Chapter Text
When Leonardo trudges into the sheriff's station in the dead of night, the hammock pitched in the corner of the foyer is swaying slightly from a weight curled inside it. He slips into his office and flicks the desk lamp on to shuffle through the filing cabinets. After tucking the located folder into the inner pocket of his satchel and tightening its straps, he turns the light back off, locks the door behind him, and makes his way back towards the small green foot sticking out of the hammock.
"You've gotta learn to wear pants, bucko," Leonardo says to the hammock's occupant, unimpressed.
Leo doesn't give a response, which is… surprising, to say the least. The smarmy, pipsqueak version of himself that fell out of the sky half-dead some months ago has been tormenting him relentlessly with both unabashed nudity and an incessant stream of balderdash. Usually, the kid has a real wobbling jaw about the feeling of free flowing air that he's afforded by his choices against wardrobe. If he's not defending a jab at his teeth-grinding teenaged pride, then he's probably moping again, a state that Leonardo is profoundly disinterested in dealing with.
The only light in the room comes from a dripping wax candle set on the main desk. Leonardo brings it closer and raises his brow at the white-knuckled grip Leo has around what is clearly a crumpled photograph. "What'cha got there?"
"None of your business, old man," Leo snips with an unexpected vitriol, turning the print-side away from Leonardo.
As if he cares. Leonardo puts his hands up and nobly resists the urge to roll his eyes. "Whatever you say. Hey, pack your plunder so we can cut. I've had a long day, and unlike Mikey, I ain't gonna leave you here all by yourself to chaw up the place."
Long day is an understatement. The reports of grotesque pink viscera raining down from all across the region haven't ceased in numerosity since the first that Donatello had mentioned all those months ago, and the fearmongering panic about them has only increased since then. Leonardo's doing what he can to squash down the rumors before they can travel down the grapevine and suggest anything less of stability of his town, but there's only so much he can do when not even Donatello can figure out exactly what the organic substance is. He spent part of the day staking out the Sandos' farmhouse because the paranoid, yellow-bellied brothers had up and bailed town, and left their unattended property as prime opportunity for a group of certain bandits to set up base. He'd proceeded to spend the rest of the day laying traps, lambasting the shit out of said bandits, and dealing with an arrow that managed to find its way into the meat of his leg. Jupiter wasn't exactly gracious about the fact of his newly obtained injury (— but really, when is the broom tail? —), so he'd had a less-than-pleasant ride back to the station that dragged out far later into the night than he'd anticipated. He's already dreaming about a base burner and a soft mattress for his aching back.
"'m not gonna 'chaw up' the place," Leo mumbles, defiant. "Mikey said I can spend the night here if I want to."
"Mikey is a real chucklehead," Leonardo responds, thinking of the shotgun he'd so cheerfully loaned to a trigger-happy Leo. "Mikey finds a hog-killin' time in your addle-brained ideas. He might be able to get away with this back home, but not in my station."
Leo adjusts his grip on the photograph. Leonardo's eye catches on a smear of charcoal smudging in the wake of his finger, and follows it to a drawing of a rough cylindrical shape with odd etchings running along its sides.
"What's all this?" he asks, gesturing.
Leo stiffens and presses the entire photograph into his plastron. "It's nothing."
"It looks mystic."
"I'm a practicing artist."
A beat of silence. The candlelight flickers, burns.
"It wouldn't happen to have anything to do with the portal that dropped you here, would it?" Leonardo says casually.
For the first time tonight, Leo looks Leonardo in the eye, and calmly says, "Nah."
To anyone else, that would be convincing enough — a repertoire of relaxed shoulders, casual phrasing, easy intonation. For Leonardo, who has spent his entire life capturing his lies in the darkened pupils of family and foe alike, it's hard evidence otherwise.
Leonardo huffs out a breath. "I'm not stupid, you know," he tells Leo. "The pink crap falling out of the sky started the same day that you fell ass-first out of the sky. You also ain't subtle in how rattled you get every time it's mentioned 'round you. Maybe my brothers are willfully ignorant about it, but I find it peskily obvious that you know more than you're tellin'."
