Chapter Text
There was something about the Hidden City that Leo just couldn’t get enough of. The spices in the air, the rackous sounds of voices, the colorful lights and the ferocity of a culture that refused to die. Like flowers growing up through the cracks in the sidewalks, some things just can’t stay buried. He stood back, resting his back against one of the rising stone walls around the street market, and let the thrum of the city melt through his shell, settling into his chest like a second heartbeat. He had never felt so connected, so grounded , anywhere in his young life. Even the lair had a sense of transience to it. Like no matter how much they built, they were still just…passing through.
Things on the surface had been quiet for a while; no Foot Clan moves, no random mutations, not even any drama April needed help with. Leo would never admit it, but the calm was starting to make his skin crawl. So, rather than spend yet another day in the lair, watching movies or coming up with more pointless challenges, or just staring at a wall slowly losing his mind– Leo had wrangled his brothers into a day out in the city. He didn’t try to fight his grin, watching Donnie trying to wrestle a potion away from a serpentine shop-keep, the liquid inside shifting from a dull gray sludge, to a dizzying rainbow of colors that would make Mikey see stars.
“You cannot just market something as a possibility, that is not a description!”
The shopkeep tossed the bottle in a perfect arc over the snapping hands of Donnie’s spider-shell, catching it again with an irritated hiss.
“It's a Potion of Possibility, that’s the name!”
“Well what does it do? That’s what I mean, why would anyone buy it if they don’t even know what its functionality is supposed to be?!”
The shopkeeper shook her head, coiling her tail around the long neck of the bottle and giving it a little shake, the colors shifting again.
“That’s the whole point, little man, anything could happen when you use it, the mystery is half the appeal.”
Leo couldn’t help himself, piping up from his spot next to the stall, “Sounds like a really complicated way of saying you don’t know what it does.”
She shot him a glare, one slitted golden eye narrowing in annoyance, “It could do anything.”
“Anything? Anything at all, really? Could even kill somebody? That just sounds irresponsible…” Leo jabbed playfully, but he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the bottle, the soft shimmer curling through the liquid as it settled back into gray…
He jumped when Mikey slung an arm over his shoulders, the little box turtle dropping his full weight into him, Raph was close behind, something bundled wrapped in brown paper bundled under one arm.
“What’re you guys doing? Me and Raph are hungry!” Mikey wailed.
Leo grinned, throwing an arm around Mikey to mirror his pose, “Oh not much, Donnie’s just found his mortal enemy is all. This fine sales-serpent says that that potion she’s holding can do anything ,”
“And I’m saying that’s not possible !”
Raph frowned, resting his free hand on his hip, “Donnie, are you for real? It’s literally snake-oil, just leave it man.”
“If I could just analyze it for a few seconds with my specs, I could tell you exactly what it does, and then we can go get food!”
The snake woman hissed again, stashing the bottle under her little counter, “No way kappa you want to know what my potion does? Buy it. Otherwise, quit wassssting my time!”
Donnie threw up his hands in frustration, storming over to Raph and pointing down the road, “Forget it, I’ll just let it consume my every waking thought, let’s go eat–”
Leo moved up to the stall, meeting the snake’s unimpressed stare with an easy smile, “Now hold up, how much do you want for it?”
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“I can’t believe you actually bought that mess, Leo. It was a snake. Selling oil. That’s literally the oldest scam there is,” Raph chided, pushing through the crowds towards their latest target: the new pizza place that had opened on the corner since their last visit.
Leo shrugged, slipping the bottle into his twin’s outstretched hands, “What? Now Donnie can check it out and satisfy his brain, and not drive us all crazy while he’s going crazy about it. Plus, she didn’t even want any money for it, she just wanted me to run a letter up to Hueso’s place and give it to him.”
“A letter?” Mikey slowed his pace to walk level with Leo, “You got a cool sparkly potion just to be a mailman for a snake-lady?”
“Hm? Oh yeah, it’s totally a love letter too, I read it as soon as she handed it to me. She’s probably just too embarrassed to hand it to him herself. I know I would be, I mean, Bone Man’s a family man, he’s got pictures of ‘em all over his office. I don’t see this working out for her.”
Raph made an affronted noise, “You can’t just read somebody’s mail , Leo!”
Mikey nodded in agreement, “That’s cold , bro.”
“I must agree, Nardo, it is unlike you to mock romance. Especially the hopeless variety,” Donnie nodded, studying the potion through the red and blue lenses of his goggles, a small frown growing with each twist of the bottle resulting in a wave of changing colors.
Leo shrugged, “There’s a difference between ‘hopeless romance’ and ‘total delusion’ , that’s all I’m saying. Come on, why don’t we try the new place next time, and just grab a creepy supreme at Run of the Mill?”
The four turtles switched direction easily, dipping through the crowds, Mikey only stopping to look back at the new restaurant once with a pout.
“What if it’s gone by next time?” We’ll never get to try it then!”
“Michael, if the pizza place, in the Hidden City of all places, is gone by our next visit; it’s probably really bad pizza.” Donnie comforted, one of his shell's spider arms patting Mikey on the head placatingly.
They found their way up through familiar streets to the familiar graffiti, slipping through the portal into the bustling restaurant and Leo spotted the off-white color of Hueso’s skull disappearing through the kitchen doors.
