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Chapter Text

Usagi Yuichi doesn’t have a crush on that striped turtle guy who used to come into Run of the Mill all the time, because that would be stupid. 

Because that turtle guy, Hamato Leonardo, is such a joke—he’s loud and obnoxious, all swagger and big talk and dad jokes that don’t even land half the time. He’s annoying, and it’s annoying that he acts like he can do whatever he wants just because Señor Hueso treats him like an unruly nephew, and it’s super annoying that he has the audacity to stop showing his face around here now that everyone has come to expect it. 

It’s not because Yuichi misses him or anything! He just—noticed that Leonardo hasn’t been around lately, because Yuichi is very observant. That’s all. 

The restaurant has felt weird and off-kilter in the turtle siblings’ absence the last couple of weeks. Yuichi brings it up once, a casual “I haven’t seen those Hamatos around here lately, have you?” that makes his coworker Qiao lower their glasses to stare at him over the rims so pointedly that Yuichi blushes to the tips of his ears and resolves to never bring it up again.  

Okay, so maybe he’s always been a tiny bit preoccupied with Leonardo—it’s not Yuichi’s fault the guy is so distracting.

Always propping his hip against counters and door jambs while he waits for a table, long and lean and dangerous, striped arms tight with muscle when they cross over his armored chest. Ugh.

His stupid picture-perfect smile—the way it warms into something crooked and affectionate when his siblings are being particularly crazy, like those same ridiculous antics that send normal people running in the opposite direction are the absolute highlight of his day—ugh.

He’s so nice to look at. When he’s not fronting like he’s got something to prove, he’s really funny. He helps out a lot around the restaurant just because he can and he portals Yuichi’s coworkers home when it gets too late and they don’t have a ride and he’s. It’s. Ugh!!!!!

And he’s a fellow swordsman. He loves kenjutsu the same way Yuichi does, in a way that lights him up from the inside.

The first time they ever talked, months ago now, Yuichi struggled to sound cool and collected under the spotlight of Leonardo’s sharp golden eyes, trying to channel the samurai spirit of Miyamoto himself to possess Yuichi and keep him from stammering like an idiot. 

Somehow he managed to maintain a flat, level tone as he casually mentioned that he trained with a sword, too. Leonardo’s face brightened in a way that Yuichi was woefully unprepared for. Mentally, he had to take a knee.

Their first conversation went on for most of an hour. Yuichi forgot he was supposed to be bussing tables and got dragged off by Qiao eventually, and Leonardo got an earful over the phone from the brothers whose dinner was getting cold in the takeout boxes in front of him, but until then—it was fun. 

They compared their respective training, despaired over the same horrible, awful, whose-idea-even-was-it-and-why-did-it-stick katas, and at some point Leonardo reached over his shoulder and withdrew one of his beautiful katana, flipping it deftly in his hand and offering it hilt-first to Yuichi. 

It was such an off-handed gesture, as if it wasn’t precious and important and an extension of his own self, as if it made perfect sense to let a complete stranger take it. Even Leonardo’s sister, sitting on the other side of the booth with Sunita while Sunita was taking a lunch break, looked wide-eyed at the move. 

And when Yuichi gave it back, a piece of himself went with it. It’s a very inconvenient thing that happened and Yuichi is holding a grudge. 

The only thing that tempers his extremely righteous and not-at-all-unreasonable ire is the fact that, since then, Leonardo has taken to seeking Yuichi out on his own whenever he’s making a nuisance of himself around Run of the Mill, spending Yuichi’s breaks rolling silverware with him and arguing hotly about TV shows and comic book characters. 

Yuichi has gotten used to him. To the dizzy, twisty way his stomach acts around him. And now he’s just not around anymore, with zero explanation. 

How dare Leonardo disappear. What’s his problem. Clearly this is an attention-seeking ploy. Well, Yuichi isn’t playing his game. He officially doesn’t care what Leonardo’s doing with his time, and that’s that on that.

Then one evening, as Yuichi is waiting at the bar for his drink orders, he sees Señor Hueso come rushing from the back of house. He’s always running around putting out fires, since their regular clientele can be an eclectic, eccentric crowd, but there’s a bit more frantic energy in his step than sits comfortably in Yuichi’s brain. 

It’s a hold-over from his most ancient ancestors, that prey-animal intuition, keeping him fine-tuned to his surroundings even when he doesn’t mean to be. He always notices when something’s off, and something is definitely off. 

So Yuichi turns, instinct nudging his eyes to follow his boss’s progress through the dining room, and then his elbow slips from where it’s propped on the bar and he almost eats it on the polished tile floor.

There’s a huge, hulking figure by the hostess stand, with a spiky shell and red mask that Yuichi recognizes instantly. This is Leonardo’s biggest sibling, the eldest brother Raphael, though from all the snippets of conversation Yuichi has overheard over the last year, he might as well be the mom. 

Raphael turns as Señor Hueso approaches and something cold slinks into Yuichi’s stomach the second he does, because now Yuichi can see his face. Raphael’s right eye is milky white, the skin around it pale with scars. His left shoulder is bandaged, and there’s a crater in his shell above the wound. 

Ice slides through Yuichi’s gut. Suddenly he’s remembering a tense evening about a month ago, the way his aunt yanked him into a hug the second he got home from work, holding him against herself like she’d almost lost him. Then she expressly forbade him and all of his cousins from going into the human world for any reason. She even called Run of the Mill and spoke to Señor Hueso (which was humiliating, because Usagi is sixteen, not six) who in turn had assured her that the restaurant wasn’t currently connected to that door, and wouldn’t be until the invasion was long over. 

“Invasion?” Yuichi had asked from around the corner of the hallway where he’d been eavesdropping. 

“Nothing for you to worry about, baby,” Auntie said firmly. “You just stay put and let the humans sort themselves out. That’s what we always do.”

Yuichi had been curious, but not so much so that he was willing to get himself grounded. And he really didn’t go into New York City very much anyway. All of his friends were down here. 

Most of his friends were down here. 

It never occurred to him to worry about the Hamatos. He knew they lived in the mortal world, but they’re so much larger than life—they’re so quick and clever and stubborn and strong—that worrying about them feels about as useful as worrying about whether or not the sun is going to rise. 

Now he feels sick. Now he thinks he should have been worried. 

Señor Hueso is talking in a terse undertone, shoulders set and stiff. He’s transparently concerned about something. Raphael shuffles anxiously, wringing his hands while they speak, the apprehensive mannerisms incongruent with his imposing size. 

A tap on the counter drags Yuichi’s eyes back to the bartender. They’ve finished his drinks and they’re watching him with sympathy in their eyes.

“Should’ve got Little Blue’s number when I told you to, huh, Usagi?” they say wryly.

“Shut up, Qiao,” Yuichi mutters, lifting his tray. 

By the time he’s finished dropping the drinks off and taking everyone’s food order—a painful process, since no one can agree on an appetizer, and they have questions about every other thing on the menu, and Yuichi desperately wants to not be dealing with any of them right at this second—Raphael is already halfway out the door. He’s holding a bunch of to-go boxes, ducking his head and stumbling through his gratitude, and Señor Hueso is waving him off briskly. 

The rest of Yuichi’s shift is agonizing. He comes up with a dozen half-formed intel-gathering schemes and discards all of them because they each essentially boil down to begging Hueso for information, and that’s his boss. He’s not quite that level of desperate, thank you very much. 

…Not yet, anyway. 

This is all your fault, Leonardo, Yuichi thinks darkly during closing that night, stuffing paper napkins into their receptacles with maybe six times the necessary aggression. All of his coworkers give him a wide berth, except for Qiao, who mops around him where he’s viciously restocking tables and very loudly says nothing at all.  

Fuck. Yuichi really should have gotten his number. 

Chapter Text

Yuichi lasts another whole day before his scraped-together willpower completely fails him. Okay, half a day. At work he approaches Sunita in that lull between the lunch and dinner rush while she’s folding linens for the tables and makes his daring move. 

Her phone is propped up against the napkin holder, playing a music video by a human performer Yuichi is unfamiliar with. Sunita is bopping along to it and doesn’t notice Yuichi until he’s standing directly in front of her. 

When she does, she jumps about a foot in the air, yelping loud enough that a few of their coworkers on the other side of the dining room turn and shoot them judgemental looks. 

“I’m so sorry!” Yuichi fumbles. He’s constantly accidentally sneaking up on people, but just watch him try to sneak out of the house on purpose to go joy-riding with Chizu and Kitsune. He gets caught nine times out of ten, usually before he’s even halfway out his window. It’s a joke. 

“Ugh, I spend all my time with ninjas these days and I still get spooked,” Sunita says, patting her chest where her heart must have leaped in surprise, but her tone is good-natured. “You’d think I’d be used to people popping up out of nowhere by now, with how often my girlfriend’s little brothers do it, but nope! Anyway, sorry, did you need something?”

“Uh, hi,” he says at length. To his alarm and dismay, he doesn’t actually know where to go from there. It’s very possible he didn’t think this through. “I mean, I just wanted to say hi.”

Sunita saves him with a smile, her visible eye crinkling with the force of it. 

“Hi, Usagi,” she says brightly. “Lunch was wild, huh? Did you make good tips?”

“Yeah, actually. It almost made my ten-top worth it.”

His coworker laughs, commiserating the way only a fellow server possibly could, but her eyes drop back down to the napkins. She mentioned to him once that she has to split her focus constantly, to be sure not to leave slime residue behind on everything she touches. 

Yuichi is finished with his side work for now, so he reaches for a stack of the linens and drags it across the table toward himself, settling in to help. Sunita seems happy to have his company and doesn’t mind leading the conversation, his brief, generally one-word contributions no deterrent at all. It’s always been easy to talk to her. 

“Um, hey,” Yuichi says very casually when he’s bolstered enough courage. “I was wondering if you had Leonardo’s number? I don’t have it, and—it’s been awhile since I’ve seen him.”

“Oh!” To his immediate disappointment, Sunita looks apologetic. “Oh, I totally would, but it’s not really a good time? Things are kind of touchy right now.”

Yuichi focuses very hard on the napkin he’s folding because otherwise he’d probably stare at her as if he’s hanging off her every word, and that. Well that would make him seem desperate. And he’s not desperate. 

“Because of the invasion?” he asks. His friend nods, her bubbly good cheer displaced. 

“Yeah. It was really bad. I don’t know all the details but April and her boys were right in the thick of things. And after—well, after, Leo wasn’t doing too good. It was pretty scary. So his siblings sort of just closed ranks around him.” She slimes the napkin she’s holding and makes a face at it, balling it up in her hands. She finds another smile for Yuichi and adds, “Hey, how ‘bout this? I’ll text April and see what she thinks, okay? I’ll bet Leo would love to hear from a friend!”

Sunita is the best. He’s buying her boba tea after work tonight. And maybe, if she gets him Leonardo’s number, he'll buy her boba tea after work from now until the day they die. 

Later that night, when he’s helping wash dinner dishes, Yuichi’s phone starts vibrating like it’s fighting for its life. When he checks it, he finds messages from Sunita rolling in. She’s a quintuple texter on a good day. 

SUNA: hey ₍ᐢ.  ̫.ᐢ₎

SUNA: good news!!

SUNA: april says she’ll meet up with you tomorrow

SUNA: you’re off right? i said you’d come to the restaurant

SUNA: she’s busy in the afternoon so it’ll have to be before 11

Yuichi notes right away that there was no mention of his potentially not meeting up with April tomorrow. He gets the feeling he doesn’t have a choice. 

Usagi: That’s great. I’ll ask auntie but I should be free. 

SUNA: okay april will see you there at 10 am sharp !!

Usagi: Thanks, Sunita. I owe you one.

SUNA: no prob!! ☆૮꒰ˊᗜˋ* ꒱ა

The bunny emojis would rankle if they were sent by literally anyone else, but from her they manage to be adorable. Yuichi locks his phone and sets it face-down on the counter, then clears his throat. 

Auntie glances at him, rubbing a sponge around the inside of a casserole dish. Two of his cousins are parked at the counter with coding manuals and coloring pages but two is better than the full audience of five, so Yuichi just goes for it. 

“Would it be okay if I skipped my morning chores tomorrow?” he asks quickly. “I know the farmbotto still needs fixed but I promise I’ll get it done!” 

“You stay far, far away from my robot,” cousin Botan says loudly without even deigning to look up at him, little seal point face buried in an unethically-sourced textbook thicker than Usagi’s arm. “It’s still holding a grudge from what you did to it last time.”

“It was an accident, and it was as much Momiji’s fault as mine!” Yuichi shoots back. 

Momiji sends him a look of absolute betrayal, her russet-colored fur bristling in offense. “Was not! You were the one who said we should play samurai!”

“Alright, enough,” Auntie says with a clap of her hands that causes little dishsoap suds to scatter. Botan and Momiji both settle down, but considering they’re ten and six years old respectively, it’s not much of a victory. “Yuichi, what are you up to now?”

Yuichi twists the dishtowel in his hands. “Uhhhhh, so you know—you know Leonardo?”

His cousins both snort. Yuichi whips around to pin them with a glare. “What was that? Why did you do that?”

“Do we know Leonardo?” Botan asks dryly. He’s very sarcastic for such a tiny rabbit. “Hamato Leonardo? Gee, I dunno. You only bring him up nine billion times a day.”

“I do not!”

“Ignore them, baby,” Auntie says, amused. “What’s this about Leonardo?”

“Uh, well, he hasn’t been around lately. And I work with his big sister’s girlfriend, so I asked her about him, and she told me that he was—I mean, I guess he got hurt during that invasion. She couldn’t tell me much, so I was going to meet his sister tomorrow morning.”

Auntie drops the sponge in the dishwater and braces her hands on the edge of the sink, brow furrowed. “What? That poor boy was hurt and you didn’t tell me until now?”

“I didn’t know until now,” Yuichi says. Then, a little desperately, he adds, “Please be normal about this.”

“I’m making him a care package and you’re making sure he gets it,” Auntie steamrolls over him in her most no-nonsense tone. She abandons the dishes left in the sink and starts bustling around the kitchen. “If you’re seeing his sister in the morning, I’ll need to get started on it now.”

Yuichi gazes out the window at the darkening sky, praying that his ancestors will smite him on the spot, but unfortunately he lives to see tomorrow. 

Also unfortunately, April doesn’t cancel or blow him off the next morning, and is even earlier than their agreed-upon meet-up time. She’s standing outside Run of the Mill when he gets there, her arms crossed and her mouth set, and if she’s nervous about all the big yokai milling around on the street, opening their stores or heading down to the market, she doesn’t show it at all. 

She picks Yuichi out of the crowd with steely brown eyes and he steps up his pace a little bit, Spot trotting faithfully at his side. 

“Good morning,” he says, hoping it’s a safe enough start when she seems annoyed with him already. 

“Yeah, you too,” April replies. She considers him for a minute, then uncrosses her arms and stands a little taller, squaring her shoulders and jutting out her chin. “Sunita told me you wanted Leo’s number. Look, if this is some kind of joke, I’m not laughing.”

Um. What? Dumbly, Yuichi parrots, “A joke?”

“Leo may be the absolute worst sometimes, but he’s still one of the best people I know all the time,” the human goes on hotly, as if they’re both on the same page here. Yuichi has the sinking feeling that they’re reading completely different books. “Whatever you’re trying to get back at him for, it ain’t worth it. You do anything to hurt him and his brothers would go on the warpath, and frankly so would I.”

“I’m not trying to get back at him for anything,” Yuichi blurts. Honestly the only thing he wants payback for is all the real estate in his brain that Leonardo takes up, but that’s not something he’s willing to admit, out loud, with his mouth, where someone might hear him. “Why would you think that?”

“Because you can’t stand Leo,” April says plainly. “You always look pissed off when he’s around. I know he can be annoying as hell, but if you can’t see how good he is, too, then that’s your loss.” 

Something in Yuichi’s chest folds right in half. Wow, it hurts a lot. 

Historically, resting bitch face runs in his family. Usagi Miyamoto was known for many things, one of which was his dark, glowering expression. He isn’t smiling in a single painting of him that exists. Yuichi is usually very proud of every single trait that he’s told he inherited from that famous samurai, but maybe he could do without this one. 

Now he’s combing through every interaction he’s ever had with Leonardo, every conversation. He’s picking apart each exchange and trying to look at it from a third party’s point of view. Did it seem like he didn’t want Leonardo around? Is that what Leonardo thought? 

The striped turtle had a way of plowing unceremoniously through uncomfortable silences, of carrying the conversation when Yuichi’s tongue was all tied up, and it seemed as easy for him as it always was for Sunita—her vibrant personality and Leonardo’s charming one, filling the gaps Yuichi’s social awkwardness tended to create. 

But maybe it wasn’t that at all. Maybe it was easy for Leonardo to talk to Yuichi because he figured he had nothing to lose—because he thought Yuichi disliked him already. 

Suddenly, the only thing Yuichi wants to do is go back home, march up the stairs to his loft, climb back into bed, and stay there for approximately a hundred years. Spot leans his head against Yuichi’s leg, sensing his downward spiral the way hounds are trained to sniff out foxes. 

“That’s not true,” Yuichi says. It sounds weak to his own ears. 

He doesn’t know what else to say, and Leonardo’s sister isn’t willing to fill the silence the way Yuichi’s friends are. He looks everywhere but at her, flexing his hands, then remembers what he’s holding. 

“Oh. This is from my aunt,” he tells the ground, holding out the embroidered bag Auntie forced upon him before he could slip out the door. “Sorry. I told her about—and she—yeah. Please tell Leonardo it’s from anyone else. Tell him it’s from Señor Hueso.”

“He’ll know it’s not from his tío at a glance,” April says. She sounds surprised and agreeably lifts the bag out of his hands. Huffing a laugh at how heavy it is, she gazes at Yuichi thoughtfully, then takes a peek inside.

He probably should have seen that coming. Yuichi does his best to sink into the ground and disappear as she takes in the tupperware containers and plastic-wrapped pastries.

April looks back up at him. Some of the ice in her eyes has thawed.

“I’m definitely telling him it’s from you,” she announces.

“From Auntie,” Yuichi stresses desperately.

“Right,” April says. She’s grinning outright now. She shoulders the bag like it weighs about as much as a handful of grapes, and props her free hand on her hip and says, “You got your phone with you?”

“Uh-huh,” Yuichi says, dazed. Is this what whiplash feels like? He felt sort of like this when he crashed his bike in the watermelon field last year. 

“Give it.” April makes a grabby gesture, swiping his phone from him immediately when he holds it out. She taps at it for awhile, then tosses it back. Her own phone chimes from the pocket of her jacket, cluing Yuichi in to what she was doing. “There. You’ve got my number and I’ve got yours. If Leo likes his present, I’ll pass your digits along.”

Her tone has warmed considerably. She winks at him and Yuichi has to remind himself sternly that it would not be cool to bury his face in his ears and hide there until she went away. 

