#soldrawss

“What did you do to my brother?” Leo says with a smile that cuts as easily as any one of his blades ever did. “In ten words or less. Don’t waste my time.” When she only stares at him, quivering like a mouse under the cold, calculative eyes of a bird, he adds pointedly, “My arm’s getting tired.”

“Okay!” she blurts. With a pang, Raph realizes she can’t be that much older than Mikey. “Okay okay! It’s not permanent, it doesn’t even hurt, I’m not allowed to use spells that harm until I pass my A-Levels! I just wanted to ruin his day!”

“What’s going on?” Mikey says, brow furrowed as he and April join them. “Is that Georgie’s scarf?” 

“OKAY NOBODY PANIC,” Donnie interjects in a significantly panicked tone of voice, the scarf in question clutched in his hands. “We’ve found ourselves in a situation that I am very much not equipped to handle, so I am tapping out and tagging Raphael in. That’s your cue, brother dearest.” 

What Donnie could possibly be under-qualified for that Raph isn’t, he has no idea. And he has no idea what he’s going to see when he steps over to Donnie and looks down at what Donnie is hovering uncertainly in front of, what his bulky battle shell has blocked from their siblings’ collective view. 

“Oh my fucking god,” Raph says without thinking. 

“Raphael!” Donnie hisses. “I’m implementing a swear jar and you’ll be receiving my Venmo request imminently.” 

“How the turntables,” Mikey mumbles behind them, kept from crowding close to look by April’s arm thrown out in front of him. Just in case it’s something bad. Something he can’t unsee. 

“Is he okay?” Leo calls over. There’s a thread of tension in his voice that only the people who love him would be able to hear. “Someone tell me if I need to add to my Hidden City arrest record.” 

The witch’s eyes widen, and she looks like she’s about to risk wriggling her way to freedom, sharp sword against her neck be damned. 

“He’s okaaaay,” Donnie says in a not-reassuring way, tone lilting uncertainly at the end. Leo’s body language rockets past worried and straight into alarmed. 

“Stop,” Raph says, putting firmness in his voice but not raising it, hyper-aware of Gio’s eyes tracking his every move. “He’s fine, Leo. We’ll call Barry and get him sorted out. But I think it would make you feel better to come see for yourself, so get your new friend’s contact info and cut her loose.”

Leo scoffs, but sheaths his sword over his shoulder. “Gimme that,” he says without an ounce of charm, pointing at one of the bangles on the witch’s wrist. 

Her yellow fur is sticking straight out at this point, but she works the bangle off and all but shoves it at Leo without a word. Leo doesn’t bother explaining why he wants it, what purpose it will serve. Raph knows that Mikey, an earnest student of mystic arts ever since his arms healed from the invasion, would be able to track the owner of a personal item through hell itself and out the other side. 

The witch doesn’t know that, and doesn’t ask questions. She lingers one second, then two—then, when it’s clear Leo isn’t playing a trick on her, takes off at a dead sprint and disappears into the marketplace crowd. A few yokai have lingered to watch the show, but for the most part business has carried on as usual. Raph loves and hates the Hidden City in equal measure for its quasi-lawlessness and customary chaos. 

Mikey is all but climbing over April at this point, and she has both her arms looped around his middle to bodily haul him back, since no one’s given her the clear to let him go yet. Leo joins the cluster of his big brothers and, to his eternal credit, the state of their eldest sibling only stuns him into stillness for a moment.

Then he smiles the way he’s only ever smiled at Michelangelo and folds his legs underneath himself and says, in a voice so unlike the one he spoke to the witch with that he might as well be a different person, “Hey, you. Do you know who I am?”

A tiny spotted turtle with Hamato Yoshi’s brown eyes looks up at them, absolutely swimming in Giorgio’s dark clothes and gear, the compound crossbow on the ground beside him laughably big in comparison. The bead art ladybug keychain clipped to the bow stock is the only thing that makes sense for this tiny baby to have near his person. He can’t be older than four.

The baby turtle looks surprised that Leo is talking to him. He scoots his arms and legs a little closer to himself, hands curled into fists that he hides in the folds of the coat Gio had let Splinter tuck him into two hours ago. 

Eventually, very carefully, he shakes his head. It must come as a blow. Gio spoils all of his siblings recklessly but he dotes on Leo most of all. 

“Aw, that’s okay,” Raph interjects, talking to them both but looking at Gio. He’s keenly aware of how much bigger he is than this pint-sized version of his only older brother, practically towering over him, and he’s quick to crouch next to the twins. He’s still in damage control mode, even if now it’s taking a tone that reminds him vividly of his childhood of being the de facto babysitter and the one responsible for breaking up screeching fights over the Wii remote and soothing hurt feelings. “Do you see how we’re all turtles like you?” he asks. 

Gio’s nod comes slightly quicker this time. He doesn’t uncoil from his tight little ball, but he doesn’t seem overly fearful. He just watches them with huge dark eyes, absorbing everything. 

“Well, his job is to make sure little turtles aren’t hurt after big falls,” Raph says, patting Leo’s carapace. “Does anything hurt anywhere? Do you feel an ouch?” 

