Love Like Crazy

“Hey, Space-Case,” not-sensei says with sensei’s crooked smile. He almost definitely has a broken cheekbone, and two black eyes, and he’s smiling like he doesn’t feel any of it. “Sounds like you’ve been holding out on us. Slow and steady, life’s not a race unless you make it one.” 

Casey knows what it sounds like when Leo is worried, can hear the upset under the polished glass surface of calm. It shouldn't be comforting to know that, but it’s comforting to know him. He ekes in a breath, it scratches all the way down and it doesn’t feel like it makes a difference, but the success emboldens him to suck down another. 

“You were breathy on the ride home, I thought it must have been from all the smoke,” Leo goes on. “But I guess that was a trigger. Do you have an inhaler?”

“Y–” Casey starts to say, and coughs again, and Leo’s fingers tighten around his before he can panic. “Belt,” he gasps. 

“Okay, that’s enough from you,” Leo says a little shortly. Which isn’t very fair, Casey was just answering his question. Then he realizes Leo’s clipped tone is probably because Casey’s dizziness is overpowering his ability to stand upright.

“Raph,” Leo says to someone else, and instantly, Casey’s controlled fall is arrested halfway is arrested halfway to the floor. 

The last time Uncle Rapha held him, he was much smaller and Raph was much bigger, but somehow it feels the same. He leans back in Raph’s lap, the solid plastron behind him bracing him upright, and clumsily tries to help Leo paw through the pouches on his belt. The third time Leo bats Casey’s hands away, Raph reaches around and holds them still. 

“Let’s let the boss work,” Raph rumbles softly. It’s a miracle that he has any softness to spare for Casey, of all people, who closed the door and left his brother behind it. Left his brother in the dark where the monsters live. “We’re still breathing, right, big man?”

“R—Right,” Casey says, but it’s barely got enough air behind it to count. 

“No inhaler,” Leo announces, already turning to address someone else in the room. “Donnie, metal cabinet by the door, third drawer down, should be one in there.” Turning back, he leans in and pins Casey to the spot with a look. “Keep breathing, Case,” he says. “That’s your only job. Don’t slack off now.”

“Why do we have one?” Mikey asks in a voice that shakes. Casey manages to split enough of his attention to regret scaring him. 

“Red used to have asthma when you were all just little turtles,” Splinter says quietly. “He outgrew it, but Blue always says—”

“It’s chronic, not curable,” Leo says in a falsely bright tone, the cadence of an ancient argument. He catches the box his twin throws over and wastes no time ripping it open and shaking the inhaler into his palm. Within seconds, it’s primed, and Leo is curling one hand behind Casey’s head and bringing the mouthpiece to his lips and ordering, “Deep breath.” 

He obeys, feeling the medicine go to work, and holds without exhaling for as long as he can. It’s not long, barely five seconds. Leo shakes the canister and has it ready for him again when he’s ready to suck in another desperate puff. 

“Okay,” Leo says, studying his face with back and forth flicks of bright gold eyes. “You’re okay, Casey. Breathe.” 

“Breathe… breathe,” sensei says, large fingers combing Casey’s hair back from his sweaty forehead. His hand is calloused from the hilt of his sword, rough with scars that didn’t heal well, and gentle. 

“Look at the stars, kid,” he adds, their family’s little joke, because there hadn’t been a clear night since the war started, the skies overcast with smoke and ash and pollution from the Technodromes, but every single room Casey had ever lived in had glow-in-the-dark constellations on the ceiling. 

“Look at the stars,” sensei says. 

There aren’t any, Casey wants to cry, maybe would if he had the breath to. There aren’t any anymore. 

Instead he inhales and exhales, carefully, counting each second in his head. The tension seeps out of the room like water through a sieve. Splinter is talking about hot drinks, April is talking about calling her mom. Four bright lights stay sat, a constellation that Casey is somehow in the middle of. 

“I haven’t had an attack in years,” Raph murmurs quietly. He’s rocking Casey very slowly and doesn’t seem to realize he’s doing it. “Since I was—six or seven, maybe. You kept one this whole time?”

“Correction, the medication expires, so he has consistently replaced each one this whole time,” Donnie says, and sways disinterestedly with the force behind Leo’s disgruntled shove of his shoulder. 

“Oh,” Raph says. “But why?” he asks a moment later. 

“So I could say I told you so when you ended up needing it,” Leo replies disingenuously. 

Casey could say that sensei carried an inhaler in his kit every time he went into the field. Even after Uncle Raph died, he stayed in the habit. It saved Casey’s life once, the day they discovered he had asthma in the worst possible way. Sensei didn’t say I told you so to anyone. That was never the point.

“He loves you,” Casey says. “That’s why.”

For a moment, none of them speak. Then Mikey’s smile fills the room like stubborn sunshine finally breaking through rain clouds. Donnie says, “Intelligent beyond your years. I understand now why Future Me kept you around.” Leo seems to be considering the pros and cons of sinking into his shell and never coming out again, hunched small and embarrassed beside his big brother.

Casey can’t see Raph’s expression, but he can imagine what it looks like. He knows the feeling.

It had been a long minute since Donnie had willingly left his lab, in his defense. More often than not Mikey had to brave the mess of cold wires and empty metal to try and bring dinner to his brother that he knew in his heart of hearts would be forgotten. And Raph rarely stayed in the Lair long enough to do anything other than sleep. He hadn’t thought— well, there was the crux of it. He hadn’t thought at all. 

Returning through the front door with bags of broccoli and the fancy kind of cheddar, he’d been thinking of warmth. Of getting that rare shy smile of Gio’s to shine through once again, just for the two of them. He’d been thinking of kitchen lights and music bouncing off walls, and not at all of the echoes or the empty rooms around them. 

“ – if you think, for one second that he’d– “

“That’s the problem!” Raph’s voice thunders. Mikey’s heart takes a sharp twist and tumbles straight down to the stone floor. “I don’t know anymore. You don’t either! Just— can we stop pretending?” 

A sharp, icy scoff. “Isn’t that what you’re best at, brother of mine? Or is that just Mikey. Should we ask him?”

“Don’t,” Raph growls back. 

“Or what! You’re not even here. Am I the only one who can’t do this? This thing where we act like we can make anything better just because he’s here—” Donnie’s voice pitches up, practically a roar by the end splintering off into a thousand barbs Mikey knew he’d wrap himself in the second that he could. But where is Gio? 

There’s a crash.

The bags fall from his hands to the floor. He takes in the fact Gio’s bedroom door is open, that the lights in the living room are on and— 

It’s all noise and color. Mikey barrelling through, skidding to a stop and registering just enough to note Raph’s balled fists, Donnie’s sharp glare, and Gio, standing just behind the couch, surrounded by shards of glass. Gio’s wide eyes, looking between his brother’s and over at Mikey like he isn’t sure there was anywhere left in the world for him to go. 

No one moves except for him.

He falls to his knees instantly, scooping Gio’s face in his shaking hands. “Are you— did they hurt you? Show me your hands, buddy, okay? I’ll check, I’ll make it better, you’re safe I promise, I—” 

Gio blinks, lets Mikey fuss and turn his hands all over, placating and malleable. There’s a tiny scrape on his knee that looks old, no cuts or nicks on his hands. No red or purple rising on his dark skin. Mikey closes his eyes, leaning his forehead against Gio’s for a shaky breath. 

He feels Gio’s hands reach up and press against his palms. “I’m okay,” he whispers after a moment, voice small and trying not to shake in the way that made his voice flatter. Younger. 

It doesn’t stop him from being terrified, because Gio had grown up somewhere Mikey didn’t know, where pinches and slaps had been handed out as easily as words. And it had taken Mikey all these hard months just to get the kid to stop scanning for exits in every room they stood in, and his brother’s had been yelling.

The thought slows, grinds to a halt. His brother’s had been yelling. About him. 

He makes himself lean back. Glances over at the rest of the room. 

Raph’s face is hollowed out. A complete study in guilt, one hand reaching forward almost unthinkingly. Like the smallest shard of an old Raphie had flickered through for a microsecond before vanishing on both of them. And Donnie– 

“We didn’t know he was here.” Don says, flat as ever. 

Mikey frowns, pulling Gio more firmly into his side. “That doesn’t make it okay.” 

There’s something strange to Donnie’s expression. Guilt? It can’t be. The loss of his twin had warped him so thoroughly that Mikey could never manage to fully understand, and he knows that this Donnie is a facsimile more often than his own person, but he’d thought… It isn’t a kind thought. It isn’t a thought he’s allowed to have anymore. 

“Mikey—” Raph tries, and some of the simmering anger Mikey makes sure he doesn’t have rises up between his breaths. 

“Don’t Mikey me. You were yelling about—” his voice catches, he makes it hold. “About me, right? You think I’m playing pretend. That I don’t know how bad we are.” He remembers that Gio’s here and holds onto the reminder like a buoy in the midst of all this disappointment and hurt, and the things they never say out loud anymore trying valiantly to fight their way through. “I’m not a stupid kid anymore, of course I know!” I know more than you, I know a thousand other worlds more than you, how badly we’re broken, I’ve seen them. 

His hurt crashes against him. “Of course I’m angry! I’m tired, and it’s so hard to try but I can do it  even if you can’t, and I am trying, so just. Stay the hell away and leave Gio out of this!” 

Raph’s face twists, his good eye dropping to the floor. “We thought. I thought he was with you. We wouldn’t hurt him.”

Gio’s warm and still bendable with his need to appease at Mikey’s side. It grounds him in all the same ways it makes all of this so much worse. Wouldn’t hurt him, except they’d yell and glare and avoid, right? Wouldn’t hurt him except that they didn’t know Gio thought he didn’t belong in the one place he should always feel safe. That he thought they hated him.

