7 For Leosagi?? 🥺

7 for Leosagi?? 🥺

dialogue prompts

7. “No. No, stop. Stop talking like that. You’re gonna be fine.”

i'm so sorry in advance. here's a song rec ❤️‍🩹

x

It’s not like Usagi expected to get a happy ending out of the apocalypse. It’s not like a happy ending could exist anymore—that idea went up in smoke the day Raphael died and took a part of every single person who loved him right along with him. 

Leo hasn’t been Leo since then, not really. That magnetic person Usagi first met in Run of the Mill, with brilliant gold eyes and the loudest laugh in the room, is made up of smaller parts, and those parts run around in color-coded bandanas. 

Losing Donatello was hard for all of them, and in some ways was the final nail in the coffin that no one wanted to admit they had already dug a grave for in their minds. 

Oh, Usagi realized that night, in between holding Leo and praying he’d scream or cry or do anything other than stare vacantly at the wall, I’m never getting him back again, am I?

That shining boy Usagi fell in love with was long gone by then. 

But the man left behind still woke up in the morning and went to work, and his unyielding heart still beat for them, and his brand-new way of smiling with half the life he used to have was becoming more familiar every day.  

Usagi knew that he and April were two of Leo’s touchstones, important and integral and necessary. He also knew that Michelangelo and Casey Jr. were the real miracle workers. 

Mission room, quick, Mikey had sent with ninpo rather than a communicator, more of a feeling that gave the impression of words than an actual message. But Usagi had been an unofficial adoptee of the Hamato clan long enough that the turtles’ ninpo had a well-worn little nook inside his soul to rest in, and he was moving before Mikey’s voice had faded. 

April was already in the doorway when he skidded into the hall, and he didn’t have a chance to ask what the matter was before he heard what had to have put that stunned look on her face.

Laughter. 

Leo and his little brother and his little ward were sitting around the table, and what had probably begun as a lesson in strategy had devolved into what sounded like a homebrewed D&D campaign. Mikey was sitting cross-legged on the table, forming little figurines out of light as Casey requested them that became solid as they traded hands. 

It was a pocket of goodness Usagi never would have guessed he would find that day. Mikey looked over his shoulder and beckoned them in with a nod of his head, smile widening to include them. 

“Living up to your name every day, Angelo,” April murmured, hopping up to sit on the edge of the table and bumping her shoulder into his. 

“You guys make it easy,” Mikey said as if his little miracles were unremarkable. 

Usagi circled around the table to sit on Casey’s free side, rewarded with a samurai rabbit figurine and a backstory that sounded a lot like a fictionalized version of the horrifying disaster of a mission of four years ago, when he had led a pack of Krang hounds away from a cluster of survivors and somehow managed not to die for his troubles. Casey’s rendition edited out a lot of his panicked swearing, and made him sound more like a hero than anything. 

Usagi had only told his fiancé the finer details, so this heroic Yojimbo character had to have come from him. It made his heart warm, and he listened to Casey’s earnest, inherited storyteller voice and Leo’s indulgent, leading questions fill the room for long after he should have gone to find some work to do. 

And then the Krang arrived by the hundreds, with their hounds and their parasites, and crashed over the resistance like high tide. Everything fell apart, their forces scattering to survive only to be picked off one by one. Usagi lost sight of his family in the chaos, but then a beacon went up. It attracted attention for miles, and Usagi gritted his teeth and fought like hell to get there first. 

He felt it when Mikey’s ninpo went supernova—an echo inside his heart that felt like loss. That felt like grief. 

No, Usagi thought. Please no. 

He found Leo lying on his plastron in an obscene pool of red, too much red to make sense. There was a portal open behind him—not blue like the ones he used to make, or burnt orange like Mikey’s, this was the color of the sun on those summer afternoons before the sky turned a perpetual pink. Shining so bright it was impossible to look at head-on. 

Usagi barely looked at it for longer than a second before he was crashing to his knees at Leonardo’s side. The turtle’s carapace was a ruin and he was so still and Usagi didn’t realize his mouth was moving on autopilot, a steady stream of his inner no no no no, until Leo made some tiny noise that was sign of life enough to stall Usagi’s impending meltdown. 

