#mad4turtles

“Let me kill it,” the sister alien says, crowding in from behind so silently that Leo had no idea she was there until she spoke. Her breath is hot against the side of his face, teeth so close he can count them. “It won’t talk. It’s a waste of our time. I haven’t gotten to kill anything yet.”

Leo is sixteen, and has so far lived in a world where, generally speaking, people have compunctions when it comes to killing children. Draxum dropped him off a roof, but he seemed to believe that Leo would be able to walk off a fall from that height, or at the very least not die. Big Mama did make a targeted attempt on the turtles’ lives, but her cat-and-mouse games almost seem to be how she shows affection. Leo has a standing invitation to come work at the Nexus whenever he wants—and another standing invitation for a poker game every other Saturday. He hasn’t told dad about either, because he doesn’t think that would go over very well, but he has taken her up on the poker games. Hypno and that worm guy are constantly causing trouble (case in point: stealing the stupid key for the stupid Foot Clan) but they also sent the Hamatos RSVP cards for their wedding next summer. And, like, Leo and his family are going to the wedding. 

The Shredder was another story, but he wasn’t really a person. He was a spirit, trapped and warped inside a curse until barely anything remained. It was the dark armor they were fighting, really, a construct of malice. 

Leo has never been here before. Held helpless between two powerful creatures who swatted his family around like flies, who are discussing his death the way people discuss dinner plans. He’s frightened. He wishes he wasn’t alone. 

When he reaches inside himself for bravery, he finds the memory of Raphael leaping off the rooftop after him. No hesitation. No plan. Just courage and conviction and love for Leo that was louder than anything else. 

I can do that, he thinks, clenching his fists and squaring his shoulders. I can be fearless, too. 

“You may be right,” Krang One says, unbothered by Leo’s lack of cooperation. “I’ll just have to see for myself, then, won’t I?”

It grabs him by the shoulder and bears down, and Leo coughs out a wounded noise he can’t help when it grinds intentionally against his open wound. 

Something burrows beneath his skin and climbs upward, little tentacles, worms, slithering, disgusting, inside his body, inside his head, reaching for—

Well, isn’t this interesting, the Krang’s voice says from inside his mind. How does a creature as small as you contain hatred this big? And with such a fearsome weapon, why point it inwards?

Memories fall in front of him like dominoes, outside his control. It doesn’t make sense. Someone else is rifling through them, someone else is trying to find something. 

Leo catches on with barely a second to spare. The Krang wants to know where the key is, which means he’s looking for information about the lair. Panicking, scrambling, Leo thinks really hard and really fast about the old lair, destroyed by the Shredder, everything reduced to nondescript rubble. It’s a clumsy deflect, barely more than a road bump. The Krang continues probing, annoyed now. 

Where is your home? the Krang demands. 

So Leo thinks of home—April’s bathroom, manicures and face masks and Snapchat selfies—home—any dim alleyway with Mikey and a couple cans of spraypaint, watching it all come alive with color—home—a darkly lit TV room and late night Spanish soaps that he learned to love because of the one-on-one time it granted him with dad—home—sitting with his twin on the curb outside their favorite bodega, sandwiches in hand, watching a video essay about any obscure topic on his phone—home—Raphie’s shoulders, anywhere—

“Useless,” the Krang spits out.

“Tell me about it,” Leo barely manages to bite back, exhausted.

He just has to hold on a little longer. They’ll come for him, he knows they will. 

“Oh, how cute,” the Krang says, picking up on the thread of that thought like a hound scenting out a fox. “You think they’ll save you?”

From Leo’s memory, he pulls forward the key again—Leo fumbling it, making a mess of the mission, Raph’s anger, the troubled expressions Donnie and Mikey wore. Leo is trouble, nothing but trouble, he only invites disaster. He did half of the Krangs’ job for them. In fact, it’s largely thanks to him that they’re here at all. 

“I should be offering my gratitude,” Krang One says meanly. 

As he speaks, Leo can feel him rifling through memories, taking advantage of Leo’s split attention. 

If Leo were anyone else, it would have been impossible to keep up. But this is where the peculiar manner of his existence really shines. 

Draxum designed the four of them meticulously. There are still moments he’ll look at them with a sort of reluctant pride when he thinks they’re not paying attention. Once, after an uncomfortable family dinner, he let slip that he had intended for Donnie and Leo to be a working pair, which is why it amused him that they decided to be twins entirely on their own, even removed from his influence. 

And while Raph was built to be a tank and a front-line fighter, and nothing and no one outmatched Mikey in speed and agility, the twins were always destined to be the thinkers. Draxum, who was an alchemist as much as he was a warrior, regarded both physicality and intelligence to be of equal importance. He had had a half-formed plan of Donnie and Leo running the lab together while he managed his army. 

With Donnie, that intelligence is easy to see. Like Leo, he has perfect recall, but he’s also a verifiable genius. Growing up with him, as isolated as they were, it’s easy for his family to take for granted how terrifyingly gifted Donatello is. No other nine-year-old is going to be able to build a working generator out of junkyard scraps through trial and error and a keen intuition. 

