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Casey Jones is eight years old when they lose Donatello.
It’s a small mercy, perhaps, that he wasn’t there when it happened – but the nightmares of all the ways it could’ve played out could potentially be worse. He’s still not sure, really – was it the deathrays? A razor Kraang tentacle through his softshell? Did he get crushed under falling rubble, or the heavy war mechs?
“We lost him,” is the only thing Raph says when they return, one colour short of the four they’d left with. The eldest turtle’s voice doesn’t warble or waver – it’s a facade of strength so convincing Casey would’ve fallen for it if he couldn’t see how badly Raph’s hands are shaking.
The snapping turtle closes his eyes and leaves for his room. He doesn’t come out for a week afterwards.
It just… it didn’t feel real, that moment, sitting on his mother’s shoulders, jolted out the game they’d been playing with Commander O’ Neil, his body trembling with Cassandra’s shoulders as she shivers with rage and despair – and yet some small, dark part of his conscious had known this had been inevitable. The Kraang were steadily becoming more bold in their attempts to topple the Earth’s resisting forces, packing their mechs with more ammunition than should be possible each day, and Donatello, with his vulnerable shell and breakable defences, was always destined to fall first. Casey’s too stunned to even be mad at himself for thinking this way.
Donatello was never weak, despite his setbacks, despite whatever these stupid thoughts are saying. That’s why it’s all the more jarring to know that he’s–
“Leo?” Casey finds his voice saying, frail and scared in the taut atmosphere of the room. “Sensei?”
The red slider’s head snaps up from where he’d been staring at the ground of the bunker, eyes full of alertness and then relief as they land on Casey. “Oh,” he says faintly, and takes the kid into his arms when Casey reaches for him. “Oh, God, hi,” he breathes, and Casey flinches when he hears Leo’s voice crack. It’s not supposed to crack. His sensei never lets his voice crack.
Leo’s head lifts towards Cassandra and April. “Are you guys okay? Did you get attacked? Donnie said he’d picked up on explosions around here before we–” He saves his voice from breaking, this time, but he has to breathe slowly before opening his mouth again, “--before we got jumped.”
“They ambushed you?” Cassandra hisses through tears. “The cowards.”
Commander O’Neil puts a hand on Leo’s shoulder, and Casey doesn’t like how he can see her eyes swimming, too. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen her cry before this. “We’re fine, the explosions spooked us but everyone’s alright. Leo, what happened? How did you lose him?”
“There was a–” Leo gasps, pauses, tried again. “We were–” stops again, growls at himself. Casey nudges his head under his sensei’s chin and gives his plastron a reassuring pat with a tiny hand, but it only makes the choked sobs from Leo grow worse.
“It’s okay,” Cassandra says softly, which sounds odd from a woman that is usually so relentlessly sharp. She gently lifts her son from the red slider and places him on his feet beside April, taking Leo’s arm and pulling him towards the other room – their poor excuse of a kitchen. “I’ll get you a blanket and we’ll… we’ll figure this out.”
Leo nods distantly and lets himself be ushered away.
“Mikey?” April’s voice sounds out after a silence that is far too thick for Casey’s liking, and he’s suddenly aware of the box turtle in the corner of the room, boxed into the shadows like he’s trying to disappear. He’s got his hands fixed around something stick-like in build, clutching it so tightly his knuckles are starting to go white, and Casey realizes it’s Donnie's tech-bo, bent and twisted and devoid of all the machinery and flashing lights he’d seen only this morning. It looks defeated.
It looks dead.
“Mikey,” Commander O’Neil says again, louder this time, taking a step closer to the box turtle. Mikey doesn’t respond, only holds the staff closer to him, his gaze blank, disbelieving.
“Master Michelangelo?” Casey tries, dread pooling in his stomach at the sight of the bright, cheerful fireball of the group standing stock-still in the darkness. He steps forward to rest a hand on the box turtle’s knee, and Mikey blinks his eyes back into focus to glance down at the child before him.
“Oh,” he whispers, with a smile so sad it actually hurts to look at. “Hello, Casey.”
And then he just starts sobbing.
April rushed forward to them both as Mikey’s legs give out and he collapses on the floor before Casey, the bo clattering to the ground, sparking feebly. Casey can feel his own eyes start to water as he moves to hug the box turtle in the only show of sympathy he knows how to give, burying his face in his neck and letting the tears out when they come. Mikey’s arms go around him, holding the boy like he’s the cliffside keeping him from falling into oblivion, and Casey holds him back and finally, finally realizes that Donatello Hamato is gone.
The turtle that had fixed him with his armour, played chess with him on the slow days and gave him reassuring smiles and tea during the stressful ones, who’d let him sit on his battleshell while he worked and laughed warmly when Casey tried to guess what each button did, whom Casey had loved like an uncle, was gone.
Being trapped underground in the centre of the apocalypse didn’t hurt nearly as much as this did.
“We’ll be okay,” someone is saying; Casey can’t see who, can’t see through the tears and closed eyelids and cold skin against his face. “We’ll be okay.”
It wasn’t a lie at the time, really, because no one knew it wasn’t true.
Casey Jones is fourteen when they lose Raphael, in a horrifying moment where he was there to witness it this time and comes to the conclusion that it is way, way worse to be there when it happens.
There hadn’t been a plan for anyone to fight today, but on the other hand, there never is, really. It was going to be a stealth mission, a gathering intel mission which was the only reason Casey had been allowed to go at all.
Even then, there’d been some pestering. Raph had been adamant that Casey stay in the bunkers so they wouldn’t have to worry, and Leo was certain he’d needed more training before leaving for a job so close to the Kraang headquarters. Mikey just didn’t want anyone to get hurt.
Casey knows Donnie would’ve backed him up – the softshell had always been a fan of experimenting on the field, especially when he’s made some new invention he desperately needed someone to test or he’d just be crushed, Nardo, please? He hates how Donnie’s not here anymore to give some offhanded, sarcastic comment about Raph’s overprotectiveness that would make Casey giggle. He hates how he has to guess what Donnie would say now, because he’s not around to say shit anymore.
But Casey’d been working hard to prove himself the past few months – barely stopping to eat or sleep as he spends his nights later and later in their crude handmade dojo, striking punching bags and practice dummies until his knuckles go raw and his palms start to blister, the steel of his chainsaw hockey-stick warm in his grip. He’d bested April in a spar, then Cassandra, then Mikey, and almost Raph once, though the snapping turtle will smile and shake his head fondly whenever Casey boasts about how close he’d gotten.