He opens his mouth, some boiling betrayal burning on his lips— 

“It’s my fault.” Donnie cuts in, still blank and stiff and sharp the way he always is, now. The admission is a tiny miracle nonetheless, and Mikey’s anger dies a quiet heat death in the center of himself. He doesn’t miss the tiny lurch in Gio’s breathing at his side, though. 

No one says anything for a long, horrid moment. Donnie looking straight through Mikey like he’s alone on a dying star; and it aches– it aches all the way through to know it’s an untouchable chill Mikey can’t ever break through even when he tries, and it’s worse to think that he’s used to it, but it’s familiar all the same. Don turns his head, hands flat at his side. 

“I’m the one who can’t do this.” Love right, he means. He doesn’t mean he can’t at all. 

Mikey pulls Gio closer, like he can shield him from the misunderstanding he knows will reach the kid anyways. He feels the words hit Gio, wash over him as Donnie leaves with a hiss of his lab door clicking firmly into place. 

He doesn’t mean it, Mikey thinks of saying helplessly. Except Donnie does mean everything he says, it just exists in stone blocks and hard data now and none of the softness has anywhere to stay. 

Raph watches Donnie leave, and lets out a long sigh. He rubs a hand over his face, and ages rapidly in a thousand eye bag lines all at once. “I’m sorry, kid,” Raph mumbles. Mikey’s not sure if he means Gio. He hasn’t been Raph’s kid in a long time. 

“It’s okay,” Gio says, stiff and quiet. Raph nods to himself, eye gazing emptily at anything but them, and shuffles himself off to his room. 

It’s them, again, like always. Mikey hates the fact he’s relieved enough to let himself untense— that his brother’s could ever exist in the same sentence as danger. It hurts to realize that his instincts have been wired backwards and inverted like this, in this reality Mikey couldn’t save anything from. 

He lets Gio go with a puff of breath and forces himself to stand, tries to find the strength in himself not to cry. There’s a light in him somewhere, still, but it’s different, too. 

Maybe he has been playing pretend in a type of way. Acting like he hadn’t changed as much as everyone else, too. 

Gio’s hand touches his, briefly. “Your knees.” 

He blinks. Oh. There’s blood, patches of it on the floor in between the glittering bits of glass. For a moment he worries that he had missed something after all, that Gio had been hurt— Gio stares nervously at Mikey’s legs where he’d crashed to his knees. 

There’s bloody tears in his pant legs. He doesn’t even feel it.

“Oops,” Mikey tries to laugh. It comes out wavering and pathetic. Gio bites his lip–  isn’t that a thought. All the yelling and the anger and the sheer brokenness of their family, and Gio looks like he might actually cry just over some scrapes from Mikey being stupid. He loves this kid so much it balloons right through him constantly in endlessly shocking ways. 

I’m sorry, Mikey thinks. He’s always sorry these days. “Let me get cleaned up, okay? Then, um. How about a new recipe? Think you’ll love it.” 

Gio looks like he wants to say something, closes his mouth instead. Smiles that tiny way Mikey would burn the world down for, instead. 

Maybe they’re both pretending, really. Maybe that’s all they can do. 

___

Gio grew up cold, it’s an inescapable reality he’s forged his understanding of the world around. There’s a bone deep chill that resides within most places, rooms for things that aren’t to be kept, and stern words meant to correct in straight neat lines. There’s no space for anything else. That’s the reality, kid. 

He’d spent most his life adapting, quick as he could to make the next deadline or the next drop. Make sure he was useful but not too important to be seen, to keep the jobs coming and food for the next day available. 

There was a point A to a point B, a quickest route forward. That’s all he needed. 

When Mikey found him a lot of that had been subsequently shaken apart. A lot of things suddenly meant staying, and promises, and bright room lights that held. Suddenly, food was fun and a given, and could be asked for, and there were laughs bubbling up and bouncing back to him, and warm hands against his cheeks asking ‘are you okay’ just to know. To check. 

He knew what being warm was because he knew the cold. He considered this a gift. 

There isn’t a single atom of himself that doesn’t ache with a deep homesickness he’s not sure he’s allowed to have every second that his Mikey is lost somewhere unreachable, but he is grateful. As much as he loves his family now, and their bright silly constant thrum of life everywhere he goes, he wouldn’t ever have chosen differently. 

If he was cold for nineteen years, it was so his big brother could burn bigger in comparison. 

His family now has plenty of warmth all on their own, but he tries to burn the same way for them all the same.

It’s funny, sometimes; his stomach twists with a fond ache that’s equal parts grief and absolute relief all in one that ties his words up somewhere else he can’t touch, but he misses his Mikey in the same way he loves this one. He wonders if Mikey knows how bright he is, that it’s the bravest thing he’s ever known. He’s also so small, here. Breakable in all the ways he bounces. It’s absolutely terrifying. 

Gio had been fighting in back alley scrapes and life or death battles since he was ten, but that doesn’t mean his little brother should. 

“Did they hurt you?” He asks, scanning absolutely every inch of Mikey’s arms and face he can see. He presses carefully at his sides, where the hard shell and plastron give way to more tender spaces. Mikey giggles instead of flinching, thank god. 

“Gogo~” Mikey complains, laughter bright on his cheeks. “I’ve been in bigger fights last week.” 

“You got thrown through a wall.” 

Mikey waves a hand. “Like, a little.” 

“No, he’s right,” Leo leans over Gio’s shoulder. “That sounded pretty rough. Anything dislocated?”

Gio hates the idea abruptly that any of them know what dislocation feels like, or that it’s regular enough it wouldn’t be obvious. 

“I’m fine, really! I pinky promise double swear.” 

Leo purses his lips. “With sprinkles on top?”  

Raph’s worry sensors must ping at the commotion, because Gio can hear him abruptly switching to Mikey fussing mode from the other room. Mikey’s expression darkens, Gio switches tactics. 

“You’re okay,” he decrees, with a tiny nod. “Soup will fix it.” 

Leo’s muffled snort is worth it for the way Mikey’s eyes light up. 

“Oh! I have broccoli I’ve been meaning to use.” He immediately jumps up, luckily confirming he is in fact just fine in the same motion, and instinctively puts both hands on Gio’s cheeks with excitement. “Oh mama, you have no idea what can of worms you’ve just unleashed. I’m going to make so much soup. How about a new recipe? I think you’ll love it.” 

Gio’s heart does something funny. 

There had never in Donnie’s life been a problem that couldn’t be made into their problem. It came with twin territory. 

And Donnie’s twin in particular is good at translating Donatello and translating other people for Donatello, and jumps on any chance to be helpful and feel wanted, and absolutely loves problems. It’s one of the most annoying and endearing things about him. If there is any trouble within a hundred miles, Leo will find it. He will worm his way into the center of it and then puzzle his way out from the inside. Most other clever and curious people were satisfied by the daily Wordle; Leo would chew through a wall unless he had something more hands-on to occupy his mind with. As polar-opposite as the two of them could be in, in that regard, they were one and the same. 

It’s somewhat reassuring to Donnie that Leo’s immediate reaction is plain incredulity. He looks baffled, like Donnie has just started throwing stuff around the room for no reason. 

(He knows better. In the medbay, of all places, that would be a death wish. Leo runs a tight ship here and only here.)

“Sorry, you don’t think Gio likes you?” Leo says slowly. “Our Gio? The guy who let you infodump about the mycelial networks of fungi to him for almost two hours, all because Mikey mentioned he was making mushroom stir-fry for dinner?” 

Donnie scoffs, but he can’t help but feel warmed by the reminder. Gio had settled right in, the way he always did once he was sure of his welcome, and watched Donnie talk like nothing more interesting existed on this side of the equator.

“His eyes didn’t even glaze over,” Leo goes on, doing what he always does and pressing the advantage. “That’s a new personal best in this family. Even April started looking for a window to climb out of at the thirty minute mark.”

“There was bound to be at least one other mutant turtle in the New York metropolitan area with an appreciation for botany,” Donnie says imperiously, tilting his chin up. 

But the worry is still there, firmly rooted, trying to flower. Leo must be able to tell because his frown deepens, playfulness evaporating by the second. He pauses the music and sets his phone down. The room rings in the sudden silence, but it’s not uncomfortable, because it’s a room Donnie exists in with his twin. 

“I just want him to like me,” Donnie says. It’s a childish want, it makes him feel half his age, but it’s true. 

He was never one of those human kids lingering near the playground, on the edge of the classroom, desperate to fit in. He was never on the outs because he never had the chance to be. But this is probably what that would have felt like. 

Giorgio is quiet by default, absorbing everything with dark brown eyes, always pausing to think before speaking in a low, flat register that is becoming as familiar to Donnie as Raph’s comforting rumbles and Mikey’s energetic shrieks and Leo’s sweet or sly laughter. 

He hasn’t been anything but kind since he got here. He saved Leo, brought him home from a place it should have been impossible to come home from, so Donatello would put up with any manner of assholery from that quarter in exchange—but it’s not that at all. 

Once Gio’s initial guard goes up and then comes down, once they outlive that moment of consideration that verges upon scrutiny without ever crossing the line, the eldest turtle softens for any younger one like clockwork. He indulges whatever noise or nonsense they’ve brought with them like there is no better use of his time. 

It doesn’t seem like a lie. But Donnie is the least qualified person he knows to make that judgement call. 

There’s a lot at stake if he’s wrong, is all. 

Leo looks like Donnie has taken a melon baller to his insides just for fun. 

