Chapter Text
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Gio has never belonged anywhere. He’s never had a home that he was more than a guest in, or a family that was his to keep.
He was told as a child, by the perpetually displeased matron who managed the orphanage he lived in, that he was difficult, unruly, uncooperative. Largely because he was almost completely nonverbal up until the age of about five.
Around then, Gio was placed with a strict family who denied him meals until he asked nicely for them, even if that meant sending him to bed on an empty stomach for the third night in a row. He didn’t remember much of that time, but he still carried the food insecurity with him. He was still afraid when someone bigger than him asked a question he didn’t know how to answer, no matter how deeply he buried that fear down and stubbornly lifted his chin.
The matron called it progress when that placement came to an end and Gio came back with better manners, more willing to say please and thank you as soon as he was prompted. She said, “It’s not that hard to be polite, is it?”
He struck out on his own the second the opportunity presented itself. He was thirteen when he climbed out a window and disappeared into the dull grey of early dawn, everything he owned in a bag that weighed practically nothing. No one was going to look for him. He didn’t mean anything to anyone, it didn’t matter if he lived or died, if he went hungry or cold. Whatever he didn’t scrape together for himself out of nothing he just had to go without.
It was a stroke of luck that he was hardy and difficult to squash, like a bug, with the disproportionate strength to match. He had been on the street for a handful of days before he was mugged for the first time, and he managed to fight the older yokai off despite being half his size.
The would-be mugger was some combination of reluctantly impressed by his own broken nose and mildly pitying regarding Gios’ empty pockets. He swiped the blood off his chin and said, “If you’re looking for work, I know a guy.”
The guy in question was a kingpin named Ryu who was willing to give Gio work but seemed to be under the impression that the kid would flake or wash out or get himself killed. When he kept not flaking or washing out or getting killed, Ryu kept giving him work.
Which is how Gio fell into the business that he did—mostly running. Some smuggling. Stealing when he had to. At the end of that first week, he had a tidy sum. At the end of that first month, he was renting a room of his own above a bar, where sometimes the owner let him wash dishes in exchange for a free meal.
A road opened up. A life he could have appeared in front of him. Not an easy road, or a comfortable life. But one that was his.
The kindest thing anyone ever did for him was when Ryu sussed out his sharp eye and potential with a long-range weapon, and he did that for his own benefit. Making Gio better at his job made Ryu more money.
Gio ended up forfeiting a good chunk of his pay for two weeks in exchange for the compound crossbow his boss tossed into his lap, and then forfeited an additional three days’ worth for as many lessons in care and maintenance. He’d had to go hungry for a bit, but it was worth it. Clients stopped dismissing him at a glance when he started carrying the bow. They started taking him seriously when he proved he knew how to use it.
He felt safer with its weight on his back. By the time he was seventeen, there was talk of a war in the human world. The former head of Hidden City security had gone rogue, had built weapons and taken them topside to eradicate humanity in the name of keeping yokai kind and their society safe.
“It’s a bad time to be a turtle,” the owner of the bar Gio had lived above for years said one evening, a hard look on his face. He jerked his chin toward a field jacket hanging from a hook on the wall, and Gio understood without being told more than once.
From then on, he kept his shell covered, a combination of the jacket and a baggy scarf. He kept everything he owned in a duffel and the pockets of his work pants. If it mattered, Gio carried it on him. He had his built-in armor and the armor he crafted himself ever since he was a nonverbal toddler in the foster system:
Never give anyone an inch. Never let anyone close enough to hurt you. Gio couldn’t remember the last time he let cruel words land hard enough to sting.
It didn’t last, because of course it wouldn’t. Ryu had lost a lot of business due to the war, and one day he’d reached his breaking point. More and more partners and clients were turning to Big Mama’s budding empire, the safety of her hotel and the riches she offered like candy. Gio had been standing in the wrong place at the wrong time when a deal Ryu couldn’t afford to lose fell through and he needed an immediate target to place blame on.
Gio had barely had time to snatch his bow and bag off the table before bolting out the door. He couldn’t return to the bar because Ryu’s people would know to find him there. There weren’t a lot of unaffiliated places that would take in a turtle, no matter how much money that turtle offered in exchange for room and board. In seconds, his life was thrown into total upheaval.
It wasn’t the first time he’d had to disappear, and it wasn’t hard to leave, but the thought of starting over was enough to make him want to sink to the ground and let it swallow him.
