tmnt 2007
word count: 2.5k
pairing: leo & mikey
post-movie / canon compliant
this was my story for @tmntzines Leader in Blue zine ! this project was so much fun and so many talented people contributed, i'm really happy i got to be a part of it !
@maykrlime drew lovely art to accompany the fic, please be sure to check their page out 🩵
title borrowed from not strong enough by boygenius
read on ao3
x
When Leo calls his brothers together for a training run, and tells them they’re dividing into two teams of two, he’s prepared for the way Mikey and Donnie group together automatically.
They’re as inseparable now as they always have been, and it should be a relief to know that at least this one thing that Leo left behind has remained completely unchanged. But instead it sits with him wrong. It’s part of an overarching problem he’s determined to make right.
“Actually, Mike’s with me tonight,” he says.
Michelangelo perks up at once, eyes bright. Donatello, on the other hand, cuts a sharp, calculative look at Leo that he does his best to weather gracefully.
Between Raphael and their two human siblings, Leo was painted a very clear picture of all the slack that Donnie picked up for him while he was gone, and what a thankless job it was, and how little credit he got for any of it.
Leo deserves Donnie’s anger and skepticism. He even deserves this painful deliberation that never would have been necessary before he left, as one little brother decides whether or not Leo can be trusted with the other.
“I wasn’t around much,” Raph had admitted gruffly, his shame obvious in how neatly he avoided meeting Leo’s eyes. “And April and Casey were busy most of the time—new jobs, new apartment, new marriage. He really only had Mikey in his corner. You thought he was protective before, but that kid will bite your face off if you even look at Mike wrong these days.”
Leo is braced for the metaphorical (or literal? He wasn’t sure and he was afraid to ask) teeth to come out, but Don surprises him. The genius tugs lightly on one of Mikey’s long mask tails, no words necessary between the two of them, and then drifts over to stand next to Raph without argument.
Raph looks like he’s been handed a live grenade to hold, but when he asks what Donnie is doing on his phone, Donnie only stares at him for five uncomfortable seconds before tilting the screen so his big brother could see.
With that inevitable explosion tabled for another time, Leo looks over at his littlest brother and smiles involuntarily at the way Mikey is already bouncing on his feet.
“Enough energy to power Lower Manhattan for a week,” April used to say when they were kids, all affection, poking Mikey in the ribs as if to find an off button and only eliciting giggles from a turtle who could not still if his life depended on it.
Twenty minutes into their run, however, the cracks in the foundation are easy to see.
Mikey is all good cheer, happy to be in Leo’s company, but there’s no relentless chatter, no pointing out every cute dog on the street, no reading out bad puns on billboards with cheesy tourist accents—none of the fundamental Mikeyisms that Leo could have set every clock in the lair by. He only speaks up when Leo says something first. More than once, those blue eyes catch the gleam of some neon sign or shining storefront, and he opens his mouth eagerly only to snap it shut again without a word.
Leo noticed this odd pattern of behavior almost immediately, just a few days after the dust had settled over the ruins of Winters Corp and everyone had had a chance to catch their collective breath. Mikey’s off-key singing in the kitchen woke Leo up in the morning the way it had for the majority of the mornings in his life, only to cut off abruptly when Leo wandered in to help with breakfast.
Something was decidedly alien about the whole scene—this Michelangelo who made omelets without belting out Lady Marmalade loud enough to wake the entire underground. A younger Leonardo might have felt relieved that his alarm clock wasn’t put out of a job for once by his noisy little brother.
Leonardo at that present moment felt cheated.
He brought it up to April, hoping that she would tell him it was all in his head, but his sister frowned at him instead.
“He knows why you left, but he doesn’t know why you stayed gone,” April said, not unkindly. “He doesn’t know why you stopped writing. He doesn’t know how to make sure it doesn’t happen again, so he’s trying to be on his best behavior. He really, really missed you, honey.”
She said it like it should have been obvious that Leo’s absence had carved a hole clean into his family. Like it was possible for his siblings to have missed him even half as much as he’d missed them.
Leonardo had been so homesick these past two years that it just became another ache in the pit of his chest that he learned to live with. He had never once considered the idea that his little brothers were homesick for something too.
The worst part of it all is that Leo can’t even tell Mikey what he wants to, the gospel of his heart, which is I would never leave you, because that’s been soundly proven to be untrue. He can’t stand the thought of a Mikey who’s afraid to test Leo’s patience, afraid to be his silly, sunny self—as if there was anything about him that would drive Leo away.
He brought Mikey out here with him to fix it, to at least try to, but he has no idea where to start.
Leo has never had to run after Mikey before. He’s only ever had to open his arms and let Mikey come crashing into them. There’s an awkward distance between them now that Leo doesn’t know how to navigate.
He imagines, for one second, a world without noisy little brothers who fill his days with chaos like well-meaning hurricanes. One where they sit by him quietly instead of clamoring for his attention, as if he’s a bird they’re worried might startle into flight. His mind shudders away from the bleakness of that idea instantly.
