The Irrealis Turtle

by molotovs_slushie

Summary:

“Irrealis moods are a category of verbal moods that indicate that certain events have not happened, may never happen, or should or must or are indeed desired to happen, but for which there is no indication that they will ever happen...all best expressed...as the might-be and the might-have-been.” – André Aciman, Homo Irrealis.

Leo reads a book. It gives him an existential crisis.

Notes:

Hi hi hello! I hope you enjoy this little thing that I had to get out of my system. I haven't written fanfiction in over a decade, and it's my first time posting to ao3. Woop woop!
Shout out to my sister, @Hyperfixation_Goddess for beta reading this.

Leo needed to get out of his skin.

He’d tried being alone, leaving the lair for solo patrol as often as he could, for hours at a time. He’d tried being around other yokai and letting his identity melt into the crowds of the Hidden City. He’d tried meditating. He’d tried training until he passed out. None of it soothed the itch, that burning itch under his skin that screamed wrong. He hadn’t even noticed it until he read that stupid fucking book.

*

April had been reading it for her philosophy class in the medbay toward the end of Leo’s recovery. He snorted at the title: Homo Irrealis.

“Ha. Homo.”

“Are you ten?” she asked, without looking up, but he heard her smile all the same.

“No, I’m Leo. What’s that book about, anyway? It better be about gay people.”

“First, it’s complicated. I don’t know how to explain it other than time is...really weird. Secondly, no, it’s an essay collection. But this guy did write Call Me by Your Name.”

“Ex-CUSE me, you could have led with that, April! He wrote the ultimate gay love story between the alluring Oliver and the naive Elio! Which was adapted into the 2017 movie starring Armie Hammer and Timothee Chalamet where he FUCKS—”

April waved her hands wildly to cut him off. “Yes, Leo, ohmygod don’t say it, I’ve seen it. I’ll let you read it once I’m done with this class if you promise to shut up about that scene.”

“Anything for you, dear sister.”

*

Approximately three months later, in the chilly, wet December, April handed Leo the book and said, “Go nuts. Don’t get discouraged if it seems difficult. It was hard for me, too.”

Leo scoffed. “I’ll leave it till after Christmas, but trust me April, I’m the jack of all trades, master also of all those trades. No problemo.”

It was, in fact, a little problemo.

He spent a week on just the first one, but over that week he found himself in love with the writing. He sought out the poem on the train Aciman had mentioned (he couldn’t find it on the subway anymore, so he printed out a copy of his own and taped it to his wall). He didn’t understand everything about it, but that made it more alluring, he thought. (Is this how Donnie felt when he was on the cusp of discovery?) There was something about it that stirred him, that kept him awake at night, but he couldn’t put his finger on why. He talked to April about it one day while playing video games.

“Well,” she said, “it’s a collection of essays all about the same thing, right? So you’re going to run into one that you find more interesting than the others. Once you find that one, the rest will fall into place around it. That’s the way it happened for me.”

“What was yours?”

She hummed. “Evenings with Rohmer: Maud. It kind of forced me to look at emotions in a different way, and...it kind of pushed me to ask out Sunita.”

Leo gawked. “Really?”

She laughed. “Yeah. But everyone reads it a little differently. I wouldn’t be surprised if you took something from it that I hadn’t even considered. But yeah, you’ll find your spot.”

April was right, of course. His epiphany came while reading “Sebald, Misspent Lives”, and his carefully constructed walls that he had built around the section of his mind labeled “INVASION: DO NOT TOUCH” disintegrated with the following paragraph.

“It is the script of roads not taken and of lives that have been cast adrift, unlived, or misspent and are now marooned in space and time. The life we’re still owed and the fate that dangles before us and that we project at every turn and feed upon and, like a virus or a suppressed gene, gets passed on from one day to the other, from person to person, from one generation to the next, from author to reader, from memory to fiction, from time to desire and back to memory, fiction, and desire, and never goes away because the life we’re still owed and cannot live transcends and outlasts everything, because it is part yearned for, part remembered, and part imagined, and it cannot die and it cannot go away because it never, ever really was.”

*

Leo stopped reading it two weeks ago. A human he had never met somehow managed to get his hands into his soul and tear him apart bit by bit. He’d managed to put off thinking about That Day for so long and this made it impossible not to think about. Overnight he’d turned into a jumpy mess, a change that didn’t go unnoticed by anyone.

Donnie grabbed him by the back of the shell as he tried to slink away to go on patrol for the fourth night in a row. “Oh no you don’t, ‘Nardo. You were the one to schedule mandatory Twin Time, you aren’t skipping out on me.”

“Twin Time?” Leo mentally ran through his calendar, and kicked himself when he realized—yes, that’s right, they were supposed to do something today, and this had been the plan for upwards of a month. Fuck, what were they doing again? “Oh. Yeah. Uh...what did you wanna do?”

“You’re kidding.”

“For the sake of this argument, let’s pretend I’m not.”

