,” Mikey chimes in, straining with the force of the world in his palms.  “This isn’t a goodbye, it’s a be right back, okay?”

 

Mike rips open a hole in the world and shreds himself with it, and Leo shoves Casey through. 

 

For fifteen seconds, for the first time in his entire life, Leo is entirely alone. It’s not the worst thing, although it rips through him with the force of a hurricane to believe it. 

 

There’s another timeline, another world, where he’ll never have to be. Maybe that’s all he needs. 

______

The first time they’d all learned what it really meant to be different species of turtle, Leo had cried for hours. He didn’t tell anyone, smiled and made a joke about their great grandparents being the same big dinosaur, and then ran off to his favorite hiding place to quietly break his own heart. 

 

Anywhere he went back then was also Donnie’s, though. His twin had found him in two minutes flat. 

 

“Thought the red was a give away,” Don said, flatly, scooching himself into the rafters beside him. Leo’d found it half on accident during a game of hide and seek. There was an offshoot tunnel high up in the lair that didn’t lead anywhere, got all bricked up somewhere down the line. The roof was patchy, though, and if he leaned his weight on a few of the bricks he could slide them free enough to squeeze into a crawl space above it. He liked it mostly because he’d found it on his own, and because not even Papa knew where he went when he crawled in. 

 

Donnie was allowed here though, Don had most of his secrets anyways. 

 

All tucked up with his head in his knees, Leo frowned at him as much as he could. He’d pushed his bandana off around his neck, so it probably looked more baleful than furious, in hindsight. Donnie let out one of his big sighs and leaned in closer. 

 

“Stop being a dum dum,” Don said, simply, pulling out his Nintendo in the dark space between both of their arms. 

 

Leo frowned harder, twitched back slightly. “You’re not supposed to call names, you know.” 

 

Don sniffed. “And you’re not supposed to be a dum dum.” 

 

“Am not,” Leo said, more muffled than heated. “Just— just sad, maybe.” 

 

Donnie clicked a few buttons, the pixelated screen solidifying into a Pikachu after a moment. “Mhm,” Don hummed. “Certified dum dum then.” 

 

Leo shoved him. “Shut it! Am not.” 

 

“Are too,” Don said, without looking up.

 

Maybe Leo’d had too many big emotions swirling up in his chest. Dad was out for a minute, to get some softer blankets for them for the winter, and Mikey had excitedly dragged his big book of animal facts over to them in the middle of board game time, so maybe the flip of moods and the lack of Papa reassurance had made it too big for him to handle. He burst into tears. 

 

“I just,” He hiccuped, scrubbing at his own face with his knees and burying himself as deep into his arms as he could go. “I wanted it to be real. ” 

 

Don didn’t say anything for a long moment, the menu screen tweeted its happy tune quietly between them as Leo struggled to get his emotions back inside himself.

 

It just seemed so unfair, to have brothers he loved so much. To have all the bright loudness of it in himself and not have anything to show for it. Him and Donnie were supposed to be twins, he thought. If they weren’t the same, he didn’t know how they fit. He thought maybe not having a twin meant losing things, like his secrets and his hiding spot, and he wasn’t ready for it to be make believe at all. 

 

Don leaned into his side, a soft thump of their sweaters. “Are you going to make me keep repeating myself.” 

 

“ Donnie— ” 

 

“Leon. Leonardo.” 

 

“Stop— it isn’t funny ,” Leo tried, looking up at his brother with betrayed wet eyes. Don wasn’t even looking at him, he was staring down at his screen but he wasn’t clicking any of the buttons. 

 

Don sighed again, a smaller one. One Leo didn’t hear ever. “I knew already. Soft shell turtles are terrible pets by the way.” 

 

Leo side eyed him. “You did? Why didn’t you— why didn’t you tell me?” 

 

They told each other everything, he thought. Well, Leo told Raph things too but only stuff that wouldn’t get him in trouble. And Mikey was his favorite buddy to goof around with, but he cried a lot and wasn’t good at staying quiet if Leo was doing something against the rules. Donnie never told anyone, he didn’t even act like he heard it half the time. He thought it maybe went both ways. 

 

Donnie looked up at him, and he was frowning a little, Leo noticed, before he looked away. “I didn’t think it would matter to you. But…” 

 

“Why— what? Why wouldn’t it matter? That we’re not real twins ? You were going to let me be an idiot and, and pretend that we were—” 

 

Don flinched, slightly. Said something too quiet for Leo to hear, then hunched his shoulders up and looked back at his game. 

 

The frustration in Leo’s heart softened, loosened the way it always did when any of them were sad in the way that wasn’t for show. 

 

“What was that?” 

 

Don’s shoulders hunched up higher. “I said , it doesn’t have to be pretend just because it isn’t biological. I repeat: dum dum.” 

 

Leo blinked, looked down at their socks. They’d switched one, by accident, then just started doing it all the time. One blue sock, one purple sock. His purple sock is worn out, he’d had to sew it up with Dad already twice and had a fit when he suggested they throw it out. He wears it anyways, just so they can match. 

 

“Oh,” He said, slowly and probably stupidly. He thought about how they all decided their birthdays, about how Leo and Donnie had different ones because Leo liked when it was warm enough to sit under the sunbeams and Don wanted his to be on the same day as some scientist he liked. About how Mikey was his baby brother even though he never saw him when he was really a baby, and how he liked crawling on Raph’s shoulders when he grew bigger than them and wouldn’t want anyone else to be the biggest. Maybe it was like that. 

 

Maybe the way Donnie knew where he went without even trying and found all his hiding places was just as real as being the same type of turtle. He thinks Don would look goofy with the red anyways. 

 

His brother— his twin— looked up at him cautiously, eyes tense before flicking back to his screen. “Are you going to show me how to beat the Ice Gym like you promised, now?”

 

Leo scooched closer, sniffling. “Yeah, okay.”  

__

Somewhere, the back of his mind, a light goes out. 

 

__

 

1

Chapter 3

Despite all odds, and in spite of himself, Leo wakes up. 

 

It’s not a pleasant awakening; he’s more ripped from slumber than anything, gasping awake with tears in his eyes before his brain can process why. He's upright, he thinks. Held up by his wrists somehow, and there's this horrid creeping blankness forming just on the peripheries of his mind. It hits him: the portal, Casey. Be right back.

 

The living room, the doors— all of them are quiet.

 

April’s, Mikey’s. 

 

Alone, he thinks, hates to think. The word is four hundred storeys tall and weightier than the ocean. He drowns in it readily.

 

Breath spears through him against his will, panic ridden and slack jawed. His eyes stream so hard he can’t make sense of anything around him. Pain shoots through him as an undercurrent but it’s dwarfed horrendously by the sheer feeling of loss crashing through every divot of himself. The cacophony of it is overwhelming. For a moment, he doesn’t exist as anything but the loss.

 

Something grabs his neck. Some hind brain training instinct clears through the mess of agony and chokes off his next wheezing inhale; focus. Danger. 

 

“-- walked right to our door, after all these years,” A voice sneers and— Krang, that’s who that is. He recognizes the low hiss on every exhale from his nightmares, from the day they lost Raph especially. “To think, the very last of your kind, here before us.” 

 

Last of your kind. His mind blurs with grief. “Only need one of us to—” The tentacle around his neck squeezes, it’s fine. It wasn’t one of his better quips. 

 

“Enough. We have waited too long to see your end. Pitiful attempts at stopping our control, annoying pests at our side, and finally. ” Leo can think past the blinding ache in him for half a second, half a second and he can see it’s the Krang leader himself holding him up. It’s kind of funny. Trying so hard for years to face this particular hellspawn nightmare fuel, and here he is. Weaponless. If Leo could just—

 

“Finally, I can end it once and for all.”

 

“Big talk,” Leo gasps out, wild grin on his face that’s more bared teeth than emotion. “So kill me then.” 

 

The Krang growls, lifting him higher. “I would not waste my reward that soon.”

 

Leo’s flipped around, he can barely see with his eyes streaming, it’s all splashes of watercolor and brimstone, big thick plumes of fire. “Look at what your resistance has done. All to pieces, all at once. You’ve lost everything .” 

 

He has, he has, it’s a long dark pit into the center of himself but he has nothing. The rooms are all dark. Leo hasn’t been alone a day in his life, not once, not really. There’s no one in the bowels of his heart left over to win this for. The world has never been a larger expanse of nothing at all, and he's still stuck here in it like a fucking grave marker.

 

“Now, you alone will get to witness the celebration of my total, and complete, victory.”

 

Something in him writhes at the thought; the world should end if they're not in it. Gravity should abandon them and let the whole planet stop in place, this thing that stole them all can't possibly stay in their place. Brimstone angry and feral, he slaps a hand on top of the tentacle against his throat and envisions the runes snaking up it. Mikey always said their ninpo was two parts magic, one part self love. If he believes he can end it here, he will. Because he’s alone, and if he has to be alone, he’s taking this fucking thing down with him. 

 

Except the runes don't light up. Nothing happens except for his nails digging in. The shoddily duct taped together well of strength he’d managed to snag onto all these years, the shallow pool that let him open portals here and there, is — it’s gone . It’s nowhere. He’d held onto it for so long, that shaky connection— he’d bent and weathered all of this and held it together, and somehow it’s been ripped clean of him anyways.  

 

Ah, well, one last thing to take from him, he supposes. He’s never been enough on his own. 

 

His hand drops. 

 

“What’s this? Nothing more to say? All the more fun to be had when we rip your screams from you.” 

 

I'm sorry, he thinks. It should have been me. See you all soon. 

 

Something twitches, a tiny blip in the back of his mind. A scratch from another side of a door. A shout from another end of a hallway that perfectly matches his own. 

 

Knock tap. Knock knock knock. Knock.  

 

A click-whir from another room. 

 

Tap knock. Tap knock tap tap. Knock knock knock. Knock tap. 

 

Tap. 

 

Not. Steadily, carefully: alone. 

 

Leo’s mind alights. 

 

Rainbow technicolor streaming at him from every direction. Orange like a sunset streaked with fire all around him, red and orange, and a lightning strike of purple right down the center— the Krang screams, dropping him to the floor in a pile, except it doesn’t stop. Liquid neon chases right up its limb, directly to its core. 

 

“How is this—- what is this—-?!” The Krang leader breaks off with a horrible yell, trying to lash out at Leo one more time anyways. 

 

Leo’s not sure he’s ever been in more pain in his life, his arm is gone, his breaths leak out funny on every exhale, but he knows this. It’s not a goodbye, it’s a be right back. Heart in his throat, in his hands, he pushes himself up and smiles. “Dramatic entrance much?”  

 

The Krang leader explodes inwards, dying star without the muster. Shreds himself into a thousand paper pieces right there on the floor of the ship. Anticlimactic, possibly, after everything, he tries to say so and isn’t sure if his mouth moves at all. 

 

The spark shoots everywhere, static globe across the space, and skips to land at his fingertips. 

 

For a moment, it’s still and silent as Leo fights himself just to breathe, and ends up falling to one knee anyways. They’re… alone. The analytical whirr in his brain tells him there’s only a few minutes. The Krang leader had likely had a plan that didn’t involve killing him yet, or it would have been more of a spectacle, which means there’s a time limit. He needs to move, he needs to— He’s not sure what he needs. He's not sure if he's hallucinating, if he died in the last few minutes and played out a fantasy instead.

 

He looks down at the snapping light. It prickles at him, humming. The faintest touch is like the wrong end of a battery. It feels real, it thumps along in Don's Morse code shorthand at him the same way as it had through sewer walls.

 

"Are you. Here?" He whispers. The light grows, he can hear it all at once.

 

His brothers aren’t— they’re not gone. Pressing in at every angle like they’re fighting the current. Don would never leave him if he could help it, Mikey had never gone anywhere, none of them would. He’s always had his brothers, looking out for him. Every step of the way. The shape of it is always the same. 

 

The light twitches, sharpening. It tickles faintly and Leo tries to smile again. “Yeah, yeah I get it. Not alone, give me. Ah– give me a second.” 

