Chapter Text
Leo was tired. Very tired. So damn tired.
And it had nothing to do with how little sleep he had gotten the night before.
He glanced at Mikey, then at Usagi, then avoided looking at Leatherhead as much as you could avoid someone his size, and finally settled his gaze on the much smaller rabbit, swinging his legs carelessly on the chair.
Leo closed his eyes for a moment, tilted his head back, and sighed heavily.
“Why is it that every time you invite me here it's about something like this?”
The question was rhetorical, but Usagi felt compelled to answer anyway. And perhaps a little offended, too.
“Hey, not every time. Yesterday I really just wanted to see you.”
Leo ignored this. Mainly because thinking about yesterday could very quickly and effectively distract him from more important matters.
“Who's that?” he asked, pointing to the child at the table.
Or at least he assumed it was a child. Although he didn't rule out a very small rabbit. Perhaps there were dwarf rabbit yokai too; who knows? He'd never really asked.
Usagi exchanged a look with Mikey, which was never a good sign.
“He says his name is Jotaro.”
Leo gave him time to elaborate. He did it out of pure habit and maybe to spite himself, because Usagi never elaborated.
“Okay. And where are Jotaro’s parents?” he asked, waving his hand in the air to indicate he needed a little more.
Mikey and Usagi exchanged a second look, which already promised complete disaster, so when neither of them managed a response, Leo walked over to the table and leaned over the child.
“Are you lost? You need help?”
Jotaro didn't even look up at him, fully focused on sucking all his juice through the straw at once, and when the carton finally emptied, he gasped for air as if he'd just drowned.
“Can I have another one?” he asked.
Without a word, Leatherhead slipped one more juice box into his hand.
Leo pointed at him indignantly.
“Hey, but don't give it to him until he answers!”
Mikey looked at him as if he were the one starving.
“We're not playing 'good cop, bad cop' with a kid,” he huffed, and then, a little less confidently, added. “Besides, we've already tried that, and it doesn't work. He just... doesn't want to tell us anything.”
Leo ran a hand over his cheek, more to do something and gain a few seconds of peace.
“Where did he even come from?” he asked, knowing in advance that he would quickly regret it and that it would be much wiser to remain in blissful ignorance.
This time, all heads turned toward Leatherhead. Leo wasn't surprised, but he managed to keep any comments on the subject to himself.
Leatherhead hunched his shoulders even more than usual, perhaps a little embarrassed by the sudden attention.
“Steve...” he began, then cleared his throat nervously. “Steve brought him in. He's a security guard at the Nexus Hotel. He said, “This little guy,” he nodded at Jotaro, “came up to him and asked if this was where the big fights happen, because he wanted to participate, too. So Steve sent him to me.”
“Shouldn't the security guard take care about stuff like this?”
Leatherhead hesitated.
“Steve isn't exactly...” He paused, seemingly trying to find a term that was both accurate and not offensive.
Usagi didn't mess around with it that much.
“Steve's batshit crazy,” he interjected, which sounded strange coming from him.
Firstly, because in his opinion, absolutely everyone was “nice” and “friendly” and secondly, because he wasn't particularly good at being completely normal himself. Leo decided he'd rather not even ask what exactly Steve had done to deserve such a reputation.
Leatherhead nodded slowly.
“Yeah. Yeah, he is. And he seriously figured if the kid wants to fight, why not. And I'm in recruiting now, so... Yeah. I decided this was a bit beyond me, and I needed someone sensible.”
Leo raised an eyebrow.
“And you called Usagi?” he asked in disbelief.
Leatherhead made a face as if to ask if he really thought he was stupid.
Leo did, but that wasn't a point at the moment.
“No, I called Angelo. Usagi just dropped by to ask if I'd have lunch with him.”
“We thought,” Mikey added, “that maybe if he saw another rabbit, he'd talk more, but no. He won't say where he's from, what he's doing here, or where his family is. We spent half an hour trying to get the name out of him.”
