Mutant Ninja Midlife Crisis - Chapter 14 - a_platypus (2024)

Chapter Text

As far back as Donnie can remember, he’s loved fixing things.

The process of disassembling parts, troubleshooting, and methodically reassembling a working product has always been gratifying in its own right. Something about fostering a new fondness and understanding for the machine he alone has breathed fresh life into. Yet, no task or machine has ever rivalled the bright, overwhelming emotion that burst from his chest the very first time he repaired the family TV.

He can still vividly recall the way dad smiled after he’d enthusiastically showed off his hard work—soft, proud, crow’s feet wrinkling. The way dad had placed the soft pads of his hand atop Donnie’s head and crooned, “good work, Purple.”

Donnie can’t remember being as pleased with himself as he had at that very moment. The fact that dad had proceeded to swipe the remote from his hands and dive into his armchair without a second glance is a superfluous, unnecessary detail. The paternal validation hit powerful as a drug directly to his bloodstream. Embarrassing? Perhaps. But from that day forward, Donnie chased that high.

They were all still kids—five, six and seven years respectively—when his brothers began bringing their broken toys to Donnie, palms up, eyes pleading, lips quivering.

“Dee, fix?”

Donnie became incredibly efficient at putting axles back on toy cars, meticulously sticking torn pages of comic books back together, reconnecting the Wi-Fi, sewing the eyes back onto ripped plushies, reattaching broken Atomic Lass and Jupiter Jim figurine parts, repairing appliances after training got slightly too rowdy. With each success, his brother’s confidence in him grew. His sense of pride expanded. It all became rather intoxicating for a little Donnie, so used to being the weakest, the slowest, the most fragile, the strangest outcast in a family of outcasts, to suddenly feel so appreciated—so needed.

Donnie loved it. He thrived under the attention. He could absorb information at a rapid rate and apply the theory with skill and creativity. His hands were deft and steady and knew exactly which piece went where. When things broke down or they scrounged something old and metal and dead, Donnie could always come up with an idea as to how it could be given new life. He was sharp, reliable, gifted, intelligent. The most intelligent.

Donnie could fix anything.

And then, one fateful day, Mikey had come to his room, utter devastation on his face, a bundle of feathers cradled between his hands. Donnie hadn’t thought to ask how a dumb flying rat managed to get itself lost in the sewers, too transfixed by the way Mikey held out two shaking palms and presented the small, broken pigeon to Donnie.

With big, fat tears rolling down his cheeks and a quivering shake in his voice, he begged, “Dee, fix.”

And Donnie, of course, with the heavy burden of being the only one in the family with half a functioning brain cell, had to explain. Had to search for words that would make his sweet, soft-hearted little brother understand that he couldn’t make a bird (yes, even one that looks like it’s just sleeping in his hands) fly again. Donnie had to watch Mikey’s face fall as he explained—in the least callous manner he was capable of—that there’s just some things that Dee can’t fix. Was forced to witness his little brother’s crestfallen expression deepen, his sniffles turning to sobs as Donnie firmly reiterated, over and over, in no uncertain terms, that this was beyond his ability, that some things were simply unfixable.

The ache was indescribable. Despite all his tears, Mikey had never so much as hinted that he felt a modicum of disappointment towards his brother. To Donnie though, in one single moment, he’d been tipped from his pedestal—failed to live up to the precious faith placed on his shoulders. He had become abruptly, irreparably fallible again, and worst of all, broken his brother’s heart in the process. All it took was one stupid dead bird.

A near decade later, and Donnie’s still running from that moment. He can’t let it come to that. He won’t. He refuses.

Donnie’s eyes feel scratchy from hours staring at screens, his body jittery from the caffeine, brain raw from sleeplessness.

The others haven’t even tried convincing him to lie down, caught up as they are looking for leads on the surface themselves. Any effort to put him to bed would be for naught, regardless. Donnie can’t sleep. Not beyond the interspersed minutes he passes out (on the sofa if he’s lucky, but usually with his cheek pressed to the desk next to his keyboard) while he waits for an algorithm to run. Anything more than that would be a waste of precious time.

Besides, some of his best work is done sleep deprived. Most of it, actually.

It would chafe on Donnie’s pride, to have the team blindly searching the city when he has specifically designed systems just for this purpose, but it’s better than watching them all anxious and aimless — Raph pacing circles around his lab, Mikey similarly unable to sit still. Both brothers are highly distracting, and yet still less piteous than the sight of Casey crouched in some dark corner of the room with his head in his hands, greasy hair clenched tightly between his fingers, foot tapping nervously against the floor while April sits beside him, one hand rubbing his back and the other clenched in her lap, her mouth pulled into a worried frown.

At the very least, Casey seems to have forgiven her for withholding knowledge about Leon’s harmful nightcaps. To blame just her wouldn’t be fair or logical by any measure. There has always been something off about Leon. They’d all seen the weird injuries, his avoidant behaviour, the grief that followed his every action, accumulating like a nebulous cloud overhead. They’d all taken part in allowing him to dismiss them, even when they knew he was lying.

Having the others benched with nothing to do presented a significant problem to his work-flow. Having Raph run them through dead-end after dead-end isn’t much better, but it keeps them occupied and out of Donnie’s mask tails. Besides, it’s much easier to hold onto hope when you’re not stuck on your ass feeling completely useless.

The more hours tick by though, the further bleak pragmatism creeps into Donnie’s mind. Everyone is sombre, quiet, and hyper-focused in their attempts to locate the guys. They’ve already circled back five or six times to rest or refuel, each time empty-handed. It’s been over eighty-six hours now. Donnie knows exactly how unfavourable those numbers are for the prospective wellbeing of a missing person. He’s the least spiritual person he knows, and even he’s holding out for a miracle. Yet, morale does not suffer. No one breaks under the stress mounting with each second. Instead, they draw together, moving through their search with a fierce kind of desperation, a united front—too stubborn, too unwilling, too much of their hearts in this to accept defeat.

Red light spills across the dark room as a pop-up blinks on his monitor: SEARCH RETURNED [ 0 ] RESULTS.

It’s the fifty-sixth time he’s read this message, successful searches that led to dead ends not-included. Donnie stares blankly into the screen for a moment, frustration and despair welling up in his throat.

His fist slams into the desk. His fingers clench, tighter and tighter against the helplessness overwhelming him, grasping for the immaterial. Irrational.

A repairable problem, he thinks—endeavours to convince himself, fingers flying across the keyboard. It’s difficult in more ways than one. It doesn’t help that neither of those fools took their damn phones. GPS tracking, wi-fi triangulation and IP address tracking have been a no-go from the beginning, making Donnie’s job exponentially more difficult. He’s got multiple programs monitoring social media platforms, filtering out the chatter for any mention of a giant one-armed man-turtle and his smaller identical twin. Ditto for the city’s surveillance footage. They’ve even mobilised some of their contacts in the hidden city to expand their search where Donnie’s digital reach falls short. There’s little Donnie can do to further improve his recognition algorithms or broaden his surveillance width without upgrading processing power—a task that would require more time than he’d like to throw to the wind without assurance it’d produce results.

It simply doesn’t make sense. Magical portals notwithstanding, they can’t have just vanished into thin air. Granted—that Donnie would fail to procure a single public record of his brothers’ existence since their disappearance isn’t a mathematical impossibility, but the odds are unlikely enough that he’d sooner blame it on some kind of system error. That, or something more nefarious like—

Donnie freezes.

Nagging doubt prickling at his neck, he checks for user logins from the past few weeks that don’t line up with his own digital footprint. He finds nothing suspect, but it’s possible they wiped any tracks clean. He pulls up code files he hasn’t touched recently and cross-references the checksum to previous versions he’s confident he hasn’t altered.

The flighty motion of his hands goes still when they fail to match, his body going cold. Someone’s altered his code.

Not a hacker, surely. Donnie’s firewalls are impenetrable. There’s no way to break in from the outside—not without leaving a hint of trespass. He kicks himself for not paying mind to such a glaringly obvious possibility with more severity sooner, but it had been such a ludicrous notion from the beginning that Donnie’s pride stopped him from sparing a thought to consider it. He spares a very serious moment now, and the more he investigates, opening his eyes to the negative space, the more illuminating the gravity of the situation becomes.

File after file missing. Several threads of painstaking detective work cut free. Evidence of phantom data injections flooded seamlessly with the real information, causing deliberate misdirection.

He clacks away at the keyboard with a viciousness the inanimate tool hardly deserves. There’s only one person he can think of that would have the means and the motive to do this. Donnie doesn’t want to believe it, but he thinks of the digitised failsafe he set up to divulge every last important access protocol to those he trusts most the moment his heart stops beating. He thinks of the shadow that often occupied the doorway to his workshop, of Shelldon’s indignant squawks when Donnie accused him of not acting as he’d been programmed. He thinks of the dream-like sensation of weightlessness and a blanket being pulled over his shoulders before he returned to the blankness of slumber.

Confirming his suspicions is as easy as a quick check of his system logs. He pulls up the access activity from that night, and there is no further denying it.

It’s a solid punch to the gut.

“I knew I should’ve changed those passwords.” He grumbles, self-chastising, because this is in large part, his own fault. He knows his brother, and though lacking his usual flair, this is exactly the sneaky, underhanded sabotage he would expect from Leo. And yet still, he cannot stave off the sinking feeling of betrayal.

It is, however, the closest Donnie has come to uncovering the truth, and that knowledge alone is enough to galvanise his exhausted mind into action. He downs another energy drink, ignoring the shaking of his hands as he follows a trail of voided information. He will find Leo. Both of them, then kick their sorry asses to kingdom come.

He’ll fix this.

- - -

The discordant rattle of the chains rings harshly with each heavy step Leon takes towards the muted screaming of the crowd outside.

The iron wrapped around his wrists and ankles are a new touch; an ‘extra precaution’ after the guards found a certain red fox yokai with his own handcuffs locking him to a shower pipe.

Leon’s fun little escapade around the Nexus’s holding area hadn’t lasted as long as he might’ve liked. It’d been exhilarating, alarms blaring as he sprinted through hallways bathed in red searching for potential exit, only to discover that the passages beneath the arena are practically a labyrinth. There had been nowhere to run, no unlit corners for him to disappear into, functionally reducing Leon to a single, unarmed, lost and exhausted turtle against fifty assholes with super-tazers.

Not the greatest of odds even on a good day, and Leon is far from performing at his best. It had been a poor plan, poorly executed. The night had ended no more painful than any other, but at least time he got the grim satisfaction of finally getting to fight pricks that deserved the pain he could dish out. That alone, he would argue, is worth the consequence of aching muscles and bindings chafing uncomforting against his scales.

His predicament however, remains two-fold, and despite all his puzzling over the upcoming fight, he has yet to come up with a solution that would address both aspects of his problem: his own immediate survival in the arena, and a viable escape for Leo. There has to be a solution, but so far all his endless circling has yielded is metal around his neck and mounting dread in his gut.

Leon squawks and nearly stumbles over the chains linking his ankles when the guard following close behind gives him a harsh shove. He recenters his balance, managing to avoid falling on his face, and jerks his head over his shoulder to snap icily. “Do you mind?”

The guard is the largest yokai Leon’s encountered thus far, the twisted horns adorning his head very nearly scraping the stone ceiling above them. The oversized brute’s beady eyes narrow, the silver ring hanging from his nose swings when he grunts. “Walk faster.”

As if it’s not abundantly apparent that having his limbs constrained by iron weights is hindering his motion.

“Didn’t they tell you?” Leon quips. “We turtles are all about taking things slow. Gives assholes like you all the more time to you know, shove us around, breathe down our necks, fly spittle at the back of our heads, stink up the place—”

Pain explodes from his jaw as he receives a sharp elbow to the jaw. Leon staggers, but manages to keep himself upright. A moment later, he tastes copper; blood pooling in his mouth from a bitten tongue. He spits, then straightens his shell.

He doesn’t spare the guard another glance before shuffling down the passage. They’re treating him rougher because he’s gotten under their skin. He’s made them feel a semblance of the humiliation and smallness that every other prisoner on this ship experiences on a daily basis, and now they’re lashing out at him because they’re stupid and weak and most importantly, because they’re scared of what he’ll do next.

His prowess in the arena hasn’t escaped their notice. They know he’s endured these conditions for longer than any of them could possibly fathom. Even now, shackled, bruised, and beaten down in what is, by all accounts, an unwinnable bitch of a predicament, he’s nothing but spitfire and teeth. Leon doesn’t need the extra push to step foot back into the arena. In fact, there’s a sizeable part of him that would much rather be out there in the ring than curled up next to Leo on the cold floor of their cell.

There is an undeniable madness to refusing to give in under the circ*mstances, but he hasn’t completely lost it yet. Has some loose screws up there, maybe, but after everything he’s been through, he’ll be damned before he lets Sylvia of all people to be the one to break him.

Besides, a fight to the death in the Nexus feels… not good, exactly, but mechanical. Familiar. A microcosm of Leon’s routine apocalyptic schedule, stripped back to its barest essentials—where he doesn’t have to worry about paperwork, or orders to give, or recruits to select, or people to manage, life or death missions every week, lives in his hands every second. The pressure has always been unrelenting and absolute, but this time if he ends up making a mistake in the field, no one will end up kicking the bucket except him. Here, he’s forced to switch off everything that isn’t immediately imperative to staying alive.

It’s nice. For half a day he doesn’t think about the past, or all his innumerable f*ck-ups, or the people he left behind. There is no anxiety at the forefront of his mind that can outcompete his adrenaline-fueled fight response for survival.

He can slice without second thought at man after monster, cut through flesh, sinew, bone. Watch as they fall, weapons clattering to the floor. No one he loves has to get hurt. Here, in this world, there’s no Leo, none of his family’s screams, none of their blood. No grieving what could have been. All the things he will never be. Those he couldn’t save.

When he manages to make it back to his and Leo’s cell, each day a little worse for wear than the last, it’s almost a comfort. Partly because the bleeding heart behind Leo’s nonchalant exterior is never more evident than when he is cussing Leon out while he patches up his wounds. Partly because the downtime forces him to recognise that ever since he’d retired from his role as resistance leader, Leon hasn’t been getting worse. It only felt like his mental health had been on a rapid decline because for once in his life his mind had the peace and time to process all the things he’d rather not think about.

The Nexus, as it so happens, has become a very effective avoidant mechanism. It puts Leon back into his most functional state. Which… isn’t really functional at all in the long-term. Leon’s not used to thinking within that frame. Less than a year ago, existence and stability in the long-term was a far too idealistic and fantastical concept for him to afford.

Yes, grim, but maybe that’s why he’s been relatively ambivalent about this whole ultimatum Sylvia’s handed him. After all, this is hardly the first time he’s been backed into a corner. Leon may be exhausted – weak from a lack of food and water and a solid nine battles’ worth of injuries, but if she’s expecting him to just lay down quietly and croak, she’s got a hell of another thing coming.

Leon winces as strong fingers suddenly dig into the flesh of his shoulder, the chains at his back jingling and the ache at Leon’s temples pulsing as he is yanked to a halt.

“Don’t try anything.” The bull hisses into his ear, before he stoops down low to release him.

Leon regards him with his driest look. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

A click, a key turning, a rattle, clink, clink, clack. Once at his ankles, once at his wrists, one final time at the collar around his neck. The manacles fall to the floor in a noisy heap. Leon feels twice as light but no freer.

Leon’s rubbing circulation back into his arm when the gruff voice sounds from behind him again. “One last thing.”

Leon sighs, the exasperated push of breath long and slightly painful as his diaphragm presses against bruised ribs.

He’s in the process of turning around, a biting remark on the tip of his tongue when he becomes cognizant of motion—the black arc of a baton swinging towards his head.

Leon thinks bastard, and the next thing he knows his vision is exploding with stars. He crumples to the floor.

From there, time and space become vague, disjointed concepts—a kaleidoscope of images and sensation falling in and out of focus. His tympana are ringing. Head trauma numero three is turning out to be a real doozy. He doesn’t recall being hauled back up to his feet, but he finds himself stumbling from a void of darkness to blinding light. It’s pure muscle memory that has him following an established routine.

A wall of noise hits him from all sides, so cacophonous Leon can feel it down to the marrow, overwhelming the ringing in his ears and beating a painful, splintering drumbeat against the fragile walls of his cranium. Leon lurches forward unsteadily. Colour and sound swim around him, disorientating, nauseating. Leon takes his position, his left hand wrapping around the hilt of a sword. By the time his mind manages to weave the world back into a semblance of coherency, it’s to a thunderous peak of cheering. He winces, eyes falling shut under the fresh wave of nausea that crashes over him.

Thoughts return, slow and thick as molasses.

He stands at a corner of the once pristine Nexus arena grounds, now reduced to rubble and dirt. They’re screaming his name. Not Leon, of course. He doesn’t exist here, in this reality. Here, he’s simply his sword. He is Ryūsei. A lifeless, ancient rock from another world, hurtling through space, burning up, threatening to destroy anything in his path or crumble and break upon collision.

“And Ryūsei’s opponent tonight…” The ruckus around the stadium gradually dies back down as the announcer’s voice booms.

The floodlights suddenly dim, leaving a lone spotlight to highlight the swirling pool of water in the middle of the field. He should probably be more worried about fighting Sylvia’s death omen after being given what felt like a f*cking lobotomy, but right now all he can feel is the relief of not having a thousand watts of light beamed directly into his face and a million fans screeching into his ear.

Beneath the sound of the announcer, Leon hears a barely audible mechanical hum—low and whirring, like one of Donnie’s robots powering to life. Suddenly, his legs are shaking, knees struggling to keep him upright, and it’s not until he’s fighting equilibrium to avoid crashing to the ground that he realises it’s not the steadiness of his footing threatening to give way, nor is it his body that’s shuddering. It’s the floor itself.

“A Nexus All Star, the feared maiden of Menhit, the Hidden City’s own shining Mare of Diomedes…” As the announcer speaks, the edges of the chasm in the centre of the pool fall away, the rush of the water falling down the sink amplifying as the hole widens. From it, a silhouette rises with the mist.

It faintly registers that this is far more show than they’ve put on for any of his other lowly competitors. It’s a level of effort and pizzazz that demands attention, drawing all eyes to the foreordained champion and away from the bloodthirsty fans’ obsession with Ryūsei – the lowly underdog who’s about to puke his guts up on the field. He’d probably feel embarrassed by his own lackluster entrance and insulted by the clear favouritism on display here were it not for the fact he doesn’t feel much else except nauseous right now.

Leon squints. He can just barely make out broad shoulders, two short, curved blades, a humanoid figure with a body of lithe muscle.

“KING LAMPON!”

Leon’s senses erupt with pain once again as the crowd comes alive and the full weight of the Nexus’s floodlights beam down upon them — the sound and light surrounding him, all-consuming and inescapable. He cringes, eyes instinctively squeezing shut against the sharp, stabbing discomfort in his eyes, his hands coming up to cover his tympana as the audiences’ screams take a battering ram to his already tender brain.

This is it. He’s going to hurl in front of an audience of thousands. For the second time within a span of twenty-four hours. The fight hasn’t even started yet.

Leon wills himself to swallow it back and eases open his eyes. It’s not pleasant, but his vision eventually adjusts. He can’t say the same for the pounding at the back of his head. Exhaustion, bruising, concussions, the aftermath of a few hundred volts of electricity seizing his muscles. His body certainly doesn’t lack reasons for its aching.

Come on Leo, do what you do best—showy and annoying. Flap like a peaco*ck, dance like a bee.

“Gugh.” He groans, feeling every year of his age.

He brings a free hand to his temple. It comes away clean—a welcome surprise. His head has bled enough blood for two lifetimes in the last week alone.

When he finally lifts his gaze, his eyes meet gold—lustrous metal catching the rays of light, adorning the pauldron strapped to one of her shoulders, wrapped in tight, scaled cuffs around muscled forearms, reflected in three-fingered talons wrapped around twin blades.

The whole look this Yokai has going on strikes Leon as awfully garish for what is essentially a deathmatch in the dirt, though he can hardly complain—standing on the other side of the arena with a silk kimono and his thighs out—rocks from glass houses and all. If he were a glass half full kind of guy, he’d say that the scene they set makes for quite a glamorous deathbed.

Lampon jumps down from her platform, her boots splashing into the shallow pool of water below.

She approaches, far smaller than Leon expected, her footing cat-light as she sizes him up. A long hood sits over a white mask with crimson markings. The angles of the mask are sharp, menacing, reminiscent of a skull— bold red lines imitate the ridge of her brow, disappearing into the dark of her hood. Large red eyes the shape of Big Mama’s betray no emotion, whole and blank and shining under the arena lights. Leon can read nothing from her but a battle-ready focus and a fierceness that promises a punishing fight. There’s faint screaming from Leon’s hindbrain advising him to settle down into some kind of defensive posture, but there’s a louder thought that suddenly cracks through the forefront.

“You’re like me.” Leon blurts.

Her mask tips, appraising him head to toe. “I doubt that.” She replies huskily.