(He doesn’t get to spar with his sensei very often, but it’s not something he’s salty about – Leo’s leading an entire rebellion, after all. The red slider is usually out scavenging for rations, or consoling another broken family after the death of their loved one, or, more often then not, in his room scrutinizing his scribbled maps and Donnie’s old strategy notebooks, muttering war tactics and team maneuvres to himself as the pathetic dinner on the plate before him goes cold, just like his breakfast had.)
It was only after Commander O’Neil’s constant reminders of how hard Casey had been working did Leo agree to bring him along. So it was funny, in some horribly dark way, how Casey wasn’t the one they should’ve been worried about.
There’d been a stupid slip-up on one of their younger recruits’ behalf (not Casey, thankfully); a telltale sound of pebbles rolling under clumsy feet and a hissed “shit” that sends a young man tumbling into the midst of the patrolling Kraang mechs below. The man is crushed between Kraang claws almost instantly. Casey hates how he’s gotten used to throwaway deaths like that.
“Fuck,” Raph says from one side, sounding far too resigned.
The robots turn their piercing red eyes upwards, and Casey feels his stomach drop.
“Scatter!” Leo calls from the front of the party, and there’s a blur of muted dark clothing as their people scramble away from the ledge they’d been perched on, just in time to dodge the ray of light that is shot in their direction. The explosion sends Casey to the dry earth below and immediately rolling to the feet of a waiting Kraang mech, barely gaining enough time to get onto his feet before another beam of red energy is trained on him, hot in his face like someone’s shoved a clothing iron into his cheeks.
He leaps to the side as a laser is fired, and then to the other as metal claws reach for him, drawing his chainsaw and slashing at the legs of the bot like he’d been taught. He’s met with a satisfying clunk as steel joints disconnect and an angry wailing shriek as the mech and the Kraang inside it are sent tumbling to the ground.
“Nice work, stinkbug!” Cassandra calls from her perch on the head of a much larger robot, shooting her son a thumbs-up and a Cheshire-like grin before she brings down her fists into the glowing red eyes beneath her, making shattered glass rain down from above as she leaps away to seize the Kraang alien that tries to skitter off. It whips around, intending to strike her with its razor appendages, but she’s already run her weapon straight through its middle before it can even lift a tentacle.
Casey smiles back at her, blood pumping with adrenaline and guts churning like a washing machine. He’s never been in a fight this intense before, save for a few small skirmishes near their bunker with less enemies and more backup (the turtles are very thorough with their work – very few Kraang have managed to get close to their hideout), but he’s not scared. His training is bright in his brain, and he knows how to use it. He feels strong; he feels invincible.
Destabilize them. That’s step one. Two hissing Kraang creatures hurtle towards him – the creatures created from the Kraang bio-growth latching onto another living thing, unnatural and beast-like in form that Casey’s only ever heard stories about until now. He swings his saw down in a low arc around him, lacerating the feet of both monsters, sending them reeling sideways in pain and cursing him with shrieking cries.
Aim for the eyes. Step two flashes across his mind like clockwork as he spins the weapon in his hands, keeping a foot on one of the writhing Kraang-beasts’ neck to keep it from escaping. It takes him one stab with the handle of his hockey stick for the creature to become blind; takes him two more with the chainsaw side of his weapon to destroy the second creature’s eyes as well. The beasts are both on the ground now, leaking horrible black blood, hissing pathetically. Casey just needs to finish the job.
Strike them through their core. He steps back to prepare himself and stops as he hears a sickening crunch under his foot. And fuck.
He turns around and glances down with wild eyes, torn out of his adrenaline rush as he lifts his foot and sees the face of a dead person.
Casey knows people die in war. He’s seen what death can do to a family; hell, he’s experienced it firsthand. But he’s never really seen it. The man that had been killed during the fall wasn’t anybody Casey’d known personally – he could turn his back and keep fighting because, logically, he knows people die and he knows stopping to panic about it only distracts him from the task at hand. But the person here was someone he’d known – a recruit only a few years older than him, whom he’d trained with, laughed with, lived with – and something harsh, like misery and anger and guilt, punches him in the gut so fast he stumbles. And it actually fucking hurts.
She’d been a person. And now she is dead.
He’s too caught up in his head to notice the staggering creature behind him, footless and blind but still alive. It can’t see where it attacks but it lashes out anyway, its frenzied tentacles whipping around like propellers, and Casey can’t see, can’t look up fast enough before–
There’s a flash of red and green, and he’s suddenly overshadowed by a wall of spikes as Raph seizes the beast with his bare hands and slams it into the ground with enough force to shudder the earth. Casey stumbles backwards and actually lands on the corpse behind him, on the several corpses he is now realizing, all of them wearing the faces of people he knows (he knew), and there’s blood on his hands and he’s eight years old again and Donnie is dead and everyone is dead and he absolutely, definitely doesn’t feel invincible anymore.
It takes him a few moments to realize bewilderedly that the ringing in his ears is actually someone talking to him. “-sey? C’mon, kiddo, you gotta breathe. Sit up and breathe with me, in n’ out, C’mon–”
Casey scrunches his eyes shut and inhales far too sharply, but he can’t bring himself to care. He’s torn between wanting to break down right then and there and knowing that he’s in the middle of a war and they don’t have time for this Casey for fuck’s sake stop being a baby there are people DYING and you’re crumbling over ONE of them you selfish–
“Casey Jones,” Raph’s voice rumbles, steely and calm. “Look at me. Breathe.”
It takes a while for his panicking to subside enough for him to meet the snapping turtle’s eyes, takes even longer for his breathing to slow back to its usual pace. Another Kraang beast flings itself at them and Raph snags its neck and hurls it away without even blinking, not letting his gaze disconnect from Casey’s.
The strained pressure in Casey’s throat finally eases. He’s okay, he’s alive, he’s safe. Raph’s got him.
“Master Raphael,” he croaks. “Thank you.”
“Just business, kiddo,” Raph replies with a snaggletooth-edged smile, a feeble attempt at humor before he steps backward and glances behind him. Casey doesn’t miss the “oh, shit” that falls from the snapping turtle’s lips, and can’t help the “crap” that falls from his own as he cranes his neck to see the rampaging Kraang mech beyond them.
The bot is huge, easily quadrupling the size of the suits of armor the resistance usually fight, raising boulders whenever it steps forward. It’s layered in heavy titanium – the same type Donnie used to use for his works, Casey thinks with an aching pang of anger; they must have stolen it from him – and a pulsing eye of red so bright it looks like a second, less forgiving scarlet-hazed sun.
