29 with Mikey and Leo please!
29. “Tell me where it hurts, and be specific.”
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It really was his own fault. If Mikey didn’t want to be babied, he shouldn’t have broken his wrist.
He was mostly just annoyed it happened in such a boring way, catching himself wrong falling off his skateboard.
Yes he’d decided to sneak off and find a sewer tunnel to attempt the full pipe loop a full two weeks before Draxum said the gross mystic mandrake tea would finish running its course, but he felt fine! His hands barely shook anymore, only when he overworked himself or let himself get too tired or too excited.
But from the look on everyone’s faces when he slunk home ungraciously dragging his board behind him, you’d think he was at death’s door.
What was worse, Donnie wheeled him by the shoulders into the infirmary and deposited him right in front of Leonardo, the only person Mikey couldn’t out-stubborn, whose affable smile faded at once into that serious look that made all of his siblings straighten their spines and pay attention.
If the skateboarding accident had happened pre-almost-apocalypse, Dr. Leo would have probably led with a joke instead of, “Tell me where it hurts, and be specific.”
Mikey resigned himself to a ridiculous amount of mother-henning for the duration his arm was stuck in its short cast. His brothers took his newly fragile hands so personally, like they were the ones who couldn’t hold an inking pen or color inside the lines or even cook a meal more complicated than lasagna without having to give up in the middle and have someone else take over. Like they were the ones who woke up shaking in the middle of the night from some distant, half-forgotten dream of disappearing into fragments of light, arms radiating pain like it was their job, a confused jumble of grief and fear and farewell on his tongue until he went and climbed into bed with papa or Raphie and let them hug it all away.
Leo said Mikey’s wrist wouldn’t need the full six-to-twelve weeks that a baseline human’s would due to their genetic modifications—“Thank you, Barry,” they had chorused in varying degrees of sincerity (Mikey, Raph and Casey) and sarcasm (Leo, Donnie and Splinter)—but that he still needed to give it time to heal.
“You’re the toughest guy I know,” Leo had said, poking Mikey on the beak to stall the inevitable whine, “but you gotta give yourself a break, Miguelito.”
He said it like his skin wasn’t still bruised like a peach and his shell all wired together from going one-on-one with an actual living nightmare even as he found the energy to take care of someone else.
He sat there in the doctor’s seat, pressing carefully around the wet fiberglass to mold it to Mikey’s wrist, all his attention bent to the task. He always tended to his brothers’ hurts the same way, as if it was the most important and remarkable thing he’d ever do.
Leo’s own casts had only been removed last month, and he was usually very good about following his own medical advice, if only because he knew his siblings would cite his behavior in a heartbeat if it meant they could loophole around doctor’s orders. So Mikey really had no choice but to sulk and accept the distant cousin of scolding he received.
“It’s not a race,” Leo said, smiling at him. “No one’s gonna run off without you. Where would we go that’s half as good as where you’re at?”
It was his knee-jerk reaction to smile at Mikey, like his day got better automatically when Mikey was in it, and it soothed that jangling, frustrated thing inside of Mikey’s chest that only got loud when no one took him seriously. Leo always took him seriously, was always the first of their siblings to believe he could do anything he said he could do, and that meant taking Mikey’s injuries seriously, too.
He’d seen the way Leo had to run himself ragged making sure Donnie kept up with the treatments to his shell and Raph followed instructions on taking care of his eye to the letter. They were trying to spare Leo additional stress, but if they knew they were only compounding the stress he was already in and making it ten times worse, Mikey was pretty sure they’d shut up and take their medicine.
Mikey wanted to be on Leo’s team, not playing against him. So he put his sulk away and put on his best listening face instead, rewarded when some nearly-invisible line of tension in Leo’s shoulders relaxed until it was gone.
Besides, it wasn’t all bad. He got to pick what color cast he wanted, and got everyone to sign it. And it wasn’t the most horrible thing in the world not to have to do any chores.
And when Leo announced to the lair as a whole that he was going to visit his tío Hueso and bring back pizzas for dinner—in a tone that made it very clear he was not asking for permission or inviting any worrywart older siblings along—he followed it up with, “You coming, Angie?”
Maybe because he had been under the scrutiny of worrywart older siblings, too, and understood better than anybody how close Mikey was to biting the next person who tried to baby him. Or maybe because Mikey was the exception to Leo’s rules and he always had been—always invited and always welcome and always wanted.
In another place, in another time, Leo asked Mikey to die for him, and Mikey died for him.
In this kinder one, Mikey jumped to his feet with a grin and said, “I’m with you!” and it didn’t cost him anything.
It should have been silly to say something out loud that they both knew was true, but sometimes it was nice to hear it.