 

Breathing is not his friend, he swallows roughly and feels the bruises forming with it. His arm is missing, still, and whatever blast he’d gotten sideswiped by after sending Casey home definitely lodged some things loose in his chest. It’s— he’s fine. Better than fine. He can feel them, sharper than ever; the well he’d been fighting tooth and nail to hold onto is now a river, like a damn broke somewhere along the line. April’s still out there, he can trace her light all the way back across the field, bunkering down between two buildings. God, thank god. And Raph is— 

 

The light prickles more sharply, twists around his wrist and up towards the center of his chest, over his heart. Leo laughs, shakily as it heartbeats out, slow: tap knock tap. 

 

Leo’s eyes widen, he looks around, down at the light. “Raph’s here?” Alive? Not likely, not possible. But the thrum in his chest hums heavier, fuller than he’s known in years anyways. The spark skitters around him, resting on his shoulders. Go, he imagines it saying. In Don’s voice: Anytime today, Leon. 

 

It steals a laugh from him, broken and stuttering. The Krang leader is— this doesn’t feel real, but it’s all he has. His brothers are here, the room is not dark. He’ll take it. 

 

He manages to pull himself to a stand, it’s the hardest slouch into motion he’s ever made. It’s also the lightest he’s felt in years. 

____

 

The hall he’s in is wide, empty. A drawbridge across an empty blank of awful Krang slop, stretching all the way into darkness, and a throne on one end. He drags himself to the far end, where the fleshy walls of the ship open into pockets of tunnels. The ‘drome is half alive, organic in swathes of roiling pink interrupted by jutting bits of metal, and it shifts under his touch. 

 

It’s strange to be here in the middle of it. With the battle raging on somewhere below. With the silence.

 

“Home reno… isn’t in the… most powerful being in the galaxy’s whole… alien resume, huh?” He gasps out, mostly to himself. Partially for the way the light chitters in non existent key clacks and whizzing fireworks in his ear. He shoves himself up against a wall, ignoring the squeal of it, as he huffs a laugh; waiting for the grey to creep back out of his vision so he can take another step. 

 

He was always the medic of the family so he can catalog how bad the damage is, has made lists in the back of his brain all outlined in red and alarming. Ribs, lungs, who needs them really. Ideally, he should lay down and wait until breathing isn’t a straw siphoning out from nothing, ideally he shouldn’t be moving. But, well. When in Rome.

 

The light whirrs at his skin. He puts his hand on the wall and thinks: Raph’s here. 

 

It’s a strange marvel, to be able to feel the light in that doorway after so long. Like a song he’d almost forgotten the melody of (not that he would have forgotten, not that he’d ever have let himself). It’s more vivid now, like it’s dragging him forward rather than the other way around.

 

The wall opens up behind him as he leans, slithering back from his hand instantly. It’s a doorway, an arch. Rows and rows of fleshy, empty pods greet him. He follows the drumbeat, the thunder crash and raindrop hearth of it through. 

 

“Must be where… all their party guys come from,” Leo huffs to himself.

 

The Krangbots being tucked up safely away in the dark, like nestled sleeping bats, makes him feel vaguely nauseous. Those things had leveled city blocks, burrowed scores into the earth; imagining them cocooned in here, red eye covers twitching in the still silence at the heart of this thing is grotesque. 

 

He limps cautiously around a corner, expecting to see the red blinking back at him at any moment. It’s not dread, filling his lungs— Leo is weaponless currently, but his ninpo is a livewire in his veins. He’s not sure anything could stop him if it tried. He hasn’t felt this smell of earth after the rain, a thunderstorm rolling across a hazy sky in summer, porch lights on for a balcony in a quiet evening, in years, in what feels like decades, in lifetimes. He walks forward with every breath loud in his head, the light zipping around his hand, because he’s not sure if he can bring himself to name it any louder. 

 

When the world first fell, Raph had this saying about hope being ten feet tall. He'd meant the Resistance, them as a unit. To Leo, he'd always thought about a big outline of red.

 

"You'll see it," He'd say, hands on his hips. "One day, bursting right through that ship up there, larger than anything. We're gonna make it, Leo." 

 

"Course we are," Leo would sniff, leaning on Raph's arm. "We don't know when to quit."

 

"I'm not quitting on you," Leo mutters now, chasing his heart through a maze. "Not now, not ever."

 

Leo turns another corner and— there. At the end of the dark sheathes of metal— a dim green-yellow light. The pink meatiness of the Krang’s ship sticks to the sides of it, baked on and spiked, thicker as it stretches closer to the bulging film of the pod. In the center, the vague shape of a hulking figure with one overbright, lizard eye staring back at him. 

 

“Oh,” Leo finds himself gasping. It’s just— to think, the years, decades, all of it. They couldn’t feel Raph anywhere, Mikey had come back from searching the mystic plane somber and still, with a forced stretch of shaky tear soaked smiles, and he’d never asked. “You’ve. This whole time, you were … here ? I should have—- ” He couldn’t have anything, they’d never made it this far before. 

 

His poor brother. Trapped for so long like this. He wonders if the Krang had ever set him out on the battlefield, if Donnie and Leo and Mikey had ever been that close to bringing him back and never even known. Has to stop thinking like that before it seeps any farther into his heart. 

 

The lizard eye hasn’t left his, Leo realizes, even as the other side of his face is congealed behind a mess of pink and writhing spiked vines. There’s no part of him visible, only stretches of pink, like it crept right up over his heart. Wrapped through with pits and whorls and time. 

 

“Raphie,” Leo breathes.

 

Reaching out, he pushes his hand against the surface of the pod. It bends under his touch. The thin membrane of it breaks open instantly, with a rush of liquid crashing around them. 

 

Maybe there’s another world, another version where this is hard. One where the thing that’s taken over Raph’s mind hisses and claws for control, that fights and snarls at him and he has to beg. Maybe it’s the worst moment of his life, to look across at this version of his brother, and have to try to convince him to come back. 

 

His hand is still up, Raph’s eye tracks over to it, waiting. His arm twitches like an afterthought, like an echo. 

 

It’s not the worst moment. It’s not hard at all. 

 

The spark from Leo’s hands skips straight up to Raph’s shoulder, and buzzes around in a messy circle, as Leo looks up at the shape of his big brother, and says, “I missed you, so much.” 

 

Raph blinks, big yellow eye closing as he dips his head back in a nod. Missed you too.  

__

2

 

Maybe it’s because Krang prime is gone, maybe the one well cell service connection's been ripped right out, but Raph just sort of follows . 

 

Big eyed and flat expression, from the mildest hint of face underneath the twisting pink. It reminds him of some offshoot of when they left him alone too long, how he’d get monosyllabic and rigid until they could coax him back out. It’s like that ramped up to a thousand. He can’t seem to form words at all, or expressions. Meekly plodding along behind Leo’s limping gait like he’s waiting for orders. 

 

Leo needs to take a breather, in spite of himself, shortly after leaving the hall as his ribs shift in fun and interesting ways and spike through until the grey in his vision is most of it, and Raph just— watches him sink to the ground, turns and faces outwards. 

 

Standing guard, Leo thinks dizzily. 

 

It’s like how they used to run point, Don and Leo causing mayhem in the background, Raph keeping their escape wide open. Leo thinks he’s maybe all instinct at the moment, the whole scraggly loveable outline shape of his biggest brother with nothing really to fill it in beyond. There’s something soft and lost about the blankness in that lizard eye that makes Leo want to coo and lead him along by the hand, but his ribs — 

 

The spark fizzes between them. Leo can practically hear Donnie ranting about something, some clue they’re missing. Mikey flailing his arms with the same pout as when he was five and trying to be as brave and big as Raph. The strategist in Leo’s brain is dulled but still running — he knows there were hundreds more of them on board, that they can’t all be on the field hunting down his remaining scrambled together family. 

 

They’re on limited time, and Leo’s out of gas, but he needs the Key. 

 

There’s a point to it, after all. This whole being at the edge of the world’s end thing. Who’d have thought. 

 

“Heh,” Leo wheezes, holding his arm across his center. He needs to keep it all in place, just for a bit longer. He’s sure they’ve been through worse, he’s sure he’s survived more than this. “Could really use... Mikey, huh?” 

 

One outstretched hand and Mike could un-krangify Raph, or reach inside himself to that other plane and tell them exactly what Don was trying to say. Give Leo that smiley, glass-half-full kind of look that he did and make him remember there was once more than all of this. The grief in him burns bright enough it steals the rest of his breath for a second. 

 

Raph tilts. He’s facing outwards still, strong shouldered and ready, but his gaze slides slightly back at him. There’s a twitch to what should be his jaw. He’s…. talking, Leo realizes. Trying to, anyways. It looks like it hurts, uneven plates of twisting goo pulling too taut on the sides. 

 

“Hey, hey it’s okay,” Leo says, leaning his head back against the wall and trying to ride out the arcing sting in him. “It’ll be ok, big guy. We’ll, ah, we’ll get all this gunk off you. Once we close this bad boy down… who knows, maybe it’ll just uh. Vanish with all this stuff, right?” 

 

Or you’ll be like this, forever , Leo doesn’t say. He’s working with the concept that he has any of his brother at all.

 

A strange noise curls through the air between them. Leo blinks over at his brother, at the wrong-right shape of him. Raph’s turned fully towards him now, long pink twists of his arms flat to the ground and yellow eye boring into him. Something in his mangled face shifts, and the warbled noise follows. 

 

It’s a…. It’s a chirp, he thinks. A cluck, strangled in his throat, like they’d started speaking before the rest. His heart breaks, crashes down and reforms on the rocks of how much he misses his big brother. Trying against everything to reassure Leo.  

 

He swallows hard around the lump in his throat. I’d go anywhere you went, he thinks fiercely. Never go without me again. 

 

Raph moves even more, kneeling down in front of him. A pink vine reaches ever so slowly up to where the light is fizzing around Leo’s collarbone. It immediately zips over, planting itself right on Raph’s shoulder too. Staking a claim, recognition instantly the same way Leo felt. The yellow eye looks back at Leo, widening like a cat. 

 

Leo’s heart skips into his throat. “Yeah,” He says. “Yeah, Raphie. That’s Don. He’s here too.”

 

Raph stares at him, that strange croaking rumble warbling through him as he looks down at the spark and back up. There’s a question in his mind, Leo can tell. A pilot light flickering in the house of him. 

 

That’s it, he wants to say. Raph, come back. I need you. Your family needs you. 

 

For April, who hung around this long with him despite all of it, who’d begged him not to make her lose anyone else, for his people that charged into an unwinnable war anyways just because he asked. For Casey, for hope .

 

“We came after you,” Leo tries, and wishes it was more true. Raph doesn’t need to know Leo’s arrival was three parts swan song and one part that wracking loss. He doesn’t need to know Mikey isn’t anywhere at all. Not yet. 

 

The light hisses a string of noise, a tiny steam engine being translated into binary as it skips across Raph’s arms. 

 

“Hhh,” Raph says. “Hhhrr.” 

 

Leo frowns, lifting himself up enough to put his hand on Raph’s. “H–hey don’t hurt yourself, Raph. Don’t have to speak, okay? You know me, I love being chatty.” 

 

The big mess of his head shakes, slow and aching with hisses and pops. He plants his messy hand on Leo’s chest, right in the center. Right like Don did. 

 

Raph’s gaze tracks out, across the hall and down into the dark depths of the Technodrome. Leo feels the petrichor summer storm in the back of his mind and realizes with the same hope-at-a-precipice sudden drop feeling: 

 

Don came here for another reason. 

 

At the same time, a door opens down the hall. “I will confirm the perimeter alarm. Tell Leader when he returns that recalibrations must be done to ensure they stay active once tripped—” 

 

Shit . Leo’s wide eyes meet Raph’s calm one. There’s three of them he can see, slithering towards them. Normally, he’d say he could take them. He could take anything with Raph here beside him, but his breath is pinholing out of his lungs funny and in ways he knows spells danger, and he’s not sure how much Raph has been allowed to move around in the years he’s been here. They’re not in fighting form, not even in the ballpark. 

 

He’d woken up here without a purpose to fight, really, and now he has two and he can’t . Turtle luck, rearing its ugly head once again. He almost feels like laughing. 

 

A fizzing sound fills his ears instead. The overwhelming feeling of missing somewhere he’s never been piling in around him afterwards like a quickshot in the darkened hallways of that waiting room in his mind. 