He was barely eighteen and he didn’t belong anywhere. No one cared if he lived or died. Some days even Gio nearly fell into that pit of not caring.
Then he turned a corner and saw the yellow door, glowing like sunlight on water in an otherwise dim, dirty sidestreet. It felt warm. It felt like open hands reaching out for him and only him, no one else.
Maybe it was wishful thinking, but it felt like the way home.
2031
Before he was Giorgio Hamato, he was Clem. The tag attached to his shell had said clemmys guttata, and the people who found him had assumed that was his name. He didn’t talk much then, couldn’t explain where he’d come from. He didn’t even know.
The world had been very small and safe when he was born—a cool, dark enclosure, with food to eat and water to swim in, and other tiny little bodies to tuck in next to his under a brilliant warm light—when suddenly the world became huge and he himself had been changed, and he went from that small dark safe place to somewhere bright and noisy and unfamiliar, and those other little bodies were gone.
He didn’t know how to explain any of that when he was a child. He missed someone but he didn’t know who. All he had was a tag on his shell to indicate he had ever belonged to anyone, and he didn’t even have the tag anymore.
Mikey’s face had done a funny spasm when Gio had given his full name, a little like the spasm that always preceded a very angry phone call or argument behind closed doors that Gio politely pretended he couldn’t hear. It seemed to take Mikey a minute to decide what he wanted to say, and finally he smiled with all his teeth and said, “Clem’s a nice name! It’s short for Clement, or—oh, Clementine! An orange, just like me! Citrus duo!”
Just that seemed to cheer Mikey up, his fanged grin warming into the real thing. Gio felt himself smiling back automatically, strung along by his older brother’s buoyancy and enthusiasm. Some days he felt more like a moth than a turtle, bumbling through the dark to follow the light. Some days he was certain he would walk through hell if he knew Mikey was on the other side.
“Okay, I’ve turned the corner on Clem, but you could still have another one!” Mikey barrelled on. “Nicknames are pretty big around here, I have like a hundred of them. And there’s our running theme, you know, with the Renaissance artists. We could pick out a matching name for you if you want!”
Of course Gio wanted that. He wanted a name and a home and a family of brothers who smiled at him the way Mikey did, who carved out a place for him at the table like it wouldn’t make sense for him to sit anywhere else.
But he should have gotten here sooner if he wanted to be a part of that. He missed the boat.
Splinter was consulted, because it only felt right, Mikey said in the tone that was becoming familiar to Gio as his I-will-force-of-nature-my-way-through-this-and-god-help-anyone-who-tries-to-stop-me tone, to include Splinter in the decision.
Gio mostly stayed tucked behind Mikey while doing his best to make it look like he wasn’t hiding. He didn’t know how to be around this quiet, absent-minded old man who mostly stayed in his bedroom—who, in another life, might have been Gio’s father.
The rat seemed agreeable, if a little disinterested. He patted Mikey’s cheek absently and hobbled over to a dusty shelf standing against the far wall. Mikey reached back for Gio’s hand when he realized he had taken a few steps without him and pulled Gio forward from where he was rooted uncertainly in the doorway. The two of them watched Splinter haul an old book from the shelf, brushing fuzzy film off the embossed title with his thumb.
“I picked all of your names from here,” Splinter said. “I had one picked out for you, of course, Gray. But—I don’t quite remember—”
Mikey’s hand tightened around Gio’s. Gio understood, abruptly, why none of the turtles came in here.
Leonardo’s absence in this house was as obvious and noisy as someone standing on the corner of Times Square with a megaphone. The pictures that crowded the memorial in the hallway were full of strangers—a Donatello who smiled and made silly poses for the camera and draped himself over his siblings instead of snapping his teeth at anyone who got too close—a Raphael who scooped his little brothers up in his arms, never flinching or cringing away like he feared he’d hurt them by accident just by standing there—an April who sprawled on the sofa or sat on the counter whisking eggs like she as good as lived here, even though Gio could count on both hands the number of times she’d visited since he moved in.
Gio studied those photos over and over again, trying to make the people in them look familiar. The only one he recognized was Michelangelo, but it made his stomach squirm uncomfortably to recognize him, because it made it obvious how tired and dull his Mikey had become in comparison. Still the brightest thing in Gio’s whole life, but somehow, impossibly, not as bright as he would have been in a kinder world.
And Splinter was a ghost of his old self, too. He had never fully recovered from losing one of his children, and now that the rest of them were grown, he had begun to allow himself to drift away.