Through the dust from the explosions, Casey can make out the tiny shape of Mikey, glowing with gold energy as he darts around the mech like a fly to a plate of food, moving so quickly he’s almost nothing but whispers of orange light. He sees the box turtle’s mystic chains swing around the gargantuan bot and sees the mech shred through them like paper, reaching out a clawed hand to bat Mikey out of the sky with a swipe that the box turtle barely manages to dodge. He sees Leo working his way up the Kraang-mech’s face, twisting his blade to aim for the eye, and he sees his sensei pause and then duck out of the way as a ray of light explodes from it, expelling red energy so volatile it’s blue around the edges.
“Oh, Casey,” Raph breathes, almost to himself. Casey sees him rub his forehead with a giant hand, suddenly looking a lot older than he was. “You’re too young for this.”
Always seeing, never doing.
“Master Raphael, I can–” Casey starts, and never gets to finish.
The snapping turtle takes his shoulders and leans down to match his height, green eyes heavy. “Kid, listen, because I’m only gonna say this once. It’s not fair that you had to grow up in a world like this and it’s not fair that you still have to fight in it. But it’s made you strong, I can see that. When all this is over, I want you to use that to choose a path of your own, not fightin’ a battle that ain’t yours, yeah?”
“What are you saying?” Casey tries to take a step toward him, but Raph’s hands keep him steady. “Raphael, what are you saying?” he repeats, because in his gut he knows what this speech means, just can’t bring himself to believe it.
“Take care of them for me.” Raph’s pace quickens as his eyes dart around the situation before them. “Tell Leo not to overwork himself; remind him that not all of this is on him. Tell April she’s the best commander we’ve ever had – if she laughs at you, tell her I mean it. Tell Cassandra that it’s okay to slow down a li’l, sometimes she forgets. Tell Mikey–” he shifts to stare at the eye of red above them. “--Tell Mikey I’m sorry.”
Casey follows the snapping turtle’s gaze and feels his insides plummet as he pieces together what Raph is going to do. He tries to stop it. His heart knows he can’t. “Master Raphael, please – we can find another way, we can retreat and make a new–”
“Stand down, rookie,” Raph commands, and years of training make Casey’s mouth snap shut and his posture go rigid, however much his eyes start to water. The snapping turtle softens and gives a final pat to Casey’s head, ruffling his hair, with a sigh that sounds like he’s carrying a village on his back. “I’m sorry, kiddo. You’re doing great. I’m proud of you.”
Casey is already crying before Raph leaps away, but to his disdain, his vision doesn’t glaze over at all – like his body wants him to witness what he knows will happen. In the distance, Raph’s grip finds the giant mech’s tail and uses it to fling himself upwards, landing with a crunch on the bot’s skull that dents the titanium there. Leo reaches for him and Raph bats him aside, drawing his sais and scrambling over to meet the burning red eye that immediately flares up as soon as Raph reaches for it. But Raph doesn’t falter, taking his weapons and plunging them through the red light, raising shards of glass and severed circuitry, slashing the eye so badly it casts out a wave of crackling blue electricity. The scarlet glow dims slightly, and Casey thinks, with a flicker of hope, that maybe it’s over – maybe Raph destroyed the laser and he’ll leap down at any second with a triumphant grin on his face, victorious and alive –
And then there’s a burst of red and Raphael Hamato is dust.
Casey blinks. Blinks again. Blinks a third time, because hell, he did not just see that happen.
The eye of the mech crackles one last time and then flickers out, the snapping turtle’s work clear in the vicious cuts and sparking wiring across the machinery – that blast was evidently going to be the last one, which should be a relief, but it just makes Casey angry. Because if only Raph had moved a little bit faster. Jumped a little bit quicker.
Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit.
Casey moves to take a step forward, to raise his saw, to do something, and then Mikey screams.
The sound resounds through the battlefield like a clanging bell, loud and mournful and downright fucking furious. The box turtle’s glowing chains make their return, looping around the robot’s neck, barely leaving Casey enough time to even glimpse them before they burst into flames of searing orange and white, eating into the steel of the mech. The blue blur of Leo is just a speck among the fire but Casey can see him draw his katanas and stab them through the Kraang-bot’s face with a vigor that could split boulders. He leaps down, and his swords screech angrily as they follow, dragging through metal and circuitry, loosening the mech’s defenses before Mikey delivers the final blow with a blazing fireball through the robot’s chest.
There’s a pause, like the entire world is inhaling, and then the mech creaks backward.
The enemy that killed Casey’s uncle topples, but he doesn’t feel happy. He can’t feel anything.
“Casey,” a voice says, low and worried, and his eyes come back into focus to see Cassandra vaulting over rubble and crumbling earth (and corpses. So, so many corpses) to reach him, face no longer alight with wild glee and instead shadowed by sullen disbelief. His mother takes him into her arms and inhales shakily, letting her weapon slip from her hands. Casey is about to protest, about to shove the dagger back into her hands and urge her to keep fighting because the battle isn’t over yet, but he glances over Cassandra’s shoulder instead to be met with silence. The remaining Kraang have fled, their ace-in-the-hole bested. But this sure as hell doesn’t feel like a win.
“Casey,” Cassandra says again. “Oh, stinkbug, I’m so sorry.”
“I’m okay,” Casey whispers, the words meant to be some form of consolation but turning out to be anything but, because he starts crying the moment he opens his mouth.
This isn’t real, it can’t be. He’s going to wake up in his room back in the bunker any second now, still scared for his life but knowing that, at least, all his family is with him – that Mikey’s in the kitchen making the best he can do for breakfast with the ingredients they have; that Donnie’s sitting at the table with April and Cassandra discussing his newest invention with a sparkle in his eye, that Leo’s going to come in a few moments to check that Casey’s awake with a tired smile on his face; and that Raph is there with them all, their foundation, keeping them grounded, keeping them safe.
But now their foundation is gone, and the building’s falling apart without him.
Casey hides his face in his mother’s shoulder and sobs.
He can hear Mikey and Leo’s rushed footsteps behind them and their panicked breathing as they crowd around him, but he doesn’t look up, can’t risk them seeing him like this. “Where’s April?” Mikey is gasping, and Leo is talking about “ -ot safe here, they’ve gone back for reinforcements, we have to leave” in a voice that is remarkably steady after what just happened, and Casey thinks he hears Cassandra scoff something that sounds like “we’re never safe” , but he’s too tired to register anything.