Leo's quiet and considering. Leonardo waits, but for once, the kid doesn't say anything — close enough to an admission of guilt. Not that he needed a confession to know. He feels a familiar anger begin to surge in his chest, months of steeped stress and frustration boiling to the surface hot and fast; tries to keep it contained to a mere seepage of acid.
"You know, for all that you insist that you want to go home, you don't really give the impression that you care a lot about your actual brothers," Leonardo hisses. "You avoid talking about them at every turn while you revel in my brothers' attention, clinging onto Raph like a wet-eared calf all the damned time, and he lets it happen because he has a mile-wide blindspot for turtles that are half his size. I don't have that blindspot for your selfishness that seems to have overcome all of my brothers, because I know you — I was you. You like attention and you like being loved more than you are willing to give. I reckon it's something you couldn't keep dry forever. I reckon it's something that boomed in your face.
"So now you're here, avoiding the consequences of your actions. You see all this chaos happening to our world, and you clearly know something about it; yet, you refuse to admit it, leaving us in the dark, not caring if it's — dangerous to us. I shouldn't be surprised by how little you're concerned about the well-being of my brothers, when you don't even think about your own. But I suppose you wouldn't know anything about what it's like to be responsible for the lives of others, eh?"
Every word that shoves itself out of Leonardo's throat seems to curl Leo further into himself, cementing him into a firmly furled ball of righteous shame enveloped by soft folds of the hammock.
Leonardo scoffs.
At least he gets the privilege to hear it at sixteen instead of twenty-three and a bullet. At least he'll know that his selfish stupidity is the lasso with which he's to drag his brothers into years of avoidable suffering and misery.
"If you care about the lives of my brothers and my townsfolk," Leonardo says, softly, "you'll give me that drawing. I'm not makin' you take responsibility for telling my brothers exactly what information you've withheld. I'm not even makin' you tell me what you know. Something tells me that this will be enough." He holds his hand out expectantly.
… "No," Leo rasps.
"No?" Leonardo echoes, disbelieving. "You can't be serious, kid."
Leo shrinks into himself, fingers digging into the wrinkled drawing, shakes his head. "No. I'm not giving this to you. You can't — You can't have it."
It's petulant and small and helpless. God, this kid might be even more selfish than Leonardo was at his age, and that's saying something. He'd really thought that speech would be enough to enlighten Leo into accepting a little bit of responsibility. No, not even accepting responsibility — into giving just a little.
Suddenly, Leonardo's just so sick of this. He reaches forward to pry the drawing out of Leo's fingers, but the smaller turtle suddenly launches himself out of the hammock and hightails it down the hallway of offices.
A curse escapes Leonardo's lips as he chases after, leg twinging from its actively-healing wound. Leo slides to the left and disappears into one of the secretary offices, door swinging loudly behind him, and Leonardo nearly breaks the doorknob with how fast he wrenches it open. On the wooden desk, there's a piercing red alarm clock resting atop a scattering of paperwork and trinkets, casting irregular, looming shadows around the room. Leonardo scans his eyes across the tiny space until they land on the trembling frame of a poorly-hidden ninja, wedged in the narrow space between the desk and the far wall.
"I ain't tryna fight you," Leonardo says, or maybe yells — he doesn't know. He's pissed and tired and hurt and he's just trying to help his entire fucking town and Leo just refuses to give an inch and comply. It's not that hard. It doesn't have to be this hard, but Leo's selfish, bullheaded, sixteen year-old arrogance insists on it because they only ever learn the hard way. He kneels down, hissing at the pain, and pins Leo's wrist down with his prosthetic hand while extracting the drawing from unwilling fingers with the other. He can see tiny tremors of the kid shaking beneath his metal grip, but he lets go and moves back as soon as he has the drawing secured in the depths of his satchel.
He's not trying to hurt the kid, after all. He's just being practical here, something Leo has yet to learn to understand.
The hard way. Always the hard way.
Leonardo sighs as he gets back to his feet, the motion pulling insistently at the ache of his leg. He catches a glimpse of wide, glassy eyes refracting pinpricks of red light, and pushes out the cold wriggle of guilt that worms its way into his heart.