“I miss the way you used to hum songs under your breath when we were training or doing chores,” Leo blurts without thinking. “You did it during patrol, too. Remember when you managed to get Raph singing along to Girls Just Want To Have Fun while we were fighting, like, twenty Purple Dragons? I wanted to strangle you when we got home but you told me that it was ‘good cardio’. Donnie laughed so hard he cried.”
Mikey stares up at Leo with lamplike eyes, mouth parted in surprise.
He looks tired when he’s standing still, like everything he’s lived through has finally caught up to him, and he can only pretend otherwise when he’s throwing his whole body into motion. Something gazes out of his face that is older and wearier and knows better than to put all its faith in someone like Leonardo.
“You would always get mad at me when I did that,” is what Mikey finally says, slowly. Feeling for that next step on the staircase in a room where the light had gone out. Testing his weight on a bridge that had already collapsed beneath him once.
“Yeah,” Leo concedes, dipping his chin and looking down at the street far below them, where the cars look like toys. “But while I was gone, it was one of the things I missed the most.”
He won’t admit how many times he found himself humming Welcome to the Jungle in the rainforest just to imagine the kick his youngest brother would have gotten out of it. Not because he’s embarrassed, but because if he lets himself think for one second about how devastatingly lonely he was out there, he might do something horrible, like tear up in front of Mikey.
“In Costa Rica, it wasn’t safe for me to stay in one place for very long,” Leo says before he can overthink it. The words slip out one after another, abrupt and unrehearsed. “But there were a few areas that I would circle back to, because the foraging was good and I didn’t have to compete with jaguars for food. Once was one time too many.”
He hadn’t thought he would ever tell his little brothers about his time away, since it was a source of such personal shame for him, and one of betrayal for them.
But one look at the way Mikey’s eyes get round and absorbed has Leo scraping together the courage to continue.
“In one of my camps, I had neighbors. This rowdy family of capuchin monkeys. There had to have been fifteen of them at least,” Leo recounts, amused by the memory. “Menaces, all of them. They stole my multi-tool a dozen times. When I realized they had figured out how to use it, I just let them keep it.”
Mikey exhales sharply, almost a laugh, the surprised beginnings of a smile touching the corners of his mouth. And it’s that smile, the ghost of it, that gives Leo the final push he needs to offer this small, well-guarded truth.
“Every time I saw them, I thought, ‘man,’” Leo says, nudging his shoulder into his brother’s, “‘I miss my Monkey.’”
That almost-laugh graduates with honors into the full thing, still as bright now as it was when Mikey was that little boy who climbed everything he could reach, unafraid of falling because someone was always there to catch him when he did.
Mikey was the first thing Leo let himself wish for when he was away, because he thought he could be forgiven at least that weakness. There isn’t a single person on the planet who could go a full day without missing Michelangelo if they really understood what it was like to have him in their life.
“You haven’t called me that since I was, like, ten,” Mikey says, wavering between good humor and disbelief.
“Maybe not to your face,” Leo replies matter-of-factly, partly because it’s true and partly because it makes Mikey giggle some more.
His little brothers weren’t the ones who outgrew nicknames. It was Leonardo who began to abandon childish things in his desire to be the leader his father wanted him to be. So self-conscious about his faults, imagined or otherwise. Always holding himself to a different standard.
Mikey is still Angie to Donnie, and Meeks to Raph, and Mikan to Splinter. He’s Mitch when Casey’s feeling goofy, and April, who absolutely plays favorites and doesn’t pretend otherwise, calls him Angel. And even if Leo keeps it a secret from everyone else, even from himself half the time, Mikey is still Monkey, too—undaunted and playful and forever finding new heights to climb to, curious about everything, charming despite himself, a bright point of joy that shines out of an otherwise dark and lonely and miserable place.
“I missed you, Mike,” Leo says again, so it doesn’t get lost somewhere. “You and Raph and Donnie were on my mind every single day. I hope you still know that no matter where I am in the world, I’ll come running the second you call for me. The second you call.”
That day that April managed to track Leo down in the middle of a wild, sprawling jungle, just to tell him they’re lost without you, Leo crossed an entire continent. He would swim oceans and climb mountains if he had to. Not even that looming dread of returning home a failure kept him away in the end, not when they needed him.
It’s not as good as “I would never leave you,” but it’s the best that he can offer.
And it’s enough, at least for now, because Mikey shuffles closer until their elbows and shoulders bump together. Leo’s most demonstrative brother, who understands personal space as a concept that applies to other turtles but not to him, finally peeking out of his shell.
“I know that,” Mikey says, so firmly that Leo believes he really does. Some jangling, dislocated thing in his heart finally settles.
The Leonardo of a year ago would have been holed up in his little camp right about now, watching the family of capuchins in the trees and missing home so fiercely he could have cried like a child.
Tonight he’s sitting on the edge of a rooftop in Alphabet City, across the street from a Chinese restaurant he’s never seen before and around the corner from a dry-cleaning business where his favorite bookstore used to be. His siblings grew up without him in the time they spent apart. He’s supposed to report in to Splinter in a couple of hours and he’s still not sure what his sensei is waiting to hear from him—if he managed to become what he was sent away to become, or if he’ll still be found lacking. Anxiety thrums in the back of his mind, his oldest and most reliable companion.
