Work Text:
The styrofoam beads filling Donnie’s favorite beanbag chair squeaked and shifted as he typed away on his laptop, so preoccupied that he didn't notice the intruder portaling into his room until his twin was within pouncing range- and pounce he did. Donnie let out a yelp of surprise when his twin lunged at him, nearly knocking the computer off his lap.
"Godda-!" Donnie barely caught the computer before it hit the floor. "Leo!" He growled, lip slightly raised to flash a sharp canine at his brother threateningly. "You nearly made me break my laptop!"
The offender chuckled, not at all apologetic. "Oh, you mean the brick of a computer you reinforced with military-grade titanium? I think the concrete floor would be in more danger if your laptop hit it." He waved one hand dismissively, then shifted a bit so that he was wrapped around Donnie, hooking his chin on his shoulder. "Whatcha workin' on?"
"Working on upgrading and rewriting the code in the communicators..." Donnie replied, not bothering to push Leo away at this point. "I'm encrypting them so they can't be tapped or bugged while we're on missions."
"Hm, makes sense." Leo hummed, and Donnie could tell he was only half listening. It was not out of the ordinary for Leo to hunt down and "bother" Donnie while he worked, but his leader usually had a reason for doing so, and based on the pattern of the past few days…
"Nightmare?" Donnie asked casually, raising an eyebrow as he continued to type away, not missing a beat as his twin tightened his grasp on Donnie's torso.
Leo just groaned heavily in response, which Donnie took as an affirmative. He never did like admitting he'd been frightened, even if nightmares were a common occurrence for all four of the Hamato brothers, and Donnie rarely pried. They sat like that for a while longer, Donnie clacking away at the keyboard and Leo clinging to him, breathing too even not to be measured. Eventually, Donnie was satisfied enough with the finishing touches on his upgrades to call it for the night. As he saved his work and closed the computer, he tilted his head to catch Leo in his periphery.
"We giving up on sleep tonight?"
‘We’, because single pronouns did not apply to Leo and Donnie. Leo sought him out in the middle of the night because he needed him, and Donnie left his doors unlocked because he expected it. Regular insomniacs, they spent more nights awake together than they did days; not because both of them were unable to sleep, but more often because one of them couldn't sleep and therefore the other refused to. That was how they operated.
Donnie recalled a time over a decade ago when he had fallen ill with some virus that his mutant healing factor wasn't able to fend off, and Splinter had quarantined him to his room to keep his brothers from catching it too. Leo had pitched a fit, demanding to be with Donnie, but their dad remained firm. That night, Leo had snuck in and rubbed his face in Donnie’s pillow, reasoning that if he was sick too, Splinter would have no need to keep them apart. It didn't work, likely because Donnie’s weakened immune system was more to blame than whatever virus he'd come down with, so Leo just resorted to faking being sick so he didn't have to spend another night apart from Donnie. Curled up against his brother, still sweaty from fever but glad not to be alone, he realized that he would've done the same if the roles had been reversed.
He got a non-committal huff in response, and took that to mean 'yes.' He set the computer down beside him and turned his full focus on his brother. "Do you want to talk about it?" He asked, because he always did, even if the answer was usually no. Donnie didn't like talking about his deep-seated-trauma-induced dreams any more than the next guy, but sometimes hearing his twin crack jokes about them made the reality of it feel farther away, at a safe enough distance that it couldn't hurt them anymore, not when Leo is whole and safe and snickering “skill issue”.
Leo shifted, turning his face into Donnie's neck and hiding his expression. When he spoke, his voice was muffled by his twin's sweatshirt.
"Same old," He mumbled, and Donnie didn't have to ask him to elaborate, he already understood.
Where Donnie's dreams tended to be horrifically creative worst-case-scenarios of their old foes coming back for vengeance or haunting what-ifs from a dead timeline, Leo's were typically reruns of real memories, the highlight reels of their fucked-up lives. Where Donnie's fears were based in hypotheticals, Leo's subconscious dealt in absolutes.
"Ah," Donnie replied, ineloquent but not dismissive. There was something comforting in the silence that settled over them, in the warm weight of his twin leaning on him, the steady, familiar rhythm of Leo's pulse point against his own as they breathed in sync.
"Your bed or mine?" Evidence suggested that any attempt at sleep was merely wishful thinking, but they'd have a better shot at it if they weren't scrunched up on top of each other in a beanbag chair.
Leo gave another noncommittal noise, sounding too tired to care, and Donnie made the executive decision to relocate to his twin's room. He stood, not quite shrugging Leo off of him but pushing him into more of an upright position as Leo leaned against him, stubbornly clinging to Donnie like a koala on a eucalyptus tree.
"Come on. Up we go."
He and Leo moved together, the pair of them looking more like one strange, multi-limbed and two-headed creature than two individuals.
They reached the dented train car Leo had claimed as his room after a few stumbles in the dark, and Leo tipped them over into the bed, wasting no time yanking the unmade comforter up around their shoulders. Curled up together, facing each other, Donnie could make out the gleam of his twin's eyes in the low light. When Leo spoke, his voice was barely more than a whisper.
"Hey, Donnie?"
"Yeah?"
"I love you." Leo said it like the easiest thing in the world, and the ring of sincerity in his voice was clear and crisp.
“I know,” Donnie replied, because that was the important part of the declaration.
Their younger years had been spent dancing around the words, initially out of the aversion for displays of affection that all siblings have, and then for fear of giving away the deeper truth of their feelings, hidden behind a veneer of comradery and brotherly affection. It took too many close calls to silently agree to stop withholding their ‘I love you’s; it took nearly losing each other to realize that they didn't say it enough, to strike the fear in them of sending their other half to the grave without confirmation that they knew how much they were loved.