He wants to go home. This morning he’d been so desperate to be able to fight alongside the turtles, but now he just wants to go home.
Casey Jones is so, so tired.
He digs his fingers into Cassandra’s sleeve, trying to ground himself and simultaneously hold down the bile threatening his throat, and his mother’s attention snaps back to him in an instant. “Yes, baby, what’s up? Are you hurt?”
“‘Nna go back,” he says, in a voice so small even he can’t comprehend what he’s saying. “W’nna go back home.”
And Cassandra, in a typical way only mothers seem to be able to do, understands him in an instant. She lifts him up off the ground before he’s even done talking, gently taking him around her shoulders like he’s the five-year-old she’d caught practicing battle moves in the kitchen late at night again, sleepy and clumsy on his feet but so, so determined to be as great as the rest of them were. Now he just wants to sleep.
You’re doing great, kiddo. But he’s not. Not if he keeps losing his family left and right.
Casey goes back home with his face in his mother’s hair and one more uncle short of the four he used to have. They all sleep in Raph’s room that night. Leo never goes back to his own.
Casey Jones is eighteen when he loses everything.
He feels – a lot. He feels pissed that he can’t singlehandedly stop this war and he feels grief for the people they’ve lost; for the people they’re still losing. He feels sick, so very sick, that the blood in his gloves doesn’t wash out anymore and that he can no longer count the deaths he’s been responsible for on just his two hands. He feels outraged at the fact that the apocalypse is still fucking going, despite how tired they all are, and he feels that his emotions won’t impact anything in the long run, so maybe he should stop feeling things altogether.
No rest for the wicked, as they say.
The Kraang-mechs have grown over the years, of course – The Kraang have found an approach that was successful (Casey can feel his blood boil at the mere thought of considering Raphael’s death as a success) and intended to exploit it. Armies of more robots exactly like the one on that fateful day had emerged throughout the war, towering over even the tallest New York skyscrapers, piercing red eyes and lashing steel tails. They are so close to finding the resistance’s headquarters and shutting them all down, so close is actually hurts. Casey can’t sleep anymore because he knows their movement is doomed to failure, now that he’s leaving the shiny eyes of his childhood behind him and stepping into the mindset that only a young adult borne of an apocalypse could have.
There are supposed to be four turtles, four heads of the rebellion. There are no longer four – and without all of them, the others can’t function at their best. Which serves as an issue because the fate of their whole world needs. Their. Best.
So, yeah, Casey can’t sleep because of the harsh reality that they are all going to die sometime , and that time could be any fucking second.
They haven’t lost yet, by some miracle, and Casey knows that most of that credit goes to Master Leonardo and his sheer, blatant adamance to win. The slider has his lows, obviously – more than he used to, which was expected but still hit Casey with a startling fear when he sees his sensei crouched over himself on his bed with his head in his hands, breathing shakily and brow furrowed like he’s trying to will them into a different timeline – but there’s a stubbornness in his movements when he’s sharpening their weapons or laying out new potential defense strategies, an obstinance that assures Casey that they’re in the best available hands for a situation as dire as theirs.
(It also scares him a little, because he knows that if Leo can’t handle this, nobody can.)
As another tiny little tip in the resistance’s side of the scales, though, they now also have a backup plan. A last resort, if you will.
Granted, Casey is fairly certain he’s not supposed to know about it, but it’s not his fault the walls in the bunker are frightfully thin. He’d just left his room for a drink and caught sight of all his (remaining) guardians huddled around the kitchen table in the dead of night, going over a worn page of notes on yellowed paper that was covered in the looped handwriting that belonged to… Donatello.
Casey ducks around the doorframe and listens.
“It should be me,” Leo’d been saying, eyes hard as flint, the fingers of his heavily-plated artificial arm tapping the wood of the table impatiently. He looks exhausted, but he also looks determined as all hell. “I should be the one to go through.”
“Uh, Leo, you’re also running a whole rebellion,” April points out, soft but brusque, in the way only an older sister can master. “Even if this works, we’d still need you here to keep things running.”
“Plus, you’re also getting old.” Mikey’d been pretty quiet this entire time, sitting in a chair with his hands linked together and resting in his lap, staring at the ground as if it were reading a book to him and he hadn’t understood a word of it. Even his attempt at lightheartedness falls flat. “No offense, big brother, but I don’t think running all across New York trying to find this thing is a game you’re fit for anymore.”
Leo blinks. “I’m not that old.”
“This sounds… too good to be true, though.” Cassandra is hunched over the piece of paper, eyes narrowed like she’s trying to find a flaw in the writing. If Casey had known Donatello at all, he knows that that search will come up empty. “Michelangelo, are you sure your powers could do this?”
The box turtle shrugs. “I remember talking to Dee about what they can do and how we can harness them for battle, but he’s never mentioned anything like this.” His eyes flicker upwards. “I’ve seen things, though. Glimpses of random moments of our past – I guess they could be memories but they were just so clear. So… yeah. The evidence tracks. Donnie thought it could work, so–” his voice stumbles; he catches himself to breathe. “--So I do, too.”
“But… it says here you might not survive the process,” Cassandra says softly. “Are you… are you willing to do it, if push comes to shove? Donatello’s note specifically states ‘Use only as last resort. Don’t use at all, if possible – I actually quite like having my little brother around.”
Mikey’s laughter is sad and sour around the edges. “Yeah. That sounds like him.” The box turtle stands and flexes his fingers, which have accumulated several scars over the years of creating escape gateways and powering his flame attacks; threads of thunderbolt-shaped patterns weaving down to his wrists like exposed veins. It would almost look cool if Casey hadn’t been aware that Mikey can barely hold a pencil straight in his hands anymore because most of his nerves have been shot.
“I wanna do it,” the mystic warrior says, jaw set. “If it doesn’t work, I still wanna try. Besides, this is only if… push comes to shove, you said? It’s a last resort. I’ll be fine.”
They all sit in uncomfortable silence for a beat, eyes cast downward, and Casey can tell what they’re all thinking because he’s thinking it, too – they’ve all certainly been fucking shoved.
Leo’s gaze is the first to raise back up, studying the people before him like they’re a painting and he’s the artist trying not to make the wrong brushstroke. “I still think I should go through, if Donnie knows what he’s talking about and this plan works.”
“You,” April says with impatient steadiness, “are getting on my nerves.”