Leon finds nothing to suggest otherwise: shell, plated plastron, three fingers. She’s wearing very little in regards to armour; the golden pauldron secured to her shoulder fastened with a single broad strap that runs across her plastron. Her scales are hidden behind dark grey bindings and a high collar, but the outline of her lithe figure reminds him of Leo’s—his own, as a teenager.

He tilts his head at her as she begins to circle him, predator hunting prey.

In all his years, he’s never met another turtle. Yokai are a diverse group—he’s come across people that look like all manner of reptile, but not once has he come across another mutant like his brothers. He would’ve noticed. He would’ve remembered.

“I mean no offence to thy king, but are you, perchance, bald under there?” He calls.

The question is met with stony, silent contempt. Okay. A different approach. “What are you doing here?”

How the hell did you get caught up with a maniac like Big Mama is the implied query there, but somehow Leon doubts that will be well received.

Lampon slides her foot back slowly, stance lowering. “Right now?” She asks, perfectly relaxed, her motions perfectly controlled and dexterous as she flourishes her blades. “Theriocide.”

“Ah.” Leon watches her closely. There’s a tingling, crackling pressure in the air that registers as danger in Leon’s reptilian hindbrain. “And if I were to tell you that some kind third-person spectators may be either too homeschooled or too concussed to know what that means…”

She stops her circling, straightens. “Allow me to demonstrate.”

A blur of motion. It’s only instinct that has Leon throwing up a guard and bracing his core. Blades sing and sparks fly when their steel meets, the force ricocheting painfully up Leon’s left arm and vibrating in his teeth.

Alarm crawls up his spine. In the time it’s taken him to blink, Lampon has managed to close the distance separating them. The strike is solid — far more powerful than he might’ve expected, and now that Lampon has breached his space, she doesn’t let up, as fleet-footed as Mikey when he still had two heels on the ground. Her falchions are shorter than any traditional sword, and her slighter frame paired with swift footwork sends a barrage of consecutive cuts and swipes so incessant that Leon struggles to keep pace, his stupid blunt brute of a sword big and unwieldy in the face of her speed.

They fight, a vicious blur of two bodies, Lampon’s advance and Leon’s dodge, Lampon’s thrust and the sharp sting of her blade across the flesh of Leon’s forearm before he finally parries and sends her a step back.

Leon pauses, huffing, heart pumping, blood singing through his veins, adrenaline muting his headache. “Alright King, you’ve got my attention. I’ll play ball.” He changes his grip around his blade.

This time, when Lampon lunges forward, Leon meets her midway. He deflects her under-swipe, forcing an opening and drawing first blood from her side. The slice is shallow.

Leon darts forward, slicing down again, trying to capitalise while her guard is low, but Lampon makes no sign of even having felt it. She parries, then twists, viper-fast, one blade tucking backwards in her hand before she swings wide from the side. Leon pivots hard and dodges backwards, his heels skidding across the dirt as he drops back into a guard.

Lampon barely pauses to breathe. She swings her blades in a flashy flourish, throwing the hilts up and catching them in reverse grip, thumbs curling over the pommels as she settles into another stance. “Y’know, it’s hard these days to find a swordsman that can keep up with me.” She says, her tone dry and bored. “When Big Mama threw me a bone here, I thought I might actually have a challenge for once.”

Irritation plucks at a tense muscle in his neck. She’s got talent, he’ll give her that much. Though he is a little dubious as to how much of that is natural. He’s rarely come across someone this fast, let alone someone who can lay down blows this powerful. It spells trouble for Leon. He’s worn down. Already struggling to keep up.

“I have to admit, I’m somewhat disappointed.”

Leon’s left hand tightens around the leather hilt of his sword. “A little early to be making judgments, no?”

The red eyes of her mask turn towards him. “To you, this is a nightmare you wish to escape. For me, it’s a home. I grew up learning to appraise an opponent by the first lick of their steel. Trust me, old man, you do not measure up to the rumours.”

Leon watches as she rolls her shoulders and cricks her neck, her posture limber and relaxed like this is nothing more than a warm-up to her. Leon would almost be offended by the casualness of it all were it not for the feeling of her gaze on him behind that mask, eyes intent on the slightest opening.

Her composure sure does speak of experience, though she sounds young enough to still be in college with April in this world. Strong and healthy enough to be a perfect candidate for the resistance, in what was once Leon’s. Did she really grow up here? In the undercity? Or was she raised imprisoned— another messy familial bond of Big Mama’s. It would certainly explain her aptitude in the arena.

Leon should be on his guard, mind clear and focused, but every time he looks at her, he struggles to suffocate his pity, the questions circling his psyche. Why are you here? Who did this to you?

“Haven’t you heard of giving a guy a little time to come out of his shell?” He quips.

Leon jerks back when Lampon surges forward, arm rising just in time to bear the brunt of her blow as he rushes out, “I think I should be afforded one free terrible pun without retaliation per head trauma,” he pushes her blades away and swiftly follows up with a riposte, “it’s only fair.”

Lampon parries, eyes narrowing in a subtle wince from the weight of his swing. She aims low — knows she’s deadliest the closer she is to the ground, where any other opponent would be dead. He flinches and jumps back at the sudden heat that erupts from his leg, taking a shallow slice that’s more pressurised air than blade, splitting the threads of his kimono and cutting through scales just above his knee.

Leon bites back a hiss, his arm shooting out with a wide haphazard swing, forcing space. Lampon pivots back with far more grace, her eyes already searching for the next opening. On Leon’s part, he doesn’t know which opponent is worse — the one before him, or the vertigo. His vision spins, his world shifting on its axis.

Lampon is certainly proving that she’s not in the mood to be reasoned with. Every attempt Leon’s made to convince an opponent that there is a third option that involves neither fighting nor dying has resulted in failure, and he simply does not know enough about this girl to try and put forth a solid argument. Every personal hint Lampos deigns to grace him with is an impossibly small drop of information in a raging sea that Leon is currently drowning in. There’s little logic to diving deeper when his life is dependent on keeping his mind focused and his head afloat.

Leon takes an unsteady step backwards, chokes back another untimely wave of nausea and tries for a distraction.

“And what about those rumours? Tell me. What have they been saying about me?” He huffs, trying his level best to keep up a convincing guard while he swallows down the thick sourness pushing at the back of his throat. “Only the nice things, please. I’ve been having a rough go of it lately.”

“... Very well.”

He flinches when he spots Lampon pushing off her back foot, his sword immediately at the ready. She advances on him, a blur of silver and gold. Leon darts in and back, each thrust and parry a whirlwind of movement—blinding flashes of silver and gold as the arena’s spotlights glint across the metal.

“They say Ryūsei is a newcomer to the scene with the skills of a veteran. Composed under pain and pressure, bearing a cool and sharp-witted confidence—-one born of experience, as opposed to arrogance.”

Leon throws himself sideways in a manner that’s more drunken stumble than dodge, narrowly avoiding a downward blow that would’ve lopped his good arm off were he a millisecond slower. Leon hits the ground hard, his heart slamming into overdrive as he feels the rush of wind and specks of dirt spray across his vision.

“As beautiful as he is haunted.” Lampon announces with another downward strike.

“Weird and off-putting way to compliment a guy, but I’ll take it.” Leon remarks as he rolls out of the way of the stab, his brain rattling around in his skull as he rotates. He hops back up to meet the whip of her other sword slicing through the air towards him.

Lampon goes on, “a ronin that fights like he has already survived several hells. A master swordsman that could rival the greatest.”

As soon as Leon’s got his balance, he brings up his sword in a guard, keeping low to the ground, using his weight and gravity to protect himself from the next blow while he regathers his wits.

“And yet…” She pauses for a particularly vicious swipe at his neck. Leon blocks, a shriek of steel scraping steel. “Somehow, not a single person has heard of him before. A complete Nexus nobody, in every sense of the word…”

Leon blinks away the sweat catching in his lashes. His lungs expand, forcing new air into his lungs, forcing the old out. His arm aches as again and again Lampon’s blades slams into his own, wearing him down.

“No history.”

She leans forward, shoulder dropping, one of her blades swiping low. Leon reads the motion, jumps, then immediately swings his blade up to parry her next blow.

“No origin.”

Electric streaks of heat race up Leon’s nerves until his entire arm begins to tremble. Several cuts burning with the salt of his sweat and pulling with each motion of his muscles.

“No family.”

The pain pulsing through Leon fades to a dull roar, a wave of raw emotion drowning out the agony. He spins out of the way of her strike then sweeps his blade in an arcing blow at Lampon’ head. As she dodges it, Leon brings his sword back, takes the hilt between two hands, and brings the blade down.

Momentum comes to a crashing halt, a shock screaming up his arm as Lampon drops to a knee and blocks the blow with both swords, paired silver raised above her in a protective X. Blank red eyes peer up at him through the cross of their blades.

“That’s a nasty look,” Lampon’s head tilts a fraction, “struck a nerve, did I?”

Leon squares his jaw and pushes harder against her guard. “Sounds to me like your dearest Sylvia hasn’t been very forthcoming with you.”

Lampon doesn’t budge an inch. “She isn’t interested in revealing what hole she unearthed you from. The myth is far more compelling, I suppose. Ryūsei — her own bright star, fallen from the heavens.”

He would hardly call where he came from heaven. “If this is leading up to a punch-line where you call me Angel…”

She huffs through gritted teeth, her breaths strained. “Don’t flatter yourself. I’d sooner call you a ghost.”

He jerks when Lampon’s steel unlocks itself from his own with a screech — the resistance pushing against him falling away with a suddenness that has him stumbling forward.

Lampon rolls to the side, smoothly dodging the downward arc of his sword. Leon knows this feeling—when he’s exhausted and hurting and gives his all to win and throws defence to the wind. Foolish, amateur, fatal.

The sting of impact reverberates up Leon’s arm as his blade buries itself firmly into the ground.

The crowds’ screams reach a fever pitch, ringing between his tympana as he plants his feet and tries to yank his sword free. The blade stubbornly refuses to budge, and too fast do Lampon’s blades return, snaking towards his throat.

Leon’s entire being goes taught with fear. He reacts without thought, his fingers releasing from the hilt of his sword, his neck instinctively pulling into his shell at the very last moment.

He does not see the arc of her swing. Only hears the whoosh of wind as her blade slices the air where his head had resided, feels the sharp sting of flesh just above his brow.

Lampon yells out in frustration, then there’s a heel hooking around his ankle and the world’s equilibrium shifts — the dark giving way to momentum and impact as he’s forced flat to the ground. His head pops out to blinding arena lights and Lampon’s blades whirling back for a finishing blow. Leon tenses, his arms immediately rising to protect his head.

He catches one of the blades in a metal hand. The other glances across the plates of his outer forearm and plunges into the keratin of his shell. A guttural scream bursts from his lips, his eyes widening as he feels the blade pierce through to the soft tissue below his ribs.

Leon’s eyes squeeze shut against the pain. He blindly grasps out with his free hand, his fingers finding purchase in the fabric of Lampon’s high collar. He sharply yanks it, pulling her in as he smashes his head forward.

A short thrill of exhilaration strikes through him when he hears a satisfying crunch.

The weight pressing down on him disappears as Lampon’s head snaps back. The moment he senses the weakened hold, he pulls at her sword, relinquishing the weapon from her grip and throwing it to the side. Leon hears it clatter to the ground somewhere to his left and fumbles for the other blade—the one still stuck in the keratin of his plastron. Yikes.

Between the pain and the imminent threat of a pissed she-devil rising back to her feet, Leon doesn’t have the space to think. He wraps both hands around the handle and rips the sword from his body with a sharp cry, nearly doubling over in the process.

The white noise between his tympana rings loud. It feels like there’s a bubbling cauldron of lava erupting beside his stomach, the throbbing heat radiating outwards. Lightheaded and dizzy, Leon sways. Lampon’s bloodied blade shakes in his grip as wet heat trickles down his brow, mingling with sweat—salt and copper prickling at his eyes. He blinks away the blurriness and glances up.

The air is punched from his lungs as a weight slams into him. Leon’s world tilts sideways, the newly obtained blade slips from his weak fingers, the raw wound below his ribs screams as his shell is reacquainted with the floor.

Fear arcs through him with the impact. Through the haze of pain, Leon’s first instinct is to locate a fallen weapon. With both of them unarmed, this fight is going to devolve into a mad scramble for whoever can obtain the sharpest object to stick the other with first. It’s what any smart non-krang enemy would do: eliminate the most immediate threat to their life via the quickest and easiest means necessary. It’s what Leon would do. It’s what he is doing.

It is not what Lampon does.

The moment Leon takes his eyes off her, she pounces, catching him mid-twist with a lock of her thighs around his left arm. Leon blinks, then she’s rolling sharply away from him, forcing the arm into a painful deadlock, leaving no leeway to struggle.

He strains, but any violent motion threatens to detach his shoulder from its joint. The ache of the stretch worsens with each second. It’s the longest break from potentially killing blows they’ve had since this fight started.

“We can stop this. I can help you.” He gasps out. “You don’t have to do this, you’re more than this.”

She pauses for a split second, her head lifting slightly. Her mask is cracked— one of her red eyes shattered. The split reveals golden markings around a sharp amber gaze that narrows at his words. “More than what?”

“A tool.” He hisses, gambling his own grievances, searching for an echo of understanding behind her eyes. “A prop. A plaything made to shine for her amusem*nt.”

There’s a long beat where Lampon is perfectly still. Leon tries to buck against her grip, but the angle is all wrong. Her hold doesn’t shift so much as a millimetre. She presses her boots into the weeping wound in his side.

Leon’s world drowns beneath the wave of agony. He screams.

When his mewling dies down, she speaks, pushing past the sharp buzzing in his head, her voice low— breathing composed as if holding Leon down isn’t difficult at all. “You know what the difference between you and I is?”

Alright. Not exactly the response he’d been aiming for. Between the straining of his arm and his own heartbeat thudding in his ears, Leon’s mind is drawing a blank.

Another flare of pain rises from his side as she digs her boot in deeper, pushing for a response.

“Dazzling charm?” He wheezes.

The deep chuckle resonating in her chest vibrates against his arm. Leon flexes his fingers, eliciting protest from the tendons in his wrist. “Not quite.”

What is this girl’s deal? Leon presses the back of his head into the ground, eyes clenching in discomfort. He rattles off whatever comes to mind. “Multiple, compounding concussions? A hyperfixation with the colour gold? A bigass chin? The ability to call killing a man ‘asserting my girl power’? A really intense manicure job?”

She hums. “No.”

Leon squirms. The wound in his side joins the chorus of agony as Lampon presses down harder with her boots, halting his movement.

“You’re really drawing out the suspense here.” He manages weakly.

“A functional sword arm.”

Leon’s immediate thought is how vehemently Donnie would defend the work of scientific genius attached to Leon’s shoulder, which is the fourth hint now that the effects of Leon’s repeated head trauma are really starting to kick in (not that Leon’s counting)—

He is violently yanked from the depths of his wandering mind by a sickening pop.

His vision fills with white.

A loud, high-pitched noise fills the space between his tympana. It takes three seconds for Leon’s brain to register it as a scream, and another five for Leon to recognise it’s his own. His senses are enveloped by an electric heat that engulfs his shoulder, leaving his body locked in a state of rigid-limbed agony, his nerve endings igniting a firework of sparks behind tightly clenched eyelids.

He doesn’t notice when Lampon releases him—is hardly aware of the coolness of the dirt as he writhes like a worm, mindlessly trying to escape the sensation, metal fingers in a death grip just above the shoulder.

He cracks open an eye and peers up to see Lampon squatted down close, coolly observing him.

“Maybe there is a part of you that lives up to the stage name…”

Lampon’s voice barely reaches him between the incomprehensible chanting of the crowd and the wildfire igniting his senses. Leon cries out when she gives his shoulder a pat, igniting another barrage of agony that drowns out his thoughts and leaves him shaking.

“Y’know, the thing they don’t tell children wishing upon shooting stars is that they’re nothing more than ancient bits of debris. Destroys the fantasy of it, doesn’t it? That these bright, shining symbols of prosperity flying through the sky are just fire and rock—material vaporised in the atmosphere, lucky to touch the ground before it’s turned back to dust.”

He counts his breaths and grinds his head into the ground, tries to pull himself from the tides of pain radiating from his arm, his skull, below his ribs. He needs to get it together. He needs to think.

This involves processing the increasingly apparent reality in which his arm — the real, flesh and blood, good one — won’t move. The sensation shuddering through him is both fire and ice.

The arm is still there. It’s still attached. Leon can see it. Dangling uselessly from the joint. There’s an odd tingling sensation in his fingertips. He can see it, he can feel it.

His brain suggests dislocation. Leon suggests his brain shut up, given that he now has more pressing concerns to prioritise, like how Lampon is standing up and moving away, probably to collect her swords so that she can put him out of his goddamn misery.

His fear is muted by the pain shooting through him, pulse after pulse, like drums being bashed repeatedly over his head. It’s making it hard to form a plan, much less move a single muscle. Everything aches, mentally and physically. sh*t out of luck, this time.

Lampon returns, the permanent scowl of her mask floating above him. “You’re broken. Undisciplined. Past your prime. This is your indictment. She sees no further potential in you.”

A sharp scream rips free from his throat when Lampon’s boot slams into the wound below his ribs, the force of the kick flipping him onto his shell.

“That is the difference between you and I, Ryūsei.”

He… goes away for a moment. Just lies there, shaking and breathless. The burn in his arm and his side is still there, but muted. Distant. Like his head has been dunked underwater, the noise of the crowd muffled and indistinct, replaced by static. He has a vague feeling that this spells danger for him, medically speaking, though he’s not in a state to recall the exact term for his symptoms.

He flinches at the sudden glint of light in his periphery.

There’s a millisecond delay between his brain and the correlated processors in his arm. Leon’s so focused on the sharp silver flying directly towards his face that it barely registers as his own movement when the metal hand shoots up and catches the blade centimetres from his flesh.

He sharply inhales as the chaos of the arena comes back into focus. The mechanics inside his arm whir under the force of Lampon’s strength bearing down on him. Her glare is piercing, illuminated by a primal intensity—a beam of gold that slices through the cacophony of light and noise around them. It settles on him with a laser-like focus, stripping away any semblance of safety or sanctuary.

Leon winces under the strain as she pushes down harder, her blade biting deeper into the metal of his hand. His eyes squeeze closed. Panic clenches around his heart as his chest and back muscles shiver under the exertion, threatening to give out.

Lampon zeroes in on the weakness, driving down with all her weight. Leon gasps. Each and every muscle in his body aches, pushed to the point of exhaustion.

“Give in,” she snarls, “there’s no shame in falling to my blade. Retain some semblance of honour and die with dignity.”

His eyes slide open… Honour?

An inexplicable sense of giddiness breaks through the waves of pain—delirious glee that snags his diaphragm in a tight grip and shakes.

Dignity?

A loud bark of laughter bursts free from the bars of his teeth. The noise is shaky and wheezing, the pressure of Lampon’s strength bearing down on him thinning the air in his lungs. The cackling has him feeling lightheaded and even more out of breath, but there’s little he can do to stop it. Lampon blinks, her domineering aura wavering at his reaction, and f*ck, that’s funny. Leon laughs harder at the look of slack, utter bafflement plastered across once sharp features.

“Have you seen me?” He asks with near-hysteric and earnest curiosity. “What gave you the impression I have any of that left to lose?”

His laughter dies off when she presses down harder, the air catching in his throat.

“What purpose is there to prolonging your life for a few scarce moments? Your sword arm is useless. You can’t fight.” She sneers, as if this is something that matters to him, as if he wouldn’t crawl on his hands and knees to—

Ah. But this isn’t about him, is it? This is about Lampon. Her pride. Her glory. She won’t strike him down like this. Not in front of her audience, not in front of her patron. She wants a proper victory. A kneeling surrender. Not an ugly, scrabbling slay in the dirt.

How ironic. An ugly death is all Leon has come to expect from his life.

“It’s over.” She spits. “Accept it. I’ve won.”

Leon imagines it. Following Big Mama’s orders. His blood splattering the ochre ground below him, dark stains that will remain until the boots of other fighters kick dirt over it. The idea fills him with nothing but exhaustion. The passage of time has never been kind to him. Surely this would be easier—no more hurt feelings, no more living dread for the fate of this world…

His eyes dip to the purple and red masks tied around his dislocated arm, brushing against the dirt.

Leon stops.

“You’re right.” He agrees blandly.

Lampon falters. The moment the realisation registers behind Lampon’s eyes, Leon grips the blade in his hand with all the strength Donnie’s prosthetic has bestowed upon him.

He parrots her words, “I’m shameless. I’m nobody, from nowhere. I’m, by every definition of the term, a loser.”

He slowly pushes himself off the floor. Lampon’s boots skid in the dirt as he forces her back, inch by inch. The motion pulls at his shoulder, pouring fuel on the wildlife engulfing his left arm. Lampon staggers, head dropping and arms shaking as she tries with all her strength to hold him down.

“All true.” The steel between Leon’s fingers begins to dent and warp beneath the pressure. “There’s just one teeny tiny crucial detail you failed to take into consideration.”