Leo was about to say that maybe if they hadn't given the child everything he asked for at the beginning, the negotiations would have gone a little better, but something else distracted him.
“Wait, how long have you been sitting here with him?”
Usagi shrugged, Mikey looked expectantly at Leatherhead, and Leatherhead turned thoughtfully to the clock on the wall.
“About an hour? Give or take, I don't remember exactly.”
If these were the less 'crazy' Battle Nexus employees, Leo had no idea how the whole thing was still functioning.
“And all this time it never occurred to you to take him to the police station?”
Usagi's whole face bristled.
“Why the police?” He moved closer and placed a defensive hand on the back of the chair. “He didn't do anything wrong; why arrest him?”
Leo closed his eyes again, this time rubbing them with his fingers.
“Cottontail, I love you, I really do, but sometimes when you start talking...”
When he looked back at him, Usagi looked as if he was pondering deeply what exactly he'd said wrong. Jotaro, on the other hand, actually looked at Leo for the first time, his gaze so piercing it seemed as if he could explore his entire soul and even take souvenirs from it. Fortunately, he immediately swiveled in his chair so he could reach Usagi's sleeve.
“Is this your boyfriend?” he asked, in the loudest whisper possible.
Usagi smiled broadly.
“Fiancé,” he corrected, because he really liked that word. Especially recently, since the wedding began to transform from a vague vision into a real event.
Jotaro looked at Leo again, this time giving him a very appraising look.
“Hmm,” was all he said before he turned back to his juice.
Leo blinked, taken aback by how much this stung him.
“What's that supposed to mean?”
Jotaro shrugged.
“Nothing,” he said, his tone suggesting the exact opposite.
Judging by his height and still-chubby face, he couldn't have been more than seven, maybe eight if he was just growing very slowly. Caring about his opinion would be idiotic and childish and would cost him a shred of dignity, so Leo had absolutely no intention of doing so. He simply wanted to set the record straight. It wasn't at all because the kid had hit him squarely in the ego.
He leaned against the table again, leaning forward so that he towered over his opponent.
“For your information, I'm the best ninja in the world, and I have witnesses to prove it. I saved this city before you were even born, and some people still call me a hero.”
Jotaro finished the juice, and for a moment the only sound was the slurping of the straw against the empty bottom.
“Well, I haven't heard of you,” he said finally and started arranging the empty boxes next to each other.
If Leo had been less mature, he probably would have knocked them to the floor. But he was more than mature, so he limited himself to acting out the scene in his mind.
Mikey let out a short laugh.
“Truth speaks through children,” he said, and tapped Leatherhead on the shoulder with the back of his hand. “Give him more juice.”
Leo knew that if he let the kid start making fun of him now, he wouldn't live to see the end.
“Okay, that's it,” he decided, straightening up. “We have to take him to the police before someone accuses us of kidnapping. Muy pronto, Hermanos!” he urged. Only then, amidst loud sighs, did his family graciously move toward the door. Sluggish and slow, but at least in the right direction. “One, two! Hurry up.”
Jotaro also slid down from his chair, having no chance against the force of the crowd, and his expression was as if he had just run a marathon and didn't have the strength to move his muscles.
“Can't you just make that portal again?” he grumbled, trailing behind Usagi, still clutching his empty juice boxes.
Leo opened the door and stood next to it, gesturing for the others to go through.
“Naaah, better not. We don't get along very well with the authorities here, since they almost locked up my brother for life. And he really didn't do anything then. I'd rather not draw attention to...” He stopped mid-sentence.
He closed the door in Leatherhead's face, turned, and crouched down in front of the child, this time looking at him with complete seriousness.
“How do you know about the portals?”
Jotaro stopped stuffing the boxes into his pants pockets and froze. His nose twitched, his ears drooped low, and suddenly he didn't look as confident as he had seconds before. He didn't look at Leo, just pursed his lips, then turned and sat back down in the chair, gripping it tightly in his hands as if to signal that he wouldn't go willingly.
