Chapter Text
2020
Leo regretted his last words as soon as they left his mouth.
“Hero moves are totally your style”? As if Raph doesn’t have enough issues already.
But what he meant—what he would have tried to explain if there was time—was that Raph is his hero. He’s always been Leo’s hero. And if Leo could be anything like him, even for a second, even if it was the last thing he ever did, then he could be satisfied with that.
It’s a silly thing to be stuck thinking about, laying on a torn up chunk of earth with a monster ominously lumbering somewhere below, looking for where it threw its toy. Laying there, feeling every bruise and broken bone, and hoping that he didn’t hurt his big brother’s feelings.
They’ll be okay, Leo thinks, trying to make it be the thing that gives him courage instead of just more homesickness. They’ll miss me, maybe for a long time, but they’ll be okay.
Leo’s supposed to be fighting for his life, but it’s all he can do to keep a grip on the photo in his hand, the only thing in this entire dimension worth holding onto. It’s all he can do to keep his eyes open when every blink is longer than the last.
It feels like enough of a rebellion. The Krang looked annoyed that he was still breathing the last time it batted him through the void like a fly, which gives Leo the idea that he should probably be dead by now. He feels a detached sort of pride at how grown-up he’s being about all this. Better late than never.
Leo waits for the Krang to come for him, dripping his blood and sneering his daddy’s nickname for him hatefully as it does, and hopes he made his family proud.
Leo hopes he’ll go wherever Gram-gram is. It would be nice to know someone when he gets there.
Movement in his periphery snags Leo’s attention. His brain starts throwing up warning flags, signaling danger—anything moving around in here is another parasite, or a Krang hound, nothing he’ll want to be sprawled out on a silver platter for—but he can’t summon any urgency.
He turns his head and finds himself looking up at another turtle.
It’s the very last thing he expected to see. They both just stare at each other for a moment.
The newcomer appears to be a few years older than Leo, based on the broadness of their shoulders, and half a head taller. Their skin is more gray than green and their plastron is so pale it’s closer to white than yellow. Their carapace, what Leo can see of it, is a deep blue-black and they’re covered, skin and shell both, in white spots. Two of the spots on their face give the impression of eyebrows lowered in a glare, but they don’t seem angry at him.
The turtle is completely unfamiliar to Leo, which is saying something. He thought he and his family had the monopoly on… this whole situation.
Disquieted, Leo remembers that he’s supposed to be the only turtle here. That was a very significant part of the decision he’d made.
It must be a hallucination, he decides, instantly comforted by his own reasoning. That makes sense. He just wished that if his mind was going to conjure him some dying company it could at least be someone he knows. An imaginary Mikey or Donnie or Raphie for one last hug. One last affectionate forehead bonk. An “I still love you,” if that wasn’t asking too much.
Don’t you cry now, he scolds himself sternly when his eyes start to blur and burn. It’s not about you.
With a resounding crash of metal against stone, the Krang finds them at last. He’s snarling something that Leo is too slow to piece together before he cuts himself off—surprising the hell out of Leonardo by acknowledging the hallucination. That’s not how that works.
“Another pest,” the Krang hisses. His serrated teeth glint when he draws his gummy lips back in an ugly smile. His tone is oily and unpleasant when he adds, “You’re less colorful than those other ones. I would have remembered seeing you. Where were you when your accomplices were fumbling about in my Technodrome like the stupid creatures they are?”
“We won,” Leo reminds the alien, even though it makes him cough. “Blew up your ugly ship. Who looks stupid now?”
“Shut your mouth!” the Krang roars, going from slimy to homicidal in about three seconds. Leo cringes, every ounce of animal instinct in his body urging him to hide in his shell and ride the rest of this nightmare out.
The spotted turtle snaps, “Don’t talk to him.”
It would have made sense if he was looking at Leo when he said it. Don’t engage, don’t bait the big monster that could kill you with as much effort as it takes you to blink, et cetera ad nauseum. If only he’d had a nickel for every time he heard that.