There’s a loud metallic whir and a creak of the gears in his hand before the blade finally crumples under the pressure. Lampon gasps, her shocked gaze darting up at him, her pupil blown wide. She takes a step back, her grip slackening around the warped weapon. Leon lets the sword clatter to the ground, then steps forward and shoots his hand out to grasp Lampon by the collar before she can retreat. When Leon looks into her eyes, he sees fear.

“I’m an ambidextrous loser.”

The wound at his side screams as he lifts and bodily throws her across the arena.

She doesn’t go far, somersaulting in the air and tumbling to the ground. Leon, lightheaded and vision spinning slightly, holds his bad side with his good arm and languidly makes his way over to where his sword is buried into the earth.

His legs are a little shaky, but each step forward is more confident than the last. With the blade before him, he takes a deep breath, wraps his metal fingers around the blade’s hilt.

There’s a voice at the back of his head—cynical and contemptuous, whispering that is yet another exercise in futility. She is younger, stronger, healthier than him. Leon shakes his head. Precision beats power.

With one, great, adrenaline-fueled tug, he rips the sword from the ground.

When he turns back to Lampon, she is scrambling for her other blade. She’s faster. Leon readjusts his hold on the grip, tries to detach himself from the agony rippling through his shoulder and the growing numbness of his left fingers as he lowers into a defensive stance. Timing beats speed.

Her desire for the win burns far greater than his own. Yeah, well. She’s never been exposed to the perks of being a washout screw-up, has she? The world sharpens as the whites of his nictitating membrane slide over his eyes.

He’s no stranger to the concept of survival over victory.

- - -

Donnie jerks awake at the feeling of a vibration buzzing against his cheek.

He blinks blearily, head lifting to look around the room, momentarily disoriented. His workshop is dark, his monitor asleep. Dad’s dressing gown slips from where it’d been placed over his shoulder.

A frisson of anxiety rushes through him as he glances down to purple light blinking from his wrist-tech—the notification that awoke him. He can’t have passed out for longer than an hour or two. His head feels like it’s full of wool and his eyelids are heavy, his body signalling its desire to collapse back against the desk. Donnie swipes the drool from his cheek and turns back to his monitor, wincing when the light immediately burns into his corneas before he’s able to turn down the screen brightness.

The notification leads Donnie down what he can only define as a sordidly clandestine rabbit-hole. He applies several… less than legal strategies to bypass several security measures before he’s finally able to land at the very bottom of the well with a single link—rather innocuous looking for a resource that required specific decryption keys to detect.

Donnie accesses the link with a foreboding pit in his gut—hopeful and anxiety-ridden by the thought of what that hope might do to him if his efforts have led him to yet another failure.

The feed begins to play.

At first it’s difficult to comprehend what he’s seeing.

Two forms move together in a wild flurry of motion, a distance away from the camera. Their weapons clash, silver singing as they dance across a mosaic of fallen, weathered marble columns and uneven ground. The dirt has eroded away in places, exposing patches of underlying material that glints with a metallic sheen under the amphitheatre’s spotlights—more metal than bedrock. In the centre of the war-torn battleground, a large pool of water flows towards a swirling centre.

At the bottom of the stream layout, a timer. Twenty-three minutes, sixteen seconds and counting. On either side of the clock, names, one highlighted in a banner of gold—Lampon, the other, in cerulean blue. Ryūsei.

The smaller opponent’s footing stutters for a second—a reaction of pain, blood drawn. A rise of shock and alarm prickles on Donnie’s clammy shoulders. This is no high school performance in a run-down theatre.

They block the next attack, retreating towards a wall. The camera pans out further, revealing a crowd. The height between the epicentre of destruction and the audience stands is cavernous, and large sections of outer walls which have all but crumbled away.

The opponents come to a sudden halt; their blades caught in a deadlock. The view switches to a different camera, a closer angle. Donnie’s been subconsciously leaning towards the monitor, drawn physically to the edge of his seat. The new perspective fills his vision. The air in his lungs freezes, his heart drops, horror takes hold.

He’s found him.

There is no satisfaction, no sense of accomplishment to the discovery. Leon is alive, barely, and it’s clear that this status is on the imminent verge of deteriorating.

Leon looks beyond exhausted. His body is a medley of scrapes and bruises. Blood drips from a cut on his head, running over his brow ridge, catching in the fabric of his mask and rolling down his cheek like tears. A shivering cascade of terror crashes through Donnie at the sight of even more red flowing freely from Leon’s side, staining the blue of his robes and dripping down a bare leg.

His cozy, loose clothing has been swapped out for a mockery of a hakama, exposing the shaking in his muscles—bulk that looks so lithe and defined it could be sculpted from marble. Malnourished, Donnie’s mind supplies. Fat reserves burned away to practically nothing, the body not far off from beginning to eat into itself. Donnie’s fingernails dig crescents into the palms of his hands. Catabolysis.

Leon’s veins and arteries are visible to even the camera’s resolution, snaking down his forearms into his hands. Severe dehydration, like a bodybuilder right before a major event—the cut of their body accentuated to the eye, but the athlete is barely able to stand due to the physical punishment inflicted upon the body.

Leon’s opponent slides bloodied blades away from his sword. The rhythm of the fight picks up again. Donnie’s foot bounces up and down, his knuckles white where he’s clutching the arms of the chair.

Leon fights brutally—wielding his sword like it’s an extension of his prosthetic. If Donnie wasn’t a nervous wreck, he’d be impressed by how quickly Leon’s mastered control of the new arm. Granted, Leo’s been swinging with both hands for as long as he’s been able to lift a sword, but Donnie had still predicted the integration process to take far longer than this… He’s used to seeing Leon as a leftie—fighting solely with…

With an arm that now hangs loosely at his side.

Donnie squints. The shoulder joint looks wrong. The limb is completely slump as he dodges yet another attack. Dislocated, he realises with another hot-cold shiver of panic.

The horrible pit in his stomach grows. Donnie’s thoughts race faster, synapses sparking like fireworks. Leon will undoubtedly be in immense pain fighting as he is, and he needs to do something that will end this fight and end it quickly. Shock and adrenalin are beautiful, powerful forces of biochemistry, right up until the second their effects wear off and you pass the f*ck out, which in Leon’s case will be equivalent to death.

He needs to find out what—where this is, but he finds himself paralysed, equally enraptured and disturbed by the sight before him. He hangs on the precipice of action and inaction, helpless and captivated. All he knows for certain about anything is the information presented before him, and all it’s telling him is that Leon is about to die and Donnie will be incapable of fixing anything—

Leon’s opponent slices at the air and catches one of the tail ends of the red and purple masks tied around Leon’s leg as he kicks backwards. Donnie’s awareness sweeps over the tattoo sleeve, information that is both new and entirely unimportant right now. Donnie’s more interested in the masks—recognises them from the family’s first encounter with Leon, wound around the grip of the sword that had been posed to murk him. Difficult image to forget.

What plants a seed of dread in him though is the blue wrapped around Leon’s other leg. Now that Donnie has noticed it, he cannot stop noticing it.

The facts lay before him, plain. Leo was with Leonardo. Leo is no longer with Leonardo. Leo is not here. Leo is nowhere to be seen. Dead, deceased, another ghost that Leon has tied to himself.

Donnie squeezes his eyes against the moisture forming there. No. His breaths are leaving his lungs too fast, thin and shaky. He digs his teeth into his lip and shakes his head. He can’t make baseless assumptions and fall into a panic. He takes a slow, stuttering breath. He can’t focus on the negatives. This is Schrodinger's cat. Either Leo is fine, or he isn't. He can’t know until he knows.

The action of looking away from the fight so he can pull up the stream’s details on another monitor is more difficult than it should be. It’s nonsensical. The end of this fight will not be dictated by whether or not Donnie sees it, and yet he feels responsibility to Leon to watch. If he lays his attention elsewhere, all his progress will be lost. Leon will disappear again, or fall to his opponent’s blade, and Donnie won’t see how they murdered his brother, and somehow that would render this whole experience as even more unjust.

His eyes dart between both screens as he scans through a goddamn advertisem*nt for Big Mama’s Battle Nexus revival with a detached sense of disbelief. It’s all so loud, so public, so obvious. Here Donnie was, labouring through days of fruitless investigation, slamming into dead-end after dead-end, and all he had to do was tune in to the Hidden City’s biggest new attraction? The knowledge fills him with a deeply confused frustration and a deeper sense of loss. He can’t have missed this. How did he miss this?

Leon makes a sweeping blow that misses its target, then staggers, wincing. Blood in the water. His opponent advances on his weakness, their sword slicing through the air. A breath catches in Donnie’s throat, his stomach flipping. Leon leans back at the last possible moment and the blade skims across his plastron.

Leon catches himself with the prosthetic and kicks his opponent in the stomach hard enough to send them stumbling back. Then, bruised and bleeding and looking like a stiff wind could topple him, using his sword as a crutch, he props himself back up.

His opponent is already on their feet, making their way towards him. Leon does not flinch away. With a terrifyingly single-minded focus, he staggers forwards to meet them.

The next clash of their blades is brutal, ugly, technique on both sides suffering from exhaustion and injury. Leon’s opponent is blatantly attempting to attack the vulnerability on his left side. Leon simply uses the predictability to his advantage, pressing forward, bearing down on his smaller opponent with all his strength. Their left foot slips a fraction—a fraction of an inch on uneven ground, and that’s all the opening Leon needs. Without warning, he swiftly pulls his sword back, throwing his opponent off balance, then twists.

His blade slices through their side. The arena goes silent.

Immediately Donnie is up, his chair rolling backwards. His palms slap against the desk, heartbeat going off like a jackhammer.

A weapon slips from a lax grip. Leon’s opponent falls to their knees, fingers brushing over the wound.

The hushed tension among the crowd gives way to a burst of energy. A raucous eruption of cheers break out across the arena. Donnie’s caught between elation and dismay. There’s a tightness pressing against his chest—the urge to scream or punch the air in celebration or cry.

Leon’s chest rises and lowers as he heaves rough breaths through his nose. He watches his opponent passively, his expression empty, gaze unwavering. It fills him with a terrible sense of unease. Donnie can’t remember a time he’s seen Leo so physically quiet—so lifeless.

Leon’s blade lifts for the killing blow. Donnie doesn’t blink. Every muscle in his body clenches.

A split second before Leon can bring his sword down, an object whizzes past the camera, fast as a bullet. Gasps ring out across the crowd as it collides with Leon and explodes outwards in glistening threads of white. They snap to Leon’s form in an instant, wrapping around his limbs like rope and smashing him to the ground.

The rope-like substance constricts, limiting Leon’s thrashing. His panicked efforts only ensnare him further.

Another figure enters the frame. Donnie recognises her instantly. The arena fills with uproarious outcries—booing and heckling as Big Mama crouches over Leon’s opponent, her bulbous abdomen curled downwards, hiding them from view.

Donnie’s stomach clenches. The audience is enraged. Their show disrupted moments before its penultimate climax, due process broken, bets lost, bloodlust unrealised.

The feed glitches, cuts to black.

Donnie stares into the darkness, his vision blurring, the room silent bar from the rapid thudding of his heartbeat, the shortness of his breath. His knees feel like jelly, and suddenly he’s sitting on the floor.

His stomach contracts, watery, acidic bile burning the back of his throat, and his body is scrambling for the trashcan beneath his desk before he can make the active decision to do so.

- - - - -

Leo is in his usual brumation stupor when the tremors of the arena reach him—the ground rumbling from what is either a very destructive fight, or a roused crowd. It’s got to be a lot of activity to carry this far down.

He sighs. Just when he’d thought he’d managed to sleep into blissful unconsciousness, he’s back. Freezing cold, neck aching, side of his face numb from where it’d been pressed against the stone. He shifts, trying to settle against the vibrations shaking the wall. It’s not helping quell the anxiety beneath his skin.

A couple minutes pass. Leo counts them out, breathing in and out slowly, trying not to get his hopes up, trying not to think at all. A task that used to be far easier when he was averaging fourteen hours of screen time and god he misses his phone—

Leo startles at the sound of the cell door swinging open with a grating screech. He rises to his feet, hand lifting to shade his stinging eyes as he squints into the sudden blinding light.

A pair of guards greet him by hurling a hefty, white bundle into the room and gracelessly tossing it to the floor. It collides against the stone with a heavy thump, stirring up a cloud of dust.

With that, just as abruptly as they intruded and without so much as bothering to spare Leo a second glance, the guards turn heel and leave, slamming the door shut behind them.

“Hello to you too.” He mutters.

Apprehensive, Leo stares down the mummified package they’ve left him with. He half expects it to burst and release a spawn of wasps that will lay eggs in his eyeballs and feast on his face. Being quite fond of his eyeballs and face, he approaches the bundle with a healthy amount of wariness—balanced on the balls of his feet to spring back if necessary.

It’s difficult to make out in the dark, but the closer he gets, the less and less the material encasing the package resembles mummy wrappings. The way it catches the small bands of light beneath the cell door, delicately woven and almost transparent… it’s more like an expensive silk. He notices a very subtle motion to it too—a faint rise and fall that’s paired with a soft rasping noise that sounds almost like—

Heart skipping a beat and stomach dropping to his feet, Leo abandons all caution and practically dives to the floor. The thick web coating sticks and clings to his fingers as he fervently scratches at it, his nails sinking into the thick layer of gossamer and ripping it apart until the metallic smell of blood fills his nose and the figure beneath is revealed. Leo stops.

No, no, no, no—

Leon’s eyes are closed. Leo cradles his head between his hands, swiping a thumb over the blood smeared across half his face. He looks deathly pale. Deathly. Leo’s hit with the memory of being pressed against the wall, hot breaths against his cheek. You could go on, knowing that every time he returns, limping, bleeding, dying, that you’re the cause for it.

“You’re breathing.” Leo tells an unconscious Leon, mentally shaking himself. “Old boy’s still kicking, right?”

Slightly paranoid that he’s hallucinating the rise and fall of Leon’s chest, Leo slides a shaky hand down to his neck, and yes, there. Leon’s pulse is weak and thready, but the relief is immediate.

He’s a mess, as usual—his body a patchwork of blood, bruises, sweat and… spiderwebs, carrying all the grim connotations associated. Leon’s lower half is still encased in the stuff. Big Mama’s work. Leo lets go of his face to reach for his left shoulder. Maybe if he can get a good hold he’ll be able to yank him out—

Leo places a hand over the shoulder, feels the unnatural slope of it beneath the fabric, then freezes. The instant he applies investigative pressure, Leon gives a violent, full-body jerk and gasps sharply, eyes flying open, wide and sightless.

“Hey, hey, hey!” Heart racing, Leo leans back and raises his hands in surrender as a disorientated Leon frantically wrestles against his bonds, face creased with pain. “Stop! You’re going to make it worse!”

Leon gives a shudder then blinks, a slow recognition dawning behind his eyes.

“Leo?” He croaks.

Leo hangs his head and presses a hand over his chest, trying to calm the rapid, painful thud of his heart against his ribcage. He closes his eyes, trying to mask the sudden surge of relief. Leon has survived another night and he’s here and it’s always like a sudden burst of sunlight in the darkness. This place is a lot easier when he has Leon to talk to. Even if he hadn’t grown attached, Leo would be driven to keep him alive if only to avoid another hellish solitary hour in isolation.

Leon clears his throat. “I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

Leo interjects with a sigh. “Don’t apologise, that was my bad.” He looks up, his focus returning to the awkward angle of Leon’s arm. “Your shoulder…”

Leon lets his head fall back against the stone and releases a long, weary breath. “Looks worse than it is.”

There is not a bone in Leo’s body that believes that. The fact that he’s even bothering to try to lie about it motivates enough of a vindictive streak in Leo to challenge him on it. “Prove it.”

Leon cranes his head up off the ground and squints. “What?”

“Simon says lift your arm over your head.”

Leon’s eyes narrow. He lies still for a moment, then, eternally stubborn, his metal prosthetic rises. Even with the wrong arm, he only gets about half-way before he releases a little back of the throat noise and winces. The arm drops to hold onto his side, his eyes clenching shut as he presses the back of his head into the ground and pants through the pain.

Leo curses and flies into action, ripping through the spiderwebs constricting Leon’s lower half. Leon fumbles to help, his legs shifting under the webbing, metal arm pulling at the threading around his plastron.

“What the hell happened out there?” Leo hisses.

Leon replies weakly. “Think I made our wicked queen matron mad.”

“Big Mama?” Leo pauses, glancing up from the torn webbing around Leon’s legs. “Usually I would say up-top, but as your unofficial doctor I’m going to refrain from high-three and fist-bump related territories.”

Leon manages to huff out half a laugh before he cringes again, his metal hand darting back to hold onto his side. Leo’s eyes follow the motion and he stills at the sight of red seeping through silver fingers. Putting two and two together he realises that this is the source of all that blood he found coagulating on Leon’s legs and staining the spiderweb he’d been peeling off of him.

Alarm bells sound in his head. Leo’s no medical professional but it reads as a worrying volume of blood to be on the outside of Leon’s body. Suddenly the weak pulse and the pale skin and the whole corpse vibe Leon has going on makes a lot more sense.

“Move your hand.” Leo orders.

Leon’s eyes are half-mast like he’s on the brink of drifting back into a senseless haze. “Nah. I’m not fallin’ for it.”

Leo squints. “What are on about?”

“You didn’t say Simon says.” Leon mutters, bafflingly.

Leo releases an agitated noise and forces the prosthetic out of the way. It’s not difficult. Leon’s disconcertingly compliant beneath his hands.

He sucks in a sharp breath when he pulls up the sliced fabric and lays eyes on the true extent of the injury. The wound isn’t wide, but it’s about as deep as he feared—cracking the tough protective shell of his plastron. Leo carefully slides a hand underneath him, checking his shell for an exit wound. Fortunately, he finds nothing, though that hardly improves Leon’s prognosis.

“Please tell me you haven’t punctured a lung.” Leo says, voice edged with panic, though he’s fairly certain he’d be able to hear it in Leon’s breathing if his lungs were getting filled with fluid.

Leon responds with a dorky, lopsided smile. “Internal organs are overrated.”

“Hate to ‘well actually–’ you, but I think the importance of internal organs have been rated pretty fairly. Y’know, I don’t think anyone’s writing bad Yelp reviews about their functionality… unless you’re lactose intolerant or have an appendix issue. Or really bad acne. Is skin an organ?” Leo mentally kicks himself. He’s distress-rambling, a behaviour notorious for being helpful for no one and nothing.

“Skin is in fact an organ. And I would argue there’s more people than that.” Leon replies.

Leo slides a hand down his face. Stressful. This is stressful. Have I always been this wilfully stupid? “Leo. Leon. It’s me. The voice of wisdom from your past. Listen to me. You might’ve hit something vital. The blood loss alone—”

“I would already be riggin’ my mortis.”

Leo stops cold. “Excuse me?”

All guile has faded from Leon’s expression. Cold metal fingers take hold of his wrist in a loose grip. “If this was somethin’ that could’ve killed me, I would never have made it back here, trust me.”

Leo stares at him, his throat tight, the icy grasp of Leon’s hold spreading outward.

“I heal fast. Benefits of mutation. I’ll perk up in no time.” Leon says evenly. “I just… need to rest a while.”

Leo looks away, the hollow words doing nothing to warm the cold tremor coursing through him.

Leon’s dislocated shoulder can be set aside for a moment. The actively bleeding hole in Leon’s side on the other hand is not something they can simply wait out.

Leo scans the empty cell for a solution he can find more agreeable. His eyes catch on the silky strings of spiderweb surrounding Leon. He kind of regrets pulling the stuff off him now. Sure, it’s gross, but at least it’d been doing a half decent job of keeping the wound covered and…

His mind’s reeling grinds to a halt.

Yeah, okay—it’s definitely not ideal. Leon will not be pleased, but he’s not seeing anything else within his vicinity that could help.

Leon squints up at him when he unlatches himself from his grip to reach over and begin winding clumps of webbing around his fingers.

“Do I want to know?” Leon muses.

Leo looks from Leon to the web in his hand, back to Leon. “We’re going to use her… uh, gunk to… well… plug the hole, comprende?”

Leon eyes the webbing with a grimace. “First, let’s ditch that word. Not a fan of that word. And second—”

“Which word? Gunk or hole?” Leo asks, before pressing the web directly against his open wound.

Leon jolts with a yelp, his metal fingers latching back around his wrist in a bone-crushing grip. Leo winces, but otherwise bears it without complaint, using his other hand to finish packing the sluggishly weeping gash. He then collects more webbing around his fingers and more intricately guides it around Leon’s scutes to hold the seal in place. Temporary bandage, hurrah.

“Are you okay?” Leon eventually grits out, forcing Leo to pause for a second to gape at the gall of such a question.

“Aren’t I supposed to be asking that?”

Leon shakes his head. “No, I— did anything happen today?”

Leo stares at him. He doesn’t even know how to react to such a critical deprivation of self-awareness.

“You’re for real a broken person.” He mutters on an exhale.

Leon’s features pinch together. “Did anyone come while I was gone?”

Leo dismisses the needless concern with an exasperated sigh. “No one came.” He says, before redirecting focus to his messy web-bandage tapestry.