Gio’s face is round and soft and young, with spots he hasn’t grown into yet that crowd for space on his cheeks and forehead—so to see him wearing that serious expression they’re all so familiar with at this young age will be both funny and cute just as soon as Raph is capable of finding anything funny or cute about the situation. 

Mikey, who finally breaches containment and lifts himself over Donnie’s shoulders to see, has no such compunctions and coos audibly. 

“He’s so precious!” 

“Michael,” Donnie says at length. 

“What, are you going to tell me he’s not?”

“Of course not. I’m a man of science, and it’s an indisputable scientific fact that baby turtles are adorable. But it’s not the time or place for selfies so put your phone away.”

Mikey scoffs, but slides his phone back into his pocket. Raph is about to lose what little is left of his cool. While the peanut gallery is sniping back and forth, Leo has inched closer, and Gio is agreeably allowing him to check him over. Aside from a tender spot on his knee that will bruise tomorrow, presumably from his rough landing, he’s perfectly fine. 

Leo still puts an unnecessary Barbie bandaid on the sore knee with a silly amount of fanfare, and then pokes Gio on his spotted cheek playfully, and earns himself a tentative, inching smile. 

They’re holding up traffic, but Donnie and Mikey turned and stared down the one person who dared clear their throat at the inconvenient turtle roadblock until that person got uncomfortable and silently walked around them, and no one else bothered them after that. But Raph still wants to get home sooner rather than later. He feels vulnerable, like his heart or a lung is on display out in the open, where anyone with cruel intentions might step on it or steal it away. 

So he mentions dinner, as if he’s thinking out loud. Leo looks guiltily over his shoulder at where the Run of the Mill takeout is probably laying in a heap on the street, but Mikey is quick to jump in.

“Oh, Georgie, let me make your favorite! Whatever you like to eat! And you can help me cook, how ‘bout that? I bet you’re a good helper!”

“That does sound fun,” Raph says. “What do you say, buddy? Does that sound good?”

Gio nods, the fastest response they’ve gotten yet. Then he surprises the hell out of Raph by lifting his arms, the universal sign of a child that wants to be picked up. It’s not a big, enthusiastic want, it’s more hopeful than anything—two little hands that still know how to reach out, that haven’t been taught otherwise yet. 

It bothers Raph that Gio is so comfortable with strangers. That he hasn’t cried or fussed even though he clearly doesn’t know where he is or what he’s doing here. That he tucks himself into a quiet little ball and just lets things happen, like that’s what he’s used to doing, and there’s no point trying to raise his voice to be heard. 

But Raph had a seventeen year streak of being the oldest brother, and he’ll always be the biggest, so it’s muscle memory to scoop the baby turtle into his arms. The tiny curve of Gio’s black, white-spotted shell is a perfect fit in the crook of his arm. 

The faded friendship bracelet that Raph has never once seen Gio without is comically big on his thin wrist and in danger of falling off at any second. Raph carefully removes the bracelet and pockets it for safekeeping, and Mikey passes over the prized ladybug keychain for Gio to hang onto instead. Donnie and April have Gio’s clothes and gear and bow bundled haphazardly in their arms. Leo is holding a sword down by his side, standing close enough to Raph that Gio probably can’t even see it.

“Do you want to see a magic trick?” Leo asks Gio in a sneaky tone that has, historically, always rallied other turtles into running headlong into mischief and trouble with him. 

Sure enough, Gio nods again, maybe even eagerly this time. 

“Close your eyes,” Leo says. 

—

Leo and Mikey are picked up from Leo’s apartment by a valet the following afternoon and chauffeured to Teterboro Airport in Jersey, where Grand’s private jet is waiting. They share the flight with the insurance lawyer Leo met in Donnie’s office the day before, a middle-aged man named Draxum, and a woman who looked like she was only barely out of college and introduced herself shortly as Kendra.

Draxum is dressed like someone whose best approximation of what constitutes outdoor-wear starts and stops at Ralph Lauren, in gray chino shorts and a navy down vest.

He also, five minutes into the polite conversation Leo is carrying alone, since Mikey’s face has been glued to the window since takeoff, says, “You’re much more likable than your counterpart, Dr. Hamato. I can see why he referred me to you.”

It takes every ounce of willpower Leo has to keep a pleasant smile on his face. From the disbelieving huff of laughter Mikey lets out, his little brother can probably tell. Leo swallows the first thing he would like to say—which is that Donnie isn’t paid to be likable, that’s just for free, and he’s the best person Draxum is ever going to meet in his whole miserable, money-grubbing, lawyerly life besides—and then the second thing—which is a catty comment about the man’s decision to wear suede boots to a rain forest, were those on sale or something?—and finally settles for, “Thanks. Tell your friends.”

Mikey nudges Leo with an elbow a couple minutes later and holds out his phone. He used the sluggish in-flight WiFi to look up the ugly vest Draxum is wearing and found it online, priced at two-and-a-half thousand dollars.

They make hysterical eye contact for a split second and then quickly find something else in the cabin to look at, because if Donnie finds out they didn’t even make it off the plane before they got themselves fired, he will never let them live it down.