Leo straightened up, shaking his head.
“Well, that clears one thing up,” he said. He wasn't particularly happy about it, but at least they knew something more.
Mikey stood next to him, looking from him to Jotaro.
“You think he came through your portal?”
“Very possible. You know I don't check to see if I'm letting anything in.”
Mikey grimaced.
“Unfortunately, we all know that,” he muttered, clearly still holding a grudge against him from the last time.
Leo decided to avoid the topic.
“But I only portal to Hiden City from home or from the Lair. And he couldn't have come from New York.” He tried to think of other places he could have used his portals, but the honest answer was 'everywhere'. He was a busy man; he didn't have time for such trivial things as walking. “Okay, I have no idea where I could have picked up him. Let them take his picture and put it up all over town. Oh, or they could broadcast it through speakers, like in the mall.”
Usagi, who had been suspiciously quiet until then, now moved closer and touched his elbow to get his attention.
“Leo.” He seemed tense and clearly worried about something. “Leo, do you think maybe...” He lowered his voice a bit. “Maybe yesterday...?”
Leo was sure all the color drained from his face in a second.
“No.” He shook his head quickly. The thought made him feel faint. “No, no, no. Absolutely not.”
Mikey looked at him with a mixture of surprise and amusement.
“Are you manifesting or what?”
Leo walked over to the table, pulled out a chair, and leaned into it, making it wobble. He tried very hard not to look at Jotaro as he did so.
“Yesterday we went... Hometown.”
He winced at the last words, which should have said it all, but Mikey still didn't understand.
“Whose hometown?”
Usagi cleared his throat.
“Mine,” he explained, his face not looking any better. “Not on the farm itself, but close by.”
Mikey opened his mouth, said nothing for a moment, and then shook his head.
“No. Please, say it's not that.”
Leo really, really wanted to do it. The problem was, he couldn't, because he really wasn't paying attention when opening portals, especially when he was going through them with Usagi and was focused entirely on something else. While he'd never failed to notice that a real, living child had sneaked through with them, it happend more then once with some rats and even a cat.
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment. And he said it was a stupid idea to even hang around the farm. He'd been saying that from the very beginning, but had anyone listened? No, of course not. Probably because only Usagi could hear him, and once he got something into his head, you might as well be arguing with a wall.
“These flowers grow only there,” he said yesterday, and in his own opinion, this ended the discussion.
Leo, who really didn't want to get out of bed at the crack of dawn on a whim he didn't understand at all, just rolled his eyes and turned over.
“I'm sure that's not true. No flower grows in just one field.”
Usagi pulled the covers off him in one pull.
“Okay. Then find me somewhere else. But all I know is that they're blue, so good luck.” He folded his arms across his chest. “If you really don't want to go, just open a portal for me, and I'll handle it myself.”
This finally made Leo reluctantly sit up and stretch.
“You? Near your 'village culture'? Alone?” He reached for the prosthetic arm propped against the wall. “Not on my watch.”
Over the past two years, Usagi's therapist had made him his magnum opus, crushing all his arguments with the force and determination of a tank; methodically drilling into him that his childhood was neither normal nor happy, no matter how you looked at it. It took many months, during which Leo seriously considered at least four times whether it wouldn't be better to leave him in that irrational, but at least safe, bubble. Usagi's conscious self had grown healthier, but he also gave the impression that something important had been taken from him and left him with a vast void. He stopped talking about being sold like his family had sent him to boarding school, and his repertoire of hilarious childhood anecdotes diminished significantly, which no one missed. But he also began to look at Leo's brothers with longing and a touch of envy. Especially Raph, which no one was surprised by.
When he suddenly announced that he had planned a trip to the vicinity of his former home, Leo at first thought he was either taking a giant step backward or desperately trying to jump over a cliff. For many reasons, it sounded like a terrible idea, so he flatly refused. Only when Usagi explained that he wasn't referring to his family but to a very specific species of flower that supposedly only grew there did he agree to give him a chance and hear him out.
