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“Can we stay like this?”
There was an annoyed groan from behind him.
“We gotta patch you up.” Raph’s voice was muffled where his mouth was pressed against Casey’s shoulder. “Y’ can’t ignore this one, Case.”
Casey couldn't even manage to sigh. His ribs ached too badly. A lucky shot, really, from a lowlife Casey was sure would never try an armed robbery again after Raph had gotten to him. Casey had to admit, it was impressive— and a little attractive, if he was being completely honest —how quickly Raph had taken him down after Casey had collapsed.
And he was so comfortable now. Raph was sitting behind him, head resting on Casey’s shoulder, face pressed against him. His solid plastron was a surprisingly good back rest, and Casey would never dream of complaining about being so close to Raph. Not when this was an occasion as rare as a blue moon.
But his ribs did hurt, and Raph wouldn’t truly let him rest until he was sure Casey was okay.
“Fine,” he finally said, and Raph was already reaching under Casey’s bed for the first aid kit.
“Wish you’d be more careful.”
Casey shivered as Raph eased his shirt off and the cold air hit his skin. “Being careful is boring.”
He could almost hear Raph roll his eyes. “Sure. Because breaking your ribs is fun and exciting.”
“...Did I really break them?” Casey asked, and hated the way his voice trembled slightly, hated it even more when Raph’s hands became gentler because of it.
“I don’t know,” Raph admitted. “You might just be bruised.”
“Casey Jones doesn’t break ribs fighting random criminals.”
“Casey Jones needs to let me check. Now take a deep breath and tell me if it hurts.”
Casey complied, and found a dull ache as he breathed in and out. It felt nothing like the stabbing pain he had felt when he broke a rib a few years ago. He reported as much to Raph.
“Good,” Raph replied, more than a little relief in his voice. “That’s good. I’m still getting you ice, though.”
“I can get it—”
“You’re not going anywhere.” Raph gave him a grin in the dark. “Don’t worry. I’ll be quiet.”
He always kept that promise, so Casey let him go. He opted to stay sitting up, though. Just in case. Raph had only been in the rest of his apartment one or two times. Casey trusted Raph, sure, but he didn’t trust his dad to be sober and in bed, even at three in the morning.
He wondered if his dad would ask about the bruises.
Probably not. He hadn’t paid a lot of attention to Casey in the past couple of years. Only enough to yell when Casey got in trouble at school or curse him out when he disappeared for a couple of days.
It made Casey’s stomach twist with nausea to imagine explaining the countless bruises, scraps, and worse to him.
“Hey.”
Raph was back.
“Hi,” Casey replied, making no move to take the ice from him.
“You look miserable,” Raph commented. The mattress sank as he sat beside Casey. “Something wrong? Aside from… you know.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Suit yourself.” Raph’s eyes traced down his back. “You’re bleeding. Just a little.”
“Gonna do something about it?”
“Jackass.”
Casey took the ice pack Raph offered and hissed through his teeth as soon as Raph started to clean his scrapes. “Your hands are freezing.”
“I can’t help it. I have cold blood.” Raph smoothed a bandaid on his shoulder, then on his lower back. “You know, you’d never get these if you had a shell. And you wouldn’t have to bother with a shirt that’s going to get torn up anyway.”
“At least I can wear a shirt,” Casey shot back, then regretted it as soon as Raph fell still. “...Sorry.”
“It’s fine.” Raph took Casey’s hand and mopped up the blood on his knuckles. “I know you don’t mean it.”
“You’d better,” Casey teased half-heartedly, hoping Raph’s expression would brighten again. It didn’t.
“It’s weird,” Raph said after a few seconds, his brow still furrowed.
“What’s weird?”
Raph sighed. “I guess… humans? A back with no shell? …You?”
Casey took Raph’s hand and opened the tight fist. A cold palm. Rough. Three fingers. Nothing like Casey’s.
