Archive of Our Own

Somehow, the thing that unravels him entirely is a Jupiter Jim movie marathon.

Leo's sitting on the couch, wedged between the scales of his brothers in a nested home of safety and comfort, watching a projection of Jupiter Jim floating silently through space for what should be the hilariously small length of time it takes for the next movie to boot up, and — something inside him breaks.

Something shaped like childhood. Something that wasn't supposed to be frayed.

It was woven by a dozen thousand threads. A homemade tapestry of scrappy memories: laundry-basket bathtubs flooded with warm suds, scraped knees from falling off skate ramps, colorful band-aids for the visage of bruises that rarely blossomed, ragged blanket edges shuffled around affection and love. Easy wanting, unabashed and shameless, to be loved by his family, and getting it all the way through, even if he would never be able to articulate why. It was enough back then, and he's been carrying the echoes of those fluttering wingbeats between his ribs as some kind of comfort when no one else is around to articulate it for his abnormally empty mouth. For that, of all the fragmented pieces that make up the distorted expanse of Leo's mind, it was the part that he clung to the most tightly during his freefall in the void — the part of him that was supposed to stay intact as the image of him curled around it to protect it better than his physical body ever could.

It was supposed to stay untouched, untarnished. 

Apparently, it wasn't enough, he thinks, unable to tear his eyes off the flickering screen of the television. His heart thrashes violently in his chest like some feral creature, wailing kind of like the world is ending all over again. He doesn't really know whether to puke or cry; his body will probably decide soon enough for him, anyway, with how it doesn't seem to do much but betray him these days.

He'd intended to pay his penance in the form of a closed portal and an eternity, but his sentence was cut short; now, it seems like the Kraang just keep taking from him.

Ha. Ha.

Here's how Leo sees it. 

There are levels to innocence, or whatever, different ways of categorizing it — attribute them to different stages of life, maybe. That's probably Mikey-type science. And being locked in a prison dimension with a squishy pink alien bastard who has a very big grudge against you, with all the means and all the time in the universe to exact vengeance on you, means that inevitably: through the medium of spilled guts and the existential horror of eternity, you're going to lose some of that innocence. Have it clawed out, inch by inch of bloodied scales, mile by mile of empty black space.

(It's whatever, okay? Leo knew what he was doing when he threw himself in there, really, he did, he just… never really thought he'd have to reckon with its consequences in a tangible reality.)

There isn't really anything in his mind that Leo cherishes more than those scrappy memories of childhood, because that was the only time in his life where he didn't feel ashamed for being loved. Some innocence has to be more valuable than others, calculated through a rough approximation of I've been blasted through enough space rock to absorb some astronomy knowledge, which is basically calculus, right Donnie? If he only had to pick one comfort to hold onto for the rest of some incomprehensible length of forever of floating through space, he'd pick childhood, again and again and again.  Being loved easily, without reason, only reckless abandon: it's easy like that, even if childhood itself isn't uncomplicated.

Maybe holding onto it is the reason it broke. If his remarkably useless body can break, so can the things that he wanted to protect with a bubble-wrapped mind and that middle distance between. That image of a creature, retreated to the back of his mind.

The back of his mind. He's not that anymore.

Leo's been doing okay, alright? Not great, but no one can really be doing great when they're half-mummified in bandages from getting the shit thrashed out of them and are stuck on crutches between resin. Not great, but okay. Passing through these picture frames of life, some sequence of images shifting slightly to the left with each step. Time moves forward consistently and unrepentantly, unlike the syrupy hourglass of the prison dimension, and Leo clings to that fatal knowledge like some tethering lifeline during the metronomic space between heartbeats of red-light alarm clocks. 

It's easy. It's okay. 

So excuse him that he finds it a little bit hysterical — of all the things, of all the shit that he's been through, the thing that irreparably breaks something inside him is a Jupiter Jim movie. Jupiter Jim's Pluto Vacation IV, proclaimed favorite of the Donnie-April duo. A Jupiter Jim movie, from a B-movie franchise known for its impressively poor screenplays and such egregiously offensive mishandling of pretty much every woe it addresses that it circles back around to funny. It's the fact that he's watching a movie that he's watched a thousand and one times over again, with his brothers, his sister, during late nights tucked into a beanbag with heavy eyes that refuse to be swallowed by the impenetrable misery of sleep. And he's watching the movie in all its goofy, overdramatic surreality, and all he can think of is the prison dimension, and all he wants to do is puke or cry or both.

(Because it was cold and dark and lonely and an endless, drifting void of space that clung to him like molasses without warmth; the narrow middle space that still lingers on his scales despite being buried deep beneath the dirt of the Earth, where he should feel comforted by the claustrophobic pocket of solid geometry that was so profoundly absent in open space.)

Somewhere out in the vast expanse of space, Leo's body holds its breath and doesn't cry. Jupiter Jim just keeps drifting.

Because, sure — maybe he got reduced to complete, utter turtle-brain at some point during his frankly ridiculous, anime-torture-porn type beatdown, for a little bit. Maybe he got rattled around a little too hard for a little too long that even though there was no point in trying to fight, trying to hide, the tiny animal in his brain took over his impaired person and shoved itself into the cracks of his shell in some desperate attempt to bury further into this body it was destined to never exit. Maybe he was an animal that freaked the fuck out for hours at a time following his rescue before passing out into a coma for a week, and that gave good reason to his brothers to think that he's going to lose his mind given moment. But really, now that he's not getting flung around and reeled back in through the starless void like the gravity of some mangled party pinata, the animal has receded and he can think clearly. Mostly.

