Chapter Text
Two months. It had been two months since Leo left. Things had slowly started going back to normal—or as normal as it could get when they were missing someone.
Mikey walked into the living room to find Donnie sitting in his favorite beanbag chair, donning a purple hoodie and staring at a tablet. As stealthily as he could, Mikey snuck up behind him to see what he was doing. He managed a glimpse at it before Donnie noticed, giving him a hiss.
“Angelo, what did I say about looking over my shoulder at my work like that?” He snapped. It wasn’t particularly menacing, but Mikey shrunk back somewhat nonetheless. Donnie quickly backpedaled with, “Sorry, sorry, you startled me. Do you need something?”
Mikey relaxed a tad, replying, “No, just wanted to see what you were up to…”
“Oh, well…” Donnie said awkwardly, “I’m just working on a new project… I didn’t want you to see it until it was done.”
Mikey’s interest was piqued with that. “Oh? What’s it—”
“Abapapap, nope, no, no spoilers,” Donnie interrupted. “You’ll just have to wait.”
Mikey pouted playfully and shrugged. “Fine, fine, I’ll wait. But you better share it the second it’s done.”
Donnie gave a light smirk and a huff, nodding. He turned back to his tablet after turning the brightness down so it was harder to see. The dark spots under his eyes were especially visible in the light coming from the screen; he clearly still had trouble sleeping even with their consistent turtle piles.
Mikey couldn’t blame him. It wasn’t the same.
It was then that he heard familiar footsteps coming from the entrance. “I’m back!” Raph’s voice rang out. Mikey immediately ran to greet him. He gave his brother a big hug the moment he saw him, giggling when Raph rubbed his chin on the top of his head.
“Hey, big guy, how’s it going?” Raph said happily.
“As good as it can be,” Mikey answered.
For a moment, Raph’s expression wavered at the subtle wording. Mikey understood instantly the unspoken implications of his own words and looked away. They all knew none of them had fully recovered from their brother’s death.
Raph set him down gently, putting a vaguely anxious smile on his face. “Come on, Mikey,” he said, “let’s go get some breakfast. I’m hungry after all that patrolling.” With that, he strolled off to the kitchen.
Raph had started patrolling again about a month after what happened, and Mikey saw it as his excuse to stop lying around or being in the lair. It became routine for Raph to be gone for about half the night, going to bed earlier and having Donnie and Mikey join in for a turtle pile at their own sleeping time while he left at around midnight to go out.
It was shocking that Donnie had started leaving his lab at around the same time Raph started going on patrols. Mikey wasn’t quite sure if these were connected as he rarely saw the two interact when he was around, but he figured he’d count both developments as positive change.
When they made it to the kitchen, Donnie was surprisingly sitting at the table drinking some coffee, tablet still in hand. He looked up when Raph and Mikey entered to give them a little nod of hello. Raph headed to the counter and opened the cabinets while Mikey went to grab a pan.
“Are we okay with pancakes?” He asked, already collecting ingredients.
“Pancakes again?” Donnie voiced his displeasure.
Mikey couldn’t help but feel that it stung even if his brother had every right to be disappointed. “I— well— we don’t really have any other ingredients right now, it’s been a while since we went out for groceries and I think everything in the fridge has gone bad. I can try to—”
“What do you think you’re doing?” Donnie’s voice cut through the room with chilling precision, and Mikey froze. Huh? Mikey thought, I don’t think what I said was that bad…
It was then that he turned to see Donnie shooting daggers at Raph who had just grabbed a glass from an overhead cabinet. Mikey was confused; what was Raph doing that would upset Donnie so much? Then he saw the glass in his hand.
They had all always kept their glasses on the counter for whenever they needed water. The only time they weren’t there was when they had been cleaned, and Casey had just done the dishes the afternoon before. It was an unspoken rule of which glass belonged to who, and they would never touch anyone else’s unless it was by accident. And the cup that Raph held had been Leo’s.
By the time he seemed to register that Donnie was talking to him, Raph had already filled the glass and was drinking out of it. He paused mid drink and realized his terrible mistake. “O-oh, sorry, I was just— I didn’t notice—” Raph stuttered.
