Chapter Text
Floating didn’t feel like he thought it would. He keeps being wrong.
When Leo was little, he and his brothers used to sneak out to spend hours and hours floating down the waterways of the sewers. Circling through lazy rivers again and again. Using their inner tubes was safer, but Leo could only really feel the flow of the river without them.
Turtles can’t breathe underwater. They can only hold their breath for a very, very long time. It still hurts if you forget to come up for air. (His chest hurts now. Did he forget?) Going for a ride in the river only got rarer as they got older, but Leo still thinks about it.
Leo could still feel the soft pull and tug of the waves when he would go to bed those nights, staring up at the ceiling of their lair, watching the vents vibrate with the sounds of his family already asleep. (Old lair, now, and man that thought still hurts.)
He always thought that being underwater would be the closest you could get to zero gravity.
Then he thought it might be freefall.
He knows that’s not true either, now- with those, there’s always a sense of pressure, a reminder that there’s still a world around you. Like the waves. Like the wind. Like a hug. Like his brothers’ hugs, which he should probably focus on right now instead of thinking about gravity.
But it’s just so comfortable. It’s so warm with them all back together. It isn’t nothing. And one of his eyes is closed already, and one of his arms and one of his legs have already fallen asleep, so it would be so easy to just…
Someone is shaking him, and wow is that scrambling his brains a bit. He opens his eyes again to tell whoever to let him go back to bed, but—
“Whoa, Mmikey, wh’ happened to your hands?” He hears himself say. Something isn’t right, but it slips away from him. Even when he’s not being hugged anymore, that growing pressure in his chest won’t go away.
Something is trying to pry his hand open. Panic rises with the pain- he can’t forget. He can’t let go. He can’t let go, it’s all he has- he pushes at the arms around him, stumbling into something solid.
Things are looking real sideways at the moment. He shuts his eyes tight to clear his vision.
It’s a lot harder to open them back up again.
Where is he?
“Back home, Leo. You’re home.” A deep voice answers.
But- wait. He was just complaining about Staten Island. How’d they get here already? Back in the subway. Probably at the medbay. Med subway. Med subbay…? Heh.
An exasperated voice comes from above. “What? What are you even talking about?”
“How’d we even get here,” Leo repeats helpfully. His genuine question gets ignored. Rude.
Then, suddenly, Don’s- because he knows who that is, of course he does- voice comes back in full passionless passion. “Could you list all the ways we could have gotten back to base?”
Weird ask, but sure. “You could have… taken a taxi. Or Casey could have come back, and we all swung home with his grappling hook Tarzan style…”
He blinks his eyes open at the feeling of too close too close too close. But it’s just Don snapping his fingers in front of Leo’s face. Super rude. “Incredibly cold guesses, brother. Try again.”
“Mmm… Someone found my swords, and we, uh…Mikey’s hands…” The thought leaves him, but a jolt of clarity quickly replaces it. “Ooh, while we were out you guys got kidnapped by the feds, and you had to bust us all out before we got Dee-sected…” He laughs, but he can’t hear anyone else laugh along.
That isn’t right. It goes setup, punchline, laugh track. Are they still there? It’s too dark in here.
Something pries open an eyelid, and- oh, duh. That would make it hard to see, ha. Dumb dumb. Now he can see Donnie grimacing above him. Which isn’t too unusual, but something in Leo’s hindbrain kicks at him to look closer.
…Donnie’s hands. Now held distantly from himself like he’s trying to keep them away, flexing his fingertips into empty air. Leo calls the exact moment that Don shakes his hands like he’s trying to flick away the dark red spots on them- he’s seen this exact moment play out enough times to know, but it doesn’t really make him feel any better.
Donnie’s talking and his hands are moving in and out of his vision, which isn’t right at all. Whenever Donnie tries to workaholic his way out of a meltdown it literally never works. Dummy. Leo needs to remind him.
“Should wash your hands, Don,” he says, but the words don’t come out quite right. “It’ll help.”
Then the world shifts from under Leo, and he gasps from the feelings in his- in his chest, and his side, and his face and-
Another voice starts, and another, overlapping each other. He recognizes every voice, even if they’re only saying nonsense at him. Leo can’t help but smile.