Is Leonardo’s entire family like this? Because it feels like Yuichi has just survived a tornado or tsunami or some other terrifying force of nature, and this conversation wasn’t even ten minutes long. 

April waves cheerfully and takes off at a brisk jog, weaving through the Hidden City streets like she was born and raised here. Yuichi sinks onto a bench, presses his forehead against his knees, and calls Chizu while he’s still all curled over into a yokai pretzel. 

“I’m calling in a favor you owe me,” he says by way of hello the second she picks up. “Meet me at the market street.”

“I don’t owe you anything,” she replies dryly. 

“It involves getting ice cream and making fun of my life choices.”

“We’ll be there in twenty.”

Yuichi ends up blowing the rest of his pocket money for the week on parfaits from their favorite street food stall, and his friends definitely don’t hold back laughing at him when he unpacks the latest installment in the Leonardo saga, but it doesn’t seem as hopeless with the three of them around. 

Gen in particular, big softie that he secretly is, hoists Yuichi up to ride on his shoulders as they make their meandering way back to Usagi Farm. It’s the rarest of gestures. Not even Kitsune’s best doe-eyes get her a shoulder ride.

His friends make Yuichi feel ten feet tall. 

And the next morning, he wakes up to nine new texts from an unknown number. A lot of them are just strings of exclamation points and emojis. He knows exactly who this is. 

Yuichi’s fingers tighten around his phone as his ribs seem to tighten around his heart. A grin spills across his face before he can help it, mirroring the relentless summer sunshine pouring in from the window above his bed. 

Chapter Text

Usagi: Good morning Leonardo.

Unknown: USAGI

Unknown: there are so many snacks in here oh my god 

Unknown: what the hell 😭😭😭😭

Unknown: im heavily medicated its not fair to do nic ethings ill cry

Unknown: tell ur aunt i said THANK YOU!!!!!!! and the blueberry buckle was SO GOOD😭😭

Unknown: i shared some w mikey and he wants the recipe like yesterday

Unknown: we actually ate like. all of it in one sitting. raph was pissed lol 

Yuichi lays in bed smiling at his phone for a while before he gets around to pulling his braincells together to form a reply. 

He starts and stops typing so many times that it’s embarrassing. He’ll pretend he didn’t do that. 

Usagi: Those snacks were specifically meant to aid in your recovery.

Unknown: so idk how familiar u are w baby brothers but typically mike gets whatever he wants

Yuichi thinks of his youngest cousin Jomei. Tiny and soft, with huge gray eyes, and unfortunately already self-aware at four years old. If Mike—Michelangelo, Yuichi thinks he remembers the boy being called—is even half as powerful as Jomei, then Leonardo’s blueberry buckle didn’t stand a chance. 

Usagi: Fair enough. 

It’s a good thing he woke up early. He doesn’t get anything else done for hours. Leonardo is an enthusiastic conversation partner at all times, and his texts manage to translate that energy effortlessly.  

Typically, Yuichi lets his friends save their contact IDs in his phone however they want. Leonardo isn’t there to do it himself, but Yuichi makes the rookie mistake of giving him free rein anyway. So Leonardo insists his number go in under ⚡️NEON LEON⚡️ and Yuichi has something to roll his eyes at every time they message each other. 

It also makes him feel warm. There’s an affectionate little tug in his chest at this clear proof of Leonardo in his hands. 

Now that he has this unfettered access to the very same person he wants to talk to all the time, Yuichi checks his phone a lot more than he used to over the next couple days. He even keeps it in his waist apron pocket at work, which some of the other servers do, which technically isn’t against the rules because none of them have abused the privilege so far. 

Yuichi will feel extremely bad and guilty if he’s the one who abuses the privilege and ruins it for everyone. But when it vibrates in his pocket while he’s going outside to dump the trash anyway, he might as well linger for an extra minute and check his messages, right? Right??

One afternoon, Señor Hueso catches Yuichi lingering in the employee lounge after his lunch break is well over, moving at a snail’s pace back toward the dining room with his nose buried in his phone. He almost walks right into his boss’s chest, saved only by the last-minute sense of someone else’s immediate presence that Karasu-Tengu-sensei mercilessly trained into him years ago. So he freezes a few inches away instead and his eyes dart up to the skeleton yokai’s unamused expression.

Oh boy. Señor Hueso is generally a very patient person but he’s no-nonsense about work. Is Yuichi in trouble? Is he going to get fired?

“I’msosorry,” Yuichi whispers. 

But instead of scolding him, Señor Hueso only gives a pointed look to the phone in Yuichi’s hands and says sternly, “You tell Pepino to give it a rest. He’s still recovering from a concussion, he doesn’t need to be staring at a screen all day, madre de dios. Please be a good influence.”

“You don’t know I was talking to Leonardo,” Yuichi says defensively. He has other friends he could be texting! Then he takes a second look at the older yokai’s face and backtracks immediately. “I mean. Uh. Yes, sir. I’ll tell him.”

“Good. Now you have tables seated in your section.” 

It’s a dismissal if Usagi’s ever heard one, so he scurries into the dining room with five times his initial urgency, sending one last message before he shoves his phone away. 

Usagi: Señor says no more screen time while you’re recovering from a concussion. 

⚡️NEON LEON⚡️: what?? how even???

⚡️NEON LEON⚡️: he doesn’t KNOW ur talking to me 

Thank you, that’s exactly what Yuichi said!

He makes it a point to actually focus for the rest of his shift, but it’s a Tuesday afternoon, and things are slow. Sunita is off for the day, and Qiao is studying at the bar when they’re not actively pouring drinks, and those are the only two coworkers Yuichi is familiar enough to strike up conversation with, so he keeps to his own section and works quietly. 

It’s been brought up a couple of times now, in passing—Leonardo’s condition. Apparently, even a month after the invasion, he’s still healing. Yuichi didn’t know the symptoms of a concussion could last whole weeks. He doesn’t really know much about kappa, or whatever manner of creature Leonardo and his brothers are, but for a head injury to be that severe… 

Suddenly, the sight of Raphael’s damaged eye jumps to the front of Yuichi’s memory. The clean hole in the big turtle’s rock-solid carapace. What the hell could have done that? What happened to them?

His brain is coming up with nightmare fuel like that’s its job. Something horrible went down behind-the-scenes while Yuichi was completely ignorant—while Yuichi was waiting tables and getting into trouble with Kitsune and Gen and helping with the tomato harvest, Leonardo and his family were in almost certain danger. And Yuichi didn’t know. 

He plops down on a stool at the bar at the tail end of his last break for the day, and Qiao wordlessly slides him a cranberry juice on the rocks. 

“How do I get my friend to tell me about something that may or may not be a sensitive subject?” he blurts.

“Have you tried asking him about it?” the ram yokai replies in a tone that manages to be both over-exaggerated and monotone.

Yuichi doesn’t even know why he bothers. He taps his phone on the counter a few times, takes a big gulp of cranberry juice that he pretends is something much stronger, then goes for it. 

Usagi: I need to talk to you. 

⚡️NEON LEON⚡️: oooooo ominous 

Usagi: It’s not ominous, weirdo. I have to go now but I’m off at 7. 

Any normal person would have taken that last text at face-value, but Yuichi isn’t dealing with a normal person, is he?

So maybe he should have been expecting it when he leaves the restaurant a few hours later and finds Leonardo waiting for him outside. He's leaning heavily on one of his katana, either in an attempt to look cool or because he’s having trouble staying upright. 

Yuichi is not inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. 

“What the fuck are you doing here?” he blurts. His flat tone definitely does not convey his shock, but he’s feeling too much right now to articulate any of it properly. 

Leonardo laughs out loud. It’s a different sound than it used to be—hoarse and a little restrained, like he’s trying to remember he doesn’t have to be quiet. But it’s still bright, and it still makes Yuichi’s heart do backflips in his chest.

He’s wearing a hooded sweatshirt that looks way too big to belong to him, a deep maroon color, repaired with clumsy pink stitches along the shoulders. One of the sleeves is hiked up to Leonardo’s elbow, due to the unwieldy cast on his left forearm, covered in doodles and stickers. The hoodie is unzipped down the front, so Yuichi can make out the cracks in Leonardo’s plastron, spiderweb lines cutting cruelly through the armored scutes. It’s hard to imagine the kind of pressure it would have taken to crush his shell—the same kind that drilled that hole through Raphael’s? What happened to them?

The skin around Leonardo’s neck and the side of his face is still discolored from what must have been pretty nasty bruises, and there are puffy red marks where scars haven’t settled yet. He looks older than the last time Yuichi saw him. 

But he’s here. And he’s smiling, a footprint of that laughter left on his face. And now he’s—oh boy, now he’s starting to list to the side. 

Yuichi crosses the distance between them at a run, catching Leonardo by the arm before he can topple all the way over. 

“I don’t see what’s so funny,” Yuichi says waspishly, afraid to let him go. 

“You wouldn’t,” Leonardo says cheerfully. He’s leaning heavily against Yuichi’s shoulder, his hand is shaking as he sheathes his katana at his back, seriously, what the fuck is he doing here? “Everyone’s cussed me out at least once since I woke up. Add you to the list.”

Flustered, Yuichi says, “I did not do that.” 

“You did! You said the fuck word!” 

Yuichi rolls his eyes and begins the process of dragging Leonardo toward the nearest bench, staring down anyone who drifts into their path. The tree yokai already reclining there takes one look at Yuichi’s expression, grabs her bag, and takes off without a word. 

Maybe he’ll feel bad about being impolite later. He doesn’t have any room for it in his brain right now. He doesn’t even think he remembers to breathe until Leonardo is safely sitting down, slumping onto the bench seat like someone five times his age. 

Yuichi crouches down in front of him, giving him a hard look. If he needs medical attention, Yuichi will kick Run of the Mill’s doors down and drag Señor Hueso out here by his tie. Who needs a part-time job anyway?

But Leonardo seems to be okay now that he’s caught his breath, and he’s still grinning, like Yuichi is the best thing he’s seen in days. 

“Do you use your scary face to get what you want all the time, or is this a special occasion?” the turtle asks coyly.

“I am beginning to understand why everyone has cussed you out since you woke up this morning,” Yuichi replies, sitting back on his heels. 

Something tight that’s been clenched in his chest like a closed fist has suddenly loosened, a letting go when Yuichi didn’t even know he’d been holding on. 

He’s missed Leonardo. Being around him has always been easy, even when looking directly at him is like staring into the sun, even when Yuichi’s words get lost somewhere between his head and his throat and he ends up spending most of their conversations just listening and watching. 

“Not since this morning,” Leonardo interjects. “Can you imagine everyone getting on my case like that all in one day? That would just be bullying. I meant since the coma.” 

There it is again. Little breadcrumbs, teasing scraps of information. 

Yuichi gazes up at him, and has at least a dozen questions he wants to ask. That’s why Leonardo is here, even if he doesn’t realize it. Yuichi’s curiosity inadvertently dragged his friend from the safety of his home and the safe harbor of his family to the chaotic streets of the Hidden City.

The trip itself seems to have been hard on him, when usually it’s little-to-no-effort to step through a portal between one location and the next. His forehead gleams with sweat, and he’s still breathing a little heavily, like he just ran a marathon. He’s a pale shade of the vibrant boy Yuichi first met a year ago. He looks like he regrets bringing up the coma. 

But he’s still here. 

Abruptly, Yuichi doesn’t want to ask any of his questions. He just wants his friend to be here. 

When Leonardo says, “Sooo, what’s so serious you dragged me all the way out here?” Yuichi pushes himself to his feet and takes the seat on the bench beside him with a sigh. 

“Nothing, Leonardo,” he lies. “I just wanted to talk to you. You’re the one who jumped to conclusions.”

Some tense line in Leonardo’s shoulders that Yuichi hadn’t noticed before seems to go lax, even as he rolls his eyes. “I’m a ninja, we jump, it’s a whole thing. Anyway, more importantly, did I see a stall selling dumplings down the street or nah?”

“There’s no way I can convince you to stay on this bench, is there?” Yuichi knows the answer already and he’s getting up before Leonardo has a chance to say anything, offering him his hands. When Leonardo takes them, Yuichi hauls him up onto his feet.

They stand there together for a moment, neither of them letting go. Yuichi doesn’t even feel the usual need to spring away from him before he gets too close because he’s missed this stupid guy. And his stupid face, and his stupid big hands, and the stupid way Yuichi feels around him.

Whatever happened to him, happened. Yuichi can’t change that now. And if Leonardo wants to tell him about it, he will. But Yuichi gets the feeling that what Leonardo really wants right now is to feel normal. To feel like maybe one thing in his life is the same as it’s always been. 

“Dumplings,” Yuichi announces, with all the enthusiasm of his little cousins faced with the unjust trial of bedtime. “If you fall on your face, I’m leaving you there.”

“If I don’t, you’re buying,” Leonardo quips back. 

Yuichi scowls, remembers he’s still holding Leonardo’s hands, and then sort of forgets how to person for long enough that Leonardo lets go and goes a few steps without him. His brain literally goes offline for a minute. That’s never happened before. 

“No it’s okay,” he hears Leonardo saying to someone on the street nearby. “It’s not his fault, he’s never been the same, you know, not since the storm.”

Fur bristling, Yuichi hustles to catch up, hopefully before Leonardo has done any actual lasting damage to his reputation. He has an image to maintain around here! He’s Usagi Miyamoto’s direct descendant, and Miyamoto was never anything but cool! 

“Quit making up lore about me!” he hisses. 

“Quit being weird!” Leonardo replies, clearly enjoying himself. “Dumplings!”

Yuichi scowls but falls into step beside him anyway. This is the guy he missed so much? 

As soon as he has that uncharitable thought, he regrets it.

He thinks about April saying he always seemed pissed off to have Leonardo around, and darts a quick look at the striped turtle ambling along beside him. Leonardo doesn’t seem put off by Yuichi’s prickly attitude, but still—it wouldn’t hurt to make sure. 

Yuichi waits until they’ve paid the elderly yokai woman running the food stall for two paper plates of crispy gyoza, so he has something to do with his hands, something to focus on besides his awkward tongue, to say, “I’m glad you’re back.”

Leonardo glances sidelong at him, crunching through a dumpling unselfconsciously. His mouth is full but his expression very clearly says ‘say what now?’

“Here, I mean,” Yuichi tells his plate. “Back here. I didn’t even know you were—I’m just glad you’re better.” 

They walk the length of the block before Leonardo replies. 

“I wouldn’t worry about us, Usagi. Me and my brothers can take a hit. You could even say we were made for it.” That’s a strange sentiment, and something bitter comes and goes across Leonardo’s face before Yuichi can make sense of it, as swift and darting as the little minnows that flit through the creek that winds past his family’s farm. Then Leonardo adds, sounding much more like himself, “My stupid arm is all that’s slowing me down now.”

“Considering it was broken in eight places, I would take six more weeks in a cast as a solid win,” someone says from directly behind them. 

Yuichi doesn’t jump in shock, he freezes, rabbit-still. Leonardo doesn’t seem surprised at all—he just groans theatrically. 

“Oh nooo, it’s the consequences of my actions.”

Donatello snorts. Because that’s who it is, Yuichi realizes as he turns to get a good look at him. 

“You can’t just run off, Nardo,” the purple-masked turtle says. His tone implies that this is not a suggestion. “You get why that’s uncool and unfair, right? Like, I don’t have to explain that very simple, elementary-grade concept to you?”

“I left a note,” Leonardo argues in his own defense. 

“You sure did,” Donatello replies, so level and calm that it sets Yuichi’s whiskers on edge, because that level calmness is very much a thinly veiled promise of bodily harm. “You left a note on your door that said “Do Not Disturb, Beauty Sleep in Progress.” And then you left one on your empty bed that you just drew a winky face on.” 

“I realized I didn’t need any more beauty sleep, Dontron. I decided to save some for the rest of you sad scrubs. You’re welcome.”

“How magnanimous.” 

Beyond the color-coded masks and the dramatically different body shapes and skin tones, there’s another easy way to tell the Hamato siblings apart; all of them have brown eyes in varying shades. Michelangelo’s are warm, tempered honey, while Raphael’s are darker and richer, edging into red. 

Leonardo and Donatello, the twins, have identical golden eyes, piercing and impossibly bright even in the semi-dark of falling dusk. Under the warm lantern light, with their defining characteristics all but overshadowed, it would probably be easy to mistake them for a perfect mirror of each other. 

But Yuichi could never make that mistake. Donatello’s eyes are different, because the way he looks at Yuichi is different. 

Especially now. Where Leonardo was delighted to see Yuichi for the first time since before the invasion, Donatello is looking at Yuichi like he’s a clear and present threat. 

Yuichi doesn’t know what Donatello has to feel threatened about. He has a good grasp of his own abilities and he’s self-aware enough to admit that Donatello could definitely take him in a fair fight. Any of his siblings probably could, up to and including his sister, out of stubbornness and spite alone. Yuichi is the one who feels hunted, like a tiny fluffy animal that was just sighted by a bored, hungry hawk, all because of the cold, calculating gold in Donatello’s eyes. 

Then Leonardo plants his good hand on the side of his twin’s face and shoves it an arm’s length away. Donatello sputters and flails, and Leonardo talks over him with the ease of years of practice. 

“Thanks for the dumplings,” Leonardo tells him. “See you when I’m finally un-grounded, someday seven years from now.”

Yuichi nods, offering a little wave. He watches Leonardo unsheathe a katana and form a bright, spinning blue portal with one swift downward slice through the air. Donatello is griping at him in harsh undertones, and Leonardo is giving back as good as he gets, but it doesn’t escape Yuichi that Donatello has gravitated protectively to Leonardo’s bad side, and Leonardo is leaning his weight against his brother like he’s actually much more tired than he was willing to let on.

Leonardo needs a break. He needs fresh air. He needs to—to not disappear again, even if it probably won’t actually be for seven years. 

Before he can second-guess himself, Yuichi blurts, “I’m off on Friday! You should come to the farm. One of our tokage’s eggs just hatched so we have babies to play with and they’re really cute!”

Donatello makes an antagonistic noise under his breath and hauls Leonardo through the portal. Before he disappears, Yuichi watches Leonardo’s whole body light up, a grin splitting his face in half. 

“It’s a date!” Leonardo calls cheerfully in the seconds before he’s gone. 

The portal closes. Yuichi stares at the empty space where it used to exist while the word “date” bounces around in his head like a free-floating balloon filled with screaming instead of the more traditional helium.

Usagi: Important time-sensitive HYPOTHETICAL question

Usagi: When you make plans with your friend and he calls it a date, how do you ask what he means by that without sounding like an insane person??

SUNA: oh my god!!!!!! ꒰☉ｪ☉꒱

Chapter Text

Somewhere in between overthinking Leonardo’s ‘date’ comment, being reassured by every single one of his closest friends and Leonardo’s own unchanged nature in their texts that it was just a figure of speech, and picking apart all of his other mild panic attacks over things that were probably pointless to determine how much of a freak he actually is, Yuichi breaks his promise to his aunt. 