Then Leo’s phone buzzes, probably either Raph sending out an SOS because Donnie finally succumbed to the Cain Instinct and tried to kill him for real, or a friendly reminder from April that they were all supposed to be meeting at hers and Casey’s place for dinner and that she would hunt them down one by one if they didn’t show up.
Then Leo remembers abruptly that Splinter had made more than one unsubtle remark about a new tea he wanted Leo to try, and the multiple seasons of daytime television he had to catch Leo up on, and that “reporting in” was probably just a thinly-veiled excuse for his father to spend time with him.
Then Mikey leans forward to catch Leo’s eye, his old self again for the moment—unafraid, energetic, the brightest thing north of Battery Park. Trusting that old bridge to hold him the way it had a million other times.
“Did you really see a jaguar, Leo?” he asks eagerly.
The thing is, Leo really had seen one. In those very early days, he was an amateur wildlife tracker at best, the most he had ever dealt with in New York City having been alleycats and subway rats, pigeons and the occasional stray racoon. So stumbling by accident upon a jaguar den was very nearly the last thing he’d ever done.
When the big cat finally got tired of chasing him and returned home with an aggravated flick of her tail, Leo had collapsed on the ground the second he felt safe enough to, all the strength going out of his limbs in a rush. He rolled onto his carapace to stare up at the colorful canopy above him, at the incongruous sunlight filtering cheerfully through the leaves and the busily fluttering birds who paid him no mind, and didn’t move again until his heart’s wild leaping had lulled back into a steady beat.
Absurdly, Leonardo’s very first thought at the time had been, This will be one hell of a story to tell the guys later.
If you're okay with another fic prompt, maybe Mikey hiding his tears in the rain? And one or all of his brothers (or friends) figuring it out and comforting him.
Can I also request it be in the 2003 verse?
x
Usually it’s Raph who puts his foot in his mouth in a major way, but this time it’s Leo.
It doesn’t happen often. Donnie thinks he could probably count on both hands the number of times Leo has said something intentionally hurtful to one of his brothers and still have some fingers leftover. Since returning from Japan, that frightening temper that turned their warm-hearted leader into a brooding stranger has been discarded for good, but it left a few scars. And Leo is as much a teenager as the rest of them are, even if he wasn’t always free to act like it. It’s not fair to expect him to regulate his emotions all the time. It wouldn’t be fair to expect that of a non-traumatized seventeen year old, let alone a kid with PTSD and anxiety and god only knows what else.
So really it shouldn’t be as surprising as it is when the words come bulleting out of Leo’s mouth, sharp and seething, “Some ninja you are.”
It shouldn’t be, but Raph whips around like someone struck him upside the head, and Donnie’s hands on Mikey’s shoulders clench tight involuntarily. He’s still kneeling in front of Mikey, still mopping up the blood on his head with a shirt Raph unapologetically ripped off a clothes line, still halfway through mentally cataloging the fatalistic difference another inch to the left would have made, so he has a front-row seat to the hurt that parades across the smallest turtle’s expression.
That hurt hadn’t even existed when the Purple Dragon threw the knife at Mikey’s head in the first place. He’d been laughing a second ago, shaking off the jitters from the very close-call. Leo’s bitter condemnation stole that away in an instant. Their eldest brother is special and important to each of them, but he’s Mikey’s hero.
Rain is drumming all around them, cascading off the boarded-up storefront overhang they’ve sheltered under. It’s early May and the recent days have gotten warmer, but abruptly Donnie feels very cold.
“He don’t got eyes in the back of his head, Fearless,” Raph snaps back, like clockwork. His hackles are up, because as far as he’s concerned, only one person on this planet is allowed to give Mikey any semblance of a hard time, and that person is decidedly not Leonardo.
“Then how about a little spacial awareness?” Leo bites out, squaring his shoulders when Raph faces him, as if they’ve never managed to mature past thirteen years old. “We’re running drills in the dojo starting tomorrow.”
It’s on the tip of Donnie’s tongue to say the hell we are, but he doesn’t bother. Raph and Leo are starting their unstoppable-force-meets-immovable-object routine and they’ll be at it for a good five minutes at least. Instead he reminds himself that his big brothers are keyed up and agitated out of worry and care, that the fighting only started after Donnie gave the all-clear, because it really won’t do anyone any good if all three of them lose their tempers.
A second later Mikey is leaning out of Donnie’s hands and pushing himself to his feet. He’s looking right at Leo with all that hurt packed away into a neat little box, impossible to find. His orange mask is stained a stomach-turning rust color. The balled-up shirt is still in Donnie’s hand and Mikey is just letting himself bleed.
“Mike,” Donnie says helplessly.
“I’ll text you later,” he replies and ducks away quickly, out from under the overhang into the alley. Donnie sometimes wonders at the things his family has normalized over the years. His only little brother, the only person Donatello has always been directly responsible for, is all plastered with rain and walking off with a head wound, and it’s not even in the top ten worst things that’s happened so far this year. And it’s May.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Leo says suddenly. He storms after Mikey, reaching out like he’s going to grab him by the arm, and Donnie has just a second to think yeah that’s not good before Mikey whirls around.