He's still so scared. He doesn't understand why he's still so scared when there's nothing left to be afraid of, the hurt locked up in that special hell he'd been pulled to leave behind. He still feels like a turtle crammed into its shell with a wildly flailing heart and nothing in its brain. He doesn't like being turtle and he never has, unlike the way that Donnie and Mikey and even Raph find some comfort in it; but after this, he's really rather never be turtle again.

Fear slithered on top of him like a second skin and he never figured out how to shed it off. He doesn't even know if he wants to, because — fear is bad, yeah, but what caused that fear is so, so much worse. It's an agony and a shield; the thin, crippled barrier between the detached slog of his brain sliding violently around his skull and the monster that slammed cold metal claws into his useless hollow of a body for hours on end. He wraps fear around himself and lets himself sit with it, become one with it, until it's just a part of this new version of him. That's okay — he's good at reshaping himself into whatever he needs to be, once he's admitted that it's who he has to be. 

He's been coping. He copes. 

In the art of rewiring, he's spent so long coiling himself inwards, tighter and smaller, that for a long time he didn't really fully know why he was so afraid to loosen in the first place. And then the invasion happened, and a haze of agony and echoing words and emptiness of floating through the dark void of space happened, and he understands the heavy, crushing weight of 3:00a.m. dread that his seven-year-old self could not articulate: to have a body is a curse. To be alive and seen is a curse. Gravity spiraled endlessly away from him and all he could do was hang uselessly suspended in a vat of viscous, liquid loneliness.

It's not that Leo doesn't want to be seen or to be given attention — that would be an antithesis to the whole premise of his existence. But as he is, a chronically dishonest animal-creature split down the middle, there's a showboat fueled by gasoline to please, and the remaining emotional mess that can't be fixed even by appearance, so it's better to just remain unseen.

And yet.

And yet, in the prison dimension at his absolute worst, he had the Kraang's full, undivided attention. It was the only time he could really be certain that someone was thinking about him entirely, seeing him for the exact wretched animal-creature that he was, and finding gratification in it enough to want him. And some tiny, pathetic part of him twisted into the flawed wiring of his brain feels good about that in a really disgusting and shameful way, and there's nothing to talk about in regards to the prison dimension the way that his brothers keep harassing him because all that happened was he got his shit sacked exactly the way they could see imprinted all over his stupid meatbag of a body.

Innocence, or whatever.

Like — haha, okay, here's the thing. Look at it this way. Leo would very, very much rather eat a sock soaked in soy sauce sooner than let someone that he wants to be loved by see an honest version of his unlovable, obnoxious traits, which is pretty much underlying all of him if he's being truthful because he's the worst, so — so he'd rather not be perceived in truth. And the Kraang saw all those ugly aspects to Leo's very small existence: the way that he throws on a short facade of stage bravado for the sake of dazzling and distracting until it's too late to get a real word in; the way that the moment the curtain closes its last, he's going to shrink inwards like a shriveled-up sponge that had temporarily inflated with insubstantive soapy ego. The way he dons the name of hope for those who need it, then goes giving up and taking it the moment no one he wants to be loved by is still around to see, because even if it had been his plan all along, it didn't alleviate the fissured fractures in his brain by any means that signaled, Now is about a good time to give up. Giving up was part of the plan; send the hope forward, it's enough to carry his own name. His family didn't give up on him, but he did, and it makes his lameness about ten times more pathetic by immediate contrast. He knows all this, and the Kraang saw it all up close and personal, and —

And, well, it's not like Leo wanted to be loved by the Kraang, okay? It's just, with that resignation to the end, some nebulous, unimaginable concept known as an eternity of just floating helplessly, mindlessly through the vast expanse of the void, it'd — it'd be nice for his roommate 'til the end of time to want him, or something like that.

And the Kraang did want him, his ugly qualities on full display and all. Maybe he wanted him all the more for his ugly qualities, because then it would never get old to beat down on, or something. Something.

He just laid there with his gross guts spilling out, mostly metaphorically but also kind of physically, and he was wanted so desperately. There was time he spent drifting alone and even then, when the fear seized his heart so crushingly tight that it gave way to a numb emptiness, he still knew he would be wanted again soon enough. The only promise in the void.

That doesn't happen to him.

Leo's not exactly sure, but somewhere along the line of being pulled out of that place and the painful process of settling back into this body, it got a little twisted up. Love, want. The Kraang was — is — thinking about him, wanting him, the rawest assailed version of him that gave up the fight so damn quickly, prone and useless, with a person-brain unwilling to do anything to lessen the pain or the fear because it was easier that way, and a turtle-brain fully succumbed to the bottom-of-the-lake ease of separation and hiding. Both pathetic on the between and heights of their pendulum swing, and both so fully thought about and wanted. 

It doesn't matter. He's taking it all to the grave, when his stupid reactionary body is decomposed enough to never betray him again.

But until then, it's just something that he carries with him, crammed in the corner of the bathroom between shaking legs, on trembling fingers, drenched in shame and disgust and a thought that he'll never even bother trying to love like that. Not that he was ever interested, but now it's fully cemented in his heart, and isn't that a shame to lose the option of growing into it?

It's just another thing that has been unraveled. Left him unraveled, more like.

And really, he was okay with it. Mostly. He's learning to be okay with it, just like he's trying to be okay with all those other pieces of himself that he's managed to lose in one fell swoop: one specially uncomfortable facet of the penance he pays for what he did to his brothers, what he almost did to the world.

The point is, it was far enough from childhood, anyway. A different one of those intangible named things of innocence, or whatever. It's not for childhood, so it can be — like, teenager-hood or something. Donnie wouldn't be very impressed by Leo's mastery of the English language, but the point remains:

If Leo had to lose one, it would always be that.

But maybe I'm just supposed to lose everything, he thinks, watching paralyzed as the darkest scene is abruptly plunged into the light of the sequel, numb corpse pulled past that cold spot in the lake. It went on too long; time spiraled away violently and thoroughly, again.