Leonardo, Gio thought sometimes, what did you save them from that could be worse than this?
“That’s okay,” Mikey said with forceful good cheer. “We can go through it together, maybe jog your memory.”
But Splinter’s energy wore off quickly, before they’d made it through more than a dozen pages. Mikey didn’t know how to apologize for that, and Gio didn’t know how to make him understand that he didn’t need to.
He’d never known anyone stronger than Mikey, who flipped past a photo of Da Vinci’s La Scapigliata as easily as if the name in the header didn’t dig a knife right into his stomach.
He’d never known anyone more deserving of a miracle.
“Time travel is tricky,” Renet explained, kicking her feet idly, as at home on the edge of the rooftop as she seemed to be anywhere else.
She had insisted they get iced coffees, her treat, but Gio couldn’t enjoy his drink. He was letting it melt into watery tastelessness without so much as taking an obligatory sip.
“True time travel,” she added, not for the first time—really stressing the difference. “Mikey’s dimension-hopping is amazing, but it’s something else entirely. We’re talking about the real deal, here.”
The reason why Mikey and his brothers couldn’t go back, despite all their begging and bartering and, in one case, threatening over the years was simply because they were already there. They existed in the fabric of that time already. Things became unstable when they were overloaded and it was already such a delicate balance to maintain.
“Like a coral reef,” she said, which was a less helpful explanation than she probably realized.
Before, when Renet had said Gio didn’t belong here, she didn’t say it to be cruel. Gio’s knee-jerk reaction was hurt, and then an instant smothering of the hurt, and then an attempt to look unbothered so Mikey wouldn’t bare his toothed smile at Renet like a weapon. Some time after that, he let himself sit with her statement, and he realized that any friend of Mikey’s must have meant it some other way.
Now she was explaining that Gio didn’t belong here because he actually belonged back there. In the past that Mikey had begged her a dozen times to send him back to. In the past where Leonardo was still alive. Gio should have been there all along, but he wasn’t.
“You know, if we engage in a bit of healthy rules lawyering and obey the letter more than the spirit of Null Time’s foundational principles,” Renet said brightly, “we’re really, like, righting a wrong, if you think about it. Please don’t think too hard about it.”
“And when I’m done, you’ll bring me back?” Gio clarified.
“You’ll end up exactly where you should be,” she told him. “Hey, you remember your yellow door?”
Gio, surprised she knew about that, nodded.
Renet told him that she had once been sent to investigate an explosion of mystic energy that opened windows throughout all of time and space. It was a spectacle that had led her right to the turtles. Right to Mikey.
“That was him,” she explained, smiling at Gio. “He didn’t mean to, but he gave you a way home. Next time you’re lost, keep an eye out, and he might surprise you again. He really is amazing, huh?”
When Gio returned to the lair, Mikey seemed restless and unhappy. He looked like he was seconds away from grounding Gio from leaving ever again and pulling the plug on his scheming with Renet once and for all. He looked like he wanted to protect Gio from every bad thing that dared to darken their door.
Gio really loved him. He really did. He hadn’t known what that felt like until he met his big brother, and then he knew it felt like carrying a sun around inside you. Impossible to contain, spilling light from every side.
He wished for the thousandth time that he’d been here all along. But maybe it’s for the best that it worked out the way it did.
It’s because he got lost back then that he could save Leonardo now. He was the only one who could.
“You’re leaving,” Donatello said.
Gio, who had lived there for almost a full year and could count the number of times Donatello had addressed him directly on one hand, froze mid-step. Being approached by the imposing turtle in the metal shell was a lot like staring down a shark in a swimming pool.
He had no idea how this conversation was going to go, and had truthfully not even planned on having it in the first place.
Saying goodbye to Raphael and Donatello was really for Gio’s own benefit, not theirs. They didn’t like him, and wouldn’t miss him, but Gio had never stopped wanting to be their brother. He hoped that if he did this right he’d get another chance to be.
Yesterday, Gio went into the dojo after dinner and took his usual spot along the side of the room. Raphael didn’t always acknowledge his presence there, but he never kicked him out, allowing Gio to observe his training without censure.
The snapping turtle was a powerhouse, enough force in each strike to level buildings—that probably would have rattled the entire underground if it weren’t seamlessly absorbed by the Genius Built equipment—but he was also incredibly precise. It was a marvel to watch someone so big do exacting, meticulous katas with a cool smoothness that belonged to water.