“I’d know if he didn’t like you,” Leo says with absolute certainty. And he probably would. And he would take it so personally. He wouldn’t let Gio know a single moment’s rest until the spotted turtle had a coming-to-Jesus moment and acknowledged his wrongdoings in canceled Youtuber apology video format. 

Since that isn’t the reality they live in, and Leo’s daily relentless pestering of Gio is harmless and little-sibling-shaped and decidedly not mean-spirited by any stretch of the imagination, some small part of the tight, unhappy feeling in Donnie’s heart has no choice but to accept that as the compelling argument it is. 

“He probably misses you, Tello,” Leo adds, something softening in his face that it hurts to look directly at. “His you, I mean. I know I would be a train wreck cosplaying as a person if I had to go someplace I’d never see you again. Can you imagine how screwed-up I’d be?”

Donnie’s whole soul shudders at the idea, at the nightmare that almost came true when the portal closed around the Technodrome and as good as severed Donnie clean down the middle. At the glimpse of a life he’d be forced to live with one leg, one lung, one arm, one eye, half a heart. 

“That’ll never happen,” he says, a little too loud. 

“You’re stuck with me,” Leo agrees. He means it, Donnie can tell—even after that almost-nightmare he put his family through, he means it. It’s one thing to take the nuclear option at the actual on-paper end of the world, it’s another to sit in a safe, warmly-lit room with his twin brother and try to conceive of an existence in which their dynamic duo was whittled down to a solo act. 

When they were little, Donnie once tried to explain how big the unobservable universe was. He told Leo that light from the big bang hadn’t reached Earth from all the way over there yet. It was a concept he struggled with as a child, that something could be so unknowable and immeasurable.

“That’s how big my ‘I love you’ is,” he said, all of seven years old and putting it into words the best way he knew how.

“I love you bigger than that,” Leo said promptly. 

“Ugh, you can’t,” Donnie said, frustrated at his twin for always trying to one-up him, for not understanding the huge thing Donnie was trying to compress and fit into his hands. “It’s not possible.”

“It is,” Leo said firmly, eyes gold to match Donnie’s, warm and shining in a way that was all his own. “I do.”

And then Leo went on to prove it. In a way Donnie never would have wanted him to—in an explosion that split the sky and left flash burns in their eyes, and the hollow pain of a surgical removal as the still-beating heart of their family was cut away, and the discordant electronic fuzz where a beloved voice had been rushing through last words, replaced by the sound of a radio without a signal, a device unpaired—but he proved it in a thousand other ways, too. 

He was even proving it now, this afternoon he spent leaning on a forearm crutch as he ambled around to various shelves and cabinets to keep up with his stock of medical supplies that had been severely depleted in the weeks after the invasion when he should have been resting. Leo had carried bandaids and lidocaine spray in a tiny tote bag since he was two feet tall. He couldn’t stop bad things from happening but he could try to make the bad things better. 

He’s looking at Donnie like he would right every wrong for him if he knew where to start. Like the unobservable universe was small enough to fit in his pocket compared to the lengths Leonardo would go for Donatello. 

Leo is the younger twin, but sometimes the only thing there is for Donnie to do is shuffle over and bonk their foreheads together and believe him. 

“If Gigi hated you, he wouldn’t be a Hamato,” Leo announces, muffled and silly and entirely correct. “It’s a prerequisite. You must have missed that meeting with HR.” And then, because it’s important, he whispers, “I promise, okay?”

“Okay,” Donnie whispers back. 

At about that moment, TSwift’s I Think He Knows comes on, proving once and for all that there is actually no way Leo’s playlist is on shuffle. The weighted moment they’re holding on tight to transitions into a lighter one that gets flung haphazardly around as an immediate life-or-death struggle for the phone ensues. 

Stalemate is only reached when Splinter barges in to read them the riot act for daring to roughhouse while they had a non-zero number of broken bones between the two of them. Leo is bright-eyed with mischief and already fast-talking their way out of trouble the same effortless way April can rattle off her brothers’ favorite coffee orders, and Donnie’s worry has been soundly evicted, all its belongings in boxes in the yard. 

Sitting around has never been his style. He’s a turtle of discovery and invention. And now that he’s been reassured that the absolute worst-case scenario is not on the table—that it, in fact, was never on the table to begin with—curiosity rears its head and snaps up the dregs of anxiety like a hungry wolfhound who mistook it for an unattended rack of lamb. 

He wants to know why Georgie is being weird, if it’s not dislike of Donatello. Leo’s certain it’s not, so certain that he was willing to promise, point-blank and absolute, instead of being tricky and sly in the name of cheering Donnie up instead. Which means it must be something else.  

So after dinner a week later, as the whole family crowds comfortably around the banana split bar spilling across the entire kitchen island and argues over which toppings Gio and Casey should stack their bowls with first, Donnie blurts, “Can I see your crossbow?”

Giorgio really is one of the clowns in this circus. He proves it by putting his ice cream down, and picking the bow up from where it was relegated to the bench seat where everyone tosses their coats and shoes when they get home, and passing it right over. No normal person would put a loaded weapon in Donnie’s hands just because he asked nicely. 

As if in tacit agreement, both of Casey’s eyebrows shoot toward his hairline and Raph makes incredulous scoffing noises. April says, “You did not just—” at the same time Splinter blusters, “Purple, you fire that thing off in this house even once and I am grounding you from everything you know and love, including Orange!” and Donnie screeches, over Mikey and Leo’s hysterical laughter, “I can be trusted with projectile weaponry!”

The crossbow has been carefully maintained, but it hasn’t been used in weeks that Donnie is aware of. They’ve all stuck pretty close to home since the invasion, and it’s not like Gio knows anyone but them—it’s not like they need firepower for grocery hauls or pizza runs, though, knowing their luck, that could change any given day. 

But Gio still cleans it regularly, and he’s become a familiar sight at the kitchen table; parts spread out on an oil-stained rag, meticulous and methodical with the one belonging he brought here with him from the future other than the clothes on his back and the colorful friendship bracelet on his right wrist. 

It’s important to him, clearly , but he’s letting Donnie handle it with an indulgent look on his face. Like there are no better hands to leave it in than his little brother’s. 

Because he’s at risk of having a whole emotion about that out loud, where his entire family is assembled to witness it, Donnie quickly turns his mind onto the much safer road of gadgetry.  

He has never actually held a crossbow before, has never built or used one, but he’s been doing a lot of research. He has a lot of ideas. He wants to print mechanical broadhead arrows with explosive tips, or tear gas canisters, or EMP charges. It’s a brand new world of creative chaos and that’s not even touching all the build customizations Donnie has in mind. His fingers are already itching to dismantle and reassemble the machine into something better, something that won’t ever fail, something his big brother will love. 

Only—huh. What feels like a low-level electric current thrums to quiet life like it was waiting to be noticed by the right pair of eyes, just enough of a static shock to get his attention and guide his hand to the rail. Glowing purple does the work of an allen wrench in seconds and a handful of screws clatter to the table. Donnie removes the scope in one sure motion, and moves on to snap the rail from the stock. 

Raph says, low and warning, “Donnie,” intimately familiar with gremlin gadget mode and all the kitchen appliances and shared toys destroyed in Donnie’s early years in the name of science. But he’s not breaking this time, he’s just looking. 

He flips the rail over in his hands and finds the source of that odd electricity-conductive feeling. Hidden on the underside is a small embossed logo that Donnie would recognize anywhere, because it’s his.

“A-ha!” he says, absurdly pleased with the discovery. “A Genius Built mod.” 

The rail was one of the first things he’d had in mind to upgrade, but it looks like he’d beaten himself to the punch. 

“With a custom rail, we can add whatever attachments we want to the stock, way beyond just an average scope or a rangefinder,” Donnie says eagerly, his mind darting ahead in three different directions at once. “The world is our oyster, Georgie!” 

He can’t help grinning. His logo on Gio’s prized possession is that last little bit of evidence he needed. He’s never been happier to be wrong, and will endure Leo’s smugness for an unheard of two entire business days before initiating retaliation. 

No version of Donatello would put that mark on anything unless he really cared about it. 

The kindest thing anyone ever did for him was when Ryu sussed out his sharp eye and potential with a long-range weapon, and he did that for his own benefit. Making Gio better at his job made Ryu more money. 

Gio ended up forfeiting a good chunk of his pay for two weeks in exchange for the compound crossbow his boss tossed into his lap, and then forfeited an additional three days’ worth for as many lessons in care and maintenance. He’d had to go hungry for a bit, but it was worth it. Clients stopped dismissing him at a glance when he started carrying the bow. They started taking him seriously when he proved he knew how to use it. 

He felt safer with its weight on his back. By the time he was seventeen, there was talk of a war in the human world. The former head of Hidden City security had gone rogue, had built weapons and taken them topside to eradicate humanity in the name of keeping yokai kind and their society safe. 

“It’s a bad time to be a turtle,” the owner of the bar Gio had lived above for years said one evening, a hard look on his face. He jerked his chin toward a field jacket hanging from a hook on the wall, and Gio understood without being told more than once. 

From then on, he kept his shell covered, a combination of the jacket and a baggy scarf. He kept everything he owned in a duffel and the pockets of his work pants. If it mattered, Gio carried it on him. He had his built-in armor and the armor he crafted himself ever since he was a nonverbal toddler in the foster system: 

Never give anyone an inch. Never let anyone close enough to hurt you. Gio couldn’t remember the last time he let cruel words land hard enough to sting.

It didn’t last, because of course it wouldn’t. Ryu had lost a lot of business due to the war, and one day he’d reached his breaking point. More and more partners and clients were turning to Big Mama’s budding empire, the safety of her hotel and the riches she offered like candy. Gio had been standing in the wrong place at the wrong time when a deal Ryu couldn’t afford to lose fell through and he needed an immediate target to place blame on.  