“Exasperated sigh. You said we could go see Shakespeare in the Park. I’ve been looking forward to it, even though it is Hamlet, the overrated one.”

It all clicked into place, and Leo grinned. A perfect opportunity to take his mind off of everything and take Donnie’s attention off of him had fallen into his lap.

He sliced a portal into the air to Central Park and said, “After you, mi hermano.”

*

So...maybe Hamlet wasn’t the best play to take his mind off of things. The Prince agonizing over every decision and the weight of his destiny hanging over him for the entire play made Leo sweat. He tried to focus on Donnie’s commentary, which did make him laugh, but Ophelia’s death turned his stomach.

“Scoff. What a needless, illogical death. Never would have happened if he’d just killed Claudius. Othello would have done it by now.” Donnie turned up his beak at the close of the scene. “What say you, Leonardo?”

“Uh...yeah. Yeah, this does kind of drag—why does he take so long to kill the guy?” Leo quickly went along with his twin’s opinion, but his mind raced, dragging him through every possible life Hamlet could have lived, every way he could have stopped Claudius before now, and how he wasn’t sure that he would be happy in any of them anyway.

“Unfortunately, dear brother, that is the entire point of the show. We are supposed to be frustrated, but at the same time, put ourselves in his shoes to ask if we would do the same. I, with my superior intellect and ninjitsu skills, would not.”

“Hm.”

The show went on. The set pieces were incredible and the acting was top-notch. As a certified drama queen, Leo could appreciate that. The play itself, however, wormed into his brain the same way the essay did.

At the end, when Horatio stood in agony over his dead friend (“They’re obviously lovers,” Donnie insisted), Leo began to cry. Yes, in a thousand other worlds, he and Horatio were the same, and he and Hamlet were the same, and he and Ophelia were the same. No one escapes unscathed. So why did he end up here, where everyone lived and everyone suffered, and no one was punished for what they did wrong?

Imagine a Hamlet where everyone lived—then it wouldn’t be Hamlet at all.

Imagine tears, dropping onto the dead February grass.

“Incredulous stammering! Don’t tell me you’re crying over this...this perfectly average work of The Bard!” Despite the words, Donnie touched the nape of Leo’s neck like he was made of crumbling ash. “For Darwin’s sake, Leo, there were fucking pirates. Pirates! They had nothing to do with anything!”

Leo laughed, wet and pathetic. “I know. The pirates were pretty stupid.”

They were quiet for a moment.

“Leo...what’s going on?” Donnie asked. “Don’t lie to me, I know it’s...it has to be something about the invasion.”

Leo’s skin prickled. He wasn’t sure the last time he’d heard that word, other than maybe Casey when Leo was still early in recovery. And it was funny how his brother said the phrase, tumbling out of his mouth—“theinvasion”. Donnie didn’t like to shy away from language. He said exactly what he meant to say.

The winter wind blew between them and pushed Leo’s mask tails in front of his mouth.

“I guess it shouldn’t be too surprising. Angelo and I have been working on a little project together, researching trauma, and I’ve learned that symptoms don’t always show right away. It’s not uncommon for it to be latent for a while and then something...triggers it.”

Change the subject. “Mikey? Sitting still long enough to research?”

Donnie smiled, a real soft one, and said, “I know, right? I was already doing some work on it and one night, he came in to sit with me. He asked me questions and got really into it. It’s been...it’s been really nice, actually, to have him spend so much time with me, doing something I’m interested in.”

Leo smiled, too. “That’s great, bro.”

“You changed the subject.”

“You noticed.”

“Scoff. You underestimate my powers of observation. I just wanted to tangent briefly about our dear baby brother.”

Leo’s smile faltered. “He...his hands. He’s not overworking them?”

“No. Whenever he’s writing or drawing for me, I make him take breaks every 15 minutes to stretch.”

“And you totally do the same thing for yourself, right?”

“Again, deft change of subject, but you won’t get out of this, Leo.”

Neither of them said anything for a long while.

Then Leo stood, and sliced a portal open, and said, “Follow me.”

*

They arrived somewhere dark, far darker than New York. The snow on the ground made Leo thankful he’d worn boots to the show. Seriously, who does Shakespeare in the Park in February?

“Where are we?” asked Donnie. “Jersey? Please don’t tell me we’re in Jersey. Or if we are, at least South Jersey where they’re less obnoxious.”

“Cherry Springs, Pennsylvania. Just south of the New York border.”

Donnie furrowed his eyebrows. “Pennsylvania? What—”

“Look up.”

I should have gotten a picture of his face.

They stood in an empty field. Above them, a stripe of the Milky Way curved across the fishbowl sky in shades of white and orange and blue and purple and green. It looked like a rip in spacetime, or the subsequent suture of that rip. The stars splattered across it in the hundreds of thousands, and neither of the twins had seen anything like it ever before.

Donnie breathed out an “Oh” so quiet Leo almost didn’t hear.