 

“Close your eyes,” A voice says, and some hind brain part of him says trust, so he does. 

 

The crack that lights the far end of the room in sickly green-yellow hues is bright enough to make his teeth hurt. He has a half thought about death and warm busy rooms and reaches out for Raph instinctively. 

 

The one two punch of the explosion doesn’t reach him though. He blinks around to a familiar, tired face. His heart knows who it is before his brain catches up. 

 

“Hi Sensei,” Casey Jr. says, kneeling down beside him. “Sorry I took so long.”

 

---

3

There are four hundred and twenty three minutes between visits. If he closes his eyes and breathes in for five and exhales for six, he can fall into enough of a microsleep to keep his mind functioning the bare minimum he needs it to. He does this often. He makes it through. 

 

In for five. 

One, he can still feel his fingertips

 

Two, if he blinks his eyes open, he can still see beyond the film that’s been slowly clouding his vision. 

 

Three, he’s still himself.

 

Four, he’s still himself. 

 

Five. 

 

Out for six. 

 

He’s lost parts since he rocket launched his entire packed set of explosives into the center of the Krang ship hovering over his family’s hideout. Memories fractal around him and never quite land in the right shape. It doesn’t matter, though, if the whole of him is still there. The majority of him is still more than enough to hold out. 

 

They think they can break him, of course. Taunt him about it as often as they visit. They brought him to the hivemind of it all, right inside the Technodrome, because they think that his mind is the only thing he has in defense. 

 

He knows what it looks like; a last minute mad dash effort, all instinct and half-cocked glory to try and do as much harm to them as they were doing to him. He’s counting on that being their interpretation, actually. The Krang aren’t ones to care to learn much about the species they’re destroying; self important god complexes, the lot of them. Beyond a cursory push through his memories to try and get to their codes (ha, as if he lets himself memorize them), or their hide out locations (picked on a random map with a dice toss that not a single member of their leading team holds all the answers to), they’d mostly given up on believing he knew anything about where the others went (he does, he made sure not to know). 

 

They haven’t really tried all that hard if Donnie’s honest. It makes sense, the Krang think they’ve already won. 

 

Their purpose in picking him up is more scientific than strategic— he’s built firewalls they can’t crack, he’s taken out armadas of theirs with a single EMP. Besides Mikey and his unquenchable mystic fire, he’s the one they’re afraid of. He knows what they want from him, and it's not something he’s able to offer. 

 

“Breaking you is more about the art than logic,” one of them had said gleefully at him, the smaller slimier one with the sharper tentacles. “Sometimes we like to indulge.” 

 

Sure thing, Don thought to himself. I know someone who’ll be real pissed off when he finds you though. 

 

He should be dead, is the thing. They’ve more than tried to kill him— they pretend that they mean to string him along, to drag it out, but he sees the looks they give each other. They can’t— all their might, and there’s something stopping them. 

 

In for five:

 

One, no new bones are broken.

 

Two, whatever their last round of interrogation was trying to accomplish, he doesn’t think they found it. 

 

Three, he can still think, he can still wait.

 

Four, he’s still himself. 

 

Five. 

 

Out for six. 

 

He can feel it, still. The faint humming— if his mind is a labyrinth it’s because he built it that way with rulers and sharp cutting edges. It’s lines and algorithmic codes that encrypt and decrypt daily in generated strings of tokenized data. Unhackable, unbreakable, and yet: there’s always been one person who can stroll right on through without even thinking. 

 

Faith in two things has pulled him through this far: scientific certainty tested and tried a thousand times over in his own brain, and the fact that he is an unquantifiable half of a whole. 

 

Leo’s out there, he’s alive and he’s going to figure it out. Leo will pull through. Leo always pulls through. 

 

“Look at this one, pretending to be asleep,” A voice croaks, right on the dot. 

 

“How droll this whole charade is. Purple one, must we walk the same circles each time? It only ends in pain for you.” 

 

Don lets his eyes flutter open. “You know what they say about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” He ignores the fact that his speech is slurring slightly, irrelevant data. He gets a smack across the face for it anyways, which probably will make the speaking aspect worse. 

 

The pink lurches towards him: he breathes out. 

 

The taller one looks annoyed, a hint of bared teeth behind its typically smug expression. Don catalogs it for later. Getting through an ‘interrogation’ is about compartmentalizing, about absorbing data to parse afterwards. He doesn’t feel the awful sticking texture of the Krang around his wrists, he doesn’t feel the slide of it against his shell, it’s not him that connects somewhere deep inside the wired out harddrive sludge of the Technodrome. He’s somewhere far outside himself sinking backwards into the labyrinth. 

 

They’re saying things in the back pocket of his brain, ‘you can’t hide it in here forever, weak one’ as he’s falling backwards behind columns and shelves stacked tall with binary. He can. Watch him. 

 

He can hear his brother in there, the hair raising static right before lightning lands. He’s always gone where his brother is, this isn’t any different.

 

Knock knock knock. Knock knock. Tap knock knock.

 

Somewhere, distantly, he hurts. Somewhere there are vines where they should not be (behind his eyes, in his shell, through his hands) but it’s far enough away. He reaches up to the nearest row and corridor. 

 

Knock knock knock. Knock tap knock.

 

Tendrils in meaty chunks creep over top of the ledge he leans against, slithering inexorably towards him. They’ve never found him before, when they’ve chased him in here. Usually retreating into the maze means frustration for them and more physical pinata’ing to get the frustration back out somewhere tangible. This is new, something changed. 

 

The tendrils gather, a mass of pink cascading slowly to cut off the exits. 

 

He freezes and hopes that they won’t sense the movement, or his rabbiting heartbeat— thinks in neat rows, the square roots all the way up to 8,485, anything to restructure his brain a little more to the left. The tendril twitches, pauses. 

 

Surges. 

 

A wave of pink washes over the divide, massive writhing wholes of it. They’re laughing, somewhere in the physical world, he can hear it far away. Glee-filled and awful, and he can’t move fast enough to— 

 

The tendrils stop. Crashing against a sheen of red before they ever touch him. He thinks he hears them screaming, furious and outraged. Music to his lack of ears. 

 

“Thanks,” Don gasps, to the nothing, to the hulking shape that crackles against his arms like a bear hug he hasn’t had in years from the warmest person he knows. Donnie’s not alone here, he never was. 

 

He can hold out as long as he needs to.

 

“You know what they say about trying the same thing and expecting different results,” He tries to say, all down the snout dripping with animosity. It falls from him, even in his mindscape, a little weakly. “Einstein, baby.” 

 

They think they can break him because he’s the fragile one, the soft shelled brainiac. They think it’s only his inclination towards explosions and his mind that are keeping him safe— as if Donatello would dive into this particular hellhole without backup, he’s not Leo.  

 

There’d been a signal, a thread that he’d followed from hypothesis straight into theory was all. As usual, once again, he was right. 

 

The world as it were is a half-skip from collapse, despite what Leonardo says; it was unwinnable, still is if he’s being razor thin honest. Leo’s, impressively, locked them all into the world’s longest stalemate through sheer gritted teeth, thousand paces an hour chess game maneuvers, but it’s a slow hold out to the inevitable. Even if Leo realizes it consciously he won’t ever let himself stop.  

 

(It’s not that Don was worried about his brother, because he wasn’t, because logically, he can pull the brakes on this particular trolley problem before it gets that far. 

 

They have a charade they like to run: Don goes too far, Leo smart talks their way back out. Don just figured it was his time to be the getaway van.)

 

So, maybe Don hadn’t brought all the intel he had to the table, sue him. Maybe he saw that Nardo was going to take the tidbits of a working thought he’d gathered and run that fifteen mile sports slam touchdown right into the ground. Maybe he had been just a little bit worried. 

 

It wasn’t necessary, Don had it under control. Besides, Raph was still out there. He could prove it. 

 

In for five:

 

One, Leonardo leading the remnants of the world through the wreckage, empty shelled and empty eyed.

 

Two, the medical scans on Michael came back red. Red, red, failing red.  

 

Three, they were running out of time.

 

Four, he was still himself. He was also something else. 

 

Five. 

 

Out for six. 

 

He’d sent a beacon up, with the last batch of Krang droids patrolling the outskirts of Old New Jersey. Just a little probe, wrapped up in a pile of scraps meant to look like an important device. Reverse psychology, the science of extroverts and con artists. Classic. 

 

At first, it hadn’t revealed much. Just that the Technodrome was half organic as well as biomechanical, and that there was in fact a portal key somewhere within it siphoned all its power through. Useless facts, data points he lined up neatly and regarded with something like frustrated disdain. 

 

(They didn’t have time for shots in the dark or wrong guesses. Don didn’t have the luxury of being wrong. He was here because he was composed of proxies and firewalls and tripwires set in backdoor mystically hex coded sections of their interfacing, and he didn’t make mistakes. If he felt the weight of it, that crushing all encompassing knowledge of how much rode squarely on his shoulders, then he decided he didn’t. It was weightless, actually.  

 

He knew his brother’s were carrying their own portions the ways only they could, too, and his was all numbers and data. Science never lied and Donatello was never wrong. He could fix this, he would fix it.) 

 

He’d had to sit through weeks of the unfortunate slow sink knowing that Michelangelo was on a short set timer, and that if he didn’t jump, Leo would first.

 

Dum dum, he’d thought, angrily. Angrier, still, when his eyes had watered over it. Losing you wouldn’t fix anything, you’d take us with you. 

 

The way they were losing Michael was already a cruelty; he’d had enough before of Mikey near shattering himself apart searching desperately in the mystic planes for their long lost brother, to add this slow burn crater impact felt— It didn’t feel. He wasn’t going to agonize about the concept of his lightning quick, razziest and tazziest, brother fading away to nothing right in front of them. There wouldn’t be another shell on the wall, not if he was still breathing. 

 

It was magic, but there was a science to magic. Baron sent him detailed notes of books he recalled, and trained mystic warriors from the Hidden City who’d survived in hidden pockets, and it didn’t look good or fine at all, but he’d built their first toaster from a broken VHS player when he was six. Everything came down to math in the end, there was no more world to be had if Angelo wasn’t bounding off the walls every moment of it. Even if all he had left were a few monitors and an array of sensors larger than the state of Kentucky, he’d done more with less. 

 

(If Mikey’s magic sat in his veins, it was a URL on his favorites tab. It was an address that auto filled for him that held his first and last name in sessions that always saved. Maybe it was muggiernow, slower like a DDOS that made it load for hours, but he knew how to find it. Could click on the right button in his sleep. 

 

Raph’s was the landing screen, loading up bright and quick first by default. A 404 error he clicked past.

 

If Don’s own was the hacker, the binary code ones behind it, then Leo’s was the zeroes. The POST to his SEND. The video call he’d started the moment he’d been able to think that never, ever hung up. A consistent constant html code file they’d been typing at half their past lives and into this one, he was sure.) 

 

Still— Mikey’s vitals trended weaker, he could stand less and less. Leo slogged them all forwards with the same gusto as always, somehow finding that backburner of inspiration continuously, miraculously, and let himself get burnt more in the process. 

 

Luckily, the Krang had always considered themselves to be higher beings to a fault. When they couldn’t figure out the mysterious device Donnie had left behind for them, they’d trashed it. Thrown it right down into the belly of the beast where it was summarily swallowed up by the organic alien material making up exactly 68 point 4 of the entire ship. He could hear Leo booing in the back of his mind for that missing .6 percentile. 

 

What that meant was that the probe buried within the metal warped casing slipped free. That it was absorbed into the matrix that made up the semi living space craft. It meant that Donnie had a remote control access chip to the inside of the Technodrome. 

 

It also meant, in the absolute quiet of the middle of the night shift that he elected to never properly adhere to, Donnie got a reading about an organic life signal that was much larger than it should have been. 

 

Maybe there was a touch of hubris right in the middle of things to mull over, though. Nardo would have seen the trap for what it was, but, well. Donnie got results. He pressed the advantages that he had. Whatever signals he was transmitting into the ship were crisp clean lines of data, something the Krang never seemed to bother to understand— they were all brute force alien-fronted biomechanical mess, no finesse or time for smaller details. Their instruments quite literally were not built to be able to read modem signals or send post data requests and it let him oftentimes pass entirely unnoticed. 