Gio had barely had time to snatch his bow and bag off the table before bolting out the door. He couldn’t return to the bar because Ryu’s people would know to find him there. There weren’t a lot of unaffiliated places that would take in a turtle, no matter how much money that turtle offered in exchange for room and board. In seconds, his life was thrown into total upheaval.  

It wasn’t the first time he’d had to disappear, and it wasn’t hard to leave, but the thought of starting over was enough to make him want to sink to the ground and let it swallow him. 

He was barely eighteen and he didn’t belong anywhere. No one cared if he lived or died. Some days even Gio nearly fell into that pit of not caring. 

Then he turned a corner and saw the yellow door, glowing like sunlight on water in an otherwise dim, dirty sidestreet. It felt warm. It felt like open hands reaching out for him and only him, no one else. 

Maybe it was wishful thinking, but it felt like the way home. 

—

2031

Before he was Giorgio Hamato, he was Clem. The tag attached to his shell had said clemmys guttata, and the people who found him had assumed that was his name. He didn’t talk much then, couldn’t explain where he’d come from. He didn’t even know. 

The world had been very small and safe when he was born—a cool, dark enclosure, with food to eat and water to swim in, and other tiny little bodies to tuck in next to under a brilliant warm light—when suddenly the world became huge and he himself had been changed, and he went from that small dark safe place to somewhere bright and noisy and unfamiliar, and those other little bodies were gone. 

He didn’t know how to explain any of that when he was a child. He missed someone but he didn’t know who. All he had was a tag on his shell to indicate he had ever belonged to anyone, and he didn’t even have the tag anymore. 

Mikey’s face had done a funny spasm when Gio had given his full name, a little like the spasm that always preceded a very angry phone call or argument behind closed doors that Gio politely pretended he couldn’t hear. It seemed to take Mikey a minute to decide what he wanted to say, and finally he smiled with all his teeth and said, “Clem’s a nice name! It’s short for Clement, or—oh, Clementine! An orange, just like me! Citrus duo!” 

Just that seemed to cheer Mikey up, his fanged grin warming into the real thing. Gio felt himself smiling back automatically, strung along by his older brother’s buoyancy and enthusiasm. Some days he felt more like a moth than a turtle, bumbling through the dark to follow the light. Some days he was certain he would walk through hell if he knew Mikey was on the other side. 

“Okay, I’ve turned the corner on Clem, but you could still have another one!” Mikey barrelled on. “Nicknames are pretty big around here, I have like a hundred of them. And there’s our running theme, you know, with the Renaissance artists. We could pick out a matching name for you if you want!”

Of course Gio wanted that. He wanted a name and a home and a family of brothers who smiled at him the way Mikey did, who carved out a place for him at the table like it wouldn’t make sense for him to sit anywhere else. 

But he should have gotten here sooner if he wanted to be a part of that. He missed the boat. 

Splinter was consulted, because it only felt right, Mikey said in the tone that was becoming familiar to Gio as his I-will-force-of-nature-my-way-through-this-and-god-help-anyone-who-tries-to-stop-me tone, to include Splinter in the decision. 

Gio mostly stayed tucked behind Mikey while doing his best to make it look like he wasn’t hiding. He didn’t know how to be around this quiet, absent-minded old man who mostly stayed in his bedroom—who, in another life, might have been Gio’s father. 

The rat seemed agreeable, if a little disinterested. He patted Mikey’s cheek absently and hobbled over to a dusty shelf standing against the far wall. Mikey reached back for Gio’s hand when he realized he had taken a few steps without him and pulled him forward from where he was rooted uncertainly in the doorway and the two of them watched Splinter haul an old book off a shelf, brushing fuzzy film off the embossed title with his thumb. 

“I picked all of your names from here,” Splinter said. “I had one picked out for you, of course, Grey. But—I don’t quite remember—” 

Mikey’s hand tightened around Gio’s. Gio understood, abruptly, why none of the turtles came in here. 

Leonardo’s absence in this house was as obvious and noisy as someone standing on the corner of Times Square with a megaphone. The pictures that crowded the memorial in the hallway were full of strangers—a Donatello who smiled and made silly poses for the camera and draped himself over his siblings instead of snapping his teeth at anyone who got too close—a Raphael who scooped his little brothers up in his arms, never flinching or cringing away like he feared he’d hurt them by accident just by standing there—an April who sprawled on the sofa or sat on the counter whisking eggs like she as good as lived here, even though Gio could count on both hands the number of times she’d visited since he moved in. 

Gio studied those photos over and over again, trying to make the people in them look familiar. The only one he recognized was Michelangelo, but it made his stomach squirm uncomfortably to recognize him, because it made it obvious how tired and dull his Mikey had become in comparison. Still the brightest thing in Gio’s whole life, but somehow, impossibly, not as bright as he would have been in a kinder world. 

And Splinter was a ghost of his old self, too. He had never fully recovered from losing one of his children, and now that the rest of them were grown, he had begun to allow himself to drift away.  

Leonardo, Gio thought sometimes, what did you save them from that could be worse than this?

“That’s okay,” Mikey said with forceful good cheer. “We can go through it together, maybe jog your memory.”

But Splinter’s energy wore off quickly, before they’d made it through more than a dozen pages. Mikey didn’t know how to apologize for that, and Gio didn’t know how to make him understand that he didn’t need to. 

He’d never known anyone stronger than Mikey, who flipped past a photo of Da Vinci’s La Scapigliata as easily as if the name in the header didn’t dig a knife right into his stomach. 

He’d never known anyone more deserving of a miracle. 

—

“Time travel is tricky,” Renet explained, kicking her feet idly, as at home on the edge of the rooftop as she seemed to be anywhere else. 

She had insisted they get iced coffees, her treat, but Gio couldn’t enjoy his drink. He was letting it melt into watery tastelessness without so much as taking an obligatory sip. 

“True time travel,” she added, not for the first time—really stressing the difference. “Mikey’s dimension-hopping is amazing, but it’s something else entirely. We’re talking about the real deal, here.”

The reason why Mikey and his brothers couldn’t go back, despite all their begging and bartering and, in one case, threatening over the years was simply because they were already there. They existed in the fabric of that time already. Things became unstable when they were overloaded and it was already such a delicate balance to maintain. 

“Like a coral reef,” she said, which was a less helpful explanation than she probably realized. 

Before, when Renet had said Gio didn’t belong here, she didn’t say it to be cruel. Gio’s knee-jerk reaction was hurt, and then an instant smothering of the hurt, and then an attempt to look unbothered so Mikey wouldn’t bare his toothed smile at Renet like a weapon. Some time after that, he let himself sit with her statement, and he realized that any friend of Mikey’s must have meant it some other way. 

Now she was explaining that Gio didn’t belong here because he actually belonged back there. In the past that Mikey had begged her a dozen times to send him back to. In the past where Leonardo was still alive. Gio should have been there all along, but he wasn’t. 

“You know, if we engage in a bit of healthy rules lawyering and obey the letter more than the spirit of Null Time’s foundational principles,” Renet said brightly, “we’re really, like, righting a wrong, if you think about it. Please don’t think too hard about it.”

“And when I’m done, you’ll bring me back?” Gio clarified. 

“You’ll end up exactly where you belong,” she told him. “Hey, you remember your yellow door?”

Gio, surprised she knew about that, nodded. 

Renet told him that she had been sent to investigate an explosion of mystic energy that opened windows throughout all of time and space. It was a spectacle that had led her right to the turtles. Right to Mikey. 

“That was him,” she explained, smiling at Gio. “He didn’t mean to, but he gave you a way home. Next time you’re lost, keep an eye out, and he might surprise you again. He really is amazing, huh?”

When Gio returned to the lair, Mikey seemed restless and unhappy. He looked like he was seconds away from grounding Gio from leaving ever again and pulling the plug on his scheming with Renet once and for all. He looked like he wanted to protect Gio from every bad thing that dared to darken their door. 

Gio really loved him. He really did. He hadn’t known what that felt like until he met his big brother, and then he knew it felt like carrying a sun around inside you. Impossible to contain, spilling light from every side. 

He wished for the thousandth time that he’d been here all along. But maybe it’s for the best that it worked out the way it did. 

It’s because he got lost back then that he could save Leonardo now. He was the only one who could. 

—

“You’re leaving,” Donatello said. 

Gio, who had lived there for almost a full year and could count the number of times Donatello had addressed him directly on one hand, froze mid-step. Being approached by the imposing turtle in the metal shell was a lot like staring down a shark in a swimming pool. 

He had no idea how this conversation was going to go, and had truthfully not even planned on having it in the first place. 

Saying goodbye to Raphael and Donatello was really for Gio’s own benefit, not theirs. They didn’t like him, and wouldn’t miss him, but Gio had never stopped wanting to be their brother. He hoped that if he did this right he’d get another chance to be. 

Yesterday, Gio went into the dojo after dinner and took his usual spot along the side of the room. Raphael didn’t always acknowledge his presence there, but he never kicked him out, allowing Gio to observe his training without censure. 

The snapping turtle was a powerhouse, enough force in each strike to level buildings—that probably would have rattled the entire underground if it weren’t seamlessly absorbed by the Genius Built equipment—but he was also incredibly precise. It was a marvel to watch someone so big do exacting, meticulous katas with a cool smoothness that belonged to water. 

Gio could see why he used to be the family’s foundation, why his siblings used to trust him to carry them everywhere. His siblings still did. Raphael was the one who lost that faith. 

