Chapter Text
It was safe to say he lived one of the least normal lives in the world. A mutant turtle who lived in the New York City sewer system with his four brothers, his rat father, with his found-family human sister on speed dial at any time, any day. They all possessed super cool weapons with super cool mystic powers that they more-or-less controlled, and used those powers to fight the bad guy mutants who were so unhappy with their lives they turned to crime and mayhem.
With all of that in mind, one would think that Leo would be a little less bothered by being tossed off of a roof earlier that night. Falling off stuff made up, like, a quarter of his whole life. He was pretty resilient, able to take punches or being thrown or slammed into the floor or whatever else without so much as flinching. Hit by a bus? Sounds like something ol’ Neon Leon can walk off, piece a cake.
And yet here he was. Six in the morning, when all of his brothers were usually peacefully asleep, he was awake. Awake, his fingers trembling, his heart threatening to beat out of his chest.
Why? Why was he so stupidly restless? Even when he couldn’t sleep normally, it was never this movemovemove feeling. There was excess energy coursing through his body, adrenaline that hadn’t quite died down.
(“I’m not giving him the bugs! These villains are all talk, he ain’t gonna–”
“Okay.”
Plummeting, plummeting, plummeting–)
UGH. He NEEDED to get up and move before he lost his mind.
With a grumpy groan, Leo rolled out of bed, standing up straight. He needed a distraction. Badly. He could not sit here and mope about his impromptu skydiving when there were a million other things to be doing.
First, he tried reading some comics. Comics were his go-to source of entertainment when he needed to not be thinking about something. He stopped reading after he realized his eyes were not focused enough to process what he was seeing on the pages, and that he had no idea what he’d been staring at for the past five minutes. So reading wouldn’t work, since his brain was too restless, and his leg wouldn’t stop bouncing… what was something less focused he could do? Something that required significantly less brain use?
What abooout… exercising! Getting his body moving was precisely what he needed to be doing right about now. Burn off the energy, and then conk out to sleep the anxieties away. Flawless plan! Nothing could possibly go wrong!
Well… that was usually the case. Exercising never typically ended poorly.
That was until he decided to go for a run.
And deciding to take his run out of the sewers, to get some fresh air. “In and out trip!”, he thought, like the complete, utter fool he was.
And he was suddenly back at the construction site, where it had all begun. Where they had first encountered those mystic freaks who were trying to kidnap Mayhem.
And then he was standing in front of that brick wall, thinking back to Draxum’s lab. Before it had, uh, blown up. For reasons unrelated to him or his brothers.
Draxum created us. It was an indisputable fact– Leo had heard it with his own two ears. He clearly wasn’t very attached, if his recent behavior was anything to go off of, but just that scrap of information left Leo burning for more. Why did Draxum create them? Why did he choose four vastly different turtle species to mutate? How did they end up with Dad, living in the sewers, if Draxum was the one who had them initially? He didn’t imagine he could just waltz into Draxum’s home and ask about it.
…
Right?
Sometimes, when Leo was up way too late, he did stupid things.
Like spending an entire hour trying to figure out how to portal into the Hidden City. His stupid portals were not cooperating with him, unlike earlier today. It was frustrating and dumb and utterly elating when Leo finally figured it out.
And then he’d spent another two hours finding his way back to Draxum’s old lab after getting lost about a dozen times. That had been annoying.
Look, no one ever said Leo was intelligent, okay? He certainly wasn’t Donnie-smart, with computers and all that fancy stuff. He wasn’t leader-smart like Raph, and he didn’t have an artistically talented bone in his body. All those had been reserved for Mikey. Point was, he was well aware that what he was doing was officially the dumbest thing anyone had done in his entire bloodline. He also didn’t care.
To get his mind off of being thrown off of the roof by the guy who made him, he broke into that guy’s lab to find out how he made him. Huh.
Well, somehow, it was working.
The lab wasn’t completely repaired yet, but it was certainly in better shape than he had last seen it. Construction tape hung from walls, blocking off areas that still seemed to have damages to them. Half of the upper walkway that circled around the whole wall of the room was still broken as well, the very walkway which Leo was sneaking along. The center of the room, that pillar thing with the energy core or some sciencey term like that seemed to be the most polished thing in the room, and that was saying a lot.
Leo scanned the room, and then double-checked his initial observation just to make sure he was right. The coast seemed to be totally clear. No creepy gargoyle shoulder pads, nothing imprisoned that could startle at his presence and sound the alarm, and certainly no crazy sheepman hellbent on mutating people.
Smirking silently to himself, Leo dropped down from the walkway, landing stealthily on the floor. His ankles didn't even ache this time around! Nailed it! Who needed training when he was just that cool?