“Back off!”
It stops Leo in his tracks so completely that it probably would have been funny in another time and place. He blinks dumbly, like the computer in his brain is rebooting. Donnie knows that this sudden temper of his was triggered by fear—that the sight of a knife flying towards his littlest brother’s head woke up something ugly in his brain that sprang to the defense in the quickest, easiest manner it could, clouding rational thought—but that doesn’t mean his words hurt any less.
Mikey wipes roughly at his face with the heel of his hand. It’s impossible to tell through the rain, but he might be crying. Then, with an economy of motion that all his brothers have envied since they were clumsy little toddlers, the orange-banded turtle scales the side of the adjacent building and disappears over the roof into the dark.
“Well done, asshole,” Raph says, but it’s half-hearted at best. “At this rate, I’ll be out of a job.”
Leo’s brow is furrowed beneath his mask. His hand is still slightly raised, like Mikey is still right there within reach. He’s never been here before, Donnie knows. Even when Leo was at his most hateful, those painful weeks after the showdown with the Shredder, Raph and Donnie—and even April, Casey and Splinter—were careful to keep him the fuck away from Mikey on his darker days. There are some things that can’t be walked back.
This isn’t that. To be frank, they’ve said much worse to each other over much smaller fish. But sometimes hurt can spring up where it’s least expected. And sometimes when you get a knife thrown at your head, you want sympathy from the person you’ve spent your whole life idolizing, not scorn.
“Why did I say that,” Leo mutters. It doesn’t sound like a question.
Donnie answers anyway. “Because you’ve refused every single one of my attempts to get you into therapy. Telehealth exists, Nardo. We’re on a very good insurance plan.”
“Since when do we have insurance?” Raph says. He’s peering out from under the overhang into the rain, like maybe Mikey’s going to make a surprise reappearance. “Are you frauding some sleezy millionaire again?”
“Just doing my part,” Donnie says mildly. He touches Leo’s shoulder and says, “You owe him an apology. But he’ll be okay.”
It’ll be a cold day in hell when just that would be enough to make Leo stop worrying, especially in this case, but Donnie still had to try. Sure enough, Leo nods once, mechanically, and then says, “Can you track his phone?”
“Slow down, Mamanardo,” Raph says. “Let the kid have a minute to himself.”
“He’s hurt,” Leo replies like it’s making him sick to think about. Donnie has a comment locked and loaded that sounds something along the lines of “how convenient of you to remember that now and not when you and Raph were ripping each other’s heads off” but he chooses to be the bigger turtle.
“He’ll be okay,” Donnie reiterates. He tosses the ruined shirt into a nearby bin and then sticks his hands out into the rain, washing the sticky, tacky red away. “Besides, tracking his phone is unnecessary. There’s only one place he would have gone.”
Even Raph raises an eyeridge at that, and Leo is equally clueless, but that’s okay. Donnie has been Mikey’s co-conspirator and secret-keeper since before they could talk in full sentences, and it’s only fair, because Mikey has been all of those things for him, too. Being on the B Team doesn’t have a lot of perks, but this is one of them.
A couple of hours later, Donnie successfully shakes his brothers off at the lair. Splinter caught Donnie’s eye and helpfully ushered the elder two turtles into the dojo for a convenient meditation session, so Donnie didn’t have to worry about a pair of red and blue mother hens trailing after him.
He crawls up the side of an apartment building in East Village and sits on the railing of the fire escape to peer into a warmly-lit window on the seventh floor. Inside his little brother and his little brother’s best friend, a human with piles and piles of curly blond hair and dimples when he smiles, are probably minutes away from getting a noise complaint, dancing around a cramped shoebox living room and singing at the top of their lungs.
“Girl, put your records on,” they bellow, sharing the TV remote as if it’s a microphone. “Tell me your favorite song! You go ahead, let your hair down!”
There’s a big pink bandaid plastered to the side of Mikey’s head, and evidence of Thai takeout on the coffee table that’s been shoved to the side of the room, and he’s in a sunflower yellow hoodie that’s at least two sizes too big. Any trace of the hurt from earlier is long-gone.
They’ll need to get home eventually. It isn’t safe to stay out in the early morning hours, as the city that never sleeps begins to pick up speed. And Leo is almost certainly going to be waiting up for them, restless until he sees for himself that his baby brother hasn’t been driven away by him completely. They really do need to get that boy some therapy. Donnie makes a mental note to get April on his team for that.
For now, there’s still some time. Until the end of this song, at least. It’s catchy.
tmnt prompts you say….. :3 how about some 2k12 leo and mikey cos i just adore the way u write their dynamic ✨✨
x
Honeycutt isn’t always easy to understand. He’s very enthusiastic and demonstrative, and surprisingly expressive given that the only parts of his face he can emote with are the digital lenses of his eyes, but there are times when his mind works in mysterious ways that baffle even Donatello, who understands their android guardian best.
Sometimes, like today, Honeycutt watches Leo and his siblings file onto the bridge in the light of artificial morning and he tilts his head and studies them for a long moment without speaking.
Then he claps his hands together and brightly says something like, “Good morning my friends! I have great news! Our ship needs immediate, serious, time-critical repairs!”
