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Leo’s body jerks upright before he’s even really woken up.
Instincts are wild, huh?
His entire body heaves violently with the gasping breaths he takes, eyes still shut, trapped in the awful in-between of sleep and consciousness. It’s not enough air. He isn’t awake enough to breathe right.
He can’t be sure if he’d balled his fists up in the blanket covering him before or after he’d snapped into a sitting position, but he knows he’s gripping them like his heart might stop if he lets go. It could, possibly, he thinks. The medic part of his brain knows it wouldn’t, but that part of his brain was locked away at the moment.
Nightmares weren’t uncommon. They weren’t uncommon for anyone, anymore. But for him, they were an especially recurrent affair. He just didn’t usually wake up from them this silently. Maybe it’s a blessing he isn’t screaming himself raw for the third time this week over… over…—
It’s too fresh in his mind and he can’t stand seeing the tail end of the dream play itself again and again. Seeing the Kraang just about to land the killing blow on loop like a never-ending torment is something he can’t handle right now, so he forces his eyes open.
And he stares into a room he does not recognize. He stares into a room that is not his own.
It isn’t even the prison dimension, like he sees sometimes when he’s panicked out of his mind. He would at least recognize that. He would know what he was seeing, then, but he doesn’t.
The realization startles him in a way he hasn’t felt since the invasion. He does not know where he is.
His chest spasms with a fear he doesn’t quite know how to place, but makes him nauseatingly dizzy all the same. He wonders if he’s falling. Or floating. It certainly feels that way.
Leo swims in that feeling for what seems to be hours. There’s nothing he can do but swim. He doesn’t feel safe, he doesn’t feel here, he doesn’t know where here is, so he just lets that motion sickness swell.
Until he realizes that he does know where he is. And he recognizes it well.
Not only that, but it is, in fact, his room. The train car he had claimed when his family had moved into the abandoned subway station after about a week and a half of searching for a suitable place to live, with the walls all plastered with his Jupiter Jim posters and the floors just messy enough that he could walk without tripping most of the time. Anyone could have guessed whose room it was with one single glance. His room.
How could he have forgotten?
It still isn’t where he wanted to have woken up. The room isn’t right.
A somewhat foggy clarity hits him hard enough that he has to bite down tears from spilling over; he’d wanted— no— he’d needed to wake up in the bedroom he had grown up in, in the sewers.
But, unfortunately for him, it had been destroyed months ago by the Shredder. He wouldn’t wake up there again, no matter how he that desperation wailing inside of him grew with the knowledge. Even if he was to portal over there now, in hopes of gaining some sort of consolation, all he would see is the destroyed remains of the first fifteen years of his life. How could he have forgotten?
Leo almost wants to laugh. He wants to cry, more than that. He wants— needs— his brothers’ comfort, his father telling him that it was just a bad dream, the safety and nostalgia of his home.
But he won’t ask for it.
He refuses to beg for the attention he used to bask in, even though he needs it so much more now. He refuses to give into that urge. That selfish, pathetic, desperate urge. Because it would be just like him to burden his family in the middle of the night with something as small as a nightmare and homesickness, wouldn’t it?
Somehow, his hands manage to grip his bedsheets tighter as he tries to fight the rising sob in his chest. It’s a hard battle; one he’s just on the edge of losing, despite having taught himself how to cry quietly years ago. He can barely breathe around the tears that form, but do not fall. It isn’t even that he won’t let them. They just won’t fall.
“Get it together,” he hisses to himself, voice wobbling and sounding about as unsteady as he felt. “Get it together, Leon.”
An odd strangled sound escapes at the end of his words, and he has to press his face hard into his hands to smother it. He keeps pressing, harder and harder, bending forward until he’s nearly doubled over on himself.
That helps, a little, as strange as it seems. Gasping wetly into his sheets and making himself as small as possible. It helps. He almost doesn’t think about how the sheets aren’t on his bed properly, how he’s never even really made his bed at all, because he still doesn’t feel fully moved in.
He almost, almost doesn’t think about how it still doesn’t really feel like home, here.
There’s still a shake to his frame as he lifts his head, a shudder rolling through his body too quickly to be ignored. Leo ignores it anyway.
His ribs and lungs ache. His hands are trembling. His stomach is sick and sad, his heart is sad and sick, and he doesn’t even know how to begin processing that. So he ignores everything else, too.
What he doesn’t ignore, though, is that every part of him is exhausted. And that’s good— great, even— because normally, getting any sort of rest after a nightmare like this is an almost impossible venture. The nightmare wasn’t really what bothered him this time around, though, was it?
In any case, he would be able to sleep off this miserable feeling. At least until the morning.
“Problem for morning-Leo,” he jokes into the silence of his room. It isn’t at all close to being funny, but he still huffs out a small laugh.
He huffs, again, a shakier, ever smaller thing as he shifts to lay on his side, curling up in a way he hadn’t since he was a child— a baby, really. Something about it soothes him. If he thinks too hard about it, he’ll start crying again. So he doesn’t.
Even as the shaking subsides, even as his breathing slows from stuttering exhales to soft sighs, even as sleep pulls him down into a hopefully dreamless slumber, he knows it isn’t what he wants.
Leo wants to go home.
He just wants to go home.