Work Text:
Above you, the sprawling, neon-lit grid of New York City is drowning in a torrential downpour. But down here, in the cramped, suffocating darkness of an abandoned boiler room beneath a forgotten Brooklyn warehouse, the storm is just a dull, echoing roar.
You press your back against the concrete wall, your chest heaving as you try to force air into your lungs. Your hands are shaking. You clench them into fists, squeezing your eyes shut, trying to banish the afterimages of the ambush that are still flashing behind your eyelids.
It was supposed to be a routine patrol. Just you, riding shotgun on the rooftops with the brothers, keeping eyes on a suspected Foot Clan smuggling route. But the remnants of Karai’s elite guard hadn’t just been smuggling tech; they had been waiting because they’d set a trap.
You remember the sudden, blinding flare of high-tech weaponry cutting through the dark. You remember the deafening crack of Donnie’s comms link instantly shattering into static in your earpiece. You remember the smoke, the smell of burning rain, and the collapsing steel scaffolding.
But mostly, you remember Leo.
When the perimeter blast went off, tearing the rooftop apart, he didn’t hesitate. His hypervigilant, tactical mind registered the fatal trajectory of the blast, and his massive frame moved with astonishing speed. He threw himself over you, a mountain of dense muscle and battle-scarred shell, completely enveloping you just as the world exploded into white-hot fire.
He became your shield—and he paid the price for it.
You turn your attention back to the center of the room. “Leo,” you breathe out, pushing yourself off the wall.
Leo is sitting on the floor, his back propped against a dead generator. Even stripped of his tactical harness and katanas, which you unceremoniously dropped by the rusted iron door, he takes up nearly the entire space. His size is usually a comfort, an imposing, unshakeable monument of strength. But right now, his chest heaves with shallow, ragged breaths.
“I’m fine,” he’d growled just a few minutes ago when you finally managed to drag him down the access ladder and into this hole.
It is his leader voice, the one he uses to keep his brothers in line. It’s the voice of the perfect soldier. The fearless commander. But you know him better than that. You see right through his acting, through this thin disguise he wears like a second armor. You hear the perfectly delivered lines he uses to convince the world that he feels no pain, that he feels no fear.
They don’t fool you. Not anymore.
You step closer to him, the soles of your boots splashing softly in a shallow puddle of rainwater and grime. The emergency glow stick you snapped earlier casts harsh, flickering green shadows across his face. His bandana is soaked and plastered to his skin; he squeezes his eyes shut in silent agony.
A deep, jagged gash cuts across his left shoulder and bites down into his bicep, courtesy of one of Karai’s specialized, electrified blades. It had pierced right into his shoulder and tore into the dense muscle beneath right before it had fried his localized comms. The temporary wraps you applied have already soaked through.
“Leo, sit still,” you murmur, dropping to your knees beside him. Your hands are still trembling, but you force them steady as you tear open a fresh pack of medical gauze from the emergency kit strapped to your thigh.
He doesn’t open his eyes. “I told you,” he murmurs, his voice cracking at the edges, “I’m fine. Save the supplies.”
“You’re not fine,” you snap, your voice fierce despite the panic clawing furiously at your throat. “You’re bleeding through the wraps, our comms are completely fried, and we haven’t heard from Donnie, Raph, or Mikey in three hours.”
You kneel directly between his legs, forcing your presence into his immediate space so he can’t ignore you. You reach out, gripping his clammy jaw, forcing him to open his eyes and look at you. “So for once in your life, Leo, shut up and let me fix it.”
His blue eyes, normally so hyper-focused, calculating, and distant, search your face. For a long, agonizing second, the stoic leader slowly fades. The walls he has built around himself—walls made of duty, honor, and self-sacrifice—waver. What is left behind is something exhausted and terrifyingly vulnerable.
“Okay,” he rumbles softly, the fight completely draining out of him. His head drops back against the generator with a thud.
You go to work, your jaw set in grim determination.
You pull out a pair of shears and carefully cut away the wraps and the shredded straps of his remaining armor. You toss the ruined gear aside, leaving his chest and left arm entirely bare. As you gently press an antiseptic-soaked cloth to the wound, a sharp tremor runs through his entire frame. It’s an involuntary reaction to the pain, but he bites back a groan, his jaw clenching so hard you can hear his teeth grinding.
Suddenly, his hand flies out, his fingers locking entirely around your wrist.
You freeze, your breath catching in your throat. He doesn’t squeeze—he knows his own strength perfectly, knows he could crush your fragile human bones into dust if he isn’t careful—but the heat radiating from his palm is staggering against your cold, rain-slicked skin.