“I- I- I have to go. Now. I-”
“‘Sokay, Don, we can-“
“Where did we put-?!”
“Leonardo. What is hurting the most right now?”
How can anything hurt? He got to see his family again.
---
Leo opens his eyes, one slower to follow than the other.
Metal.
The burn in his chest grows and grows until he realizes he’s looking right up to a ceiling. Right. And his lungs feel heavy because he was holding his breath. Of course. Leo forces himself to breathe in and out slowly to keep from pulling something.
Ridged metal above him, no visible piping. He drags his eyes downward. A large lamp, arm extended and facing him, turned off. (One of their old sunlamps. They only really needed them nowadays for bad winter nights.) A collection of quietly beeping monitors circling his bed.
It takes a minute for Leo to blearily recognize he’s in one of the cars of their designated medical area- nobody’s gotten hurt enough to end up all the way back here since they moved in.
He’s able to slowly roll his gaze over the room. Each item he spots makes him more sure that he really is back home. (And all the tiny details- Mikey’s random knickknacks spread across clumsily built shelves and cabinets, a strange ‘motivational’ poster, a recently rummaged-through pile of blankets in the corner- that he hadn’t remembered at all help him be more convinced he isn’t dreaming.)
But most importantly, Michelangelo is right there next to him, hunched over in a chair pulled close to the bed. He’s not looking up at Leo, but he doesn’t seem to be exactly sleeping, either.
Leo tries to give a smile. It’s far harder to lift one end of his mouth than it really should be, and it makes his cheekbone ache, but he probably lands somewhere around a charmingly lopsided grin.
He’s gotta say something to turn that sad little frown upside down.
He opens his mouth, and-
The breath he takes before speaking stutters and stops somewhere along the way. “Wh-“ Suddenly his lungs have staged an all-out rebellion, and all that comes out is a painful hacking cough. Ow.
Mikey gets up from his chair and reaches for him, looking decidedly un-comforted.
Leo waves him off- ow ow ow, ok, tries to wave him off with the hand that isn’t limp in a sling, but Mikey’s bandaged arms are still hovering right in his peripherals- Wait, what?
“Woah, are your hands ok?”
Mikey slumps back down into the chair, frown replaced by a shaky little smile instead. “You keep asking that.” He pouts while picking up a glass that was just out of Leo’s sight- and suddenly water sounds amazing for the small hiccuping coughs Leo’s trying to keep down. “I think Raph just put them on to feel better.”
He says that, but there are ripples in the water even as Mikey’s holding the glass still. Hm.
Leo puts a pin in that, accepting the offered water gratefully. He starts downing it- maybe a bit too fast when he sees Mikey starts to get out of his chair again- and slows himself. It’s not like Leo’s going to drown via glass of water, but Mikey’s forming a bonafide Raph Chasm.
…Has he forgotten something? He looks at the last few droplets running down the side of the glass before remembering the purpose of his coughing fit.
“Also!” He goes for the comfortingly roguish grin, attempt number 2. “Heya, Mikey.” It’s hard to think of the line that was supposed to go after that, but it’s a start.
“Hi, Leo.” He giggles. “You seem… awake? Like still weird, but…”
So he’s been asleep for a while. Maybe in and out of it. He means to say something like ‘heeey, not that I’m not super duper glad to see my little bro, but what’s the sitch with everyone else?’ in a super duper casual way, but what comes out is a strained “Where is everyone?”
He clears his throat, hoping that part just came across as dehydration, and tries again. “What, no welcoming party?” No alarms have gone off and Don’s nanny monitors haven’t gone berserk at him waking up, so he’s assuming this isn’t an ‘our dearest brother Leo has been in a coma’ situation. Still- where was everyone?
“You’ve woken up a couple of times already.” Mikey’s eye ridges pinch together. “You don’t remember anything?”
Leo hums a little tune as he tries to get his brain back in gear. “If I don’t remember my own whole tearful reunion scene, I will seriously demand a redo,” he jokes, but a few memories are trickling back even as he says it.
A family hug, with April dragging a dazed Casey into the middle of all of them. One-sided conversations. A handful of half-remembered checkups.