His thoughts are all turtle-shaped. Turtles all the way down. So his total ignorance about that invasion a little over a month ago has become this black hole in his brain. His curiosity is overpowering. He has to know. 

Here’s the thing: the Hidden City has its own dedicated cell service, network space sourced from one of the major human carriers, but the internet is another story. 

Yuichi’s phone doesn’t have a tether to an internet hotspot the way most of his friends’ do. It’s a lot of money and auntie already has enough monthly expenses as it is. Besides, between work and training and helping around the farm and wrangling five cousins, Yuichi has always had plenty to keep himself busy. When something really worthwhile happens online, Yuichi can count on Kitsune crawling through his bedroom window to make sure he sees it, or hearing all about it from Sunita at work. 

He could probably ask one of them if he could use their WiFi and they would most likely say yes. There’s even a tiny hole-in-the-wall internet cafe somewhere in the more urban side of the Hidden City. Yuichi has options that don’t include breaking the rule Auntie has yet to rescind. 

Here’s the thing. Yuichi is going to the human world. 

He tends to jump in without thinking. It’s something every adult who has had more than a passing influence over him in his formative years has despaired over. He’s impulsive, reckless, he’s heard it all a hundred times. 

But when his intuition points him somewhere, Yuichi follows. It’s the only time in his life he doesn’t overthink, he just goes. Sometimes it gets him into trouble. Other times it leads him toward something amazing. It’s how he found his sensei, how he met his best friends, the reason he has a magnetized yo-yo in his pocket, plucked from the wall of an ancient temple he had no business wandering into, one that had disappeared by the next day when he tried to show Gen. 

Now his gut feeling is telling him he needs to see for himself. He needs to understand. 

So he slips out of bed when everyone else in the house has gone to sleep, already dressed. He ties up his ears, wraps a dark gray haori over his usual whites and navy blues, and lifts Edgewing carefully from its stand in his room to belt at his hip, just in case. 

His door eases open quietly, and by some miracle he manages to avoid all the squeaky floorboards as he creeps across the landing and turns to lower himself down the short ladder to the second floor landing. 

Spot watches him from the doorway, beady black eyes reproachful. 

“Don’t look at me like that,” Yuichi whispers, refusing to feel any kind of guilty pang. “I’ll be back before anyone knows I’m gone.”

He makes it to the second floor without a sound, and he feels really good about it until a voice from behind him says, “Bet you won’t.”

If he didn’t recognize that voice he would have shrieked. As it is, his heart still leaps up into his throat, and he whirls around to hiss, “Yuma! You should be asleep!”

“Pot, kettle,” his oldest cousin says boredly. She’s actually almost a full month older than Yuichi, something she never lets him forget. “Are you really sneaking out to see a boy right now? I thought I wouldn’t have to deal with this sort of thing until Momiji was older.”

“I don’t like what you’re implying,” Yuichi says, doing what he always does when he’s uncomfortable and shutting down. Hands balled in the bottoms of his sleeves he adds shortly, “I just want to use the internet.”

Naturally, Yuma breezes right past his defenses like they aren’t even there. 

“I know, moron, I heard you talking to Spot. I already texted you an address. Go up to the roof and join the network I gave you. For some godforsaken reason it isn’t password protected and it’s 5G.”

Yuichi blinks, then narrows his eyes at her. That sounds like a sideways admission that his mild-mannered cousin has been sneaking out to the human world on the regular. 

“We’re talking about this later,” he says sternly.

“No one will ever believe you,” Yuma replies, and closes her bedroom door in his face. 

At least there are no more surprises waiting for him as he creeps through the house and out the kitchen door into the side yard. Then he books it for the garage, footsteps falling silently in the overgrown grass. 

When he slides the accordion doors open, he finds Spot sitting on the seat of his motorbike like he’s been waiting there for hours, long tail curled comfortably around his folded legs. 

He gives Yuichi another judgmental look. Yuichi gets the feeling that Spot is less annoyed about sneaking out in general than he is about being left behind.

“Okay, okay,” Yuichi says, unwilling to admit to the stubborn lizard that his tiny presence gives Yuichi courage. “I guess you can come along.”

He pushes his bike down the road, until the lantern on the fence post in front of his house is out of sight, then he slides into the seat, pulls his helmet on, and brings it to life with a roar. Spot climbs up to his shoulder and coils neatly around his neck. 

The way is familiar. It’s not a long drive. The Hidden City bustles at night, and no one looks twice at the motorbike tearing down the street. There are plenty of doors to the human world that aren’t policed or even registered, and Yuichi’s friends always use the one between the bath house and the laundromat, because it opens up into a tiny crooked side street in Manhattan, only a few city blocks away from all the action. 

But as soon as he crosses over, a chill runs down his spine. Right away, those prey-animal instincts kick in. He stops the bike with a shudder, pulling up short and tugging his helmet off quickly. His surroundings are wrong. Something is wrong.

Yuichi has been here before. He knows this place. Him and all his friends came up here together just last year to watch a brightly-colored parade. If he didn’t recognize the street signs on the corner, the faded billboard across the street, he would never have believed he was in the same spot. 

It’s as if a massive tornado rolled through and demolished everything. The road is all torn up, buildings folded into piles of rubble and rebar. He can trace the path of destruction as easily as if he’s watching Jomei drive a toy tractor through a pile of blocks. 

If Yuichi’s ears weren’t tied up, they’d be pressed flat to the back of his head. His whiskers are slicked and his fur is bristling and his heart is about to runaway without him. 

Spot’s weight against his leg reminds him to move. The tokage presses his head against Yuichi’s stomach, grounding him. 

“Okay,” Yuichi says hoarsely, stooping to pick his little friend up and hold him against his chest. For his protection or Spot’s, he isn’t sure. “Let me hide the bike, and then we’ll go up.”

He’s shaky for some reason. The climb up to the top of the nearest building takes him whole minutes longer than it should, even with the convenient fire escape. He puts the address Yuma gave him into the GPS on his phone and it gives him an eleven minute walking route. Normally he’d have a good time rooftop running, but his heart isn’t in it. 

The destruction is everywhere. The invasion left a visible footprint on this city. Yuichi sits on the ledge of the rooftop Yuma told him to find, tucks Spot against his side under the warmth of his haori, and connects to the open network. 

He’s still doing this. He’s come all the way here. But now dread is beginning to outweigh curiosity.

The information he’s looking for isn’t hard to find. It’s still trending on social media. There’s a wealth of knowledge immediately available, and he doesn’t know exactly where to start, so he dives right in. 

The videos are all a mess, shaking wildly or auto focusing through smoke and ash, unable to capture the full scale of the chaos within the frame. But there are thousands of them, uploaded by thousands of people, and one by one they piece together a story.

The sky that day was dark, even though the timestamps suggest that it should have been a little after noon. There was something horrible in the sky, some great hole torn open between the clouds and the reaching tips of the skyscrapers, allowing a giant ship to come through. 

The size of the ship is immense, its own gravity field beginning to rip up the city before it’s even a quarter of the way through. Floating debris fills the sky. Buildings crumble and the rubble crashes into the ground at deadly speed. 

People are shrieking, running, crying. Grotesque, contorted figures covered in squishy pink stuff, fill the streets dripping with tentacle limbs and glowing yellow eyes—and oh god, Yuichi realizes, those were humans. Turning on their friends and family like feral animals, puppeteered by that sick goo. 

The humans try fighting back, of course they do. Their military assembles within the first hour, but it’s a joke. Their strongest defenses, their heaviest hitters, do absolutely nothing. 

There’s a sense of hopelessness in these documented chronicles. Fear and uncertainty and despair. This danger is so big. Nowhere is safe to run. 

A couple of times, in just a handful of uploads, Yuichi sees glimpses of a girl in yellow—it must be April—fighting alongside a masked boy her age and a small furry creature. Her face and the boy’s, when it’s not covered by his mask, are always conveniently blurred no matter what video they appear in, cellphone recordings or CCTV footage, and there’s no way to make heads or tails of the smaller creature running alongside them. 

Yuichi is inclined to give credit for that to Donatello and the limitless scope of his tech savvy, protecting his family in one of the most understated, most important ways he can. 

And then Yuichi finds it. 

One person posted a video they took from their bedroom window, where they had hunkered down with their family to try to ride this whole thing out. They zoomed in as far as their camera would allow, and only then does Yuichi see what they’re trying to capture. 

There are four small indistinct figures racing forward, meeting this giant looming danger head on. Flashes of bright light, of vibrant color, fighting back.

Leonardo and his family. It couldn’t be anyone else. Yuichi recognizes those familiar flares of spinning blue, his friend’s portals opening and closing at dizzying speeds, carrying his brothers toward an impossible threat. 

There are dozens of videos of the same moment—triumph, incredulity, hysterical relief as the portal suddenly closes around the center of the ship, and the whole thing is finally destroyed.  

Yuichi doesn’t know why any yokai would choose to live in the human world, where they constantly have to hide what they really are, their true selves. But he doesn’t need to understand that choice to respect it.

And when the horror has faded to a dull scar in the back of his mind, Yuichi will have to grapple with awe and pride, too.

This strange, messy, human city is where the Hamatos have made their home. And when the time came to fight for it, they fought tooth and nail. 

Somehow, Yuichi has more questions than he started with. He knows now that the invasion his auntie and neighbors speak of in hushed tones when they don’t think any children are around to overhear was of the world-ending variety, and he knows that no matter what the human news outlets have to say about it, it’s thanks to his friend’s family that the city is still standing. 

Yuichi has no idea how Leonardo won. He doesn’t know what happened to him up there, how he could have been injured so badly he wound up in a coma, when he and his brothers have always seemed so indestructible, when just yesterday he said they were made to take a hit. 

It’s frightening that all of this happened one magic doorway away from where Yuichi lives. He feels for the hilt of Edgewing and grips it, wrestling with a sense of guilt and inferiority and uselessness. 

It’s really scary that Leonardo could have died and Yuichi wouldn’t have known until weeks later. No one would have thought to tell him. No one realized he and Leonardo were friends. 

He has to change. He has to do better. 

He spends the next few hours stuck in a mindless TikTok scroll, wrapping up his educational evening with celebratory videos of friends and family reuniting, of rescued people coming home, of mom-and-pop stores reopening with the help of their local communities, of crazy parties on rooftops and strangers with their arms around each other screaming their existence at the empty sky. 

All around Yuichi, there are already signs of rebuilding. The lights are as blinding as they’ve ever been. The humans are doing what humans do best—carrying on, living through it.

This is the world that Leonardo and his family were raised in. The world that shaped them into the people they are. They’re not human but they live the way humans do—clinging stubbornly to survival and the people they love and the place they call home. 

Yuichi sets his phone on the ledge beside his knee, lifts Spot into his lap, and drinks in the sights for a little while longer. Somewhere down the street, he can hear music. People are laughing. He doesn’t know this city very well, but he thinks he can understand why it’s worth fighting for.

After all, someone he cares about lives here. 

Usagi: What’s the name of that Mexican restaurant you like?

⚡️NEON LEON⚡️: HUNGRY BURRITO!!!!!!! 

⚡️NEON LEON⚡️:  april said they just reopened for carry out only but theyre back on grubhub 

⚡️NEON LEON⚡️: its literally the best day of my life 

Yuichi laughs out loud, sitting on the edge of a building somewhere in Manhattan, ten stories above the rushing cars and the constant foot traffic and the steady forward heartbeat of humanity. 

Maybe he can find some things to love about this place for himself. He hopes so. Because the next time Leonardo needs to defend it, Yuichi is going to be there, too. 

Chapter Text

Friday morning, Yuichi is waiting on the corner of the street, directly across from the exact spot Leonardo portalled to last time. He’s twisting the front of his shirt, anxious and excited and mostly just dying for Leonardo to show up already. 

Granted, he got here forty minutes early, so he’s had plenty of time to walk around in circles and collect strange looks from vendors setting up for the day. He’s also had four cans of milk tea from the vending machine nearby so he’s comfortable blaming the jitters on caffeine. 

Yuichi just—really wants to see him. He wants today to go well.  

He’s just sunk into a reluctant seat on the edge of the bench when he catches a glimpse of blue in the corner of his eye. He shoots right back up to his feet at the same time a portal blooms open across the road and three people step through. 

One of them is Leonardo, in a purple jacket this time. He’s also wearing a sling now—probably his siblings’ desperate last-ditch attempt to keep his left arm as immobile as possible, given that Leonardo seems to act as if it’s not broken in eight places and the cast is just someone’s tacky idea of a fashion accessory. He’s fiddling with the long tails of his blue mask, brushing them off his shoulder and then drawing them back over it again, like he can’t decide how they should lay.

April and Raphael are with him. They’re both hanging back a little bit, indulgent expressions on their faces. 

Leonardo bounces eagerly in place, scanning the crowd, and Yuichi gives himself just a second to absorb the sight of him. For a moment he feels the way he used to before he ever knew Leonardo’s name—when he was just an annoyingly handsome stranger with rowdy siblings and an unfairly nice smile, and Yuichi would hold his breath every time he walked into work, half-dreading, half-hoping he would be there. Back then, he did a lot of looking without speaking. 

Now, their eyes meet, and Leonardo’s face lights all the way up, and Yuichi feels a surge of something fierce and toothed and achingly tender at the same time. 

“Usagi!” he yells, like it’s been weeks since the last time they met in person, instead of like two days.

Leonardo can still smile like that. After everything. After an invasion and a coma and a concussion and his whole world being thrown into chaos, he’s still here, making a noisy nuisance of himself on an otherwise peaceful street in Yuichi’s rural neighborhood. 

Yuichi is so fond of him he doesn’t know what to do with it all. He’s so lucky he didn’t miss this guy before he had a chance to really know him. 

“You’re late,” Yuichi calls back. He doesn’t know what his voice sounds like or what his face is doing. “That’s what I get for waiting on a turtle.”

The Hamato clan is a tactile, demonstrative bunch, which Yuichi knows firsthand from having seen it pretty much every time they’ve ever been in Run of the Mill for longer than two minutes—sharing seats and grabbing each other in headlocks and draping arms over shoulders, casually affectionate—and Yuichi wouldn’t say he’s the same way generally speaking. 

He lets his cousins dangle off of him, and he’s had the same three best friends since they were all children, so they’ve sort of been grandfathered in. But everyone else is a different story. Yuichi knows he isn’t very approachable, and it’s never really bothered him before. 

So people don’t usually run to meet him, but that’s exactly what Leonardo is doing. Yuichi’s arms fall open automatically and they collide hard enough that it knocks the breath out of his lungs. Leonardo’s arm squeezes him hard and even lifts him a few inches off the ground.

Oh, okay. Strong. That’s—yeah. 

Yuichi pulls back when Leonardo does. They’re eye-to-eye and there’s a moment where they just stand there and grin stupidly at each other. 

Then some stranger shuffles past them and Leonardo seems to remember at the same time Yuichi does that they’re in broad daylight on a busy street just standing there in each other’s arms, and they spring apart. 

“Oh my god,” Raphael says from behind them. 

“See? See? It's exactly like I said,” April replies with wicked glee.

Leonardo’s sort of agitated, back to fidgeting with his mask tails, and he shoots a scowl over his shoulder at his siblings. 

Raphael ignores him, smiling over the top of his head at Yuichi. “Hi, Usagi,” he says politely. “Thanks for having us over to your place.”

“Neither of you were invited,” Leonardo says loudly. 

Yuichi offers the giant turtle a hesitant smile. He wants so badly for Leonardo’s family to like him, and Raphael’s good opinion feels like a really important thing to have just in general, all on its own.

“Oh, it’s no trouble. I, um—I thought it sounded like Donatello and Michelangelo were going to come, too. Did they change their minds?”

“These four together are a walking chaos generator and we figured we’d spare you that whole situation,” April says. “Especially since you seem to have something special planned for—”

Leonardo leaps toward her and they immediately start scuffling. Raphael sidesteps them easily and goes on talking as if nothing interesting is happening behind him.

“They wanted to come along, but like April said, there’s already two of us crashing your plans, which isn’t really fair. So I asked Donnie to stay and keep an eye on Mikey, and Mikey thinks he’s keeping an eye on Donnie. They’ll stay put.” 

That’s genius. Thinking of his own little cousins, Yuichi says, “And that works?”

“Oh, yeah. It’s the perfect system until one of them figures it out.” Lowering his tone conspiratorially, he adds, “I used to use it on the twins all the time to trick them into convincing each other to go to bed.”

Leonardo’s head whips around. “What?”

“Nothing, Leon,” the bigger turtle deflects quickly.

Yuichi really likes Raphael. 

“Come on,” Yuichi says, hooking a hand around Leonardo’s elbow and hauling him forward. “If we let you start complaining about the injustices of your childhood, we’ll be here all day. You didn’t eat breakfast, right? Let’s get okonomiyaki.”

Raphael snorts and April laughs brightly. Yuichi thinks he feels Leonardo staring at the side of his face, but when he glances at him to check, the turtle is looking somewhere else. The skin of his cheeks has darkened a little, like he’s flushed from the sun or all the wrestling around with his sister. His pulse is racing beneath Yuichi’s hand.

He’ll feel better once he’s had something to eat. Yuichi drags him toward food with single-minded focus. 

Originally, Yuichi had sort of daydreamed about giving Leonardo a ride on his bike, but that went up in smoke when his eldest siblings invited themselves along. 

Still, this isn’t bad. It’s a nice day for a walk. And this way they can eat savory pancake off a paper plate with their fingers, and Yuichi can point out his favorite parts of the place that raised him without having to compete over the roar of the wind and the engine. He even forgets to be nervous around Leonardo’s brother and sister, who seem happy to trail behind them and let them talk. 

The farm comes into view around a bend in the road and almost immediately four little voices bellow, “HE’S HERE!”

“Oh spirits,” Yuichi whispers. 

Botan, Momiji, Jomei and Sonoko tear across the yard at full speed. Were they waiting to ambush Yuichi and his guests this entire time?

Spinning to face the Hamatos, Yuichi blurts, “Actually this was a bad idea. We should go, right now, literally anywhere else.”

“Nope,” Raphael says. His voice is warm and rich, like it’s about to dissolve into laughter. “We’re already here, might as well stay.”

“Yeah, and you promised my little brother some dinosaurs,” April adds wryly. 

“Aww, hey, are these your cousins?” Leonardo says, shoving the leftover okonomiyaki into his brother’s hands. He looks nowhere near as intimidated by the oncoming stampede of small children as he should be. “They’re so much cuter than you could have ever prepared me for, what the heck! Bunnies!”

The stern bark of “Kids!” freezes them in their tracks before they can tackle Leonardo to the ground, which is how they usually greet Yuichi’s friends.

Auntie climbs down the wheezing porch steps, her prosthetic leg whirring quietly with each step. She waves the little kids away patiently and plants her hands on her hips when she’s directly in front of the guests. 