“Look, we’ll talk about who’s going through tomorrow,” Cassandra promises, taking Donnie’s notes and folding them carefully into a neat little square of paper, handing it to Leo with her eyebrows raised meaningfully. Beside the slider, Mikey twitches like he wants to take it from him. “I can’t believe I’m the one saying this, but we need to take a break from battle strategies and actually sleep for once.”
Leo rolls his eyes with a trace of the stubborn teenager he once was, but apparently he knows better than to start an argument this late at night because he breathes a disgruntled “okay” and stands up with the others, his prosthetic arm clanking as he does so. Casey skitters back towards his room before any of them can step out the doorway, feeling a lightness in his heart that he hasn’t felt in a long time.
From what it sounds like, they may actually have an upper hand for the first time in years. A glimmer of hope in this dark tunnel.
And he’s so, so relieved.
Of course, looking back, though, Casey probably should’ve known better than to think their safety wouldn’t require a couple hundred sacrifices. He’s been clawing his way through this world of blood and war for eighteen years, after all.
He realizes this when he wakes a week later being carried across the war-ridden wasteland in the arms of Commander O’Neil, beams of lethal energy raining down on them both like thunderbolts. And, of course, he reacts as appropriately as you can when you’re being dragged through a battlefield first thing in the morning.
Casey Jones screams.
April jolts at the noise, stumbling over her feet and almost careening them both into a cliff. “Jesus fucking Christ, sir,” she hisses. “Maybe don’t shriek when our enemy is looking for us, huh?”
“What– what–” Casey’s eyes are wild, scouring the scene before him, heart racing. Where are the others, are they safe, what is happening – battle instincts and panic are warring inside him so fast it makes him dizzy. He vaults himself impulsively out of April’s arms, trips, falls, and somehow manages to somersault himself back onto his feet to join the Commander’s frantic sprint through the lasers and war machines, feeling impressively lightheaded.
April raises her eyebrows appreciatively. “Impressive move for someone who’s just woken up. Good morning, by the way.”
Casey exhales a quick breath of air in an acknowledgment that doesn’t quite meet his eyes. He knows she’s trying to keep it light – that was her first move whenever he’d throw a fit as a kid – but it’s hard to appreciate when they’re running for their lives and she’s clearly out of breath from hauling a newly adult man across a wasteland.
“C’mon,” she says, tilting her head towards a large piece of debris from one of the Kraang ships – a piece large enough to be used as a temporary shield. Another ray of light cuts between them and they both leap away at the same time, ducking behind the discarded metal. Casey clutches his chest and attempts to breathe steadily, trying to filter out the shell-shocked thoughts in his brain that shriek about almost meeting his demise the same way Raph did. It’s not working very well.
“What the hell is happening?” He hisses, once his lungs decide to work again.
“What does it look like?” April raises her hand to gesture to the war around them, her breaths as raspy and short as his own and her answers concise. “They found our home. We ran. People died.” Her eyes go dull and she closes them. “Cass didn’t make it.”
And Casey’s stomach drops.
Fuck. Fuck that, and fuck everything else. To think of his mother – the fiercest warrior in their entire resistance, the woman that raised him, shared his name, his blood , – as collateral damage in the Kraang’s sick game… it makes him feel sick and it makes him feel angry.
No. Fuck that.
“Okay,” he says, because as much as his heart begs him to scream his grief from the mountaintops, or break down and cry until his eyes are raw, or beat the crap out of the dried earth before him, he doesn’t have time to do anything else. “Are Sensei and Master Michelangelo safe?”
April considers him through eyes glazed with sympathy and tears, clearly seeing how much pain he’s in, but she, too, knows that they have a job to do. “Yeah… yeah, they’re okay, I saw them up ahead. Kinda hard to miss two glowing blue and orange mutant turtles.” She puts a hand on his shoulder suddenly, her fingers digging into his flesh, eyes blazing. “There’s a plan in place, Junior. I need you to get to those ruins there.” She points – the Statue of Liberty’s mangled body lights up in the lights of the blaster fire from above. “Meet with Mikey, and Leo too, if you can; they’ll tell you the rest. Do not stop until you reach that point. That’s an order. The mission comes first, you hear me?”
Casey just nods. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Good man.” She pats his shoulder and lets him move away.
He stands, looking quickly over the edge of their makeshift shelter before risking one more glance back at his commander. He can’t just leave her here. “But– what about you?”
“I can handle myself, kiddo.” She lifts to her feet as well, every inch the strong-willed, determined woman he’d grown up with, spinning the gun from her belt into her hands and shooting him a comforting grin. It reminds him of Cass. “You got this, Casey Jones.”
No ‘Junior’ this time. Because he’s the only Casey left.
He nods again. Gives her a salute that she’d probably have laughed at under different circumstances. And then he bolts.
He keeps his running pattern zigzagged and sporadic, as he’d been taught, leaping out of reach of the deathrays from above and beelining for the spot April had referred to. On one side of the battlefield is Big Mama, tearing through Kraang in a blur of claws and pincers, on the other side is Hypno and tiny Warren, guns out and aiming for the spaceships and mechs towering above them, both spitting out fire so bright Casey can’t even make out their faces.
Something orange whizzes far too close to his face, snapping him back into focus and bringing him to realize that he’s gone further than he’d thought, and he skids to an untidy halt that barely stops him from stumbling into the neon-bright carnage before him.
The orange thing – the end of one of Mikey’s nunchucks, Casey notes – plunges back into the blazing whirl of blue and orange light and then ricochets forward again to knock away the Kraang-beasts that had leaped fruitlessly into the fray. Something else is flung out at the enemy, too – a katana that darts across in a flash of silver before exploding into a ring of blue, sucking the writhing creatures into oblivion. Every mech that charges toward them flies back in pieces, every Kraang or Kraang-beast returns staggering and bleeding. Such is the wrath of brothers Leonardo and Michelangelo.
Casey feels a new vein of confidence bloom through his bloodstream… and then immediately dissipate as he looks up and sees the bulking Kraang mech above them, eye trained on the two turtles.
God, when will this end?
“Sensei!” he calls, and then has to narrowly avoid being mauled by the three Kraang-beasts that whip toward the sound of his voice. He wrestles them off him, stomach churning as he glances back up and sees that the eye is drawing energy in, it would fire at any second, their last remaining thread of hope is about to go up in smoke – “Sensei!!”
