Chapter Text
Blinding light. A flash and a scalding pain so white-hot it felt briefly comforting.
When Leonardo dragged open his eyelids, he wished he hadn’t. The memory of the last 30 seconds still burned the corners of his eyes. His whole body ached. He had thrown Casey through the portal, and watched as the kid he had raised, flew through the gateway’s glowing sheen, and into the maw of responsibility. Leonardo resented the decision, but it had been a necessary one. After all, what does one more regret matter when you don’t plan on surviving the day?
The big problem, rising to the front of Leonardo’s pain-clouded mind, was that he did not appear to be dead. The moment the Kraang’s beam had engulfed him, he thought he was done. Now he blinked and raised his line of sight to take in his new environment. Hulking metal walls covered in a dripping latticework of tentacles. The Kraang.
“Fuck.”
Leonardo looked down at himself. Ouch. The gash in his side was steadily pouring out blood, if he was lucky, he thought, that might finish him. Not that he was ever lucky. He noted with sweet relief that the hulking metal arm, built for someone larger than him, was still attached to what was left of his shoulder. At least he had that. Sometimes he hugged it at night, though he would never admit that aloud.
Pulling his mind from its blood loss-induced wandering, his eyes settled on a window on the far side of the room. It was Sweeping and rounded, alien in design. His vision came into focus and Leonardo realized he was looking at the ruins of New York City. From above. His stomach sank as he realized that the only place he could possibly be sitting right now, was the Technodrome. He looked around and realized that the room he was in, was filled wall to wall with materials. That was the only word he could use to describe it, concrete chunks, mangled corpses of cars, I-beams. The detritus of a civilization. His civilization.
Leonardo’s mind raced to form the theory that the Kraang must be collecting building materials, essentially mining humanity for its resources, and he had been picked up and transported to a storage room.
God, he really didn’t want to be here.
Leonardo’s knees creaked as he dragged himself to his feet and his brain began cranking away at a plan.
_____________
For someone who had spent his whole life adapting, Casey was struggling. He knew objectively, that the battle was fought and done. The Kraang were gone, they had succeeded. But that wasn’t the hard part. He found himself laying awake in bed at night, the soft clean bed with two different types of sheets on it, and wishing for war. Missing the hunger, the pain, the loss. It made him sick. Sick with guilt that he wasn’t grateful for what April’s family and the turtles had given him. Sick at the thought that he was spending his second shot at life, longing for the horrors of his first one. Most of all, sickened by the ever-constant reminder that he had what his sensei didn’t. Day after day after day, spent alongside the people his sensei Master Leonardo had lost. Every time Casey looked into his sister’s eyes, he saw commander O’neil, the general whose portrait Michaelangelo had carved into the side of Leonardo’s metal arm, with the dates that she entered and left the world. His throat tightened every time Mikey winked at him, recalling the last moment he had seen his Michaelangelo.
“This is what loss feels like.” April had whispered to him as his body shook with sobs. According to her, he had to face everything he had never processed through years of living on a battlefield. What he wouldn’t give to have that battlefield back, to have gone out like his sensei. Not to be the one left behind to pick up the pieces of his whole reality. Not to have to put in the effort to unlearn years of habits sprung from constant hunger and hurt. Casey was tired.
“Would you like your receipt?” The salesgirl’s chirpy voice pierced his thoughts and Casey snapped back to the present.
“Oh, um no thank you.”
“Have a great day!”
“You too.” A bell jingled as Casey stepped out of the small bodega and onto the crowded sidewalk. He started off towards the lair, plastic bag swinging in his hand as he tipped his head up to take in the view of the high rises. Landmarks described to him, that had fallen long ago in his memory. Walking beneath ghosts that now stood like nothing had ever happened, because indeed, nothing had. The world Casey now inhabited, was a violation of what he knew to be true. It was beautiful but felt undeserved. He began humming a song as he approached an intersection. Traffic lights and yield signs, untouched by alien terraformers. Carpeted in stickers and scrawled tags, the same light post he had passed last week was still there, not incinerated. Such a strange concept, permanency.
“Faces look familiar but they don’t have names. Towns I used to live in have been rearranged. Highways I once traveled down don’t look the same. Everything has changed. Everything has changed.”
_____________
Leonardo dragged himself across the room, reluctantly taking note of how tactically detrimental his little blood trail was. He took note of every exit in the room and began making his way toward the closest one. He made it to the doorway, much larger than a human door, and leaned against the frame to catch his breath. The hallway he found himself looking into, was flanked by shelving units piled meticulously with treasures, artifacts, and garbage from a thousand worlds.
“Holy shit, they’re even richer than we thought.”
Leonardo hobbled slowly through the doorway and to the nearest shelf. His prosthetic clutching his side, and his good hand wrapped around the pipe on the side of the shelf. Something caught his eye and he winced as he removed his right hand from his plastron to reach for it.
“Huh.”
Leonardo's metal fingers closed around the handle of a small rectangular device, adorned with a green cylindrical protrusion atop it, and a single button. He had not a second to consider what it might be before he heard a noise down the hallway. The unmistakable chatter of a Kraang. Leonardo could not forget that voice if he tried. It was burned into his memory as the personification of how he failed, the harbinger of his brother’s deaths. He couldn’t make out its words, but he felt its presence approach with a cold rock settling in his throat. His eyes darted from the object in his hand to the turn in the hallway.
Leonardo was by no means far enough gone to think this was a good idea, but forgive him if he has little left in him that cares. Leonardo pointed what he assumed to be the front of the device, at the wall next to him, and pushed the button. He was well aware of the risks and possible instant-death-related outcomes of this action, in fact maybe he was hoping for that a little. Instead, a ray of green energy jets out of the device, and Leonardo’s eyes light up as he recognized the disk of glowing light materializing in front of him as a portal. As he would recall the story later, there was no look back, only his dead-set tired gaze ahead as he stepped through.