“I am pretty weird,” he agreed.
Raph didn’t laugh. He pulled his hand away from Casey’s and busied himself with packing everything back into the first aid kit.
Casey watched over his own shoulder, quiet.
“You are weird,” he repeated after a stretch of silence. “At least, to me. But not in the way that you think.”
“And how’s that?”
They caught each other’s gaze for a moment. Casey looked away first, out the window and into the busy city outside. He heard Raph shift again, resuming his position right behind Casey.
“Can I touch your back?” Raph asked, as if he hadn’t already done it two minutes earlier.
Casey answered like he knew the question was coming. “Yeah.”
A rough hand came to rest in the center of his back. Slowly, Raph traced up and down Casey’s spine, over the small ridges and patches of acne, again and again and again. As if he was trying to memorize it.
“My brothers think you’re weird because of all the reckless shit you pull.” Raph made a sound that was not quite a hum and not quite a laugh. It came from deep inside his chest, rumbling down to the tips of his fingers. “Especially Donnie.”
The touch of his hand disappeared, then reappeared again at the nape of Casey’s neck, where tangled black hair fell to his shoulders.
“I don’t think you’re weird for that.”
“Thanks,” Casey said. It came out more breathless than sarcastic like he had intended.
“Hey.” Raph reached around and poked him in the cheek.
Casey spluttered out a laugh. “Hey!”
Raph snorted. “You gonna listen or not?”
Casey quieted down instantly.
Raph took a deep breath and continued. “You’re weird to me because you’re human. And I’ve never… I’ve never been this close with a human, y’know? Or… or with anyone, really.”
Slowly, gently, Raph rested his head back on Casey’s shoulder.
“Your back is weird. It’s so exposed. Your hair is weird. I’ve never really felt hair other than Splinter’s, I guess. Yours is different. And your five fingers. They’re way skinnier than mine, yeah? They could break so easy.”
Raph took his hand again, tracing the palm lines. In between one breath and the next, Casey’s heart fit in an extra beat.
“Sometimes I wonder how you haven’t died yet.”
“Aw, worrying about me?”
It slipped out before Casey could stop himself, half desperate to break the tension in the air and half longing for it to continue. He expected Raph to scoff, maybe even laugh, and make a sharp retort about how of course he doesn’t worry. Casey could keep up with him, Raph knew that. Casey Jones didn’t need to be worried over.
Instead, Raph turned his face inward, so that Casey could no longer see his expression out of the corner of his eye.
“Are you?” Casey asked incredulously.
Still, there was no response.
“I can take care of myself.”
“I know,” came Raph’s soft, impossible voice.
“I just… I just got bruised, Raph. My ribs aren’t broken.”
“I know.”
Casey choked out a laugh of sheer confusion. “Then why are you worried?”
“I’m not worried. I know you can fight.” Raph continued to hide his face, but the hand that was holding Casey’s tightened. “I know you can take care of yourself. ‘M not stupid.”
“Sometimes you are.”
“Shut up,” Raph groaned. “I don’t know how to explain it. This is stupid, you’re stupid, I’m stupid, and, stupidly, I noticed all these things and now I’m telling you because… because I care. Or something.”
Casey hesitated, then, “You make these sounds sometimes.”
“What?”
“You make noises,” Casey said, bulldozing through the embarrassment, “and I’ve never heard anybody make them before. Sometimes it sounds like a chirp, like a bird, and sometimes it sounds like a cat purring. I wasn’t sure if you knew you were making them, so I never brought it up.”
Raph’s head lifted off of Casey’s shoulder, like he was trying to hear him better.
“You only do it when you’re with your brothers. Or sometimes me. It’s a turtle thing, right?”
“Yeah,” Raph replied, and he sounded like he could barely believe what Casey was saying. “Yeah, it is.”
A smile worked its way onto Casey’s face. He squeezed Raph’s hand.