“So you must be Leonardo. I’ve heard so much about you it feels as though I know you already. My nephew talks about you constantly,” she says with absolutely no mercy. Yuichi gives up and hides his face in his ears. “It’s about time that boy brings you to meet me. Call me Auntie.”

Leonardo is grinning, two children dangling off his good arm, another wrapped around his leg, and the last one trying to clamber up the back of his shell. He stands there like he doesn’t even notice their weight. 

He’s not the type to admit when he’s hurting, though, so Yuichi begins extracting bunnies from his person before they can do any actual harm to his still-healing body. 

“Auntie! Thank you for the snacks! Everything you sent me was the best thing I’ve ever tasted, obviously, but I loved the blueberry buckle more than life itself.” He ducks his head to avoid a flailing limb as a squirmy six-year-old is forcibly removed from his carapace, but otherwise doesn’t miss a beat as he goes on, “My little brother made me promise to ask for the recipe, but if it’s a family secret, he’ll totally understand.” 

The or else is neatly implied. 

“Of course, sweetheart,” Auntie says, patting his hand. “And I just made some fresh cakes yesterday, you’ll have to take one home with you. I’d better pack some extra for the rest of your siblings, too. Look at the three of you—way too skinny!”

Leonardo and his siblings all stare at each other in confusion, then he and April glance at Raphael, who looks down at himself at the same time, as if they’re all trying to figure out how ‘skinny’ could be applied to him in any sense of the word. 

“Okay well anyway,” Yuichi says loudly, grabbing Leonardo’s shoulders from behind and propelling him toward the barn, before his family can make this any worse. “They’re here to see the hatchlings, so that’s what we’re gonna do. Just us, without any of you.”

Horrifyingly, Auntie makes knowing eye contact with April and Raphael before she agreeably begins herding her children back up toward the house. The kids all loudly protest losing their turtle-shaped jungle gym but Yuichi is finally able to make his escape with Leonardo in tow.

Spot pokes his head out of a bed of loose straw when they step into the barn, and he trots over to Yuichi eagerly.

“There you are, buddy. Good nap?” Yuichi feels himself relax immediately as Spot presses into his hands for scratches, the tokage’s pacific presence smoothing down the prickly, scratchy edges of the bundle of nerves lodged in Yuichi’s chest. “Leonardo, this is Spot.”

Leonardo kneels next to Yuichi eagerly and within seconds it earns him an armful of curious, wriggly lizard. He laughs out loud, his old laugh, the full-bodied, bright thing it used to be. 

April makes a muffled noise behind him that Yuichi turns to investigate. She has her phone out and is clearly recording the whole thing, hand pressed over her mouth, eyes all dewy. 

“His brothers are gonna love this,” she whispers. “Expect a delivery of baked goods from Angelo sometime in the next two to three business days.”

“Hey, losers,” Yuma calls from one of the stalls, leaning over the gate. “You know how hard it is to herd a bunch of baby lizards into one spot and then keep them there for any extended period of time? Are we doing this or what?” 

“Ohmigosh,” Raphael says upon approach, all high-pitched and delighted, “they’re so little!”

They’re just over two weeks old and very little. There’s eleven of them and they’re all about the length of Yuichi’s arm from nose to tail. None of their colors have settled yet, their scales still pale grays and greens. The hatchlings swarm these strange newcomers without an ounce of fear, making curious vocalizations and inspecting their persons for food. 

Perhaps predictably, Leonardo’s attention is snagged by the most brazen of the bunch, the tiniest hatchling of them all. He’s sitting on the stall floor and she’s determined to climb the hills and valleys of his folded legs. She squawks when he attempts to assist her so he backs off with an amused snort, completely charmed by the pint-sized creature’s larger-than-life-sized attitude. 

“She was the last to hatch and she’s a lot smaller than her siblings,” Yuma says, arms folded on the top of the gate. “It’s still too early to tell if she’ll make it.”

“Nah, look at her. She’s a little lion.” Leonardo is smiling at her where she’s triumphantly perched on top of his knee. When she crawls right into his open hands, his smile breaks into a crooked grin. Lifting her so they’re nose-to-nose, Leonardo tells her sternly, “You show them, niña. Think big, shiny thoughts. Be their champion.” 

She chirps at him and he chirps right back. 

Okay, what? 

That was the most adorable thing that’s ever happened in the entire collective history of the Hidden City. Yuichi didn’t even know turtles could make that sound. What the hell is going on here? 

Raphael whirls around to look urgently at April, as if to make sure she got that on video. She flaps a hand at him, grinning like a loon while she continues to record. 

Yuichi thinks his heart is actually going to give out. It’s kind of messed up that no one warned him about this. He turns around and walks fully out of the barn, the heel of his hand pressed to his chest. Calm down. What’s wrong with him?

Clouds that have been flirting with the horizon all day have finally crept closer. The sky is overcast, gray with coming rain, so the various robots around the farm are beginning to come in from the fields and gardens. The kids are romping across the yard, fully distracted from their quest to embarrass Yuichi no matter what by what looks like a big toad that’s leading them on a merry chase toward the creek. 

He doesn’t hear footsteps behind him before Raphael is suddenly standing with him in the big open doorway. For a big guy, he sure can move without making a sound, even though there’s plenty of crunchy feed and hay underfoot that should have given him away. 

“You good?” the red-masked turtle asks thoughtfully. There’s an edge to his voice that sounds like laughter but there’s no mockery in it. 

“Oh, uh, mmhm,” Yuichi says stupidly. “Just—needed some fresh air.” 

Raphael hums and thankfully doesn’t point out that they’ve had nothing but fresh air all morning. He just leans his considerable bulk against the massive door frame and turns his gaze out toward the rest of the farm. 

“This is really nice,” he says, apropos of nothing. “Your home is beautiful. Coming here is exactly what my brother needed. I wanted to thank you for that. And, uh—for putting up with the rest of us. I know it’s a lot of extra stuff you’re dealing with, but you’ve been good about it. Really, thanks.”

This sounds like approval. Or gratitude at the very least. Yuichi tugs on one of his ears. His heart is doing something weird and acrobatic in his chest. He thinks, tentatively, that today was a success.

“I’m happy he’s here,” Yuichi replies. It feels clumsy and falls comically short of how happy Yuichi is that Leonardo is here. But Raphael seems to understand him. His eyes are very gentle when he looks down at Yuichi, and it gives him the courage to add, “I really don’t mind. The—the ‘extra stuff’. It must have been scary to see Leonardo go through all that. I wouldn’t want to let him out of my sight, either.”

It’s nerve-wracking, sure, but Yuichi isn’t going to hold it against any of them. He gets it.

The sentiment takes Raphael by surprise somehow. He blinks and straightens up from his casual lean, mouth twisting down on one side. Maybe he’s about to say something else, but then their conversation is torn soundly in half by a resounding crash. 

It’s a combination of splintering wood and screeching metal, coming from directly behind them. Yuma and April both shout in what sounds like alarm, and baby tokage scatter in every direction. Heart racing, Yuichi spins on his heel and dives back into the barn at a run. Raphael is two steps ahead of him. 

A farmbotto lays in twitching, sparking pieces on the barn floor. Leonardo’s swords are in his hands and his chest is heaving and his eyes are somewhere far away. 

Chapter Text

“Leo,” Raphael says softly. 

Leonardo doesn’t seem to hear him. He’s braced for an attack. The sling is in two pieces at his feet.

Time inside the barn is frozen. This horrible moment drags on towards infinity. 

April tries next, her voice trembling. “Leo, baby, it’s okay. You’re not in danger. He’s long gone, he’s never gonna hurt you again. I’d never let anybody hurt you, Blue.” 

Leonardo’s gaze darts toward her, but only briefly. His eyes are nearly black with fear, pupils swallowing up all the gold. His bad arm is trembling so hard that Yuichi has no idea how he’s holding a sword steady in that hand. 

Running footsteps are their only warning before Auntie bursts inside, ears upright on top of her head. Clearly she heard the noise and ran across the farm as fast as her prosthetic leg would allow. She only slows down when she sees for herself that no one is hurt. 

“Fuck,” Yuma says, hand pressed to her chest. She leans into Auntie’s worried arms, which gives away how rattled she is. “It’s okay, we’re okay. The farmbotto came right up behind him and it—I think it scared him.”

The robot in question is a harvester. It’s huge, with a lot of moving parts, and it towers over Yuichi. Anyone might have panicked to have it lumber up behind them unexpectedly. Those accessories are no joke. 

But this—this isn’t normal panic. This is Leonardo hardly able to breathe, gasping for air like he can’t get enough into his lungs, hands white-knuckled around the hilts of his katana. Blue sparks are spitting from the blades. His stripes are beginning to glow in the gloom of the barn.

When Raphael approaches, Leonardo’s eyes linger a little longer this time. They cut away again when the downed robot twitches. He’s teetering on the brink of fight or flight, as if every inch of his body wants to burst into movement, but something holds him back. 

“When has April ever been wrong, huh, big man?” Raphael asks him gently. All the heartbreak on his face doesn’t make it to his voice. He sounds steady and solid, like he’s ready to move mountains if Leonardo would only ask him to. It begins to soothe even Yuichi’s rankled nerves. “Put those down, you don’t need ‘em. You don’t need to go anywhere.”

Leonardo drops the swords with a clatter, a mechanical wrenching open of his hands. An act of faith, unthinking and automatic, maybe before he was fully ready to go unarmed. His next gulping breath is more of a sob. His hands are empty and he’s alone and he’s afraid.

But a second later Raphael is right in front of him, on his knees so that he and Leonardo are of a similar height. What must be a full lifetime of absolute trust goes to work, does all the heavy-lifting, because the minute his big brother is front and center, Leonardo’s erratic breathing starts to slow into something more regular.

Raphael offers his hands to hold instead of another weapon. When Leonardo takes them, he folds his big fingers around Leonardo’s much smaller ones and holds on tight. It looks like it would take a whole entire second world-ending scenario to make him let go, and even then, he wouldn’t do it without a fight. 

“I’m here. You’re safe with me, Leo. Raph’s here.”

Tears drip silently down the striped turtle’s face. He leans forward, straining against himself and the footprint of that awful fear, and Raphael meets him halfway, wrapping his arms around him and holding him close. 

Yuichi isn’t aware of moving until he’s standing at Raphael’s shoulder. He doesn’t remember how to breathe or think or be a person at all. Raphael doesn’t twitch as he approaches, doesn’t lift his head from where it’s tucked securely over his little brother’s, but he doesn’t need to. 

“It’s okay, Usagi,” he says sotto voce. “That one wasn’t one of the worse ones. He’s okay.”

“Okay,” Yuichi parrots hoarsely. He folds to his knees and shuffles as close as he can, until he’s pressed against Raphael’s arm. 

“Your boy’s here,” Raphael says for Leonardo’s benefit. “Will that help prove it? Bet you didn’t have anything warm and fluffy in the prison dimension, huh?”

The what?

Raphael gives Yuichi a speaking look. Yuichi reaches over carefully to touch Leonardo’s shoulder. The purple hoodie has slipped down a bit and the moment Yuichi’s fur brushes his scaly skin, a shudder runs through his whole body. 

“We’re on the farm, remember? We were looking at the baby dinosaurs,” Yuichi says. His voice is flat and quiet, the way it gets when he’s overwhelmed, and for a brief, stunning moment, he hates himself and the way he is. He can’t even be normal now? When Leonardo needs comfort? Still, he has to give him something, so he adds, “I know my family is a lot to deal with, but you’re not getting out of this that easy.”

Raphael exhales sharply, the ghost of a laugh. The last bit of tension finally goes out of Leonardo on the back of a sigh. 

Yuichi can hear April talking somewhere behind them, her voice thick and wet with tears. 

“—so sorry, about the—the robot thing, he didn’t mean to.”

“I can see that. Don’t you worry about that silly old machine,” Auntie replies at once.

“I’ll get Donnie to come fix it right away. I swear, better than new. He’ll probably put in something stupid, like a speaker system, or a Skittles dispenser, but—”

“Sweetheart, the robot is the last thing on my mind,” Auntie says, her tone gentle and no-nonsense at the same time. “Harvest season is practically over and it won’t kill my kids to get some work done the old-fashioned way for the next couple of days. I won’t hear anymore about it.”

“He was so excited to come here,” April mutters, a past-tense that puts a lump in Yuichi’s throat.

“He’s welcome back any time. Let’s get him inside.”

Raphael stands up with Leonardo tucked in his arms, face buried against the crook of his neck and shoulder. He’s awake, but clearly out of it, eyes glassy and half-lidded. April picks his swords up and wraps her jacket around the blades so she can hold them close to her chest, a substitution for holding the turtle they belong to. 

“We’ll just head home,” Raphael starts, but he quails immediately under Auntie’s expression. In another time and place it would be hilarious, considering she’s maybe a third of his size. 

“And let that poor boy get sick on top of everything else? No, you’ll come inside and call your family, and let the little dear rest awhile.”

Auntie’s word is law pretty much everywhere, but especially here. So that’s what they do.

It hasn’t started raining yet, but the farmhouse and the fields are painted in dark shades of gray, and the air smells like ozone, pungent and sharp. It’s cold, and Leonardo’s shivering, and it’s making Raphael’s face do grim things. Yuichi, generally a fan of thunderstorms, abruptly resents the weather. 

April is stroking Leonardo’s forehead, murmuring to him in what sounds like Japanese. There’s a glowing sheen to her eyes when she lifts her head, but it’s gone the next time she blinks. A trick of the light, maybe. 

Yuichi stays behind to help Yuma round up the hatchlings, and she kindly doesn’t mention his shaking hands. The broken farmbotto in the middle of the barn floor is an elephant in the room they’re both pointedly edging around. 

The sky breaks open when he and his cousin  are halfway up to the house, so they’re soaked by the time they make it inside. Yuma nudges their shoulders together gently before she peels off toward the bathroom. 

With a towel from the linen closet draped over his head, Yuichi goes looking for Leonardo. 

Raphael glances up when the guest room door opens. He offers a smile but it’s a pale imitation of the real thing. Leonardo is tucked under about a hundred homemade quilts and appears to be deeply asleep. 

The bedside lamp casts the room in soft orange light. Rain is drumming against the windows, and the occasional rumble of thunder is faraway and harmless. 

“April’s calling pops,” Raphael says to explain her absence. “Sorry in advance if your house gets invaded by a bunch of insane people in the next hour or so, but it wouldn’t have been fair not to tell them.”

Yuichi picks up a chair and carries it over to the bed, parking it next to Raphael’s and then slumping into it. 

“It’s okay,” Yuichi says. His tone is still—ugh. He tries again. “Really. You already almost lost him once. It must have been horrible. Like I said before. I get it.”

“Of course it was,” Raphael says abruptly. “It was terrifying. Every day he didn’t wake up was the new worst day of my life. But…”

He clenches his fists. His eye looks closer to red than brown in the warmly lit room. 

“He almost killed himself,” the big turtle blurts. “Not—not got killed, get it? Killed himself. He threw himself into a nightmare dimension with a monster who blew our strongest attacks away with the flick of one finger and then locked the door behind him. It’s a joke, how strong that guy was, and Leo—to protect us, to save everyone else, Leo—”

Yuichi feels numb. There’s a creeping sensation in the pit of his stomach, skin-crawling horror making a home for itself in his brain and his understanding of the world, but all of that is far away right now. He just feels cold. 

Raphael picks up one of Leonardo’s hands and holds it carefully. His mouth is trembling, like if he were any other person, in any other place, he’d let himself start bawling. 

“It was my fault,” he goes on. “I pushed him so hard to be a hero, and when the time came, he tried. He did what he thought he was supposed to. And then he was alone with that—that thing—and it hurt him, it almost killed him, but it—it was mean to him, too. My little brother, my little star, and it was so mean to him. We heard some of it on the—the comms, before—”

Raphael covers his face with one hand, the other still wrapped carefully around Leonardo’s limp one. 

God, it’s no wonder Leonardo’s family hardly lets him out of their sight. Yuichi really didn’t appreciate how much of a miracle it was that Leonardo showed up for the visit today. 

They’re all trying to cope with what happened, but how could they possibly? It doesn't even matter that they got him back, they still lost him in the first place. How do they come to terms with that? How does Yuichi? 

“I thought Leo was dead.” Raphael admits this in a shameful whisper. “When Mikey opened that portal to save him, I thought it was already too late. But I still let him try. I—I didn’t want Leo to be somewhere cold. All by himself where, uh, where we couldn’t take care of him. I wanted to bring him home.” He lifts Leonardo’s hand, pressing it against his cheek, full of misery and love and fear that isn’t old enough to be a scar yet, still a gaping wound across his memories. “It feels like I failed him. Like I left a piece of him behind. He’s hurting and he won’t talk to me.”

Yuichi doesn’t even realize he’s going to speak until he says, “Leonardo talks about you constantly. I have the texts to prove it.”

It seems to take Raphael by surprise. He glances sideways at him, eyes wet with tears he hasn’t let go of yet. Yuichi plucks at the frayed edge of the damp towel he’s still wearing and just goes for it. 

“He—he adores you,” he says, as earnestly as he knows how. This is the absolute truth but he doesn’t want it to get lost somewhere in his tone or expression. “He wants to be everything you think he is. If he’s… not telling you certain things, then… he probably just doesn’t want to disappoint you again.”

Raphael stares at him like he’s just started throwing things around the room. 

“He could never—”

“Hey, I know that,” Yuichi cuts him off pointedly, and tips his head toward the bed, as if to say, he’s the idiot that doesn’t get it.  

A scuffing sound at the window has them both looking up. It squeaks open on tired hinges, and a pale little head at the end of a long, snakelike neck pokes its way inside. 

That tiny hatchling from the barn climbs into the room with a lot of noisy scrabbling and lands in a clumsy heap on the floor. 

Undeterred, she shakes off the rain and searches the room with grave yellow eyes. When she spots the figure on the bed she bursts into a scuttling run, clambering up the side of the bed with little fistfuls of the quilt. 

Yuichi and Raphael watch in stunned silence as the tokage trips her way across Leonardo’s body. She gives the other two a deeply suspicious look, leans in really close to inspect Leonardo’s face, then seems convinced that this is the turtle she’s looking for. 

She curls herself into a ball the size of Yuichi’s palm, tucks her long tail tight around her body, and goes to sleep right there on Leonardo’s cracked plastron.  

It’s completely absurd, but mostly it’s adorable. 

“How did she even—?” Raphael starts, bewildered. 

Yuichi laughs before he can help it, way before he thought he’d ever laugh again. He finds himself hoping April comes back into the room soon so she can get a picture.

“Looks like your brother found himself a keeper,” Yuichi says, glancing up at Raphael. 

Raphael is already looking back at him. He still looks sad and tired, but there’s warmth and affection on his face, too. It seems to be his default setting. Even after everything, even with all the new stress and misery and concern piled on top, that doesn’t change. 

It makes sense that he’s the biggest of his siblings, since he has so much caring to carry around with him everywhere he goes. 

“Yeah,” Raphael says with a quiet smile. “Looks like.”