“You didn’t notice? Didn’t notice?!” The softshell was clearly ticked. “How did you— you can’t just— Y-you can’t just use his stuff—!” He was obviously frustrated that he couldn’t—or that he even felt he had to—articulate why he was angry.
Mikey shrunk in on himself, head partly in his shell. He somehow landed himself in the middle of an argument, the first argument he had witnessed since their brother passed. They had all kept to themselves since then; everyone seemed to have been too tired to speak up about anything even if something did bother them. And yet, this conversation he was witnessing felt like it wasn’t the first, at least not for them. Raph almost sounded like he knew exactly what Donnie was going to say before he said it.
Mikey in that moment wished he weren’t so perceptive; he wished he could have just written off the tone in Raph’s voice to be a byproduct of realizing Donnie was about to yell at him, but no, he knew better than that.
“Donnie, it was an accident, I promise,” Raph tried to explain to calm the situation. Holding one hand up as a show of surrender, he poured out the remaining water in the cup into the sink with his other hand. This appeared to do nothing to appease Donnie, especially when Raph set it down on the counter.
“But you can’t just use it—” He desperately covered his tympanum with his hands.
Raph rushed over to him, and they seemed to have forgotten Mikey was there at all. “Hey, hey, Don, look at me. It’s okay, I’m not using it anymore,” Raph said in a hushed voice. “Nothing bad’s happened, Raph promises. I’m sorry for grabbing it without thinking… I’m sorry it happened again…”
Again? Mikey thought to himself, as if trying to pretend in his mind that he didn’t already realize this was not the first time. …how come this is the first I’m hearing of this? Why hadn’t he heard anything about this before? When did this happen? He doesn’t remember them ever getting into a fight before this, especially not over Leo’s stuff.
Suddenly, Mikey felt as though the world was closing in on him. He didn’t know what was going on; his family wouldn’t tell him anything. Why wouldn’t his family tell him anything? For weeks, he had been asking how they felt, asking if there was any way he could help them, asking if there was anything he could possibly do. He knew it was selfish to want to know everything, but that’s what came with knowing nothing. And now that he’d seen that with his own eyes, the thoughts he’d kept away from the front of his mind all came spiraling down onto him.
Against his will, he started sniffling. He wanted to move away, to leave, to be anywhere but there, but his legs would take him nowhere. He was being a petty child, he told himself. He shouldn’t be doing this. And yet his heart would not listen.
Mikey’s head slowly sunk into his shell as he instinctively tried to hide from everything. His crying only grew worse until it was a sob; it was only then that Raph and Donnie seemed to notice he was even still in the room. It was difficult to hear what they were saying as they sounded somewhat panicked beyond his echoing cries in his shell. It only made him feel worse that he could no longer just leave; they had already seen him.
He managed to pick out Raph asking, “Hey, what’s wrong?”
This sent him tripping over his own words, trying to find what to say. “I don’t— No one told me— Why doesn’t anyone t-tell me anything? D-do you not trust me? Did I d-do something wrong—” He started stuttering, barely lifting his head out from behind his plastron to be heard.
It was Donnie that tried to help next, hands hovering carefully out in front of him. “Hey, hey, Mikey, of course we trust you. You didn’t do anything wrong. Why would you think something like that?”
Guilt started to eat away at him—the guilt that he was making a big deal out of nothing, the guilt that he was drawing unnecessary attention to himself. But his words tumbled out in almost incoherent waves once again against his will. “I asked— I tried— I tried so hard to help… It didn’t do anything, I couldn’t do anything, you guys were hurting and I couldn’t— And now I’m just making a mess—” He started repeating himself, his head clouded in a jumbled mess of thoughts and emotions. “I asked, I asked, I asked, I asked so many times and I never got an answer— and now— I couldn’t do anything, I can’t do anything— I miss him—... Why didn’t anyone ever ask me what I…?”
Oh no, he thought. This isn’t where I wanted it to go. This isn’t about me, this was about them not telling me how they were feeling all this time.
