Splinter Week Day 6: Stars
Splinter wasn’t sure where Leonardo’s fascination with space had come from. Well, yes, he knew it originated with that silly Heroes show but why Leonardo had latched onto that so specifically, he couldn’t say.
It was a delight to see him aglow with such awe and passion, a sorrow in that Splinter couldn’t foster it very well here—not just down to earth but far underneath it. Donatello was satisfied with bits and pieces of scrap metal. Michelangelo was (ironically) over the moon to receive paper and paint. Raphael’s energy could be taken out on his mixed selection of action figures; it never mattered what franchise they were from.
But of course Leonardo strove higher, yearned farther in all areas of his life. Try as he might, he couldn’t settle. He would sit by for whatever show the family had picked but they could guess what he’d prefer to watch. He would go along with his brothers’ games of pretend but they could tell he would rather be playing astronauts. He wasn’t ungrateful for the toys his father found but what he wanted more than anything was a model of the Dauntless. He would never ask outright, self-aware enough to understand it was too exclusive for Splinter to scrounge up, but his desire was still plain enough to see.
He tugged abruptly, uncharacteristically against Splinter’s paw on their walk home from collecting algae for a late dinner. When Splinter glanced back, he found him staring intently through the sewer grate—no doubt trying to squint past the city’s light pollution toward the stars.
“Humans made it all the way to space,” he blurted as if they had been discussing it the whole trip, desperately wistful and stubbornly optimistic at once. “Maybe mutants could too!”
Splinter doubted it. He ached to watch him hope for something so obviously out of his reach…but a crushed hope would hurt infinitely more than a distant one. Let a sweet boy keep a sweet dream.
Pensively squeezing his hand, he allowed a simple, “Perhaps.” Stranger things had probably happened to stranger creatures than them.