To his credit, Leo had never actually seen flowers like these. But then again, he hadn't seen much yokai-related stuff, so that still didn't prove anything.
“And you're saying it has to be this particular color?” He asked, crouching to pick two flowers at once. They were small, with thin stems and intensely navy blue petals, which would make the perfect dye.
Usagi already had at least a dozen in his basket and was looking around for more.
“Yes. Nothing else gives that shade. It's neither too dark nor too light. Oh, just be careful; they dye everything really easily.”
Leo glanced down at his pants, now streaked with dark blue lines.
“You won't say... What if wore a white shirt to the wedding? What would happen?”
Usagi shrugged.
“I don't know. No one in my family ever did. Everything at weddings was always blue.”
“Because?”
“Because it was. Blue is the color for births, weddings, and funerals, plain and simple. Something about 'stages of life,' but you know that no one in my house ever explained anything to me.”
He was turned, so Leo couldn't see his face, but he caught a change in his voice, a hint of sadness, and a touch of anger. The latter wasn't aimed at him, wasn't aimed at anyone in particular; it simply existed in a vacuum, because Usagi still couldn't find any purpose or use for it.
Leo approached him slowly, hugged him from behind, and kissed his neck.
“So when I die, will you dye me too?”
Usagi's shoulders relaxed a bit, and when he replied, he was calmer and a little amused.
“I don't know yet. Wouldn't that be 'platonic'?”
Leo rubbed the flowers on his cheek, leaving blue marks on the white fur.
Mikey hadn't yet had time to process the petals into dye, so their wedding shirts were still white. Leo wished that was still his main concern and not a lost child potentially from a village cult.
Usagi took this a little better and looked at Jotaro carefully, tilting his head from side to side.
“Actually, he looks a bit like me...” he finally said.
Mikey immediately perked up.
“I know, right? That's what I've been thinking, but I didn't want it to sound racist.”
With the greatest effort, Leo forced himself to look first at the child, then at his fiancé. At first glance, Jotaro was diametrically opposed to Usagi, with his dark brown fur, shorter but fluffier ears, and every dentist's nightmare on display whenever he opened his mouth. Then again, he could simply be dirty, and surely no one had ever thought to put braces on his teeth, so Leo squinted and took a closer look. They had similar eyes and mouths and similar facial shapes, and if he'd seen them in the dark, ignoring the height difference, he'd probably have hesitated for a moment to decide which was which. He wasn't sure, though, if the situation wasn't the same with any other rabbit yokai, since he'd never encountered one.
“Well, maybe a little,” he finally gave up, choosing the safer option.
Jotaro seemed to finally realize that no one was going to drag him out of the room, with chair or not, because he relaxed, stretched his arms out on the table, and pushed the cardboard boxes across it like toy cars. Mikey, who was particularly touched by the sight, placed another juice box and a handful of candy in front of him.
“What are we going to do with him?” he asked.
Leo leaned back in his chair. Suprisingly, they hadn't been on a mission together in over a year, but whenever a problem arose, he was suddenly the leader again, responsible for the action plan.
“I have no idea,” he admitted honestly. “I mean, we can still... go to the police with this? We don't have to tell them where he's from. We found a child; here he is. Now he's your problem. They'll find him something.”
He himself didn't believe what he was saying, so he wasn't surprised when Mikey looked at him in disbelief.
“Find him something?” He repeated, as if asking, “Are you hearing yourself?”
Usagi, on the other hand, straightened up, his ears twitching and his fur standing up.
“I can't leave him!” he said, outraged. “He's my family!”
“Maybe!” Leo quickly interjected, afraid that if he left it unprotested, he would seal his fate. “Maybe he's your family! We don't know for sure.”
Usagi rolled his eyes.
“Oh, please, you don't believe that yourself.”
“Maybe we should take him somewhere for now?” Mikey suggested, and now Leo was the one making a face at him.