Gio tucked his knees to his chest, made himself extra small and extra out-of-the-way, and rested his chin on his folded arms. He didn’t move for most of an hour, and Raphael sent him a few wondering, sidelong glances, clearly confused but unwilling to break their companionable silence. 

Bye, Raphael, Gio thought, a secret farewell to his biggest brother that he’d never hear. I hope you’ll be happier. 

Now he was standing in a hallway feeling half his height under Donatello’s unflinching stare. It was one thing to throw the term ‘genius’ around in conversation, and another thing entirely to be confronted by someone much smarter than everyone else to a degree that was laughable, feeling like a deer blinded by headlights on a highway. 

“Why bother?” Donatello asked. 

Gio tilted his head, not understanding the question. Feeling that instant gut-punch of fear that followed not knowing how to answer a question, that had followed him since he was five years old. 

“This has nothing to do with you,” Donatello said, each word blunt and precise, a knife punching through paper. “You didn’t even know Leo,” he went on. He spoke the name differently than he said every other word, placing it down instead of dropping it wherever. “Why do all of this for him?”

Nothing to do with me, Gio thought, letting the hit land where Donatello wanted it to. Since he didn’t know Leonardo, he wasn’t really family. He was missing something intrinsic and fundamental that every other Hamato had in spades. He knew that already. It still hurt. He still let it hurt. 

And now he did understand how to answer Donatello, but it wouldn’t endear him to the older turtle in the slightest. It might make Donatello angry enough to snap at him. 

The truth was that Gio wasn’t doing this for Leonardo. He wasn’t even really doing it for Donatello or Raphael or Splinter or April. 

“For Mikey,” he corrected, quiet in the cavernous hallway. 

The following silence was big and hungry enough to swallow up the whole city. Gio was braced for a lot of things to happen. He didn’t expect Donatello to draw back as if he’d been slapped in the face, staring at Gio with an actual emotion peeking out of his eyes—surprise, clear as day, where Gio was used to seeing weaponized nothing. 

Then Donatello turned in the direction of his lab and walked away as abruptly as he’d shown up in the first place. Gio stood still for an extra second or two, just in case the shark circled back. 

When Renet returned to the lair and announced everything was ready for their not-technically-illegal extracurriculars, Donatello appeared in the room moments later. He would stop a forest fire in its tracks, Gio thought, as all activity ground to an immediate halt with his arrival. 

Donatello didn’t so much as glance at Renet, radiating a frosty disinterest in her direction that even she knew better than to attempt to bubble her way through. He was holding something very purple in his hand, and Gio didn’t have time to do more than glance at it before the older turtle was walking right up to him and putting the purple thing in his jacket pocket. 

“This is for the Krang,” Donatello said flatly. On Gio’s other side, Mikey was watching in stunned disbelief. “Don’t handle it too much, it’s temperamental. Shoot it from your bow. And give that monster a message from me.” 

Message delivered, Donatello straightened Gio’s lapel idly, and then walked out of the room. Renet said, “Wow, he sure is a force of nature!” which was putting it lightly, since both she and Gio had been careful not to even breathe too loudly while the softshell was talking. “Anyway, you ready?” she asked Gio. 

He was ready. The sooner he left, the sooner he could come back. Mikey on the other hand looked so pale and miserable that Gio couldn’t help but tell him, “If you really don’t want me to go, I’ll stay.” 

A tiny, secret corner of his heart betrayed him by wishing Mikey would ask him to stay. But his big brother—who worried about him constantly when he stayed out too late, but never imposed a curfew, who fussed when he came home with scrapes or bruises from odd jobs in the Hidden City, but never forbade him from going back out—would never keep him here if he thought Gio wanted to go. 

His smile said as much. Warm, and not as bright as it should have been, and a little sad. 

“Then I’ll see you when it’s over,” Gio said firmly. 

Mikey’s smile faded, a crease forming in his brow. His eyes darted over to Renet and whatever he saw on her face surprised him. He glanced back at Gio with that surprise painted all over his expression. Then the sadness got bigger. Then the warmth won. 

He poked a spot on Gio’s forehead playfully, and pressed a kiss to the same place. Gio’s heart shuddered, unsure what to make of the flood of affection over its parched earth. 

“You are not alone,” Mikey said firmly. “Promise you’ll remember.” 

“Promise,” Gio whispered. 

The actual act of time travel was over before Gio had a chance to open his eyes. 

—

2020 

From all the stories Gio had heard about him, it would have made a certain kind of sense if Leonardo turned out to be ten feet tall. 

Gio had seen pictures. He’d even seen videos; windows into another life. He knew of Leonardo, the boy who had lived for his family with all the same earnestness and conviction that he had died for them with. The boy who tore a hole out of the world when he left it, a wound that closed up but didn’t heal right. The one whose absence was a scar slapped across the earth where no flowers could grow. 

He’s so small, was all Gio could think the first time he saw him. He’s so small. 

Nothing could have prepared him for Leonardo looking up at him and making a joke, as if he wasn’t broken and bleeding and farther away from home than he’d ever been. He was frightened and trying not to be, his smile fearless and his eyes glassy and traumatized. He was clinging to a bloody photo like it was the only thing left for him to hold. 

Gio had only just met him, and he already couldn’t imagine letting anything hurt him. He had already begun to realize, a light clicking on in his head, exactly why no one had really survived losing this kid. 

There was a light in Leonardo that felt familiar—cooler than Mikey’s warmth but gentle in the same way, like a breeze on a hot day—and Gio bumbled toward it the same way, too. Stupid moth dressed up in a turtle shell. 

You don’t belong in the dark, Gio didn’t say. 

“We’re going home,” Gio told him instead. 

The slider pressed his cheek against Gio’s shoulder and curled up tired and trusting in his arms, a little turtle familiar with the art of being carried someplace safe by someone bigger.  

Gio swallowed a painful lump in his throat and held his brother as securely as he knew how. 

He had never carried anyone before, had never been carried as far back as he could remember. He wanted to get it right. 

The Krang’s howls of pain had gone tellingly quiet when the yellow door glimmered into existence. Gio waited an extra moment to be sure, but he couldn’t imagine the revenge that Donatello had had almost eleven years to dream up would have left big enough pieces behind to be a problem even if one did manage to trickle through after them. 

It was the first time Gio had ever killed anything, but that knowledge wasn’t heavier than the kid who was bleeding all over his jacket, who wanted to go home so badly he was willing to trust a complete stranger to take him there. 

Compared to him, it wasn’t heavy at all. 

The walk to the lair was long, but with Leonardo’s tech thoroughly fried and his own phone full of numbers that had become extremely long-distance, Gio had no way of contacting the Hamatos for a pickup. He also wouldn’t have known how to start that conversation even if he had the means to. 

The lair itself was a step to the left of familiar. The walls and layout were exactly the same as Gio remembered them, but somehow it managed to look like an entirely different home. It was not the quiet museum he had lived in.

There were blankets everywhere, cups stacked haphazardly in an odd formation, a half-built computer taking up most of the coffee table. Comics and sweaters and sneakers and skateboards were strewn in all directions like someone’s closet had exploded. 

It couldn’t have been more obvious at a glance that a big family lived here. It wouldn’t have been unreasonable to guess, after one look around, that they were always sharing space, constantly getting under each other’s feet, comfortable in their closeness. 

Gio felt oddly seasick standing there, absorbing what this opposite shore had looked like before a devastating hurricane barreled through and rearranged the landscape. But he only had a moment to take it in. 

When Mikey started shouting, Gio started running, a knee-jerk reflex. 

Bursting into the garage was interrupting the opening act of a tragedy—entering stage left and changing the direction the play was going to go. 

He had never seen Donatello wear emotions so plain on his face, eyes glassy with tears that went sliding down his cheeks the second Leonardo started to speak. He was across the room before anyone else had finished processing the prodigal son’s return, lifting his twin out of Gio’s arms and sinking to the floor with him, crushing Leonardo to his chest. He was rattled by the close call—crying mostly silently, but shaking like a leaf—and clinging with a desperation that Gio understood perhaps even better than Donatello did. 

He knew exactly what the nightmare scenario looked like in high definition. And he knew exactly what Donatello looked like after surviving it.

Gio wouldn’t wish that on anyone, but certainly not this kid. Donatello had never warmed up to Gio, never even came close, but Gio was quickly realizing that he would do anything—anything—to protect this bright, quick-to-cry little likeness of him. 

Raphael was sobbing, huge, wracking sobs, lifting them all into his arms with a deftness and certainty that Gio had never witnessed before. His Raphael always hesitated before touching anyone, second-guessing his strength at every turn. The first time he had touched Gio’s shoulder, he had visibly worked up the courage to do so in a way that just hadn’t made sense. 

It made sense now. This big protector, the biggest brother, the shield who let a knife get through. The guardian who almost failed. 

Gio couldn’t look at Mikey for longer than a second at a time without feeling his chest start to constrict painfully. He wanted to go home. He kept waiting for a yellow door to appear. 

But Leonardo’s eyes flew wide with panic when he realized Gio wasn’t in step with him to the infirmary. Gio understood why the world fell to pieces without him because he had only known Leonardo for the better part of three hours and already his built-in response was to do anything to take that fear away. 

He took Leonardo’s reaching hands the way no one took Gio’s when he was sixteen and held them. He promised not to leave yet. 

“Thank you,” Raphael said suddenly. “God, no one said that yet. Thank you, Gio, for—”

“You don’t have to thank me,” Gio replied, staring at Leo’s hand squeezed around his, because it was the only safe place in the room. 