…Bursting into tears the second he saw his dad. So embarrassing.
He was trying to keep his tone light, but only knowing where one out of five- six- of his family are totally counts as a failing grade. He looks around Mikey to try to see where they might be. There are not a lot of hiding spots in this car, but maybe behind that chair…? Behind the curtain? Last he saw, Donnie’s ninpo shell had faded, Raph’s eye…
Before Leo sprains something craning his neck all around, Mikey answers. “Donnie and Raph are finally getting the rest of their stuff patched up. Dad n’ Casey are helping.”
He can hear something happening in the next cars down, faintly, so he’s choosing to take Mikey’s word for it. Five out of six.
“Aaand April’s with her parents, but she’ll be back! And it doesn’t seem like anyone in the Hidden City got hurt, either, but we’re gonna check with everybody- like, everybody everybody- in the next couple of days.” Mikey smiles up at him, still twiddling his thumbs. “And I… I’m supposed to be in bed, but I didn’t wanna leave you alone.” Leo tries to let out the breath he was holding as casually as possible.
(He might feel a little bit guilty about being so relieved. After all, he has no idea what happened to all the- tens? dozens? of people who had gotten gooped. Or for that matter, in another world, the dozens and hundreds and thousands and millions and billions-)
Anyways. What’s important right now- what Leo can actually do something about right now is trying to lighten up his bro’s spirits a bit. At the very least, a touch of emotional vulnerability is in order.
“That was… awesome, Mikey. I mean… You saved me.” Leo gestures to… all of himself, really. Here. Alive. “With some totally new mystic magic! Dude, have you been holding out on us?”
Mikey smiles.
…
That’s it. He smiles. Which is weird for his little brother, who should be waving him off with full-on faux humility. Maybe humblebragging through their old Champ of the Day bit. He knows Leo loves a good callback.
…Maybe it’s Leo that’s underplaying the scale here. He doesn’t… he’s not trying particularly hard to think about the memories of the last 24 hours that didn’t already get knocked out of him, but it was a capital letters Big Deal. He can acknowledge that. And half the things he says come out as sarcastic even when he’s not going for the ol’ reliable cool, funny and unaffected routine, so maybe he needs to try again.
“Seriously. I am so proud of you. My big dumb Raph-style Hero speech stuck with ya, huh?” Mikey hunches his shoulders again, and Leo lightly taps them with a fistbump. “You didn’t give up. You pulled through. That’s all you can really ask for.”
Mikey’s face scrunches up, but he finally starts talking again. “I was- I was almost too late.”
“Hey hey hey, don’t do that to yourself. You did it when it all came down to it.”
…That didn’t help, either. Leo likes to think he’s pretty good at picking up his brother’s tells, especially the more obvious ones. Donnie shakes his hands and scratches his arms. Raph bites at his claws… alongside, like, a million other cues. Mikey rolls his wrists and tangles his fingers together again and again if he doesn’t get something else to do with them.
Mikey twirls his fingers in his lap while picking at the blood-free bandages wrapped around his hands. Leo’s looking for it, now, and he can see hints of a dim yellow-orange from under strips of gauze.
Then Mikey’s hands grip together tighter and tighter until they start trembling from the strain.
“I know. I knew I could do it. Th-That I always could have done it.”
Leo snaps his head up to look at his brother, who is busy staring daggers into the empty corner of the room. “Why couldn’t I do it earlier?” Mikey’s voice cracks in two. “If I’ve always had the power to do it, then why…” His eyes are shiny and his chest shudders, but he’s still forcing down his tears. “Before Donnie got hurt, before you got lost, before Raph…”
…Leo has miscalculated. All his clumsy comforting did was twist the knife. “Mikey,” he starts, but his stupid brain can’t think of a single thing to say. Michelangelo’s face crumples, and all Leo can do is open his arms as wide as his shoulders allow.
Mikey practically leaps out of his chair to fill the empty space.
His chest burns. He tries to remember to breathe, tries to create a steadier rhythm for Mikey to follow than his gasping sobs.
The feeling must be the pressure on his plastron from the hug, but Leo can’t make himself care.