The slider’s figure, wreathed in blue light, snaps his head towards Casey and then up at the deathray beaming down upon them. He moves so quickly Casey is awed he’s actually moving at all; there’s a glint of something metallic as a katana is drawn, a whisper of green against blue as Leo moves the katana in a circular motion, an encompassing flash as the portal opens–
And then the two of them disappear behind red light.
Casey is thrown backward with the force of the impact. He can smell burning, even through his mother’s hockey mask on his face, and he swears he hears screaming through the ringing in his ears. His stomach plummets, ready to jump to the cursed conclusion that has occurred so many times before, and then something thuds behind him and he can distinctly hear Leo’s voice say “shit”.
“Leonardo?” Casey turns to see the slider leaning against another piece of fallen debris, hunched over himself with his hands pressed to the side of his abdomen. He’s injured; Casey can smell blood and burnt flesh.
Leo’s face tries to smile as Casey approaches. It looks more like a pained grimace. “Hey, Junior. Thanks for the heads-up back there, we definitely woulda been toast otherwise.”
“Just business,” his student says breathlessly, echoing the words that Master Raphael had offhandedly told him the day he died. Casey glances around. “Where’d Michelangelo go?”
“Ah, teleported himself outta there before me. He’s fine, although I’m a little worried about him using his mystic energy so often.” Leo tries to sit up and hisses through his teeth as the motion shifts his plastron, momentarily revealing the streaks of blood across his torso as if a child had clumsily taken a paintbrush and thrown it at him.
Casey crouches down to inspect the injury, hockey stick in one hand in case some enemy decided to make a move, using the other to apply strong pressure against the wound the way Leo had done to him as a kid where he’d landed the wrong way during spars and ended up with blood across his knees. The slider chuckles lightly to himself as Casey does, clearly recognizing the maneuver as his own.
“You got hit by part of the beam,” Casey deduces swiftly, straightening up again. “I take it you didn’t bring any of your medical supplies?”
His sensei groans and knocks his head back into their makeshift shield. “I didn’t have time, we got jumped.”
“Figured.” Casey shifts the weapon in his grip and offers a hand to Leo. The slider pulls himself up with a wince and allows his student to support him with an arm around his back. “Do you think you can run? We have a spot to get to, and we need to get there now.” He glances up at their destination. They can make it; he’s sure.
“Yeah. Yeah, I can.” Leo keeps his prosthetic hand sturdy against his injury, casting Casey a look he’s seen before but never really understood until now – a look of guilt, of pain, of pride. The slider hates the world Casey had been forced to grow up in, hurt that the apocalypse had taken so many that were dear to them, but above all else, there’s a glowing pride for Casey – that his student is still going strong even after every death, every bombshell, every doomsday. It gives Casey a tiny little budding flower of hope in the roaring bonfires of disaster, and he takes it and holds it close to his heart like a lifebuoy.
“Junior’s all grown up now,” Leo breathes, “huh?”
Casey exhales a laugh. “I guess I am.”
And then they’re off. They’ve lost the advantage of agility now, slowed by exhaustion and the slider’s injury (that is gradually becoming more worrying to Casey as the dizzying brain rush of battle fades and clarity settles in – a ray of pure energy straight through his side; no way was that gonna heal quickly, especially with their panicked sprint across a war-torn wasteland), but if Leo has any qualms about their pace, he doesn’t voice them, keeping up with Casey with a set jaw. There’s a note firm in the turtle’s grasp, flashing yellowed paper in Casey’s peripheral vision, but there’s no time to ask about why it’s there or what’s on it.
The mission comes first, April had said, and so had Donnie, once, and Raph, and Cassandra. And Casey Jones would be damned if he didn’t listen to them.
“C’mon, sensei,” he says as Leo almost stumbles over his own feet, breathing heavily. He feels awful for pushing the slider like this, but they have no other options. Another ray burns down beside them, far too close to Leo’s shoulder, and Casey tightens his grip on his sensei and powers forward. They are so close. “Stay with me.”
“You’re a lifesaver, Casey Jones,” Leo says, under his breath like it’s supposed to be a secret.
“Yeah, well, I learned from the best.” Casey flashes his sensei as close to a smile as he can get. “C’mon, we’re almost there.”
The Statue of Liberty’s ruins are bathed in red light and ash, casting long shadows across the drought-ridden earth. An awfully poetic sight – it probably could be seen as some pretentious metaphor of the Kraang’s victory over New York, if you had time to think up metaphors while running for your life – but however gut-wrenching the view is, it also serves as a pretty effective hiding place. Casey only lets them stumble to a halt after he’s sure they’re cloaked by the statue’s giant shadow, and Leo slides down to the ground as they do so, leaning his weight onto a mound of rocks and dirt and something that looks way too much like multiple skulls that Casey tried not to think too hard about.
Low growling reverberates across the ground behind them, low enough that they don’t pick on it until the last second, but something shrouded in gold sends the Kraang-beasts flying so fast Casey hadn’t even had time to raise a finger. Beside him, his sensei mutters something fond about dramatic timing as Mikey flashes into view and sends out a great blast of orange energy that would have obliterated any other enemies within their radius, so bright it’s like staring straight at the sun. Casey screws his eyes shut, but he’s still seeing stars long after he opens them again.
Leo tries to shift and jolts with a pained wince, causing Mikey to snap out of his mystic energy-induced trance and turn towards them immediately, eyes alight with a specific kind of concern – standard in a situation like this, sure, but there’s a trace of something familial in it. Even after all their years of growing up too fast and too roughly, Mikey still wields the fear of a younger sibling seeing an older brother hurt and helpless when older brothers are supposed to be anything but.
Not that Casey would know anything about having brothers.
“Help him, Michelangelo,” he says instead of thinking about it, turning his eyes upward to meet the floating box turtle. “He’s hurt bad,” he continues uselessly, as if that wasn’t devastatingly obvious.
The slider glances down at his hand – the one that he’d been pressing against his wound, so now it’s coated in blood like he’d attended some morally questionable fingerpainting class – and then up at the two before him, blinking fast and jaw set. He looks almost… resigned as he meets their eyes, and Casey is hit with that strange sense of wrongness again, like the one he’d felt at eight years old when he’d seen April cry for the first time. That jolt of the world is broken and unbalanced because that person should never look like that.
Leonardo Hamato is strong, loyal, a little bit of a showboat, and above all, stubborn as hell. So these tired, defeated blue eyes staring back at Casey do not belong to his sensei, should not – and yet here they are.
“That’s it,” the slider says. His voice is strained like he’s a man climbing an impossible mountain. “The resistance failed. The Kraang won.”