 

However, Donnie hadn’t considered that the signals they were sending back may also be untraceable by his measures. An en passant, of sorts. They used his backdoor to make their own backdoor. This is why Leo had such a sore winner phase, he assumes, with how easily Don missed it.  

 

It should have rung an alarm in him when his scant and scattered hours of sleep became infested with dreams of wiry pink tendrils, clouding into his vision, possibly. When he’d had thoughts aligned more to data download procedures than the clinical proficiencies of software maintenance. 

 

To be fair to him, being hacked within his brain wasn’t a move that he thinks he should have had to account for. 

 

It doesn’t matter though, he’s gotten very good at keeping them out the past few months. He came here for a reason.

 

Leo will pull through.

 

In for five:

 

One, he’s still himself.

 

Two, he’s still himself.  

 

Three, he’s still himself.

 

Four, he’s still himself.

 

Five. 

 

Out for six. 

They’re talking around him again, he swims back to the present day with the usual throb behind his eyes. Ugh. Unsanitary. 

 

“-- time is nearing, should we not include this one in our celebration?” 

 

“Leader has not called for us yet.” 

 

A shrill noise of complaint. “He said this one was mine, it’s mine to play with. And I want to bring it to the bridge.” 

 

“Sister, to go against Leader’s command is treason,” The smaller one says with practically a face splitting grin. “It would be delightful to watch the last remnant stubborn dregs of hope bleed out of this one, though. After all the annoyances he’s caused us.” It’s said with a vague thrum of nervousness, that distantly tickles him. Strung up like this for months, and they’re still afraid of him. 

 

The other one giggles, it burbles in her throat. “I do so love the idea of killing them both at once.” 

 

Don’s sluggish headaches, but he stills at the word. Both. 

 

The part of him that is not him, that’s tied to this hulking mass of a ship writhes. He forces that searching wave back, reverts it— the red is still here, it hasn’t gone anywhere else, but it’s thinner somehow. Strained, like there’s suddenly another end trying to pull it back in vague questioning tugs. 

 

Block 4A Subsection 2.3— door entry. Pod 181168 has been Released; no. Rebooting.

 

fetch("Access Logs”)

 

  .then((response) => response.json())

  .then((data) => console.log(data))

 

Download complete.

 

In for five. Out for six. He is still himself. 

 

Oh , Don thinks, belatedly as his whole self slots back behind his skin and teeth. Raph’s out. 

 

The red that’s been hovering around his heart and head for months swirls slowly, lazy loops like a warm blanket wrapped tight. He blinks, the Krang prattle on around him, will-they won’t-they’ing about his untimely demise. 

 

Raph’s out. Someone— Leo, set him free. It has to have been Leo, right? 

 

Figures, something Donnie had set out to do months ago could be accomplished by his twin in five minutes flat. Relief, he thinks, tingles at the tips of his fingers he can barely feel. 

 

“It’ll be delightful, won’t it? Seeing that foolish look of belief in their eyes, and then smiting it entirely.”

 

It would , Donnie thinks, all barbed wire and wolfishly. It will. 

 

Donnie got himself escorted to the Technodrome (a gentler way of saying knocked out, strung up and subsequently had any vestiges of connection to mystic powers ripped full from his skeleton, or so they said) with a few intentions. 

 

He’s not a strategist by any means, the subterfuge really was borrowed from his golden tongue gifted half. Some element of lying is a die and hard form of variable control in some less credited scientific pursuits. There’s an age old tradition in science of a bold faced refusal to tell the entire truth, with a purpose. 

 

Or rather, science may never lie, but scientists do. 

 

Regardless, the goals were: one, to hopefully kick some Krang ass. Now or later, he’s not picky. Two, to find Raph and wherever pit they’d trapped his brother in. Three, to reverse that mysticism removal power that the Krang had, the one that locked Leo’s ninpo in some hard to reach, behind a proxy vault, the thing that was choking off Mikey’s natural ability to share his endless flow with all of them and making it writhe under his skin restlessly instead. And four: well. A magician never reveals all of his secrets. 

 

Once Leo got here, he could start that domino in motion, though. 

 

One Leo got here, because he was. Because he’d made it, just like Don had always known. Simple math: Don got into trouble, Leo got them out. He just had to hold on. 

 

In for five.

 

Something rattles at the edges of his brain. The locked vault doors that he imagined slamming down around him, opening one by one in a coordinated symphony. 

 

“What was that?” One of the Krang shrieked. “Leader’s not called for us, we can’t be—”

 

Don squints his eyes open again, enough to catch the look of baffled panic on their slimy faces. 

 

“Told you,” He manages, bruised jaw and feral. “He’s gunna be pissed .”

 

A tentacle whips out, grabbing him by the chin and squeezing. “ Who is.” 

 

Don tilts his head into it as much as he can, laughing even as the Krang whip crack his face sideways. Even as they try to shove back into his brain again, even though they can’t, they’ve been trying for months–years and they can’t. Desperation makes them bold, though and they push even harder. Icepicks and fireworks pop behind his eyes. “Who could possibly— there’s none of your kind left. We’ve finished them, this is our celebration. No one is coming for you —”

 

A slithering sound cuts through. A door opening at the other end of the room. 

 

“Sorry to crash your party. Think I see our car outside though, and our pops really hates it when we miss curfew.” 

 

Leo’s eyes meet Don’s, he knows exactly how the next five seconds are going to play out. 

 

Don grins and lets his eyes fall closed again.

 

Out for six. 

 

 

 

“--gotta wake up, Dee, come on. Hey— there you go, that’s it.”

 

Reality shifts back into place in hazy side steps. The blurry shape of his brother hovers in front of him, eyes wide with worry. That’s— Leo shouldn’t worry, because Don’s going to fix it, he always does. He knows Mikey’s vitals aren’t good, he knows, but he has a plan. He tells Leo as much.

 

“You— yeah, Tello, you got a plan. I know you do, you’re full of fun facts today. Tell me about all of them while I get you out, okay? How do I get you out?” 

 

There’s another shape behind Leo, holding him up high enough he can reach up to the tendrils wrapped tight around Don’s arms. He’s not sure they aren’t part of his arms at this point, they might be. All of this might be him, he can speak into the code of the ship and it can speak back. It might just be Donnie in here. 

 

Leo grunts, pulling at something by his wrist. “No. Stop that, okay, alright it looks pretty rough but we’ve gotten out of worse, right Dee? Use that beautiful brain of yours, tell me how to get you out of this, I don’t— I don’t want to hurt you.” 

 

He forces his eyes to focus, the shape behind him is pink, twisting and spiked, and its lizard-like eye is focusing right in on him. The space behind his eyes screams things like brother and Casey Jr. and home , so he lets himself breathe in. His heart beats for one, for two, and Don breathes out. 

 

He’s still himself, his brothers are here. He held out. 

 

“It’s….” His voice croaks, he tries to clear it. “The ship, it’s biomechanical. It’s living. Gunna have to…. To pull me out.” It’s gotten on the inside, he thinks with a whining dread he’s been thinking around for months. Have to get it back out. 

 

“Sensei—” Casey says, somewhere behind Don’s shoulder. 

 

Leo pauses, his face swims back into focus with a furrowed line between his eyes. “That’ll— there’s so much of it that’s…” He can hear him catch himself, tuck the scared twin away and let the armor of being the resistance leader step forward. “Don are you sure?” 

 

Is he sure, scoff. Leo’s heartbeat knocks at the same exact tempo as his own across the entirety of the world’s near collapse, just because he followed Don directly into hell. Of course he’s sure.

 

The amalgamated shape of Raph croons, gurgled and steady from over Leo’s shoulder. Leo’s face crashes and settles with a nod. “Alright, on the count of three then. Raph, you pull him as hard as you can, we gotta make it quick. One… two—” 

 

Raph pulls, doesn’t give Don enough time to tense or for the integrated systems in his mind to freeze up and run the call-response to make it worse. Don feels something snap, a cord at the back of his brain and it burns like the sun but then—

 

He’s on the floor. His hands, his knees. Chest heaving wildly and. 

 

It’s quiet. 

 

No thrum of background scuttling or program files adjusting, only—

 

Tap tap tap. Tap. Tap knock tap. Tap. 

 

“Uncle Tello…?” 

 

“I’m still me, I’m.” And what a marvel that is, he chokes. He manages to look up at his brother, kneeling in front of him with hovering worry. “Still the pretty one. Hope you didn’t get used to it.” 

 

Leo’s face breaks into a wild grin.

 

Don reaches up, leans as far back on his haunches as he can and puts his hand on Leo’s. They’re making eye contact, he doesn’t have to say it. Thank you. 

 

“We need to get out of here.” Don manages.

 

Leo shakes his head, swallowing roughly. “You can barely stand, Raph and Case took care of the other two. why don’t we just—” 

 

“No,” Don says more forcefully. “Leo, we need to leave.”  

 

His brother’s eyes widen with realization, Raph shifts uneven long arms of him twisting. “Okay,” Leo says. “You got it. Raph, Case, vamanos. Curtain call time.” 

 

The hulking shape of their brother stares at them silently, moves its head carefully up and down. Chirrups low and crooked like a rolling storm, and holds his arms out. 

 

When the portal first opened and the Technodrome first crawled through, Don remembers that they’d been patching Mikey up at home. Raph had turned on the news, right before plopping on one of Angelo’s favorites, and they’d all thought for a moment that some sort of Halloween prank had come early. 

 

“The CGI on that thing is crazy,” Raph had gasped. Moving closer to the TV fuzz like he could poke right through and figure out how it was made. 

 

Leo had frowned and jumped up to peek over Raph’s shoulder, squinting harder. The news reporter stepped in, looking harrowed and gaunt. Stunned into silence for a long moment, and that’s how they knew it was real. ‘Alien Invasion’ scrolled across the bottom bar, like that wasn’t entirely insane. Like it wasn’t six o’clock on a Wednesday and the human world wasn’t getting home from their day jobs.

 

Don remembers Mikey bursting into tears as the shaky camera footage showed masses of pink and purple horror creeping across the ground, encasing entire buildings and swallowing people up with it. The lurch of familiarity when he realized the fight they’d just come home from wasn’t over. He remembers dad lurching forward with an expression they’d never seen on his face before, the word ‘Krang’ pulling from him like a gunshot. 

 

Mostly, Don remembers the way Leo had turned to them all, grabbed for his swords and said ‘this is going to be one hell of a story to tell April later.’ 

 

The world had ended fifteen times over before breakfast— they’d stormed towards the tower and the mass of nightmare fuel above it, over confident from their fight with Shredder a year prior, and summarily gotten the floor fully vaporized out from under them.

 

Don prides himself in retaining pinpoint accuracy on all points of details. He can’t listen to the recordings from when they’d stumbled home that day without dad. 

 

And still, in the middle of everything else, there were a few constants: April’s constant support and caring by doing energy; Mikey clinging to his arm; Raph’s soft timbre and shaky smiles; Leo seeing the best way forward.

 

The TV networks had been among the first things to go down, but Donnie had been hand making generators since he could talk, and they’d still somehow believed that this war would be won in the coming months despite it all, so. They’d had a wall of DVD’s and a home that hadn’t been yet invaded, and a desperate need to reassure themselves that everyone was right where they were supposed to be. 

 

There’d been their couch, their pile of blankets, the glow of a movie they all knew by heart. Mikey fell asleep on Raph’s shoulder halfway through, Raph following right after. It was okay, none of them were really laughing anyways. 

 

“It’s going to be okay, you know that?” Leo whispered at him, propped up on a pillow and staring almost blankly at the screen. Don watched the reflections of space bouncing off his brother's eyes before Leo tilted his head over at him. “I mean it. We’ll figure it out.”

 

There were a thousand things he could say, there was nothing to say. The world outside had fallen into panic five minutes after the ship broke through, nothing could have prepared any of them for how sudden the take over really was. It hadn’t hit Canada yet, supposedly. 

 

Leo’s face was serious in a way he rarely saw his twin, though. A statistical anomaly, a gravity well right there between them. He cleared his throat and whispered back, “How can you be so sure?”