Gio could see why he used to be the family’s foundation, why his siblings used to trust him to carry them everywhere. His siblings still did. Raphael was the one who lost that faith.
Gio tucked his knees to his chest, made himself extra small and extra out-of-the-way, and rested his chin on his folded arms. He didn’t move for most of an hour, and Raphael sent him a few wondering, sidelong glances, clearly confused but unwilling to break their companionable silence.
Bye, Raphael, Gio thought, a secret farewell to his biggest brother that he’d never hear. I hope you’ll be happier.
Now he was standing in a hallway feeling half his height under Donatello’s unflinching stare. It was one thing to throw the term ‘genius’ around in conversation, and another thing entirely to be confronted by someone much smarter than everyone else to a degree that was laughable, feeling like a deer blinded by headlights on a highway.
“Why bother?” Donatello asked.
Gio tilted his head, not understanding the question. Feeling that instant gut-punch of fear that followed not knowing how to answer a question, that had followed him since he was five years old.
“This has nothing to do with you,” Donatello said, each word blunt and precise, a knife punching through paper. “You didn’t even know Leo,” he went on. He spoke the name differently than he said every other word, placing it down instead of dropping it wherever. “Why do all of this for him?”
Nothing to do with me, Gio thought, letting the hit land where Donatello wanted it to. Since he didn’t know Leonardo, he wasn’t really family. He was missing something intrinsic and fundamental that every other Hamato had in spades. He knew that already. It still hurt. He still let it hurt.
And now he did understand how to answer Donatello, but it wouldn’t endear him to the older turtle in the slightest. It might make Donatello angry enough to snap at him.
The truth was that Gio wasn’t doing this for Leonardo. He wasn’t even really doing it for Donatello or Raphael or Splinter or April.
“For Mikey,” he corrected, quiet in the cavernous hallway.
The following silence was big and hungry enough to swallow up the whole city. Gio was braced for a lot of things to happen. He didn’t expect Donatello to draw back as if he’d been slapped in the face, staring at Gio with an actual emotion peeking out of his eyes—surprise, clear as day, where Gio was used to seeing weaponized nothing.
Then Donatello turned in the direction of his lab and walked away as abruptly as he’d shown up in the first place. Gio stood still for an extra second or two, just in case the shark circled back.
When Renet returned to the lair and announced everything was ready for their not-technically-illegal extracurriculars, Donatello appeared in the room moments later. He would stop a forest fire in its tracks, Gio thought, as all activity ground to an immediate halt with his arrival.
Donatello didn’t so much as glance at Renet, radiating a frosty disinterest in her direction that even she knew better than to attempt to bubble her way through. He was holding something very purple in his hand, and Gio didn’t have time to do more than glance at it before the older turtle was walking right up to him and putting the purple thing in his jacket pocket.
“This is for the Krang,” Donatello said flatly. On Gio’s other side, Mikey was watching in stunned disbelief. “Don’t handle it too much, it’s temperamental. Shoot it from your bow. And give the monster a message from me.”
Message delivered, Donatello straightened Gio’s lapel idly, and then walked out of the room. Renet said, “Wow, he sure is a force of nature!” which was putting it lightly, since both she and Gio had been careful not to even breathe too loudly while the softshell was talking. “Anyway, you ready?” she asked Gio.
He was ready. The sooner he left, the sooner he could come back. Mikey on the other hand looked so pale and miserable that Gio couldn’t help but tell him, “If you really don’t want me to go, I’ll stay.”
A tiny, secret corner of his heart betrayed him by wishing Mikey would ask him to stay. But his big brother—who worried about him constantly when he stayed out too late, but never imposed a curfew, who fussed when he came home with scrapes or bruises from odd jobs in the Hidden City, but never forbade him from going back out—would never keep him here if he thought Gio wanted to go.
His smile said as much. Warm, and not as bright as it should have been, and a little sad.
“Then I’ll see you when it’s over,” Gio said firmly.
Mikey’s smile faded, a crease forming in his brow. His eyes darted over to Renet and whatever he saw on her face surprised him. He glanced back at Gio with that surprise painted all over his expression. Then the sadness got bigger. Then the warmth won.
He poked one of the spots on Gio’s forehead playfully, and pressed a kiss to the same place. Gio’s heart shuddered, unsure what to make of the flood of affection over its parched earth.
“You are not alone,” Mikey said firmly. “Promise you’ll remember.”
“Promise,” Gio whispered.
The actual act of time travel was over before Gio had a chance to open his eyes.