Chapter Text

Yuichi is pissed off.

It’s been most of a week since the incident at the farmhouse, and Leonardo hasn’t answered a single text. 

At first, it was alarming. Yuichi’s brain went running in circles around it. Was he okay? Was he in a position where he couldn’t reply? Maybe that flashback had set back his recovery. Maybe Yuichi was the worst person in the entire universe for allowing it to happen. 

Then at work Sunita told him she’d been to the lair recently and that Leonardo seemed fine. A little subdued, but not so much so that he couldn’t partake in her surprise birthday party. 

Which told Yuichi two things: one, that he’d missed Sunita’s birthday, which he was going to remedy at their favorite boba place in the near future. And two, that Leonardo was avoiding him. 

The absolute nerve of that guy!

First, he completely vanishes from the Hidden City after a horrifying invasion of the mortal world and leaves Yuichi wondering what the hell happened to him. Then he returns and unceremoniously takes up every single available square inch of space in Yuichi’s brain and heart, and soul, probably. And now he thinks he can just? Disappear again? And let Yuichi waste his days wondering about him again??

Well, he can go to hell. 

Usagi: Hey so

Usagi: I understand that this is a difficult time for your family. And I want to be respectful of that. 

Usagi: But Leonardo’s my friend and I need to see him and I am 100% willing to just walk through every tunnel in the NYC underground until I find his house. 

Usagi: Or buy a spell from Witch Town to find him for me. I’m not actually allowed to go there but I will. 

Yuichi is braced for a fight, or an argument at the very least. He’s pretty sure Leonardo’s family doesn’t like him very much, but he doesn’t take it personally. It really is a difficult time for them, and when he tries to imagine Botan or Sonoko in Leonardo’s position, his hackles go up immediately at the idea of some stranger waltzing in during the aftermath and taking up his precious time with them.

Still. He’s ready to do this. And he really will go to Witch Town if he has to. 

But Leonardo’s sister surprises him by not only responding immediately, but enthusiastically. She even seems relieved. 

April (Hamato?): oh thank GOD this boy has been driving me up the damn wall 

April (Hamato?) has shared a location

April (Hamato?): here. wait topside tho the tunnels can be really confusing at first and if i let you get lost i will literally never hear the end of it for as long as i live

April (Hamato?): i’ll send angie to meet you there. when are you coming?

Usagi: Now. Thank you, April. 

April (Hamato?): just get your fluffy butt down there. there’s only so much moping a girl can take

April (Hamato?): 💛

Yuichi owes her a drink. Coffee of her choice. Also, he needs her to change her contact ID. 

When he pulls his bike into the sidestreet her location pin indicated and pulls his helmet off, his ears swivel immediately toward a shadowed corner of the alley, so he turns his head in that direction, too. 

“Oh, wow,” a vaguely familiar voice says, “you sussed me out that fast?”

The youngest Hamato comes slinking soundlessly out of the dark, all his bright colors incongruent with the way he can seemingly disappear into thin air at free will. His arms are bandaged up to the elbows, crisp white gauze where the stark black wrappings usually sit. 

Michelangelo smiles and offers a little wave, approaching at an energetic trot. He’s tiny, but his personality is huge. It’s better suited someone six times his size. Somehow, Yuichi is more intimidated by him than anyone else in Leonardo’s family. 

And he’s clearly holding back from him. Even this lively greeting is restrained compared to his usual demeanor, when Yuichi would watch him clown with his brothers at Run of the Mill. 

“Hi, Usagi!” Michelangelo says cheerfully enough. “April told me you needed an escort.”

“Thank you,” Yuichi replies carefully. 

“She said you weren’t mad about the robot,” Michelangelo goes on. His tone is still bright, but doggedly so, like he’s doing his damnedest to be nice but he’s also ready to drop the act at a moment’s notice and square up. “Is that true? You’re not allowed to come if you’re mad.”

That’s surprising enough that Yuichi blurts, “What? Of course not. If anything, Leonardo should be mad at me.” He plucks at the strap of his helmet, mouth twisting. “I wanted him to have a good day and it turned out horrible.”

Michelangelo stares up at him for what feels like a short eternity. Then he piles forward without warning for a hug. Whatever happened to his arms, they’re still strong enough that they feel like iron bands wrapped around Yuichi’s middle. 

Yuichi lets out an involuntary “oof” and stands there stupidly for a second. People aren’t exactly lining up to hug him, given how unapproachable he comes off as. But Yuichi has plenty of practice with his little cousins, and Kitsune when she’s drunk, and Michelangelo is completely little-brother-shaped in a disarming way. 

So he tosses his helmet to the ground and lets his arms rest around the top of Michelangelo’s carapace. It feels strange for a second, and then that second passes. 

“He likes you so much,” Michelangelo muffles against Yuichi’s shirt. “I’m glad you’re nice.”

Yuichi wants to say He likes me?? but he ignores the dangerous impulse because if he actually asked that he would have no choice but to flee the country. Instead, he says, “‘Nice’?” because that’s equally as baffling. 

The spotted turtle leans back to look up at him. His eyes are a little shiny, but his smile is back in full-force. “Yeah, the kind of nice that actually matters. Anyway, come on! Let’s go! We didn’t tell Leon you were coming. That’s what he gets for trying to self-sabotage.”

Yuichi admits, “I am a little mad about that.”

“Ugh, dude, tell me about it! I was like two hours away from staging an intervention.” Those bright brown eyes dart past him to his motorbike. “Hey, let’s take your bike. I can show you where the garage entrance is, so you don’t have to leave it up here.”

Deciding the best thing he can do in this whirlwind is just hang on for the ride, Yuichi smiles back. “That’d be great, thanks.”

“Can I drive?” Michelangelo asks innocently. 

Yuichi squints at him. “No.”

It takes all of three minutes for Michelangelo to wear him down. Yuichi resigns himself to the passenger seat and decides Leonardo actually wasn’t exaggerating about those baby brother privileges. 

By the time they get to the repurposed subway station that seems to serve as the Hamato clan’s home, Yuichi is hopelessly lost somewhere in the Manhattan underground. Michelangelo did his best to point out helpful markers, but it will definitely take a few trips before Yuichi is at all comfortable managing the route on his own. 

“This way, this way,” Michelangelo says eagerly. “He’s probably still in his room. He won’t come out unless Raph, like, physically carries him out.”

So—moping, according to April, and holed up, according to Michelangelo. It sounds like exactly the same way Yuichi has been spending the last several days, minus the interludes of forced productivity at work.  

On one hand, Yuichi is sort of inappropriately relieved he’s not the only miserable party here. On the other hand, Leonardo is miserable over something he had absolutely no control over, something that was in no conceivable way his fault. That’s nothing to feel relieved about. 

Michelangelo leads him across the cozy, lived-in station to one of the subway cars sitting stationary on the tracks. The cars must serve as their respective bedrooms, because Michelangelo lifts a finger to his mouth in the universal gesture of be quiet, and creeps with exaggerated stealth toward the open doors. 

Yuichi peeks through the long window, eager to get a glimpse of his friend’s life. There are string lights up on the walls, illuminating movie posters and colorful artwork all signed with a stylized M and a smiley. The shelves are stocked full of action figures and trophies and an even mix of medical textbooks and comic books. In one corner, propped up next to a big cabinet arcade game, sits a bright pink and blue skateboard and a battered guitar case. 

Leonardo himself is on the bed, cross-legged with his back resting against the wall. There’s a human boy sitting with him. Maybe the one from the videos of the invasion, the one who fought alongside April. He’s leaning comfortably against Leonardo’s good side and holding a Switch so they both can see the screen. Leonardo is using the hand of the arm draped around the human’s shoulders to point something out. 

“Shake the trees. Sometimes they drop furniture or bells. Just look out for—oops. Okay, those are wasps.”

“Sensei,” the human says, totally aggrieved. 

They both look up at the same time when Michelangelo’s shadow crosses the doorway, before he makes so much as a whisper of sound. Their mannerisms are a perfect mirror of each other, which is sort of an odd thing to see in action.

Even stranger, the human goes still with surprise when he sees Yuichi. Then his whole face lights up. 

“Uncle Yui!”

“Eughh boy,” Michelangelo and Leonardo say at the same time. 

“Sorry, what’s happening?” Yuichi says blankly. 

The human looks mortified a second later, but Leonardo tightens his arm around the boy’s shoulders and doesn’t let the silence settle into something awkward. 

“Yeah, so I guess I’m a dad?” he says in a blithe tone. “Only my son is the same age as me, and from a future that no longer exists. You know how it is.”

Yuichi stares at him. This is the last thing he was expecting when he walked into the room. 

“I refuse to let you distract me from why I’m here,” he finally says. “But we’re definitely circling back to—that whole situation.”

Michelangelo laughs out loud, bright and clear as a bell. 

“This is Casey!” he announces. Then, as if it isn’t at all weird, or maybe because of how weird it is, he adds delightedly, “My nephew!”

Yuichi would be inclined to believe that this was just a joke the brothers were pulling, except that Casey looks earnest and genuinely happy to see him. 

He’s heard stories about time gateways. Only real masters of the mystic arts can attempt those, and only with the collaboration of a Time Lord. 

Casey doesn’t seem like a mystic master. He’s way too young, for starters. Yuichi wonders who opened the door to send him back. It would have had to have been someone incredible. 

“Nice to meet you,” Yuichi says plainly, for lack of better thing to say. 

So Leonardo’s—son??—from the future (??) knows him. And seems to think highly of him. The implications of that are doing something squirmy to Yuichi’s stomach. It’s a mostly good feeling. 

“You, too,” Casey says. Since his pseudo-siblings are absolutely unwilling to let him feel embarrassed, he musters up a shy smile. “I always wondered how you and sensei met. You guys would make up a different story every time I asked.”

“Oh?” Michelangelo asks with a menacing amount of real interest.

“ANYway,” Leonardo says loudly, then unceremoniously throws the human under the bus. “Casey was just saying he was hungry. Miguel, didn’t you make him some—”

“Ohmigosh, the chocolate-banana muffins!” Michelangelo squares his shoulders and folds his arms, the playfulness bleeding from him. “Hey. Casey, when you’re hungry, you tell somebody. That was the deal.”

Leonardo interjects, “He told me, Doc. That counts.”

“Come on, Mas—Mikey.” Casey sets the Switch down and swings his legs over the side of the bed, hopping to his feet with a level of grace Yuichi doesn’t usually observe in humans. “Can you show me where they are?”

He smiles at Yuichi as he passes him, then grabs Mikey by the shoulders and carts him out of the room. He goes with a lot of unspoken trust in Yuichi’s character, like if there’s anyone Leonardo is safe with, it’s him. 

The doors close behind them, and then it’s just Leonardo and Yuichi and the destroyed-farmbotto-shaped elephant in the room. 

Leonardo starts to pluck anxiously at his cast. One of the glittery stickers is peeling. His golden eyes dart up, trying to read what’s on Yuichi’s mind from studying his face. Yuichi finds himself thinking, with equal parts exasperation and fondness, that he could just ask. 

“I, uh,” Leonardo says, “I should—I want to apologize for the—”

“Finish that thought and I’m going to fight you,” Yuichi cuts him off plainly. “I’ve already explained this in every possible way I can think of, but I’ll try again anyway. The robot does not matter. I break them all the time and no one has ever disowned me.”

He can feel himself relenting in face of the striped turtle’s obvious discomfort. He takes a few steps into the room and sinks into a beanbag chair. Leonardo’s eyes follow him, and when Yuichi nudges their feet together, the hint of a smile touches the corners of his mouth. 

“I just hate that it happened,” he admits very quietly. 

Either he means the robot, or the invasion, or what happened after the invasion, or all of it all at once. Yuichi doesn’t dare interrupt, not when Leonardo has just taken this brave step forward into seemingly uncharted territory. He just nods to show he’s listening. 

“And it feels like. I should, um.” Leonardo’s face twists darkly, anger and hurt and frustration, and he breathes in sharply through his nose, trying to temper it before he even has a chance to really feel it. Yuichi can still hear it in his voice when he says, “I should be better by now. I should be over it. It’s not about me.”

“What the fuck?” Yuichi blurts, sitting forward. “Yes it is.”

Leonardo couldn’t have looked more startled if someone dumped a bucket of ice-water over his head. Yuichi points right at Leonardo’s cracked plastron—that proof of his survival, the most beautiful goddamn thing in the entire world as far as Yuichi is concerned. 

“This,” he says firmly, “is yours.”

For awhile, neither of them speak. There’s music and noise happening somewhere else, Leonardo’s lively siblings hard at work breaching the peace of the otherwise silent underground.

Then Leonardo says, “I don’t like talking about it. But Mikey keeps saying I need to tell somebody. And I guess you’re volunteering.”

As if it isn’t painfully obvious that that’s what Yuichi is doing, when he’s all but begging on his knees for Leonardo to just talk to him. He heroically refrains from rolling his eyes. “I guess so.”

So Leonardo tells him:

“In the prison dimension. The—” He struggles to choke this word out, then finally manages, “The Krang. The general. He was holding me down. I was, uh. I was pretty scared. He was so mad. I don’t even know what he was saying, it was like sliding around in my brain, I couldn’t hold onto anything.” 

Yuichi understands that. Those latent animal instincts overriding rational thought, simplifying everything until all that remains is the powerful urge to keep existing. To survive at all costs. 

“Um. He leaned in and like—I don’t know, sneered at me—and his teeth were so close and I was so—I wasn’t thinking. I couldn’t breathe, I—” He lifts his hands, helplessly, then lowers them again. “There was rubble underneath me. Sharp metal, all in pieces, from one of his old ships. One of the pieces fit into my hand, and as soon as I had it, I just—I used it.” His voice is so small. “I blinded him.” 

Oh. It feels like his heart is being ripped clean apart. Yuichi gets up and moves to the bed, sitting close enough to Leonardo that their shoulders bump. His pulse is flying. His stomach feels sour. 

“His blood was oily and cold and got all over me. He screamed and rampaged for—hours? Days? I don’t.” Leonardo blinks, far away. “I don’t know. I spent most of my time there hiding. Tucked all the way inside my shell, like a—like a hurt animal. Not much of a hero, huh?”

Somehow, Leonardo is ashamed of himself for this. As if it was cowardly. As if he should have managed to incapacitate a warrior ten times his size and strength in a more honorable way. Like he wants a nicer truth to give his family. 

Yuichi closes his eyes and tries to imagine the prison dimension. Raphael described it haltingly, the glimpse he saw of it through Michelangelo’s portal. Dull grays and ghost ships and an Arctic chill, this horrible place the sun has never touched. 

Now he tries to imagine Leonardo there, injured and frightened, all alone with a monster. 

He wonders if he would have had the strength of heart and mind to throw himself into hell to protect his friends and family, to save that nebulous concept of “the whole world.” He likes to think he would, but he doesn’t know. How could anybody know until they were there, with the choice in front of them?

Yuichi thinks Leonardo is amazing. He has no idea how Leonardo can think of himself as anything less than amazing. He’s glad the Krang is blind. He would be even more glad if the Krang was dead. 

“I don’t like to talk about it,” Leonardo says again, hushed and haunted. “I’m afraid they’ll hate me for it someday. When they’re done being relieved I’m alive.”

I’m in love with an idiot, Yuichi thinks. 

Oh, wait.

He’s in love with this idiot. 

It isn’t even a surprise. The truth goes down easily, because somewhere along the line he knew that already. Now he’s just—sinking into it. Looking at Leonardo and realizing what this fullness in his chest actually means. 

Yuichi was pulled into Leonardo’s orbit from almost day one—the sun and the moon. Months of passing by each other, never speaking, their lives never overlapping. Wanting so badly to approach that full, lively table, second-guessing it every time, always backing out at the last second. The hours and hours he spent agonizing over it. Finally taking the leap. Rewarded impossibly by Leonardo’s interest and curiosity and his smile. 

Those precious afternoons in the dining room of the restaraunt, arguing hotly from opposite sides of the same booth, leaning in to put their heads together to watch videos on Leonardo’s phone. Yuichi clinging to Leonardo’s attention, hoarding gold like a miser, because he only ever wanted Leonardo to look at him. 

Of course he’d end up here. Where the hell else was he gonna go?

“They would do anything for you,” he hears himself saying. “Do you have any idea how much you mean to them?”

“I do!” Leonardo says quickly. “I just. I’m scared anyway.”

“Tell them that,” Yuichi implores urgently. “Let’s go tell them right now.” 

Leonardo stares at him like he’s gone crazy. Yuichi loves him. 

“I’ll go with you,” he says, offering his hand. He thinks he’s trembling. His body feels too small to contain the monumental reality he’s just discovered. “You’re not alone.”

That gets him a choked laugh. Leonardo grabs his hand and holds it almost desperately, as if Yuichi is too good to be true. As if he might do something crazy and impossible if Leonardo lets go, like walk away. 

Not in this lifetime. Yuichi never wants to do anything but walk towards Leonardo for all the rest of his days. 

They go find his siblings. It isn’t hard, they just have to follow all the noise. 

Something chaotic is happening in the kitchen. Michelangelo is perched on Raphael’s carapace, elbows parked on his big brother’s shoulder and chin propped in his hands to watch the show. Raphael is trying to gently extract a hot pot of coffee from Donatello’s hands and Donatello is trying to drink from it directly. Casey is sitting on the counter, eating a huge lopsided muffin with an expression of doe-eyed wonder on his face.

They all look up when Leonardo and Yuichi come in. Leonardo’s step falters under the sudden scrutiny. He clutches Yuichi’s hand tighter, his grip bruising. Like somehow—somehow—Yuichi’s presence beside him makes him feel brave. 

It’s okay, Yuichi tries to tell him, squeezing back. I’m not going anywhere.

Chapter Text

This bold new world in which Yuichi is aware of his feelings for Leonardo—where he has a name for that sunlight that sleeps in his heart, and understands why it feels like dawn every time they’re together—sort of looks exactly like the old one.

His revelation may have changed the landscape of the universe as far as Yuichi is concerned, but nothing much seems to have moved for anybody else. 

Chizu, Gen and Kitsune look so full of pity when he gathers his nerve and bares his heart to them that it’s abundantly clear they’ve known all along. Yuichi has never felt any particular way about being a rabbit yokai, but now he’s learning to be fervently grateful for his thick, downy fur. 

No matter how hard he blushes, it doesn’t show. And he’s been walking around with a face on fire lately. That wouldn’t do wonders for his reputation. 

At least his friends are supportive, in their own way. It’s like a dam has broken and they’ve got nothing but comments and opinions on his love life now that the secret is out and it’s fair game. 

Kitsune makes fun of Yuichi relentlessly, but also promises that if Leonardo does anything to hurt him, she’ll curse him so hard his descendants a thousand years from now would feel it. Yuichi has the sinking sense that she isn’t kidding. He darts a sidelong glance at their voice of reason, but Chizu only looks mildly impressed by the ferocity of the threat and also like she would be on board with seeing it through. 