Dread, an all-encompassing wave of it, is threatening to swallow them all.
“But it isn’t over,” Leo continues, and there’s a smile making its way across his face, one that looks borderline manic in the context of their situation, but Casey can feel his spirits lifting automatically at the sight of it. “We still have a ninja’s greatest weapon: hope. That–” he turns to Mikey, “--and a badass mystic warrior.”
The rest is a blur.
An old photo with a key sketched on its back in charcoal. Sacrifices, a time gateway shaped like the sun, hands turning to gold. A steel hand on his shoulder, a mantra that served as his mission – Find the key. Stop the Kraang. The fate of the world, in Casey’s hands. On Casey’s shoulders.
A turtle bursting into shards of light as a portal throbs a burning yellow. Another disintegrating under the burn of red light soon after, destroyed by the merciless murderers from above. His last piece of family, destroyed.
Casey hopes, at least, as he falls into Mikey’s portal with tears in his eyes and a photo clutched to his chest, that he can do them all proud.
Casey Jones is eighteen when–
No. Nineteen. Casey Jones is nineteen now.
Casey Jones is nineteen now.
He lurches up out of bed with a start and comes very close to knocking out someone’s teeth, as told by the short sharp pain in his head and the abrupt “OW!” from above his bedframe. Master Leonardo stumbles across the room with a hand to his jaw, looking more lightheartedly annoyed than pained as he complains, “dude, what have you been eating to get your skull so thick, that hurt.”
Right. Not Master Leonardo. Just Leo. Casey chastises himself mentally for the mistake; he’s been in this timeline for a year, goddammit.
“Sorry,” he says automatically, and then adds, “you were kinda asking for it, though, if you’re watching me sleep.”
“How dare you accuse me of such a thing.” Leo huffs in mock outrage and moves back towards him to drum the tips of his fingers excitedly on Casey’s shoulder. “Casey Jr. My son. My child. My baby boy. As your father I have a right to look at you and feel overwhelming pride for the man you’ve become on your birthday.”
“I’m older than you here.”
“Time is an illusion,” Leo declares in protest, wearing a sly smile as he throws away Casey’s blanket like it had insulted him and bowing deeply with a grandiose theatricality that Casey had only just gotten used to. His timeline’s Leo was only ever dramatic in sparks, due to him having to tamp down on his natural flair for showmanship for their situation. This Leo flaunts it almost arrogantly, with smug movements and smirks and teasing words that are thrown around like playing cards. He’s still got some work to do when it comes to self-restraint, but Casey would be lying if he’d said it wasn’t a welcome difference.
The behavior reflects a teenager with the space to be one. And it’s nice to see his former sensei without the burdens of the apocalypse weighing down his playful nature, even if it’s remarkably annoying at times.
“Come, child,” Leo says in an accent so ridiculous it makes Casey chuckle, still holding his bow. “Your birthday feast awaits.”
“You guys did not have to make me a feast,” Casey says as he gets out of bed, but it falls on deaf ears and the slider turns around gleefully to yell at the doorway. “HE’S UP, EVERYONE GET READY! DONNIE, GET OFF YOUR PHONE.”
“FUCK YOU,” comes the insulted response, followed by twin yells of “language!” from Raph and Splinter. Leo giggles and tugs on Casey’s arm, grinning as he takes them both into the kitchen and into the scene of colors and cake within it.
It’s surprisingly… pretty modest. Streamers are taped haphazardly across the kitchen walls and ceiling, and there are a few multicolored balloons here and there, but not too much that it detracts from the people in the room. A chorus of “happy birthday” s greets Casey as he blinks bewilderedly at the people before him, all bright eyes and smiles, and then down at the cake, which flashes three tiers of bright green frosting and multicolored sprinkles at him, as well as his own face on the top, piped in a darker shade of green.
Ah. So all the flamboyance of the party went into the cake. Got it.
“Big cake,” he says once the cheers have quietened down, earning him a light burst of laughter.
“I made it!” Mikey boasts cheerfully, leaping down from his perch on Raph’s shell to fling confetti in Casey’s face with a wide, tooth-gapped grin. “I was gonna go bigger, but Dee told me you’d probably want something a little less loud. Jokes on you, though, because asking me to be less loud is like asking Lou Jitsu to drink cold soup, so you get the brightest frosting I could find, for that touch of Michelangelo!” The box turtle waggles his fingers to emphasize his point. They’re still patterned with vague lightning-bolt scars, but thanks to Leo’s healing prowess, they get fainter every day. “You better like it.”
“It’s perfect, Mikey,” Casey assures him truthfully.
“It hurts my eyes, Mikey," Donnie mumbles in a half-hearted mocking of Casey’s tone of voice, causing the orange-clad turtle to give the softshell an elated middle finger. The intention gets across – as evident in Donnie’s dramatized scoff of protest and Raph’s exhausted attempts at mediating – but it really does just look like he’s pointing weirdly at the ceiling. Casey shakes his head and laughs.
“It’s not for looking at,” Mikey says to the softshell, poisonously plainly as if he’s explaining the alphabet to a toddler he immensely dislikes. “It’s for eating.”
“Oh, yes, please, I have not eaten in DAYS.” Cassandra’s voice resonates like a klaxon from where she’s sequestered in the corner of the room with April, snapped out of whatever conversation they were having to gesture wildly with the suspiciously hockey-stick-shaped present in her hand. April has to duck in order to not be hit in the face.
“You ate my breakfast on the way here,” she reasons with the former Foot Recruit, not unkindly. They all know Cassandra had a fixation on her training so intense that she often forgot to do menial, everyday things from time to time, such as eating, so it’s somewhat of a relief when she’s consciously doing them.
“DAYYYYSSS,” Cass reiterates, eyes wide with indignance. Mikey snickers and tells her to help herself.
It’s fairly scary how much his new family echoes his old one, sometimes. When Raph comes up with a new battle move that is eerily reminiscent of one Casey’s seen Master Raphael use, or when Donnie rambles off about a piece of defensive technology he's thinking of building that Casey already has installed in his armor, or when Mikey shows him a painting he’d recently done that Casey recognizes from a wall of their apocalyptic hideout where he grew up. Things he knows from his childhood, relearned in a timeline where his history is their next weekend. It’s jarring – like someone is recreating the jigsaw puzzle that made up his lifespan without using any of the pieces he’d used. It also makes him a little sad.