Damn, Mikey’s Picasso hands would probably be a lot better at this…

The grip around his wrist tightens marginally, Leon’s tone sharpening in its insistence. “Are you lying to me?”

He scoffs, annoyed now. “What, you can’t tell?”

“Leo.”

Leo briefly drops the attitude to cast a stern look at Leon. “It’s the truth.” He states firmly.

Leon searches his gaze for a moment. Whatever he finds there must satisfy, as the hold he has on Leo slackens as he sinks back to the floor, eyes returning to the ceiling. Leo’s finishing attaching the last few threads of webbing to a corner of his plastron when Leon scrunches his face. “This is disgusting.”

Leo tries to brush the rest of the webs off his hands. The threads collect any dust on his palms and roll into a dirty clump, sticking to his fingers. The tensile strength of the stuff is a lot stronger than he’d expected.

“I had to sleep up against you last night when you were coated in smelly viscera of unknown origin.” He replies dryly. “You don’t get to complain.”

Leon scowls. “It’s my stab woun— argh!” He releases his wrist to take hold of Leo’s shoulder as Leo tries to gingerly prop him up against the wall. “What are you doing?”

With Leon’s assistance, Leo manages to lift him into a seated position.

“It’s going to be a lot easier for me to pop your shoulder back in like this.” Leo explains once he’s upright. More stability and leverage for Leon, more gravity assistance and access to maneuver the joint for Leo. Less painful for both of them.

Leo’s reaching for the dangling limb when the metal arm thrusts back up, extending in front of Leon to keep Leo at bay. “Wait!” Leon exclaims sharply, his voice strained. “Wait, just… hold on a sec—”

Leo stops.

“Hah…” Leon shudders. He looks worryingly pale, like he’s about to be sick. “It’s…” He meets Leo’s eye, and if he’s about to say it’s fine, Leo swears, he’ll—

The intensity of his weary frustration Leo’s exuding must be palpable because Leon hesitates, then his prosthetic drops back into his lap. “Yeah. Okay, it’s bad.”

Leo lifts a brow ridge and gestures to his arm. “May I?”

Leon concedes with a jerky nod.

As gently as he can, Leo takes hold of his wrist. It’s only then that he notices how tense Leon is. It’s barely discernible in the dim light—the subtle tremors shivering through him, the way his muscles strain with each breath, the clamminess of his skin. He’s hunched over slightly, like even with the wall supporting him, he’s fighting to hold himself up. It makes him come off smaller, more fragile—an impression that is at complete odds with what he knows of Leon.

Damnit, having some pain relief on hand right now would be an honest godsend.

Fat chance, Leo. He thinks grimly. They’re not about to oh so kindly hand over an uncracked bottle of Ibuprofen when they refuse to toss so much as a block of ice at their heads for the swelling.

This whole process sucks when muscle relaxants are available. It’s going to suck exponentially more so if he can’t get Leon to relax a bit.

“I’m not gonna do anything you don’t agree to.” Leo tries. “We can go slow.”

Leon snorts, his voice is still shaky. “What is this? High school prom?”

As if either of them had so much as touched the traditional education system and all its associated events with a ten-foot pole. “Given how crazy rigid you are right now, it might as well be.” Leo snarks back.

Leon's expression dips into irked territory before levelling out again as he releases a deep breath.

“Have a little faith in me.” Leo grouses. “You’re perfectly aware I’ve already done this like, twice.” Another side-effect of having three accident-prone brothers.

“I’m perfectly aware that the only reason you’ve done it twice is because you messed up popping Donnie’s arm in the first time.” Leon retorts, before muttering more quietly. “Who am I kidding, this is karma.”

“As if I make that mistake a third time.” He reasons, mustering up a strained smile. “Come on, have some faith. What are the chances of that?”

“Just because you know how to do it wrong doesn’t mean you know how to do it right—” Leon breaks off in a hiss when Leo lifts his arm a fraction, every muscle clenching up against the motion. “Stop stop stop!” He blurts.

Leo freezes. Leon’s eyes are clenched shut, the muscle in jaw prominent from how tightly he’s clamping up.

He’s unsettled by how affected Leon seems to be about this. Despite how evasive the older slider can be, he’s never been one to shy away from the gorier elements of receiving aid. More than once has he seen Leon’s features twist with the vestiges of pain, but each time, he’s been swift to cover up his pain… Then again, if Leo only had one arm left, he'd probably be a little more sensitive about people yanking that thing around.

“What’s up?” He edges.

Leon cracks open an eye and chuckles nervously. He gives a little shake of his head. “Just… how about you give me a count?”

“Sure.” Leo replies with put-on casual confidence. “Let me align it first?”

Leon swallows, nods, then his eyes slip closed again. He takes in several steady, calming breaths.

“Don’t pass out on me.”

Leon grimaces. “No promises.”

This time, when Leo carefully maneuvers Leon’s arm, he meets no resistance. Slowly, he pulls the injured limb gently forward and downward, stretching it to its full extension, then moves the arm away from his body, rotating it externally to line up the ball of his arm bone to the shoulder socket. Leon pants against the wall, his face awash with pain. Leo waits until his breathing has levelled out to a meditative rhythm, each muscle beneath his fingers relaxed, the tension in his shoulder loose.

“Good. On three, then?” He asks quietly.

Leon gives the smallest of nods.

“Three.” He says, then with pressure and a quick, precise motion, the joint slips back into alignment with a distinct, audible pop.

Leon inhales sharply, his brows pinching tightly together for a moment.

Leon’s face slackens as the immediate pain subsides into a dull ache, the tension melting away to a fatigued but unmistakable relief. He opens his eyes slowly, blinking as though emerging from a fog. He releases a long exhale and, in the soft tones anyone else would use for endearment, says, “I knew you were going to do that, you brat.”

“You’re welcome.” Leo retorts as he carefully pulls the sleeve down from Leon’s arm.

He probes around the shoulder, checking the damage. All things considered, the dislocation seems to have been relatively clean. It’s difficult to make sense of in the dark, and Leon isn’t helping by only signalling his pain through tension and faint, back of the throat noises, but he seems relatively relaxed when Leo gently palpates the muscles around his shoulder. There’s still a lot of swelling around the shoulder itself and the upper arm, which is to be expected. He avoids that area. He doesn’t need to be a mind-reader to know it hurts. If Leo had to guess, he’s probably torn some tendons.

Leo double-checks the joint’s stability and range of motion, shifting and rotating the arm with slow motions to assure himself that he’s done the job properly, then gingerly setting the arm down. He frowns at the way it hangs at Leon’s side. He needs to immobilise the limb somehow…

Leo frees the kimono sleeve Leon usually keeps tucked into his belt, then, with a harsh tug, tears the fabric from its stitches.

Leon gapes at him. “What was that?”

“Me being incredibly intelligent and resourceful.” He replies, before grabbing the sleeve on the other side and ripping that off too. “You’re doubly welcome.”

Leon watches quietly as he takes the two ends of the fabric and ties them together.

“Lean forward a bit.” Leo instructs, placing a hand between his shell and the wall and gently guiding him away from it so he has enough space to fit the tied sleeves over his head.

Once it’s in place, he helps Leon gingerly place his injured arm into the makeshift sling.

“There.” Leo takes a step back to admire his work.

The discolouration around Leon’s shoulder joint is already more pronounced than it was a couple minutes ago and the flow of blood from the gash above his brow remains an alarming sight, though Leo knows head wounds tend to run a red river even when they’re not immediately life-threatening. The webbing around his side at least seems to be holding firm—no sign of blood staining through.

“You look ridiculous.” He remarks with more levity than he feels.

“Thank you.” Leon responds, and the level of earnest gratitude in his voice gives Leo the impression he’s referring to more than just the sling.

The air between and around them still smells metallic. Leo’s stomach rolls queasily.

“Anything I missed?” He asks.

“You’ve done plenty.” Leon huffs, which is a little worrying considering it’s not an outright no.

“I strive for excellence.” Leo deadpans. “Come on, what else hurts? Head? Shoulders?”

“Knees and toes.”

Leo swings his head back to stare at the ceiling. Do not attack the turtle that can’t stand on two feet because he’s taking beatings for you. He takes a deep breath before addressing Leon again. “Stop being difficult and answer the question.”

“I did. You want me to pinpoint just one?”

Leon responds to Leo’s proceeding glower with a low chuckle. “It’s fine. I’ll live.”

The way he says it, soft and casually dismissive… It’s obviously meant for Leo’s benefit—meant to reassure, to lessen. All it really succeeds in doing is winding the knot of worry in Leo’s chest all the tighter.

“How’s the portal progress going?”

Leo glares at the brusque subject change.

Leon arches a bloody brow. “That bad, huh?”

He settles against the wall next to Leon and draws in a breath, letting it slide regardless of how lousily obvious Leon’s being. “I got a few specs of dust floating again.” He grumbles.

Yes. Right before he was hit by the memory of cold weightlessness, metallic boots crushing his shell and gateways to the Prison Dimension. Figures Leon would be stuck in perilous peril with the one ninpō-user in the family who is completely defective.

“... That’s something.” Leon replies, his tone deliberately optimistic.

Leo rolls his eyes. “Yeah, thank goodness, I’ll be able to razzle dazzle this cage clean with my subpar mystic mojo.” He wiggles his fingers. “Big help that’ll do us.”

“The fact you’re able to output an effect on the surrounding environment is proof the juice you need is there. The time will come when it all comes together. It’ll just click. You’ll see.”

Leo lets his head fall against the stone with a gentle thunk. “Mind if I throw you a question?”

“Ominous that you’d ask,” Leon draws out, “shoot.”

“How old were you when you first portalled without the swords?”

Leon pauses. “Y’know, it’s hard to say. Twenty-five? Twenty-six, maybe?”

Nearly a decade older than Leo is now…How the hell does he expect him to figure this out that much sooner?

Leo clears his throat. “How’d you do it?”

Leon stiffens. “It’s… not a nice story.”

Why does that not surprise him?

“Is it ever?” Leo drawls.

Leon’s head rolls over to glance at him. “I’d need to give you some context.”

Leo opens out his arms, his hand bumping against Leon’s shell. “Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m here all day.”

Leon closes his eyes and re-settles against the wall, his metal arm folding beneath the sling and loosely cradling the wound at his side. “And I vote the rest of it would be better spent curling up tight and saying night night.”

“Come on,” Leo goads, “please? It could help me.”

Leon cracks open an eye and gives him another long, considering look, before he finally gives in with a long, exasperated exhale.

The silence stretches onward for a few moments, and Leo shifts uncomfortably, opening his mouth to speak. Leon shuts it down immediately. “I’m thinking about how to word it.”

Leo waits.

“Okay, so…” Leon begins uneasily, “the Resistance wasn’t always this well-oiled, unified front against the Krang,” his brow wrinkles, “I mean, we were hardly ever that coordinated, but back when we were just a ragtag group of survivors, we were in something of a rocky alliance with the EPF. We didn’t have much to offer at the time, though we did happen to come across a lot of Krang technology and artefacts no one else could get their hands on at the time—”

Leo lifts a hand, feeling lost already. “Woah, woah, slow down—the EPF?”

“Right, sorry—the Earth Protection Force. Some…” He waves the metal hand vaguely, “secret, scientific, intelligence organisation from the old world that had been tasked with dealing with mutants.”

Leo blinks. “Us, you mean? You brokered an alliance with the scary government authorities set up to ‘deal with us’?” He asks incredulously, throwing up finger guns.

Leon winces. “In my defence, I assumed with the world being invaded by extraterrestrials, their focus would shift to the bigger priority.”

“Ohhh, right— the introduction of the alien enemy. The ones that would’ve validated any unsavoury assumptions these people had about non-humans. That made them chill. Yeah, that makes total sense.” He says sardonically.

Leon frowns. “Look, I’m not any less naïve than you are. I had the same thoughts going in, obviously. They hated our guts—weren’t all too fond of the yokai in our ranks either—all the same to them, I guess. Bunch of bigots.” He sighs. “But, they had resources and shelter, of which we were always falling short of, and not making use of the offer was going to lead to more lives lost. We weighed the pros and cons of cooperating with them, and the balance tipped enough in their favour that cooperating seemed like the lesser evil.”

Alright. Fair. He supposes he would have to concede there. “Enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Leo recites glumly.

Leon looks away. “I figured the chance of betrayal was low, partly due to our reputation, partly because despite being known for protecting mutants and yokai, we always had a larger percentage of human civilians in our camp. Declaring war on us would not just stretch their offensive resources thin, which was already at its limits against the Krang—-who were always the far greater threat, but it was just plain bad optics. I assumed if any schisms came to light, if I caught so much as a whiff of harassment between their people and ours, I’d be able to shut that sh*t down.” Leon huffs. “And for a while, it was fine. Granted, we never ran smoothly. Working with us bruised the EPF’s pride and moral sensibilities big time. There was never any mistaking who we were. What we were.”

Leo presses his mouth into a firm line. He doesn’t like where this is going.

“Things only soured from there, and after a couple of tense months and more than a few blow-up arguments, April spared us from having to make direct contact with them by playing middleman.” Leon scowls. “I guess that should’ve been a red flag, but we made sure we had our bases covered. The location of our meetings were always held in neutral, above-ground locations, with one of us keeping an eye on April in case they were spotted by the Krang, or, y’know, the EPF decided to stab us in the back…”

“Comforting thoughts.” Leo comments drily. “If you were so paranoid about something going wrong, why not just end it?”

“I was paranoid about a lot of things back then.” Leon dismisses, his expression going sombre. “Although, yeah, this agreement of ours, more than most. I was planning to discuss breaking off the deal with the group after one of April’s meetings. Only, when April came back, she was alone and in a total panic. Apparently Mikey was listening in from a distance when she lost comms with him. Just, poof, gone, completely disappeared off the face of the map. Even Donnie couldn’t get a pin on him. The EPF agents claimed they had no involvement—told her they didn’t even know he was there. Kicked up a whole stink about a breach of trust.”

Leon chews apprehensively at the side of his cheek. “You didn’t believe them.”

Leon scoffs, a sliver of past anger shining through. “f*ck no. Mikey had an uncanny ability to just know whenever Krang were on our tail—he would’ve at least had time to shout if it was them. And I already didn’t trust the EPF bastards as far as Casey Jr. could throw ‘em—who was a toddler at the time, by the way. I kept the communication line between us open long enough to be able to track them back to their bunker after the next rations trade.” Leon’s expression darkens. “What I saw inside was…”

Leo can see the tension creep up Leon’s spine. He gives a shudder and shakes his head.

“The whole time, the same experiments they’d been conducting on the Krang, they were using on mutants and yokai. We were never people to them, we were all just… data. Subjects to test on. I saw people strapped to tables, hooked up to machinery, poked and prodded and pulled apart like insects, frozen behind glass. Research, torture, didn’t look to me like the EPF knew how to discriminate between the two. I descended through the whole base, freed who I could, left those who were beyond saving—”

“Alliance over at this point, surely.” Leo remarks with more levity than he feels, his jaw tight.

Leon inclines his head. “Dead in the water. And that was well before I scrape the bottom of the bunker.” The metal of his hand creaks as his fingers tighten. He speaks haltingly, “I come across this… it looked like an operating theatre. I see Mikey, unconscious, strapped into this… I don’t even know— machine, I guess, needles pushed into his skin, extracting his blood…”

Leo can sympathise with Leon’s anger. Even knowing this is a future that will never occur, the thought of it being a possibility is… distressing, to say the least. The idea of any version of Mikey subjected to something like that rankles.

Leon releases a breath. “I see my little brother, and I just…” his hand opens, “blank.”

Leo’s concerned confusion must show in his features. Leon attempts to clarify. “Like, I don’t think, I don’t breathe, physically I don’t feel much of anything except for static at my fingers and the hot rush of my own blood and… I— I can’t…” Leon shakes his head, “one moment we’re at the very bottom of the most fortified bunker on earth, then I blink, and suddenly he’s in my arms and we’re home.”

Leo tilts his head. “You portalled?”

Leon shrugs, eliciting yet another wince. “Must’ve.”

“You don’t remember?”

Leon pauses. “I remember flashes—seeing Mikey, freeing him, lashing out at people crowding around me, people yelling at me, shouting coming from me as they tried to take him from my arms—medics, presumably. I remember passing out.”

Leo rubs a knuckle against his chin. If creating his own portal demands summoning more energy than Leo’s been capable of mustering so far… he can understand why trying to portal both himself and Mikey for the first time might’ve drained Leon flat. Nonetheless, Leon’s account doesn’t really offer Leo any clues as to where he might be going astray.

“You said it requires focus.” Leo points out.

“Yeah?” Leon frowns. “It was Mikey. I was livid. I wanted him safe. I couldn’t have been more focused.”

“But you…” Leo opens and closes his hands, “blanked out. How’d you figure out how to do it on command?”

“Well, to start I had to piece together what happened back there. Don’t get me wrong—it took me a long time before I could make regular, reliable jumps. Knowing I could do it was just the first step.”

Leo crosses his legs, props his elbow against his thigh, rests a cheek against his hand, and thinks.

Leon’s experience runs contradictory to the conscious efforts and meditation that Leon had been trying to drill into him to calm his mind and direct his flow of ninpō. He speaks as if it’d been a reflex—sudden and uncontrollable, born from desire and an eruption of emotion rather than balance. And if that’s true… Maybe all Leo needs is a good push? Preferably one that doesn’t require becoming a horror story’s final girl.

“Was Mikey okay?” Leo asks after a long moment.

Leon nods. “He woke up before I did, actually. He was fine—a little shaken, frustrated about being caught off guard like that, but physically they hadn’t done anything he couldn’t heal from.”

From what he can gather, Mikey had been unconscious for the majority of the ordeal, which offers a flicker of solace. Leon, in stark contrast, was subjected to every harrowing second. Leo had only gotten the incredibly shortened, probably censored, second-hand abridged version of his experience, and even that makes his stomach churn to think about.

“Were you okay?” He edges.

“Me?” Leon pauses, mulling it over as if this line of questioning is completely new to him. “I mean… I was disturbed by what I saw in there. Like, hah—talk about nightmare fuel, right? My brain was running speed strats through those hallways in my sleep for weeks. Mostly though, I think I was just plain pissed. The number of people I put at risk—that ended up getting hurt because of me for nothing more than a string of stupid decisions.” His shoulders slump. “I should never have allowed the EPF to have any contact with us in the first place.”

Leo shakes his head, his brows wrinkling. “You can’t have known.”

“It was my job to know.” Leon growls, before adding more quietly. “I should have checked.”

Leo presses his lips tightly together and opts out of that argument. He doesn’t see it going anywhere productive any time soon. He rests his hands behind his head and slouches against the wall.

“Well, you weren’t lying. That story was definitely somewhere south of light-hearted.” Leo says ruefully.

“Can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Leo hums out a noise of half-hearted agreement.

Time passes. Leon’s eyelids gradually droop, his breathing deepening.

Leo, selfishly not wanting to be left alone with his thoughts so soon, and for lack of anything better to talk about, wonders aloud. “D’you reckon the Mad Dogs have figured out where we are yet?”

There’s a shift in the rhythm of Leon’s breathing, then a long pause, the silence hanging on some sort of cliff.

Leo shifts nervously. He sneaks a sideways glance at Leon’s expression, which betrays nothing past contemplative—eyes downcast, his features slightly pinched.

“We’ve been over this.” Leon says slowly.

“Been over what?” Leo furrows his brow, unsettled by the sudden dip in his mood. “I was just asking—”

Leon holds onto his wounded side and shifts towards him—away from the light beneath the cell door, shadows obscuring his face. “Is this what’s holding you back?”

Leo stares at him with stunned dumbfoundment. “What?”

“This… This uncertainty—is this just another thing that’s stopping you from—”

Leo lurches to his feet. “You think I want to be trapped here like some damsel in distress? I’m trying, okay? I’ve spent days concentrated solely on getting us out.”

Leon shakes his head. “No, you haven’t. You’ve been distracted… because of me, because of them.” He somehow manages to sound guilty about it. “The fact you’re even asking—”

“Why are you so against accepting their help?” He fires back.

Leon stops, his brow furrowing, he opens his mouth. Closes it. Struck dumb like he hadn’t expected the tables to turn against his brilliant, wise advice.

This time when Leon looks away, the ghost of some old pain stirring in his face, Leo presses. “After everything I—we endured… Didn’t we learn? Isn’t… Is that not the one take-away we got from all the sh*t we had to go through? That we don’t have to do this alone. That no matter what happens, no matter how dire things become, they’ll have our backs. They’ll be there for us.”

Leon’s mouth twitches in that way Leo’s does whenever they touch on something that holds some personal significance before he’s able to smother the conflict warring in him with a smile. “Has it ever occurred to you before that I might not have been lucky enough to come across the same lessons you’ve been afforded in this timeline?”

Leo blinks. He doesn’t know how Leon has turned this around to being his problem again, but just this once, maybe there’s truth to it. Maybe this has been Leo’s problem all along—directly equating Leon’s struggles with his own. There are similarities. Parallels. The desire to prioritise protecting his family, balanced against a need to prove himself that has a tendency to cloud his better judgement. But Leon takes it to the extreme. Arrogant in his actions, his skill, his experience. Unable to consider the potential outcomes of his overprotectiveness with any clarity. So consumed by fear and grief that he’s willing to sacrifice everything—ruin himself in a desperate bid to seek what he sees as the only solution.