“Where, to the Lair? And what, will Splinter take care of him? Or maybe Donnie?”
Mikey bit the inside of his cheek.
“What about Raph’s place?”
Leo imagined the look his older brother would make if he showed up on his doorstep with a little rabbit. He'd barely have time to say a word before getting yelled at.
“He'll never agree to this.”
“But Mona would agree. She likes kids.”
“You say that because she's a woman.”
Mikey narrowed his eyes menacingly, taking the accusation much more personally than Leo intended.
“I say this because she and Raph have been talking about whether or not they are ready for a baby.”
Leo blinked.
“Raph wants to have a baby?”
“Yes, and you would know it if you didn't only talk about yourself at every meeting.”
“Let's bring him there.” Usagi took advantage of Leo's momentary shock and resentment to raise his hand. Mikey immediately did the same. “I trust Raphael.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Leo saw Leatherhead slowly raise his hand too, unsure if he should even voice his opinion. He hesitated for a moment about saying something about him meddling in family matters but ultimately decided it was better to continue to blatantly ignore him.
“Great,” he muttered. “You trust him, but he'll kill me for it.”
Somewhere behind him, Leatherhead cleared his throat loudly.
“Shouldn't you just take him back to his home?”
All three immediately looked in his direction.
“No,” they shushed him in unison, at which he raised his hands defensively, took a step back, and sat down by the door. He seemed to have resigned himself to being stuck here as a silent witness.
Usagi exhaled slowly.
“If he really is from the farm,” he explained, a little calmer, “then take my word for it, they've already declared him dead and danced at the funeral.”
Leo nodded.
“All in blue.”
“All in blue.”
Leatherhead nodded, indicating that he understood, that he accepted, and that he preferred not to know any more details. Leo was incredibly jealous that he still had this opportunity. He tapped his fingers on the table to release some energy, and when that brought him no relief, in desperation, he leaned toward Jotaro once more.
“Hey.” He tapped on the table again, this time to get attention. “Time to break this silence strike; your future is being made here. Are you from a farm?”
The boy did not answer, ignoring him stubbornly as if every word he said could cost him his life.
Usagi shook his head.
“Well, it's obvious. I bet he's Eleven's son.”
“How can you tell?”
“I can't.” He shrugged. “I just really hated her. She was always mean to me. It would be fun to steal her kid.”
He looked to Mikey for support, and Mikey went from 'That was weird, even for you' to 'But who am I to judge?' in a second.
“Well, if she was that mean...”
At times Leo really hated how close these two were to each other.
“We can't just take someone else's child. It doesn't work that way.”
“Why not?” Usagi tilted his head as if he truly didn't understand. Because he probably didn't. “He's from my area, and that's how it goes there. And you said you wanted kids.”
Leo pursed his lips, growing increasingly frustrated.
“Yes, but... But someday. And hypothetically. Maybe, in the future, if that's even possible.”
“It's possible now.”
The situation was slowly becoming too abstract even by their standards. Children had appeared in their family under more unusual circumstances, but Leo had no desire to continue this particular tradition.
“Okay, this isn't the time or place for this conversation,” he cut in firmly, stood up, wincing as something jammed in his knee, and reached behind his back for his sword. “Mikey, take a picture of the kid, take Leatherhead, and ask around. Maybe by some miracle someone will recognize him. You, kid,” he pointed at Jotaro with his hilt, “are coming with us.”
The boy seemed much more excited now, and he didn't take his eyes off the sword. When the blade sliced through the air, leaving the blue glow of a portal behind it, he gasped in surprise and reached out his hand, as if to test whether it was solid and could be touched.
“Where are we going?” he asked, looking at Leo with interest, maybe even a little admiration, for the first time.
Exactly as it should have been from the very beginning, but apparently some people need more time.
Usagi put his hand on Jotaro's shoulder to make sure he wouldn't get lost this time, and Leo gestured for them to go first.
“To my supposed father. Let him be useful for something for once.”