Leo watches the movie. Leo wonders if he should puke or cry. Leo doesn't move.

It was easy enough for his scrambled brain to make him feel something good in the loss of "teenager-hood", even if it's not good of itself. He can reason the same for childhood, but maybe without the good feelings, just the good qualities.

So really, Leo can reason: it's for the better, isn't it? Is it really punishment so much as a kindness for the betterment of himself? Childhood would always weigh him down, despite the miracle of there being nothing heavy about it — the absence of a father, the absence of a frantic heart awake at 3:00a.m., the absence of a fight. It was never heavy, but opposite enough to everything else he's known since, and now he knows that it holds the capacity for a fatal distraction that he can't afford. It's for the better. It had to happen to him because he only learns lessons the hard way, it's the only way he knows how, and it's for the better that he learned this one before the hard way is Raph dying. All of them, dying. Something like that. Something of a gift, kind of like an electric collar, but with no good-intent behind it.

It had to happen to him, okay?

It had to happen. It had to happen. It's a lesson. It's penance. It had to happen.

(It hurts to keep losing, over and over again.)

Leo blinks rapidly at the fluorescent lights of the bathroom ceiling, because apparently his body has suddenly and already decided for him — he is going to puke at what was supposed to be his favorite movie franchise, that sour acrid feeling already burning its way up his throat unpleasantly, tongue bitten hard enough for a sharp metallic sting to settle. 

Eugh, boy. Well, that's fine, if not humiliating and gross. Leo makes sure to keep his head firmly over the toilet bowl so he can just flush it down and forget about it. 

Ha. Like Piebald, amiright?

Okay — ideally not like Piebald, considering how she came back to haunt them. Yeesh, what a prank of which the outcome is starting to feel an awful lot like some really cosmically comical foreshadowing of the past month. That's something he'd rather not think about. Haha.

Everything hurts so much. He's not supposed to be up and running around for very good reason, with the way that pain settles into the fractures of his shell like water seeps into soil, the base of his spine quivering from a violent pressure that doesn't exist. Leo thinks that this must be what Dad feels like whenever he's complaining about his back, except it's his entire body fully overextended and barely functional. He supposes he may as well resign himself to the bathroom floor until he can not only mentally but also physically get himself together. 

The consequences of freaking-the-fuck-out while fresh off a concussion and still 80% mummified, everybody! 

The Hidden City doctors said that he'd recover okay as long as he's not stupid (paraphrased), and this whole situation firmly falls on the side of stupid. Hopefully he hasn't, like, permanently damaged himself. 

(Oh, who is he kidding; he's already done that, but he can always make it worse.)

At least his body was smart enough to drag him to the bathroom, even if he can't exactly thank it for the physical agony getting sent through his brain waves. He can't let anyone be around to see this whole situation, not if he doesn't want to get put in another twenty layers of bubble wrap. He's situated in his body and he's completely losing it, despite being held in the heart of the claustrophobic earth instead of anchorless and drifting among a starless void space. Despite, despite, despite. It all comes down to his stupid, breakable brain and something as dumb as a Jupiter Jim movie proving to him that there's no coming back from the image of his own death and destiny to be distraught and alone forever — no coming back from the full intention to die and passively let it happen to him, because it's easier than the alternative of living. It all comes down to this proof being enough for something tiny in him to crack open and swallow all the good smiles that he's put together for his family and leave him throwing up on the bathroom floor for literally no good reason at all.

"Leo?" Raph.

… Apparently, turtle-brained Leo cannot implement the art of ninjitsu in his extremely intelligent, forward escape from a Jupiter Jim movie marathon. That's definitely not not lame.

"Are you okay?" Raph continues. "You didn't seem so good during the movie and then you suddenly left in a real hurry. I brought your crutches."

Leo's mouth opens, seven different not-yet concocted excuses ready to slide off his tongue in real time, when all at once this crippling fear of letting anything leave his mouth grabs him by the heart and it closes so fast.

Say something, you idiot.

Much to Leo's dismay, a small pathetic whine escapes from the back of his throat, and Raph's concern audibly doubles.

"Hey, hey," Raph urges. "C'mon, Leo — let me in, buddy. Raph can't help you from out here."

He's not scared, he's not scared (even though the fear lives in him, wriggles atop his scales, eats him alive whenever he settles into his body too heavily). There's nothing to be afraid of. He squashes down the frantic fluttering of the thought of speaking. He can do whatever unpleasantness needs to be done because innocence be damned, he's grown up and mature, now.

There's an infinity of other things to be more afraid of. He knows this intimately enough.

Just say something. 

"No," Leo protests weakly, the word strangled in his throat, bouncing off the metal wall of the bathroom door. He coughs and tries again. "You don't — You don't have to waste your time on me. I'm fine, Raph."

"You don't sound so fine," Raph retorts. He's probably already begun imagining all the horrible ways that Leo is spiraling, mentally and physically, and he'd be exactly right, which is why —

Leo takes a deep breath. Deter. 

He can fix this. 

He pivots, switches on the dramatic, punchable smarminess and image of irresponsibility that had successfully carried himself and his crippling insecurity through a decade of people caring about him, and opens his loud mouth. "Fine, you win, I am not fine. Listen, don't tell him, but I might've had way too much of Donnie's flavorless juice stash, and now I maybe had to puke in the toilet. And —" Leo lowers his voice, injecting as much childishness as he can muster into the warning — "it's kinda not just puke."