 

Outlined in highlighter blue, Leo smiled. “Come on. I’ve got you guys, that’s how I know.” 

 

Escaping the Technodrome is a matter of bravery, really. The Krang leaders have all been taken out summarily in one way or another, and their worker bees are wreaking havoc elsewhere— it’s almost eerily quiet as they plod through. Raph scoops Leo into his arms after the first hiss of air Leo lets out through clenched teeth, and continues his discordant grumblings like some distant back part of him is trying desperately to ask ‘are you okay? Are you okay? I can carry you home’. Don very nearly does something useless like cry about it when Leo doesn’t even fight back. 

 

He’s not sure if this is real, after so long. Having only his thoughts inside his head is making him almost giddy, a manic sort of low flying panic coursing through him. He feels everything ten times more than ever, textures and sounds all grating behind his jaws, but it’s washed behind the cold cut logic that his brothers are alive. They’re going to end the apocalypse. 

 

Less real than not real, not as real as he thought it’d be. Comme ci, comme ça.

 

The halls are quiet as anything as they make their way through. Casey Jr. sneaks under Don’s arm steadfastly, carrying his weight. He can walk another step, he can walk as many as he has to. 

 

Casey’s different, he notices that his arm has to lift a little higher to reach his shoulder length. His hair is longer. He’s grown into his own shoulder pads in the time that Don’s been missing, and he tries very loudly not to feel any way about that either. He remembers a kid that had been so eager to help, that could sneak in behind his desk chair and hold up wires for him. Casey smiles over at him with dark pressed smudges under his eyes and Don thinks: you really are your father's son.

 

There’s going to be fighting outside most likely. Drones and lap dogs crawling around and guarding the place. Don tries to gear up for it, he can fight if he needs to; there’s a well of that ninpo stored up and echoing back between the three of them he hasn’t felt in years, but it won’t be pretty. Leo should not be moving at all, if the way Raph’s carrying him tells him anything. They could use an extra push of strength, as much as he loathes to ask. 

 

“Should we—” Don hesitates to ask, knows that Leo wouldn’t have let their baby brother go anywhere too far, but he doesn’t know how long it’s been. “Should we get Mike? Is he…” 

 

Leo lets out a quiet wounded noise, tucked into his big brother's chest. Don almost doesn’t let himself understand.

 

Oh . He’d been so sure. If he could find Raph, and if Leo could break them both out, he’d been so sure they’d make it in time for Mikey to—

 

He hears the wheezing punched-out noise that escapes him distantly. He said he'd fix it. Promises always meant so much to Mikey, he'd hold out his hands at them with the most aggressive pout the world had ever known until they pinkie swore up and down as a kid for the smallest things. Not to eat the last cookie, not to watch the new episode without him. Don's never broken one before.

 

“Hhrrr,” Raph rumbles, creaking jaw and all. Leo’s arm lifts to pat at his chest consolingly. 

 

“He,” Leo tries, and the crack in his voice is devastating. “He sent Casey back. To get the key.” 

 

Casey shudders on an exhale beside him.

 

He swallows it all down; makes it flat. The facts are, they need to leave as soon as possible, there’s time for emotional crisis after they’ve continued to not die. He’s not the strategist, but he’s been planning as much as he can for this moment anyways.

 

Don clears his throat, tries to shape his family in the outline of how Leo always did for him. "We have to go."

 

Casey nods, eyes shining. Leo says nothing.

 

“When we get to the door, wait for it to flash red twice. Then, Raph, run Leo as far as you can to the far side of the warehouse. Me and Casey will give you a clear path.” 

 

Raph clicks, that low rumble thick in his lungs. Casey pulls Don’s arm closer, leans more of his weight on him without thinking. 

 

Case looks at Don, then Leo. “I want you to know, before we do this. You gave me a do over. It worked, there’s a whole world now where none of this ever happened.” And yet he came back here, to this one, Don thinks, staring at this kid, Leo’s kid.

 

“We stopped them in that one. Everyone made it.” Casey says. 

 

Don blinks down at the top of Casey’s head, how it rises to almost his chin now. He’s older, Don realizes. Older than a few months would change. It’s hard to think around the roaring gap in his brain of Trying Not to Feel he’s doing. All the doors are slamming shut in his mind to make sure that he can keep standing. Bifurcated time branches, lines splitting infinitely and a parabola that never meets zero. Of course it didn’t change this one, There’s a world where Mikey’s still theirs, maybe that should be enough. He’s never cared for enough. 

 

“Hhhhrrrr,” Raph says again, agonizingly slow. He stops walking, looking pointedly at them all with that yellow eye. 

 

Leo glances over at Don, eyes wet. “I’m sorry. I don’t know if he—” He clicks his jaw shut, that hint of begging shitting down with it. Leader shifts in. “Angie… didn’t make it, Raph. I’m so sorry.” 

 

Raph shakes his head, terse. Don isn’t thinking about it, but he imagines the weight of grief as a cloud. Blurring the distances between them. They don’t have time for this and yet, everything seems slowed. Farther away. 

 

Casey hangs his head with a quiet shaky inhale. “I should have been here.” 

 

Leo practically rolls out of Raph’s arms to reach for him. “ No , no. Case, you— buddy, you being here is already impossible, you know that? It’s not on you, he made his choice.” Except Don knows his twin, the telltale way he’s looking at Casey’s chin, not his eyes. Leo’s in charge, so it’s his fault in his mind. 

 

It was always their job to watch Mikey when Raph was gone. Don swallows hard, feels the dam shift. 

 

“He— he wanted you safe,” Leo continues. “We all did.” 

 

Don’s mind shifts to the hours he spent locked in front of monitors, when Mikey would poke his head in and sit quietly on the bench beside him, kicking his feet until he’d concede to joining him for dinner. About a Mikey who wanted to grow up exactly like Leo, a Mikey who spent days searching for dad and then Raph in the mystic plane just to make sure they knew they were loved. 

 

Shit, shit. His hands clench, the dam seethes. 

 

“He's… Here,” Raph says again. Clearer, a hint of emotion under the clicks in his voice. For a wild moment Donnie hears Mikey’s voice asking for them to rewatch Big Hero 6 with him, something like a hysterical laugh nearly punches through him. 

 

Leo looks vaguely sick. “He’s not, I’m sorry, but he’s not anywhere, I was there when he— I gave the order.” 

 

“ No, ” Raph says, carefully and with clicking and odd gurgles in the back of his throat. He taps at his chest harder. “Mike. Here.”

 

Leo shoots a helpless look over at his twin, heart breaking in reverb. Don clears his throat. “Raph, Mikey’s gone.” He says it slow, clearly, placatingly even as his voice goes flat and clinical. “He was dying months ago.” 

 

I was too late, he means. He’s thinking very hard about not thinking about it, too. All the ways that he’s built himself off promises he always keeps and he couldn’t manage this most important one. The one Mikey hadn’t asked him to even make. 

 

Raph’s face twitches, an all over motion not unlike a frown. A grimace. He sets Leo on the ground gently, carefully, and taps with one twisting hand directly over the center of his chest. 

 

“I… found him.” His yellow eye tracks between them. “I. Held on. Look. ” 

 

He doesn’t— Don doesn’t understand. He doesn’t know how Mikey went, but that bright, bursting place in his chest is still and dim. The ground warmed like the sun had beat on it for long summers, and cooling with the fall, but it’s not the mass of fire he knows Mikey to be. There’s a 404 error anywhere he looks. There’s no body here for Raph to carry. 

 

Leo’s staring up at him. Raph tries again. “Mikey’s here. I got him.” 

 

“Oh,” Casey says, voice small. His hand is over his heart as well. “He’s— he’s so small. I think I can—” 

 

“You got him,” Leo says wonderingly. 

 

“Safe,” Raph nods, sharp. Like it’s obvious. Like reaching through outside himself to keep Donnie safe for months was easy, like grabbing the flickering flame of their baby brother and housing it in himself to make sure it didn’t go out was nothing extraordinary. Because their Raph kept them all safe, and had been the whole time. 

 

The shaky breath Don was desperately holding inwards with both hands rattles free. He can feel him, his littlest brother, hovering somewhere in the back of that shared space they all have that feels so much like Leo, waiting to be let back in as politely as he can. Casey squeezes his wrist, and rocks back on his feet ever so slightly with him. 

 

Raph’s yellow eye tracks at each of them and Leo stands up, shakily, wheezing. He reaches his arms up high to grab their brother’s warped face in both hands. “What did we ever do without you,” He says, soft and sad. 

 

He can see from where he’s standing, the way Raph carves himself into his brother’s hand, rattling chirrup from the back of his throat with it. His jaw works several times before he croaks. “Never was. Without Raph.” 

 

“Yeah,” Leo laughs, surprised and watery. “Guess you’re right, huh. Silly me.” 

 

 Somewhere in the distance, a crack like thunder rolls through a hallway. 

 

“Oh,” Don says, wiping his face with his good hand. “Right. That.” 

 

Casey cranes his neck up, “Did you— when did you have time to plant a bomb? ” Oh, he is so Leo’s kid. 

 

Don smiles, tiredly. “Right after they decided to try to put one in me.” 

 

“Go?” Raph says, glancing between the twins like he’s waiting on their queue. Leo laughs, wild and verging on snapping with some kind of stress, but he’s laughing. It’s the most Don’s heard in years. 

 

“Yeah, let’s get out of here.” 

There isn’t as much of a fight as there should have been, once the door cracks open. The Technodrome is alight with burning blue flames and sparking with chemicals by the time they break for it, and the hivemind connection must be a screaming livewire in all of their heads. 

 

The bots are scrambled, not nearly the deadly sharp points they’ve come to resent. Don barely has to summon his armada, but he does anyway. It barely touches the flow of juice in the back of his mind, that spring of energy wrapping through his fingers.  

 

Of course it doesn’t, he thinks, that’s our Angelo. 

 

Casey’s stronger, too. Cuts through swathes like he’s grown into his limbs and become sure footed somewhere along the line.

 

This alternate version of the past seems to have suited him well. Probably the Vitamin D. 

 

Mid-fight, right when Don’s about to really blow the lid off the place, the Technodrome gives an ominous squeal-hiss before falling entirely silent. Tentacles stilling entirely, metal that typically groans and shift, stopping. 

 

It explodes outwards all at once; noise, light, chunks of metallic shards. It’s beautiful, it’s everything he dreamed of, and they are way, way too close. 

 

“Oh shi—” Don dives over top of Casey, conjuring a wall in replacement for the Battle Shell he’d lost with the pure thought of ‘protect’ running in his mind on all fours. 

 

Luckily, he doesn’t have to try too hard. A familiar rose-tinted haze falls across them and Donnie relaxes into it, even as he curls around Casey tighter. He feels the rush of heat distantly, through glass planes in the summer. 

 

“Don’t worry, Donnie,” He thinks he hears. “This is not a hug.” 

 

Maybe he’d allow it this once, even if it was. 

 

“Raph!” Leo gasps, once the debris has settled, and Donnie’s head snaps up ready to take in the new damage, except— 

 

Raph is there, all ninpo fused larger than life, and in his hands, he’s holding a jumping ball of orange fizzing liquid gold, like he plucked it straight out of the night sky itself. 

 

“How did you— Master… Michelangelo?” Casey says, cautiously, something like a break of day in his voice. 

 

The orange-white-gold light in Raph’s hands flickers brighter in response, like a happy waving hello. Like a welcome back. 

 

“I got him,” Raph says, softly, and Leo lets out a horribly guttural choked off sob, lunging forward in a way that can’t be good for any of his organs. Don has half a thought to lurch forward and catch him, but Casey Jr’s grip is iron bars of tentative relief and stern support, and Raph moves in to catch him before he can anyways. 

 

Raph, who’s blinding teary eyed grin could light up the whole city and— oh . 

 

His big brother holds Leo up by the shoulders, with two hands. Full bashful and snaggle toothed, pink-free and spiked, Raphael, like all of them had thought they’d never get ever again. 

 

The orange fire of their baby brother roils around the two of them like a halo. Any smudges of pink shrink back from the glow, recoiling as far as they can into the shadows around them, and— shit. There are tears on his face, despite everything. To be fair to him and his general reputation, it's starting to feel a little bit like they’ve won. 