“Uh, we really do,” Raphael said. He was sitting patiently still while Casey cleaned his eye, gazing earnestly at Gio without moving his head. “I know some people have a thing about that, like, ‘there’s no place for thank yours or apologies between family,’ but we don’t subscribe to that policy.”

“Sometimes it’s just nice to hear it,” little Mikey piped up from where he had finally eeled his way onto Leonardo’s cot despite everyone else telling him not to. 

He snuggled right in, sure of his welcome, his shell a perfect fit beneath Leonardo’s arm. There was no way Donatello hadn’t noticed immediately, glued as he was to the other side of the bed, but he didn’t do more than roll his eyes. When the rest of the family clued in they let out aggravated sighs, but no one made any attempt to remove the smaller turtle. April only straightened out Leonardo’s blanket so it covered them both.

“I wanted to say it, too,” Mikey mumbled, word salad lost in the hollow of Leo’s neck and shoulder where he tucked his face to hide. “Thank you, Gio. And sorry, Leo. I couldn’t get you out. I tried and I couldn’t. If you died it would have been all my fault. I didn’t save you. Sorry, Leo,” he said again, voice thick and choked and giving himself away. 

Six people start talking at once, all of them vehemently opposed to the idea Mikey was presenting. Gio couldn’t stand the idea of even a sliver of his Mikey’s self-blame and self-hate existing here, too, when it never should have existed at all. 

“You did save him,” he said, unintentionally cutting through the noise as perfunctorily as an arrow piercing through a straw target. Mikey peeked out at him, red eyes miserable and swimming with tears, and Gio forced himself to meet those eyes head-on. “You sent me,” he said. 

“Oh,” Casey said, a look of slow-dawning understanding on his face. “You’re from the future, too.”

April said, “That would have been so much harder to believe yesterday.” 

Mikey’s eyes were round as he lifted his face most of the way out of hiding. Gio’s heart fucking broke letting himself remember for one second the life-altering grief that this fifteen-year-old had to live through the first time around. The bleakness that drained his whole world of idealism and wonder like rain washing colorful sidewalk chalk away. 

It didn’t happen, he thought, willing someone who wasn’t present to hear it somehow. It won’t ever happen now. 

“Did I really?” Mikey ventured in a tiny voice. 

“Really,” Gio said firmly. “You couldn’t reach him inside the prison dimension because he wasn’t there anymore. He was already gone.” 

“Because you got him out,” Donatello interjected, piecing it together laughably quickly. “Mikey’s portal on Staten Island didn’t work because his portal from the future beat him to it. Leo wasn’t there because he was with Georgie out here.” 

The nickname from him of all people rattled something in Gio’s heart that he was careful to step on. 

“How come it had to happen that way?” Mikey whined nasally, drying his face on the blanket even though it made Donatello hiss at him.  “That really scared me!”  

Casey was staring from across the room with a look on his face that was becoming more stricken and haunted by the second. Gio caught his eye and held it, the only confirmation he was willing to give that whatever conclusion the other time traveler had come to was probably the correct one—and also, hopefully, enough of a hint that Casey should keep it to himself. 

“Isn’t that a paradox?” Raphael was venturing nervously. “Like in the movies? Aren’t those—not good?”

“Not according to Novikov’s consistency principle,” Donnie said in a very loud, rapid-fire voice, phone appearing in his hand, “which I am happy to explain to you all if you’ll give me a brief moment to reorganize my PowerPoint slides. S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N., bring me the laser pointer.”

“No PowerPoints,” Splinter cut over him. “And no paradoxes! It is time for little turtles—and honorary turtles—to go to bed!” 

“Okay, well, we can not do the slideshow, but the paradox thing is kind of out of our hands?” April replied. 

She was kicking her shoes off as she said it, though, and climbing up next to Raphael on the other cot. The big snapping turtle patted the free side of the bed until Casey minced over to join them. 

“We will discuss it in the morning, like civilized mutants,” Splinter said decisively, distributing forehead kisses and blankets throughout the room in the same no-nonsense tone. It was businesslike to a degree that almost felt silly and performative—that was meant to be silly and performative, Gio realized, because it was causing little faces to scrunch up and fight laughter.  

He blinked at the polka-dotted blanket that appeared in front of him. 

“Take that jacket off and I’ll get it cleaned for you,” Splinter said, tone gentling just slightly, just for him. “I know my turtles tend to run cold, so wrap up in this in the meantime.”

Gio was not a child who needed to be coddled or tucked in. He had outgrown any real need for a parent years ago. He had, within days of meeting Splinter in the future, smothered the little hope that his actual parent might want him. 

But he still shrugged out of his jacket, letting go of Leonardo’s hand only briefly to do it. He folded the jacket inside-out to hide the blood from anyone who hadn’t noticed it yet and traded it for the blanket that Splinter wrapped around his shoulders. 

He held the front edges together in his free hand so it didn’t slip down his shell. He couldn’t help rubbing the fabric between his thumb and the side of his forefinger, memorizing the softness. 

“You heard all that, right, Miguelito?” Leonardo mumbled, slowly losing his battle to stay conscious as he poked one of the sunny spots on Mikey’s cheek. “More proof that you’re the best little brother a guy could ask for. Maybe I’ll retire and leave all the portaling to you from now on, how ‘bout it?”

“That’s illegal,” Mikey replied promptly. He was unselfconcious about the tacky tear residue on his face and seemed to feel better now that he was done crying. “You’re stuck with us forever. Donnie, get up here already.”

“Yeah, Donnie, get up here already,” Leonardo parroted unhelpfully.

“You have so many broken bones, Nardo,” Donatello grumbled, sounding halfway convinced despite himself.

“So don’t break anymore of them and we’re golden, Tello.”

Leonardo finally fell asleep with his hand curled around Gio’s and his younger brother and older twin squeezed into the bed on either side of him. Everyone else dropped off one by one, unwilling to leave the room to find a more comfortable place to sleep, clustered together like it went against their very nature to be apart. 

When Gio gave in and rested his head in the pillow of his folded arm, he had only had his eyes closed for a number of minutes before a furry hand touched his forehead. He feigned sleep, a riot of tenderness and confusion taking over his chest, as a thumb brushed gently over his brow in a way that reminded Gio immediately of his big brother. 

His big brother who, Gio was only just realizing, was a patchwork of everyone who had ever loved him. Pieces that made up a greater whole, inherited and passed on. Love that traded so many hands before it made its way into Gio’s. 

Splinter was humming a song Gio didn’t recognize, low and soft, over and over. Gio shouldn’t have felt safe enough to sleep, but he did. And he was. 

—

Someone else was humming now, the same song in a different register. 

“Rise and shine, Clementine,” that voice says, warm and sweet and on the edge of crumbling, like a coffee cake crusted in cinnamon sugar, fresh out of the oven and falling apart in eager hands. 

Gio wonders for a second if he’s home. Then he realizes that he must be dreaming. He’s still in the infirmary but it’s darker now and absolutely silent, not even the machines at the bedside beeping or blinking. No one moves when he lifts his head or stands up to look around. And Mikey is here. 

Long dark hair in a messy plait, shoulders broad and burdened with things that weren’t just his to carry, twenty-six going on a hundred. Gio’s Mikey. 

Some jangling, dislocated thing in his chest is soothed by the presence of his big brother and Gio smiles automatically. 

Home came to him. That’s never happened before. 

“You’re amazing, you know that?” Mikey says, beaming back at him. “You did exactly what you said you would. You got him out. My big brother, my Leo—Gogo, thank you. Thank you.”

 The praise and gratitude fills him with a golden warmth that would put the sky in July to absolute shame. It isn’t hard to hear it from Mikey the way it was almost impossible to endure hearing it from little Raphael, because Gio keeps everything Mikey gives him, even the things he doesn’t deserve. 

“I can come back now,” he says, not quite a question. He can’t think of why else Mikey would be here. 

Something passes in front of Mikey’s joy like a cloud moving in front of the sun. A cold, hard kernel of dread lodges itself in Gio’s stomach, doubling in size by the second. It must show on his face, because Mikey crosses the few steps between him urgently. 

“If I could, I would,” he says. “I’d bring you anywhere you wanted to go. But I can’t.” 

Mikey wouldn’t hurt him—had never hurt him, had never given Gio any reason to believe he would ever hurt him—so when he holds out his hands, Gio takes them. It seems to give the older turtle a little strength, or maybe courage, some cluster of tension in his shoulders leveling out. 

They stand there together instead of apart as Mikey says, “You belong right here.” 

Gio has to fight his first and second impulse to flinch away from that. Maybe Mikey can tell, because he squeezes their joined hands, expression pleading. 

“Why?” Gio asks, barely enough strength behind the question to constitute a whisper. 

I wouldn’t have left if I knew I couldn’t come back, he doesn’t say, because it would be selfish and unkind, and maybe even untrue. He can’t imagine abandoning Leo to that dark place he found him in for any reason. It’s hard to even really think about leaving him after he pleaded with Gio not to go. The first person who had ever asked Gio not to go. 

“Why can't I go back?” he says, feeling half his age, that stupid child who still wanted to be wanted, who hadn’t figured out yet that it would never happen. 

“Georgie baby, the future hasn’t happened yet. There’s nothing there to go back to.” 

He struggles to wrap his mind around that, not quite understanding yet. “You’re there.”

“No,” Mikey admits, “not even me. All that’s left of me is this part, the part that went with you.” 

Horror creeps in like a late autumn chill through a window someone didn’t shut right. Gio’s world is upending, a disaster that’s about to happen, the split-second before a car crash. 

Mikey goes on, “I asked Renet to let me tag along. This much of me, anyway. Sorry, shortcake,” he adds ruefully, a younger brother who lived long enough to become the overbearing older one. “I know you wanted to go, and I couldn’t force you to stay. But I hated the thought of you out there by yourself.”