“What?” Leo, Donnie and April blurt at the same time, at the same volume.
“Doc, that’s not good news,” Casey adds, looking vaguely seasick. His claustrophobia hasn’t exactly gotten better out in the vacuum of empty space. “Are we—do you—we should get you a thesaurus.”
“April and I just ran a system check two cycles ago and everything was fine,” Donnie says, and he’s already bringing data up on that holo-gauntlet that’s been permanently attached to his arm since the second the Professor gifted it to him. “The bulkhead shields have degraded a little but—”
“Forget all of that,” Honeycutt says, waving his hands through the holographic screen until it fizzes out. Donnie looks extremely offended. “The point is, we’ll have to stop at the nearest repair station. Lucky for us, there’s one only a parsec away! We’ll use the warp drive and be there in no time. And we might as well see the sights while we’re there. Let’s make a day of it! Chop, chop!”
Leo’s siblings scurry to their stations, all but sulky Donnie, who has to be propelled there by the implacable Professor’s deceptively strong noodle arms.
“Where are we going, Professor?” Mikey calls out. He didn’t sleep well the night before, Leo can tell. There’s a shadow of something pressed over him, like the footprint of a bad dream. He didn’t bring any sunshine onto the bridge with him.
Raphael, sitting in the console beside Mikey, gives him a sidelong look that validates the little wriggling fish of concern swimming around in the back of Leo’s mind.
Honeycutt’s head twists on the column of his synthetic neck to face Leo’s littlest brother and his eyes smile at Mikey kindly. It’s that kindness more than anything that makes Leo continue to trust him. It reminds him of Splinter, in a way that manages not to be painful.
“We’re going to visit an old friend of mine,” Honeycutt explains cheerfully. “We may as well make the most of our sticky situation, don’t you think? Now off we go!”
They don’t land at a repair station. They land outside of what looks like the gates of a giant theme park, if Leo absolutely had to guess. Honeycutt must have called ahead, because the guards are expecting them, and not in the usual unfortunate way guards tend to expect the fugitoid. They smile and salute Leo’s family in greeting and escort them inside.
Apparently this place is called the Battle Nexus and it’s amazing. It’s a planet-wide arena made up of all kinds of different levels and terrains, for the purpose of a multi-cultural exchange of battle tactics and training. The master who oversees the whole thing is a wizened warrior referred to as the Daimyo, who turns out to be an old friend of the Professor’s.
The Daimyo was happy to usher Leo and his siblings into the competition—the kid-friendly version of the competition, anyway. Honeycutt very firmly steered the six of them toward their own age bracket, far, far away from anything even remotely grudge-match-shaped.
Raph looked a little forlornly at the blood-stained brawling pit they were marched past, but he and Casey both quickly fell in with a group of rowdy aliens around their size. Donnie wasn’t remotely interested in anything until a group of medics on stand-by caught his attention with the tricorders they were holding, and then he was hounding them within an inch of their lives. Leo watched after him anxiously, but the medics seemed reluctantly charmed by his purple-banded brother, and humored his barrage of questions. Mikey was still with Honeycutt and the Daimyo, chatting at the old master like they’d known each other for years, probably securing yet another life-long ally for his family in that easy, off-handed way he always made friends.
“Leo, come on,” April said, tugging on his arm. Her eyes were sharp and eager, glinting with that competitive edge that shined as brightly as Raph’s did at times. “They’re doing archery over that way, let’s go!”
So—it’s fun. And it only takes Leo most of an hour, if that, to realize that their ship is more than likely just fine, and it was actually very kind of Honeycutt to bring them here. It makes him feel warm and cared-for, like when he was much younger, and the shiny responsibility of leadership was still a distant dream.
And then a certain sixth sense pings in the back of his mind, drawing his attention from the archery targets and across the meadow to where Donnie looks like he’s one second away from causing a diplomatic incident, his face a thundercloud of pure, distilled rage. He’s shouting something at a group of humanoid aliens standing around in a scattered formation, and his body is tense and still the way it is when he’s literally about to pounce on a Footbot and tear it to pieces with his bare hands. Mikey is standing just behind him, tucked out of sight.
“Oh, boy,” April says from Leo’s shoulder, and then they shove their bows into the hands of the people closest to them and cross the field at ninja speed.
“—worth a hundred of you,” they get there in time to hear Donnie bite out. “So you can take your stupid game and shove it right up your—”
“Donatello,” Leo says, stunned more than scolding. Did he and Raph switch bodies somehow? Leo’s not ready to deal with that today.
But no, Donnie whirls to face him with that particular brand of wounded frustration in his bright red eyes, a look that Leo is familiar with. It’s a look that says ‘why are these people so stupid and why is it my problem?’ and it only ever precedes Donnie losing his absolute shit in a very big way.
Raph falls in next to Leo, grim-faced and groaning, “Nooo. God, what did they do, Don?”
“We’re not staying here,” Donnie announces in lieu of an actual answer. “We’re leaving.”
“What?” Casey asks blankly.