It feels strange to mourn people that won’t exist anymore, but Casey can’t help himself, not when April adjusts her glasses the same way Commander O’Neil used to, or when Leo nonchalantly tells a joke that Master Leonardo used to tell when their troops were dispirited. Not when he’s constantly surrounded by reminders of the family that never was, and the only person that understands them is him. It’s hard not to grieve. Or not to feel a little bit insane.
(April has mentioned a few times that he ought to get a therapist. In all seriousness, Casey barely knows what a therapist is.)
It used to be embarrassingly tempting to stop moving on without them; to wallow in their absence and mourn times that never happened. To just stop doing anything. Stop making new memories because they’ll get in the way of the old ones, the ones he wants to desperately preserve because he’s the only one that can.
Casey had come close, a few weeks after the invasion. Scarily close. To just sitting, thinking about them, and never moving again. Give up trying to be anyone because they won’t be around to see it.
But he’d known that wouldn’t be what they’d wanted. They’d fought tooth and nail (and blood and hearts and lives) for him to live a life, and damn him if he was gonna throw away that gift so easily.
It’d felt like betrayal at first. But a year later, Casey knows better.
They’re still around, in a sense: in a weird state of proxy within their teenage selves. Leo gives him Master Leonardo’s small grin of pride – the small, lopsided one that flickers like a secret, not his over-the-top, showboat-y one – whenever Casey mimics the slider’s precise strike to their training dummy flawlessly or manages to do daunting things like sign up for the local hockey team. It looks unpracticed on Leo’s face, like he’s just as new to having this sense of pride as Casey is receiving it from a face that isn’t Master Leonardo’s, and yet it looks like it belongs there. Sometimes he catches Donnie staring at him with a specific kind of determined scrutiny that belonged to Master Donatello; the look that read I’m going to make something to protect you whether you like it or not, and I am trying to figure out how to fit it to your needs. This is a look he’s given his brothers several times, but one Casey hasn’t gotten in a long while. It’s nice to receive it again.
Casey’s past and the turtles’ future, melding into a messy compromise known as the present. It still hurts sometimes, but he finds himself happier than sad these days, despite himself.
He turns back to the family before him – his family, relived, laughing and yelling and snatching food off each other’s plates, alive in a world that was kinder to them than his own. They’re rough around the edges, not as refined as the family he’d grown up with, but definitely more lively than they ever could have been. Improvements could be made, but they all have the time to work through them.
They have all the time in the world.
“You okay, Casey?” asks the ghost of his sensei, father, friend. Leo’s eyes are wide and a little worried as Casey meets them with his own. He doesn’t know what the expression on his face tells the slider, but that’s fine. He can’t tell how he even feels – there’s a barrage of emotions hitting him all at once like a hurricane.
He feels sad, happy, awful, grateful. He feels bittersweet tears building up in his eyes and a tiny smile playing at his mouth, but most importantly Casey Jones feels alive. He’s one year older than that mangy kid that was raised in an apocalypse, one year stronger and smarter and undoubtedly happier.
Casey Jones looks Leo in the eyes, tears streaming down his face, and says, “yeah. I’m okay.”
He thanks his family, both old and new, for the fact that he’s got many more years to come.
Between the stars, wedged in the margins of the universe, Master Leonardo watches.
He’s not sure how he’s conscious, exactly; he highly doubts he even is. After Casey’s mission had been fulfilled he’d been thrown into this odd space between was and will be, like even the universe itself isn’t entirely sure what to do with him now. Like it can’t decide whether he’s the ghost of someone that died or someone that never got to live at all.
He’ll disappear soon enough, though, he knows. The time will come when the universe goes oh, yeah, shit and cleanses the weird plane of not-alive that he’s suspended in.
He’s definitely dead, that much is certain. His time on stage is over (or had never come at all? Time travel is so needlessly confusing) and so now he’s kind of… backstage. Not quite in the show, not quite out of it. A spectator. But he is dead – the evidence of that is scrawled across his middle in the shape of a laser burn through his chest.
Master Leonardo presses his face to the veil of reality and looks.
Below him, the second coming of his family thrives, living when the first coming could not. They’re watching some stupid movie – April is tucked into Raph’s side on the sofa, both of them teetering over the edge of sleep; Mikey on Raph’s other side stuffing his face with popcorn and batting fruitlessly at Donnie’s hands to repel them when the softshell reaches for some; Splinter staring wide-eyed at the screen like he’s astonished at how far special effects have gone since his time as Lou Jitsu; and Leo, complaining loudly about the movie’s plotholes and everyone shushing him to no avail. Master Leonardo chuckles lightly at his younger self. Idiot.
And then Casey, situated on the floor in front of the sofa everyone was piled on, leaning against Leo’s leg as he watches the movie with rapt eyes. Master Leonardo presses a little closer, trying to drink in the sight of his former student and how far he’d come. The kid looks kempt and taken care of, his hair soft and brushed and his clothes clean, and his eyes are bright with a childish awe that Leonardo had thought Casey’d lost to the apocalypse (along with countless other things). The shadowed bags of fatigue under his eyes have almost disappeared entirely.
Master Leonardo has many regrets regarding Casey Jones Jr. Not being there for him, forcing the fate of the entire world into his small, inexperienced hands, having him grow up in a world of blood and war in the first place. He can still see the weight of his negligence in Casey’s posture, among other things – the way he still holds himself like a meerkat on alert even though he’d long since been rid of the apocalypse’s dangers, like he doesn’t trust in the good things he receives. Like he still thinks this peacefulness comes with strings and he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Leonardo knows that this is not entirely his fault. It doesn’t stop him from wishing he could have done better nonetheless.
However, Casey had had the time and maturity to learn what Master Leonardo couldn’t get into his head, what the Leo down there still probably doesn’t understand – burdens aren’t meant to be carried alone. And the slider is glad that Casey’s found people to help him with his. Succeeding where Leonardo couldn’t.
What is a son’s purpose, though, other than going further than his parent ever had?
“Leo!” someone calls from behind him. It sounds like family, home, and distinctly like Donatello. “Nardo, you’ve been there for ages, we gotta go.”
Master Leonardo stands up. “Yeah, just… gimme a sec.”
Below them, Casey laughs at something Mikey’d just commented. Leonardo finds himself smiling with him.
“Nardo! C’mon, dude, he’s gonna grow up whether you watch him like a hawk or not!”
Master Leonardo breathes out a chuckle as he gives the family one last, long look and turns toward the sound of his brother’s voice. “Yeah. I know. I just can’t wait to see what he does next.”