“I can take care of myself,” Yuichi says, bristling a little. 

“Sure you can,” Kitsune replies indulgently. 

Gen even pats him on the head, like that was an adorable sentiment and he was adorable for sharing it. Yuichi is going to keep them all far, far away from the Hamatos for as long as he possibly can. 

He doesn’t know how long that’s going to be, though. He wants to spend all of his time with that stupid turtle. He wants every quiet hour of his life filled up with Leonardo’s groan-worthy puns and surprisingly sharp sarcasm and wry good humor. In a perfect world, Yuichi would see him every day. 

That’s definitely opening the door for his friends to eventually make a spectacle out of themselves, but the only alternative is limiting how often he sees Leonardo, and that—he isn’t sure if that’s possible? Like, he wouldn’t even known how to do that. 

Case in point, when Leonardo texts one night asking if the following afternoon was a good time to swing by the farm and finally fix that farmbotto, Yuichi drops his phone in his haste to send back an affirmative. 

It might be time to admit his self-control is completely nonexistent. Or he could live in denial a little while longer. 

Whatever. He stops worrying about it, his brain too full of a warm, bubbly, champagne-flavored feeling that drowns everything else. Yuichi is going to see him tomorrow!

Oh god. Yuichi is going to see him tomorrow. 

“All hands on deck,” he bellows down the second floor hallway. Various fluffy heads poke their way out of various doors, and he adds, “Leonardo is going to be here in twenty-four hours and this place is an entire disaster.”

“My room is clean,” Momiji says, looking around at her siblings judgmentally. 

“He’s really coming back?” Jomei asks. He’s tugging on his fingers, like he’s thinking about sucking on them. It’s a self-soothing behavior he’s only recently outgrown. “I thought we scared him away forever and that’s why he left without saying bye.”

“I told you, you didn’t do anything wrong,” Yuma says firmly. “The robot scared him, so his big brother took him home.” 

“Robots are cool,” Botan says. “And ours are super old and harmless. Who’d be scared of them?”

“Remember when you got lost in the woods when you were little, and it started to storm?” Yuichi asks, not unkindly. “Remember how rain would upset you after that? Even though you knew better and didn’t want it to?”

The cream-colored bunny is quieted by that, seal point face wrinkling in what Yuichi hopes is understanding. 

“A robot was mean to him?” Sonoko asks, glancing between Yuma and Yuichi for clarification. 

“Something like that,” Yuma says, in a tone that suggests that’s all the answer they’re going to get. 

“We should hide all the bots,” Jomei pipes up. “So he doesn’t get scared again.”

So the next morning, Yuichi’s little cousins spend a full hour running back and forth across the farm, making sure even the smallest gardening bot is locked away in the furthest shed for the afternoon. They’re very vindictive about it. It’s really cute.

Yuichi is waiting on the porch when the spinning blue portal opens in the yard. His heart is racing, and there are butterflies fluttering to life inside his stomach, and it almost feels like being a little kid again. Back then the world was full of wonders and every single day was bursting with potential adventures and nothing was impossible because it never occurred to him that anything actually should be. 

This feels like that. As brilliant and breathless and shining as that. Yuichi tries to hold it down, keep it safe and secret, where it can’t ruin anything. 

He doesn’t know how successful he is. Leonardo is wearing a yellow jacket this time, with iron-on patches in various shapes and colors, and even without it he’s the brightest thing for miles. Michelangelo is draped against his carapace, leaning forward over his shoulder to show him something on his phone, and Casey is chattering at Donatello, whose one-word answers in response don’t seem annoyed in the least. 

Donatello, at least, has a task to accomplish. Casey and Michelangelo are clearly only tagging along in the role of emotional guard dogs. 

Leonardo catches Yuichi’s eye from the yard, and his face splits in half with the force of his grin. Yuichi doesn’t realize he’s moving until he’s hopping the porch steps, and Michelangelo slides off Leonardo’s back so he can meet Yuichi halfway, and they slam against each other with enough force that it nearly hurts. 

They lean apart, and Yuichi is going to say—something. Something completely normal and not at all lovesick and also effortlessly charming. He’s definitely going to say a thing that is all of that all at once. 

Before he gets a word out, there’s a mob of small children clamoring around them. 

“Aw, it’s my favorite bunnies!” Leonardo says brightly. “And they’re in attack mode! We should have brought riot gear.”  

He hoists Jomei into his arms and tosses him into the air in the same effortless way the cooks at work toss pizza dough. Jomei shrieks with delight the whole way up and down. 

Casey has a melting look on his face, gazing at Yuichi’s cousins the way people look at baby photos, and it occurs to Yuichi that the young time-traveler must have only known these children as fully-grown adults, if he knew them at all. He settles cross-legged in the grass and holds out both his arms, so Botan can get a good look at the gear he’s wearing. 

“My uncle made all this for me,” he says proudly. “I used to live someplace not very safe, so my family made sure I had everything I could possibly need with me at all times. I’m safe now, but I’m still getting used to it.”

Given the bold purple insignia on his equipment, Yuichi is willing to hazard a guess at which uncle he means. The uncle in question has side-stepped this whole meet-and-greet and looks less than enthusiastic about being here in the first place. 

“I’m here for the robot,” he says tonelessly, more to his phone screen than to Yuichi. “They’re here for the dinosaurs.”

“False, Donald!” Michelangelo declares. He has a giant tote bag slung over his shoulder and he thrusts it forward now, as if that alone is proof positive of his real motivations. “Usagi, where’s your aunt? I brought her thank-you pastries!”

“Right here,” Auntie says from the back of the group, having approached at a more reasonable pace behind the kids. 

She looks no-nonsense, and beckons Leonardo down for a hug before he can get guilty and weird and try to do something stupid, like apologize for his panic attack. He has to bend nearly double to fit into her arms, but her embraces all have some mystic property about them. It’s impossible to feel anything but safe and warm when she’s holding you. 

“Welcome back, sweetheart,” she says, letting him go. “And these are your brothers?” 

Michelangelo darts forward to introduce himself, and Auntie warms to his sweetness and enthusiasm within seconds. He presses his tote bag into her hands, mouth running a mile a minute about this recipe and that ingredient, how amazing her cooking was, how grateful he is that she was so kind to his big brother, here’s your tupperware back and I filled them all back up with baked goods as thanks, etc. 

Yuichi steals a moment in all the conversation and chaos to press his arm against Leonardo’s. It doesn’t even matter that he doesn’t have him all to himself—Leonardo is here, close enough to touch, solid and healthy and grinning in the late afternoon sunshine, and that’s the only thing Yuichi could even think of to ask for. 

Leonardo’s golden eyes are lethal in this light, and his crooked smile is a weapon in and of itself, and Yuichi feels his heart kickstart under the turtle’s undivided attention. Then Leonardo jolts a bit in surprise and glances down and Yuichi has a front-row seat to the way his face brightens like someone flipped a switch inside his head.

There’s a familiar tokage pawing at the black wrappings on his leg, making petulant little laser beam noises. She’s the size of a small housecat now, and the gray of her scales has cooled more towards blue. There are bold streaks of yellow from the outer corners of her eyes that stretch all the way down the sides of her body. She’s still settling but she’s already eye-catching. She’s going to be spectacular when she’s done. 

“Hey! It’s the little champ herself!” He drops to the ground and the impatient tokage at his feet immediately worms up the front of him until he has no choice but to hold her. “How are you, cariño? You’ve gotten huge!” 

“That’s an overstatement,” Yuma says, smiling. “But she’s definitely made a comeback. She’ll be ready to go home with you in a couple weeks.”

Leonardo’s head snaps up in surprise. He opens his mouth, but before he can say anything, Michelangelo blurts, “SURPRISE! Raphie’s been talking to Usagi’s aunt about it since your last visit! She said you and Champion really bonded and it wouldn’t be fair to give her to anyone else!”

“All tokage have latent mystic powers,” Yuichi explains, feeling affectionate at the gobsmacked expression on Leonardo’s face. “When we say you bonded, we mean that sort of literally?” 

“Okay?” Leonardo says, holding her like he’s worried that any bond with him might have had an adverse effect on the little lizard, because he’s an idiot. 

“That just means she’ll evolve to be the best companion to you that she can be,” Yuma pipes up. “That’s why Auntie’s tokage are so big, and settle in greens and browns—they’re farm animals, they help with plowing and building and stuff.” 

“Champion might do something entirely new,” Yuichi says. He’s sort of looking forward to it. Leonardo’s influence can only lead to crazy and chaotic and amazing things. 

“Ninja dinosaur,” Michelangelo whispers in awe.  

“It’s really okay?” Leonardo asks Auntie. 

“Of course, baby. We just need her to be a little bit stronger before she leaves the nest,” Auntie tells him. Her eyes are warm. “Give her something to look forward to and she’ll sprint to that finish line.”

Yuichi smiles at the scene for a second longer, before the impatient aura radiating around Donatello finally becomes too much to ignore.

The broken farmbotto is still exactly where they left it, mostly because it’s huge and unwieldy and in a lot of sharp, heavy pieces. It seemed too dangerous to risk moving without help, and Leonardo was adamant about his brother being the one to undo the damage he’d done. 

Donatello hums in vague interest and gets right to work, squatting next to the machine and pulling his goggles down over his eyes. Yuichi is fidgeting with the yoyo in his pocket, mustering the courage for the noble and potentially very stupid act of making conversation, when his phone chimes. 

⚡️NEON LEON⚡️: donald hasn’t attacked u yet has he?

⚡️NEON LEON⚡️: set smth on fire if u need an extraction

⚡️NEON LEON⚡️: if i see smoke ill come running 

⚡️NEON LEON⚡️: 🐢💨

Usagi: Your brother is NOT that scary. You’re just trying to psyche me out.

Donatello is exactly that scary, but Yuichi isn’t giving Leonardo the satisfaction of admitting it. 

⚡️NEON LEON⚡️:  bet

“So what’s your deal with Nardo?” Donatello asks abruptly. “You’re real cozy all of a sudden, but he always seemed pretty certain you didn’t like him.”

The initial shock—Donatello is speaking to him?—is drowned out by a surge of frustration. 

It’s not Yuichi’s fault he’s like this. He’s always been like this. It’s not easy for him to reach out to people he doesn’t know, even if it’s someone he would really like to know.

How many times did he second-guess himself before he finally approached Leonardo that first time? For a reason that wasn’t taking an order or dropping off plates?

How many times has he second-guessed himself since then? Sometimes he has no idea what the hell Leonardo is even doing here.

“I did like him,” Yuichi says quietly. “I do. I’m not, uh. I’m not good at…connecting with people. I never really. I never know what to say.” He tugs on his ear, disquieted by his own failures. “And Leonardo was so intimidating. I had no idea how to be his friend. But I wanted to.”

Donatello’s hands have slowed until he’s sitting there gazing down into the cavern of a gutted robot without moving at all. Yuichi is abruptly worried that he’s said too much and irritated Leonardo’s most critical sibling to the point of no return. 

For twins, they’re so different. Leonardo is charming and charismatic, but it’s impossible to tell what he’s actually thinking. Donatello is calculating and disinterested in anyone outside his tight-knit clan, but he’s also transparent to a fault about what’s on his mind. 

They’re each unfailingly loyal, and probably the most stubborn people on the planet. 

That’s why it’s such a surprise when Donatello starts talking, unprompted, for the second time in as many minutes. 

“Time moves differently in the prison dimension,” he says, apropos of nothing. “It’s all relative. An hour here could feel like days there, or the other way around. I know, because the time logs in Leonardo’s gear jump all over the place. Trying to sync it was a nightmare.” 

Every time Yuichi thinks he’s heard everything there is to hear about the invasion and his friend’s part in it, something else is thrown onto the top of the pile, and it always manages to be more upsetting than the last. Yuichi closes his eyes against the swell of second-hand anguish and tries to ride it out. 

“Leo is the worst person in the world,” Donatello says without feeling. “He’s impulsive and arrogant and stubborn and he has an inferiority complex as wide as the Hudson is deep. But he’s also my twin, and my other half, and my best friend, and my little brother, and he was gone. He didn’t exist anywhere in the world. For twenty-one minutes and thirty-eight seconds, I wasn’t a whole person.” His hands clench around his tools so hard they begin to whine in protest, and he has to set them down. “And I don’t know. How to do this. Without him.

“So. Look. I’ll lay this out one time. And then I’ll have reached my emotional vulnerability quota with you for the next calendar year.” He doesn’t look up, eyes trained on the dismantled parts spread out in front of him. “Leo’s my person. Hurt him and I’ll kill you twice.”

“Understood,” Yuichi says softly. 

“Good,” Donatello says. After a moment, he adds grudgingly, “After your little tête-à-tête he’s been talking to us more. He even went and woke Raph up the other night after a bad dream and he hasn’t done that in—I don’t know, years. Raph was crying about it at breakfast the next morning. So thanks I guess. Anyway I didn’t bring my extra arms so hold this flashlight and point it where I tell you.” 

His tone has taken on that not-annoyed quality it had when he was talking to Casey earlier. It’s entirely possible that Donatello doesn’t hate him! Yuichi accepts the flashlight with about twenty times the gravitas it deserves. 

Take that Leonardo, he thinks smugly. 

And then, as if summoned by the passing thought of him, Yuichi hears the distant sound of Leonardo’s voice in full performance mode, undercut by the noisy, squealing laughter of children. 

Oh spirits. 

“One second,” Yuichi says quickly, and sets the flashlight on a workbench as he hustles to the open barn door. 

His intuition led him true. Leonardo is, for some godforsaken reason, on the roof of the two and a half story farmhouse, broken bones and all. Yuichi’s four youngest cousins are gathered below to watch whatever spectacle he’s about to make of himself. 

“LEONARDO!” Yuichi yells, hands cupped around his mouth. 

“What??” the turtle has the audacity to call back. 

“That thing you’re doing right now—it’s really, really dumb.”

“Momiji bet me I couldn’t do it,” Leonardo says, like that’s in any way a decent excuse. There’s a chorus of giggling from the audience of grade schoolers clustered in the yard. 

“Momiji is a child. She is literally six years old. Are you really going to let a six-year-old child peer-pressure you into breaking even more of your bones?”

Even from a distance, Yuichi can tell that Leonardo is squinting at him, the golden coins of his eyes narrowing into judgmental slivers. 

“I feel like that’s a trick question. I’m a ninja, I won’t break any bones.”

“Okay, do what you want,” Yuichi replies, leaning back and spreading out his hands in a show of surrender. “But just so you know, Champion will be really disappointed if she has to wait even longer to go home with you because you decided to prove to everybody in a ten mile radius that you can’t even take care of yourself, let alone a baby tokage.”

“Oh my god, you can’t threaten me with my daughter, you monster!” Yuichi is pretty sure his expression is speaking for him just fine, because Leonardo groans theatrically and starts clambering down off the roof. “Okay fine.”

“Thank you. Spirits,” Yuichi adds in an undertone, crossing back to Donatello’s workspace. He picks up the light and aims it again. “Sorry.” 

Donatello has his goggles shoved to the top of his head and is turned around to stare at him severely. His expression is impossible to read. Yuichi has no idea what he’s looking for, but he seems to find it after a very tense twenty seconds. 

He goes back to work without speaking. Just when Yuichi has resigned himself to never getting an explanation for that particular episode of strangeness, Donatello says abruptly, “Your yoyo.”

Yuichi jerks a little in surprise, the beam of light wavering. “Uhh, yeah? What about it?”

“How would you feel about adding an electroshock function?” Donatello asks unremarkably. “Like a stun gun, only better, because it would be Genius Built. I could get the high voltage discharge up to 1000 microcoulombs, easy.”

It’s the last thing he was expecting. Yuichi stills in surprise, and reaches into his pocket for the yoyo he never goes anywhere without. 

He found it in that weird mystic temple that appeared in the woods near his house one day and disappeared just as suddenly. Karasu-Tengu-sensei looked really alarmed when he mentioned it to her, seizing him by the shoulders and looking him up and down as if to make sure he was all present and correct after a harrowing ordeal. 

It hadn’t really been very interesting. He didn’t know why sensei was so anxious about it. The temple had been musty and neglected, and probably deeply haunted, but ghosts are an okay sort as long as you mind your manners. After he poked around for a bit, the farthest wall had rippled, and showed him a collection of different things. Gems, and weapons, and ancient tomes. Something enticed him forward, offering him a choice. 

Yuichi didn’t really need another sword, because he had Edgewing, his pride and joy. And he isn’t much of a reader, so the books weren’t of interest to him, either. He was making a mental note to bring his friends back another time, because they’d be more into all of that than he was, when he saw it. 

“It gave you…a toy?” sensei had asked blankly. 

“I think it was sort of a consolation gift, since I didn’t want the other stuff,” Yuichi had explained, a little embarrassed. He thought his sensei would have chosen differently if she’d been there. 

From the surprise on her face that warmed into affection, he was pretty sure he was right. But all she said was, “You’re a good boy. Now give me twenty flips for going into a cursed temple without my permission.”

Yuichi slides his finger into the slip knot at the end of the string and lets the toy unwind and wind back up into his hand once. It’s like one of Botan’s fidget toys, except this one is potentially haunted. 

“An electro-yoyo would be hands-down the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” Yuichi says enthusiastically. 

“That’s only because you haven’t seen my lab yet,” Donatello replies plainly. “Light, please.”

By the time Donatello is finished, most of the daylight is gone. The house is warmly lit, all the windows stark and yellow in the blue hour. The kids are still romping around like menaces but Leonardo is sitting on the porch steps, left leg stretched out carefully in front of him, Champion in his lap. 

He smiles when he sees them coming, golden eyes glowing in the falling light like the house windows behind him. 

“I’m so proud! All limbs intact, no visible injuries.”

Yuichi rolls his eyes. Donatello says, “Same won’t be said of you when I tell Raph you were gonna backflip off the roof.” Ignoring his twin’s betrayed squawking noises, he goes on, “What are you doing over here?”

“Uhh. Well, I was just telling Champy here that I’m feeling kind of sore. And my leg has been cramping up again. She was really understanding about it, even though she wanted to play—weren’t you, cariño?”  

He seems weirdly nervous about admitting to even that much. But it’s clearly a big step for him. 

Donatello doesn’t outwardly react to this proof of progress except to ask for more information in a neutral tone. It reminds Yuichi of the way Sonoko will coax feral cats into the barn. Leaving a trail of breadcrumbs, leaving the door open, letting them decide on their own if it’s worth the risk of coming inside out of the cold. 

Leonardo is a little cagey but ultimately forthcoming, and even guides Donatello’s questions along, the one area of their lives in which his knowledge eclipses his genius twin brother’s. The longer they talk, the more Donatello begins to rock slightly from side to side, tapping his fingers against his thighs rhythmically. They’re agitated gestures, but he seems really happy. 

It’s nice. 

“So what have you guys been up to?” Leonardo asks. “Did it really take that long to fix the bot?”

“Donatello’s going to weaponize my yoyo,” Yuichi announces, pleased as punch. 