Mikey refused to look up—he couldn’t look up, not with what he just said. Raph’s voice choked as he spoke his name. “ Mikey… ”
It was then that Mikey snapped. He couldn’t stand it anymore: the crying, the knowledge that they were both staring at him, the thought that they were looking at him as though he was a child because that was exactly how he was acting. His legs finally unlocked, and in shaking, stumbling strides, he ran. He did not know to where, but he ran.
No sound came from behind him.
Mikey found himself in a familiar back room of the lair. On the wall hung the shell of their beloved Leo, and beneath it was a shelf with probably a hundred candles on it, some even placed on the ground to make them collectively form a slight semi-circle.
His breaths were labored, and he tried to calm down. He hiccuped and went behind the candles to the right to find a paintbrush and high quality gold paint that he had left there. He picked them up and set them in the middle of the room. Carefully, he reached up to the shell and lifted it from its hooks.
He moved backward to sit cross-legged on the floor. He opened the lid to the paint jar, dipped the smooth bristles of the brush into it, and, with a wave of his hand to light all of the candles, began painting. Lighting the little flames was a trick he had learned on a whim; it was exponentially easier than opening the portal to the prison dimension, it almost felt like child's play. Which was ironic considering why he had run to this room in the first place.
As delicately as he could, he once again started tracing and filling in the markings on the carapace with gold. It was a project Mikey had started a couple weeks prior, working on it only on occasion to not strain his hands. They still shook frequently, but he began to adjust to what would put too much stress on them. Being able to paint again was soothing and gave him a sense of comfort.
Hanging up Leo's shell had been Casey's idea; he said that his Leonardo had done it in the old future, and everyone agreed to the idea. No one dared to mention the implications behind the statement, and Casey seemed content with not elaborating.
The gold paint, however, was Mikey's idea. He had seen it in a dream: Leo's shell glowing with a beautiful metallic sheen. Mikey didn't bother asking for permission; he didn't feel he needed to. Ever since he began to use his mystic abilities, there were things that just felt natural, as if they were meant to be. Telling Leo to pick up poetry had been one of them, and now painting his shell was another. In his mind, they weren't Mikey's ideas to begin with; rather, it almost felt like fate.
He got closer by the day to finishing filling in all of the shell's markings. No one had ever mentioned it; Mikey wasn't quite sure if that was a sign of approval, a sign that they didn't notice, or a sign that they didn't go into the room. Mikey could see why they might not visit often, but he personally went there at least once a day or every other day.
He would talk to "Leo," although it was more talking to himself. It felt sort of like how Leo's journal seemed to address him sometimes, and it felt like returning the favor in a sense. He would ramble on about how things were going, bear his soul to the void knowing there would be no response, and ask for advice despite the returned silence.
This time was no exception.
"Where did I go wrong, Leo?" He asked while trying to keep paint from pooling in any of the cracks so he could maintain the consistent, thin layers. "You told me just by being me I could help them, but it's… it's not working… I don't know what's going on, I don't know how to get them to let me help, and I don't know how to fix it."
So much effort and they don't even bat an eye, Mikey thought with a frown. It was amazing how the moment he started working, the moment he started talking, his tears dried and his breathing steadied.
Another part of Leo's letter to him came back to his remembrance.
"You need time for yourself, too, or else you can’t help others, now can you? You are so much more than just what you can do for others."
His brow ridges furrowed, and he said, "But how can I take time for myself knowing that I have other people who need me?" He paused. "What if… What if they don't need me? Maybe that's why they never asked me how I was doing and never told me how they were doing…"
Mikey lifted his hand away from his mindless, but still deliberate, outlining to look at the carapace. The glow of a few dozen little flames illuminated off of the gold, reminding him of his dream. It's almost done, he said to himself, a fond smile softening his face in spite of his worries.
He closed the gold-filled jar, setting the paintbrush on top for a moment while he hung the shell back on the wall. With another wave of his hand, the candlelight flickered away.
Mikey didn't want to face his brothers just yet. He picked up the brush to go wash it, cautiously leaving the room.
I need some fresh air, he decided instead. So, when he finished cleaning off, Mikey threw on a hoodie and left the lair.