“I thought I’d get to come home,” Gio says. He feels crushed, eyes stinging, a hopeless aching thing yawning open inside him. He feels stupid. He should have known better. He thinks of Mikey’s face when Gio left, just another person who left. He thinks of never seeing Mikey’s face again, and the pain pours out of him because it’s too big and too full of sharp broken edges to hold. 

“I’m sorry,” he tries to say, but it comes out punchy and strangled, mostly a sob, “I’m sorry.”

“Hey,” Mikey says, all fast, swooping right in. His hands come to rest on Gio’s shoulders, a familiar comfort. “Sweet kid, you didn’t do anything wrong.” 

Gio’s big brother, the one who taught him everything that matters. How to cook soft scrambled eggs. How to make a friendship bracelet. All the words to Ribs by Lorde, learned while dancing together in the kitchen in the middle of the night. Gio had never held hands with anyone just to dance. He had never laughed so loud in his life. 

That kitchen was the safest place in the entire world. The heart of an almost-empty home, where a little light above the stove always stayed on. Gio could find his way to that room in total darkness. He could find his way there from the other side of the universe. 

“You meant the world to me,” Mikey says. “That doesn’t just disappear.”

The tears don’t stop, betraying him one after another. A dam broke somewhere inside him, the last levee standing underwater. He’s pulled into a hug, tucked under his brother’s chin for what could be the last time. Gio clings to him the way he never allowed himself to before, some desperate and frightened and homesick corner of his heart convinced that he can hold on tight enough to never let go. 

Mikey presses his cheek to the top of Gio’s head, swaying them back and forth. Effortlessly kind, even now, even when Gio doesn’t have to be his problem anymore.  

“Will I see you again?” Gio asks, not sure he wants to know the answer. 

“Who knows?” Mikey tells him warmly. “Maybe you should wake up and find out.” 

—

Someone is gently shaking him awake. He doesn’t flinch away because the hands on his arm are familiar. They’re smaller than he remembers but he’d know Michelangelo anywhere. He’d never mistake him for anyone else. 

When Gio opens his eyes, a round, bright face is beaming at him. There is nothing broken or lost or drowning about this kid. He’s summer sunshine, he’s spoiled and loved and has never gone a single day without being scooped up and smothered in affection. He wouldn’t know the first thing about living without all of that. 

And he looks at Gio the way Gio’s big brother used to, like there was no one he would rather share all his light with than him. 

“Rise and shine, Georgie!” Mikey chirps. “You were promised breakfast empanadas and I aim to deliver. Wanna help me out? I need someone on bell pepper duty before Raphie eats them all!” 

Some things change and some things stay exactly the same. Gio smiles before he realizes he’s going to, helpless to do anything else. 

The closer they get to the turnstiles that serve as the front entrance to the lair, the more clearly Leo can make out raised voices. The confused rambling in his brain goes quiet and his heart sits up at attention, because it sounds like Mikey is shouting. It sounds like he’s crying. 

“Oh, no,” Leo says. “We gotta—hey, we gotta get in there.” 

He is abruptly aware of his missing swords, the lack of any suitable stand-in for him to transform into a sword. He’s tapped out, he doesn’t think he could so much as walk a few steps on his own, but he won’t let that stop him. He would portal to the moon a hundred times if it would take that grief-adjacent anger out of his baby brother’s tone. 

Gio doubles his pace, because he’s clearly a turtle with his priorities in order, hopping the turnstiles and shooting like an arrow through the messy living room toward the garage where all the noise seems to be coming from. 

Mikey’s still shouting. The sound is grating and horrible, like it’s hurting his throat to do it, like it’s about to either ratchet up into a shriek or double over into a howl at any moment. Leo can’t make out what he’s saying, but he doesn’t need to know to be unsettled by it. He’s never heard Mikey sound this way before, not even when they lost Gram-gram and the first lair and had to leave dad behind. What could possibly be worse than all of that?

“That’s my sunshine,” Leo tells Gio seriously. “Shouldn’t sound like that at all. World might still be ending.”

“As far as he’s concerned, it is,” Gio replies, frank but not unkind. “He thinks his big brother died.” 

Leo’s stomach lurches sickly, an instant, intense reaction, because his mind connects ‘big brother’ straight to Raphie and then draws another line to connect Raphie to ‘died,’ and then everything falls out from under him like the ground is gone and the sky is gone and it’s just bleak empty horrible nothing in all directions.

Only he can hear Raph’s warbling rumble from down the hall now, all thick and syrupy, stuttering in a way that’s unlike him. It puts a hard pause on Leo’s panic, yanking up the emergency brake. Raph is alive. 

His twin is also Mikey’s big brother, and maybe that’s who Gio meant, but now that Leo has had a moment of stunned disorientation—confusion that is sitting with itself instead of just screaming wordlessly in both his ears—he realizes Donnie’s little light in Leo’s soul is as warm and alive as ever. So is Raph’s, and Mikey’s, and April’s, and dad’s. Their constellation hasn’t gone dark anywhere. If anything, it’s one star brighter than it used to be. 

Then they’re in the doorway and there’s no more time to think because Leo is staring across the garage at his family, who are all staring back at him. The sudden silence rings for a very long, stretching second. They’re all there—everyone Leo held close to his heart in hell, everyone he was ready to die for. 

They’re all staring at him like they’ve just seen a ghost. They’re all very still, like the ghost might disappear if they’re not careful.

This is when Leo should say something. He had—back in the prison dimension, he had so much he wanted to say to all of them. So many last words and goodbyes. 

When he opens his mouth, what spills out is, “I’m sorry.” He’s looking at Raph, his Raphie, whose right eye is inflamed and puffed closed, whose left shoulder still hasn’t been bandaged by anyone. It must hurt. Leo hates that it hurts, that it’s his fault it hurts. “I’m sorry,” he tries again. “You’re my hero. That’s what I meant. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’t know what else to do. I’m sorry. I love you. I’m sorry.”

Suddenly Donnie is right there, so fast he must have teleported, which is not a thing that Leo knew Donnie knew how to do. He wastes no time pulling Leo into a crushing hug and they sink to the floor beneath Leo’s weight. 

Leo’s ribs and leg scream in protest but that’s their own problem. Donnie’s snuffling wetly, sad softshell sounds that make Leo’s heart crack right down the middle, that hurt like knives in his stomach, that override every single other thing in the universe. He hugs his twin back as hard as he’s capable of. He’s not letting go until someone wrestles him away. 

A smaller body collides with them both and the embrace changes shape. Donnie would only loosen this particular brand of death grip if it was to include their baby brother. Mikey burrows right in, shoving his wet, teary-sticky face against Leo’s neck, his whole body heaving with how hard he’s sobbing. 

And then they’re all seized in huge arms and held securely against a rumbling chest that Leo would know anywhere. He’d know Raph even if he was deaf and blind and numb, he’d know him at the end of the world. The whole world.

“Leo,” Raph sobs. It’s all he can seem to manage, so he says it again. “Leo.” 

“You scared me so bad,” Mikey chokes out. “Lee, I thought, I thought I’d never see you again.”

Leo can’t move more than to press his cheek to the top of Mikey’s head. “Reports of my death have been greatly—” 

“Make one single joke and I’ll murder you, and no jury on earth would convict me for it,” Donnie hisses against his temple, still roughly more turtle than person. 

“Noted,” Leo mumbles, and then makes an upset sound because Raph is setting them all down and Mikey is peeling away just barely and he doesn’t know why they’re letting go even that much until familiar hands are cupping his face. “Daddy,” he realizes, going boneless. “I missed you.”

It’s nowhere near big enough to describe how badly he wanted his dad when he was on the other side of that portal. He doesn’t know any words big enough. 

“I missed you, too, Baby Blue,” Splinter says, stroking the stripes on Leo’s cheeks with the pads of his thumbs, unendingly gentle, the way nothing in the prison dimension was gentle. “Luckily we will not have another opportunity to miss each other for a very long time because you are grounded for the next century.”

An excuse to stay home forever is not a bad thing to the person Leo is currently, but he still has a brand to maintain, so he says, “Hmf. I want my lawyer.” 

“She’s already filed a motion to withdraw from the case, on grounds of her client being an uncooperative little shit,” April says from somewhere above him, voice drawing in closer as she presses a firm kiss to his forehead. “You’re doing the time.” 

“This whole justice system is a scam,” Leo says. He has to blink hard so he doesn’t lose focus, there’s still one person he hasn’t put eyes on. He’ll have bad dreams if he falls asleep before he checks in on everybody. “Where’s Junior? He’ll be on my side.” 

Something uncomfortable and guilty steals across his sibling’s faces—the faces Leo can see, anyway. Donnie still has his tucked in the crook of Leo’s neck and shoulder and doesn’t seem inclined to change that anytime soon. Raph ducks out of the way a little, and Mikey says, “He’s—yeah, he’s here—” 

The human boy who shuffles forward is wringing his hands, face ashen and tacky with old tears and eyes glassy with new ones. He looks more anxious and sick to his stomach now than he did when he was unwillingly pitched through a time gateway by the remnants of his doomed family. The second he meets Leo’s eyes he crumples to his knees so he’s looking up at Leo instead of down, this poor kid they all owe so much. 

“I’m so sorry,” Casey says. His voice doesn’t tremble or break but there’s barely any air behind it, like it’s taking everything he has to get the words out. “I closed the portal on you. I killed you. I’m so sorry, sensei.” 

Leo hates everything about this. He lurches forward, gets exactly nowhere with all the people holding him, but manages to free an arm and snatch up one of Casey’s restless hands.

