woodyangelo + 7 for @chimyen
(and as always im using this as an excuse to write more of the resolution au because everything in that au is exactly the way i want it)
writing prompts
7: “you did what?!”
x
Mikey’s phone goes off in the kitchen, and then Mikey's tearing out of the lair like a bat out of hell, the hatch above the ladder slamming shut behind him and none of the rest of them the wiser about what just happened.
Raph trades a Look with April. On one hand, it could have been Angel texting to let him know eggnog was finally back on the shelves for the season or something, and Mikey simply regressed back into an over-excited fifteen year old at the news, as Mikey does.
On the other hand, he didn’t cheer or shout or string any of his siblings along with him, and that was severely out of character. The first thing Mikey always does with good news is share it with his family.
And it says something about their lives up to this point, that none of them can quite settle down when he’s gone. Don sends him a text in the group chat, and they get a clipped “brb” in return with exactly zero emojis attached.
“Well, wherever he is, he’s free to text,” April points out reasonably, the implied “so he’s not in any danger” going mercifully unsaid.
Raph exhales half his worry but clings to the rest. Apparently he’s adopted Momanardo’s restlessness when one of their number is out in the city alone, and he kind of hates it. How does Leo ever sleep?
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.
Raph knows that look, has seen it on Casey, on April, on his brothers, in the mirror. It’s love that’s fierce and toothed, it’s love that’s hungry, and it’s how the rest of them love, too.
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a little rasey that i wrote for @chimyen bcus i love her and bcus i promised her some rasey 100 yrs ago and never delivered !! set in the resolution au
our love is a forest fire and we are the little things that live in the trees
x
Casey -- with the crooked gap in his grin and twice-broken nose and scarred knuckles -- is a cuddly drunk. Raph has known him for almost seven years at this point and still hasn’t quite reconciled himself to the fact.
“You gonna get off me?” Raph asks dryly. Casey hums under his breath and settles more heavily against his chest. “Guess that was a stupid question.”
He showed up at the lair two hours ago with a split lip and a six-pack of cheap beer, almond eyes bright and reckless. Now they’re in the subway car that serves as Raph’s bedroom, and Casey is tracing the lines between the scutes of Raph’s plastron with steady fingers.
“My dad’s an asshole,” he says without warning. “Don’t know why I go over there expectin’ anything different. S’stupid.”
His dad is an asshole, has been since he fell off the bandwagon and picked up drinking again. He doesn’t pull his punches, knows exactly where to hit Casey to make it hurt. He’s even meaner when he’s wasted.
And Casey has seen more danger in his life than most people his age would know what to do with -- has gone head to head with crime lords and super villains with nothing more than a spray-painted mask and a hockey stick -- but he can still be hurt by his dad.
Raph thumbs the torn corner of Casey’s mouth, smearing blood when it splits open again under his hand.
“Yeah, you do know,” Raph says. It’s easy to talk like this in the dim light of a secondhand lamp, when Casey’s eyes are hidden beneath his fringe and miles away. “He’s your dad. You want him to be better. That ain’t stupid.”
Casey is hardened and trigger-happy, scarred by street violence that was only his business because he made it that way, but he’s still soft in an uncorrupted way. Still kind in a way Raph thinks his mother would have been proud of.
He’ll forgive, even when it makes more sense to hate. He’ll bear blows that anyone else would walk away from, because he’s Casey Jones, and he’s been to space and he’s been through war and so far no one has proved him not to be unbreakable.
“I dunno what it is,” Raph admits to the dark, “but stupid ain’t the right word.”
They’re not tender people -- even their caring is fierce, and Raph’s love crouches in his armored chest like a creature with sharp teeth -- but they’re not built on violence, either. Raph doesn’t touch him just to leave bruises. Casey leans in to his mouth without bite.
Casey -- with the crooked gap in his grin and twice-broken nose and scarred knuckles -- is a cuddly drunk. He gentles as the alcohol flows, like a person loosing plates of armor one by one, and in that Raph knows he is nothing like his father.
(And if his father is every shitty thing Raph can think of, it only stands to reason that Casey must be something pretty fucking good.)