Make Raph mad for him sneaking into Donnie's stuff. Give him the moral quandary of Should I tell Donnie? or Should I let Leo off the hook because he learned his lesson the hard way as it's the only way he knows how?, because Raph is the only one of the four of them who could successfully pass a class on ethics. Induce a bit of disgust that discourages that second line of thought from leading to Raph busting down the door to help his sick little brother. Be unapologetically snarky enough to incentivise Raph back towards the first line of thought, then after a moment, gag loudly enough to permanently halt Raph in his tracks of indecision so he won't go through with sending Donnie to bust down the door for an ass-beating. And —

Yeah, okay, this is exactly why Leo's the worst. Here's his older brother who loves him way too much and just wants to help him feel better, and here he is, halfway to patting himself on the back for a manipulation well-done.

Except.

Except then Raph doesn't do the predictable thing of freezing up and leaving him be. It really doesn't help that Leo doesn't just gag but actually starts puking again because he started thinking too hard about how awful he is to Raph, how comfortable it is to just manipulate him into paralysis, and that spiraled downward very quickly and very dangerously.

Wonderful. Master manipulator, here. Tongue of silver, stomach of steel and all.

Leo doesn't think he used to be this prone to vomiting at every little mental discomfort, even if he's gotten considerably better at not vomiting at physical discomforts. Minus another point for Leo. 

(At some point in the ordeal of being pummeled around space endlessly for an unmeasurable amount of time, his stomach was definitely empty enough for vomiting up any more of his insides to just sound so unappealing that he acquired a sense for swallowing it back down. At some point he realized there literally wasn't anything left inside of him to throw up even if he tried, some parallel to the trajectory of his newly revived life on the plane of mortal existence: he's just destined to get fully hollowed out of everything that comprises Leo. It never stopped his body's attempts to purge.)

"Leo?" Raph calls, nothing but worry in his voice; not an inch of the reprimandation that Leo had tried to cultivate, expected to grow. "Leo, if you don't let me in, I'm going to come in anyway."

"You don't wanna come in here," Leo says frantically, and damn it, this is all spiraling out of his control. "Hey, Raph — Raph, stop! C'mon, think about sparing yourself every now and then! It's getting real nasty!"

Why can't he salvage this? He used to be better at feigning being fine until he was actually proven to be fine. Maybe the Kraang really did break something actually tangible in his stage character. 

(Damn, that sucks. Add another one to the list. He would say that maybe it's for the better that it'll keep him honest, except it's really not for the better for everyone else who'll have to bear the brunt of his honesty.)

"All the more reason for Raph to help you," Raph says, unbothered as the door hinges crunch with an echo of screeching metal (bad, bad, bad) and the door itself falls away.

Leo breathes carefully for several long moments, and refuses to raise his head from the toilet and look his shame in the eye. "Donnie's gonna kill you for that," he groans out through flecks of spittle.

"Donnie's gonna deal with it," Raph says. "We got a pact when it comes to your… this whole situation."

That causes Leo to fling his head around, utterly betrayed. "… Dee made a pact without me?"

But Raph doesn't respond, eyes wide at Leo's face. Leo cringes.

"What, do I really look that bad?" he jokes, fully ready to run his mouth despite the gross soreness in the back, despite the near-paralyzing fear of speaking because being seen through is just the same as getting hurt. "Beauty Z's are kiiinda hard to catch when you're locked up in the medbay for weeks. I keep tellin' ya, you've gotta let me out sooner, but nooo, I have to 'stop moving around' and 'stay here so we can make sure you don't explode the instant we don't know exactly where you are in the confines of the lair'. For the record, that's what you and the bros sound like."

"Leo," Raph interrupts, cutting straight through Leo's unfiltered blabber, "you got blood on your face."

Eugh, boy.

Yeah, that's… that's not really a good look.

Leo attempts to plaster on a sheepish smile and ends up just grimacing because all of this is gross. "… Would you believe me if I said that I ate part of Mikey's paint set again?"

"What do you mean again? How many paint sets have you eaten?" Raph demands, before shaking his head violently. "No, no, you're not gettin' out of this one, Leo. You — You can't even get your story straight! I knew you were lying about the juice." He picks up a cup off the sink counter and fills it with water. 

Leo watches with trepidation as Raph pads across the bathroom tiles, crouches right in front of him. He's not a cornered animal anymore. He's eliminated that turtle brain so thoroughly from his countenance that he will never, ever do something like pull himself into his shell and babble turtle sounds. He doesn't ever want to be turtle again. Leo's knees are folded on the floor, splayed slightly apart so he can kneel on the floor at the exact right elevation, needles splitting through his veins at every contact point. The cup of water is pressed into his trembling hands and Leo can't do anything but stare down into the crystal refractions dumbly.

"What brought this on?" Raph asks quietly, like if he speaks it too loud, the what might actualize itself in real time. He seems to have already figured out that Leo's not sick in the easy way.

Leo shrugs jerkily and tries to not laugh. He could try to lie, but apparently these days, no one will believe him anyway.

"Stupid movie," he tells Raph honestly. "Haha."

Raph's brow furrows in confusion, thinking, until his eyes suddenly clear up. "Oh," he breathes.

"Yeah, oh." Leo doesn't mean to sound mocking, but if judging by the way Raph's face drops, it probably comes out that way anyway. Stupid inability to sound anything but sarcastic. "Don't worry about it."

"That's not — Why didn't you say anything?"

Leo shrugs again. Flippancy edges in. "I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm really bad at thinking ahead."

"All of this coulda been avoided if you'd just talk to us." Raph sounds so, so frustrated, voice climbing upwards in volume. "Donnie knows every darn second of that movie; he would've been able to tell ya it's not worth watching."

And Leo can't help it; faced with the mirror of months of arguing and misery guilt loneliness, he tips the rest of the way backwards and lands on old habits. He takes advantage of the distraction that the glass of water offers to him to ignore Raph getting upset with him like the way Leo has cornered him to be, being as obnoxiously pointed about chugging it as possible, despite the choking way the water fills his throat. It's easy. It's how their story goes. 