His confusion is completely fair, and shared three ways between Leo, April and Raph. The Nexus is amazing and they’d all collectively been having a blast like five minutes ago. Leo glances from Donnie’s face into Mikey’s, hoping he might find a cue there—Donnie and Mikey are inseparable on a good day, like two pieces of a matching set, and Mikey understands him effortlessly—but Mikey’s expression draws him up short.
He’s not even looking at any of them. He’s looking down, half-hiding behind Donnie’s arm, quiet and impassive in a way that spells hurt. It reminds Leo of those days immediately after Dimension X, when Mikey snuck around the lair like it was full of dangers, when he kept looking at his siblings like he was trying to find cruelty where there wasn’t any. Sometimes Dimension X still creeps up on them like that. It’s never, ever a good sign when it does.
Alarm bells start going off in Leo’s head. They’ve been there since earlier that morning, since Mikey came up to the bridge and didn’t bring any sunshine with him, but now they’re loud.
“Dude, we literally just got here,” Raph is saying. He doesn’t sound confrontational, just honestly bewildered, but Donnie’s mouth twists like Raph just tried picking a fight with him.
“Fine, do what you want,” he snaps. “Have fun with these idiots.”
He grabs Mikey’s hand and starts to march off with him, back in the direction of the ship. Clearly he’s ready to get himself and Mikey the hell out of here, with or without the rest of them. Leo finally kicks himself into action.
“Hey,” he says, circling around to stand in their way. He puts a hand on each of their shoulders and says, “Talk to me.”
“They’re being mean to him, Leo,” Donnie says, too loud, boiling over. “We’re not staying here.”
It almost doesn’t make sense at first. It wouldn’t be the first time Donnie’s started talking in a foreign language just to trip his brothers up. Leo thinks maybe that’s what’s happening right now, and a glance around at the rest of his siblings only further substantiates the idea, because they all look as baffled as he feels.
“Mean to who?” April says, brow furrowed. “Mikey?”
“But that’s the dumbest shit I ever heard,” Casey blurts incredulously.
And the thing is, Leo thinks, it really is the dumbest shit he’s ever heard. Mikey is genuinely the most likable person in the universe. The really irritating side of him is a sibling-exclusive, a baby brother perk that these complete strangers would definitely not have had a chance to experience in less than three hours of his company.
He grew up navigating the tempers and pitfalls of three extreme, explosive personalities, courtesy of his big brothers, so he’s capable of getting along with just about anyone. He can smooth over any uncomfortable, tense situation with a smile. He rolls with the punches. Just being around him is a breath of fresh air.
So what the fuck?
“What the fuck?” Raph says out loud, hands tightening around the handles of his sai.
The aliens—juveniles of their species, since they’re in the same age bracket as Leo and his brothers, taller and broader than the turtles, but with a soft, round-eyed quality that they’ve yet to grow out of that gives their youth away—look markedly uncomfortable about this whole thing. They’re shuffling and avoiding direct eye-contact.
One of them says, “We didn’t mean anything by it. It’s tradition.”
“What, like hazing?” April asks coldly. The atmosphere around her is starting to prickle, like the build-up of energy before a big storm.
“It’s only because he’s—” The word they use doesn’t translate directly. The universal translator they’re each equipped with does its best, spitting out young/inexperienced/stupid as the closest interpretation, and all of Mikey’s siblings go stiff with fury.
Mikey isn’t looking at any of them. He’s got that vacant look on his face that he learned to wear after months alone in a hostile alien world, seemingly abandoned by his family, with no one to count on and no rescue coming. He had a bad night, and now he’s having a bad day, and it’s the last thing he deserves.
Leo can’t afford this. Anything that threatens to draw his siblings away from the fold is a threat to Leo’s entire world, and he’ll neutralize that threat no matter what interplanetary consequences spring up as a result.
It would be easy. It wouldn’t help a single thing.
So instead he glances at Donnie, inclining his head an inch to the left. Donnie is nearly blind with anger, but he still trusts Leo—it warms Leo to the very bottom of his soul that the trust wins. He’s reluctant to let go of Mikey’s hand, but he lets it go, and that’s what finally brings Mikey to look up.
And then Leo pounces.
Mikey makes a startled yelping noise, driven to the ground by the weight of his eldest brother, but it quickly morphs into laughter as they go rolling shell over shell across the warm grass. It’s like being transported back into the dojo where they learned to practice ninja—muscle-memory, the way Mikey twists out from underneath him and flips over Leo’s head, landing nimbly and then diving into a forward roll to avoid his next swipe and giggling the entire time.
To them, it’s play, in its purest form. They were learning how to jump and tumble when other babies their age were still mastering the crawl. Mikey comes alive when he’s on the move, more than any other time, and now his blue eyes are brighter than they’ve been all day.
Leo draws him into a tight kumite bout, and each micro-sequence between the two of them is clean and precise, and each blow would be potentially lethal if it landed. That crowd of kids—the ones who hurt Donatello by hurting Michelangelo—have gone tellingly quiet. Leo splits his attention from Mikey long enough to take in their wide eyes and slack mouths, and thinks, Good.
He can feel pride and satisfaction radiating from their siblings as he proves to this entire level of the Nexus that his baby brother is every bit the deadly assassin their father taught him to be. He can feel nothing but joy from Mikey as he’s swept up in the familiar motions, the fun, fast-paced back-and-forth.