Okay so I know that this was probably ages ago but I saw in a fic of yours that you made a little while ago there was some leosagi and it was so adorable and well written omg. Would you be willing to write some leosagi? If not feel free to ignore this, you're super talented!!
i thiiiink you might betalking about the resolutionau i started writing for @chimyen? in which case,heck yes i’ll write some more. i’m actuallypretty fond of the dynamics in that au – and it was prettyself-indulgent in that it includes all of my favorite pairings, haha.so yes. heck yes.
let’ssee if i still remember how to write these dumbkids
x
None of them are comfortable lettingLeo go alone, but he’s so quietly stubborn about the whole thingwhen for so long he’s been little more than a ghost around the lairthat they don’t have the heart to deny him, either.
“Promise me you’ll keep in touch,”Donnie says, stern for all the softness in his eyes. “I’mnot above following you across the Atlantic if I think for a secondthat you’re screening my calls.”
“Of course,” Leo says, maybe tooeasily. His voice is hoarse, and whether it’s from disuse oremotion, or a footprint of that terrible grief, Mikey can’t besure. So he squeezes Leo tight when it’s histurn for a goodbye hug; hoping to impress the feeling of his armsaround Leo’s shoulders in a way that will keep, so Leo doesn’tget lonely, or forget his family while he’s gone.
Maybe it’s something they should bedoing as a family – returning father’s ashes to his homeland,laying him to rest with Shen. But Mikey doesn’t want to go.
“Is that wrong?” he asks Raph, afew hours after Leo and the precious urn have gone – and he’stwenty-one years old, but his voice comes out so small he might aswell be twelve. Waiting for recrimination, but all that happens is agentling of Raph’s expression that really isn’t a surprise toanyone.
Raph slings an arm around hisshoulders, a few inches shorter these days but no less solid andstrong than he’s always been, and Mikey leans into his roughbrother’s side the way he’s done his whole life.
“’Course not,” Raph tells himshortly. “Father wouldn’t want us to drop everything for him,would he?”
He wouldn’t, Mikey concedes,lightened. And they know that for a fact. He was sick for so long they had more than enough time tomake peace and say goodbye.
“Leo’s doing this for himself,”Raph adds, not unkindly, “and if that’s what he’s gotta do tobe okay again, then that’s what he’s gotta do. But the rest of us– we got shit to do here.”
And they do. The lair flooded just a couple weeksago in a bad, bad way; the grimy waters effectively stealing theirhome away in a matter of dark, stormy hours. It would have broken asixteen-year-old Michelangelo’s heart, but it wasn’t as hard asit could have been.
Homes are transitory, he remembersfather saying once.
They’re settling into the pretty loopstation that sits abandoned under busy Manhattan (and Mikey is soglad this contender for The Lair 2.0 won over thatold water treatment plant in the Bronx, because that place gave himthe creeps) and Casey, April and Woody make thetransition easier than it would have been without them, and Mikeystill has his brothers and his cat and fond memories of the place heused to live.
Leo’s the only one struggling to keephis head above water. Mikey misses him the moment he’s gone, andignores the tiny voice in the back of his brain that questionswhether or not Leo will ever come back.
“I’ve barely been gone a day, Don,”Leo says by way of greeting the first time Donnie calls him, and hesounds scratchy and tired but happy to hear from them, and Mikeyclusters against Donnie’s shoulder to shout his own hello. “Hi,Mikey,” he adds fondly. Mikey’s heart swells two sizes, and hebeams so radiantly at Donnie that Donnie’s smile back is aknee-jerk reaction. “Wait. Isn’t it close to two a.m. there? Whatare you still doing up? You have class in the morning.”
“Yeahhh, online.All I have to do is a discussion board, anyway, who cares. Tell meabout the trip so far!”
And so he does. And maybe Mikey’simagining it, but Leo sounds a little lighter already, like justgetting out and getting away was enough to seep some of those sadshadows out of his soul. It hurts, just a tiny bit, that Leo had toleave them to feel better, but mostly Mikey’s glad.
Leo calls again when he arrives atKarai and Shinigami’s little apartment in Tokyo, and then they all get amass text from Karai’s number which turns out to be a selfie shetook of herself, her girlfriend, and her little brother, all mashedcheek-to-cheek. There are dark circles under Leo’s eyes, but theblue of them is bright, and his smile is a crooked flash of teeth.
