"Grief, " the slider swallows and shifts his feet, "grief has many forms, CJ." He lets the silence stretch in a way that's painfully familiar before siting down beside him and continuing.

"I used to think it was just sadness when you missed someone who was gone. But now.. I know its what's left behind when you loose something that was once there... even apart of yourself." His words are slow and careful. Leo's walking in a minefield and they both know it.

A frustrated noise leaves Casey's throat and he shoves his head into his knees. Pitiful. "I know grief, Leo," he all but growls. "I know how long it takes before you can breathe and not physically feel the void they leave behind in your chest. Something that never goes away but you learn– I know how to keep fighting and not forget someone. I know how to light candles and take off my shoes and–" his voice breaks off, because those shrines will never be tended to again. And they will never get real ones. He doesn't know which one is worse. Leo watches him, deep eyes searching his face.

"This–" he wheezes, clutching the edge of the concrete with calloused hands, "this is not that weight. This is–" he desperately searches for anything to put the maelstrom that has consumed him into words. Uncle Tello would have a word for it.

"A black hole." That is the only word that seems to come close. He remembers how scared and in awe he was of them as a child, sneaking into his Uncle's lab to listen to his long explanations of the stars and planets they could no longer see.

"I know grief for a person." Yes, he knew it well. It was a companion his whole life. "I don't– I can't – I can't hold grief for a whole world, Leo. I can't keep–" he bites his tounge and looks away, dark and unkept strands falling into hollow eyes.

Leo doesn't make an immediate response, instead pulling Casey into a side hug, singular heavy and warm arm trying to ground him.

"How– how?" His hands are shaking and Casey thinks he might collapse in on himself. A super nova. There is no purpose for him here. From the moment his mom and Uncle Raph found him he has been brought up a protector, a follower, a student. The krang are gone. The resistance is gone. His Sensei is dead gone.

"You don't carry it alone," Leo states, an attempt at solid ground.

Casey knows he means well, but he can't help spitting back, "You don't know them. You're not them— Your not h—" him. Gone.

"I'm not saying we are, Case, " he responds, when was he so patient (when was he not?) "I'm saying you're going to let us carry their legacys too."

Casey stares at Leo's stripes (wind blows through his heart) and trys to think about what that means, what that would look like. He does not know how to remember a whole world. The thought of forgetting tears him down to bone.

"Okay?" Leo is holding his shoulders now, leveling him with a familiar look. The look of a leader, someone to follow.

"Okay."

Leo is not Sensei.

His hugs are more fleeting, less solid but perhaps more warm. They're almost the same height, Leo and him. If anything he's a bit taller than the slider, which feels all kinds of off-kilter.

His presence does not loom over a room protectively, instead Leo fills it with laughs and bright eyes.

Leo is not Sensei, but he will still follow his lead. He will still make a life beyond the ink that clings to them both, unrelenting, from where they've been. He will hope. He will hope when it hurts, when it tears him asunder.