"Look, bucko," he says, "I'll give this back to you after I get some research done. You're smart enough to understand why I need it, even if you don't care."
Leo doesn't respond. Leonardo leaves the office and the door shuts behind him with a soft click. Lets out another heavy sigh.
He doesn't think Leo is going to inflict any damage on the station tonight, even alone. He'll come back in the morning when he's had some rest, some time to compile mystic resources. Maybe Leo will understand by then — or maybe he won't; ultimately, it doesn't matter.
Leo clearly doesn't understand by the morning, because he spends the rest of the following day avoiding Leonardo like the plague.
In fact, not only does Leo avoid Leonardo, but he also avoids all three of Leonardo's brothers. Leonardo knows this because Michelangelo rudely barged into his office earlier in the day to harass him about the whereabouts of Leo.
How am I s'posed to know where the blatherskite went? he'd said. Maybe he's taken up a hobby in disappearing. Oh, hold — he's a ninja. That's what they do.
You were the last one in the station last night, Michelangelo had responded, unimpressed. You were the last one to see him. Raphie and Dee ain't seen him at all, and the horses won't tell me anything.
Leonardo had scoffed and that was it. He'd started to ask his little brother if he could spare a minute to take a look at a drawing of some mystic artifact, but Michelangelo had scoffed right back and stormed off in search of his little counterpart.
Which is frustrating, because Michelangelo is the most well-versed in mystics out of the four of them. Leonardo has never had a great touch for mystics, only really understanding it in theory — and even then, his knowledge is extremely limited. He's coughed up a couple portals here and there out of sheer desperation, but never with any sense of accuracy; he suspects that he may need a proper conduit to channel them through, but he never bothered finding out what that would entail. Donatello learned to apply mystics to his life in the sense that he uses it as a convenience, the equivalent of carrying a collapsible toolbox around with him, but perhaps out of sheer disdain, similarly never bothered learning more. It wouldn't be particularly handy in his more indulgent line of work, anyway, with how much time he spends in the rodeo with Curie. Raphael —
Well. There's a lot of things Raphael used to know about that he doesn't anymore.
That's to say, Michelangelo is the only one of the four of them who ever took the concept of mystics seriously, and learned to actively apply it to his life. He knows a litany of traditional spells and has an arsenal of various kinds of fires in his backpocket for many a shootout gone wrong, and studying up on mystic artifacts is possibly the one and only time in his life that he's read a book.
So Leonardo spends the morning locked in his office flipping through a volume of Michelangelo's compendium of artifacts, but he gets the feeling that his mindless searching is not going to bear much fruit. Not only does he have no idea what it is that he's looking for in a semantic sense, but he also has no idea how this book is organized, because every time he thinks that he's identified a categorical pattern in the arrangement of magic baubles, he gets thrown off by the contents of the next page.
He needs a break.
Leonardo picks up the drawing to add to the folder. Pauses. It's not like he really cares about the contents of the photograph, but —
It's a colored photograph of Leo and his real family. They're crowded around a young, bright-eyed April holding a shining diploma for Eastlaird University, grinning widely despite slight imprints of exhaustion beneath their eyes.
They look… small. Young. Full of faith in the future and an unshakeable love.
Leonardo looks at this version of Leo and struggles to find the throughline to the Leo that he knows here.
There's a smattering of dark red splotched on the crusted corners of the photograph. Leonardo carefully doesn't think about it as he slides it into the main folder of reports.
After locking the door behind him, Leonardo swings by the front desk to let Clem know that he'll be taking lunch out, and loops around to the back stables to get Jupiter. She snorts gustily at him, flaring her nostrils directly into his face, and he recoils.
"Gross, girl," he mutters. He settles the saddle blanket over her back, layering the saddle on top, and knees her in the stomach to release the air before tightening the girth straps. She clacks her teeth to express her irritation, but Leonardo ignores it; she always tries to hold her breath to allow a bit of leeway for comfort, but the slack is not exactly conducive for good riding. The bit and bridle she accepts with marginally more grace, and he heaves himself up onto her back for the ride back home.