Yet once again — 

Raph doesn't do the predictable thing of responding to the song and dance by getting angrier and more upset by provocation; instead, like a punctured balloon, his anger deflates, and he sinks lower to the ground, closer to Leo. He pulls the emptied glass out of his shaking hands and sets it aside.

"Why won't you just talk to us about what happened to you?" Raph asks. His hand is cupped to reach towards Leo's jaw but there's nothing there to comfort, just a bruise and the space of knocked-out teeth, and the hesitance that resides in his motions since the invasion maintains the space anyway, so it doesn't matter.

Leo smiles and it's something fragile, breakable, a little bit manic. He wants to laugh so, so bad. He is laughing. All he can do is laugh and say, kind of helplessly, "I don't know what to tell you."

He can't — He can't not laugh at things that hurt. It's impossible for him. Something's wrong with the wires crossed in his brain and it makes it so he laughs at all the wrong times and spits out lies even if he really ought to be telling the truth. Sometimes he thinks that Donnie performing a beginner's lobotomy experiment on him would see more success in making him normal than he could ever pretend to be.

"I… nothing happened," he tries. His voice catches on a giggle and he tries so hard to squish it down, to be serious, the way that Raph wants him to be so bad. But his stupid mixed-up brain can't take anything seriously no matter how bad he'd like to do right by Raph, and really, that's why he ended up this way. His inability to take anything seriously. His inability to stop making a joke of everything until everyone that he loves is pissed and furious at the edge he expels into the air, and everything down to the pebbles of the earth falls apart. He clears his throat and tries again and refuses to look up, to see the disappointment that must be clear in his brother's eyes. "Really, nothing that hadn't already happened happened. There isn't anything to talk about because nothing happened."

(Just marinating in the rest of time — some big, nebulous concept like the entire world that he could never really conceptualize until those hours of hanging, suspended in space, a liquified oxymoronic distance between an onslaught of pain and a numb emptiness from acceptance and a crippling fear that never collapsed inward the way the former had eventually over time. Nothing happened.)

"Leo…" Raph trails off.

"Like," Leo cuts in, desperate to make Raph understand, "I got beat up, but so did — so did all of you guys. We all got the crap beat out of us, okay? I'm not special just 'cause I got some deluxe one-on-one extended treatment. I mean — you…" He stops, because trying to articulate just what happened to Raph — what his actions did to Raph — might make him claw out his own throat before he can say enough to sate his older brother. "It's not about me."

See? He's finally learned the lessons that Raph needed him to know, to understand, because he gets it now.

Between Leo's embarrassing, hysterical giggling, he manages to push out, "You wanted me to be more serious. I did what I could, I've been doing what I could — I'm trying, okay? But this is —" He breaks off entirely, a sharp hollowness piercing through the marrow of his interior bones like a parallel echo to the laughter bubbling deliriously out of his exterior body. He says, small, haltingly, "I'm sorry I can't be more serious. I've been trying. It's just so funny."

"What's funny, Leo?" Raph asks. His expression itself is doing something funny, almost enough to send Leo straight back into the laughter that Raph is sick of.

God, Raph is so sick and tired of Leo's joking. He doesn't know how to stop. It's all that he can do if he tries to think about the prison dimension for all of two seconds. His entire life, really. It's woven into his circuitry — he has to laugh at the most inappropriate of times, if only to piss off his brothers a little bit more, to make him a little bit more intolerable. He doesn't know how to stop laughing, how to stop being so obnoxiously unserious. It's impossible. He's committed to the bit, all the way, and it's painful every time his family buys into it wholeheartedly because a tiny part of him that he tries to keep smothered is always screaming, I'm right here, and I didn't really mean that and I'm sorry all I know how to do is lie.

He steadies himself for several seconds until he's sure that he's tampered down the urge, and says, "You keep asking what happened to me. What, you want me to detail just exactly how I got the shit kicked out of me? I can barely even remember, okay? You can see it all over me, anyway. I don't know what to tell you."

Leo's not entirely sure if he can't remember because he was in enough pain to black out or if it's because his brain locked the worst of it behind a wall that'll inevitably come crashing down at some extraordinarily unpleasant moment. If judging by his luck, it's probably the latter.

Leo shoves his face into his arms and snuffles, burning body the only gravity keeping his mind tethered. Raph's presence hovers, uncertain, pained, like every moment between them since the day.

There's always been a quiet kind of shame that settles into him whenever someone he loves sees him upset.

Having feelings. Long ago, something in Leo's animal-creature-brain decided that being perceived by his loved ones as an emotional being is the worst possible thing in the world that could ever happen, and now he's spent nearly a decade doing everything in his power to ensure that it doesn't happen.

He was doing decently, all things considered. One breakdown for Gram-Gram, but that was justified because he could never even dare to pretend to not have loved her; one sequence of breakdowns for waking up from a coma, because everything hurt in an indescribably overwhelming and huge way that his broken body couldn't contain mixed with the pounding realization that he was very, very much alive against all learned resignation and expectations. One or maybe a dozen in the prison dimension, because there wasn't really much else to do between getting reeled in and cast back out but to drift and dream and cry — for fear of the pain to come, but never really during the act of it itself.

Only the photograph ever bore witness to those ones, but it was still enough for the shame to curdle in his gut like some unloved child.