“Three things,” he says, wishing he could be more eloquent, “and you need to listen.” 

“I’m listening,” Casey whispers. 

“I told you to close the portal. I put that on you. That wasn’t right. I shouldn’t have made you do that. Right after you lost your dad. That was just—horrible for you—and when my brain isn’t a scrambled egg I’ll make it up to you. I will,” he adds fiercely, when Casey opens his mouth to interject. “Hush. You’re still listening. The second thing—you didn’t kill me, I’m right here. Alive, not a ghost.” 

Not a ghost, he thinks, because no one would go all the way to the prison dimension to save a ghost. And no one would hum for a ghost, or carry one home, or share a stupid joke to make the darkness around them not so dark. Not a ghost. 

“And—you’re still listening?” Leo checks. Casey nods jerkily like a puppet on a string. Leo squeezes his hand and says, “You saved us. You saved everybody. Don’t be sorry. You’re a lifesaver, Casey Jones.”

That child soldier comportment finally dissolves enough for the shaken seventeen-year-old underneath it all to peer out, devastated, orphaned, displaced. He holds Leo’s hand in both of his own and nods again. 

“How did you get out, Leo?” Raph asks, absurdly tentative as he asks the question they’re probably all wondering. He sounds afraid to jinx his good luck. 

“New brother,” Leo says. “Who is not imaginary. Or an alien. He was tested extensively and passed with flying colors.”

“Good to know,” April says, gently stroking his sore head the way he could remember her doing every time he was sick for practically his whole life. Then she pauses. “Wait, did you say—”

It’s funny, they’re all ninjas or ninja-adjacents, and they still managed to completely forget about the whole entire extra mutant turtle in the room. The turtle who carried Leo here, who Donnie extracted Leo from in the first place, who has been quietly observing their reunions this entire time. 

So overall, situational awareness is definitely an area that needs some improvement, but in their defense it’s been one hell of a day. 

Gio, for his part, is as good as a statue in the doorway. Every warm hint of feeling Leo managed to thaw out of him is back behind a resting murder face, that face that stared down the Krang General without flinching. 

“Hi,” he says once the entire room is staring at him, as unflappable as ever. “Gio,” he adds, by way of introduction. 

He’s so cool, Leo thinks, or maybe says out loud, if the sidelong looks his brothers give him are any indication. It’s hard to keep track when all he wants to do is lay his aching head down for roughly fifty consecutive hours. 

“Oh,” Mikey says, wide-eyed. It’s a sentiment echoed on Donnie and Raph’s faces, too. 

They’re letting themselves feel it, recognizing him the way Leo did in that connected place where their ninpo lives—the steadfast red mountain, and brilliant purple lightning, and cheerful orange bonfire, and mischievous blue wind, the landscape that Leo knows as well as he knows his own face in the mirror. 

There’s another feeling there now, another color; a fifth presence. Soft, unassuming gray that could turn stormy in an instant. Calm water meeting the shore at low tide. Miles away yet, not quite close enough to touch, but undeniable. A piece they hadn’t even realized was missing until it wasn’t anymore. 

“Little Spot?” Splinter blurts. He looks rattled. If he wasn’t kneeling on the floor already he might have fallen over. He pushes himself upright, bracing himself on Raph’s shoulder, and says, “It is you. One of my sweet baby turtles. But how can it be you? I watched —the day we escaped the lab, a machine went haywire, and you were—”

“The light you saw back then was a portal,” Gio says. His tone gives absolutely nothing away. He could just as easily be talking to anyone about any old thing. “It didn’t kill me. It just took me someplace else.” 

“A portal,” Splinter says numbly. “All this time, one of my babies has just been—someplace else.”

“Splints, how can you be so sure?” April says, more out of journalistic curiosity than any real disbelief. 

Splinter beckons at Gio with both hands. There’s a brief, stilted pause on Gio’s end, and then he obediently folds to his knees so the rat can reach him. He looks like the very last thing he’s expecting is to be held the way Leo was held just minutes ago, his spotted face cradled carefully in his dad’s hands. Suddenly he looks his age. 

“Yes, look at that,” Splinter says warmly. “He has my eyes, just as his brothers do. There is no mistake. He is one of ours.” 

From the way Gio blinks, it’s his first time hearing anything like that. His stillness now is more aligned with a prey animal than a badass alien-killing predator, as if he’s keeping himself safe by not moving a single inch or even breathing visibly. Leo feels a pang in his stomach, made lonely just by proximity to that expression on his new brother’s face. 

Stick around, Georgie, Leo thinks, and you’ll forget what it felt like to be alone. I promise, I swear. 

“Oh, what?” Mikey whines thickly, rubbing his face dry on Leo’s arm like the brat he is. “We had another brother this whole time and we’re only just getting him now? That’s not fair!” 

“Clemmys guttata, an aquatic turtle,” Donnie says, bright-eyed with interest. “Clearly a man of distinguished taste. I’ll need a blood sample.”

“Donnie,” April says with an air of exhaustion. 

“Raph has so many questions,” Raph admits. 

“I’ll answer them,” Gio says calmly. If he’s overwhelmed, it would be nearly impossible to prove it. “But first Leo needs a doctor.” 

It’s comical the way everyone springs into action the second they finish processing that statement—or it would be, if Leo wasn’t suddenly un-hugged by a whole bunch of people. Displeased, he says, “He doesn’t need a doctor, he is a doctor. I know exactly which of my bones are broken, thank you very much.” 

“You have broken bones?” Donnie snaps. “And you’ve just been sitting on the floor letting us manhandle you like an entire idiot?” 

“Infirmary,” Casey announces, already halfway across the room. “Sensei trained me in field medicine, I can help with anything short of open-heart surgery. Are we stocked?”

“Who do you think you’re dealing with?” April says, which means ‘yes, our resident paramedic is pedantic about one thing and one thing only and that’s having enough medical supplies to outlast a zombie apocalypse.’ 

Leo is scooped up in Raph’s arms, handled much more carefully now that everyone is aware of his not-entirely-intact state. Normally at this point he would be sinking, lulled into uselessness. The adrenaline fading, the individual hurts jumping up and down and waving pompoms to get his attention. He’s so close now to being able to just lay down and let someone else take care of things, but—

But Gio hasn’t made any move to join them. He’s lingering behind, like he’s trying to be respectful of someone else’s family during this difficult time. Or like he’s just waiting for them to forget about him so he can disappear. 

Leo’s heart jumps as panic seizes him by the throat and all quiet, peaceful thoughts of passing out go up in smoke. 

“Wait,” he blurts, lurching forward so suddenly that Raph almost drops him. “Hey, don’t go.” 

What if the Krang comes back? What if Leo gets lost and ends up in the prison dimension again? What if he never got out in the first place? Leo is pretty sure he’s home for real, and he’s almost one-hundred percent positive that everything is okay, but he wants Gio to be here just in case. He wants all his siblings safe and here where he can see them, including this one. 

Leo doesn’t realize he’s reaching until his open hands are taken carefully. Gio holds them and leans in to look right at Leo so Leo can look right at him. His eyes are deep and dark but there’s rich, warm brown in them when the light’s just right. His face could be carved from stone, but it softens for smaller turtles. 

Gio glances up at Raph. Leo doesn’t have to look to know that Raph is probably smiling warmly back at him. If Gio is looking for a reason to leave, he won’t find one there. 

Donnie is a harder sell on most days, but not on this one. He’s still got one hand tucked around Leo’s arm. He’s still shivering off and on, like he just had a really close brush with his absolute worst nightmare and now he keeps seeing afterimages of it each time he blinks. Donnie would be willing to make peace with Big Mama and Witch Town and the entire Foot Clan all in the same day if they were the ones who brought Leo home—but since it was Gio, he gets the free lifetime pass into Donatello’s good graces, which is a lot like winning the Powerball jackpot on your first try. 

And Mikey, of course, is everything bright and sweet and spoiled in the world, beaming at Gio and gearing up to baby brother his way into getting exactly what he wants, accepting no substitutions. 

“Come on, at least give us the chance to win you over,” he wheedles. “I’ll make my world-famous breakfast empanadas in the morning if that sweetens the pot!”

Gio seems to have no idea how to look directly at Mikey’s shining face, so he looks down at his own hands instead. Leo holds onto them a little tighter, and it feels almost like being back in the prison dimension, knowing the most important thing he can do is hold on. 

Come in already, Leo imagines calling out to the tide, that distant crashing water still dithering off the coast, still making its mind up about making this place its home. We saved a spot for you. 

“Stay,” Leo says stubbornly. Unreasonably, maybe. Gio came here from somewhere, and presumably has somewhere to go when he’s done killing aliens and babysitting clingy turtles, but he can belong to them, too, can’t he? They’re all big kids, they can share. 

Whoever else loves him out there in the universe must love him enough to share, or they wouldn’t have let him go in the first place. 

“Let’s make a deal,” Gio finally offers. 

“I’m listening,” Leo replies, game face on.

“If you accept all the medical attention Casey decides you need without sulking or fast-talking or trying to sneak off,” Gio says flatly, that blink-and-you-miss-it humor, “I’ll stay for breakfast.” 

Leo gapes at him, game face off. “Uh, hey, new guy, what gave you the impression I would do any of those things?” 

Donnie doesn’t bother containing his snort, amusement breaking through the stormy upset on his face, and Mikey laughs out loud. Raph’s chest is rumbling, affectionate and happy, and Gio is gazing at all of them like he knows exactly how much their smiles are worth. 

Like he knows exactly how much Leo is worth, and he’s willing to stick around anyway. 

“Deal?” Gio says, quiet and kind.