When he gets back, the egg-shaped chair suspended on the verandah porch is swinging. Michelangelo is sitting on the bench opposite to it, hunched over the fine weave of a new basket. Leonardo grunts in greeting and Michelangelo glances up from his task to make fleeting eye contact.
Great. Mikey still doesn't want to talk to him.
Leonardo doesn't bother tethering Jupiter in, knowing that she won't be going anywhere without him at the height of noon. He makes his way up the verandah steps and glances into the enclosure of the suspended chair. Leo is swathed in a cocoon of quilts, tucked up to his chin, gaze starkly a little left of forward, but otherwise sentient.
Leonardo sighs and sucks it up. Without Michelangelo's help, he's not going to make much progress in figuring out what he's looking for. That leaves him one option: the brat whose primary pastime is inconveniencing Leonardo.
"I got a few questions for you," he starts roughly, when a shadow inserts itself between himself and the chair.
Michelangelo holds out a hand in front of Leo, narrowing his eyes at Leonardo. "Too far, Lee," he says, voice soft and dangerous.
Leonardo pauses, if only out of surprise. There's only one other time in his life that that tone of voice has been directed at him, and that was years ago, a muffled memory submerged in the fathomless depths of bitter bottles and swimming floorboards.
"I ain't done nothing to the kid," he says. He peers more carefully into the chair to gesture, because he didn't actually hurt the kid.
Leo's shaking. Full-body tremors racing up and down his body, enough that Leonardo is almost surprised to not hear his bones clattering against themselves. His eyes are darting frantically around, settling on gaps of light filtering through the woven walls of the chair before sliding back around to Leonardo and cycling through again.
Leonardo stares and thinks about the unrelenting, obnoxious bravado that Leo had carried since the minute he'd woken up from his little coma. All of it is gone. It's unnerving and achingly wrong, and for a moment, it's enough for Leonardo to wonder.
"This doesn't look like 'nothing' to me," Michelangelo responds. He moves directly into Leonardo's line of sight, blocking the smaller turtle from view. "I reckon something happened last night. He won't tell me what, but I'm not stupid."
It slips away.
Leonardo throws his hands up, frustrated. "The little kid is moping between his charges of arson! What's new? It doesn't got anything to do with me. I just got a few questions for him."
"And Leo," Michelangelo says, saccharine sweet, "is not in the right headspace to be answering questions from you."
… "O-kay," Leonardo drawls out. "You reckon he has brains enough to scoot along and get back into the 'right headspace' to be answering questions from me, then?"
Michelangelo glances behind him, then grabs Leonardo's arm, herding him down the verandah steps. Leonardo allows it to happen, largely out of bemusement for what his little brother needs to say outside the vicinity of the brain-dead teenager.
"Listen," Michelangelo hisses. "I'm not stupid and neither are you. I don't understand why you're so bullheaded about what being traumatized looks like when it circles 'round to the little you. Maybe it's 'cause you can't hobble Leo's rebellious streak, and it hurts your big ego in lording over the town happenings. Maybe you just hate lil' shavers more than I could ever imagine. But I'm not going to let you go around bulldozing him when he's clearly going through one of the worst experiences of his life."
Leonardo raises a brow. "'Worst experiences'?" he echoes. "Somehow, I get the feeling that whatever led him here takes the gold for that, Miguel."
"I found him practically drowning himself in the run earlier and he didn't even want a hug after I fished him out."
"He's a turtle. Not everyone drowns after spending two minutes in the water."
"He's miserable because he doesn't know when he'll get home, Leon. He's not getting injured anymore, but he's still lost and alone."
"Tough luck. Jupiter was taking her sweet time getting me home last night, too. Did I mention there was an arrow sticking out of my leg?"
Michelangelo stares at him, searching.
Finally, he says, "If this is truly how you're set on treating yourself, then by all means, put us through handling that again. But no matter what you seem to believe, little Leo isn't you. You can't keep doing this to him."
"He kind of is, though," Leonardo points out patently. "Dee took blood samples for comparison the other day."
Michelangelo is quiet. Leonardo resists the urge to fidget. He drowned that impulse of his ghost years ago.
Then Michelangelo shakes his head, slowly. "You just don't get it."