“Alright, I’m not completely heartless. I’m gonna go give Hueso the lady’s letter, you guys get our order in, kay? I’ll be right back.”
It was easy to slip into the kitchen past the waitstaff, moving with the inward swing of the door. He held up the letter sidestepping the island and tapping the skeleton’s shoulder with the folded paper.
“Yo, Señor Hueso, got a delivery, just for you.”
“Ah, Thank you, pepino, I will look at whatever this is as soon as I can. But get out of my kitchen, before you break something, shoo!”
He laughed, avoiding Hueso’s swatting hands and ducking under a busboy’s tray of dirty dishes, slipping back out the swinging doors to find where his brothers had settled in.
“Done and done, and now no mystic mumbo-jumbo contract we might’ve missed, can mess with Donnie while he messes with the stuff that looks like she took it out of a lava lamp, and we can stuff our faces for a little while and enjoy the ambiance .”
Mikey and Raph snorted, sharing a look before Mikey leaned across the table, “The ambiance ? Dude, Leo, what is up with you today? Like, are you alright?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Mikey’s right, you’ve been actin’ weird since breakfast,'' Raph crossed his arms, leveling a stern look at Leo, “You didn’t wanna watch movies with us, you didn’t wanna go skateboarding, you didn’t wanna sneak April out of class to goof off in the rooftop pool even. You were practically crawling out of your shell to get to the Hidden City, and then as soon as we agreed to hang out there , you dragged us back up here!”
“What are you guys talking about? Seriously, you’re complaining that we are hanging out and getting pizza?”
Donnie didn’t look up from the potion bottle, typing into the tech on his wrist while two deft spider arms kept up the twisting motion, “You are being super weird today Nardo, that’s the 16th time you have said ‘we’ in the places you usually say ‘ I’ . Something is bugging you, and the sooner you tell us what it is, the sooner we will stop bugging you.”
Leo scoffed, standing up from the booth his brothers had chosen, “I’m not being weird! It’s not weird to not want to be stuck at home all the time! I love this place, and I love the pizza, and I love– ” He was cut off suddenly, as Hueso stepped up and set a pizza box on the table with one hand, pressing the re-folded letter to Leo’s chest with the other.
“Please, pepino do not make such a scene. Though I understand this may be…upsetting, for you.” Leo took the paper, tipping his head in confusion and opening his mouth to say something, but Hueso hushed him, “You are still young, my friend, and you have plenty of time. I am certain there is someone out there who is just right for you. But that person is not me, and this is not healthy. I had them make your order to-go, as a...courtesy.”
The four sat in stunned silence as the skeletal proprietor made his way back to his office, until Raph shook his head, “Wait, what, just happened? Leo, did you just get–”
“Señor Hueso dumped you ?!” Mikey leapt across the table, knocking the bottle out of Donnie’s spider-claw’s grip, and snatching the paper from Leo’s hands, scanning it quickly, “ Ohmigosh, This was never from the snake-lady at all! You were just looking for an excuse to come up here and give this to him?!”
“ Uh, guys–”
Raph put a hand on Leo’s shell, “Aw, and you brought us along for moral support? Buddy, you coulda said somethin’--”
“ Guys , I think this maybe isn’t good–”
Leo stepped away shaking his head, “What? No , no it really was from that snake! She must not have signed it, I didn’t think to look– I gotta clear this up right now, he can’t really think that I– He’s just messing with us!”
Donnie scrambled over Mikey to get across the table, yanking their youngest brother along with and grabbing Raph’s arm to urge him away,
“You guys, the weird lava-lamp stuff is smoking, move! ”
Flickers of violet light offset the warm hue of the Run of the Mill, and a head-splitting, nearly mechanical screeching sound drowned everything out. Leo could feel his voice in his chest as he reached out blindly, yelling for his brothers, but the sound never reached him. Eye-aching violet flooded everything out, there were no shadows, no silhouettes left to anchor himself by, and Leo’s stomach started doing uneasy flips.
It took a minute for him to realize he was falling, legs in the air over his head, in a screaming void of purple. The seconds felt like an eternity,his heart hammering an uneasy staccato against the inside of his plastron like it was trying to jump out. Pressure crushed in at him from all sides, clogging his throat when he tried to breathe. The only thing that changed in the blinding light around him was the blackness at the edges of his vision, tunneling everything to one searing point, before swallowing it completely.
He hit the ground hard enough to shock a breath back into himself, coughing and gasping while his heart tried to find its rhythm again. He was lucky to have landed on his back, his shell taking most of the force, and he looked up for a stunned moment at an unfamiliar collection of stars above him. Leo blinked against the bright spots still left in his vision, the blood rushing in his head and settling into an unsteady throbbing behind his eyes. The familiar buzz of mystic energy skittered over his skin in a wild tango with the adrenaline shooting through his veins as he got to his feet and looked around for any sign of his brothers.
There were splashes of color everywhere in the wreckage he was standing in, garish slashes of paint like open wounds on old structures… Wherever he was, it had been like this for a while .
“ Donnatello?” His voice strained, rough and breathless and barely loud enough to get an echo, “ Michelangelo? Raphael–?!” He coughed, tasting copper at the back of his throat and wincing, “-- anybody?”