 

Statistically, an anomaly but, well. The variables have always been more in their favor. 

 

Chapter 4

Notes:

For tai! Hope this soothes the wounds the rest of the fic caused you!

He’s not sure he’s awake, silly as it is. In his ripened age it seems impossible to think that he’s able to have happy dreams anymore. 

 

There’s something ungluing in slow motion in his mind regardless— the ‘drome is a myriad of technicolor fireworks across the sky (he has the distant thought that he would have loved to show Casey what a firework was before this. Maybe he’ll get to it now-- isn't that something) and the bots are falling limp and lifeless with earthquake shudders across the fault lines of their city. 

 

The living room is warm and the rooms are all bright, and he can’t breathe at all. It might be the ruptured lung, it might also be the fact they’ve won.

 

Have they? Is it over?

 

His whole life home was anywhere his family was, and it was a space where he could hear them living, and it was holding on and gritting teeth and acting like he wasn’t a half severed limb himself waiting for the brain to get the message. There’d been a time where they’d been something else, but the Resistance hadn’t needed that Leo, they’d barely needed this Leo and now— 

 

Raph’s good eye is wide and watering, his smile stretched so wide it must hurt, and he’s holding Leo up in his arms like he always did when they were kids. He’s not sure he isn’t dreaming. He doesn’t know where Mikey is.  

 

“Not dreaming, Leo. We’re here, you made it. Thank the whole universe, but you made it,” Raph says, and his voice is croaky because he hasn’t spoken in years, and the thought nearly severs Leo the rest of the way through. 

 

Thank the universe, he says, like that wasn’t the thing that kept him around against his own middle of the night wishes pinned up on nothing at all. But also, thank the universe, because it did. 

 

“We need to—” What. He needs to do what, exactly. His brothers aren’t dead, they aren’t gone. Blinking is too long to be looking away. He can feel the keyboard clacking and the thunderstorm rolling and the firecracker pop of all his brothers around him, sense April’s green mists curling their way across mountains of collapsed metal to find them, and his electric blue-red freezer burn of a kid, getting to his knees across the way. 

 

None of this should be possible— none of this was possible. He had to count on impossibilities with both hands every second of his life until now. 

 

Getting older, as he knew it, was losing and never finding anything to fill it in. All he knew was how to count on cracking apart half full glasses, and pretend. He’d always thought growing up meant having less of the world, and it wanting more of you back.  But his big brother is here, Don’s alive. Casey made his way back to them. Mikey is— Mikey is somewhere, he’s not gone. The door isn’t dark, and the war is over. 

 

Holy shit, he thinks, or maybe says out loud from the way Raph’s eye crinkles with it, like he’s fighting the urge to scold him for language after all this time. Default big brother instinct and— oh . Leo doesn’t have to be that anymore, does he? Another mantle he’d entirely ruined, and one that he can finally put down. 

 

The sky is so big and open around them, only Raph’s hand on his shoulder is keeping him from floating right up into the middle of it. 

 

“Didn’t keep Mikey safe,” he confesses, as seriously as he can with the wheeze to his lungs. The little flame leaps over to him and curls under his chin like it can reassure him in this state that it’s fine, actually. He did a great job, he’s a good leader. He led them all the way through. 

 

He didn’t lose his family, they’re right here. 

 

Almost only counts in horseshoes, and the end of the world, apparently. 

 

Raph clicks his tongue fondly, ducks his head slightly to meet Leo’s listing gaze. “Hey, I’m here now. I can handle it. Let me handle it.” Your turn to look up at the sky , he’s saying. 

 

Leo’s been carrying around capes and anchors since he was old enough to pretend he couldn’t feel the weight of them. He can’t count how many times he’s caught himself wishing it could be anyone else and then wishing no one else but him would ever have to have it. Now that he knows what leading feels like, after all those years of Raph trying to get him to understand— maybe he’s never been strong enough to do anything other than hold on. 

 

The apocalypse is quiet and maybe ending. Leo doesn’t know how to be in a world where he can let go anymore.

 

He flashes a panicked look Don’s direction, who meets it steadily while pretending to be surveying the area, resolutely ignoring the tear tracks on his pale cheeks.

 

Is it over? 

 

“I was in it,” Don says, nodding and catching the unspoken question perfectly. “Connected, I mean, and I can’t hear it anymore. Best guess? It’s dead, Jim.” He blinks back at Casey, and at Raph. “Hey, would you look at that. Guess that means we are the superior life form or whatever.” 

 

“Fuck,” Leo says, all exhale. Raph twitches a look at him like he really is about to scold him for language, and it severs the last strand of sanity he has left in the amalgamation of himself. 

 

Leo bursts out laughing, all forty-years-hewn-rough, face of the Resistance, curled over giggling hysterically at the cracked through concrete. It’s just—- he was dead, he wasn’t anywhere . He’s going to find out how bad of a job Leo did while he was gone, and how he gave up when he was alone and—- 

 

The flame burns softly at his cheek, his twin shifts his weight two feet away and Leo can hear him frowning at him without even looking up. Right , he thinks, helplessly wheezing to himself, not alone anymore.  

 

“‘S like the Sims. A never-nude. Never-alone. Ha.” 

 

“Oookay,” Don’s voice filters in towards him. “We have got to find him whatever counts as medical attention, stat.”

 

“I think that’s just what he’s always like, Uncle Tello,” Casey adds, helpfully. 

 

Raph laughs, breathless and just as stunned as Leo feels. It hits him, in between the cracks of everything else: he has them, that’s how he knows it’s real. 

___

The recovery process is messy, so he’s told. There are several complications that crop up somewhere between Leo’s half-hysterical laughing fit and the completely impossible quest to find functioning medical equipment. Don has a stash of supplies ferreted away in a few places that survived through his absence— Leo is struggling through far too short bursts of lucidity through the entire event and misses their various levels of distress. 

 

He’s told later that he kept calling out for Mikey, that he blearily asked everyone to check in on April who was carefully sitting right in eyesight the entire time for him anyways. That his heart rate plummeted anytime someone wasn’t holding his hand. 

 

Casey Jr. directed everyone on how to intubate, and where to insert the tubing to drain his lungs, and actually and fully realistically, saved Leonardo’s stupid life. He thinks, very quietly, that Casey had grown up entirely in that space between timelines into someone far more incredible than Leo could have shown him on his own.

 

He has a hazy few memories; lying flat on his shell, looking over at his arm and the red trailing towards it, his twin staring at his wristband in forced disinterest with his own arm upwards, and the red threading them all the way up to their hearts; Casey’s dark and earnest eyes and furrowed brows, humming Party Rock Anthem under his breath the way Leo taught him as he stitches his side back together, also the way Leo taught him; April smoothing her thumb across his brow; a little flame skipping around the air beside him.

 

Raph is there the whole time, he both knows and remembers, holding his hand so carefully in his large one, because Leo threw a fit whenever he tried to leave. 

 

He pulls through, because he has to. Because he has brothers waiting for him and the rooms are not dark, and there’s nowhere else for him to be. 

 

“Hey,” he says, the first time he can actually pry his eyelids open and make his throat work long enough to form a thought. Raph’s snoring with his arms crossed in the corner, Casey’s half asleep against the side of his bed with Leo’s hand tucked into his, and blinks awake instantly at him on high alert. 

 

“Oh, you’re— don’t move too much, Sensei, we didn’t have everything we needed but you’re— you’re going to be alright, that’s the important thing.” 

 

There’s something familiar in the way he fusses that Leo can’t place. He smiles as warmly as he can and runs his thumb across his kid’s knuckles. “Course I am. Got the best medic hands in the… in the world looking after me, don’t I?” 

 

Casey stares at him, something bemused and manic filtering in his dark eyes. “No, that’s always been you. I did my best, though.” 

 

Leo can feel the way the tubing pinches, the hot red stab in his lungs that tells him they’re low on painkillers. “You did perfect.” 

 

Casey chokes off a small laugh at that, and startles like he’s surprised at himself for the sound. He shakes his head. “I should have come back sooner.” 

 

It’s kind of frightening, actually, to think that Casey came back at all. He thinks of Mikey. Casey catches something in his eyes before he can voice the creeping horror, though. 

 

“Uncle Angie’s fine. In… in that world he got to practice more, and he had all of you to pull on, I don’t know the specifics. He’s okay.”

 

Oh. Good. “And… and our Mike?” 

 

Casey winces. “He’s still… he’s here.” He lifts his other hand, with the tiny flame nestled right into the palm of it. “We’ll figure out how to bring him all the way back, I’m sure of it.” 

 

“Yeah,” Leo swallows, dry and rough. His eyes burn. He has to ask the other question or it’ll ruin him. “Why’d you come back, Case? I— Ang sent you there so you could, you know. Have a slice, learn to relax a little.” Live, he means. He wasn’t supposed to ever come back to this world, there wasn’t going to be anything left of it. “You could have been happy there, bud.” 

 

The expression on Casey’s face closes out, goes steely and dark for a second before his mouth twists and it crumples into something deeper than Leo can place.  

 

“Case—”  

 

He shakes his head again, eyes shining over bright in the lab lighting. “The… the pizza was great. The upside world was like nothing I’ve ever seen. Getting to meet Uncle Raph was —” He sighs, hangs his head. He has a beard, Leo realizes with a twang in his chest. A beard and a sharpened out chin. He doesn’t know how old his own kid is, how many years he missed. “Sensei—  they didn’t know me there. You were all— you’re you, still, all of you. And you had so much more time to be you without all of this going on. But every night I would think about when we snuck up to the surface a few years back, when Uncle Angie could cloak us better? Do you remember?” 

 

Leo’s heart is lodged all the way in his throat, he can’t speak. He nods. It had been for Casey’s birthday, but they hadn’t found anything good that year to give him. The Krang had just taken over all of the bridge and cut off their one supply route, and Mikey had thought it might be nice to show Case a sunrise. Just the once. 

 

“I remember we climbed all the way up to a rooftop, and I could see the whole world from there. The Krang hadn’t found us yet, so they were far away and the clouds were clear, and you told me that years ago there’d been a park just below. And you’d come up with Uncle Ang and Tello and Raph, and your father, and you’d thought you’d fall all the way up into the sky just from looking. Do you remember that?” 

 

He does, he didn’t think it would matter enough to be remembered. A silly story he thought would make Casey laugh. 

 

“You said the only thing that stopped you was that your big brother was holding your hand. It kept you from floating off. And you said that all the stars way up in the sky were there for me, to bring me back if I ever floated off, too.” 

 

Leo unsticks his throat. “I remember.” 

 

Casey’s hand tightens on his. “I went to that park. Sat on the swings in the day time and it was just-- How was I supposed to stay there with them, when they all had each other? When there wasn't anyone here to stop you from floating away?” 

 

Leo’s heart breaks right along the seams. “Aw, Case—" He can't say he would have been fine, not when the secret of the fact he'd given up is hanging so heavy around his throat. He tries for the next best thing, the truth. " I just wanted you to be happy, kid.” 

 

His kid’s eyes are so fierce and bright, he shakes his head again and pins him all the way through. “ Dad , this is my home, too. How could I be happy anywhere else?” 

 

He's got no words for that, just a pressing flat of his lips to stop the mess of love from pouring right out on the med bay floor between them. He lifts his good arm silently, and thanks everything left in the world for the way Casey still fits perfectly right underneath.

 

__

They carefully ferry him down to the new base they’ve been building out— it’s not underground anymore, which is unsettling in a way he can’t name. Donnie takes one look at his rounded out, fear-gripped eyes though, and finds them a hideout near the back that’s half buried in an excavated train system. 

 

“Probably smarter to readjust all of our eyes slowly, he’ll do better where it’s darker,” Don says, staring at a neon white computer screen without a hint of irony. Leo loves him more than he can fit inside himself, which is convenient. He can store some of it up in his twin like he’s always done. 

 

To Leo, home has always been a slightly dilapidated section of old sewer bricks. It’s also a pile of blankets worn just right, and the startling revelation that hot cocoa packets did survive through to the end of the world and beyond, just like him. The steady hum of Casey Jr., mindlessly working through fixing up a heating fan, his place tucked right into the space beside his biggest brother. 