And then Raph barrels in, and Mikey squeaks in combination terror-excitement. The others aren’t far behind.
It becomes less about something to prove, and more about the joy of the conversation. The call and response. All of them whirling around each other in a flurry of precious Hamato clan techniques, bright-eyed and dangerous and alive.
Alive, despite everything. Together.
Leo doesn’t need any stupid Battle Nexus to tell him he and his siblings are champions. He knows that already. They survived the end of the world, and the end of their world, and they’re still here.
The Daimyo finds them sprawled on the grass, breathless and vivified and poking fun at each other. The bullies have made themselves scarce, and the thundercloud on Donnie’s face has cleared into blue skies, and Mikey is laying with his head pillowed comfortably on Raph’s outstretched arm, sweet and content and unburdened for now.
“My, my,” the Daimyo says, warm and impressed, “what a skilled group of warriors you are. I will have to give this planet of yours a visit someday soon if these are the types of people who live there.”
“We’re not typical earthlings,” Leo admits. “And it’s, um—Earth isn’t exactly—”
“Just let us know when you’re ready to swing by,” Mikey pipes up. “We’ll roll out the welcome mat.”
We’ll be there, is what he means, rolling his head to look over at Leo with a smile. We’ll all be there. We’ll do what we came here to do and then we’ll get to go home.
“Yeah,” Leo says, feeling a little choked up. “Yes. You should see it, Daimyo-dono. It’s definitely worth the trip.”
Honeycutt comes over and settles down on the ground with the rest of them, flopping back in the dirt and starfishing his limbs in solidarity.
“Ahh, it’s so unfortunate that we were set back a day by those repairs,” the Professor says. “But I’m glad that you children made the best of it! Your spirits give me strength, you know.”
Leo can’t help but smile at him. His whole entire world is clustered around him, bickering and throwing clumps of dirt at each other. Mikey is laughing, his own brand of sunlight putting the twin suns in the sky above them to shame. They’re so far away from where they belong it’s a joke, but somehow, right at this second, it doesn’t feel that way.
“Thanks,” Leo says. It falls comically short. “Thank you.”
recently i asked u guys which tmnt series i should work on next, and the answer i received was largely a toss-up between the mummy au and this one. i wrote a little something for the mummy, and now i offer you this for the ghost hunters, because i am on a slow roll
the rest of Give Up the Ghost is here
"wait, where’s woody? he’s an important and well-loved character,” said no one, “surely he’s going to play a part in this au!”
and they were absolutely right
x
A knock on the door is an uncommon occurrence, and very rarely good news. It echoes through the warehouse-like meeting place of the two-man club, and Mikey puts down his radio to look at Leo, who sits across the table cleaning ash off the nicer of their two cameras, in consternation.
"We already paid the fee this month, didn't we?" Mikey asks, standing slowly. "And there hasn't been any property damage in weeks. We've been super under-radar, right?"
"Don't borrow trouble," Leo says calmly, gesturing for the door. "It could just be someone who got lost."
Mikey doubts that. The student committee tucked their club in the farthest corner of campus, making them all but inaccessible to anyone who wasn't up for a half-mile hike uphill from everything else.
The knock comes again, a little hesitant this time, and Mikey hops up the steps to the door and calls, "It opens out, hang back a bit."
"Oh! Gotcha!" an unfamiliar voice says, and Mikey shoves open the ancient door with curiosity well in the front of his mind.
He's met with smiling amber eyes and a grin to match them, all but buried under a mop of tumbled yellow curls. The friendly-faced young man looks about his age and several inches taller, thin and long-limbed the way Donnie used to be.
"Hey," he says, offering a hand. "I'm Woodrow, but you can call me Woody."
"Michelangelo," Mikey replies, warming to the other man already as he shakes his hand, "and any shorter variation is fine by me. So what are you doing way out here? You're not lost, are you?"
"Man, I hope not. This is the paranormal society, right? I couldn't find your membership application online, so I thought I'd drop by for a copy. It took me almost an hour to find this place. You're a pretty well-kept secret, huh?"
Mikey does his best not to look as stupefied as he feels.
"Uh," he says eloquently, "wait a sec. You want to join the club?"
"Definitely," Woody replies. "We had a similar club at my old school, but it was mostly just watching horror movies and looking up spooky EVPs on Youtube, y'know? I mean, it was fun, but - not really what I was going for."
Standing back to let him in, Mikey says, "So you just transferred here?"
"Sure did. I live with my uncle. We moved from Manhattan to be closer to his sister and her kids. She's going through an ugly divorce and she could use the extra help." Woody smiles at Leo, lifting a hand in greeting and trading introductions before he goes on. "I was going to a Visual Arts school before, but the admissions counselor told me my credits would transfer no problem, so I could finish my film degree here. Tuition is way cheaper, so I'm down with that."
He looks around their club room as he talks. Mikey can't help waiting for condescension or the always-fun, super-incredulous "are you guys for real?" but it never comes. Woody's face stays open and eager, eyes catching on the equipment on their listing table the way of a sticky-fingered kid in a candy store.