It feels deeply wrong to have his little brother cling to him, crying, apologizing, and holding on with the same hands that saved him.
Leo stares at the cracks peeking out from under the bandages.
Leonardo tells Mikey that it’s ok. That he’s safe, now, as all of them are. (He can’t quite remember his own words.)
(Leo's own eyes burn. But if Mikey sees him crying, he’ll jump tracks to therapist mode in a moment. So he pushes back the tide. Blinks it all away.
Not now. Not right now.)
Leo breathes in, and out. He grabs Mikey's hands and puts on his best impression of a good brother.
“Mikey. Remember. Our ninpo was all locked up, and it was only through getting us all together again that we were able to get our mystic mojo back.” It's important that Leo sounded genuine, not just trying to make him feel better. “Even if you tried tapping into your whole crazy powerful powers you got in there, of course you’d have trouble.” Leo snaps his fingers. “It’s like, uh, a bad internet connection or something. Or a faulty USB…port…drive…whatever.”
Mikey snorts and Leo can’t help his relieved chuckle. “Heyyy, come on. Go to Don-Tron if you want a more in-depth analogy. I have a concussion.” Maybe. He’s being a bit dramatic. Probably? They let him sleep, so…
He rubs circles around and around the top of Mikey’s hands.
For as much of a pillar of emotional maturity as Mike is compared to most of their family, he's still the type of kid to hear ‘not yet’ and think ‘why not?’.
He wanted to keep up with them. Always bristling when Raph made something a Big Kid Thing, and always beat himself up if he couldn’t follow through.
And Leo’s always tried to be his little brother’s hype man. Raphael was always so protective, but Leo didn’t want the guy to take Raph’s caution as a hit to his self-confidence.
So when they were all ‘training’ by parkouring their way to the top of the lair, and Raph- and even Donnie, who had already wussed out!- said no to Mikey joining? Of course he would put himself in his lil’ bro’s corner!
And he did it. Passed with flying colors, and blew past the rest of their times. Leo had paraded him around and they rubbed it in their brother’s faces.
But, he remembers, the next day.
Mikey’s hands wouldn’t stop shaking. He had tired out his muscles so bad he could barely lift a sketchbook, let alone their pots and pans.
He got better, obviously, and then they actually did things like ‘stretch’ and ‘warm-up’ before launching themselves into something like that. But it was a reminder. A forgiving reminder of the kind of physical- and mystical, now- limits Michelangelo was willing to push with the right kind of motivation.
Leo can’t even remember how old they must have been. But he knows he was always a bit more careful with his dares after that.
When he last separated from his brothers, he didn’t remember Mikey’s hands being particularly bad compared to the rest of all of them, and he trusts that Raph saved them from that fall. The only other time that makes sense is…yeah.
Crazy impossible miracle nearly requiring a crazy impossible cost. Makes sense.
It’s important that he says it. It’s important that his little brother knows.
“You know… Even if you didn’t end up getting me back- If it would have hurt you too much, taken too much out of you-“ He has to clear his throat for some reason.
“It…” His throat’s still dry. It hurts to swallow. “It would have been okay, Mikey.”
He can tell that was another misstep just a moment after. Mikey goes on a whole little face journey- that same little chasm, then thinking, then, then… uh oh.
Mikey looks mad. Hoo boy.
“I wasn’t gonna just leave you,” he grits out, and Leo barely keeps himself from breaking eye contact.
Course correct this.
“I meant about tearing yourself apart, Miguel. I know you always want to help. And thank you,” Leo says, suddenly unsure if he’s really made it clear enough, “for saving me. But losing me…” He gestures around helplessly. “And then immediately losing you?”
Mikey’s expression loosens up a bit like he’s actually considering what Leo’s saying, but there’s still that firm set in his jaw. It’s not a… great sign. But, hey- if he tries to bring it up with Don or Raph, they’re gonna back Leo up on this. Until then, though…
“Ok. Compromise.” Given it’s probably not a good idea to keep jolting his other arm, Leo pats the blanket decisively. “Vay. Cay. Tio-nay.”
“Huh?” There we go. That shocks Mikey right out of his interrogation look. Leo’s half-smile comes a bit easier.