“I’ve wanted to come out here for a while,” said Leo. “But I didn’t want to come alone.”

“It’s...wow. Wow.”

“I knew you’d like it.”

The silence with Donnie was different than the silence of Leo being alone. Silence alone meant that no one could see his face twist with the memories that ravaged his mind, both ego and id. It meant that he could pace or scratch or bite his nails or pick at his carapace while he unraveled himself, thought himself into a black hole.

Donnie couldn’t just see his actions and expressions. He could see through him. Raph and Mikey needed to mind meld to read Leo’s thoughts, but they couldn’t get to his emotions. Donnie only had to make eye contact to figure out how Leo felt, and he could do the same. Their silence was comfortable, like a weighted blanket—a reminder that he wasn’t alone at all.

“Donnie, since the Krang...we know that there are multiple dimensions. Many universes. Right?”

“Yes, though I’d been theorizing a long time before that. It’s more difficult for me not to acknowledge the possibility.”

“Right, well…” Leo took a deep breath. “What if...I’m not your Leo?”

Even in the darkness, he could see the gears in Donnie’s brain turning before he replied. “Go on.”

“Well, think about it. There are probably hundreds, thousands of universes that are really, really close to ours, but just slightly different. I was in the prison dimension for like three minutes, but what if...what if I was supposed to stay there? What if this is all wrong?”

“Leo…”

“Look, I know it sounds crazy—I probably am crazy. I just...I’ve had this lingering voice at the back of my head since that day, and it’s been speaking gibberish to me for months, and now I’ve just learned what it’s saying, and it’s saying, ‘This isn’t how it was supposed to go.’” A lump rose in his throat and he tried to speak around it. “I shouldn’t have come back. I am supposed to be back in there, and I—you would all be better off—”

“Don’t you dare finish that thought, Leonardo Hamato. Don’t you dare say that we would be better off without you, because we fucking wouldn’t be. I wouldn’t be. For three minutes I lost the only person who understood me better than anyone. For three minutes I lost my best friend. So don’t ever say that again.”

Leo felt the words against him like scalding water. Tears slipped from his eyes again, and it became harder to speak around the lump. “Sorry. Sorry, I didn’t—that’s not what I meant.”

“Then tell me what you really mean,” and he said it without a hint of sharpness. No, he knew Donnie. It was a plea.

“Shit, this is so hard to explain...Um, I shouldn’t have logically come out of Mikey’s portal. You know that, I know that. And I think that my having lived was wrong. Not...Mikey wasn’t wrong for saving me, and I’m not sad I’m alive, or anything.” He took a deep breath.
“I think it was my destiny to be tortured in there with Krang Prime. And I defied that destiny, and the universe doesn’t know what to do with me now, but the life I should have lived, where I stayed in the Prison Dimension for all eternity, suffering—it reminds me at every turn. And then there are all these other decisions I made that day. I wonder if that was the true destiny, or if the true destiny was for Raph to not make it. Or me to cause the end of the word. And the worst part about all of this is that these lives I haven’t lived can’t go away or die because I never lived them. They didn’t happen, they don’t exist, so they can’t stop existing.” Tears streamed down Leo’s face and he couldn’t hold back the sobs that shook his shoulders.

“I-I can’t take this, Donnie. It’s like-like a black hole follows me around all day like a fucking puppy.”

Donnie said nothing but shuffled closer to Leo so their shoulders were touching. A metal arm from his battle shell extended out and stroked his back.

“Am I losing my mind?”

“Not at all. Even if you were, I’d help you find it.”

“God, I don’t deserve you.”

“I could say the same thing.” Donnie sighed. “I...I’m different. From the rest of you. You’re all so much like Dad, and I’m basically Draxum’s carbon copy, except for the mystic stuff.”

Leo scrunched up his beak. “What? Draxum? How are you—”

“I’ve won every “most likely to take over the world” poll since we were tots, ‘Nardo. I don’t get that ambition from Dad.” He turned to face him, and Leo could see the tiny details on his face—the micro-scales, the marked on eyebrows on the fabric of his mask, and the little scar on his lip he’d gotten when he ate shit on Leo’s skateboard.

“Even the ninpo doesn’t come as naturally to me. Sometimes...sometimes I think I should have been Draxum’s. Maybe it would have been a shitty childhood, I don’t know, but I understand. I really do understand. It’s not about whether the other outcome would have been better for us or not. It’s about how things should have gone. I don’t even subscribe to that fate or destiny nonsense, you know this. Logically, I would have been Draxum’s favorite. Logically, you shouldn’t have come out of that portal.”

“But we did,” Leo whispered.

“Yes. And we can’t undo any of it. If I could undo anything I already would have.” Donnie reached up and held Leo’s face in his hands, wiped away the tears with his thumbs. “But then who would we be?”

Leo didn’t say anything, and the two brothers stood there, hundreds of miles from home, under the beautiful infinite sky.