Leo doesn’t know why he always assumed he’d just one day outgrow all his worst qualities. Like magic. Like a coming to age, where everything that was undesirable would shed away like old skin. Leo averts his gaze, pained by the revelation. “Has it occurred before…” He echoes hollowly. “Of course, you’re right, how ridiculous of me to not see it,” He bites sarcastically, “because you’ve always been soooo forthcoming when it comes to talking about yourself. You’re just one big happy open book—”

“I just told you something personal about myself.” Leon argues.

“Only so I might have a better chance of getting us out,” Leo retorts, “and getting even that much was like yanking teeth.”

“You know as much about me as I can bear to tell you—”

Leo scoffs. “Which is hardly anything at all.”

“You should be thanking me for that.”

“For what? Becoming the world’s most difficult, secretive asshole?” Leo snaps at him.

“For refusing to cut myself open just so the people I love most can see the ugliest sum of my parts!”

Leo stares at him in disbelief. The room goes terribly, awfully quiet.

His mind churns. What does Leon think they could dissect that they’re not already aware of? That doesn’t already exist in Leo? He wants to criticise, to lecture, to somehow form a debate impossibly convincing enough to snap Leon from this decades-long pattern of self-delusionment before—

“We’re not the only ones at risk here” Leon states.

Leo’s inclined to keep arguing at this point, but the tension in Leon’s voice gives him pause.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” He asks cagily.

Leon massages his temples. “Do you not see what Big Mama is doing here?”

“Putting on another sad*stic show for her own amusem*nt, what’s new?”

Leon levels him with a steely look. “Leo, what is dad?”

What kind of question is that? “A telenova-addict and borderline agoraphobic single father going through a very belated midlife crisis.” He retorts smartly.

“Be serious.”

“I’m being perfectly serious.”

Leon shifts, wincing when the movement pulls at his side. He breathes out slowly, then asks again. “What is he?”

Leo takes note of the emphasis on the what in equation here, and answers cautiously. “... A rat.”

“Yes. So, from Big Mama’s perspective, what do you think that makes us?”

Well… following that line of logic. “Turtles?”

“No.” Leo sees the arm in the sling shift, rising towards Leon’s face. He’s about to dive the space dividing them when Leon flinches and releases a hiss, abandoning the motion.

“Stop moving around!” Leo snaps. “You’ll undo all my hard work.”

“I didn’t mean to— ow, damnit.” He lets his arm settle back into the sling.

Leo looks at Leon’s scowling, half-pouting face and rolls his eyes. He sinks back to the floor, dropping his weight against Leon’s right side.

“Listen, we are the cheese in the trap.” Leon stresses.

Leo gives a dubious hum. “Rat or not, I’m pretty sure dad would more likely be tempted by samosas than cheese—” he hesitates when Leon levels him with a look, a blanket of unease settling over him. “You think Big Mama wants them to break us out?”

“I think she wants them to try.” Leon mutters.

It’s a little convoluted for a premeditated plan, in Leo’s opinion. He can think of several easier ways of tricking dad into doing something he doesn’t want to do. Leo convinced him to sneak them into a midnight screening of Fast Five when he was seven years old by lying about it being a re-release of Lou Jitsu’s Teriyaki Shakedown. And he knows for certain Donnie has squeezed at least two tablets out of him through phone scams alone. It’s really not that hard.

“If she wanted them here, she could have sent an invitation. Why invest in all the theatrics?”

“Because it’s Big Mama.” Leon answers simply, “And because there’s no purpose to advertising your trap is a trap. Whatever all of this is, it’s by design.”

“So, what? She’s luring them into a false sense of security?”

A grumble. “I’ve made a hell of a lot more mistakes confident and angry than I have otherwise.”

“They’re smarter than that…” Leo asserts with more confidence than he feels.

The concept has as much worrying merit to it as the rest of the maudlin thoughts in Leon’s head. When confronted by a challenge, Raph will charge in head-first, Mikey will razzle-dazzle, Donnie will threaten the continued existence of the tri-state area with a solution more explosive than it is effective, and April will be saddled with thinking up a way to put one of her million industry certifications to use to clean up the mess. Their best chance is that Casey and pops will be present enough to direct the chaos.

Leo rubs a hand against his temples. “I hope.”

- - - - -

Donatello breaks the grim news by showing them a number of advertised ‘highlight’ reels showcasing Leon’s Battle Nexus fights.

An ill concept, brutal in the straightforwardness of Donnie’s approach, but the context is necessary. Casey had steeled himself for the worst after seeing Donnie so visibly rattled. In retrospect, he has to accept that he and the others probably would’ve found it difficult to wrap their heads around the gravity of the situation without it. At least they’ve been spared the unfiltered experience that Donnie faced, watching the fight live with no guarantee of sensei’s survival. Casey can’t imagine having to stomach it; all the gory details placed under a glorified, objectifying, consumeristic light, without knowing that much.

It still doesn’t make it any easier to see Leonardo hurt—every flash of his anguish sending tremors through them. To have to watch as he slaughters his opponents.

The thing is, it’s no wonder that he’s good at this. Excels, even. Sensei lived in a world for a longer period than Casey’s been alive where violence was often the easiest answer, the correct answer, and the only answer. And now he’s trapped in a repeating microcosm of that world where the rules of survival are exactly the same.

There’s remorse, of course. Always is with Leonardo. But there’s also that dead-eyed look—the same numb expression he gets when it all goes bad, when they lose people, when he’s given all he’s got and needs to pull through for the mission.

Casey assesses the room from his seat on the floor. Mikey had long looked away from the screen, his expression a dazed contortion of confusion and horror, eyes shining with unshed tears. Raphael has an arm around his little brother, his features dark, a slight tremor in his hands. Master Splinter hovers in the doorway, mute and listless. Donnie isn’t even watching anymore—his eyes glued to the glow of his tech-watch—utilising every spare moment they have to research, strategise, run logistics. Casey is unsurprised. Data collection has always calmed him during tumultuous missions.

They’ve only made it through a third of the twenty-minute video before Raph rumbles. “We’ve seen enough,” his voice raw with emotion. “Turn it off.”

No one objects. Donatello reaches over and shuts down the feed.

The proceeding silence is absolute. It feels like a graveyard in here. Casey would know. He grew up in one.

“It’s not what you think.” Casey insists, voice unbearably loud in the wake of the room’s silence. That person on screen, that warrior…Ryūsei does not resemble the brother they know and love. They’re frightened and disturbed, both for Leonardo, and—Casey fears—of him. “He’s not… This isn’t him.”

“No one said anything, Casey.” April tells him quietly.

“But you’re thinking it.” He snaps. “I see it. Something’s wrong here. They must have something on him. Sensei wouldn’t—”

“No. He wouldn’t.”

The room’s attention swivels back towards Donatello.

“That much is glaringly obvious.” He mutters. “If you’re reading distress from the room, it’s not because any of us think Leo has turned into a psychopath overnight. There’s any number of theories that could explain this—maybe he’s been brainwashed again. Maybe he’s had a major psychological break after having to listen to Big Mama speak at him all day with her fake, condescending voice and her stupid, made-up words. Maybe Leo’s being held over his head as blackmail—I mean, that one seems most logical—”

“Logical?” April repeats, incredulous and appalled.

“For Big Mama…” Splinter says gravely, “yes. This does not fall outside the bounds of what she is capable of.”

Donnie looks up. “Point being—we don’t have enough evidence to form a valid hypothesis right now, and as far as I’m concerned, when you’re stuck in a flying iron kill or die cage and your only defence is the sword in your hand, things are bound to get messy.”

Mikey scrubs an arm across his cheeks, removing any wetness there and sniffs. “How do we free them?”

Casey glances around, taking in the gears churning behind the eyes of each of them.

They’re not… panicking about this, he realises, astonished. It’s as if the wildfire that he feels raging inside of him has already burned through the room with such fury that naught has been left but ashes. A calm vacancy in its wake—a grim resolve to change the outcome they’ve been dealt.

Casey, meanwhile, still feels a little like someone just pulled the Earth out from under him.

“I’m so glad you asked.” Donatello replies, flicking the projector back on and pulling up blueprints of a massive airship, complete with promotional photos of the Battle Nexus at the screen’s edge. The information is comprehensive, all written out, dot point format. There are multiple maps and flowcharts. Casey would be impressed if he wasn’t aware of the positive linear relationship between Donnie’s stress levels and his quantity of hyper-fixated research.

Donnie begins. “The ship has five levels. Or six, if you want to include the envelope—”

“The envelope?” Mikey repeats, casting him a confused glance.

“Big balloon.” Donnie explains shortly, using a laser pointer to point out a wide-shot photo of the ship from ground view. From the dim blurriness of the photo, Casey can barely make out a tall metal framework surrounded by what resembles an enormous, white, over-inflated donut. “Full of helium, or hydrogen, or some other nonsensical, unscientific Yokai magical element that’s able to keep the blimp buoyant. Whatever, five layers, top to bottom—the arena, the entertainment centre and amenities,” He lists, highlighting the areas on the whiteboard. He circles around the next two layers, “The bottom three levels are a total enigma to the public sphere, but if I was engineering this beautiful monstrosity, these areas would be prime spots for utility and maintenance. Think engine rooms, propulsion systems, flight controls, power sources, all the high-tech, interesting stuff—”

“And the very bottom?” Casey asks.

“The hull provides integrity to the ship’s structure and is the most important element of its weight distribution. It’ll consist of the heaviest, strongest materials and as such,” Donnie slaps a hand against the whiteboard, “if there’s a holding area, it’s going to be here.”

Raphael straightens, his eyes lighting up. “You think that’s where Big Mama’s keeping our boys?”

“That’s my well-informed estimation.” Donnie replies.

April chews at her lip, her eyes moving from image to image. “This is great ‘n all, but how are we actually supposed to get onboard?” She asks.

The room’s attention swings back to Donnie again, who falters.

“Well…” He runs a hand across the back of his neck in a way that makes him look younger and more unsure than the turtle Casey remembers. “Tickets are sold with the coordinates to where the ship will land to drop off and pick up patrons. Which would be the easiest way to sneak in, were it not for the fact that the location changes every day and the tickets have been sold out for weeks…” He looks away sheepishly. “I haven’t had a lot of time to look into this. I’m still working on securing a ticket by other means.”

“Oooorr… we could just hop on?” Raphael suggests.

“Uh huh.” Donnie replies, his sardonic tone returning in force. “That sounds like a rock solid plan with no chance of catastrophic failure. Sarcasm, by the way.”

Mikey waves him down. “No, he’s onto something. Let him cook…”

“You can fly.” Raphael says, gesturing to his battle-shell. “If we got high enough, couldn’t you just drop two of us into the arena?”

“You mean the veritable death pit?” Donnie stresses, voice cracking. “You think crashing that party is a good idea? Through the proverbial front door, no less?”

“Maybe if we go all in on being loud and flashy, we’ll be so overt, it’ll flip around to being covert again.” Mikey says with a level of levity to his voice Casey didn’t think possible given the seriousness of the situation

Donnie’s ire shifts. “Michael, my darling brother, I love you, but we’ve been over this. Just because rhyming conventions sound better doesn’t make the bad idea hold more validity.”

Mikey scowls. “I’m putting in real effort to keep our spirits up and you’re just gonna jump on my flow like that?”

Raphael interrupts before the argument can devolve further. “Okay, Raph’s getting a strong veto vibe from the room for going in from the top, so why not make them come to us.” He points at one of the photos of the blimp. “Pop that balloon like a piñata, grab the Leo candy, then we bounce.”

Donnie lifts an unimpressed brow. “Detonate the ship our brothers are stuck on then comb through the rubble? Brilliant, Raphael, truly.”

“Okay, so the plan has some wrinkles that need ironing out,” Raph retorts grumpily, “I don’t see you offering up an alternative.”

Donnie gives a haughty sniff. “My alternative is a work in progress.”

Casey’s neck is starting to twinge from swinging his attention back and forth between each brother. He shoots up a hand, drawing all eyes in the room.

“Case, we don’t do that here, remember?” Mikey tells him, not unkindly, “collaborative space. Chip in whenever you want.”

Right. Though, given the chaotic nature of this discussion he can’t help but think the old designated talking stick would be an improvement. Casey lets his hand fall back to his lap. “Infiltration point aside, could you get us up there?” He directs at Donatello.

“Scoff. Don’t insult my intelligence. Of course I can.”

“I don’t see the problem then.” Raphael crosses his arms over his chest. “I’m open to other suggestions but with our main idea guys down for the count and the clock ticking… Raph’s leaning hard into busting in and smashing heads to get our guys out asap.”

Donnie presses two fingers against his temples. “The problem is never our ability to land ourselves into trouble, it’s the total lack of intel as to what manner of trouble we’ll be landing into. I am not in the business of punching hornet nests with my bare knuckles. Defying logic and living to tell the tale is Leo’s defining trait, not mine. And there’s two of them now, so there’s well and truly enough of that going around…” He pauses. “Or, y’know, there will be, when they’re back here.”

April crosses her arms. “Can’t deny that busting in guns blazing isn’t exactly what Big Mama would expect out of us.”

“M’kay, yeah,” Michelangelo sucks his teeth, “but… Time sensitivity doesn’t really call for a delicate touch.”

“Exactly, we can’t just sit on our hands here.” Rahael argues. “We can take Big Mama on ourselves.”

Master Splinter’s bushy white brows furrow, his expression turning severe, “No, Red. She will destroy you. You cannot one-man-army this—”

“Well, if we’re counting the odds, there’s actually six of us…” Donnie corrects under his breath.

Raphael clicks his fingers, lighting up. “Yeah! And we’ll be two more than six once we’ve freed our boys.”

Assuming Leo and sensei are fit enough to fight. Casey thinks morosely. Last they could tell, sensei was still kicking, but he’s clearly hurt, and they have less certainty around Leo’s fate. Mikey argues they would simply know if he was gone. Casey is inclined to agree, given that it’s Mikey, and because Casey’s witnessed himself how a significant change in lifeforce between the brothers can affect them emotionally.

“There will be guards and chains and traps.” Master Splinter states lowly, with a heaviness to his tone that stamps down any rising enthusiasm. “And the defensive measures will not end there. Not by a long shot.”

Mikey rises to his feet, bristling, “We’re not giving up on them just because it’ll be dangerous—”

“That is not what I’m saying.” Master Splinter interjects, “I want my sons back as badly as any of you. I feel their loss just as deeply, but I know that woman, I know this place.”

Mikey’s chin drops to his chest, his shoulders slumping.

Casey takes in the glassiness of Splinter’s gaze and frowns, hit with the sudden realisation that despite having been fortunate enough to meet Leonardo’s father, he still knows nothing of Master Splinter’s origins.

The topic rarely comes up in casual conversation, for one, and he’s reluctant to pry, respectful of the sanctity of memory for those who’ve passed. All he used to know of Splinter came from old-world relics of Hollywood action star Lou Jitsu and the tales the brothers used to tell him as a child of Yoshi—father to the heroes of the Resistance and scion of an ancient ninja clan who vanquished their evil foe, the Shredder. Details of how Master Splinter evolved to become the man—the rat he is today have been completely shrouded in myth, buried in the annals of legend.

Casey sees the haunted look in Master Splinter’s eyes, feels the uneasy stillness of the room, and it registers that this omission had probably been an intentional one.

Master Splinter steps forward, cupping Mikey’s face between his hands and gently lifting his head back up. “I do not wish that fate upon our Leos for a millisecond longer than they have already endured. We will get them out.” He vows.

Mikey nods with a determined gaze.

“But we must not jump in without thinking.” Master Splinter stresses, exchanging glances with the rest of the room. “Doing so will save no one.”

“Fair point,” April concedes at length. “All the more reason for us to take an itty bit of time to brainstorm.” When no one else speaks up, her gaze then shifts towards him. “Any bright ideas, Case?”

He straightens, blinking. “Uh.” He will never get used to those he once considered responsible adult figures with all the answers to life suddenly turning to him. Flustered, he tries to recall the last mission he went on that had any resemblance to something like this. Such instances are very few and agonisingly slow to come to mind.

“Well… one time we toppled a skyscraper downtown so that Master Leonardo could sneak into a detention camp and save all those families…”

The room’s reaction consists of silence and expressions ranging from shock and horror to begrudging approval. Ah, right. He tends to forget how much more serious large-scale destruction like this was considered in the past.

Casey lifts his hands and quickly explains. “Lower Manhattan had been cleared of civilians at the time—the only things crushed under the debris would’ve been Krang… That kind of thing wouldn’t work nowadays,” especially given how densely populated the Hidden City is, “but maybe some kind of distraction would help?”

Donnie brightens. “I’ve got the perfect thing for that.” He says, a familiar mad genius shine to his eyes that elicits a tremor of trepidation in Casey.

Raph shoots him a sideways glance and co*cks his brow. “Seriously? You’re not gonna fill us in?”

April rises to her feet and approaches the board, squinting at one of the photos in the bottom corner. “Dee, what’s this hanging off the sides of the ship?”

Donnie frowns, then sidles up next to her and flips his goggles on, magnifying the blurry photo. “Looks like rope.” He says. “Must be the mooring lines they use to secure the blimp to the ground when it lands. Usually they’re reeled in when the ship’s airborne…”

Raphael stands. “What area of the ship are they attached to?” He asks, an edge of urgency to his voice.

Donnie lifts his goggles up, his brows scrunching. “Would have to be one of the lower levels, why do you…” Then, there’s a sudden, electric shift—Donnie’s eyes widen, a bright spark of realisation. “Oohhh…”

From there, they hatch a plan.

The team pulls in, tight-knit as they discuss each of their objectives, each person adding a pointer here or there. Their unity is stark in the wake of all the past week’s unpleasantness. Of course, Casey knows this closeness and focus was likely bred from the trauma of the Krang invasion, but he can’t help but be settled by it. This is what he’d been looking for—a semblance of hope capable of pulling his mind from the doldrums of inaction.

The group breaks apart the moment they’re satisfied with their hastily formed rescue mission. Casey, who has never kicked his habit of keeping his hockey stick and mask within reaching distance at all times, is left alone with Donnie for a couple minutes while the others leave to gather their weapons and any other equipment they’ll need.

It’s kinda odd, the way Casey’s mind just switches off for a few minutes—stress overload, maybe. Is that a thing? He feels like that must be a thing. That, or it's just his training kicking in. The way Master Michelangelo used to run them through mental composure and bodily relaxation exercises before a big mission.

Donnie is back to his desk, goggles equipped, soldering iron hot in hand, multiple arms sprouted from his battleshells and working away. Casey considers asking whether the circuit board should be smoking, or that many sparks should be flying, or if perhaps Donatello shouldn’t be yanking at the wires of potentially live explosives as viciously as he is.

Casey ultimately thinks better of it, instead asking, “Is— is there something bothering you? Y’know, besides the obvious.” Not exactly a safer topic, but at least Donnie will be less likely to assume he’s questioning his engineering skills.

For a while there’s no response. Casey’s half reminded of the old days when Master Donatello took off his mask (and hearing aids by proxy) and anything quieter than a loud yell struggled to reach him. Casey’s more convinced that the Donatello of today has simply chosen to neglect to answer. But then the motions of Donnie’s hands slow to a halt.

For a long moment he stares unseeingly at the tangle of coloured wires.

“Nobody’s asked why it took me so long to find them.”

Casey blinks. He supposes given recent revelations, it might appear a valid criticism to make, but never once had it materialised in his mind. If Master Donatello was having technical difficulties, there would undoubtedly be a good reason for it—one that was more than likely beyond Casey’s understanding.

Almost as if in response to his line of thinking, Donnie continues sardonically. “Kind of difficult to miss the giant prison-arena floating in the sky.”

He shifts, uncomfortable. “None of us figured it out either. And everyone knows how hard you’ve been working.”

“I don’t blame myself. I never would’ve overlooked something this obvious unless my view was obscured.” Donnie states, his gaze finally rising to meet his own, his eyes steely. “Someone breached my systems.”

“That’s possible?” He asks, unable to recall a time the Krang or their agents were able to breach Donnie’s impenetrable security.

“Not from outside this lair.”

There’s no accusation in Donnie’s tone, but the silence that follows is expectant.

Casey stares back, a tight knot of discomfort tightening in his stomach, a spark of anger igniting in his chest.

He can’t say he’s surprised. It falls in line with all the other dumb lengths Leon has gone to to shield them from his own messes. That said, Casey’s still furious about it. Furious that this is just another achievement to jot down on Leon’s ever-expanding resume for his role as selfless guardian angel (consequences redacted). Another lie to add to the never-ending pile. Another abandonment of trust. Furious because he can’t truly be mad at Leon because he isn’t here to be mad at, and because the worry inside his chest burns far fiercer.

“Huh. You didn’t know either.” Donnie muses, his frown deepening. “Considering I can fathom no reasonable explanation as to why he would sabotage his own brother like that, not to mention himself, twice-over, I was hoping you’d be able to shed some light on the issue.”