“While I am tragically bedridden, you don’t strain yourself. Take it easy. Build your strength back up again.”
“...Wait.” Mikey balks. “Are you also talking about-”
“Up-bup-bup-Ayup.“ He smushes his finger up against Mikey’s increasingly horrified face. “I’m calling it. The doctor is out.”
“Even-”
Leo starts counting on his fingers. “Even Dr. Feelings, even Dr. Delicate Touch, Dr. Slightly Disappointed, Dr. Positive, Dr. Negative-“
“That one’s not real!”
Leo wiggles all six fingers at him, grinning. “…They’re all out of the office. Lunch break. Fishing trip. And you are, too.” He gently squeezes Mikey’s hands, stopping the tremors for just a moment. “Rest those bad boys. Got a lot of art and video games yet in your future, little brother.”
Mikey stares at their entwined hands. His eyes are still red from crying, and there’s a puffiness to them that is likely from both tears and a lack of sleep since… whenever it all ended. Leo stares at Mikey, and hopes he can somehow get across the feelings he’s too clumsy to say.
Mikey meets his gaze. He must see something there, because a teeny little smile slowly spreads across his face. “...And portals.”
Leo raises his eye ridges as far as they can go, just a tad past exaggerated and hopefully stopping before mocking. “And holy shit, Mikey, you got portals! I am so excited to hype you up about that when it stops making Raph wrap you up like a mummy.”
A real Mikey smile makes it onto his face at that. “We can be portal buddies!”
“Portal rivals.”
"Portal enemies.”
Leo gasps. “Michaelangelo! Already considering your inevitable betrayal before I’m even out of bed?” He laughs, but oof- he really might have been pushing it with all the talking he’s been doing. Leo’s laugh fades into a wheeze that makes him tap his chest.
“You need more water!” Mikey looks ecstatic to have something to do to help, so it’s not a total loss. He brings the glass over to the sink they rigged up in the corner. Leo gets a nudge in the back of his mind again. He looks closer. White gauze, white paper towels, something white and plastic.
…Wait. Wait.
That’s the photo. That’s- how could he forget? He needs that, he needs to hold on, he-
He needs to take a breather. His family is here, in the flesh. He doesn’t even really need the photo anymore- he could probably find his own timeline’s copy around here somewhere.
…It would be nice to have, though, in a totally normal way.
“You also mind grabbing that photo, Mikey?” He says in a very normal tone of voice. “I wasn’t lying- I really do look great in it. Good for my morale. Reminds me of-” His lungs cut him off before he can launch his foot in his mouth any further.
“...Sure!” Mikey’s arrived with both glass and photo in hand by the time he recovers, and he feels a totally normal amount of relief.
Mikey holds out the photo, but doesn’t let go immediately when Leo reaches to grab it. “...Are you okay?” he says, quietly.
Leo breathes. “I will be, ok Mikey?” It’s the most honest answer Leo can give. He’s with family. He’s home. It’ll be true eventually. Leo waves his hand theatrically at the machines around him. “‘Sides, you see how many machines Don has me jacked into? I’ll be back up and running before you know it.”
Mikey looks at him. Leo smiles and thinks the doctor is out the doctor is out like a mantra.
“...Okay. But you have to promise to take it easy, too.”
Leo raises a hand in defeat. “I accept your demands.”
He lets go of the photograph, and Leo tucks it under the pillowcase behind him. A massive part of the pressure lifts from his plastron. (Now it’s just the blunt force trauma, probably.)
Mikey’s smile is wobbling but so, so bright. “I’m glad you’re home. Leo. You know that?” Ugh, no, he just said he wasn’t going to cry, he can’t be swayed now.
“‘Course, Miguel. Love you too.” Mikey’s smile is rapidly approaching critical mass.
That really was the final curtain call on talking for a hot minute, though. He doesn’t need to ask before Mikey’s sitting right up next to the bed again, using his less injured arm as a pillow.
Leo stares up at the cold metal ceiling. Breathing shallow but slow to lessen the pain and not worry his brother.
Leo closes his eyes, and strains to hear the proof that the rest of his family is still alive.