“You’ve got sharper teeth than me, especially your canines. You eat entire apples, like, the core and everything.” His smile turned to a grin. “Your eyes do the third eyelid thing. Where they go all white. Humans can’t do that.”
Raph huffed, embarrassed. “Well, I’m not human.”
“Right. You’re not.” Casey slowly pushed himself away from Raph, and then, trying his best not to jostle his ribs, he turned around and seized Raph’s hand again. “And I still like you.”
Their gazes met. Raph had this look in his eye, one that Casey had seen only rarely. Soft. Strong. Sort of wondering, like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
“Got it?” Casey asked.
“Prove it,” Raph replied, unflinching. The look in his eyes didn’t disappear like it usually did.
Casey did the only thing that made sense.
He leaned forward and kissed Raph.
It… was different. Casey had only kissed one person before, back in seventh grade, on a dare. But he knew even that was closer to a normal kiss than this.
He found that he didn’t care.
He didn’t care that Raph’s sharp teeth caught on his mouth, he didn’t care that their faces didn’t exactly fit together like they should, he didn’t care that Raph was purring softly beneath him, the sound emitting from deep within his chest.
It was nice, actually. Casey had been around Raph enough to know that purring for the turtles equaled a sigh of content for humans.
“Your ribs,” was the first thing out of Raph’s mouth when they finally broke apart, and Casey would have laughed if he didn’t realize just how painful it was to lean over with bruises all along his torso. Raph, however, took it in stride.
Casey suppressed a groan of pain as Raph helped him lay down as slowly and as carefully as possible. He was, thankfully, rewarded with another kiss. Then Raph adjusted the ice on Casey’s chest and pulled the blanket up over his legs, and Casey felt a split second of sheer panic that made him reach out for Raph, desperate for him to stay— only to gasp at the pain of moving so quickly.
Raph shut him up with another kiss.
“I’m not leaving, dumbass.”
“Sorry,” Casey squeaked out. “I want you to stay.”
“I am.” Raph stared at him for a long moment. “I’m trying to figure out how to lay next to you without hurting you.”
Casey extended his arm and motioned Raph to lay down beside him.
“But my shell—”
“I don’t care,” Casey whined, knowing how annoying he must sound but honestly not caring. “I want you to cuddle with me.”
Raph covered his face with his hands. “Oh my god. You just… say shit, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I do. Come here.”
Raph peeked out from between his fingers. “I don’t wanna crush your arm.”
“My arm’s taken worse. You punch me all the time, how’s this different?” Casey gave what he hoped looked like a reassuring smile and not a wince of pain. “Please?”
“Well, since you asked so nicely,” Raph grumbled, and slowly, ever so slowly, laid down in the space between Casey’s arm and side, carefully draping his arm across Casey’s waist.
Casey took a breath as deep as he could with the ache in his chest. “This is nice.”
“Yeah.”
“I can hear you purring.”
“It’s not— I’m not purring,” Raph protested, though the deep rumble shivering through his body didn’t slow down. “If I was, it’s your fault, anyway.”
Casey smiled at that.
Raph’s body was a weight that Casey didn’t know he had been missing. It felt like he belonged there, in the crook of Casey’s arm, shifting up to kiss Casey’s jaw, heavy arm curled protectively around him. And yeah, it was a little cliché of Casey to trace a finger along Raph’s shell, following the subtle patterns. It was a little cliché of Casey to stare at Raph like this, like he was seeing Raph for the first time, like he was watching a star come falling down from the sky.
It was a little cliché to ask, “Is this real? Or are we gonna wake up and pretend like nothing happened?”
But he didn’t care.
“Yeah,” was Raph’s simple answer. “It’s been weeks of wishing you’d do that. D’you really think I wanna pretend it didn’t happen?”
“Weeks?” Casey asked softly.
“Yeah,” Raph said again, quieter this time. “You might be weird, but I still like you, too.”
Casey couldn't help but smile.