But instead the turtle is looking at the Krang, and he’s radiating the kind of cold-blooded murder that you mostly only see in movies. He has one arm flung out in front of Leo like he actually means to use it to stop the Krang from getting any closer.
“Don’t even look at him,” he goes on, sounding seconds away from baring his teeth.
This guy is significantly unaware of the danger he’s facing, and Leo ought to warn him about what enormous clusterfuck he’d just wandered into. Leo ought to say he appreciates the reptile solidarity, but you should definitely run, new guy.
But this probably isn’t actually happening outside of his own head. And besides, Leo has to focus really hard on his numb fingers so he doesn’t drop his photo.
“I’ll look where I please,” the Krang says, as unbothered by the hallucination as he was by Leo’s entire family. “Starting with that fool head of yours. I’m interested in whatever backdoor led you here. If it’s my way out, well —”
Adrenaline surges through Leo, and he’s hardly aware of moving before he’s lurching up as much as he can and shouting out, “No!”
He can’t get out, he can’t. Leonardo won’t be able to trick him again. He won’t be there to help this time.
“I do have one thing for you,” the spotted turtle interrupts to say, reaching over his shoulder for what turns out to be a compound crossbow strapped to his back.
Leo doesn’t know a lot about archery so it’s weird that his fictional turtle does, crank-cocking the weapon like it’s an extension of his arm. He watches cluelessly as the turtle slides something very purple out of his jacket pocket and notches it into the groove where the bolts are supposed to go. It’s definitely not a bolt, but it’s a piercing-type projectile of some kind, and it fits in the crossbow like it was designed with crossbows in mind.
The turtle aims the bow at the Krang, who clicks the claws of his metal suit on the ground the way Splinter would drum his fingers on the kitchen counter when he was waiting on the microwave. The Krang looks condescending and mildly curious, like he’s watching dumb little animals do something they’re not trained to do.
“He told me to tell you he’s sorry he couldn’t be here to see this part,” the spotted turtle says, and then shoots without a second of hesitation or unnecessary dramatics.
The Krang bats the projectile away, or tries to, but it explodes on contact with his armor, and suddenly all Leo can smell is burning metal. Then burning meat.
The Krang begins to scream, clawing at something defiantly purple with a mind of its own that eats straight through him the effortless, immediate way corrosive acid chews through soft tissue. It moves like nanotech, covering as much of the Krang as possible in a manner of seconds and clearly designed to consume whatever it touches like a school of cartoon piranhas.
Donnie would love it, color scheme and all.
The Krang stumbles drunkenly, howling like a creature possessed, and Leo and his turtle companion both watch silently until he tips over the edge of the hunk of torn earth they’re on. Gravity is weaker in this dimension, so he doesn’t so much fall as sort of drift in another direction while he’s distracted with the purple stuff that’s doing its best to eat him alive.
The last handful of minutes have been so bizarre that it’s actually going pretty far in convincing Leo that none of it happened for real. The Krang hasn’t actually found him yet. This is clearly a dream. Or a pre-death electrical storm as the neurons in his brain fire up to fizzle out.
He tips his head to the side again to stare up at the archer, who is putting his bow away with perfect confidence that whatever that purple thing was, it will do the job.
“Who are you?” Leo asks stupidly.
“Gio,” the probably imaginary turtle replies.
Leo’s mouth runs off before he can stop it. “Just Gio? Like Cher?”
God, he thinks. That was stupid, Leo. Not the time or place, Leo. You’re in the prison dimension.You’re dying here and you can’t even cut the jokes now? Raph was so right about you.
But the imaginary turtle surprises him by smiling slightly, the corners of his mouth pulling just barely upwards in a way that somehow completely transforms him. Not the time or place for jokes or smiling at them but here they are. Like company.