“Um.” Casey utters, caught off guard by the request. He’d thought it was rather obvious. “He’s… you know. Protective. I mean, clearly, whatever this is, he didn't want us involved.”

“Yes, I gathered as much, but why? We’re clearly not helpless. It’s not like we didn't, oh, I don’t know, save the world less than six months ago. He’s seen that we can change our futures. Sure, he’s lost us once before, but need I remind him that this was during the apocalypse. The circ*mstances nowadays are strongly in our favour. Surely he has at least one iota of trust for our own self-preservation skills here. There’s gotta be a better explanation than that.”

Casey scrubs a hand over his face. “It’s complicated.”

“Attempt to enlighten me.”

Casey blanches. “I— I don’t fully understand him myself, honestly. I can’t really… I mean, it wouldn’t be right for me to assume. His reasons are probably going to vary wildly depending on the person—”

Donnie leans forward, setting the tech in his lap to his side to address him directly. Casey finds his eyes trained on him. They feel like weights, pinning him in place with enough leverage to elicit the urge to squirm. Casey finds himself wishing he hadn’t stayed at all. Master Donatello never initiated this much eye contact unless it was serious.

“Stop dancing around the point, Casey. You know what I’m asking and you’re the only one alive that has the insight of past experience to answer it.”

He pales. Donnie doesn’t try to stop him when he stands and turns away, creating some distance. Retreating. “Aren’t there more important things to talk about?” He asks, trying to keep the edge out of his voice.

“Yes. Certainly.” Donnie answers easily. He steeples his fingers together. “Right now I want to talk about this.”

Casey considers leaving. Answers related to his past have never brought anyone peace of mind.

Though, something tells him peace of mind is not what Donnie is searching for here.

Casey releases a sigh, resignation flowing through him. He won’t run from this anymore—this veiled avoidance that has become the heart of their conflict with Leon. They do not want to be coddled and protected. They want the truth.

He averts his gaze to a dark corner of the workshop. It’s easier this way—like he’s talking to someone else.

“In the resistance days, you two were inseparable. I mean, everyone in the family was close-knit, but most days, for better or worse you were practically attached to the hip.”

Casey remembers those days fondly. When Leon would stretch himself across the pile of duvets and pillows they’d set up in Donnie’s workshop, teaching Casey how to fold paper planes then tossing them at Donnie’s head as he worked. When they returned home from a mission beaten and exhausted and yet somehow found the energy to take turns entertaining Casey—bored and restless from days trapped within the safety of the bases’ four walls—with old-world stories and dances until he fell asleep. When they’d risk a trip to the surface just to escape it all for a moment, rest against one another’s shells and watch the moon.

He remembers how they had moved together as a unit—in battle, in walking shoulder to shoulder through the base, in the infinite ways they’d pissed each other off just to distract the other for a moment from the stress or pain.

“Leon was our leader. Mikey balanced him. April was his compass. You were his closest counsel.”

“Sounds exhausting.”

Casey shoots daggers over his shoulder.

“What? Leo falls under several virtuous definitions. A listener is not one of them.”

“He listens.” He asserts.

“Mm. Doesn’t sound like him.”

“I’m not painting him in golden light for you. The problems Leo has now, Master Leonardo still had back then. But he has always listened.” His gaze returns to the dark. “Sometimes he doesn’t let it sway his decisions when he should, but he doesn’t forget the words.” Takes it to heart, laughs it off when it hurts. “If there were persisting issues—if he needed insight or honesty when his judgement was clouded by his emotion, you were the one he turned to.”

Donnie hums a skeptical note. “One can’t help but point out that he doesn’t turn to anyone anymore.”

“Yeah.” Casey agrees sadly. “Not like before.”

“So, what changed? Leon’s never said anything outright, but I always get the sense there was some kind of disagreement between us.”

Casey stutters on that. There’s truth to it, in a sense, but…

“It’s… It’s not that simple…” He closes his eyes and releases a breath. “The decision to wall yourself off from everyone you love can’t be based solely on a single, destructive event…”

“We didn’t argue?”

“No, you definitely argued.” He can say that much with confident certainty. “Your roles as resistance leaders led you to ram heads all the time. Sometimes Leon ceded to your advice. Other times you’d both scream until you went hoarse, go to bed for the night, then wake up the next day and somehow find your middle ground. The only times I can remember you both being too stubborn to agree, the topic was so unimportant that it didn’t even matter. It never devolved to outright hostility. It just felt…”

“Standard?” Donnie suggests, confirming Casey’s suspicions that they’d been this way since they were toddlers.

“Normal.” He agrees. “Like brotherly squabbles. Personal spats that you’d both forget within a week. Nothing that ever pushed you apart, or threatened to demoralise the resistance.”

“So us constantly being at each other’s throats all the time had absolutely nothing to do with him avoiding talking tactics with me now.” Donnie says, tone bone dry.

Casey turns back towards him, his heart panging. “It wasn’t constant… And I don’t think he’d ever avoid you because of that. You have to understand, most of us clung to Leon’s instruction like a lifeboat. He was rarely ever defied, not because he was some tyrant that we all feared, but because we always knew he had our best interests at heart. He never wanted power. He wanted the world to survive. He wanted his family to be able to live in it. He tried with everything he had to keep us safe, and you…” He glances up at Donnie, hesitating. It’s somewhat difficult to bring up what sounds so much like a criticism with someone he respects as much as Master Donnatello. “You disobeyed his orders all the time. Habitually. More than anyone else I knew. Right up until the end. And after…”

Casey’s at a loss for words—at least, at a loss for good enough words to succinctly describe the terrible significance of after in a way that makes sense to Donnie. He brings his hands to his face, rhythmically rubbing his skin to help himself think.

“So, he doesn’t like that I shot down some of his moronic plans?” Donnie asks with a wild gesticulation of his hands. It might as well have been a slap, the way it jolts Casey out of the flow of his thoughts. “He’s bitter that I didn’t fawn over him like some sycophantic? That’s his reason for putting Leo in danger? He’s that petty?”

Casey takes a confident step into Donnie’s space, indignation hitting the back of his throat. “Do you really think that lowly of him?”

Donnie’s mouth clicks shut.

Casey sighs, the fight draining from him just as quickly as it had risen. “He never took your disregard as a slight, but that doesn’t mean he was entirely unaffected by it, either.”

Donnie scratches at his arms with a disgruntled, almost petulant expression. “Why should I let myself be held responsible for transgressions I haven’t even committed yet?”

He still doesn’t get it. “It’s not all about the disagreements, Donnie—”

“What exactly is his problem, then?”

Casey throws his hands into the air. “I don’t know, it’s not like he walked around advertising it! Whatever was happening between you had been going on for longer than I’d even been alive, and by the time either of you had the heart to address it, it was already too late. What happened broke him. It took us years to get him to talk about anything other than logistics—”

Patience at its limit, Donnie interjects sharply, “Speculate for me.”

Casey stops. There is an idea there, lying dormant at the back of his mind—one Casey would much rather leave buried. This is the worst possible time to be having this conversation. If they can’t bring Leon back and this never gets resolved Casey will yet again be the vessel for suffering needlessly shared between past and present for Donnie. When he’d already committed to keeping that gateway closed for good.

But if he were in Donnie’s position… He would want to know.

“He doesn’t want to burden you with himself again, he…” Casey’s gaze drops to his feet. “He thought you resented him.” He manages, the truth of it scraping up his throat on the way out.

The temperature in the room drops. Donnie’s anger dissolves, temporarily forgotten. Casey glimpses up, catching sight of Donnie’s blocky brows slanted with sadness, his mouth downturned.

Immediately regretting having spoken, Casey attempts to backtrack. “To be fair, I think he had a tendency to think pretty much everyone resented him to some degree for what happened to Master Splinter and Master Raphael and every other horrible thing happening in the world—” He winces at Donnie’s increasingly crestfallen expression—not helping, not helping. “And the volatility of your interactions with him at the time probably really didn’t help convince him otherwise.” Spirits, he’s bad at this. He continues, words rushed. “But— but according to Commander O’Neil, you two never did run all that smoothly, and even though you weren’t always friends, you were always brothers, and regardless of how bad it got, you remained one of the only people he could trust to set him straight when he doubted himself—”

“And then I went against his wishes and perished in the process.” Donnie finishes quietly. “That’s what this is? He thinks I don’t have the strength to support him or the faith to go along with whatever he says so he babies me to avoid a repeat?”

“Faith? No— Donnie, no matter how many times you disobeyed an order, regardless of whether or not you claimed to believe in him— none of that mattered in the face of how it ended… His actions don’t stem from spite or a lack of belief in us. If he did have feelings of inadequacy for anyone, it would be toward himself. Now that I’m older I get that leading the Resistance must’ve taken a heavy toll on his conscience, but he… He was handling it, you know?”

As a child, Casey had been awestruck by it. It seemed inconceivable that a single person could bear such immense pressure, process all the losses and pain on a daily basis and still remain functional. Yet somehow Leon hardly ever appeared affected by any of it. Regardless of the insurmountable odds, he simply kept rising, forging ahead, taking care of whatever needed to be done.

“It wasn’t until we lost you…”

There’s a heavy pause. Casey doesn’t want to think of the after. The guttural grief and rage that encapsulated Leon, choked out all remaining joy that once accompanied his conversations. The months of emptiness that followed. Some days it felt like he and Mikey and April were the only things left in the world that kept his soul tethered and his body dragging behind.

Casey’s throat clicks as he swallows. “It wasn’t just that you were gone. With time, I think he could’ve processed that. It was your willingness in the decision—the choice… If everything Leo potentially stood to offer to the future wasn’t enough to convince you to stay and keep arguing with him, then he wasn’t worthy of any of it at all.”

Donnie looks away, his mouth downturned, finger tapping against his thigh. It’s a distasteful answer to him, unjustified by reason, unneat, the furthest thing from satisfying. And yet, he does not contend it. Casey knows the feeling. It hits too close to the ugly truth to be speculation.

“What a dumbass. I wouldn’t have…” Donnie looks down, his hands tightening in his lap, voice lowering to a murmur. “I would never resent him.”

It feels oddly selfish, but years after Master Donnatello’s death and decades into the past, Casey’s immeasurably grateful to be able to hear what he’d always known from the turtle himself. He reaches across and takes hold of Donnie’s shoulder.

They both jump a little at the sound of someone knocking at the door, their heads turning towards the entry. They exchange glances, then Casey pulls away, returning to his seat.

“You can come in!” Donnie calls, foregoing his usual password routine.

Raph pokes his head in. “We’re ready to head out.”

“We’ll be right there.”

Donnie gathers his tech, shoving explosives into a duffel bag. Casey cringes.

He clears his throat. “None of that was said to defend what Leonardo did, by the way. We have every right to be angry at him for keeping things from us. It was wrong of him to sabotage your ability to help him and land Leo in danger in the process. I’m with you when it comes to all of that, I just… I don’t think we can ignore what he’s lost.”

There is likely nothing they could’ve done to stop him, is what Casey finds to be the most maddening fact of all. They can’t protect Leon from something that’s already occurred. The apocalypse. An event so big and devastating and all-consuming that even Casey, raised in the aftermath, cannot imagine the magnitude of such a change. The past clings to Leon, shapes his decisions, his nightmares, his very being. Casey knows better than anyone that you can’t pull someone from a fire and expect them to forget the smell of smoke.

Donnie doesn’t glance back. “I understand.” He slings the duffel bag over his shoulder and rises to his feet. “And as it goes with most of life's problems, this one can be more or less solved with approximately fifty-three pounds of high-powered explosives.”

Casey eyes him with mild concern. “More or less.” He echoes, then grabs his hockey stick and follows after him.

- - - - -

Leon wakes to a low, distant rumbling reverberating the walls—the sound of the arena stirring to life. He cracks open gritty eyes, stiff and momentarily disoriented. His body drenched in sweat as if he’s been sleeping in a furnace—warmth he fears is more related to the pounding pressure in his head and the ache in his bones than the heat stemming from Leo sitting up next to him.

His gaze drifts to the loaf Leo’s nibbling away at. Despite living on nothing but stale bread, the sight of the damn thing still makes him hungry. He knows when injured, he burns more calories to maintain functionality, but it’s galling to be so weak after only a few days on meagre rations. Whatever the circ*mstance, it’s food. Any flavour is better than the pennies he’s been tasting with every swallow.

He tries to get up, then quickly abandons the notion when his body makes him violently aware of all the aches he hadn’t felt at the time yesterday. A common occurrence, to be struck in the heat of battle and note nothing of it until much later.

“Good morning dirtbag nation.” Leo announces, falsely chipper. He picks out a mouldy spot from the bread and flicks it to the floor. “Is something I might say, were it still morning.” Leo turns to him, offering Leon the remainder of the loaf. “You slept through most of the day.”

Leon stretches, wincing as blood-crusted wounds shift and several joints pop, then takes the damned bread.

“You didn’t wake me again.” He replies hoarsely.

Leo snorts derisively. “Jeez, sorry for making you miss out on some enthralling hours of sitting in the dark and marinating in self-pity while I shift dust around.”

Too tired and groggy to think up a suitable comeback, Leon simply hums a neutral note. He weakly pushes against the ground with his prosthetic and gingerly sits up, cringing when the motion manages to jostle every bruise and wound.

Leo gives him a proper look-over as Leon fills his mouth with stale bread and chews mechanically. His eyes trail across him, taking inventory—lingering on cuts, landing hard on the dark blemishes around his shoulder and ankle. Leon doesn’t remember being this annoyingly attentive. He wonders if he somehow landed in an alternate timeline where he adopted Raph’s propensity for mother-henning. The concern is heart-warming. And the attention is nice. But the back of his neck is starting to prickle with discomfort under the weight of his scrutiny.

He drops the bread into his lap and lightly pushes Leo’s head away with the palm of his metal hand. “Quit gawking at me like that. It’s bad enough you calling me old and decrepit. You don’t have to treat me like I’m falling apart.”

Leo dodges his hand and grumbles something undoubtedly unflattering under his breath.

“What was that?” Leon asks lightly.

“Finish your loaf.” Leo says reproachfully.

A sickeningly fond emotion spreads through Leon’s chest. He quirks a half-smile, then takes an obnoxiously large bite, wincing when his exaggerated chewing pulls at sensitive skin. His whole damn face throbs.

Unmoved by his theatrics, Leo leans forward to place an open palm against Leon’s forehead. Leon’s jaw motions pause as Leo holds it there for a couple seconds, his expression turning grim.

His hand falls away. “You’re sick.”

Ah, right, the fever. Naturally, this was bound to happen sooner or later. He can fight through the haze of pain and exhaustion right up until his dismissal for Maslow’s whole ass stupid triangle knocks him on his ass. Can only stretch his body so far before it snaps back and punishes him for the strain.

Leon swallows and grins at him, all teeth, then puts on his best Californian surfer accent. “Thanks bro, you’re totally gnarly too.”

Leo glowers back at him. Their staring contest lasts until his jaw aches with the stupid smile. Leon lets it drop. Tough crowd. Not his best work. “Joke. That was a joke. You know how it is. I jokes to copes.”

Instead of responding, Leo elects to turn his head to stare broodily into the middle distance. Leon side-eyes him. No snarky comeback? No quick-fire insult? No lightning wit? Unsettling. He shuts up and lets Leo be. As out of character it might be, the kid has every right to some aloof rumination.

Leon glances up when Leo springs to his feet and turns to confront him with a resolute intensity.

“I’m volunteering to fight today.”

The words reverberate off the stone walls. The bread Leon’s chewing turns to ash in his mouth.

Leon swallows thickly. It takes all his control to keep his voice quiet and calm. “You won’t.”

Leo puffs up in irritation. “Why not?”

Leon sits still, elbow on his knee, forehead in his hand, staring exhausted at the floor. Maybe on another day, having not run several rounds of death and fighting for his life the night prior, he could think up a response that will satisfy Leo without giving away just how f*cked he is. But today… today is a wash. His head hurts too much. He’s sleepy and irritable and every muscle is complaining from being constantly overworked. Everything’s sore, lately, like Leon only exists between moments of pain. It’s exhausting. This is all so damn exhausting.

“I’m older than you.” He manages.

“We were born at the exact damn time.” Leo counters.

“You know that’s not what I— argh, whatever, it doesn’t matter. My point is, she won’t let you.”

“Oh, suddenly the big evil capitalist spider lady in charge of a criminal empire is against minor league death battles.” Leo’s says sardonically. “You’re making sh*t up, you can’t know that!”

He does, is the problem. Sylvia has had this planned out for a long time—potentially from the beginning, from the very inception of his stage name. He’s her meteorite, designed to spark and shine, leave a blazing beacon of light in the sky, then burn up and crash to the Earth. Lampon had that right. Ryūsei wasn’t created to last, and Big Mama isn’t about to let him off the hook without fulfilling every contract in that namesake.

Though, if Leo learns about that, he’s going to be even less inclined to roll over and let this go…

Leon’s brows pull inward. “I’m not saying you’re not capable, but…” He glimpses down at Leo. He looks painfully young without his mask—his expression open and lost, his face marred with none of the wrinkles or scars that Leon wears. He’s already been through far too much for someone so young. Leon exhales, “you’re still a kid.”

Immediately, he knows it’s the wrong thing to say. Leo’s scowl deepens. He snaps, “and you’re being an arrogant man-turtle baby!”

“I can die content with that.”

“I don’t want you to die for me!” Leo yells, bluntly unveiling the elephant in the room. His eyes dip somewhat sheepishly, his jaw tightening, his fists clenching at his sides. “You don’t get it. You’ve already accepted to doom yourself to this, but you don’t know what it’s like being stuck here. You’re trapped, but you… you don’t know what it’s like to be powerless—you can’t understand what it is to spend days on end, trying and failing to do the one thing that could save us, having to watch you return worse off each time because— because of…” His voice cuts off, his expression crumpling.

A guilty pang spreads through Leon’s chest. This is exactly what he’d been trying to avoid. He softens his tone. “She won’t let you, even if you volunteer.”

Leo goes completely, perfectly still. His voice turns cold. “Tell me what happened yesterday.”

Leon grimaces, hit with the memory of the arena’s charged atmosphere after Sylvia had stepped in—the sense of being trapped within the eye of a storm, the primal frenzy of the crowd crackling around him. He’s astonished Big Mama hadn’t had a riot on her hands. Lampon must deeply matter to Sylvia for her to risk the reputation of her own business for her, though Leon is certain the fallout from that chaos will inevitably land on him.

Leo looks like he’s about to shake him, injured shoulder or not. There’s an impatient, anxious tension to his voice. “Leon.”

He exhales. “Sylvia stopped the fight.”

For a moment Leo just teeters there in confusion. “Wh— that’s not… Big Mama doesn’t interfere with the Nexus. She’s never interrupted before—”

“I wasn’t supposed to win.” The words leave him without thought, without foresight.

“Supposed to…” He echoes, eyes narrowing. Leo stares at him for a few seconds as he realises what that means—what Leon expects him to do. He can see the second Leo pieces it all together, his eyes darkening, expression hardening. His voice goes deadly calm. “When were you planning on telling me this?”

Leon grimaces. He places a metal hand against the floor and tries to stand, gasping as pain erupts from his side. When he sways, Leo shoots his arm out, steadying him. Leon squeezes his eyes shut and breathes through the lightheaded, nauseous feeling spinning around him. sh*t. Not a great way to instil confidence.

Leon clears his throat. “I can do this.”

A noise breaks free of Leo, too pained and incredulous to be a laugh. “No, you absolutely cannot. I hate to be the one to tell you this, but you’re all out of heroic stunts, bucko! Your ankle is badly sprained, you have a gaping hole in your side, your good shoulder is dislocated and the fleshy portion of the other one is still healing from being knifed,” Leon opens his mouth to interrupt Leo’s rapidly expanding list, but Leo ploughs through before he can get so much as a sound out. “And No, I have not forgotten about that. Your shell is cracked—I could practically hear your ribs grinding together as you slept. Ribs are not supposed to do that, Leo.”

“I’m aware, thanks.” Leon utters tonelessly. He doesn’t need to be reminded how horrible he feels.

Leo flails at him. “This can’t last for much longer. You can’t last. You were held together by loose threads before you even stepped foot into that ring—weeks of running your own stupid ass ragged. Fighting, barely sleeping, drawing away Big Mama’s goons from us. All this could’ve been avoided if you just stopped being so goddamn stubborn and actually shared your problems with the team, and even now you’re still…” Leo stares up at him in disbelief, rendered breathless. “I’m still doing it.”

Leon releases a shuttered breath and tries to turn away from him. Leo stops him halfway, placing a hand over his plastron. Leon hangs his head, eyes dropping to his feet.

Leo ducks into his line of vision and peers up at him, brows furrowed, eyes assessing. “Don’t you want to be free of this nightmare?”

Leon straightens, riled. “Of course I do.” It’s what he’s always wanted for himself—for them all to be happy and healthy and safe. It’s all he wants for them—to be the kids Leon and his brothers never had the chance to be.