“Hey! Hey, sweetheart,” Usagi said, too-fast, scooting as close as he could. The blood was still warm, seeping into the knees of his trousers. That was good, wasn’t it? That it was warm? “Tried to party without me, huh? That’s not how married life works, you know.”

The ghost of a smile touched the corner of Leo’s mouth. Usagi curled a hand around his cheek and touched his thumb to the smile, committing it to memory next to all the others. 

“Sorry I never got to marry you,” Leo mumbled. 

“No. No, stop,” Usagi said. He almost couldn’t hear himself over the sound of his own heart pounding in his ears. “Stop talking like that. You’re gonna be fine, and you’re gonna marry me. We promised when it was over, we’d—”

“It’s over,” Leo told him, cracking one eye open. The gold of it was so dull. Somewhere in there was the love of Usagi’s life, and he crawled closer, trying to find that spark he followed all the way here. The light that had survived every moment of darkness until now. 

Then that eye crinkled, and Leo’s smile deepened beneath Usagi’s thumb, and he said, “It’s my turn to take a selfish.”

There he was. The laugh that came spilling out of Usagi was half-hysterical. The air smelled like smoke and metal and the pungent tang of the Technodromes and Leo was quoting a TV show they binged together as teenagers a lifetime ago.  

“Anything,” Usagi said. 

“Behind you,” Leo managed, blood on his teeth. “The door. Mikey made it.” 

“The time gateway?” Usagi asked. They had discussed it once, years ago, but when Draxum brought up how dangerous it would be for their resident mystic warrior Leo shot the idea out of the air so completely that no one present in the room that day had dared bring it up again. 

And now Mikey was gone. Usagi chanced another look at the brilliant starlike portal and knew instantly where he had gone. Accepting the loss of him was like accepting you would never see the sun again. Acknowledging how bleak your existence was about to become. 

“The kid already went through,” Leo went on, his voice barely more than a wheeze. “The mission—it’s his now. He’s our g-greatest weapon. Always has been.” 

Their little hope. Bright-eyed and optimistic, growing up in a burning world. If anyone could save everyone, it was Casey Jones. 

“I need you—you to go, too,” Leo said. 

“What? No,” Usagi said, reeling, light-headed with a sudden super-intense fear. Abruptly understanding the shape his own personal hell was about to take. “I’m not leaving you. Don’t ask me to do that.”

Leo laughed, a gusty exhale that seemed to take the last of his strength. “Not if I leave you first,” he mumbled, an apology and a farewell and all the wryness of a joke he knew no one would like. Tears wet Usagi’s fingertips, smearing into the blood and dirt on Leo’s cheek. “I love you. I’m sorry.”

Usagi was a Hamato the way April and Cassandra and Draxum and Casey all were. The way the turtles had been, once upon a time. Taken in and given a home. He couldn’t weaponize the ninpo but he had never had any trouble feeling it. 

And he could feel it when three hands joined his on Leo’s shoulder. When Leo closed his eyes and didn’t drift from Usagi as much as he was lifted up into strong arms and carefully carried away. The body that Usagi was holding was empty. The man he loved—the shining boy he first met—was whole again somewhere else. 

Go catch up to Junior, Mikey’s voice whispered in the back of his mind. We’ll see you on the flip side. 

Usagi realized how Leo must have felt all these years, simultaneously carved from stone and insubstantial enough to float away if the wind blew hard enough. There was nothing left. There was literally, he thought, standing under a burning pink sky, the man he would have married dead at his feet, blood sticky and staining his fur, Mikey’s last act of love burning like the sun at his back, nothing left.

But there was still Casey. Alone, on a mission to stop this future from happening. 

He thought of that day in the missions room, listening in on a lesson-turned-game, and Casey’s bright young voice rewriting history. The bold, daring characters. The brighter end. 

Usagi kissed the dull red mark on Leo’s cheek and slid off his bloodied mask. Lifted the cracked blue katana from the ground and slid it into place next to Edgewing. Tied the tattered blue mask securely around his topknot.

One more try. One more stupid story to tell later. 

“I bet you’ll get a kick out of this one,” he said to whoever might have been listening, and stepped into the light.