#chimyen

The hatch opens again with a groan of old metal and a familiar form drops lithely down the ladder, and the room breathes with a sense of agitated relief. But then Mikey is reaching up to help someone else down, and Casey shoots to his feet with a colorful swear, April and Don right behind him. 

Woody’s a mess. He waves with the hand that isn’t holding a bloody dishrag to his nose, and his knuckles are scraped and bruised, and Mikey looks one thousand percent done with everything and everyone in general. 

"What happened?” Raph asks sharply. Some things change and some things stay the same and this -- this is one of his own hurt, bleeding in this home they built together, and that’s enough to piss him right off, the way it absolutely always has been. “Who did this?”

“And could you pick ‘em out of a crowd if we asked you to?” Casey puts in, with a grin that’s all teeth. Woody rolls his eyes. 

“I have enough moms at home, guys. Thanks, though.”

“Okay, see, you don’t get to be a smart-ass until after we hear the story,” Raph says. “So talk. Tell us what happened.” 

"Yeah, Woody,” Mikey parrots mildly, in exactly the same way Donnie does when he knows something before the rest of them do, “tell ‘em what happened.”

Woody gives his boyfriend a sidelong look, and then moves the rag away from his face and says, “I, uh. Picked a fight. With a Purple Dragon.”

“You did what?” Don snaps. Woody has the audacity to shrug. 

“Not my finest moment. Those guys don’t fight fair.” 

“Tell me about it,” Casey 'go-ahead-and-call-your-friends-asshole-I’ll-take-you-all-on’ Jones replies, relaxing now that he knows Woody’s beat-up on his own terms. He sinks onto the sofa cushion beside the blond and tilts his face to one side with a careful hand on Woody’s chin. “You’re gonna be purple and blue tomorrow, dude. That sucks.”

Mikey perches on the arm of the couch and makes a soft grabbing gesture for the first aid kit April hauled out. She sets it in his lap and he tugs on one of Woody’s curls to get his attention. 

“That was really stupid, so you’re not gonna get a single cartoon bandaid,” Raph’s baby brother says severely. 

Woody blinks at him, and when he smiles it softens all the harsh lines in his battered face, and his expression is almost ridiculously fond when he nods and says, “Sounds fair, Mikester.” 

“Okay,” Don says, sounding frustrated, “but why?”

“Why what?” 

“Why did you pick a fight with the Dragons, of all people?” 

“Like we need a reason,” Casey mutters, and Raph leans over to punch him. 

“Oh,” Woody says, “they were hangin’ out behind my uncle’s pizzeria, and I overheard ‘em talking. Didn’t like what I heard, that’s all.”

“The one time you don’t manage to keep your cool,” April says dryly. 

Woody winces at the butterfly stitch that goes over the bridge of his nose, and says thickly, “Well, it ain’t every day I gotta listen to assholes spitting poison about my boyfriend and his family, so I haven’t exactly worked up thick skin to it yet. Give it a few more years.”

Raph watches the agitation slip out of Don’s face like water through a sieve, and Casey’s lopsided grin matches April’s almost perfectly. Mikey pauses, his hands going still above the medical supplies balanced on his knees, and looks up at Woody with round eyes. 

“Actually,” Woody corrects himself honestly, “probably more than a few years.”

Mikey leans in to smooth a Donald Duck bandaid over the final cut above Woody’s eye, and kisses the same spot a moment later. 

“Okay,” Mikey says, his voice considerably warmer as he combs through Woody’s tousled curls with affectionate fingers -- and how he ever thought he could possibly stay mad at honey-eyed Woodrow for longer than five minutes, Raph will never know. “I guess it wasn’t that stupid.”

This unassuming pizza delivery guy came into their clan late -- though not as late as Usagi -- and he’s no warrior, no soldier, no pugnacious teenage punk prowling dark alleys with a mask and a chip on his shoulder, but he looks at Mikey like he’d go to war for him regardless.