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Three AM.
Leo stood in the darkened dojo, watching shadows play across familiar walls.
He'd waited until he was certain everyone else was asleep. Until the lair had fallen completely silent.
Don had cleared him for light training yesterday.
"Just basic forms," his brother had emphasized, as he checked healing injuries, "Nothing strenuous."
His first time training in the dojo since coming home.
The first stance felt like betrayal.
Leo's feet found positions that should have been natural as breathing. Should have been ingrained after decades of training. Should have been his .
But his body wouldn't settle into it right.
Muscles pulled wrong, stiff from months without proper use. Everything felt weak. His body kept trying to compensate for his old injuries, throwing off the careful balance he'd spent years perfecting. His arms trembled with the effort of holding even this basic form.
They wouldn't stop shaking .
Again.
The first sequence was simple. Should have been simple. Rising block into forward strike. Movements he'd mastered before he was ten years old.
His arms didn't have the strength anymore. The strike fell short, momentum wrong, everything wrong. Basic muscle control that had once been effortless now felt like fighting his own body.
Again.
The kata fell apart halfway through. His legs, once capable of holding stances for hours, burned with fatigue. Each pivot revealed new weaknesses, new failures.
His balance shifted wrong and he stumbled. A beginner's mistake. The kind he hadn't made since childhood.
Breathe. Focus. Center.
But there was no center anymore. The calm stillness that had been his foundation felt as distant as his strength.
He forced himself back into position. Started the sequence again, more slowly this time. Breaking it down into components like he was learning it fresh.
Rising block. Arms shaking.
Forward strike. Too weak.
Side step. Balance wrong.
Turn. Stumble.
Each movement revealed another loss. Another failure. Another piece of himself that didn't work right anymore.
Again.
The second kata was worse. Complex combinations he'd once flowed through like water now felt disjointed, broken. His muscles, ones that had been capable of supporting his full weight in perfect control, gave out halfway through a simple hold.
His hands still wouldn't stop shaking.
The third kata he didn't even finish. His body simply refused, too weak, too wrong. Everything he'd built over decades stripped away.
In the darkness of the dojo, surrounded by the ghosts of who he used to be, Leonardo faced the truth he'd been avoiding since coming home.
Decades of training.
A lifetime of discipline.
Everything his father had poured into him.
Unmade. Rebuilt wrong.
The warrior who had moved through these forms with perfect grace was gone.
What remained was something assembled from broken pieces. Too weak to even complete basic training.
The fourth kata waited. One he'd performed thousands of times. One that had been as natural as breathing.
Leo straightened his shoulders. Took position.
Again.
But somewhere in the space between one failed movement and the next, between one trembling stance and another, he faced the terrible possibility that some things couldn't be reclaimed.
That maybe, just maybe, the Leonardo who had trained in this room for decades was truly gone.
And no amount of repetition, no amount of discipline, no amount of trying would bring him back.
Still, he took position once more.
Again.
Because he didn't know how to be anything else.