2020
From all the stories Gio had heard about him, it would have made a certain kind of sense if Leonardo turned out to be ten feet tall.
Gio had seen pictures. He’d even seen videos; windows into another life. He knew of Leonardo, the boy who had lived for his family with all the same earnestness and conviction that he had died for them with. The boy who tore a hole out of the world when he left it, a wound that closed up but didn’t heal right. The one whose absence was a scar slapped across the earth where no flowers could grow.
He’s so small, was all Gio could think the first time he saw him. He’s so small.
Nothing could have prepared him for Leonardo looking up at him and making a joke, as if he wasn’t broken and bleeding and farther away from home than he’d ever been. He was frightened and trying not to be, his smile fearless and his eyes glassy and traumatized. He was clinging to a bloody photo like it was the only thing left for him to hold.
Gio had only just met him, and he already couldn’t imagine letting anything hurt him. He had already begun to realize, a light clicking on in his head, exactly why no one had really survived losing this kid.
There was a light in Leonardo that felt familiar—cooler than Mikey’s warmth but gentle in the same way, like a breeze on a hot day—and Gio bumbled toward it the same way, too. Stupid moth dressed up in a turtle shell.
You don’t belong in the dark, Gio didn’t say.
“We’re going home,” Gio told him instead.
The slider pressed his cheek against Gio’s shoulder and curled up tired and trusting in his arms, a little turtle familiar with the art of being carried someplace safe by someone bigger.
Gio swallowed a painful lump in his throat and held his brother as securely as he knew how.
He had never carried anyone before. He wanted to get it right.
The Krang’s howls of pain had gone tellingly quiet when the yellow door glimmered into existence. Gio waited an extra moment to be sure, but he couldn’t imagine the revenge that Donatello had had almost eleven years to dream up would have left big enough pieces behind to be a problem even if one did manage to trickle through after them.
It was the first time Gio had ever killed anything, but that knowledge wasn’t heavier than the kid who was bleeding all over his jacket, who wanted to go home so badly he was willing to trust a complete stranger to take him there.
Compared to him, it wasn’t heavy at all.
The walk to the lair was long, but with Leonardo’s tech thoroughly fried and his own phone full of numbers that had become extremely long-distance, Gio had no way of contacting the Hamatos for a pickup. He also wouldn’t have known how to start that conversation even if he had the means to.
The lair itself was a step to the left of familiar. The walls and layout were exactly the same as Gio remembered them, but somehow it managed to look like an entirely different home. It was not the quiet museum he had lived in.
There were blankets everywhere, cups stacked haphazardly in an odd formation, a half-built computer taking up most of the coffee table. Comics and sweaters and sneakers and skateboards were strewn in all directions like someone’s closet had exploded.
It couldn’t have been more obvious at a glance that a big family lived here. It wouldn’t have been unreasonable to guess, after one look around, that they were always sharing space, constantly getting under each other’s feet, comfortable in their closeness.
Gio felt oddly seasick standing there, absorbing what this opposite shore had looked like before a devastating hurricane barreled through and rearranged the landscape. But he only had a moment to take it in.
When Mikey started shouting, Gio started running, a knee-jerk reflex.
Bursting into the garage was interrupting the opening act of a tragedy—entering stage left and changing the direction the play was going to go.
He had never seen Donatello wear emotions so plain on his face, eyes glassy with tears that went sliding down his cheeks the second Leonardo started to speak. He was across the room before anyone else had finished processing the prodigal son’s return, lifting his twin out of Gio’s arms and sinking to the floor with him, crushing Leonardo to his chest. He was rattled by the close call—crying mostly silently, but shaking like a leaf—and clinging with a desperation that Gio understood perhaps even better than Donatello did.
He knew exactly what the nightmare scenario looked like in high definition. And he knew exactly what Donatello looked like after living through it.
Gio wouldn’t wish that on anyone, but certainly not this kid. Donatello had never warmed up to Gio, never even came close, but Gio was quickly realizing that he would do anything—anything—to protect this bright, quick-to-cry little likeness of him.
Raphael was weeping openly, huge, wracking sobs, lifting them all into his arms with a deftness and certainty that Gio had never witnessed before. His Raphael always hesitated before touching anyone, second-guessing his strength at every turn. The first time he had touched Gio’s shoulder, he had visibly worked up the courage to do so in a way that just hadn’t made sense.
It made sense now. This big protector, the biggest brother, the shield who let a knife get through. The guardian who almost failed.