Mikey likes this guy.
"We'd be happy to have you, obviously," he says, and laughs when Woody's face lights up. "What, you were worried?"
"Well, a little!" Woody drops his bookbag on a chair and runs a hand through his hair, relieved enough now that he must have been nervous. "I mean, I'll be real, I got a few chuckles when I asked around about you guys. And half the people I talked to didn't even know there was a paranormal society here. Maybe if that's all I had to go on, I'd be a little iffy."
He smiles, and points at Mikey.
"But I found a subforum online, local ghost stuff. People with the same problem all saying the same thing. Some scrawny college kid showed up and helped them, and left without leaving a name. But this city isn't that big, y'know, and there aren't a lot of dudes that look like you and do what you do. You weren't hard to find."
Leo is smiling, a soft, full thing he directs at his hands, probably rightly guessing that Mikey wouldn’t fully appreciate it at the moment.
"A forum?" Mikey says weakly. "Are you serious?"
"As a heart attack." Woody looks fond, somehow, for all that they only met about a minute ago. "So, sure, you might be a bit of a joke around campus, and it looks like you get, like, negative funding, but - " He shoves his hands into his pockets, and shrugs, and says around a grin, "You're the real deal. How many people can say that?"
Mikey sinks into his chair, and promptly buries his face in the scorched tabletop.
"So is there a membership fee?" Woody asks cheerfully, somewhere above his head.
"Nothing like that," Leo replies, sounding amused. "We'll get you a club shirt if you're interested, and add you to the official roster online. Meetings are daily, but there's no attendance requirement. We're actually going to check out a possible passive haunting next weekend, which is plenty of time to get you familiar with all the equipment."
"Nice. I have a Canon at home that I would swear by. Want me to bring it in?"
"Not if you're that attached to it," Mikey interjects without lifting his head. "We lose a lot of gear."
"Duly noted," Woody says, dropping into the chair next to his. "Is it dangerous?"
"It can be," Leo says honestly, "but we're always careful. And Mike usually takes the risky jobs by himself without telling me, because he's the worst club president in the entire world."
"Ouch?" Mikey sits up to look at him, wounded. "Tell me how you really feel, Leo."
Ignoring him, Mikey's best friend goes on without missing a beat. "Fifty percent of our time is going to be spent either corralling him or running damage control when his brother finds out what we've been doing with our free time."
Woody grins. "Protective, huh?"
"Almost to a fault," Leo says dryly. "But you probably won't see him much, so I wouldn't worry about it."
Considering he died a year ago, neither Leo or Mikey add aloud.
"I do a lot of babysitting for my aunt, so I think I'm probably overqualified to keep an eye on Mikester, here." Mikey squawks in indignation and Leo chokes on a laugh, and Woody pushes his sleeves up, reaching across the table for one of the battered cameras. "Mind if I help with some of these?"
It takes two days and most of a third afternoon for Woody to become a regular fixture in Mikey's life. He's hard-working and immensely likable, and ignores Raph's bark and bluster when he comes around with an unflappable ease that blows Mikey's mind.
It takes three months after that for Mikey to work up the courage to introduce him to his always-absent brother. Woody doesn't move for several minutes and when he does, for some reason, it's only to stand and pull Mikey into a hug.
Within a year, Woody is as comfortable with cramming into Mikey's wheezing double-bed as Leo is. His arm is warm across Mikey's waist, his heartbeat is familiar, and Donnie watches over them with a fond smile as they sleep.
And Woody laughs one day, bright and uncontrived, as they wait outside a burning shack for Leo to bring around Mikey's Jeep. They're covered in dirt and soot and some sort of clear, ectoplasmic slime that is a very new development and one Mikey doesn't want to think about for too long until he's had a very hot shower, and Woody slings an arm around Mikey's shoulders.
I don't know if you'd be into this, but if you're still up for tmnt prompts... what about something from Boldly Go?
aaaaa i love the space au thank u for the request !
x
Mike is singing something very softly, something in a language Raph can’t place. It makes him homesick for something he doesn’t know.
He’s using a dialect of Earth, Don explains quietly, one from their childhood. One more of those inconsequential things that only Mike remembers from a life they didn’t live.
Leo’s harsh breathing evens out after a few moments, his brow smoothing as his troubled sleep shifts into a more restful one.
The terrible nightmares that plague their brother are a mystery to the rest of them. Leo can’t explain them when he wakes up in the middle of the night, tearful and terrified and groping for things and places he doesn’t know well enough to put into words – babbling about fighting, and falling, and a long, long sleep.
The implications are enough to make Raph’s stomach twist sickly. Enough to make him want to wrap his cheerful, haunted brother up in his arms and never let go.
Mike glances up when Professor leans through the door, and smiles at the concern the fugitoid manages to project through a largely unchanging expression.
He smooths a hand over the puckered scars on Leo’s head. Despite his kind expression, the winding tattoos on his arms are a sad, muted blue.
“He’s alright,” Mike says, looking past their guardian at the doorway, where the rest of his siblings are listening. Always knowing a little more than he lets on, he adds, “As long as we’re here, he’s alright.”