(The photograph, and the Kraang, and — and innocence, or whatever. Leo's not some goody two shoes, okay? He has no misconceptions about himself in that department. The moment they were five year olds and picking up Dad's weapons for the first time, and those twin swords just slotted into Leo's hands — he was never really destined to take the moral high ground. Of his brothers, he's the one who inflicts the most explicit violence, up close and personal — his mystic powers don't give him distance the way Raph's projections and Donnie's constructions and Mikey's infinite chains do; instead, the portals make him trickier, more slippery, only an opportunity to get closer to and succeed at drawing the blood by his sword. Leo was never meant to be 'innocent' when it comes to the fight, with a sword in his hand and an intent to survive. It's an inevitability. It's whatever.)

Raph sighs really big and heavy, the weight of the whole world once again hanging off his shoulders. Leo put it there, all by himself, not even some external plot to build it; his existence alone is simply too much like that. 

(When Splinter made Leo the leader, obviously there was the initial confusion, but then —? Even through the hurt, Raph was very, obviously, clearly relieved. For a moment, at least, until Leo's stupid anxious brain had to make everything twenty times worse by proving that it was a bad idea, because he couldn't handle a little responsibility and growing up — not even for the sake of his older brother who had carried too much for too long.

No matter how Leo prefers to act, he's not completely stupid. He went with Splinter to confront Big Mama like that because he knew he could handle her, and a small underlying part of him that was still seven and squirming for an ounce of his dad's affection or praise or both wanted to ensure that his dad was the one to see the pieces fall into place. And — well, it hurt while Splinter evidently had zero-to-negative faith in him the entire day until the checkmate occurred, but that's fine. The point got across: Leo's not stupid.

And —

And Splinter started paying more attention to him during training. Asked him about their patrols when they returned. And Leo started to have this inkling that maybe Splinter took the message and started getting the wrong ideas from it. All his life, he'd wanted his Dad to understand that there's more to Leo, but…

Expectations are scary.

Death is scary.

More than either, the expectation of preventing the death of his brothers is really, really scary.

Leo isn't meant for expectations, because all he'll ever do is fail them. It's an intimate truth that settles behind his ribs, inside the flesh of his heart more easily than any other truth has.

So he started to try to reverse the damage he'd done with his old game. He leaned into the stupidity, the incompetency, the irresponsibility that he always tried to shy from to ease just some of Raph's heavy heart, if only to show Dad that he's not supposed to be any more. Look at the sheer amount of poisoned pizza puffs he can shamelessly consume in a day. Big Mama was a fluke. He's not ready to be anything more than the self-proclaimed face man, he's not.

And yet, despite everything, it wasn't enough. Dad still made him leader.

Raph never wanted to be leader. Leo knows this, because Raph's told him, entrusted him with that piece of information. All Raph ever wanted to be was the oldest brother, and sometimes, Leo suspects that even that truth wavers at times. Raph never wanted to be leader, even if he'd take up the mantle again and again if it meant keeping his brothers safe, the antithesis of Leo.

Raph didn't want the title back, not truly. And Dad wouldn't give it back.

Because Leo's the worst, he just kept pushing and pushing and pushing to force their hand. He stomped all over the truth that Raph confessed about leadership like he didn't care, even when he does because he was so stupidly afraid. So afraid, caving into his fear, expelling his noxious response, because he'd thought it would be enough to alleviate.

Now, he knows. He's learned his lesson — had it hammered into him, physically and emotionally.

Like Dad said — he only ever learns the hard way. And it's not about him.

Leo gets it now, even if his heart doesn't. He's made to bear the burden better than Raph, which is why Dad put it on him. Maybe it's inevitable that he cracks under the pressure and breaks irreparably, but until then, he can't just slack off; he has to do what needs to be done. Ignore the part that it feels like it's already too late; everyone's acting like it isn't, so he needs to keep being better as they need. Take the lesson of love to heart: accountability, responsibility.

The specifics of what entailed to ensure that lesson got learned isn't important. What's important is that Raph knows that Leo understands now. That's he's working to take the bad things in stride because they make him better the way he needs to be.

Raph doesn't need to keep sighing really big and heavy, the weight of the whole world hanging off his shoulders. Not if Leo can prove that he's got himself together.)

"I mean —" Leo begins, then cuts himself off, shuddering and forcing himself to at least look towards Raph. Not in the eye; he settles on the hole in his shell, which nauseates him just the same, but at least won't fling him into dishonesty. It holds him accountable, where the lesson's learned. "It's whatever. It's kind of for the better that I'm not going to be watching Jupiter Jim anymore, amiright?" Laugh.

"… What?"

Despite himself, Leo shrinks back, not entirely sure what that tone of voice means — and isn't that strange, to suddenly find your big brother unreadable to you despite a decade and a half of knowing him better than you could ever know yourself? His mouth runs ahead of his brain, refusing him the space to process if he should. "Like. If I stop wasting my time with watching JJ, then I can get better at being the leader you and Dad want me to be. Uh — I need to be. Once I'm good to go, that is. Haha. Ha." His voice shrinks with each word, smaller and smaller, like that animal-creature in his brain coils further into itself with each passing second. He doesn't know why it's doing that, because he's thought this through so many times it may as well be a fully drafted layout for the mess of his new circuitry.

There's a very, very quietly dangerous look to Raph's eyes. Leo frantically wrangles the very, very scared creature in his brain and chains it to the ground with a litany of unfiled claws, wrestles the beak shut until it gets the message: Shut up. He doesn't know how to be scared of Raph because that's not him.

"Sorry," is punched out of him anyway. "Sorry, sorry, I'm sorry."

He doesn't really know what he's apologizing for, only that he needs to. Because he's finally saying the right things, right? He's admitting that he did wrong to Raph, spewing out the direction to alleviating his guilt like a response to a years-long confessional, but — now Raph just looks upset yet again and he's done enough of making Raph upset for a lifetime and some (enough to spend the rest of his life paying penance in the form of losing love for childhood shapes).

"Wait, no," Raph blurts out. "Keep — Keep going. Talk to me, Leo. Help me understand."