For a brief moment, surprise darts across Leonardo’s face. He looks touched, and oddly vulnerable, and then all of it hides neatly under blanket amusement. 

“Tello, really? Weapons already? We’ve only been here for a couple hours.”

“In hopes that he uses it on you, yes.”

Donatello’s tone is scathing, but their shoulders knock together affectionately as Donatello sits beside Leonardo on the steps. 

Yuichi sits on Donatello’s other side, yoyo in hand and half a dozen questions in mind. Eventually, Donatello brings up his holo-gauntlet and starts giving him a very technological lesson on low-current electrical discharges. 

Leonardo seems content to listen to them talk. He tilts his head to watch, smiling with an edge of wonder and disbelief. Like he’s just woken up in a world where he gets everything he wants. 

Chapter Text

The next time Yuichi is invited to the lair, five very significant things happen.

1. Leonardo meets Yuichi’s friends

The first thing Leonardo announces to his family when he tumbles through the portal between Usagi Farm and his own living room is “Kitsune and I are gonna STEAL!”

His siblings take a moment to absorb that and then look behind him at Yuichi, who had all but shoved Leonardo in and then hustled through himself. 

Yuichi, feeling harassed, says, “They are not going to steal.”

The last forty-five minutes have felt like a four-day marathon. 

Yuichi is spending the day at the lair, on Leonardo’s invitation, with the added assurance that his family would love to have him. When the striped turtle initially offered to portal him there and back, Yuichi leapt on the offer embarrassingly quickly. 

He would never admit it on pain of death, but here’s Yuichi’s reasoning: if he doesn’t have to spend nearly an hour driving each way, that’s an additional two hours he gets to spend with his favorite person, so yes. As much as he loves his bike, he’s team portal. 

They made these plans a week ago, and Yuichi’s first mistake was mentioning it to Gen. So he wasn’t expecting his friends’ ambush the second Leonardo stepped through the portal into the yard, but he probably should have been. 

“Let’s go for a walk,” Chizu said, in a way that made it clear she was not asking. “We’ll get parfaits.”

Leonardo, who had been on the farm for all of three minutes at that point, which was more than enough time for him to have collected two small children and one small dinosaur, said, “Uh, yeah. Okay. Can lizards have dairy?”

Yuichi didn’t even have time to worry about his friends and Leonardo not getting along, because at the very first sign of being left behind by the teenagers, Sonoko and Momiji pitched a fit loud enough that it attracted Jomei and Botan, who were quick to join in. 

This was usually when he strong-armed them back into the house, but Leonardo said, ostensibly to Gen but with his voice pitched loud and performative so the children took notice, “What do you think? Should we bring all the well-behaved bunnies back a treat?”

It worked like a charm, because of course it did, because that was the cousins’ angle in the first place. Once they were mollified, Yuichi’s group could escape, and Chizu said, “You shouldn’t let them play you like that, Leo. Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile.”

“I was gonna get them ice cream anyway,” he replied. “Let them think they won, it’s good for their devious little brains.”

“Are you speaking from experience?” Gen rumbled, his tone warm with good humor. “Is this a lesson from the school of ninja?”

“Oh, sure.” Leonardo guided Champion up onto his shoulder, where she curled around his neck like a scaly scarf, so his hands were free to fold in the pose of a wise old master. “Lesson one—strike hard, fade away into the night, and always let the babies in the room think they’re smarter than you. That way they’re never actually smarter than you.” 

“And have the means to buy their loyalty,” Kitsune pointed out. 

“That’s the easy part. Donnie’s been seeding funds from untraceable backdoors into Fortune 500 companies for years,” Leonardo said. He turned to walk backwards, leveling them all with a narrow stare. “And I don’t wanna hear any judgment from the Samurai Squad about it, either. My twinnie’s single-handedly kept the lights on by stealing from people so rich they don’t even notice.”

Chizu and Yuichi sighed at the same time. Gen laughed. Because Kitsune bounced up to her full height, shoulders squared, and announced, “I steal, too! I’m basically Robin Hood, without all the murder! Last month I did a casino sweep, baby!” 

Leonardo’s eyes brightened. “Tell me everything about that right now.”

So, within minutes, Yuichi went from being really excited that his favorite people were getting along, to being absolutely certain in the knowledge that Kitsune and Leonardo could never be left unsupervised, ever, because they were the exact same level of chaos gremlin. 

Gen was easy. He’s a straightforward person, and there are certain qualities he admires that Leonardo has in spades. His battle-scars and the weapons strapped to his shell cut him a dangerous figure. His obnoxious laughter when Yuichi tried to hop over a puddle and landed in mud instead softened him again. So Gen challenged him to an arm-wrestling match, and then best two of three, and then best seven of ten, and then Champion bit Gen’s thumb with her tiny baby teeth for hogging her person. But by then Leonardo had cemented himself as a Cool Guy in Gen’s eyes. 

Chizu was more exacting than that, and sometimes her protective nature could turn sharp against people, and Yuichi was worried she might be unkind. But she studied Leonardo’s interactions with Gen, how unfazed he was by Gen’s size and how he didn’t treat the rhino’s simplicity as stupidity. 

And she observed the way he and Kitsune matched each other’s energy, both of them a clever trickster learning the ins and outs of the other’s wits. When Kitsune withdrew her cute qiankun bag to show him some of her favorite purloined gems and trinkets, Leonardo responded in kind, pulling his phone out and swiping through a photo album of some of the best things his brother had invented with his stolen means. 

And she watched him dither over the ice cream menu, dragging Yuichi over by the sleeve to help him pick out treats for the kids back home, charming the yokai employee behind the stand into making the world’s tiniest strawberry soft serve for Champion. And it seemed to be enough. 

On the walk back to the farm, Gen lifted the bags out of Leonardo’s hands so he didn’t have to juggle everything and a lizard, and Leonardo didn’t even notice because Kitsune was distracting him by outlining, in great detail, her dream of successfully pulling off the world’s biggest art heist one day—not even because she likes art, just because—and Chizu looked past the three of them to meet Yuichi’s eyes. 

She tipped her head towards Leonardo, raised a brow, and smiled. It very clearly said Okay, he’ll do. 

But she wouldn’t be Chizu if she didn’t like to make people sweat, so when they were back at Yuichi’s house and handing off ice cream to greedy little kids, and Leonardo was beginning tense negotiations with Champion, who had decided the inside of his jacket was the perfect place to hide from the injustice of being left behind again, Chizu barked, “Leo!” 

He jumped a foot. Dangling from his elbow, Momiji giggled.

“Jesus—what??”

“Next Thursday, we meet in battle,” she said. “Go match. Bring your wits.”

“Good thing I bring those with me everywhere. You’re on,” Leonardo said, all bold, unflinching confidence. Then he opened Google on his phone, frantically typing “how to play Go beginner cheat sheet” into the search bar. Yuichi loved this idiot with his whole chest. 

“And don’t forget!” Kitsune shouted. “Art heist! This summer! The Louvre!!”

“Art heist!” Leonardo shouted back, and that was when Yuichi decided it was time to go for real. 

And now Leonardo is telling Michelangelo, “We’re so gonna steal.”

“I still have custody of your dinosaur,” Yuichi mentions in a loud voice, which is enough to make Leonardo heave an exaggerated sigh and roll his eyes and move onto something else. 

“You’re not gonna be able to hold Champy against him forever,” April points out, sounding amused. 

“I know,” Yuichi says woefully. “I’ll figure something else out.”

2. Yuichi meets the Hamato patriarch 

Yuichi doesn’t even realize there’s an additional presence in the room until the very last second. 

Something goes flying at the back of his head, and he whirls around and deflects it with the flat of his hand, spiking it into the ground like a volleyball. 

Only it’s not a volleyball, it’s something delicate and made of what sounds like porcelain? Given the tinkling little noise it makes as it breaks into about a billion pieces?

Yuichi only has about three seconds to be completely mortified before the turtles and April erupt into hysterical laughter. Even Casey is smothering giggles behind his hand.

“Dad, was that your favorite teacup?” Donatello asks, lowering his goggles over his eyes and twisting one of the lenses, as if he’s zooming in with a camera to capture his father’s gobsmacked expression in full detail. “Was it? Dad, was it?”

“Oh my god it’s so broken,” Michelangelo wheezes, hugging his stomach. “I’m gonna throw up.”

“I thought he would catch it!” the rat says, waving his hands above his head. “Why would you just—why would—”

“That’s what you get, pops,” Raphael butts in. “It was rude of you to throw stuff at our friend.”

He pats Yuichi on the back warmly, and it’s an unmistakably friendly gesture, but there’s enough force behind it to send any normal person toppling forward. Yuichi grew up with an affectionate rhinoceros for a best friend and knows when to lock his knees. He doesn’t even sway under the touch and offers Raphael a smile. 

“Yeah, you missed the boat, Splints,” April says, wiping the tears from her eyes with the heel of her hand, glasses all askew. “Besides, my boy Usagi here is a keeper.”

“Hmph,” Splinter says, tucking his hands into the sleeves of his robe. “Just because he’s swayed the rest of you to the dark side, I won’t be deceived. Besides, Baby Blue is much too young for—”

“PAPA,” Leonardo all but shrieks. He looks mortified. All of his siblings are glaring daggers at the rat now. Yuichi thinks he missed something, because he has no idea where Splinter was going with that statement. Too young for—? The dark side? Is this a Star Wars thing? Botan loves those movies. 

Disgruntled, but unwilling to fight all six of his kids all at once, Splinter says, “He can keep up with Blue, at least. Who was your teacher, little rabbit?”

Yuichi straightens, lifting his chin. He can feel himself brighten, his smile growing into a grin. He’s so proud to be her student, he always loves when he can boast, “Karasu-Tengu-sensei! She’s the best!” 

Splinter’s expression changes immediately. The grumpy, displeased look falls away and he somehow manages to look pale through his fur. 

“Karasu-Tengu? That terrifying creature is your sensei?” 

Yuichi nods cheerfully. She is terrifying. She can quell even the biggest meanest yokai with a single look. He’s seen her do it. It’s amazing. He wants to be just like her when he grows up.  

“Oh—well, then,” Splinter says, and reaches up to pat Yuichi on the head clumsily. “Ah, that’s. Wonderful. How lucky we are to have you in our home. If you need anything, don’t hesitate to speak up. And if your—sensei—asks, tell her I said you’re a delightful boy and my son is better off for knowing you.”

Leonardo and his siblings all have a look of slow-dawning delight on their faces. Yuichi wasn’t expecting such a glowing endorsement just minutes after getting a teacup lobbed at his head, but he certainly isn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. 

“Usagi, listen,” Donatello says suddenly. “This is so important. We have to have your teacher over for dinner.”

“No, like, we have to,” Michelangelo adds, super intense. 

“She’s traveling now, but when she gets back, I’ll let her know!” Yuichi says, pleased. 

For whatever reason, Splinter looks like he’s going through the five stages of grief. 

3. Donatello finishes the electro-yoyo

He comes out of the lab singed and covered in soot, yo-yo in hand. He doesn’t seem to mind that the toy quite literally blew up in his face, and none of his siblings treat this as anything entirely out of the ordinary either. 

The armored turtle holds it out to Yuichi. Slowly, gingerly, Yuichi stretches his hands out to take it. It doesn’t explode. 

“So it looks like your yo-yo has a ghost,” Donatello says unremarkably. 

“I’m sorry?” Yuichi says, still holding the toy at arms’ length. 

“It’s okay, our ghost is scarier,” he adds, and holds up a hand without looking to fist-bump April, for some reason.

It still needs some testing before Donatello is satisfied enough to call it finished, so they go to the dojo for that, where a very sad-looking training dummy is pushed into the middle of the room. 

Although the yo-yo is heavier now, reinforced with metal plating and whatever tiny gizmos Donatello has packed inside, it’s still a familiar shape in Yuichi’s hand. But he’s never used it as a weapon before, and he finds himself at a bit of a loss until Michelangelo helpfully compares it to a kusari-fundo. 

“I used to have one,” the smallest turtle says brightly. “It got broken, but I saved the fire spirit that lived inside it. It lives in a camping lantern in my room now.” 

“Wait, what?” all three of his brothers say at the same time. 

“Anyway,” Michelangelo goes on, “has your sensei ever let you train with rope or chain before? Maybe if you think of it like that you’ll have a better idea how to use it!”

It helps a lot, actually. Within twenty minutes, Yuichi has a pretty good handle on how to use the toy as a flail, and also how to loop it around the dummy’s neck or arm, the weighted disc hooking over the reinforced string and creating a collar that only tightens the more you pull. 

And the electroshock function definitely works. After the second small fire they have to put out, the dummy’s materials decidedly not conducive to this area of testing, Donatello marks the yo-yo down as a unilateral success. 

4. The hooks come out of Leonardo’s shell 

Sometime after lunch, Splinter comes back into the room. He’s holding a cup of tea in hand, steaming and faintly fragrant. 

Leonardo makes a face at it, but when April bumps their shoulders together, he takes it without argument. 

“Mandrake tea,” he says when he notices Yuichi’s curious look. Ah, that explains both the smell and Leonardo’s distaste. It’s very medicinal, and tastes like how Yuichi imagines drinking perfume out of the bottle might. But its restorative properties are second-to-none. “Barry was basically funneling it down our throats after the invasion. These losers got to stop drinking it weeks ago.”

“I think that would make us winners,” Donatello says mildly. 

“Barry?” Yuichi asks. 

“Our weird stepdad kind of?” Leonardo explains, his tone rising at the end like he’s not sure. “He threw me off a roof once. Now he works at April’s old high school.”

There’s really not a lot Yuichi can think of to say to that, so he settles for, “Okay then.”

Splinter taps Leonardo’s chin gently. “I’ll still make you drink it, even if you let it get cold,” the rat says, not unkindly. “It certainly won’t taste better out of the microwave.” 

Leonardo wrinkles his beak—cute, the unhelpful part of Yuichi’s brain supplies—but keeps sipping. Apparently, it’s his last dose, because as soon as he hands the empty cup off, he’s shrugging out of the jacket of the day—pink, this time, and so big on him that Yuichi knows who it must belong to even before Leonardo bundles it up and shoves it toward his eldest brother. 

And then his shell is on full display, for the first time since the invasion. Yuichi has seen his plastron, and he can see that the dramatic cracks there have faded into faint pencil-mark lines, but he’s never so much as glimpsed the damage done to Leonardo’s carapace. 

It’s a lot. It’s a roadmap of cruelty. The pretty patterns on the shell are interrupted by jagged dashes, like scarring where the pieces have fused back together. At a glance, Yuichi has no idea how his friend could have survived it in the first place. The mandrake tea and that healing coma—mystic in nature, he’s beginning to suspect—might have saved his life. 

Turtle shells are so fundamentally important to their overall health, and infection is a very real fear. So it’s very likely that, in part, Leonardo was keeping it covered up to protect the hooks and bandages that were keeping the broken edges of the keratin together. 

But from the way his shoulders hunch up to his jawline the second his back is exposed, Yuichi also gets the sense that he’s ashamed.

Splinter sounds a little choked up when he says, “Oh, Blue. Your shell has healed perfectly. We can take these hooks out now, and sand you down, and you’ll be as good as new.”

“Ooh, sanding, that’ll feel nice,” Michelangelo says enthusiastically. “It’ll be like a spa day!” 

He hopped up onto the infirmary bed next to Leonardo the second the jacket came off, and he’s been scooting closer by the second, and now he’s tucking himself under Leonardo’s arm. Yuichi is standing behind Leonardo, so he can’t see what his face is doing, but it’s clearly causing Michelangelo some real distress. The rest of his siblings look grim and miserable, too. 

Yuichi remembers the first time he sat in Leonardo’s bedroom, looking at those cracks in his plastron and thinking they were perfect, because those cracks meant his shell did its job and held up to a horrifying enemy and protected the precious life in its care. 

He stands by that. 

So he puts a hand on Leonardo’s carapace, and smiles a little when Leonardo jolts in surprise and then goes perfectly still. Rabbit behavior.

The pad of his thumb brushes over one of those healed lines, where it cuts through the pale blue pattern, and Yuichi says, “Have you ever heard of kintsukuroi?” 

Almost immediately, Donatello’s phone is in his hand. April and Casey lean over his shoulders from each side to watch as he looks it up. Raphael leans over his head.

Leonardo’s breath shudders when he goes to answer, so he clears his throat and tries again. 

“Can’t say I have. Fill me in, Cottontail.”

Rolling his eyes, feeling nothing but fondness, Yuichi says, “It means ‘golden repair.’ It’s the art of repairing broken pottery with gold.” Making something more beautiful for having broken in the first place, he thinks, but doesn’t have the courage to say out loud. 

Donatello wordlessly turns his phone around so his little brothers can see the Google Image results. Michelangelo says, “Oh, oh wow, Leo! Leo I’m getting so many amazing ideas right now! You have to be my canvas later, okay? Promise?”

Leonardo laughs. It’s a breathless, punched-out sound, and it’s not the bright thing it’s supposed to be, the bright thing it was learning how to be again, but it’s still there. That’s the whole point. That’s the whole miracle. 

“More good news,” Donatello says, his eyes trained without blinking on his twin’s down-turned face. “Your cast can come off, too.” 

It does the job. Leonardo’s head jerks up, and he says, “Really?”

“Really really,” Donatello replies, smiling slightly. If Yuichi didn’t know him as well as he did now, he might have missed it. “That’s two reallys. To the lab, dum-dum.” 

The four youngest Hamatos ramble off together like a very noisy, many-legged creature, hooting and pinballing off the walls and attached at the shoulders. The eldest two stay behind. Their father makes noises about calling someone named Draxum with an update on Leonardo’s progress “so he gets off my tail!” and hobbles from the room. 

“You’re a sweetheart,” April says, resting an arm on Yuichi’s shoulder. “Golden repair, huh?”

“I meant it,” he says, lifting his chin. 

“Me, too,” she counters evenly. 

They watch as Leonardo jumps onto Donatello’s back, nearly causing his purple-banded brother to fall on his face to said brother’s very vocal displeasure, and they disappear from view inside the lab. Casey and Michelangelo are laughing as they pile in after them.

“Yeah, so it’s going to be heckin’ impossible to keep him still after this,” Raphael says off-handedly. He glances down at Yuichi and says, “Wanna stay for a spar?”

Which leads to the fifth, and most significant event of the day: 

5. Yuichi and Leonardo spar

Leonardo springs to the center of the mats and turns to face the rest of them with a dramatic twirl. Leonardo is looking right at Yuichi, a devilish grin on his face, bright eyes pinning him in place like a butterfly to corkboard. 

“The rematch of the century,” he crows, arms spread out to his sides, as if he’s rallying an audience of hundreds, “the tortoise and the hare, a one-night special engagement, here to set the record straight once and for all!”

“We’re not racing, idiot,” Yuichi says, unable to help smiling at him as he slides his jacket off and unbelts Edgewing from his hip. He hands them off to Raphael and steps onto the mats readily. “But I guess I have time to teach you a thing or two.”