Gio couldn’t look at Mikey for longer than a second at a time without feeling his chest start to constrict painfully. He wanted to go home. He kept waiting for a yellow door to appear.
But Leonardo’s eyes flew wide with panic when he realized Gio wasn’t in step with him to the infirmary. Gio understood why the world fell to pieces without him because he had only known Leonardo for the better part of three hours and already his built-in response was to do anything to take that fear away.
He took Leonardo’s reaching hands the way no one took Gio’s when he was sixteen and held them. He promised not to leave yet.
“Thank you,” Raphael said suddenly. “God, no one said that yet. Thank you, Gio, for—”
“You don’t have to thank me,” Gio replied, staring at Leo’s hand squeezed around his, because it was the only safe place in the room.
“Uh, we really do,” Raphael said. He was sitting patiently still while Casey cleaned his eye, gazing earnestly at Gio without moving his head. “I know some people have a thing about that, like, ‘there’s no place for thank yours or apologies between family,’ but we don’t subscribe to that policy.”
“Sometimes it’s just nice to hear it,” little Mikey piped up from where he had finally eeled his way onto Leonardo’s bed despite everyone else telling him not to.
He snuggled right in, sure of his welcome, his shell a perfect fit beneath Leonardo’s arm. There was no way Donatello hadn’t noticed immediately, glued as he was to the other side of the bed, but he didn’t do more than roll his eyes. When the rest of the family clued in they let out aggravated sighs, but no one made any attempt to remove the smaller turtle. April only straightened out Leonardo’s blanket so it covered them both.
“I wanted to say it, too,” Mikey mumbled, word salad lost in the hollow of Leo’s neck and shoulder where he tucked his face to hide. “Thank you, Gio. And sorry, Leo. I couldn’t get you out. I tried and I couldn’t. If you died it would have been all my fault. I didn’t save you. Sorry, Leo,” he said again, voice thick and choked and giving himself away.
Six people start talking at once, all of them vehemently opposed to the concept of Mikey having anything to apologize for. Gio couldn’t stand the idea of even a sliver of his Mikey’s self-blame and self-hate existing here, too, when it never should have existed at all.
“You did save him,” he said, unintentionally cutting through the noise as perfunctorily as an arrow piercing through a straw target. Mikey peeked out at him, red eyes miserable and swimming with tears, and Gio forced himself to meet those eyes head-on. “You sent me,” he said.
“Oh,” Casey said, a look of slow-dawning understanding on his face. “You’re from the future, too.”
April said, “That would have been so much harder to believe yesterday.”
Mikey’s eyes were round as he lifted his face most of the way out of hiding. Gio’s heart fucking broke letting himself remember for one second the life-altering grief that this fifteen-year-old had to live through the first time around. The bleakness that drained his whole world of idealism and wonder like rain washing colorful sidewalk chalk away.
It didn’t happen, he thought, willing someone who wasn’t present to hear it somehow. It won’t ever happen now.
“Did I really?” Mikey ventured in a tiny voice.
“Really,” Gio said firmly. “You couldn’t reach him inside the prison dimension because he wasn’t there anymore. He was already gone.”
“Because you got him out,” Donatello interjected, piecing it together laughably quickly. “Mikey’s portal on Staten Island didn’t work because his portal from the future beat him to it. Leo wasn’t there because he was with Georgie out here.”
The nickname from him of all people rattled something in Gio’s heart that he was careful to step on and keep still.
“How come it had to happen that way?” Mikey whined nasally, drying his face on the blanket even though it made Donatello hiss at him. “That really scared me!”
Casey was staring from across the room with a look on his face that was becoming more stricken and haunted by the second. Gio caught his eye and held it, the only confirmation he was willing to give that whatever conclusion the other time traveler had come to was probably the correct one—and also, hopefully, enough of a hint that Casey should keep it to himself.
“Isn’t that a paradox?” Raphael was venturing nervously. “Like in the movies? Aren’t those—not good?”
“Not according to Novikov’s consistency principle,” Donnie said in a very loud, rapid-fire voice, phone appearing in his hand, “which I am happy to explain to you all if you’ll give me a brief moment to reorganize my PowerPoint slides. S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N., bring me the laser pointer.”
“No PowerPoints,” Splinter cut over him. “And no paradoxes! It is time for little turtles—and honorary turtles—to go to bed!”
“Okay, well, we can not do the slideshow, but the paradox thing is kind of out of our hands?” April replied.