 

It’s a place he goes and a place he always misses. He doesn’t have to miss it, he doesn’t know where to put all the missing he has left. 

 

They have him propped up on a few pillows, the only ones they’ve managed to find so far. He’d argued a lot when they’d shoved them under his shell, in between yelps of pain as it strained his ribs. It wasn’t worth it, in his mind. Taking all the best soft things and making them all about him when they had sick and injured all over. Plenty of people were without things like blankets and soft beds right now, and the captain goes down with his ship and his crew.

 

The only way he’d settled was when Raph slid in beside him and plopped him against his side with a firm, large hand on his shoulder the way they’d done when Leo was sick and over tired as a kid before he figured out what insomnia was. 

 

“I got you,” he’d said, like it was simple. 

 

He’d tried to tell April he needed to gather everyone the second he could think to, get a body count, reorganize and come up with a plan of action, but then Hueso had stormed in, put one boney hand on Leo’s cheek and said, “Pepi n o, the world is saved. We have no need for a Resistance Leader. We will always have a need for you. Let us make sure Leonardo is in one piece.” And that had sort of been that. 

 

The little orange fire won’t leave his side, curled up in his palm, and he’s warm. The dugout box of their home has stone bricks that are just slightly too cold as he leans his head back into them, and there’s love seeping in from every square inch of the earth all at once up at them so loud he can’t hear anything else. 

 

He lifts the little orange ball up higher in his palm. “It’s okay to come out now, Angie,” He whispers, like he did when Mikey would get so scared as a kid he wouldn’t come out of his shell for days. Leo’d always known the best way to bring him back out. 

 

Raph snores gently beside him, he can hear the bustle of the world picking itself back onto its feet just outside his bedroom door.

 

Leo closes his eyes, and presses his forehead against the last door— the light underneath is bright and inviting. He doesn’t try the handle. 

 

“Don says it won’t hurt anymore, he knows how to fix it so you won’t be so tired. April’s making your favorite soup, and Raphie’s here. He’s alive, did you know that? So I think you should come back. You know he’s been saving up his best hugs.” He says softly, watching the orange firelight twirl around his hands. “It’s safe, Ang. Your family misses you so much. We’re ready for you, whenever you’re ready for us, okay?” 

 

He remembers how they’d always try to cover Mike up, big blanket forts and his favorite songs, and Leo would tell secret jokes quietly in the dark just for his only little brother in the world. Raph breathes heavy and deep, Leo tucks himself a little bit further under his arm like he’s still young and his dad is still making tea around the corner. 

 

“Thank you for not leaving me behind,” Leo confesses, sharing his secrets like he always did. “I’m sorry I made you go.” 

 

He swallows, burning through with the truth of it and keeps his voice gentle. The little fire barely feels like anything at all, he cups it with his hand as much as possible like he can keep out the world if he tries. 

 

His chest is tight with something too big for love. “You can come back, Mike. I promise, I swear. I won’t let you down again.”

 

Raph’s arm tightens around him. 

 

“You never could,” Raph says, sleepy and stern. The fire twists around Leo’s fingers and all the way around his wrist like it’s agreeing with all of itself. 

 

“Sorry, I wasn’t trying to wake you—” 

 

“Hey,” Raph cuts him off gently. “Raph missed out on a lot of the in-betweens. Happy to be here for all the rest of them, boss.”

 

Leo’s heart twists sharply, he ducks his chin. “Don’t—” He’s not even sure what he’s asking for, really. Don’t be happy, don’t act like he’s in charge. Don’t sound so proud. He’s built himself in the past few years around the shape of what it might feel like to have Raph’s pride. He’s never once thought he’d earned it, though. 

 

There’s a dark pit in his heart where those handful of minutes exist, where the doors were dark. Where Mikey went down because Leo asked him to, the world where he was made to walk with his heart half burned out of his chest for days and weeks because Donnie had wandered off into the daylight alone. 

 

“Don’t what,” Raph says, still in that soft voice. It’s the one he uses when Mike’s sad. His big brother voice, he itches and burns through all over to hear it. “Too old and in charge for Raphie, are we?” 

 

Leo doesn’t know what to say, the center of himself is all run dry and hollow, but he shakes his head fiercely anyways. Raph’s always his best with little brother’s to worry over, Leo’s only ever liked himself as part of that. He’d never give that up, not if he could help it. 

 

The firelight plays with his fingers, making rings and bracelets and infinity loops and he just wants his little brother back more than anything, the one he told him to throw himself on a pyre, the one who’d only smiled and said okay. He’s greedy, he always has been. He didn’t want to separate rooms from Donnie, his twin had to teach him morse code just so he didn’t feel too far apart. He hasn’t wanted any second of this life that’s made his brothers leave him. He’s greedy because he wants a world where Mikey had said no, where they’d gone out together instead. 

 

Raph squeezes him, hand on Leo’s shoulder with a small shake. “What’s going on in that head of yours, huh?”

 

His throat is so dry. He finds words for Raph anyways. “Just the usual.” 

 

Raph hums. “You know, I didn’t think I’d get to do this again— I mean, of course I didn’t. It’s just— I remember parts of what it was like, in there.”

 

Leo blinks over. “You do?” 

 

“Yeah, just little bits. I remember— there was this dark path, I was walking through it for a real long time, and I just knew out there that you guys were looking for me too. It was cold, all the time it was cold, but… You know what helped?”

 

Leo shakes his head. 

 

Raph’s smile is crooked and twinkling, and about one fifth of the only good thing left in the world. “There was this feeling I had the whole time, wherever I went while I was up there, that somewhere on the other side there was this big warm place waiting for me. Made it easy to follow my feet back home, you know?” 

 

Huh . There’s a part of him that wants to argue. Some big terrible barbed thing he’s let coil too deep in the years where his gentlest brother wasn’t around to pry it loose, something that riots in him like a sixteen year old that wanted more movie nights and to play tag one night longer. Mostly, he’s tired. He leans his head on Raphie’s shoulder. 

 

Raph’s big hand cups his, pulling the flame up higher. He looks at it jumping in between the loose cage of Leo’s fingers so fondly. “You did good. Both of you. Thanks for staying together for me.” 

 

Leo’s too old and war weary to do something like burst into tears, but his heart sinks and soars and ricochets everywhere behind his ribs anyways. “You said be right back,” Leo whispers, so he had to stay. Raph said he would come back, so he had no choice but to stay right where he was and lose everything anyway. 

 

“I did,” Raph agrees, his arm squeezes a little tighter. He looks a little guilty around his edges, which is a crime. The only fault Raph ever had in any of this was thinking they would be okay without him.

 

“Come on, Raph,” Leo rolls his chin up towards him, disarming smile locked and loaded to fling the tension away from them. Banish it completely, if he can. “I’m sure you’ve got notes. Army was doing a lot better before I took over.” 

 

Raph huffs, big easy breaths Leo could set his watch to. "I'm proud of you, you know."

 

It burns under his skin. "Aw come on," Leo tries. "Just did what you were already doing. Save that for the rest of the crew, hm?"

 

Raph’s good eye doesn’t change, fond and too hard to look at. Leo shifts his gaze to stare at his chin instead, like it’ll burn any less. He feels the tiny exhale under his chin more than he hears it. 

 

“Thing is, I have these absolutely crazy little brothers. You might have met them, kinda short. Green, color coded? They’re always doing these impossible things, you wouldn’t believe.” His beak presses into the side of Leo’s head, right against his temple. Leo is both forty something and ten years old, waiting in the dark for his big brother to tell him it’ll be okay. He hates that he wants it so badly, but it doesn’t stop any part of the wanting for it.   

 

Raph chuckles, quiet and sad. “I can’t stop thinking about how one of my crazy, impossible, perfect little brothers held on long enough to save the world. Kind of amazing, actually.” 

 

Leo works his jaw silently, the flame warms his palm still held in Raph’s larger hand. “It wasn’t hard,” Even though it was. Even though it was the hardest thing. Waiting should never have been so hard, he’d do it a thousand times over to have this. “Just kept your seat warm for you.” 

___

The world post-post ending starts and stops in fits. There’s a long stretch before Leo’s allowed up to move around, before breathing can be classified as ‘fairly normal’ and Casey will give him the okay. He spends a lot of it attempting to wander around before someone yells at him to take it easy, getting a lot of no’s and half answers from people he’s meant to be leading. It’s… infuriating, but the panic in him is a quiet thrumming thing that steals his voice away more than it lends to its volume. 

 

Some mandated rule from Raph means that no one will tell him the final count, how bad it is. Even his best bribes to Casey just make the kid go tight lipped and stone faced. They think it's some martyring guilt complex, probably, but he needs to know how big the toll is, how many lives are on his shoulders. It’s not a matter of pride, it’s about responsibility. About what he owes. (He built this home to be something that stayed, what’s the point of him if he’s the only thing left standing.) 

 

When he finally gets the all clear from Jr., Don’s there to help him. He grabs his arm and pushes a modified hunk of metal under it. “Pretty sure you remember how a crutch works,” Except he sidles over to Leo’s other side and wraps his arm around his shell anyways. 

 

The little flame hops up on Don’s shoulder, simmering quietly. 

 

“Where to?” Leo asks, out of breath just from standing. 

 

Don hums back at him, “World is your oyster.” 

 

“Never liked oysters,” Leo says with a crinkle to his beak. “Can I—”

 

Don sighs. “Sure, immediately after your life threatening brush with rib trauma we can head to mission control. Why not, he said, rhetorically and knowingly.” 

 

Leo snickers. 

 

He’s not actually ready emotionally to walk through the door, to see what remains of his people, but hey. He’s built a career out of doing things he was in no way ready for, it’s never been about what he wanted. 

 

The first step through the hallway, he has to squint through the light before realizing with a jolt that it’s just open air. Outside, blue-orange sky. The way he hasn’t seen in years. “Huh,” He says, out loud. “Didn’t think it could still look that color.” 

 

Don says nothing, but pulls Leo’s weight closer to his side anyways. They take one shaky step together forwards. 

 

Sudden noise startles him. 

 

Leo blinks away from the sky, towards the half built hallways of their new base. There’s lines of people on both sides, a clear path in the middle. He can see Hueso, Baron, Todd, Kendra— they’re all clapping, smiling wide behind bruises and bandaged cheeks. 

 

He stares at them, then over at Donnie who arches a brow. “What? Wasn’t my idea, Nardo. You’re not so future savingly special that you’d get to skip out on the whole heroes welcome event. I’m just an accomplice.”

 

April appears at Leo’s other side, dimples shining through with how hard she’s grinning. “They wanted to.” She laughs, and pushes him forward gently. “Let them say thank you.” 

 

For what, he thinks. He can feel Donnie’s eye roll, he reaches up to tap out their code right on Leo’s plastron. 

 

Knock tap knock knock. Knock knock knock. Tap tap knock. 

 

‘You’. Just, Leo. 

 

“I think there’s only one dum dum who could have pulled any of this off,” Donnie says, fond and quiet. “Thanks for saving the world, Leon. My favorite twin is in it after all.”

 

It’s not fair that Leo’s found so much when they’ve lost more, when every single one of these people has given all of themselves and then some. They’re all grinning though, all of them. Teary eyed and cheering as he makes himself straighten up and walk forward. 

 

"Thanks, boss," Kendra says.

 

"Good work," Baron nods.

 

"Always believed in you!" Says Todd.

 

Leo holds himself together, walks forwards with his twins arm around his, and looks right up at the sky.

 

___

Days fade into weeks carefully, with none of the slapdash reactive energy he’s built his bones out of the last two decades. 

 

Humanity ekes itself out from the cracks and crevices of the world cautiously along with them. It’s not easy, it’s not anything pleasant, but Don’s built ray guns out of scrap metal and sheer stubborn curiosity before, and he’s got a working dial up connection to three different countries going before anyone can blink. 

 

There’s a lot to do, and somehow a lot less to do than any of them are used to. A big blank step forward in every direction they look. 

 

“Is it crazy to say I want to go to college,” Don says, leaning his head back on Leo’s brand new chair. They’d fished it out of the back of a warehouse for him, somehow. A few younger members of their community sheepishly brought it to their doorstep with a red piece of string wrapped all the way around in lieu of a bow. He hadn’t cried because he isn’t sure he knows how to anymore, but it had been a near thing. 