“Alexa, play ‘Smooth’ by Santana!” Michelangelo calls out, as eagerly as if he’s just been waiting for this opportunity, and across the room, the speaker system blinks to life. 

“Thank you, Michael,” Leonardo says pointedly, like he would use much stronger words if their father wasn’t in the room. And then he dives forward and Yuichi meets him halfway. 

Leonardo is clearly holding back, because the dojo is small and because Yuichi isn’t one of the super-powered brothers he’s used to tumbling around with, and maybe also because he’s been out of commission for a little over two months now. 

But even with all of that, he’s fast. Fast enough that Yuichi can feel his blood begin to race as his body prepares itself for the upcoming workout. 

It isn’t really kata. It’s definitely not the type of sparring Yuichi would practice under sensei’s disciplined eye. 

It’s more of a game, an effortless back-and-forth. And it’s fun. And Yuichi is fast, too. 

They trade blows and blocks and dance around each other like they’ve been doing exactly this for years and years. Leonardo moves like a construct of wind and mischief, never pulling the same move twice, zigging when it would make more sense for him to zag, and it costs all of Yuichi’s attention and intuition to keep up with him. 

Yuichi is aware of the others filing out of the dojo. Michelangelo and April are all but shoving Splinter out the door ahead of them. But it’s second-hand awareness at best.

All of his focus belongs to the boy in front of him. They’re alone in the room with alternative rock crooning out of the huge speaker system in the corner and the walls are so tall and so close that it creates a reverb, an echo chamber. It’s music and motion and Leonardo’s gold eyes, his flashbang grin, and the blood in Yuichi’s veins is singing. His heart is straining at the seams. 

This is a conversation. This is hey, I know you, you’re just like me. 

When Leonardo aims a kick at Yuichi’s left shoulder, Yuichi catches his leg and holds it there, and kicks his other leg out from under him in the next second. The turtle goes down with an oof and before he can twist up to his feet again, Yuichi pins him. 

He’s straddling Leonardo’s middle, knees planted against the mat on either side of him, forearm pressed to his neck. If it were a real battle, against an actual enemy, he would have a blade pressed there instead. The match is decidedly his. 

His chest is heaving with exertion and that giddy runner’s-high feeling and he knows he’s probably grinning wildly. 

Leonardo is staring up at him like Yuichi is the first point of light after days in the dark. He looks so cute, all wide-eyed and winded. Yuichi leans in, so that they’re nose-to-nose and all that gold belongs to him, just for this one moment. What a prize. 

“I win,” Yuichi says smugly. 

“Uh-huh,” Leonardo replies, sort of faint. “You got me.”

Chapter Text

Free-climbing up the side of a high rise in downtown Manhattan might be considered an extreme sport in most other circles, but Yuichi doesn’t know anything about those circles. They sound boring. 

It’s drizzling a little, and the next window ledge he reaches for is slicker than he’s expecting. The second his grip slips, a huge green hand shoots out and catches him by the wrist. 

“Thanks, Raphael,” he says when he’s found a better foothold. His heart skipped with the close call, but otherwise he isn’t fazed. 

“You’re gonna have to break and call Raph by a nickname sooner or later,” the eldest turtle says, playfully stern. 

Yuichi busily looks down at his hands as he climbs, flustered. It makes Michelangelo laugh, ringing and bright. 

“I can’t believe we used to think you were scary,” the spotted turtle says. He’s perched on Raphael’s shell like gravity is a neat concept in theory but not one he’s particularly interested in. 

“Come oooon,” Leonardo’s voice calls down from the roof. “¡Vamos hermanos! Hey Cottontail, I thought rabbits were supposed to be fast!”

“Hey Stripes, I thought turtles were supposed to be quiet,” Yuichi calls back without missing a beat.

There’s an immediate chorus of “oooh”s at the burn, and Leonardo makes offended squawking noises, and Yuichi is smiling when he finally pulls himself over the parapet onto the flat rooftop. 

The view from here is breathtaking. NYC at night is unlike anything else Yuichi has ever seen. The blinding lights and the rumble of traffic and the kinetic energy of millions of humans going about their night. 

It’s absolutely bursting with life, and they’re sitting above it all, a part of it and apart from it. 

Yuichi’s muscles are pleasantly sore from the workout and he stretches out to cool down and get his breathing back. A nudge at his side makes him glance to the left to find a mechanical arm offering him a water bottle. Donatello doesn’t acknowledge his thanks, but he also gives Yuichi an energy bar. 

It’s one thing to know that the Hamato siblings are ninja in theory, and it’s another thing entirely to see it in practice. None of them have broken a sweat, not even Casey. 

“Do you guys do this a lot?” Yuichi wonders aloud. 

“We try to patrol once every week,” Raphael explains, then seems to catch himself. He glances at Leonardo and gets a thumbs up before he goes on, “Otherwise, Donnie has alerts set up for suspicious activity, and we go check it out if it’s our brand of weird.”

Leonardo’s family has an impressive number of adversaries, though none they really seem to take seriously. The ones they call “mutants” all have a grudging understanding with the turtles—from the tone of the stories they tell him, Yuichi secretly thinks it’s pretty likely that these grown-up yokai just don’t want to deal with a handful of teenagers any more than they have to. There’s a mantis that runs a junkyard they’re at constant odds with, but in the manner of a grumpy old man chasing annoying kids off his property. And apparently they got invitations from the hippo and the worm to save the date for their upcoming wedding.

There’s some dissension among the siblings about this, but if Yuichi is understanding the thread of the argument entirely, it’s not a matter of whether or not they’re going. It’s a matter of the gift registry, and why the hell they should subject themselves to Pottery Barn for those guys when Target is right there. 

The ones that call themselves the Foot Clan are another story. They’re a hereditary enemy, and the ones responsible for the invasion in the first place. The turtles and Casey all have dark looks on their faces when the Foot comes up. 

It’s nice to have people to blame for the shadow that passed over Leonardo’s light. Yuichi unwinds his yo-yo a few times, sparks flying off the reinforced string, and looks forward to meeting the Foot on the street sometime. 

“I’m glad Cass got out of there,” Raphael is saying. “What’s she up to now?”

Casey answers dutifully, “She told me when we went to lunch yesterday but she swore me to secrecy. She said ‘if you know, you know.’”

“Goddammit, it’s world domination, I know it is.” Donatello puts his head in his hands, staring into the middle distance. “She beat me to it.”

“I’m good with that,” Michelangelo says blithely. “When she’s finally running the show, we can take a vacation. Tahiti, baby!”

Leonardo is sitting on the edge of the rooftop, legs dangling over the side, with what would would be considered reckless ease for anyone outside his family. Yuichi sits next to him, because he’s exactly the kind of reckless idiot who would risk a thirty-story fall just to sit next to a cute boy. 

In the back of his mind, the absolutely certain knowledge that he’s completely safe with this cute boy—this insane, amazing family—thrums like gravity, constant and steady and unspoken. It doesn’t even occur to him to be afraid of falling. 

It feels like this is where he belongs.

“You know,” Leonardo says suddenly, staring up at the stars he can’t see through all the light pollution, “I keep thinking of something the General said.”

The atmosphere changes immediately. Yuichi can feel the overwhelming, undivided attention of a small ninja clan sharpening into a point. Leonardo is freer with his words now than he was two months ago, but he still generally doesn’t offer information about the Krang unless he’s pressed. 

Yuichi shifts his hand across the concrete, feeling the rasp of it through his fur, until it bumps Leonardo’s. 

Leonardo still doesn’t look at any of them, but some small line of tension in his shoulders bleeds away. 

“Oh yeah?” Donatello asks in a tone that anyone who didn’t know him might mistake for mild. 

“Yeah. He said, uh. ‘Strength always prevails.’ He said a lot of stuff, but that’s what I keep thinking about for some reason.”

Michelangelo looks like the only thing stopping him from flinging his arms around his immediate older brother is the quelling hand Raphael has on his carapace. His amber eyes are big and wide but he manages to sound halfway normal when he nudges carefully, “How come, Leon?”

“‘Cause it’s funny, isn’t it?” Leonardo says, as if anything about that day could possibly be funny. But Yuichi is watching him closely, and only sees wry good humor in his face. “If strength always prevails, and he’s gone and I’m still here, I guess that means I’m stronger than him.”

No one speaks. It seems like everyone is holding their breath. Yuichi is the one who says, “Well, yeah, Leo.”

Leonardo grins. It’s a little shaky, but it finds its footing the longer it goes. He stands up on the edge of the rooftop and throws his head back and faces the empty sky again. 

The thought occurs to Yuichi, unbidden: Now I know why his brothers call him Fearless. 

“I’m still here!” he screams. “I won! Fuck you! You’re gonna die alone and you’re never gonna hurt me again and I’m going to forget all about you!”

Casey laughs out loud, a harsh, relieved sound. Michelangelo slumps forward, hands pressed to his own plastron, but he’s beaming in a way that takes up half his face. 

There are unselfconscious tears on Raphael’s face. Donatello’s staring at his twin’s back with vicious satisfaction, golden eyes glowing in the low light. 

Someone lounging on a fire escape a few stories down, indistinguishable in the dark, lifts their beer and shouts back, “Yeah, fuck him! You’re better off, babe!”

Leonardo stumbles backwards off the parapet, laughing so hard he can’t stand upright. Yuichi reaches out to catch him, and finds himself caught up instead as this ragtag, war-torn little clan clings to each other and dissolves into hysterics together. The kind that starts from the bottom of your stomach and works its way up, scrubbing you clean. The healing kind. 

Afterwards, it feels like a party. They want to celebrate this nameless thing shaped like recovery. So they go to Run of the Mill. 

They’re a rowdy crowd clustered around the hostess stand, just by virtue of their personalities. There’s a table opening up in the back of the dining room big enough for all six of them. 

From behind the bar, Qiao gives Yuichi a very knowing look—seeing the group he’s lumped with and Leonardo’s arm draped comfortably around his shoulders—and he has to fight not to hide behind his ears at their smug scrutiny. 

Sunita and April are here already, sharing a basket of garlic knots, and they both smile warmly when they see who just walked in. Kitsune and Gen are at a booth in the corner, wearing the world’s worst attempt at disguises and peeking at the foyer over their menus.

Señor Hueso is the one who seats them, looking annoyed by all the noise but making absolutely no move to subdue them. 

He lays a hand on Leonardo’s shoulder, his sunken eyes soft with fondness if you know what to look for. The skeleton yokai says something in Spanish that Yuichi has no hopes of translating. Leonardo’s cheeks darken and he responds in kind, his tone rapid-fire and flustered. Señor Hueso confirms whatever he said with a perfunctory nod and then gathers a handful of menus and leads the Hamatos toward their table, leaving his honorary nephew sputtering behind him. 

(“Podrías haberlo hecho peor.”

“Espera, ¿él o yo?”

“Sí.”)

Leonardo catches Yuichi by the sleeve before he can follow. He looks agitated, shifting his weight from foot to foot, and blurts, “Can you hang back? For a sec?”

Yuichi blinks and turns to face him. This doesn’t do wonders for Leonardo’s nerves, for some reason. The striped turtle glances anywhere but at him, and then finally darts a desperate look at Casey. 

Across the room, the human lifts both his hands and gives him a double thumbs up. 

“Okay,” Leonardo says. “Okay,” he says again, daring to look back at Yuichi. That only lasts about two seconds.

“Hey,” Yuichi interjects, tilting his head to the side. Concern is a little wriggling fish in the back of his mind, but he refuses to give it room to swim unless there’s real reason. “Whatever it is, you can tell me.”

He puts out his hands, an offer. He doesn’t know if it helps or not, because Leonardo snatches them up quickly, but he only looks more miserable by the second, in a vaguely seasick kind of way. 

“Are you—” His cheeks darken further. He’s still studying the polished tile beneath his feet like it’s the most interesting thing for miles. “I mean—if you’re free, whenever—would you—”

Yuichi sees the moment this cobbled-together courage starts to fail him. Give Leonardo a grenade to fall on and he’ll do it in a heartbeat. He’ll hold the line at the end of the world, he thrives in the eleventh hour. But an honest conversation? Way more terrifying than any of those things. 

That’s okay. Maybe Yuichi can be Fearless this time. 

And he wants this to be what he wants it to be. He’s willing to risk looking like an idiot if he’s wrong. 

It wouldn’t be the worst thing, really. Leonardo is his friend. There’s real love between them already, no matter what shape it may take in the future, no matter if the edges of Leonardo’s feelings don’t quite match up to Yuichi’s. 

It’s like sitting on the edge of that rooftop, feet dangling over cars that looked like toys in the street. He won’t fall. Leonardo would never let him fall.  

“Yes,” Yuichi says, calling on all the bravery that belongs to his name, every inch of the samurai spirit he inherited from Miyamoto himself. “I am. I would.”

Leonardo’s head snaps up, eyes like headlights. “What? Really?” The sweet expression on his face falters before it even has a chance to settle. “Wait, are we talking about the same thing?”

This idiot. Yuichi loves this idiot. 

He squeezes Leonardo’s hands, a mirror of what his heart is doing. He tugs the turtle in a step closer, so there’s hardly any space left between them except for the space they need to breathe, the slim margin left open to keep holding hands. 

Leonardo is staring at him, and Yuichi recognizes the look on his face. It’s the way Leonardo has always looked at him, since that first golden afternoon at Run of the Mill, but Yuichi didn’t know him well enough to read him back then. Not the way he knows him now.

And now he sees warmth in those eyes. Admiration. And powerful, precious hope. 

That hope outlasted the apocalypse. It’s outlived every night terror and panic attack and strangling episode of self-doubt since. Yuichi wishes, absurdly, that he could pick it up and hold it close and carry it safely the rest of the way through the world.

He’ll have to settle for meeting Leonardo’s gaze squarely and telling him, in no uncertain terms, “I’m talking about going out with you. What are you talking about?”

“Samesies,” Leonardo breathes, and then closes his eyes, like he’s just pained himself beyond recovery. It’s ridiculous. He’s adorable. “I mean. Yes. That’s what I—that’s what—please make me stop talking.”

Finally. Yuichi leans in to do exactly that.

There’s immediate uproar from elsewhere in the room, because of course there is. Leonardo’s siblings and Yuichi’s friends waste absolutely no time making complete nuisances of themselves, hooting and catcalling and shushing each other in turns. 

But the only thing that matters is Leonardo kissing him back. 

It’s brief. It’s clumsy, a little self-conscious. Neither of them know what they’re doing, they’re both really nervous. It’s better than Yuichi ever could have imagined. 

“Took you long enough,” Yuichi whispers. He feels light as a feather, like the slightest shift in the weather might blow him clear away. “That’s what I get for waiting on a turtle.”

Leonardo scoffs, breathless and flustered. He’s flushed all over by now, and when he rolls his eyes it’s clearly just an excuse to let his eyes dart away. Then he spots something that makes him groan. 

“Oh god. Look.”

Yuichi follows his gaze to his siblings’ table, where Sunita and April have abandoned their bread basket to attach themselves to the ninja huddle. They’re all clearly straining to listen in on this conversation. When Leonardo gives them away, only Raphael, Casey and the girls have the decency to bury their faces in a menu and pretend otherwise. Michelangelo and Donatello are outright staring. 

“Ugh, they’re the worst,” Leonardo says. “I literally can’t imagine life without them.”

“I get that,” Yuichi replies honestly. As they watch, Gen and Kitsune slink across the dining room to join the Hamato clan, and they all begin having what looks like a very animated, very involved conversation, occasionally gesturing in Yuichi and Leonardo’s direction. That can't be good. 

Sometimes retreat is the better part of valor. 

“Hey,” Yuichi says, lowering his voice into a conspiratorial whisper, “you wanna get out of here?”

The cheesy line is rewarded in a heartbeat by Leonardo’s blinding smile. He clusters in a little until their foreheads bump. He loves a scheme, he loves to be in on it. They’re back on solid ground together. 

“Let’s do it. Where do you wanna go? Anywhere in the whole world.”

There’s something very earnest in the question, behind the chaos gremlin energy, the giddy good humor. He’s vulnerable, laying himself out for Yuichi to see plainly. 

His ninpo is such an intrinsic part of himself, the thing that houses his soul, and he’s saying, Use it. I’ll let you use it. 

It’s not a hard choice. Given his pick of any destination in the world, Yuichi has his mind made up in about five seconds. He doesn’t even really have to think about it. 

“I kind of want to go to Hungry Burrito and try those carne asada fries you never shut up about,” he admits. 

It’s the right thing to say. Leonardo tips his head back and laughs, and it sounds exactly like the very first time Yuichi ever heard it. Before the invasion, before the months-long recovery, before the monster that tried to ruin him and every good thing about him. Back when it had no reason not to be the loudest, brightest thing in the whole room. 

Spirits. God. Yuichi isn’t ever letting this boy go. 

The turtle reaches over his shoulder for a sword. The spinning blue portal opens right there in the dining room, and one of Leonardo’s brothers squawks in alarm, and there’s a ruckus of upset dishes and screeching chairs behind them, but Yuichi and Leonardo are faster. 

They make their escape hand in hand. The whole thing feels equal parts silly and daring. The whole night feels that way. 

They put their phones on airplane mode and eat spicy loaded fries on a fire escape in Queens and sit close enough that their knees and elbows bump every other time they move. They race each other over the rain-slick rooftops and wipe out a couple of times each and almost lose their voices in the cool night air from laughing too much. 

As far as first dates go, Yuichi has no notes. He wouldn’t change a thing. 

It’s time to head back when Leonardo’s eyes glow white between one blink and the next, and he sighs, like someone who just got a disappointing text. 

“Curfew,” he says. “Let me take you home.” 

“Are you going to survive your brothers tonight?” Yuichi asks fondly. 

“God, I don’t know. Pray for me.” 

In the blue light of the portal, when Yuichi is standing in the middle of his bedroom, Leonardo leans through after him to press a quick, shy kiss to his cheek. Then he flails a haphazard wave and disappears. 

Ugh. Ugh. Yuichi can’t with this guy. 

He collapses into bed, dizzy and breathless. He’s smiling so hard he’s half-afraid it might leave a permanent impression on his face. He feels drunk. He feels perfect. 

He’ll have a lot of shit to answer for when his friends inevitably show up at his house tomorrow, furious at the missed chance to embarrass him in front of his brand-new boyfriend (!!). They’ll definitely rat him out to Auntie, and the cousins will eavesdrop like the monsters they are and never give Yuichi or Leonardo a moment’s peace for being gross and in love, but that’s entirely future-Yuichi’s problem. 

If he’s very lucky, it’ll be a rest-of-his-life problem.

The last thing Yuichi does before he falls asleep is reach for his phone. 

Usagi: Let’s do all of it again tomorrow.

The reply rolls in immediately, every bit as if a certain someone was waiting with their phone in their hands. 

Leo💙: it’s a date!!!!!