Help me understand. That's good, that's a relief — Raph is willing to hear out exactly why Leo needs to be better.

Raph doesn't like baseless apologies. Leo wracks his brain and tries to calculate the right move through a haze of a month's worth of dragging tiredness.

"It's not about me," he manages.

Leo's not completely stupid. He knows that for whatever perpetually inexplicable reason, Raph loves him a lot, and Raph doesn't want to hear him saying stuff about how the family would be better off with him dead. He can keep quiet about that part, regardless of its truth. But Raph wants him to take responsibility, and right now, Leo's just verbally expressing a promise to do exactly what Raph wants of him — what his brothers need of him. He just needs to explain it better for Raph to see the correlation.

"I learned the lesson the hard way, but the point is that I learned it, okay? You know that's the only way I learn. And if this — this is the punishment? Can't watch Jupiter Jim? Whatever, it's fine, 'cause it'll make sure I have more time to get better at keeping you all safe. That's all that matters. You're all that matters to me."

Drive it home. The prison dimension was the best way to ensure that those lessons aren't going anywhere.

"So I got what I deserved!" Leo hisses through his teeth. He makes to throw out his hands, but the movement catches painfully in his shoulder and he halts the motion abruptly, like every other sudden ending to his follow-throughs of late. "I had to face the consequences of my actions, so I — I'm making up for what I did. To the world, and to — to all of you. I had to. It had to happen to me, otherwise I'd find a way to miss the point. Maybe it's a gift!"

(He has to fight the soft, selfish part of his brain that wanted nothing but to go home all those weeks ago. Crawl inside the shell, tear out the flesh. Stop wriggling.)

"Don't you get it?" Leo pleads, just trying to make Raph understand, but Raph's face is just getting more and more upset. To lay it all out is an embarrassment and a shame, but Raph needs to understand enough to reinforce this truth of reason that Leo clings to as desperately as he does time. "Tell me that I fucked up, that I got what I deserved. I want —" 

Leo cuts himself off and retries. "The prison dimension and everything now is just the price I have to pay for my stupid, stupid mistakes of not listening to you, for being so mean to you. I made up for it. I'm making up for it. I'm being better."

"You don't have to make up for anything," Raph insists through watery eyes. "Not like that. Never like that."

"I made up for it," Leo says, near-sobs, just a red herring. "I'm the one who lost the key, I'm the one who paid the price. Just tell me. I can take it, I —"

"Leo, just — just stop for a moment." 

Raph's visibly thinking hard, and Leo finally tries his best to stay quiet, to stay focused and serious like he's supposed to, pressing down the laughter bubbling up in his chest the way it does every time his traitorous body even thinks about crying. Just another temporary attempt to suppress the chemical imbalance in his composition. Just another temporary attempt to kill the creature in his brain.

Finally, Raph asks, "Leo, why do you want me to tell you that you deserved to get hurt so bad?"

And isn't that a question?

Because —

(Because if this isn't penance, then it's just cruelty. Because then it's just, life isn't fair. Because then it's just, the universe hates you, and it's just, this could happen to you again and again and again for no justifiable reason. And how does he live with that, knowing that one day, even if he does everything right, even if he makes the right plans and sticks to the right morals and loves the right ways, he could be hurt like that again? That despite everything, that violently and thoroughly unraveled thread holding together a childhood that was meant to stay burrowed and safe, he could still lose more of himself. That indiscriminatory claws could carelessly and unrelentingly dig further, further, further inside of him to take things he didn't even know were his to lose, just the same way his body's innocence around the ideas of attention and gratification had been, and that he would leave behind some empty husk in the shape of his cracked shell that might carry nothing but a semblance of a stolen name?

If this isn't penance, then he could still lose the rest of himself for nothing at all.)

"I just." Leo is quiet. He doesn't like that, but being any louder would make him easy prey. He's trying very, very hard to not slip away into the void of his mind the way that comfort and pain have coalesced into one and the same place of hiding. "If I didn't deserve it, then why — why did it happen to me?"

"Oh, buddy." 

Raph sounds so, so openly devastated in a way that Leo never wants to hear again. I did that.

This is why he shouldn't talk about himself. It isn't about him, it's better for it to not be.

"I mean," Leo interjects the silence, trying to backpedal the plaintive stupidity of his question, "I know why, I put myself there, but I — I had to, okay?"

"I — you — C'mere." Helplessly, Raph opens his arms and grabs at Leo, and even though he's sixteen and not a little mug-sized turtle spending his nights wailing to be held by his big brother, the latent instincts tip him forward directly into green scales that he buries his face into, hoping the pressure will be enough to cage in the sobbing his useless body so wants to give in to.

Being hugged by Raph is steady, an unshakeable comfort that always finds some way to wriggle into the self-imposed space between Leo and his own bad feelings, and maybe that's why the past months have had Leo spiraling further and further away from some abstract idea of his internal self and his external expressions that aren't just pitiful laughter, tight and brittle and prone to break. Because any affection from Raph is a curse, a sentence for the ending of this illusion that Leo has so doggedly tried to construct in the shape of aggravating negligence. He doesn't think he's been hugged by Raph for months, sans a faint recollection of burbling, frantic thrashing in the wreckage of a pungent island. Just another moment locked away, not enough to sustain some sanity off of. Leo goes boneless, melting instantly and almost violently into the embrace, suddenly unable to hold his body sack up, kind of like some kinder replication of laying on cold rock with guts spilling out, and — that's not a good thought.

"Okay. Okay." Raph peers down at him with a fierce, steady look of determination in his eyes that could almost resemble the way that he stares down the imposition of a monster — except that unimaginably big fierceness isn't anger, but love, enough that Leo really wants to cry. "Listen carefully to me, Leo, okay? Please?"