Leo’s secondary mutation is harder to pin down. He wouldn’t be able to design a working Rube Goldberg machine even if someone put a gun to his head, but he’s never lost to Donnie in chess, or go, or poker. He’s never even come close. He can tell at a glance when Splinter is lying to him, he knows before she opens her mouth when April has had a bad day at school, it will take at most ten minutes alone with a stranger before he’s reading their microexpressions and nonverbal cues with a very slim margin of error. 

Leo’s smart when it comes to people. But more than that, he knows how to position the board. He can pull strings that have even someone as tricky as Big Mama dancing in his palm. Not always, and not perfectly, but well enough. And learning how to portal reliably taught him how to think on multiple levels at once. He has to be aware of what’s in front of him and what’s going on behind and around him, too. If he’s going to move Mikey forward to cover Donnie, he has to be certain it won’t leave Raph outnumbered. His brothers dart through those doorways unflinchingly the second one appears, trusting that the other side is where they need to be, so Leo has to make sure that’s true.

And all of that feels like endurance training for this moment. He can only just maintain a single step in front of the alien rooting through his head. He feels like a guppy squaring up with a shark, but it’s just enough to slow him down. Throw out a parachute behind the speeding car and drag it back. 

“So much potential, wasted,” the Krang says derisively, his tone of voice markedly agitated by now. He probably intended to do a clean sweep of Leo’s thoughts, get what he needed, and call it a day. Leo is happy to make his life even slightly more difficult. 

He doesn’t think the alien is aware of the feedback he’s putting out. Leo can follow it like ripples across water, branching out from a central point. He doesn’t dare look too closely and call attention to the fact while the Krang is still actively present, tearing walls down in Leo’s head, but he would put money on this mental connection going both ways. 

“Ugh, you sound like my stepdad,” Leo wheezes, barely able to follow the thread of the conversation on top of outthinking the foreign body inside his brain. “As a matter of fact, the two of you would probably get along. You could bond over, like, wishing all of humanity was dead. I should get your number for him when all this is over.”

The Krang’s face draws itself into a snarl that will probably feature in Leo’s nightmares for the rest of his life. 

“I’ve had enough of you!”

Join the club, Leo would say, but the breath is punched out of him by the tentacle that wraps around his bleeding shoulder and squeezes. The white-hot agony of it makes him cough and struggle to inhale past the weight of painpainpain. He can’t help but make a subaudible turtle distress sound that would have had Raph crashing through a wall to help him if he was even remotely nearby. 

Raph, staring down at him with frightened brown eyes. Those hands that have always held Leo hovering above him instead, afraid to touch—

Not afraid, that voice in his head says with mean certainty. Disgusted. He didn’t want to touch you. After what you did? It was all your fault. 

It’s all Leo’s fault, of course it is, but that isn’t—that doesn’t matter. Raph loves him anyway. Raph wouldn’t have left him. 

But he did. Don’t you see? You’re alone. 

No. He’s alone because—he did this. He sent Raph away. He’s alone because he saved his brother and he took back the key and the Krang is just a bitter, angry old man who doesn’t know how not to be a sore loser even after a thousand years of nothing but losing—

The Krang roars, and digs into Leo’s wound even harder, and blood comes out faster than is safe or healthy, probably. Leo’s turtle noises become out-loud cries he would be ashamed of if he had room in his head for something as superfluous as shame. His pride abandons him quickly. It hurts. It hurts. 

A single crack in his shield, a hiccup in his uniformed thoughts, is all it takes. The Krang’s presence floods in like an ocean, black water rising, and Leo is drowning, drowning, drowning. 

“No one is coming for you,” the Krang says with cold conviction.

Once, when Leo was very little, he asked Raph and April to toss the clean bedding over him as they folded the laundry. He thought it would be fun—like a cozy cave to explore—but he was unprepared for how heavy the quilts and sheets would be. The weight toppled him down and he got all tangled, he couldn’t find the edges, he couldn’t find his way out. 

Within thirty seconds of that smothered, helpless feeling, he was clicking and crying so hysterically that Splinter came into the room at a run. 

Leo lasts almost a full minute this time, and maybe someday he’ll find that something to be proud of, but after almost a minute he’s screaming. 

“Help me,” Leo wails, all bravado gone, every inch of courage deserting him, writhing and clawing at the pink slime oozing up his arms, “help me help me—”

He wants daddy to run into the room and untangle him and scoop him up even though he’s too big to be scooped up by Splinter anymore. He wants to be lifted out of the mess he made and carried to where he’s always been safe, where they always take him back.  

He wants the smell of fabric softener and April and Raphie’s worried faces, Splinter’s warm fur beneath Leo’s tear-sticky cheek. He wants to still be little enough to be carried, to be someone’s baby. He wants to go home. 

He cries until he can’t breathe, until he’s choking on it, clinging to that tiny, fragile hope by his fingertips.