You look up from his shoulder, meeting his gaze. The mask is slipping further. You can see it in his eyes: the heavy, suffocating truth he refuses to speak aloud.
He’s lonely. Has been for far too long.
He holds his head up, fights the fight, bears the scars, and does his time. He plays the role of the infallible older brother, the unyielding shield for his family. But beneath that impenetrable shell, he is drowning in the isolation of command. He carries the weight of everyone’s survival on his back, and it is crushing him.
“I shouldn’t have let you come,” Leo murmurs. His voice is dangerously low now, completely stripped of its authoritative cadence. It is thick, choked with an emotion that makes your own chest ache with sympathetic grief.
“Don’t do this right now,” you reply softly, trying to gently pry his fingers from your wrist so you can finish cleaning the wound. “We need to stop this bleeding before infection sets in.”
“No, look at you,” he interrupts. His grip on your wrist tightens just a fraction, pulling you slightly closer into his space. His eyes burn with a desperate intensity as they scan over you.
He takes in the dirt streaked across your face; the dark bruises forming on your collarbone from the fall; your soaked clothes. And then he looks at your hands.
“Look at your hands,” he says, his voice breaking. “You’re covered in my blood. You’re shivering. Karai’s goons nearly took your head off tonight, and the only reason you were even on that rooftop is because of me.”
“I chose to be there,” you say firmly, holding his gaze. “You didn’t force me. I wanted to watch your back.”
“You don’t get it!” he suddenly snaps.
It’s a rare, explosive burst of raw emotion, crashing through his lifelong discipline. He lets go of your wrist as if your skin burns him, his hand balling into a fist and slamming into the floor beside him. A dull boom echoes in the small room, shaking the puddles of water.
He looks away from you, staring into the dark corner of the boiler room. The muscles in his neck strain tightly against his skin. His chest heaves, but this time it isn’t from the pain of his wound. “I am the leader,” he says. “My job is to protect my brothers. My job is to protect this city. But above all of that, my job is to keep you safe.”
He closes his eyes, swallowing hard. “And instead, I dragged you into a sewer. Wrapped you up in a fight that has nothing to do with you. And now we’re trapped in a dark, freezing hole under the city, waiting for the Foot to find us, because I wasn’t fast enough to block the blast.”
The crushing weight of his guilt hangs in the air.
He’s carrying the universe on his shoulders, completely blind to the fact that he doesn’t have to carry it alone. He looks at himself and sees a monster, a mutated weapon forged in the shadows, inherently dangerous to anything soft or beautiful that dares to come near him.
You stare at the sharp, heartbroken lines of his profile. See the deep grooves of stress bracketing his mouth. You see the agonizing loneliness of a man who believes he has to bleed in silence so that others can live in the light.
It takes one to know one.
You know what it feels like to be isolated, to hide behind a smile, to pretend everything is fine when your world is falling apart. Like a mirror, you reflect his silent pain. You recognize the walls he has built around his heart, impenetrable fortresses of duty and self-loathing.
And right now, you’re going to light a match and burn them down.
You don’t argue with him. Don’t offer empty platitudes or tell him it isn’t his fault, because his tactical mind will just reject it. Instead, you lean forward. You close the distance between his frame and yours, invading his space. You reach up, placing both of your hands flat against his cheeks.
Startled, he flinches slightly, his eyes snapping open as you physically force his face back toward you.
“Leonardo, listen to me,” you say. Your voice is no longer shaking.
He stares down at you, mesmerized, his breath catching in his throat.
“You did not drag me anywhere,” you tell him, your thumbs gently stroking the skin beneath his mask. “I’m here because I want to be. I’m here because I chose you. You spend every single day of your life being everyone’s shield, bleeding for this city, bleeding for your brothers. But right now? In this room?”
You lean in closer, until you can feel his ragged breath washing over your face, until there is nothing in the world but the two of you, reduced to your most basic, fundamental truths.
“You don’t have to be the fearless leader,” you whisper fiercely. “You don’t have to carry it all. You just have to let me be yours. Let me take care of you.”
He freezes.
The hyper-vigilant, relentlessly turning gears of Leo’s mind completely stall out. He stares down at you as if he has never truly seen you before. His chest rises and falls with a shuddering breath. His eyes drop to your lips for a fleeting second before locking desperately back onto your eyes.
The absolute, devastating reverence in his expression is enough to make your heart physically ache.