 

Raph’s in the next room— it’s an entire universe folded up in a polaroid square in his pocket to think they can have that again. Rooms, kitchens. A house with their name on the front and a door that only has two locks. 

 

He leans his head through the archway, a tiny cup of tea in hand, eye patch black and bold over one eye. The little twist of firelight hopping around his knuckles. “Not crazy. I didn’t think they still had universities running, though.”

 

Don shrugs. He’s fiddling with a tiny piece of metal by Leo’s knees and won’t show him what it is. Leo might be able to walk around, but he thinks tussling his twin for it would be a bit too much for both of them still. Not that he isn’t tempted. 

 

“They’re opening some. Got offered a full ride, which. You know. The world nearly ate shit and died and capitalism somehow survived.” 

 

“We could fix that,” Raph says with his dainty little cup. The best part is that he means it, which is sort of why he’s a gift. 

 

“Don, you could teach any class you wanted to,” Leo laughs. “There are literally entire fields of science named after you.” 

 

Donnie waves a hand at him. “So not the point. I’d be the only professor out there with no commas to my name. I think a nice six PhD’s would fix me.” 

 

Leo laughs harder, leaning back in his chair. “You know what, yeah. Go for it. Scare them all with new world records on how fast you can graduate.” 

 

“I’ll take that bet.” 

 

Raph steps farther out into the room, stirring at his cup. “Huh.” 

 

Leo rolls his head towards him, still grinning. “What is it, big guy?”

 

“Just… guess that is a thing we should think about. Future and stuff.”

 

All Leo has is the rope he tied around himself when he was sixteen— the inexorable pull forwards of wherever his family led him, whatever else they needed.  Beyond the whole of not letting humans see him, beyond his grandstanding and acting out, he’d been mostly just worried about them staying together. Then, with everything, he’d just been putting one foot in front of the other.

 

The little flame is in his palms before he can blink. He curls his hand around it carefully. 

 

“You know,” Don says, resolutely not looking up even though Leo can feel how tense he is. “I can always do online classes once they’ve got that running again.” 

 

“Lots of work to do around here,” Raph adds. 

 

He sees it for what it is, the slip of panic under all of them that echoes the same. “No hurry in sorting anything out,” Leo says, leaning his head back again. “We have all the time we need.” 

___

The missing piece at the center is of course Mikey. They all feel it. Near the end, Angie hadn’t been up for much running or playing games with the younger kids, but they remember that he did once. The older folks ask after him and leave patches with quilted hearts with Donnie and with Leo for a lack of material help they can offer. He’s loved, they’re all so loved. He could fill up the drained ocean with how rich in love they’ve always been.

 

He hopes Mikey knows how missed he is, if the tiny firelight can remember anything. He hopes he sees it.  

 

“Wherever he went, he must be tired,” April says, arms folded on the corner of Leo’s blanketed knees, poking at the tiny firelight gently. “He was tired a lot, for a long time. Maybe he’s just catching up on the rest.” 

 

“I don’t know how Raph got him back,” Leo adds. “I thought— I mean, I saw it happen.” 

 

April hums. “Maybe it’s like… he was almost gone. And some of it stayed with Raph, and he just… gave it back?”

 

Little Mikey had always dove for Raph first when he had nightmares. They’d been inseparable for the longest time growing up when Mike just absorbed all the attention Raph heaped on him. Whatever sun-beam hell on wheels Mikey had become was just him reflecting Raph’s big heart back out into the world, he’d always thought. It makes sense that he’d go to Raph after Leo broke him apart. 

 

“He’s missing one hell of a party.” Leo sighs. 

 

April smiles all in the eyes. “You know how much our little man would hate that.” 

 

Leo tries not to let anything show in his face, he kicks his foot out at April and the tiny spark just to watch it fly up in the air and land on her head. She snorts, leaning her hand on her chin instead. 

 

“To think,” April says, on a big exhale. “We’d be here at the end of the world.” 

 

It doesn’t seem so awful when she says it, it sounds like a good thing. 

 

She scoops the firelight off the top of her head, holds it in both palms and watches it shimmer. “Now, Michael,” She says, in her big sister voice that always got Mike and Leo to stop flat in their tracks. “I think it’s about time you figured out how to get yourself back here.” Her eyes flick up to Leo’s for a moment, and back. “You’ve got a couple of brothers that are losing their minds to see you. Do your magic thing and get yourself home, alright?” 

 

Leo’s eyes burn, he presses his lips together as flat as he can. “Yeah, buddy. Our home is beautiful now, you wouldn’t believe.”

___

 

He checks every night. Closes his eyes and feels for that place, that waiting room in the center of himself. The light is bright under the doorway, it’s steady, it’s warm. It still feels like a ‘be right back’.

 

He’s waited a long time before. He can wait as long as Mike needs him to. 

___

A few weeks later (to think that time can pass without any alarm bells or red alerts or dropping graphs now), Leo wakes up with more energy than he’s had in years. 

 

Rolling out of bed doesn’t awaken several creaking pains or rattling of teeth, and he can even manage to pull himself together enough to dress without calling for reinforcements. He’s brave enough to open the window at the side of their home, to look at the clear sky. He feels calm. It’s a thought, it’s potentially even a miracle. 

 

He breathes in. He imagines unclenching his fists at his sides. Of letting some of the weight he’s been dragging behind him go. 

 

“Someone’s chipper,” Raph’s voice greets him. He stretches and yawns, and fusses with the hem of his new sweater. It’s one that Casey made for him, gray with a little red heart patched right over his— they’ve been spending time together when Leo’s ‘rest’ schedule knocks him off his feet by 8pm on Leo’s own suggestion. He’d seen the awed and nervous lilt to Casey’s shoulders, the hunched draw to Raph’s, and decided enough was enough. 

 

(He’d heard part of a conversation in between naps, about not remembering and guilt. About wanting more than anything to find all the pieces of his past and know them all. He pretended not to notice the circles under Raph’s mask the next day. Softie. ) 

 

“It’s a good day,” Leo decides firmly, and makes Raph sit so he can try out the instant coffee they’d found the other day. It’s a delicacy, really, but well. Old stories about unused fine china and all. He wants to spoil his family as much as he can, sue him. 

 

The guilt isn’t as bright behind his eyes today, either. It’s still there, threadbare and anchor heavy, but he can think around it. Remember that he chose this, them. He walked all the way to this tomorrow with his own feet, and he wants to stay in it. 

 

Raph smiles back at him, a little wondrously and wobbly. “I think you might be right,” he agrees softly. There’s a backyard they could use, he thinks. A community bursting from the dry earth around them. 

 

Maybe tomorrows aren’t the worst thing. 

 

He makes it all the way to mid day, bullying Donnie and Raph into a cuddle pile to enjoy a good session of authentic basking. They’re piled up together on a thick patch of sunbeam, Raph’s arm stolen as Leo’s pillow and Donnie’s ankle smacking into his, before it hits him that he hasn’t seen the little firelight all day. 

 

Panic spears through him, bright and thick, before he slams his eyes shut. Chasing himself down corridors to the waiting room. Mikey’s room. Dread thick in his heart, except— 

 

It’s— it’s bright. It’s open. The door is streaming wide with fizzing swirls of creamsicle orange and tangerines.  

 

Oh. There you are, something says. 

 

He blinks his eyes open. 

 

Don is by his arm, flat on his stomach and stretched all the way out like a cat. Leo’s half leaning on Raph’s chest to make sure he doesn’t stretch his ribs out the wrong way, and he can hear him breathing deeply and evenly, and— 

 

There’s another weight, right by his knee. 

 

He sits up, hears the startled exhale of his brothers around him and blinks rapidly in the midday sun. 

 

“Oh,” Raph breathes, mouse-quiet and waterlogged. 

 

Mikey blearily blinks back at them, from his place on the floor and yawns. He reaches up and rubs his eyes, young like Leo hasn’t known him to be in ages, and looks at them all. “Good morning.”

 

No one moves for a long second, and Mikey’s beak scrunches as he tries to get his bearings. 

 

Don scrambles forwards first, hand over Mikey’s forehead and his wrist guard whirring without saying anything. He’s grabbing in bursts and starts with that flat press to his mouth Leo knows means overwhelmed. It gets Leo to follow his thread out of inertia, to scoop Mikey’s hand into his shaking one. 

 

Leo leans forwards too, the medic in him taking over. His pulse is a little slow, he feels warm. Baked over by the sun. “You’re back.” He’s real, they’re here. The doors, the lights: they’re all on. 

 

It’s okay. Is it? 

 

Mike blinks at him, his voice comes out wooly, stuffed full with dozy sleep. “Oh. Did I go somewhere? I think I slept too long.” 

 

“Oh my god, little man, I missed you so much.” Raph scoops him into a careful hug, pressing his cheek into Mikey’s head like when they were kids. Mike goes with it, laughing sleepily and patting at his arm. 

 

“Didn’t mean to make you miss me,” he says with the tiniest of frowns, like he’s not quite awake. Raph buries a sob in the side of his neck that’s all delight, and Leo slowly inches his way farther into believing this is real. 

 

“How are you back?” Don cuts in, leaning closer. Ever reading Leo’s thoughts, the half of himself that isn’t afraid to burst the bubble if this isn’t real at all. 

 

Mike blinks at them all slowly, sunrise crashing across his bright blue eyes as young as Leo always knew them. A grin stretches across his cheek— freckles, like spots of crayon on them. Stars in the night sky. He reaches out and presses his knuckles into Leo’s chest. 

 

“Followed you home. You kept all the lights on,” Mikey yawns, smiling warmly.

 

Leo blinks, heart jammed right in his throat. He laughs, strangled and awed, rushing forward to press his beak right there on the top of his baby brother's head. “Angie, I don’t have any ninpo anymore. Remember?” 

 

Mike scrunches his face at him and shakes his head stubbornly. All younger brother all of the time, finally, again; Leo could explode with it. “You’re always the brightest. Can feel you wherever I go, silly.” 

 

It cracks through him, just as much as Raph’s eyes on him. As much as the way Donnie shifts to shove his shoulder into Leo’s, like they all know and agree. Like him staying alive was any kind of miracle at all and not just the absolute least he could do. 

 

You kept the lights on. 

 

It’s all he’s been able to do, to keep going forward without them.

 

Raph scoops an arm around him before he can let the wild broken sob in him worm it’s way free, and abruptly he’s got a chestful of baby brother curled against him. 

 

“Didn’t mean to make you leave,” Leo croaks. It’s as much of an apology as he can manage, not nearly as much as Mike deserves.

 

That horrid guilt Leo’s been carrying in him like a burr stings sharp and loud. His heart thumps wildly with the need to grovel for forgiveness, but he can’t speak a word. Mikey burrows closer.

 

“Everyone’s okay?” 

 

You weren’t. He nods. Raph coos, smoothing a hand over the back of Mike’s head. “Everyone’s fine. Casey’s back too.”  

 

Mikey leans back to look at them, gaze turned solid and resolved. His baby brother, mystic warrior of legend who’d saved another world from any part of this crawling forward at all, who never makes him say any of the things he can’t bear to, bursts into tears. 

 

Everyone freezes. 

 

“I’m— I’m so sorry ,” Mike manages, and crashes back into Leo’s middle, wrapping his arms around him. 

 

Leo sends panicked looks at Don and Raph before his big brother instincts take over and he’s squeezing Mike back twice as hard with his good arm. Heart in his throat, breaking to pieces in the sunlight, he unsticks himself. “For what? You came back, it’s safe. We love you.” 

 

“I wanted— I saw you, Leo. You thought you were alone, and I couldn’t—” 

 

You gave up, his brain reminds him. He’s going to say he saw it, that you stopped fighting. He’s going to tell them you wanted to stop. 

 

“You were so brave,” Mikey says, watery. “But you thought we left you.” 

 

Leo swallows roughly, looks up at his twin. Remembers the thumping, the measured taps and the feeling of rolling thunderstorms in summer from Raph. “No. Not really.” He squeezes harder, panic quieting underneath. “I wasn’t alone even for a second.” 

Notes:

Trying to get into using my tumblr more - find me at klunkcat!