If this is truly how you're set on treating yourself.
And that's the crux of it, isn't it? Leonardo thinks, not without bitterness.
Leo's him, and yet he's also very much not him. He's the rebellious teenager who spent his hazy summer days days slacking off from household chores to chew gravel on dusty dirt roads and cursing the name of responsibility with blood promised on his tongue and digging mud pits for his brothers to stumble into for the punchline of the joke; the one spent his coldest winter nights gnawing on the stalks from unknown origins just to prove himself fearless of nature and letting the sheep out to measure how quick he could herd them back in and badmouthing people with power just because he had a faster pistol in his pocket. He's from the bright lights of the biggest cities and he lived in sewer tunnels without sunlight or seasons and he wields blades of blue steel song. He never knows how to stop talking because how else would he compensate for the weakness in his knees, and he always wants to be loved more than he learned to love back, and he lives in a coffin he built for himself out of his self-centric obsession for his own mortality.
It's easy to hate him. It's easy to forget who he is.
Michelangelo jerks a thumb at Jupiter, grazing lazily on the nearby lawn. "It might be in your best interest to head back to the station before you make things worse."
“Heh. I guess so.”
Leonardo pauses halfway in his steps around the perimeter of the barn as the sound of a voice talking carries across the downshifted wind.
Leo, he thinks, already feeling a pressure growing behind his eyes. Of course pint-sized city brat Leo would sidewind into the barn in the dead of the night against literally every rule they set for him to release the horses, because the horses love him for some incomprehensible reason. (It has nothing to do with how much the horses hate Leonardo.) He's probably planning some idiotic scheme that he'll need to get untangled from, figuratively and literally both if gauging by his truly abhorrent skills with the lasso.
Fortunately, Leonardo can do enough ass-whooping to make up for the way that Michelangelo seems to actively encourage Leo’s irrepressible delinquency.
“It was just… really scary. To have all of that put on me. I wasn’t ready, I… How could I ever be anything like Raph? I just wanted him to take it back. So we could go back to when things were okay and he didn't have to — uh, hate me. So I just kept. Pushing him.” The dynamic of Leo’s voice remains the same the closer Leonardo slides up to the backside of the barn, each phrase decrescendoing, lengthening.
Something heavy and sharp forms in Leonardo’s gut as Leo’s words crystallize with alarming clarity. “And one day, it just… caught up to me. The — uh — the Foot were going after some weird trinket from a museum, and I sort of lost it because my stupid ego couldn't handle the thought of me not winning. And then I ended the world. I ended the world so badly that my future self had to send some dude back in time to warn me of my own mistakes. That’s like — like a blockbuster movie type of plot, Jupie. Isn’t that unbelievably stupid?” Leo huffs out a short laugh, but it’s nothing like the unbridled laughter that fills the fields every other time the kid is let near the horses.
“And then they got Raph because I went after the key. Raph threw himself in front of me and got himself captured and I couldn’t do anything, I could only watch —“
A bullet, flying straight through —
“— and it was all my fault.”
All my fault.
Silence rings out in the fields. Leonardo doesn’t dare creep closer.
“So after what I did to Raphie," Leo goes on, sounding just a little to the left of conversational, "I don't think I can be forgiven.
"And — And —“ Leo's voice warbles upward, a thin thread dangerously close to crying. "I just keep having this — thought. That if I stayed here they... wouldn't have any reason to stop loving me. I wouldn't have to know if they did."
Oh.
The thought slams into Leonardo, dizzying and unexpected. Oh. Oh.
Leonardo thinks back to weeks, months, years spent slumped in shitty bar stools and over an emptied bottle or seven. Watching his older brother stumble through a trenched-out life, love carved out by Leonardo’s own ego, the guilt forming mirror chasms in Leonardo’s own heart. Learning to indulge the art of drowning himself in his own misery if only to lose the idea of Leonardo, burdened by the shame of a cruel red arm from his twin and the knowledge that his little brother would fight the stranger he wanted to become. If only to shed the weight of love. If only. It's a craft, taking years to hone into a sharpened hollow. Finding new holes to crawl into only to die in the heat of the blistering sun, carrion gored out by the circling ritual of vultures, viscera pulsating and entrails splattered to signal the corpse a bad idea. Finding new ways to carve out holes in everyone he loved because if the stonework of the dried-up well he'd become was crumbling and flaking then he'd better scrape together some means for his foreign family to build new ones. Moisten the pit and line it with blood for the buried layer of groundwater to emerge in festering rebirth, slowly, but destined to one day blossom despite. To kill youself for hatred of your own poorly wrought love. It is violent at the start and violent in the end, too.