“I love you too.”
Leo nodded, almost invisible in the darkness, and closed his eyes. Donnie was still fairly confident that neither of them would be sleeping any time soon, but he took his twin's lead and closed his eyes anyways after a moment of studying his shadowed features, the barely noticeable crease to his brow. There was comfort in being close, though, in the soft breaths of his twin and the heat of his body, pressed against him.
They didn't say goodnight. The night wasn't close to being over.
Leo didn't speak for a while. Neither of them did. They lay there curled up in silence, Donnie listening to his brother's breathing and pretending not to notice it when Leo's fingers traced over his arms and across his face. Leo did that sometimes; mapped out his features like a cartographer, like his palms and fingertips were charting out places his eye could never reach, tracing every scar and imperfection with the gentleness usually reserved for glasswork. There was a quiet desperation in his touches, the same desperation that was hidden in his earlier declaration.
Time was difficult to measure in the dark, but it felt like hours had passed by the time Leo finally spoke again, still barely a whisper, like the sound of breathing too loud would shatter this moment.
"Sometimes, I'm afraid you're not real."
Donnie inhaled, not quite letting out the breath. He opened his mouth to reply, not sure how to reassure his twin that he was, in fact, real, or what to say about this sudden confession, but Leo beat Donnie to it, continuing to speak before Donnie could say what was on the tip of his tongue.
"I know you are; I know you're real. But sometimes, when I dream, mixed in with the real memories I see you dying in my arms, I see you hit the ground, over and over and over again, and..."
Leo paused, his voice cracking in a rare display of emotion. After a moment, Donnie slipped his hand into Leo's, squeezing his fingers, reassuring him in the only way he could without words.
"And what if it isn't a nightmare?" He asked, the raw grief and fear in his voice belying the casual nature of the question. "What if it really happened? What if it's going to happen? It happened in Casey's timeline, what if it happens again and I can't stop it this time?"
Donnie let out a breath, understanding at once where Leo's fears were coming from. It had been over a year since their battle with the Kraang, since Casey had revealed the fate of the Hamato clan from his timeline and Leo had been willing to sacrifice his own life to prevent that reality from coming to fruition, but the knowledge still haunted them. He saw it in Mikey's cautious use of his heightened mystic abilities, in Raph's worsened neuroses and vigilance in battle. He saw it now, in the terror radiating off of Leo in waves.
"I never want to lose you, Dee. Ever. I can't lose you, I can't… I can't live without you, Donnie. I won't."
A hundred different replies rose to the forefront of Donnie's brain. He shoved all of them down, all of them feeling so inadequate under the gravity of the truth his brother had just confessed. He could spin some bullshit about how Leo would be fine without Donnie, that he could carry on and remember him fondly; he could swear up and down that Leo would never lose him, but they both knew that in their line of work promises were nothing but empty words.
The raw, naked truth was that if Donnie ever lost Leo, he would be following close behind, because there was not a universe where Donnie existed without Leo. They weren't even two halves of one whole, like their family took them to be– no, they were one entity, Leo-and-Donnie, one soul sharing two bodies, and one could not exist without the other. Donnie didn't even need to see the wild, desperate glint in his twin’s eyes to know that he felt the same, because it was an intrinsic fact they'd both held for as long as they could remember. Anywhere one went, the other followed, and death would be no different. Donnie would never ask Leo to do what he couldn't even ask of himself.
"Then don't," he said, and his voice came out steadier than he felt. "When we go, we go together. Okay?"
Donnie felt Leo still, his breathing holding for just a fraction of a second. A beat, and then his twin took in a slow, trembling breath, the grip on Donnie's hand tightening just a fraction, the unspoken implication hanging between them.
"Yeah," he rasped quietly. "We go together."
It was a long moment before Leo let go, when the silence had weighed too heavily on his lungs with every slow inhale. He leaned forward, his hand finding Donnie's face again and following the familiar path over his features.
"I need- please," He choked, the words barely more than a whisper, and Donnie didn't need to hear the rest of the sentence to know what was being asked of him.
Donnie leaned forward, too, closing the small gap between him and his twin. At the first touch of their lips, Donnie felt Leo gasp and exhale like he could breathe again, kissing his brother with a reverence that spoke what his words couldn't. The hand still resting against Donnie's face trailed lower to grip his shoulder, fingers digging into purple-patterned flesh, a silent plea to stay close. There was nothing frantic or desperate in the kiss; all of the desperation was in the fear in his brother's voice, in the quiet plea that had broken something open inside Donnie's chest. The kiss was slow, tender, almost languid, and in its gentleness it was devastating.
Donnie slid his hand under his brother's mask, his calloused touch brushing over the red crescents that were half-hidden by the blue fabric. Leo made a sound that might have been a sob if he wasn't so practiced in holding it together, and he leaned into Donnie's touch like a starving man fed for the first time in weeks.
When they pulled back, the darkness had swallowed up the inches between them again, but Donnie could feel Leo's face and the hot tears falling onto his cheeks and the soft, broken "I love you", breathed like a prayer.
"I love you," Donnie whispered back, and in the quiet darkness, the moment stretching out into infinity, it felt like the most obvious thing in the world. The sky was blue because of light scattering in the earth's atmosphere. Objects in motion stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. Donnie loved Leo. Leo loved him back.
They were both silent then, the quiet night settling once more around them. Donnie couldn't see his brother, but he could feel the soft rise and fall of his breathing against his own chest, keeping them in sync.
As they drifted off, the truths they’d left unspoken hanging in the darkness, "we go together" sounded more like a promise, now.