“Then hell, Leon, what is this for you? Punishment? Retribution? Some twisted deep down desire you still have to prove yourself the champion?” He asks with a familiar burn of anger in his voice, the one that appeared when he was at his most cutting. “Is this the result of me? Without Casey sent on a mission to break me free of my own sh*tty stagnation, this is what I become?” Leo’s hands are shaking, his voice tightening, each word enunciated with vicious precision. “An old, sick man, making the same mistakes, never learning—-just running in circles, convinced that the only way he can escape is to become some… martyr of his own story. Easier to stand the thought of his own death when he can rally and chase it down himself.”

A cold pit opens up in Leon’s gut. He bites down, tries to bottle away the emotion.

“That’s not what this is.” The rebuttal sounds weak, even to himself.

Leo searches his eyes, the hardness in his expression cracking. “Don’t do this. Please, don’t be that. Don’t make me that.”

Leon swallows, the lump in his throat thick. He looks at Leo, less than an arm’s length away, and waits for the words to arrive—I’m sorry I led you down this path, I’m sorry I made you think I changed the past—you and your brothers will always be the only ones who can shape the future, I’m sorry, don’t hold out too much hope for me, I’m sorry, I was always going to find the worst way to disappoint you, but that’s not you—it’ll never be you. Something.

Something.

“Leo…” Is the first word on the scene. It doesn’t bring any friends.

Leo steps back, all the fight draining from his limbs.

Leon twists towards the door and removes his makeshift sling. He winces as he tests the motion in his arm. It’s… not ideal. Sore. The ligaments and tendons holding the joint are undoubtedly damaged. Hurts like hell no matter how he moves it.

With Leon’s back to him and the heaviness felt between them, it’s easy to think that Leo’s thrown in the towel. A fool’s hope, really. Leon was never very good at letting things go.

When Leo’s voice sounds again, it’s more subdued than he can recall hearing it in a long time. Maybe ever.

“You still matter to them.”

Leon goes cold, all other thoughts grinding to a halt.

He hears Leo shift behind him. “You know that, right?”

A lump forms in his throat. It would be difficult not to notice, what with the way dad looks at him with the love he’s always yearned for, the way Raph is still so caring, so gentle with him—like he still deserves that kindness. How Donnie is so straightforwardly honest in that way Leon’s never been able to hide or turn away from, and yet also so attentive—willing to forgo food and sleep if it meant he could build something that could help Leon. It’s impossible to ignore when Mikey looks up to him like he keeps the night bright by holding up the stars and the moon, and it all makes Leon want to recoil, scream, tear his eyes out. They treat him as if he’s their own and it’s all he’s ever wanted and it’s a fantasy too good to be true because somewhere along the line Leon blinded them.

Splinter made him leader, Raph staked everything on him, Donnie trusted him, Mikey followed him to the ends of the Earth. He was responsible for keeping everyone fed and happy and safe and alive, and he failed. They don’t see that he killed them. Not here, not now, but he did. He had. And Casey might have it in his head that he’s atoned for that by saving this timeline, but it doesn’t erase Leon’s. There’s a physical presence of it—the sense of not belonging, omnipresent, even now. He’s not sure he fears the Nexus more than he fears living out the rest of his life as the patron saint of the worst possible outcome.

Dust falls from the ceiling as the rumblings above them grow louder. Leon doesn’t look back, for all the ways looking at Leo might undo him right now. He crosses his legs into a meditative pose and tries to quiet his mind. When the time comes—the cell door swinging open, two guards entering, cuffs in hand—Leon doesn’t fight it. With some difficulty, he rises to his feet. He’s about to take a step towards them when Leo latches onto his wrist, stilling him.

Leon takes a breath and looks down at the kid, placating words at the tip of his tongue, then. Stops.

Leos’ face has a flayed vulnerability—something so raw and terrible that he flinches to see it. Leo doesn’t say a word, but Leon locks eyes with him, and all he can see is Casey, his arms wrapped around his back, clinging, desperate. I can’t lose you too. For a moment, time moves around him. Leon is frozen in place, unwilling to move.

The moment passes though, as it always does, and he gathers his wits, places a warm hand over the kid’s and gently pries his hand away. He moves towards the door, generating space between them, then turns his shell to the guards and with a wince, holds his arms behind his back—the new angle setting his shoulder alight with pain. Leo watches silently as heavy steel is wrapped around his wrists and ankles, cool against his flushed skin. Each cuff locks tight with a click.

It dawns on him that if there were any time to dispel some lasting wisdom to his younger self, it’d be now.

How ironic it is that Leon’s mind could not be more blank. Typical, really. Over a decade of rousing speeches to the Resistance, and yet here he is at the end of his rope, and he has nothing. What can he say to this Leo, that by all accounts has accomplished all that he has not? What wisdom does Leon have that isn’t going to sound like a pile of hypocritical and patronising bullsh*t—something Leo’s more likely to punch him for than take comfort in. Leon’s a lake, as wide and deep as it is empty, any life lessons or valuable philosophies sitting as detritus at the very bottom. But he needs to say something. He’d want to hear something.

Only one thought floats to the surface.

“You matter to me.”

Leo is motionless, his eyes turning shiny with unshed tears. Leon regrets hurting him all over again, but it’s worth telling himself that, at least once.

The guards turn Leon around and guide him out of the cell.

- - - - -

Leo stands there, shell-shocked, listening as the footsteps recede and the rattle of chains fade. It’s only once he’s completely enveloped in silence that reality sinks in. He might never see Leon again.

Leo pounds a fist against the wall, squeezing his eyes shut against the heat prickling at his eyelids. Bastard. f*ck him. f*ck him. What right did he have to waltz in and insinuate himself into their lives, charming his family, protecting them, showing his brothers all the ways in which he’s a strong and capable leader and Leo’s not, winning them all over, making Leo care about him. All his life Leo’s been waiting for someone to just accept him as he is and…

Why? Why’d he have to say that? He’s never…

Leon isn’t one to let on more than he means. He always knows something Leo doesn’t—he knew he wasn’t going to make it out of this. He knew. Leo wishes he could feel betrayed, but all he feels is the sinking, leaden weight at the pit of his stomach, as if the ground is giving way beneath him.

Realising that Leon had been willing to jump on a grenade for Leo from the very beginning only maddened him. He’d never ask someone to walk through fire for his sake. Why wasn’t he worth the work it took for Leon to piece himself back together? Why wasn’t his family enough to make him want to fight with everything it took to live?

People with fevers can still function, yes, but survive the Nexus? With Leon’s injuries? In the wake of one of Big Mama’s murderous moods?

Okay, now he’s panicking. He should have stopped him. Why didn’t he stop him?

Leon’s expecting him to leave him behind. It’s difficult to be optimistic in light of that.

Leo jumps at the sound of heavy footsteps approaching the cell. He scrambles up and scrubs the tears from his cheeks.

Strange. It’s far too early for the guard on watch to be making rotation, far too soon for Leon to have returned. Something must be wrong. Leo tries to quell the barrage of hypotheticals that rush through his mind—the line separating hope and heartbreak far too thin.

The cell door swings open. Leo takes a step back, pressing against the wall when three large yokai enter the room. The largest takes one look at him and tips his head towards the hallway, “change of scenery, turtle. You’re coming with us.”

The sudden change of routine is unnerving. Leo bristles at the authoritative tone, but he’s inclined to go along with the order. Leon might’ve resigned himself to dying in this pit, but Leo’s not giving up. There’s gotta be a better chance of rescuing him out there than stuck here in the dark.

Leo peels himself off the wall. They don’t even give him the grace of walking out of there himself—taking him by each arm and ignoring his protests. His legs feel stiff and weak as he tries to get his legs beneath him as they practically drag him out.

He cringes at the brightness of the fluorescent lights in the hallway, stumbling around like a newborn foal as he tries to keep up with the guard’s rapid pace so as to not be dragged across the floor. Ninja reflexes usually saves him from the humiliation, but he finds himself weak and uncoordinated from days on end stuck in cramped conditions in the dark on minimal rations and sleep.

Their twists and turns come to a halt at an elevator at the end of the hallway. When the door opens, it does so with a slow, groaning creak that reverberates through the corridor. He’s shoved into the interior, which is cramped and dimly lit—the claustrophobic size not conducive to four oversized yokai, who squeeze in tight, their shoulders cramming him in. The guard in front punches in the number to the top floor. There’s a shudder, then a lurch in his stomach as the elevator ascends.

Ding, the doors open and Leo is jostled out into an even brighter hallway. He’s pulled forward, each step marked by the heavy thud of his anxious heartbeat. The decor up here has far more grandeur than the lower levels—the wallpaper draped in gold and the length of the floor a glossy, reflective laminate in a sickly shade of chartreuse. He’s led up a spiralling staircase—the distant sound of cheering screams slowly filtering in louder the higher they rise.

At the next door, the guards stop. The big guy in front knocks against the wood.

A woman’s voice calls from behind it. “Enter.”

Leo is dragged inside, and the arena’s noise hits him at full volume. His attention immediately is pulled to the front of the room where a glass balcony provides a full view of the Battle Nexus. They’re perched above the audience stands. The majority of the arena below is obscured by fog. Hanging on wires above, a circle of wide flatscreens play Hidden City commercials. Freaking sponsors for the death pit. Never say they do sh*t any different down here.

The rest of the room is not large, but luxurious in its contents. The polished marble floor shimmers with veins of gold and red. The ceiling above is a sprawling fresco of mythic scenes, framed by gilded corners. A chandelier hangs from the centre, its cascading prisms casting geometric shadows of light around the room. A counter lines one of the walls, filled with pyramids of champagne and snacks. Leo would be disgustedly impressed by the opulent gaudiness of it all if the assault on his eyes wasn’t giving him a sensory overload headache. In the middle of the room sits an ornate crimson throne facing the arena—the height of its back obscuring Leo’s view of the person seated.

The guard’s vice grip cinches around his forearms. He staggers as he’s dragged beside the throne. His struggles increase when he spots chains embedded into the floor next to it. To no avail. He’s not strong enough.

They yank him down to his knees and hold him there with a tight grip of his neck, forcing his head down as another guard makes work of securing the cuffs around his wrists and ankles. In his peripherals he partially sees the purple heels of the person seated next to him, their legs crossed daintily. The steel is squeezed tight enough to cut off circulation, then the locks click shut.

The guards pull away, stepping back, and Leo raises his head.

Big Mama gasps dramatically when his eyes lock with her’s, a hand rising to her mouth. “Turtley-boo, scramulent to see you again. Welcome to Big Mama’s private box.”

Leo tenses, his hackle rising. She sits perfectly at ease on her throne in her classic, high-fashion attire. “Don’t you already have a dog guy to sit at your feet?” He grits out.

She waves him off. “Gus is tending to other matters. And you’ve been such a humble guest, I thought it pertinent to treat you with the best seat in the house.”

Leo churns this through his brain with rising alarm. “You’re using me in your rat trap?”

“Heavens, no,” Big Mama replies, “I need only you to observe as your champion down there is torn limb from limb-itty limb.” She twiddles her fingers with a bright smile.

Leo lunges at her, rising maybe an inch before the restraints violently yank him back to the floor. She watches with mild amusem*nt as he strains against them for a few seconds. They refuse to budge, anchoring him solidly in place. Leo slumps forward, panting and defeated.

“What exactly are you hoping to get out of this?” He asks coldly.

“Entertainment, monetary value, reputation, revenge, a thorn removed from my side, a random variable removed from the board. Really, the question should be what does Big Mama not get out of this?”

Leo bares his teeth. “You let him die, Splinter will never forgive you.”

Big Mama laughs. “Funny, the you a couple decades from now recited nearly the same words.”

When he doesn’t respond, seething silently, her eyes slide back over to his, curious.

She sighs—long and exasperated as if Leo’s the one inconveniencing her here; just some other burden she has to deal with. ”I suppose I have the time spare to humour you… After the fizzywinkle your family affair left my business in, I required a restart. And for my newest Battle Nexus, I needed to create a splenderific champion to dizzle-dazzle the Hidden City and revitalise my reputation. I hit a predicament however when I learned the pickings have only gotten slimmer since our last debacle. Of my options, Lou Jitsu stood out as the ideal, but I had no guarantee he would refrain from repeating his past failings by being a bore and playing pacifist. Of course, a ‘murderize or be murderalized’ rule could be introduced to negate this flim flam, but I still needed to track down my Battle Nexus All Star.”

Leo eyes her icily. “Yeah, so you sent people after pops. Skip. I was there for that, y’know, being hunted for sport. Literally.”

She ignores the comment. “My dearest Lou so rarely shows his face. Before you pee-wee testudines apparated in my hotel, there were many years I thought him dead. He’s grown craftier with age—more secretive. I just can’t understand why he wouldn’t give me a second chance.”

“Well, you did kidnap and imprison him after he proposed to you. I’m no relationship expert but I dunno, that does tend to sour your long-term prospects.”

“Oh, pish posh. You’re too young to know the complexities of such things. I was only following my nature. I’m well aware Lou would never set foot back into the ring on his own terms, but there is always a way… Enlightenment showed itself to me in the form of your glorificiously arrogant older self. How flagrantly he ran around the surface—coming out every night, getting in my way time after time. What better way to pull daddy dearest back into my embrace than to make us one big happy family. I could take you as a consolatory, fantumptuous arena clown in the meantime, and the rest of the stragglers would come running—”

There’s a swell in the uproarious screaming from the crowd. Leo tunes out the rest of Big Mama’s evil monologuing as Leon’s face appears on the circle of screens hanging above the arena. Leo scans the ring’s floor, quietly fuming when he spots Leon on the far-right side, a distance from where the great cloud of fog has gathered. Even from up here, Leo can see how bad a shape he’s in.

“—But who would’ve thought that little old you could be such a ferocious, bloodcurdling warrior? Certainly not me. And yet, the others never came. My, I almost felt sorry for you. Night after long night of savagery—Lou’s beloved son in perilous danger. All of it broadcast secretly, but not so secretly that the smart, funny one wouldn’t be able to figure it out. Surely you weren’t all that dull.”

The low voice of one of the guards sounds from behind them. “Ma’am. The cryogenic containment chamber has been lifted. She should be waking now.”

Big Mama brings her hands together. “Fantabulous!” She turns back to address him. “You know what I thought? Perhaps my fuzzy-mufflewunkins isn’t taking me seriously. Maybe he doesn’t believe I would really kill one of you. I mean, surely he would be here by now if he saw Big Mama as a real threat,” her tone lowers, “and to be perfectly honest, I am sick. And tired. Of waiting.”

The horrible feeling in the pit of his gut worsens, his stomach knotting into tight, painful coils. Leo squints into the fog apprehensively. He can see refractions of shadow and reflected light but not much else. From what he can see of the shadowed outlines though… whatever’s in there with Leon, it’s big.

“So,” Big Mama says, perking up cheerily, “either you tell me how to tempt daddy dearest to my humble holdings, or we both watch this fight play out to its gratuitous finale.”

Leo feels his chest go tight with anger. She’s bluffing. She couldn’t stop this fight even if she wanted to. Not again. The audience wants blood, and if they don’t get it tonight heads will either turn to her, or leave entirely. She won’t risk that loss.

She hums as the silence stretches. “Just a quick little reminder that I win either way. I still have you, after all. Regardless of Lou’s lacking paternal abilities I do ever so doubt he’ll let you be sacrificed twice over.”

Leo digs his fingernails into his palms, his knuckles whitening with the force of his frustration. His skin feels too tight; the constricting steel restraints a relentless, gnawing reminder of how helpless he is to alter or control this situation.

“I’ve met some pricks in my lifetime, but you lady, take the goddamn cactus.” He sneers.

She tuts. “Please. All I do is put the horrors on display and charge for the seats. The rest of this crackadoo is of no one’s making but your own.”

Leo’s about to bite out a scathing curse when he catches a glimpse of a tendril whipping outwards, pink and veiny, swiping blindly through the fog.

Leo freezes, struck with a rush of heat that quickly turns to an icy numbness, as though his body is switching between extremes of fury and horrified shock.

He can’t move, can’t breathe, can’t think beyond it’s impossible. Bouncing from disbelief and dismay because this can’t be real. It can’t be him. Not after everything Leo had done… He can’t have escaped.

Big Mama giggles at his reaction “Oh, yes, I’ve heard on the rumour mill that you two have history. Don’t fret. It’s not you she’ll have her eye on today. Well, technically it is, but,” she waves a hand, “you get the gist.”

- - - - -

The pain at Leon’s side worsens with each consecutive step. Everything, everywhere, hurts. His body moved on autopilot. He gets the impression that if he were to stop, he wouldn’t be able to go again.

Big Mama makes no appearance, but her will is clear to Leon. There are no more showers, no opportunities to escape, no new uniform, no fanfare. This is no longer a performance. He’s led straight to the elevators.

He must be in somewhat of a dissociative, fugue state. He doesn’t remember getting out of the lift, or the guards releasing him from his bonds. His head throbs in rhythm with the stamping and screaming of the crowd above him as the hallway slants up—a heartbeat tempo, growing louder and louder, faster with each passing beat. The lights along the corridor leading up to the arena flash. Leon’s vision flickers—a crimson garnish that strikes metallic reflections, entering and receding, a distorted fracture in the distance. The hallway moves, a sideways jerk. Or perhaps it’s Leon that moves. The specifics are unimportant. Bright holes are tunnelling through the edges of his vision—blotchy like flame against the back of paper.

The hallway wavers as he progresses, then it falls away entirely to blinding light and the drum rolls of thunder—sound and vibration that he feels in his very bones. He squints into the loudness of the world as his moniker is announced to the screaming crowds. The lights of the arena are harsh and stinging. Leon breathes unevenly, his stomach threatening to upturn at any moment.

A dense fog blankets the arena, concealing any view of his opponent behind a curtain of white. The crispness of the air up here is a welcome relief against his flushed skin, the shift offering brief clarity of mind. He navigates through the haze to the weapons rack and retrieves his sword. The deep slice in his metal palm from Lampon’s blade makes it difficult to get a comfortable grip on the handle, but the routine is familiar, grounding.

The fog is already beginning to dissipate. The arena lights beaming down on them is not helping with visibility. Leon can see a single blinking yellow orb shining from the centre of it and shadows shifting as it moves forward.

The announcer's voice booms through the arena. “The great AKKOROKAMUI DEIMOS!”

The what.

Gasps ring out across the audience as the mist clears. Leon sees a massive, pulsating brain sat upon a body of tendrils, its flesh sickly pink and veins twitching with a disturbing rhythm. Leon’s heart skips a beat before lurching painfully into pounding.

The solitary, glowing sclera shifts, her slit pupil locking in on him. Leon’s blood runs cold from the sudden snap in the air—the chilling, deadly intent. Her wide, jagged maw splits open. When she speaks, her voice is not the melodic, chilling whisper he remembers. It’s rougher, the eerie smoothness harshened by rage.

“YOU!”

The intangible, shuddering wave that rolls through him pins him in place, leaving him cold and breathless, like a spear quivering in a corpse. Horror is the closest word for it. Pure and unfiltered.

“No.” He whispers, taking an unsteady step back. It’s not possible. She shouldn’t be here. They won. They drove them out. This world is supposed to be safe.

He startles at the sound of clattering at his feet. Glimpsing down, he discovers his sword in the dirt. A second later, he feels it. The sudden, encompassing shock all down his prosthetic—phantom nerves lighting up in agony, near crippling him with the sudden onset of pain. No, no, no. Leon clamps a weak hand around the metal and claws at invisible flesh—phantom muscle, ligament, tissue, bone, his nails scratching uselessly at the metal coating.

A shadow falls over him. His breath leaves his lungs choppy and shuttered as past and present eclipse. His head rings with the shrill of an enraged, inhuman screech, then.

Impact.

His shell cracks against a wall, the collision shuddering down his neck and spine. Whiplash. Crushed rock rains down on him. Next comes the hurt. His chest feels like it's in a vice grip. He’s winded, struggles to breathe, and when he does manage to suck a gasp into his lungs, it’s more thick dust than air. His mouth tastes like dirt, grit and copper and his whole body is shaking, fear an uneven lump in his throat.

“You wretched little pest.” She snarls. “You destroyed EVERYTHING!”

Last Leon was faced with her sad*stic cruelty, there had been an unfettered glee to it. Now Leon senses only rage, focused solely on him.

Her tentacles rise and Leon rolls out of the way as they slam down, leaving a crater where Leon sat a moment ago. When she sends down her next spiked tendril, he swings his legs out and dives away before he’s skewered. Leon scrambles up, wincing when the hurried movement echoes sharply through his shoulder and his side and his leg, and runs, every bone and muscle in his body aching like hell and not a single one wanting to cooperate with him. It hurts, badly, but he doesn’t care. He can’t.

She sends a barrage of twisting, spiked tendrils after him. Leon can’t think past the dread seizing his muscles. His dodging is more unpredictable, uncoordinated, staggering than conscious feints. He raises an arm to protect his eyes from the rocky debris flying up at him as her spikes shatter rock and stone.

She rises high above Leon, hovering like a spider on her tentacles, then shoots a whip-like tendril toward him. Leon sees it, darts out of the way, and runs straight into another tentacle that sweeps low. It takes out his legs, and Leon goes tumbling into the dust.