“You want to take care of me?” he whispers, and his words falter on his tongue as if they were a language he had never learned to speak. “Even like this?”
Slowly, he raises his uninjured right hand, gesturing vaguely to himself. To his massive, heavily muscled form. To the green skin, the thick shell, the blood steadily weeping from his shoulder. To the bleakness of the room and the deadly life he leads.
“Even with all of … this?” he asks, his voice thick with a vulnerability that breaks your heart into a thousand pieces.
You don’t hesitate. Don’t even blink.
“Especially like this,” you reply softly, the truth ringing clear in the dark.
The last of his defenses don’t just fall; they shatter.
A breathless sound escapes the back of Leo’s throat. He reaches out, moving with a desperate, overwhelming need. His hand slides through your hair, gently cupping the back of your neck. His thumb sweeps across your cheekbone, wiping away a smudge of soot and dust with a reverence reserved for holy things.
He pulls you forward, and you meet him halfway.
When his lips crush against yours, the entire world outside ceases to exist. His lips are surprisingly soft, moving with a frantic, starved urgency that betrays just how long he has denied himself this—denied himself the right to be loved, to be held, to simply be.
You let out a soft gasp against his mouth.
In response, his right arm winds securely around your waist. His bicep flexes, lifting you slightly off your knees and pulling you flush against his incredibly broad, solid plastron. He anchors you against his body, enveloping you entirely. You wrap your arms around his neck, tangling your fingers into the trailing ends of his bandana, holding him just as fiercely as he is holding you.
You kiss him back with everything you have, pouring every ounce of your devotion, your understanding, and your shared loneliness into him. You are dancing in the flames of the walls you just burned down around him, turning his guilt, fear, and self-loathing into ashes.
A low, deep rumble vibrates through his chest. He deepens the kiss, angling his head, pouring all his pent-up terror from the rooftop ambush into the way his mouth moves over yours. He kisses you as if you are the only real thing in a world made of shadows and war.
For a few perfect, suspended minutes, the storm above doesn’t matter. The blood doesn’t matter. There is only the intoxicating heat of him, the steady, rhythmic thud of his heart against your chest, and the promise being sealed in the dark between you.
When his lungs finally demand air, he slowly pulls back, breaking the kiss with a reluctant sigh. But he doesn’t let you go, refusing to put distance between you again.
Instead, he rests his forehead against yours. Keeps his eyes closed, his breathing still labored. But the tense, agonizing wire he always walks has finally, miraculously, gone slack. The tight lines of stress around his eyes have smoothed out. He just breathes you in, his chest rising and falling in time with your own.
You keep your hands gently resting on his neck, your thumbs softly tracing his skin. “Better?” you whisper into the space between you, a soft, breathless smile tugging at the corners of your lips.
A tiny huff of a laugh escapes him. His grip around your waist tightens, ensuring you aren’t going anywhere. “Yeah,” he murmurs against your skin, the gravel in his voice now rich and warm, stripped of its harshness. “Yeah. Better.”
He opens his eyes, and for the first time tonight, they are completely clear. The shadows of guilt have receded, chased away by the radiant warmth of the connection you just forged. He looks at you not as a burden he failed to protect, but as an equal. As his partner. His sanctuary.
“We need to finish wrapping that shoulder,” you murmur gently, reluctantly trying to pull back just a fraction to reach for the gauze.
“Wait,” he says. His hand gently presses against the small of your back, keeping you flush against his chest for just a moment longer. He closes his eyes again, simply relishing the feeling of your heartbeat syncing with his. “Just … give me one more minute. Just like this.”
You melt against him, resting your cheek against the expanse of his plastron, right over his heart. “Okay,” you whisper softly. “I’m right here, Leo.”
“Donnie’s gonna find us,” he murmurs quietly, his chin resting gently on the top of your head. “Once the storm breaks, he’ll re-route the local cell towers to bypass Karai’s jammer. They’ll ping my trackers. Raph is probably tearing the city apart looking for us right now.”
“I know,” you say, closing your eyes and letting the resonance of his voice soothe your frayed nerves.
“But until he does …” Leo’s hand moves slowly up your back, his fingers threading gently into your hair before planting a soft kiss to the crown of your head. “… I’m not going anywhere.”
You smile into the dark, the words echoing in your heart. You listen to the rain above, the steady, rhythmic drumbeat of the storm battering the streets of New York. Let the storm rage. Let the Foot Clan search. Because you’ve found your anchor.
And you know that no matter what battles are waiting for you up on the surface, you will never let Leo face them alone again.