She was kicking her shoes off as she said it, though, and climbing up next to Raphael on the other bed. The big snapping turtle patted the free side of the mattress until Casey minced over to join them.
“We will discuss it in the morning, like civilized mutants,” Splinter said decisively, distributing forehead kisses and blankets throughout the room in the same no-nonsense tone. It was businesslike to a degree that almost felt silly and performative—that was meant to be silly and performative, Gio realized, because it was causing Splinter’s children to scrunch up their faces and fight laughter.
He blinked at the polka-dotted blanket that appeared in front of him.
“Take that jacket off and I’ll get it cleaned for you,” Splinter said, tone gentling just slightly, just for him. “I know my turtles tend to run cold, so wrap up in this in the meantime.”
Gio was not a child who needed to be coddled or tucked in. He had outgrown any real need for a parent years ago. He had, within days of meeting Splinter in the future, smothered the little hope that his actual parent might want him.
But he still shrugged out of his jacket, letting go of Leonardo’s hand only briefly to do it. He folded the jacket inside-out to hide the blood from anyone who hadn’t noticed it yet and traded it for the blanket that Splinter wrapped around his shoulders.
He held the front edges together in his free hand so it didn’t slip down his shell. He couldn’t help rubbing the fabric between his thumb and the side of his forefinger, memorizing the softness.
“You heard all that, right, Miguelito?” Leonardo mumbled, slowly losing his battle to stay conscious as he poked Mikey’s cheek. “More proof that you’re the best little brother a guy could ask for. Maybe I’ll retire and leave all the portaling to you from now on, how ‘bout it?”
“That’s illegal,” Mikey replied promptly. He was unselfconcious about the tacky tear residue on his face and seemed to feel better now that he was done crying. “You’re stuck with us forever. Donnie, get up here already.”
“Yeah, Donnie, get up here already,” Leonardo parroted unhelpfully.
“You have so many broken bones, Nardo,” Donatello grumbled, sounding halfway convinced despite himself.
“So don’t break anymore of them and we’re golden, Tello.”
Leonardo finally fell asleep with his hand curled around Gio’s and his younger brother and older twin squeezed into the bed on either side of him. Everyone else dropped off one by one, unwilling to leave the room to find a more comfortable place to sleep, clustered together like it went against their very nature to be apart.
When Gio gave in and rested his head in the pillow of his folded arm on the edge of the mattress, he had only had his eyes closed for a number of minutes before a hand touched his forehead. He feigned sleep, a riot of tenderness and confusion taking over his chest, as Splinter’s thumb brushed gently over his brow in a way that reminded Gio immediately of his big brother.
His big brother who, Gio was only just realizing, was a patchwork of everyone who had ever loved him. Pieces that made up a greater whole, inherited and passed on. Love that traded so many hands before it made its way into Gio’s.
Splinter was humming a song Gio didn’t recognize, low and soft, over and over. Gio shouldn’t have felt safe enough to sleep, but he did. And he was.
Someone else was humming now, the same song in a different register.
“Rise and shine, Clementine,” that voice says, warm and sweet and on the edge of crumbling, like a coffee cake crusted in cinnamon sugar, fresh out of the oven and falling apart in eager hands.
Gio wonders for a second if he’s home. Then he realizes that he must be dreaming. He’s still in the infirmary but it’s darker now and absolutely silent, not even the machines at the bedside beeping or blinking. No one moves when he lifts his head or stands up to look around. And Mikey is here.
Long dark hair in a messy plait, shoulders broad and burdened with things that weren’t just his to carry, twenty-six going on a hundred. Gio’s Mikey.
Some jangling, dislocated thing in his chest is soothed by the presence of his big brother and Gio smiles automatically.
Home came to him. That’s never happened before.
“You’re amazing, you know that?” Mikey says, beaming back at him. “You did exactly what you said you would. You got him out. My big brother, my Leo—Gogo, thank you. Thank you.”
The praise and gratitude fills him with a golden warmth that would put the sky in July to absolute shame. It isn’t hard to hear it from Mikey the way it was almost impossible to endure hearing it from little Raphael, because Gio keeps everything Mikey gives him, even the things he doesn’t deserve.
“I can go back now,” he says, not quite a question. He can’t think of why else Mikey would be here.
Something passes in front of Mikey’s joy like a cloud moving in front of the sun. A cold, hard kernel of dread lodges itself in Gio’s stomach, doubling in size by the second. It must show on his face, because Mikey crosses the few steps between them urgently.