"Okay," Leo whispers, because he's spent long enough turning away.

"Nothing you could do could ever make you deserve to be hurt like that. It wouldn't matter what you did or didn't do." Raph inhales. "Even if you hadn't even tried to stop them. Even if you had put that key straight into the Foot's hands and told me you're not sorry. You could never deserve what that monster did to you, you understand?"

Leo falters.

"And… And I'm sorry that it happened to you," Raph says wetly. "That I let it happen. You'll never know how sorry I am."

And if Leo was less of a coward, he would hook onto those words with sharpened claws and dig in, because Leo's dumb mistakes are never Raph's fault the way that he tries so hard to be culpable and capable all the freakin' time. He'd dig in and never let go, would cling to the shape of his big brother until he finally understood that he's never done anything wrong ever and Leo would sooner die than let Raph spend the rest of his own life feeling at fault.

As it is, tiny and reticent, all that he can manage to mumble is: "Not your fault."

(He looked into the eye of an ancient entity in the shape of a god and calculated the very way he would die, and told Raph, Hero moves are totally your style.)

Raph doesn't give him a verbal response, just holds him tighter.

"It's just Jupiter Jim," Leo says, maybe a little bit hysterical as he starts laughing again, keeps laughing to never start crying, because this is funny, it is; everything is funny when it comes to his feelings. "It's just Jupiter Jim. It's just another — thing. It sucks. Raph, I…" His voice catches and the laughter dies a horrible, swift death. The frayed thread snaps. Cut strings of a weave: "I'm tired."

Despite himself, despite his desperate scrambling to make sense of why this had to happen to him — in this moment, all that his emotional turtle brain can really comprehend is that it hurts so much.

It hurts that he can't even enjoy his favorite movie franchise with all its memories without thinking about fear and the void of space and relentless pain. His childhood just kind of erupted quietly and without a sound and he returned to the remnants of the volcano, hot debris swirling around his feet. That's it. That's it. The Kraang took a lot from him physically, took his body, his comfort, his safety, his humanity — but somehow, stupidly, the worst thing that it took from him was his childhood in the form of a movie that he loved. 

He's tired of finding new ways to lose. It never ends.

Leo presses his face all the way into Raph's plastron. "I thought I paid enough, but they just keep taking things from me," he mumbles. "It's not — It's not fair." It's small, childishly petulant the way he says it, but — it's all that he can muster, peeled raw and hollowed out, and the way his voice cracks and bleeds beneath the bravado he's tried so hard to sustain makes the rest of him crack all the way. And the creature is sobbing relentlessly, the pathetic turtle-brain crammed all the way into its shell in some desperate attempt to escape the threat of being present and being loved. There's a part of Leo that is trying so carefully to not lose his precarious balance and tip in after it, while the rest of him really wouldn't mind. He can't bear to pull his face away and look up at his older brother, for shame, and his voice just keeps warbling uncontrollably, "Raph, Raph, Raphie, it's not fair."

"It's not," Raph agrees. "It's not fair, Lee, and I… I'm sorry." His voice sounds wrecked and suddenly, abruptly, it sends Leo straight into tears.

Leo lets go. Like falling backwards into the void, giving up on his sanity and spite, giving into the worst version of himself that doesn't know how to keep moving forward; giving up, and taking it, that relentless agony pummeled into him, the passive acceptance that he's going to die and there's no point at all in trying to do anything about it. Things just happen to him and that's it, that's it — that's all that crying is, with how it takes over your body and mind all-consumingly.

It isn't fun. Leo doesn't like crying and never has because not only is it really embarrassing, but also it's just a very unpleasant feeling that lingers beyond the trails of salty tears on his face, settling on top of his eyelids and inside his nose and making him feel a little bit less human than he already does on most days. These days, he especially doesn't like it, that synonym of the fragile mess that he's become. It's gross and miserable and only ever exacerbates the ache in his heart and bones in overwhelming and indescribable ways, and he's had enough time of instability and wreckage to not want that, frantic and choking and wet and scary with how easily and entirely it takes over the capacity of his mind.

Crying is a lot like what Leo imagines it must feel like to drown.

It's heavy. It's a lot.

"It's okay. I got you," Raph rumbles to the top of Leo's head, a low vibration that runs comfort through Leo's bones.

It's so, so scary, to tip forward and come undone and give in to giving up, something like being a creature thing falling through space with a vengeful monster-god, and yet —

It's a relief. Raph doesn't let go and Leo doesn't have to coil himself inwards, tighter and smaller the way he's been doing for so long, because Raph's got him as he is. Just the way he has for the first fifteen years of his life, holding onto him through all of childhood and never letting go unless so asked. Raph holds him through the unraveled mess that he's become, loose and frayed threads collapsed in a heap without a spool, and isn't going to let him fall apart any further.

Leo cries, goddamnit, while his big brother holds him for the first time in months. And for once, even knowing the possibility that it was never penance, held in the weave of this shielded place in the big, nebulous world, the option to lose more feels so impossibly far away. And even though his physical body has turned into something often unconfrontable and he can't watch his favorite childhood movie franchise without puking and crying, or whatever — Raph would still take him thread by thread and weave him back together with his own two hands if he needed it, that same big brother who sewed his stuffed unicorn back together when he was seven and jumped off a roof after him when he was fourteen with the same unflinching, unstoppable determination.

Jupiter Jim is just another thing he's lost. Another one of those things shaped like innocence, or whatever, burrowed in the childhood he wanted so bad to keep. But it's not alone for what it is, and submerged in the burning clarity of salt water, it feels so silly to act like that's it when Raph is right here.

Raph's right here and Raph's got him. In the tired misery of now, for Leo, it's more than enough.