“Thank you, Karai,” April whispers.Mikey leans his head on her shoulder, feels Woody wrap an arm aroundthem both, and shares the sentiment with all his heart.
They don’t know how long he’ll beaway – they didn’t really press him for details before he left,afraid to press him too hard for anything since the world seems too heavy for him anymore and even a harshword feels like enough to send him spiraling into pieces. So days turnto months, and Mikey misses him. There’s aLeo-shaped absence in the new lair they build out of the loopstation, and it won’t really be home until he’s back.
Still, they have movie marathons, andTaco Tuesdays, and cram sessions when finals week rolls around. Theycelebrate Casey’s birthday, and Donnie and April’s thirdanniversary, and fill the lair with string lights and secondhand furniture, and Mikey falls asleep most nights in the warm cocoon ofWoody’s arms.
Still, they settle into life around thehole where their big brother should be, and it’s a little scary.That it can be so normal, so functional, without him.
And then, when it’s been seven weeksand some change, Leo sendsa text asking ‘whoever’s not busy’ if they have time to talk onSkype. The result is a scrambledflurry as everyone present – which is everyone except Casey, who’sgoing to be ticked he got suckered into a doubleshift at work when he finds out – bolts into Donnie’s lab andclusters around his array of flatscreen monitors. And Leo looks alittle startled to see almost the entire clan looking back at him,but it’s a startle that turns into surprised laughter, and Mikeynearly swallows his heart at the sound.
“I wanted you to meet someone,” Leosays, sounding so much like his old self that it’s almost painful tohear. He tilts the screen of his phone to the side and his siblingsare greeted to a wealth of downy white fur and dark, almond-shapedeyes. “This is Usagi,” is Leo’s helpful voice-over,and each word is shaped like a wide smile, and whoever Usagi is,Mikey loves him.
“It’s nice to meet you,” Donniesays, and nothing in his expression gives away how his hands shake under the computer desk. Raph wraps an arm around him that manages to look casual, and none of the brightness in Leo’s eyes goes away for even a second in the precious handful of hours that they get to see his face.
When he finally comes home, he takes them by surprise. There’s no warning when the hatch opens and a familiar figure slides down the ladder. One moment, for all Mikey knew, Leo was an ocean away – and now here he is, sliding a worn bag off his shoulder, eyes wide as he takes in their home.
It was dirty and dusty when he left and now it’s warmly lit and the stained glass windows shine. He only gets a few seconds to admire the place, because a few seconds is all it takes for his family to process what they’re seeing – and then he’s got armfuls of siblings to hug, and cheeks and foreheads to kiss, and tears to scrub away as deftly as if he’s ten years old again, tending hurt feelings and skinned knees with all the proficiency of someone born to the job.
Usagi looks a little out of place, but only for a moment, because Mikey is quick to cross the room to him. And Leo must have told the rabbit all about his little brother beforehand, since Usagi’s face gentles as Mikey comes near, and he’s ready for it when Mikey throws his arms around Usagi’s waist and buries his face in the tired fabric of a well-loved kimono and holds on for all he’s worth.
There’s a whole world of things Mikey wants to say to him, this stranger who isn’t a stranger at all, who found Leo and brought him back where he belongs – but all Mikey can manage, for right now at least, is “Hi,” and “Thank you,” and “Welcome home.”
AAAA OMG THIS IS THE LEOSAGI ANON AND WOAH OML THANK YOU FOR TAKING THE TIME TO WRITE THAT IT WAS SO HEART WARMING AND SWEET 1) THANK YOU FOR RESPONDING SO FAST 2) SO GOOD I THINK IM DYING ILL PROBABLY DRAW SOME FANART IF THATS OKAY WITH YOU 3) I WAS SO EXCITED READING IT I TOLD MY MOM MY FAVORITE FIC WRITER WROTE SOMETHING I SUGGESTED AND IT WAS PERFECT IN SUMMARY THANK YOU YOU'RE SO TALENTED I LOVED THIS SO MUCH THE RESOLUTION AU IS AMAZING
im beyond glad you liked it so much! its a rly nice au to write, bcus the characters are older and matured and doggedly enduring as many good changes as bad, and their steadfast and calm flows into me a little bit as we go, haha. ive been waiting for an excuse to share more of it, so thank you for the request!!