It's what Leonardo does. It's…
It's not what Leo did.
There’s a gaping wound between all my fault and Leo landing here, half-dead and alone. At first, Leonardo had thought that Leo’s arrival was all thanks to the kid’s own foolish actions, messing around in places he shouldn’t be walking and badmouthing people with power. It's easy, when Leo snarks and whines and never shuts up and causes trouble and has just the most repugnant teenaged attitude. But now — Leonardo knows with an absolute, unshakeable certainty that Leo did something terrible to himself to make up for the sins of his former self.
After all, it’s an opportunity that Leonardo would have given anything for. The jealousy percolates in his gut, acrid. Leonardo pushes it down because this isn’t about him.
In this moment, listening to the careful breathing needed to not cry, Leonardo doesn't know how he could've ever thought that Leo doesn't love his brothers enough. He loves his brothers more than anything in the universe and beyond because that's what they do, the thing that slots into the space between each rib as the only certain knowledge; and sometimes when you're Leonardo, loving them is the same thing as hurting them — but you want that love anyway, selfishly and inevitably. And they love and it hurts. It is violence and it is greed to be loved. And he's spent his entire life thinking that being Leo will never be enough for an equivalent exchange.
Leo has had the lives of his brothers deposited directly into his sixteen year old hands and the fault of the entire goddamned world settled onto his shoulders without an inch of hesitation and he would take it on again without an inch of remorse in all his regrets for the reckless life he's led before. He knows too well what it's like to be responsible for the lives of others, the ones he loves. He's sixteen.
(He's a cruel sixteen, and is that a kindness? It doesn't matter, the simmer of envy for the lesson learned early. It doesn't matter. It was never Leonardo's place to say it all over again by candlelight and fleckle.)
Leonardo understands now. In the most eloquent of terms: he fucked up.
Unlike his little counterpart, Leonardo isn’t a ninja. He suspects that the only reason Leo hasn’t already noticed him as he edges his way around the barn is because of the way he's kept busy shoving his hands in his face and scrubbing away the glimmer of half-formed tears. Leo's leaned into the soft belly of Princess and has Curie's head half in his lap, while Apple and Jupiter form a protective barrier around them.
Apple's ears perk up as Leonardo looks his way, swiveling his head in his direction with uncanny accuracy.
You're not here to be an asshole, are you? the colt seems to say, because apparently Leonardo will never be able to stop ascribing personalities to these horses.
Leonardo raises his hand disarmingly. Apple sends one more suspicious look his way before turning his attention back to the smaller turtle, craning his head over Princess' back to nip at the tails of Leo's neckerchief. It's a reminder that Apple can and will extract Leo from the situation if he decides that Leonardo is a threat.
And Leonardo has been. Michelangelo was right that Leonardo has made things worse.
The bright thing to do would be to go find Michelangelo or Donatello or Raphael and have them deal with little Leo and his feelings, because at least Leo's not scared of them. At least none of them have pinned him down behind the red light of a desk and pried the last physical thread to his family further than the universe loose out of his hands. At least they don't make Leo stare straight through them from the bottom of the lake.
Leonardo has never claimed to be particularly bright, however. He sits in the silence and starts calculating how he can slink away without getting caught, when Leo suddenly starts talking again.
"It, um." Leo's gone quiet, head tipped towards the starry skies. "It was dark. And cold. And — And the darkness just kept going, everywhere around me. And while I was drifting, after he was done playing with me, it was like I was the only thing in the universe. And it felt like it'd be that way for… for the rest of time, at least until I died — but I didn't even know if I could." His hands are fiddling with the braids of Curie's mane, twisting the hair around his fingers and slackening before it hurts. He's smaller, gentler than that. "All I could do was hold onto the stupid photograph, but I wasn't even really thinking about them that much, 'cause… the only thing that was really in my brain was how much everything hurt. I was so scared and I really, really thought I was gonna die — and even then, I couldn't even bother to think about my family.