“Giorgio Hamato,” ‘Gio’ says. That lands in Leo’s ears as something remarkably worth making a lot of noise over, but he can’t begin to unpack it. And after a second, he forgets what the remarkable part was. His mind is a deck of cards that got shuffled too enthusiastically and ended up scattered all over the floor. Gio doesn’t seem to mind when Leo just blinks at him, adding, “I’m here to take you home.”
“Pretty sure Uber doesn’t come out this far,” Leo mumbles, the words a paint smear, all thick and wet and muddy. One of his teeth feels broken and it’s keeping him awake, a blistering ache that cracks through the back of his mouth like lightning. “And I’ve got, like, zero bars.”
This is how I cope, he thinks, watching the bigger turtle absorb the second bad joke in as many minutes. Leo’s blinking fast so he doesn’t cry. He’s trying to focus on anything but the pain radiating through his whole body, and the swallowing darkness all around him, and the ruins of ancient metal ships looming where they float unrestricted by gravity, and the ballistic howls of a pissed-off pink alien still dealing with whatever the heck this Gio guy did to him.
He can’t focus on any of that because all of that is scary and he’s already terrified. He needs to not be terrified because he doesn’t want to be that kind of ghost when he haunts his family. He wants to be the friendly, funny kind, the kind that gets to stay at the end of the movie, the kind that will make silly faces at Mikey so he doesn’t get scared, and leave sticky notes for Donnie to remember to charge his phone and drink enough water, and cover Raphie with an extra blanket while he’s asleep because it gets cold at night but he always leaves his bedroom door open for them.
If Leo’s friendly and funny, if he helps, he’ll get to stay. He didn’t get to stay the first time, so this time he has to make it stick.
Larger hands wrap around his. It doesn’t register for a second, and then it does in a big way.
Leo jerks his head up. Moving just that much hurts like his ribs are broken all the way down and the bones in his leg have all melted into liquid agony, but it clears some of the fog away.
Someone is holding his hands in the prison dimension.
An alien like the Krang wouldn’t know the first thing about the human gesture, the togetherness of it, so it’s not some mean trick that’s being played. And it can’t be an imaginary turtle that Leo dreamed up, after all, because kindness would be the last thing he’d give himself.
Possibly very real Gio says, “Fuck Uber. Whatever that is. And don’t repeat that word.”
The punchy breath Leo chokes in is going to punch out again as a laugh or a sob. Leo squeezes the bigger turtle’s hands, photo crinkling between them, suddenly tethered to something in this void and hysterically certain that he’ll die for real if Gio lets go.
“I’m sixteen.” Leo’s voice wobbles. He doesn’t know what to react to first. He doesn’t understand how this is happening. He holds on. “I can say the fuck word if I want to, I’m practically an adult.”
Gio’s face does something it hurts to look at. His eyes are dark and sincere, the shape of them entirely familiar. There’s a warmth inside him that permeates the gloom. A star belonging to a much larger galaxy, but more significantly, belonging to the same crooked constellation Leo belongs to.
I know you, he thinks, surprised by the truth of it. I do. Where have you been?
“We’re going home,” Gio says, the certainty in his voice like one of those huge stones a river parts around, unmoved by the currents and crashing water. “I know the way. Don’t worry about it. Close your eyes.”
The worst thing that could happen has already happened. There’s no reason not to trust him. There’s nothing left to lose. Leo closes his eyes.
He feels himself drawn in, tucked against the built-in armor of a turtle chest, head resting on a broad shoulder. He’s been carried like this a million times before. He didn’t think it would happen again. Somewhere along the line, he’d been picked up for the last time and put down for the last time, and now he’s here, where no one who loves him can reach him, to scoop him up when he falls asleep on the sofa and take him to bed.
But Gio lifts him up like he’s still a kid. The Krang is bellowing hateful promises in between the grating shrieks of pain, promises of what he’ll do when he gets his hands on Leo, but all of that is far away.
Leo isn’t afraid anymore. He isn’t going to be a ghost.
He’s pretty sure he’s going home.