For a moment all he feels is the rapid pulse of blood in his veins and the twisting of his stomach. He groans, disorientated. When he peers up again, it’s to the sight of a tentacle blur diving down for him. He tries to roll away, but the thing wraps around his ankle. The cold, slimy sensation is far too similar to the things clawing in his mind. Keeping himself calm is not unlike holding water in his hands, trying not to spill a drop as he’s yanked upwards. A yelp escapes him, his heart kicking into overdrive as he’s lifted high into the air.

“Pitiful,” she sneers, flying spittle at his face, “this is what banished my brothers? That ended our purification before it could begin ridding the scum from this planet? A pathetic, fragile worm?!”

His stomach lurches as he’s hurled downwards. His body slams into the rubble-strewn ground with a bone-jarring thud. Her vice grip around his ankle holds. Leon barely has the time to breathe before she lifts and brings him down again with the same brutal force, then again, and again—each slam a rhythmic, thunderous punctuation of her fury, shaking the very foundations of the arena. His shell absorbs most of the damage but he can feel a rib or two go as he collides against ground to wall to rubble. A crack of his skull against something hard rattles his brain around and sends shockwaves of pain along every nerve.

When he’s finally released, he lies still, immobilised by the stinging aftershocks. He opens his eyes with the dazed realisation that they were closed. Heat radiates from his left temple as the world spins. Something warm and wet seeps into his lashes, clouding his vision. His whole head feels like it's underwater, the world above him muffled and distorted.

“Scream, little worm,” her breaths are heavy, her tone venomous, “you’ll die slowly for what you’ve done.”

Yeah. He’s feeling that. The amount of effort it takes to breathe is tremendous, absurd—a few fractured ribs. Hopefully not a punctured lung… Leon turns his head and spits out the red that’d filled mouth. The angle is awkward. A trickle of blood escapes out the side of his lips.

Rising back to his feet takes considerable effort and burns every inch of the way. There’s this hot, horrible stabbing—like someone’s trying to pry him open like a can by jamming a serrated knife between his ribs and twisting it underneath. He groans, grits his teeth and pushes through it. By the time he’s up, his vision swims so haphazardly that he thinks he may as well be submerged underwater. Everything feels cramped and jagged and painful.

When he looks across the field, his eyes catch on a flash of red in the fog. He freezes, and suddenly his focus is so far from the Krang he might as well be in another dimension.

He inhales shakily. The sinking ice-cold weight grows tenfold—an anvil in his stomach, constriction around his lungs.

Raph’s giant frame is hunched and gaunt. He’d grown too fast. It had been a slow deterioration, the change gradual as they tried their best to keep him sustained, but seeing him now… The strain of malnutrition is evident in every line of his emaciated frame, his shell deformed, his plastron battered and jagged to the point that the only thing holding him together is a patchwork of plasters and Donnie’s tech and Leon knows nothing—nothing at all except the empty hollow where his big brother’s heart used to sit.

He remembers this. The regret, the pain, the sorrow. Sobbing, beyond distraught, because his big brother is going to die in this sh*thole and Leon can’t help him—can’t even give the peace of calm reassurance as he clutches Raph to his plastron and tries desperately to stop the inevitable. Pressing against the wound, the futile hope that the hands responsible for hurting his brother could hold back the blood. Except it’s not really a wound anymore. It’s just a hole. Leon can see right through it. Raph shows no indication he even feels it.

Leon half expects his brother to be glaring at him accusingly, but his eyes are kind, if sad. And Leon supposes that makes sense. He imagines he makes for a pitiful sight right now, and this is his big brother, whose heart is even bigger than his muscles and who wears that heart on his sleeve and who will always love him. He won’t change and he doesn’t change and he won’t ever change even after it got him killed, got him dead, and why the f*ck had Leon ever presumed otherwise. Trying to convince him to not cushion the consequences of his impulsive decisions was equivalent to smashing his head against a brick wall. Raph on the other side deciding that Leon’s going to live, regardless of the cost, and now all Leon has of him is this stupid hallucinatory hallucination and it’s not him.

His body gives an involuntary shudder, a subconscious step back. He digs fingers into his wounded side. It’s the pain that keeps him grounded, the bright sensation too real to ignore, forcing him to gasp in air and focus.

Not fast enough. “You’re not paying ATTENTION!” A tentacle wraps around his leg, jarring his ankle and dragging him across the dirt.

Leon scrabbles wildly at the ground like a wild animal, nails chipping against rock. It’s useless. His brain feels loose as she shakes him—knocking between the wall of his skull. The motion stops, and Leon’s upside down, all the blood left inside him pushing against the top of his head.

He feels her cold tendrils coil and move around over his shell, snaking down his arms, pinning him. They wrap around him and then she’s squeezing, squeezing, threatening to crack open his shell. His vision splotches, he feels his ribs creak, he can barely get a breath out.

“Where could that mind of yours possibly be wandering off to at a time like this?” Her barbed tendrils push into him, and Leon recoils at the sensation of her mind reaching into his, her touch frigid and inexorable and inquisitive.

He resists the intrusion best he can, but her hold is iron. His discomfort and resistance only amuses her. The iron bands around his ribs constrict until it’s painful to so much as breathe. The memories are not difficult for her to find—the circ*mstances have pulled them very close to the surface. One small push, and then the sensation of being cracked open and scraped raw.

A curious purr reverberates through his skull. “You… You’re not him. You’re deeper, hardened, hollowed. You don’t belong here. But, oh… what a glorious future you’ve seen.”

The air curdles in his lungs as the arena disappears like a mirage, breaking into flickers of greenlight, the rocky faraway ceiling transforming into a familiar toxic slurry of black and black-red clouds that the earth vomits, the ground below baked to powder. Reality asserts itself in a rush of heat and smoke and the acrid smell of things burning.

He’s above the city, destruction all around him—collapsed skyscrapers, chunks of hot metal and ruined concrete embedded in the buildings all around. There’s the eerie sound of wailing in the distance, people shouting and crying.

He looks up, and his heart drops out of his stomach. Dread drips down his throat, a cold, gripping, implacable feeling that’s far worse than just having it finally over with.

“No.” He whimpers. Please. Not this.

Donnie is being dangled over the edge of the top of the tallest standing building in Manhattan, his limp body held in the grasp of multiple tentacles. He’s older, wrinkled, his mask gone, hood pulled back, cape and straps of cloth caught in the wind. To see his brother who was once so capable, so vibrant and funny and robust, so intelligent, hanging there, eyes glassy, unseeing, lost—emptied after weeks in that damn ship…

There are no words. Leon longs with everything he has to stop what he knows will happen next. He cannot stop it. He’s too far away. He hasn’t been able to teleport since Donnie left. Energy refuses to spark to his fingertips—he’s all steel with no flint. April and Mikey are screaming in his ear, indistinct, unintelligible, inconsequential. He’ll never make it in time. Leon still tries. The desperation is suffocating, all-consuming. He sprints across buildings, vaulting over debris, his lungs burning as he cuts through wave after wave of zombified masses. It’s useless. All he’s doing is drawing himself closer to the nightmare.

I don’t want to see this again. He thinks with quiet, childish terror. He wants the world to stop. He claws for control, fights against her influence, despair ripping at his chest. Please don’t do this, I’m begging you, I can’t—

The world seems to shift from one moment to the next, somewhere in the past-present-future. His vision spots. Leon momentarily surfaces long enough to suck in a deep gulp of air and kick and flail against the Krang’s hold, the jerking motion only causing more pain. Her mouth curls into a smile, then a tendril snakes around the curve of his neck and cleaves tight against his racing pulse, unforgiving.

When he’s pulled back under, he doesn’t even have the air to scream.

He forces his eyes up, against the pressure tightening around his windpipe, against every instinct he has in him screaming at him to not look, it’s not real, please, please, please don’t look—

The spike rips clean through his brother’s throat.

Leon felt it. Not like Raph, where a numb void had torn open, sucking in all the light and leaving everything that once burned bright feeling cold and distant as a collapsed star. No, he’d been feeling Donnie’s gradually unravelling loss for weeks by that point. Each day his ninpō had weakened—his mind under siege, his soul choked, all connection to his brothers slowly and tortuously smothered, the flame extinguished until it was no more than an ember.

Leon feels it down to his core when that weak, frayed thread between them finally snaps free.

The emptiness that follows is almost a relief.

Leon’s mind is violently ejected back into the arena, far, far away from the sight of Donnie’s lifeless body twisting, falling, disappearing into the tangled cradle of metal and concrete below. Back to the roar of the crowd—the difference in volume making his head ache at an even greater intensity. Back to the grip around his throat—the world rushing back in, too loud, too much. Back to the past—-to the knowledge he can never undo what has already been done.

Leon can’t gasp. Can’t breathe. Hot tears spill out from the corners of his eyes, dampening his mask. Her laughter reaches his tympana, making his blood rise on a red tide of fury and destruction.

“Poor little Leonardo,” she croons mockingly, “couldn’t ever save your kin…”

Leon throws out his prosthetic and activates the flamethrower, firing at the tentacle wrapped around his throat. Somewhere, there’s a shriek of pain. Leon feels the fire licking at his face, the scorching heat lighting up nerve endings in a chorus of agony. He doesn’t care. They took his brother’s voice, his soul, his life, an element of Leon that can never be returned. He’s going to kill all of them, she’s going to die, and if he dies too, that’s fine, because Donnie’s dead. He’s dead, and nothing will ever be the same again—

Leon slips free from her hold. He falls a few feet before he manages to catch himself, his hands sinking into the flesh of her head. The flamethrower putters out, fuel finally depleted. Leon doesn’t think. He claws at her, digging his nails into her putrid flesh. He can’t win. It doesn’t matter. He was never supposed to win. Leon has lost every important battle he’s ever fought in his life. He is nothing more than a feral animal, trapped in a cage, no muzzle to stop him from baring his teeth. Desperation and grief and rage. This is all he is. It’s all he has left.

Leon bites into a pulsating artery with the ferocity of a starved animal lunging at its prey, desperate and terrified and unyielding. He clamps down hard, sinew crushing against his molars, digging in until the metallic taste of blood fills his mouth, then rips away.

Warmth flows down his chest. There’s a horrible screeching, then he’s batted away. For a moment, he feels weightless, untethered, then he collides heavily with the ground and his whole body screams with the impact.

The heat lingers, an insidious discomfort that makes it feel like his flesh is still smouldering. His aching skin pulsates in rhythm with his racing heartbeat. He spits, gasps for air, something thick and wet escapes from his throat as he crawls to his hands and knees. Could be blood. Could be a sob.

There was always a reason to stop himself before the wave of grief crested. Mikey and April were always checking in and assessing, doctors were watching, the people he was supposedly leading would be alarmed, or there was Casey Jr. waiting in the next room, who never should have been caught in the gravity well of Leon’s misery in the first place, who doesn’t deserve to see the figure that’s supposed to be protecting him like this.

But now there is nothing.

He is alone and bone-weary and heartsick and every other ugly word people use to talk about a sobbing, blubbering mess brought to his knees because even knowing everything he’d known, there was a small side of him that had been convinced Donnie would somehow make it out. He’d planned out hopeful contingencies in his head—spent many nights pulling together the words he could scream at Donnie for incapacitating him and leaving him behind, and then he would grant Donnie the opportunity to lay out all his grievances with how Leon ran things, and they’d both be too proud to verbally forgive one another, but it wouldn’t matter in the face of their bone-deep relief that they made it out alive, and all of this would eventually be diluted into yet another horrifying life experience they shared—a tragicomedy, a very close scrape, ammunition to use against one another.

Donnie is dead.

Leon had been a fool for expecting to receive something as kind as closure. Just as it was in the past, like a failing, atrophied muscle, Leon is powerless to stop himself from falling apart.

The Krang releases an inhuman screech, her tentacles swinging wildly and slamming into the ground, shaking the ground. The earthquake sends Leon collapsing into the dirt and gasping shakily for breath. Half his face is stinging with a relentless, throbbing ache. He can barely see out of one eye. The rest of Leon’s head is preoccupied with excruciating agony that screams at him to lay flat on his shell and stop moving, the pain clawing through the shock.

Everything hurts, fractures shift under his skin and pain flares as the world presses in and around him—the ground brushing against still-bleeding wounds, the noise of the crowd thundering between his tympana, the taste of metal between his teeth.

Move, he orders his body.

Insubordination. Mutiny. Nothing moves. He can’t get up.

He’s vaguely aware of the buzz of roaring blood, his heart pounding too fast. The noise of the crowd grows distant. Everything felt very distant, from the ground at his back to the hazy blur of motion in front of him, to the burning in his chest. He can’t feel a thing except the fever, the last threads of his will to fight slipping away in the heat.

A manic noise bubbles up from his chest—broken and aggrieved. Some surreal concoction of rage, sorrow and hysteric gallows humour. What a sh*tty fight, he thinks. What a way to go.

The world fogs, blurs. A black, writhing mass of tentacles rises from the haze. Alive, alive, alive. Ready to kill. A towering shadow that blocks out the blinding arena lights. Wrath incarnate. Leon watches it with a detached kind of disinterest. He’s angry, in a vague, far-off way. A visceral terror-fury-horror that he just can’t get a good grip of through the smog.

There’s another part of him though—a far more resigned, cynical part, perhaps, that always knew this was going to be how it ended, one way or the other. And there's a kind of grotesque satisfaction to be proven right to his final breath. The taste of grim vindication, that his fears weren’t unfounded, that of course they were all going to die, of course, with all his weakness and insecurities and arrogance, he was bound for failure. His paranoia and his anxieties weren’t for nothing. It was inevitable. The proof was always here, on that battlefield, in his memories, in this graveyard he’s dug out for himself with his own bloodied hands, in that empty, yawning chasm in his chest.

Leon was right to be afraid.

- - -

The fog dissipates to a mist, and there are no red lights, no steel spikes, no metallic glean. Leo’s anchored to the floor, but he’s still in his home dimension, there’s no malicious presence here other than the one right beside him, there’s nothing pressing him into the rock, threatening to crush his shell under the weight of a mechanical boot. It’s the Krang, but it’s not him— not him— not him.

Realising they’d failed to account for the survival of any Krang on Earth does not feel great, either, but he understands why the others might have overlooked this one. They’d blown out one of her eyes, dropped a damn building on her. By all rights she should be just another stain on a New York sidewalk, not here in the Battle Nexus standing before Leon.

“Do you even know what that thing is?” Leo asks incredulously. “You can’t keep it here. You can’t control it!”

Big Mama dismisses him pleasantly, “and yet, there she is, kept and controlled.”

Leo is going to be sick. Spider lady is insane. Okay, he knew that, but surely she can’t be this intentionally, cruelly obtuse. His voice climbs into a half-hysterical hiss. “This isn’t one of your Nexus warriors, it’s a member of a dying race that wants to enslave and colonize us. It wants everything here—on Earth, dead!”

“Oh, hush deary. Big Mama knows what she’s doing.”

Leo watches as the sword slips from Leon’s hands, his eyes horror-wide, not a hint of that brave front present. A gut-clenching wave of nausea ripples over Leo. He shakes his head and rasps, “this doesn’t end how you think it does.”

Leo can’t stop his flinch when Leon collides with the wall, the sound of his shell cracking against stone shuddering through him with a visceral jolt.

The dust clears. Neither Leon nor the Krang move when the arena lights flicker, the ground trembling as a deep, distant, rumble fills the air. Leo blinks.

He’s given zero time to process whatever the hell that was as the Krang whips her spiked tendrils towards Leon’s prone form. Leo watches, heart in his throat as Leon manages to twist out of the way in a move he’s definitely stolen from Mikey before clambering to his feet. He runs, though he doesn’t get far before he’s tripped up and sent rolling back into the dust.

Leo tenses as Leon is flung like a ragdoll, his coloured mask tails flapping like tattered banners behind him as he’s slammed mercilessly again and again from floor to wall, leaving cracks in the stonework that spiderwebs outwards from the epicentre of impact. Leo winces, his stomach clenching with each collision.

His heart thunders, the air around him seeming to tighten. The guilt is suffocating. Leo’s the reason she’s furious, not Leon. “It should be me down there,” should be Leo getting pummelled into the floor, “this isn’t his fault. It’s not him she’s angry at. Let me take his place.” He begs.

“As much as I’m sure we’d all enjoy that spectacle, I do believe it is far too late for that, darling.” Big Mama dismisses, lackadaisical.

Leo watches, mouth bone-dry as the Krang finally releases her grip on Leon, leaving him in a crater of dust. He holds his breath, waiting, hoping, praying he’ll get back up.

He breathes out in relief when Leon’s hands twitch then curl against the dirt. Every minute movement looks like agony. Arms shaking, he pushes, gets his feet under him, and slowly, slowly rises from the ground. The arena fills with screams and chanting, Ryūsei, Ryūsei, Ryūsei, the heartless masses singing Leon’s praises while he’s killed brutally, mercilessly, for no reason at all.

Leon sways, legs shaking beneath him. He’s reopened the cut above his brow. His face is drained of all colour. Leo wants nothing more than to be in front of him, immediately, to steady him, take the next hit for him. To grab him by the shoulders and shake him and shout this is the worst possible time to practise radical acceptance of your situation. Except, Leon’s not even looking at the Krang. He’s just standing there with this blank, glassy look and—

The Krang rips Leon from the floor. For a moment, he’s held aloft, dangling precariously in her grip. Leo’s heart drives to his throat. He doesn’t know if Leon’s shell is going to be able to handle another concrete barrage.

She doesn’t throw him. It’s worse than that. Her tendrils wrap around him, work into his flesh. Fear and disgust ripples through him like an icy current, summoning gooseflesh to his skin. Leo’s lips meet the taste of salt as a tear slips down his cheek. He haltingly averts his gaze, eyes dropping to the floor. He doesn’t want to look.

Sharp fingernails dig into his cheeks as Big Mama grasps his face and harshly jerks his head back up. “You’ll watch.”

Leon’s features are frozen with blank horror, his eyes white and sightless. His mouth opens and closes, scratching at the tendrils.

His terror is briefly immersed by alarm and confusion as the world around him shakes—the arena lights flickering and the flatscreens above glitching. There’s a deep, powerful boom, far louder than the one before. Leo feels the shockwave reverberate through the floor. The champagne pyramid crashes to the floor and the chandelier overhead sways, joining the discordant symphony as the entire ship convulses with a low, rumbling turbulence.

Big Mama’s hold slackens. “What is this?” She hisses.

The guards in his peripherals exchange glances, equally lost.

Sylvia releases his face, her nails raking across his cheek. She turns to her guards. “Keep his eyes glued to the action,” she commands, “I would so beloathe it were he off with the fairies during the thrillendous finale.”

She turns without sparing Leo another glance, leaving him to watch as Leon’s prosthetic arm slides apart to make way for a torrent of flames. Leo grips the floor, his nails raking into the marble as the fire erupts towards Leon’s face.

The Krang screeches, and after a few, agonising long seconds, the burning tentacle unwraps itself from Leon—dropping him onto her head. The tendril forms long trails of smoke in the air as it flails. Leon claws and bites into the Krang like a feral animal. She shrieks, batting him away and pulling her tendrils in close. She curls over protectively, like a fleshy putty collapsing into itself.

Leon crumples to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut. He is covered in blood and Krang vile from chin to toe, tear tracks mixing into the river of red. A broken mess of spit and snot and blood. He makes no move to get up again. Leo’s not sure he could even if he wanted to.

Behind him, the Krang is recovering, rising. Leon is within the shadow of death. He knows it too. Leo can see it in his desolate stare—the one that makes Leo think of a wolf caught in a snare, hackles raised, defiance in its eyes, but too worn out from the struggle to do anything but lay there and wait to be put down.

Leo screams his name, the raw intensity of the cry scratching harshly at his throat.

There is no reaction. Leon has not heard him—cannot see him. The Krang’s tendril lifts, the limb sharpening to a stake that’s posed to drive through Leon. Leo’s heart drops to his stomach.

No.

Leo doesn’t think. His muscles tense involuntarily, coiling like tightly wound springs. He feels a disconcerting sensation of opening—of a link pulling taut and trying him to the rest of world, animate and inanimate. Some latent force dormant inside of him, abruptly waking. There’s a crackle of electricity, the sound of his heartbeat.

Thump-thump…

In an instant, the small flame inside him is a roaring inferno, consuming every other thought and sensation until all that’s left is the blinding, ecstatic pain of staring directly into the sun. He feels himself straighten, rise, his shackles straining with the tension. His pulse intensifies, his markings flaring with an ethereal glow, his heartbeat accelerating with the surge of live, vibrant current of energy.

Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump…

He burns with it, the pumping of blood, the force of raw power rushing through red-hot wires of his veins.

“What—”

A field of energy condenses around him.Heat rises off his body as blinding light flows through him, energy crackling along his bare arms and dancing at his fingertips. The room lights up, his markings illuminating neon bright.

A guard curses hotly, a burst of panic filling the room. “Grab him!”

There’s a thunderclap of energy, his vision erupts with blue.

The world blinks.