“If I could, I would,” he says. “I’d bring you anywhere you wanted to go. But I can’t.”
Mikey wouldn’t hurt him—had never hurt him, had never given Gio any reason to believe he would ever hurt him—so when he holds out his hands, Gio takes them. It seems to give the older turtle a little strength, or maybe courage, some cluster of tension in his shoulders leveling out.
They stand there together instead of apart as Mikey says, “You belong right here.”
Gio has to fight his first and second impulse to flinch away from that. Maybe Mikey can tell, because he squeezes their joined hands, expression pleading.
“Why?” Gio asks, barely enough strength behind the question to constitute a whisper.
I wouldn’t have left if I knew I couldn’t come back, he doesn’t say, because it would be selfish and unkind, and maybe even untrue. He can’t imagine abandoning Leo to that dark place he found him in for any reason. It’s hard to even really think about leaving him after he pleaded with Gio not to go. The first person who had ever asked Gio not to go.
“Why can’t I go back?” he says, feeling half his age, that stupid child who still wanted to be wanted, who hadn’t figured out yet that it would never happen.
“Georgie baby, the future hasn’t happened yet. There’s nothing there to go back to.”
He struggles to wrap his mind around that, not quite understanding yet. “You’re there.”
“No,” Mikey admits, “not even me. All that’s left of me is this part, the part that went with you.”
Horror creeps in like a late autumn chill through a window someone didn’t shut right. Gio’s world is upending, a disaster that’s about to happen, the split-second before a car crash.
Mikey goes on, “I asked Renet to let me tag along. This much of me, anyway. Sorry, shortcake,” he adds ruefully, a younger brother who lived long enough to become the overbearing older one. “I know you wanted to go, and I couldn’t force you to stay. But I hated the thought of you out there by yourself.”
“I thought I’d get to come home,” Gio says. He feels crushed, eyes stinging, a hopeless aching thing yawning open inside him. He feels stupid. He should have known better. He thinks of Mikey’s face when Gio left, just another person who left. He thinks of never seeing Mikey’s face again, and the pain pours out of him because it’s too big and too full of sharp broken edges to hold.
“I’m sorry,” he tries to say, but it comes out punchy and strangled, mostly a sob, “I’m sorry.”
“Hey,” Mikey says, all fast, swooping right in. His hands come to rest on Gio’s shoulders, a familiar comfort. “Sweet kid, you didn’t do anything wrong.”
Gio’s big brother, the one who taught him everything that matters. How to cook soft scrambled eggs. How to make a friendship bracelet. All the words to Ribs by Lorde, learned while dancing together in the kitchen in the middle of the night. Gio had never held hands with anyone just to dance. He had never laughed so loud in his life.
That kitchen was the safest place in the entire world. The heart of an almost-empty home, where a little light above the stove always stayed on. Gio could find his way to that room in total darkness. He could find his way there from the other side of the universe.
“You meant the world to me,” Mikey says. “That doesn’t just disappear.”
The tears don’t stop, betraying him one after another. A dam broke somewhere inside him, the last levee standing underwater. He’s pulled into a hug, tucked under his brother’s chin for what could be the last time. Gio clings to him the way he never allowed himself to before, some desperate and frightened and homesick corner of his heart convinced that he can hold on tight enough to never let go.
Mikey presses his cheek to the top of Gio’s head, swaying them back and forth. Effortlessly kind, even now, even when Gio doesn’t have to be his problem anymore.
“Will I see you again?” Gio asks, not sure he wants to know the answer.
“Who knows?” Mikey tells him warmly. “Maybe you should wake up and find out.”
Someone is gently shaking him awake. He doesn’t flinch away because the hands on his arm are familiar. They’re smaller than he remembers but he’d know Michelangelo anywhere. He’d never mistake him for anyone else.
When Gio opens his eyes, a round, bright face is beaming at him. There is nothing broken or worn out or drowning about this kid. He’s summer sunshine, he’s spoiled and loved and has never gone a single day without being scooped up and smothered in affection. He wouldn’t know the first thing about living without all of that.
And he looks at Gio the way Gio’s big brother used to, like there was no one he would rather share all his light with than him.
“Rise and shine, Georgie!” Mikey chirps. “You were promised breakfast empanadas and I aim to deliver. Wanna help me out? I need someone on bell pepper duty before Raphie eats them all!”
Some things change and some things stay exactly the same. Gio smiles before he realizes he’s going to, helpless to do anything else.
Maybe this is where he’ll be allowed to stay.