Picking a random hallway, Leo made an active effort to stay quiet as he stuck to one wall, moving forwards quickly. If he got caught by Draxum, he would NEVER hear the end of it from Raph, and the teasing in the future would be abysmal. Not only that, but it would be the most embarrassing thing that had ever happened to him– being captured by a villain in their own lair was so painfully lame. No, Leo had to be careful, if only for the sake of not being a total loser.
Draxum’s lab was apparently a lot bigger than it looked, and it seemed like a lot of the rooms here survived the blast he and his brothers were definitely responsible for. He passed by some unimportant rooms, things that didn't catch his eye, but there was one room that made him stop in his tracks.
It wasn't much. But he saw folders and books, which, while mind-numbingly boring, meant information. And information was EXACTLY what he had come here for.
Unable to squash his grin, Leo eagerly slipped into the room, making a beeline for the bookcase.
To nobody’s surprise, it was boring. Books on a bunch of mystic-physics mumbo jumbo Leo could not care any less about. There were some yokai-published books about humans, which he let himself be amused at for a few moments before moving on. TLDR, science stuff he did not care about.
Leo was about halfway through the folders when his hands stopped on an impossibly thin one. The other folders were all thick with files, sorted documents and papers that Leo assumed were about Draxum’s other experiment stuff. This one was peculiar in the sense that it was so empty compared to all the others, and yet it still stood on the shelf.
Curious, he pulled it out, and examined it.
The front was blank, the label looking to have been ripped off. When he opened it, he found only a single document with a few handwritten notes on it. He let out a quiet “ooh”, shifting on his feet and scanning the notes.
“DNA collected from the human. This will be the base for–”
His eyes couldn't wander any further. The alarming clop clop of footsteps further down the hall nearly made his heart fly out of his chest, because there was only one man those steps could belong to.
Shoving the folder under his arm, Leo scrambled for his sword, hastily slashing messy circles in the air until it sparked into a portal. He didn't think twice about where he might end up, knowing only that he needed to LEAVE as fast as he could.
And sure, maybe making a portal with no destination in mind was an inherently bad decision. But he didn't immediately fall into lava when he stepped through, so that was just another victory for Leo. Seriously, his portals could be so cool when they worked right.
It took him a few tries, landing himself in all kinds of locations– Paris, a rocky beach with some very alarmed looking seagulls, a very cold back alleyway in Russia– before he finally emerged onto a rooftop, the familiar buzz of Manhattan across the river.
Leo groaned, but he wasn't willing to test his luck against his portals any more today. His arms felt like jello, as if he’d punched something too hard, and he didn't want to risk getting himself stuck somewhere.
He shot one last look at the folder he’d stolen, and decided he’d read it at home. For now, he should focus on actually getting there.
It was four in the afternoon when he finally got back to his room.
He put whatever it was he stole from Draxum’s lab in a drawer, promising himself he’d look at it later. He got what he wanted from the trip– information, and most importantly, his energy expended. His bones felt like they had melted into a fine paste against his muscles, which was far more than he had asked for. So yeah, Leo was pretty ready to conk out for the night. Day. Whatever.
Ugh. He was so tired, he could barely even think. And knowing his luck, his insomnia would strike again.
But as Leo cozied up in his heap of sheets, relaxing into his pillow and pulling his fuzzy blanket over his shoulders, no such thing happened. He closed his eyes, and drifted to sleep without issue.
And now, trapped within a timeless dimension,
he realized that he never did look back at that folder, did he?
It had so readily slipped from his mind, like the world itself had delicately plucked the memory out of his brain. He even remembered seeing it in his drawer from time to time, but always thinking, oh, hey, it's that thing, and proceeding to promptly forget about it again.
His brothers had never found out about that insomnia-induced expedition. He never told them he had robbed Draxum. And afterwards, Draxum had never mentioned it, either. Not even after his Mikey-sponsored redemption arc.
Here, where the world could not reach him, Leo thought freely about it. He wondered what it meant. He wondered if it had even survived the Shredder’s attack on their old lair, or the moving of rooms. He had tossed some stuff during renovations, so there was a chance that the file had been thrown out right along with all of that.
He could remember what was written inside of it, too. Only vaguely. But the memory was there. And that was more than anything he’d gotten on earth.
His limbs twitched, as if craving the sensation of gravity. He craved it, too.
But here, he wondered who “the human” was. He wondered where they had gone when they realized Draxum’s motivations. And more than anything, he wondered why, why it had been “irrelevant data”.
He wanted to know who they were. He thought, only for a moment, who would hate someone so much, that the world itself did not want your existence to be remembered.
He wondered if anyone remembered him. He wouldn't want to remember himself, either.