"I think… Leonardo was right. That I don't love them enough." A scratchy, shockingly bitter laugh crawls out of the kid's throat. The old, familiar creature coils in Leonardo's gut and settles comfortably beside the shame.
"I saw the sun and I woke up here. And now, I can't stop thinking that it would've been easier. I mean —" Leo cuts himself off with a sob and buries his face between Curie's ears. "Fuck, what am I saying? I'm glad I'm alive. Really, I am, I — I didn't want to die. I never did, okay? I'm glad I'm here. I'm glad I'm here. I got lucky. They can — They can get me home; Michelangelo promised. I want to go home, okay? I want to go home more than anything. I… I miss them, so bad. I want to go home, I want to go home, even if they don't forgive me — even if it'd be easier, I swear, Jupie, I swear on it."
Jupiter snorts softly and pushes her snout against Leo's shoulder as he blubbers out a desperate facsimile of conviction to an audience that can't pity. "Sometimes I look at their backs and pretend that they just got a little bit bigger," he confesses. "And then they turn around and they're older and softer and say stuff that they never would and it hurts all over again, just like it did at the start. Every time I think I'm getting better about it, I go right back. And I know I shouldn't be trying to find them here, 'cause they don't know what I've done, so… so they don't know to treat me the way I deserve, and if I get used to this, then it'll suck so much more when I do get home. Because I'm going to get — to get home."
Abruptly, Leo pulls his face out of Curie's mane to curl into himself, a small shrunken thing pressed against the heat of Princess' belly.
The field shudders from the quiet.
Then Leo starts crying in earnest.
All four of the horses immediately start vying for Leo's attention in one way or another. Princess tries to nudge Leo even closer to her body like she can melt away all the agony wracking his own while Apple tugs insistently on the tails of Leo's neckerchief in the way he'd normally pick him up to hide away. Curie is frantically trying to shove her head back underneath Leo's shaking hands and Jupiter practically croons in some rumbling imitation of comfort.
Leonardo stares, dumbfounded. He hasn't — well. He hasn't seen Leo cry, not in any real sense beyond trigger-deprived tantrums and petty wants, and he'd honestly kind of thought that the kid never would. Considering that waking up from the brink of death failed to faze him, and the thought of never being able to go home didn't shatter his smile, and — and okay, well, now Leonardo kind of understands what Michelangelo means when he said that Leo is still going through one of the worst experiences of his life. And in that space between all the brazen dismissals of hurt, Leonardo kind of sees exactly where he used to be Leo. Still is Leo.
With how the horses react, Leonardo gets the feeling that maybe this isn't the first time Leo has cried in this world.
Jupiter lifts her head and stares straight at him, assessing. Leonardo stays very still.
He's not going to hurt this kid anymore. He's not.
Then, she must see something that he couldn't even begin to qualify, because —
Do something useful in your life for once, you old, useless fart, Jupiter seems to say through the intensity of her glare, stepping aside to make way.
In this moment, Leonardo knows with absolute certainty that if he doesn't do anything right now, Jupiter will punish him for the rest of his life. And that's the sole, only reason that he steps out from his thinly veiled position by the barn and towards his tiny, inconsolable counterpart. No other reason.
It's not about the version of himself that still believed in lassoing the sun as proof of mortality. It's not about the rippled mirror in the lake filling that gorge between the crusted earth and rusted sky. It's not about some dozen years spent cursing the crude, crippled vestiges of premature decisions, or the swallow of salty blood to chase down the rest of the fire, or looking into the love hollowed of eyes he'd gauged out with his declawed fingers.
It's not. Leonardo starts walking.
Even in tears, Leo's situational awareness of openly choreographed movement cuts straight through, and the kid stiffens in recognition of the older turtle's approach.
"Uh," Leonardo starts intelligently, right as Leo pulls himself into his shell.
Moron.