Draxum scowls at the two of them anyway, as if he can tell they’re making fun of him somehow.

“So,” Mikey says to Kendra, in equal parts a bid to be friendly and also to shake Draxum off his tail, “were you invited to give a review of the park, too?”

The young woman scoffs. She has artfully-messy long hair dyed lavender, and aqua blue eyeliner and lipstick that pop against her brown skin. She looks like she thinks she’s doing the rest of them a favor by breathing the same air.

“No,” she says shortly. “I’m the park’s project supervisor. The whole island runs off my codes.”

“Neat,” Mikey says, “I work at a zoo. One of our silver langurs just had a baby. Do you want to see a picture?”

He doesn’t wait for a yes, since obviously any reasonable person would want to see a picture, and Kendra seems reluctantly charmed by his enthusiasm. The Michelangelo effect in action. No one is immune.

“Dr. Hamato is here as my consultant, recommended to me by someone who has done work for my firm in the past,” Draxum supplies. “If he believes the park poses any sort of danger to the public, he won’t sugar-coat it. We’ll shut the whole thing down.”

“Be my guest,” Kendra snaps.

“Are we expecting an element of danger?” Leo asks conversationally, wondering what in the hell Donnie got them into.

“That remains to be seen,” Draxum says. “Grand claims it’s only the anticipated start-up delays of any new theme park. A lawsuit from the family of the worker that died claims otherwise.”

Leo was given the bare-bones rundown of that whole situation after he’d signed the NDA. Apparently the man had fallen under some machinery on-site and had to be airlifted to a hospital, where he had ultimately passed away. Now the park’s investors are nervous and the park is being audited for safety.

It almost makes sense. Leo smells a rat, but he's always been the suspicious type. He’s keeping the rat to himself for now.

“And this island we’re going to,” Mikey says, “I looked it up and I couldn’t find anything about it, no deed, or development site plans, not even a single ‘coming soon’ announcement. Pretty hush-hush for a family attraction.”

“Oh, yeah,” Kendra says bitterly. “It’s a secret, all right. I didn’t even know what the original program I was designing was for until I was more than a year into my contract. That woman doesn’t tell anybody anything.”

With that, she put a pair of earphones in, and didn’t take them off again for the rest of the flight.

“She sure sounds starstruck,” Leo says mildly. “Which one of us is gonna nab Grand’s autograph for her?”

“Obviously you,” Mikey says, with that patented wide-eyed sincerity that makes him a menace to society. “Make sure she signs it ‘to my biggest fan’.”

He’s always ready to play along. Leo wonders, not for the first time, if Mikey had had other plans for the weekend before being volunteered to go on this trip. If he did, Leo would probably never know about them.

By the time they touch down in San Jose, Draxum looks as though he wishes he had thought to bring earphones, too.

There isn’t a landing strip on the island, so the plane touches down at the San Jose International Airport instead, where a helicopter is waiting to take them the final forty-minute stretch. They pass through wispy, low-hanging clouds, over hills and mountains covered in lush greenery, past crescent-shaped beaches and stretches of bright Pacific blue.

Finally, the pilot announces, “There’s Isla Nublar.”

The island is mountainous, all jagged peaks and forest, and the helipad is on top of a hill that would probably be majestic to look at if it were possible to see anything through the dense fog.

‘Cloud Island,’ Leo thinks, taking off his headset as the rotors slow. Appropriate.

Mikey is showing signs of stir-craziness, and Draxum is showing signs of being tired of everyone he’s currently confined with, and frankly Leo doesn’t trust Kendra not to push somebody out of a moving vehicle for attempting to make conversation with her, so he steers Mikey toward the second of the two Jeeps waiting to take them down the hill and leaves the other two to endure each other’s company.

As they’re helping the driver pile their luggage in the cargo department, Draxum says dangerously, “What do you mean she’s not here?”

A blond man leaning out the front passenger side of the first Jeep says, “Hey, Ms. Grand is a busy CEO, she has things to do. She can’t just cancel all her plans for the weekend at a moment’s notice.”

“The way the rest of us all did?” Leo says to Mikey, who raises his eyebrows back in tacit agreement.

“She can, and she should, if she expects her investors to believe that she’s taking this seriously,” Draxum grits out. He pulls out his phone, either to send an angry text or make an angry phone call, but puts it away again after a few frustrated taps on the screen.

“Oh, yeah, service is really spotty,” the blond man says sympathetically, either unaware of or unconcerned with Draxum’s visibly rising temper. “All the mountains, the canopy, the volcano—you know how it is. Anyway, Ms. Grand is going to video call later this evening to greet everyone, and for the duration of your stay, anything you tell me will go straight to her.” He stretches a hand out, still not bothering to actually exit the vehicle, and says, “Warren Stone, Public Relations manager.”

Draxum looks at his hand as if Stone is offering him a decaying fish to hold.

If Draxum keeps this up, Leo is going to start thinking he’s hilarious. Unfortunately the older man already committed the unforgivable act of slighting Donatello, which made him unfunny and unlikable forever, and he needs to stick to the script.

“Can we go already?” Kendra says waspishly. “I have work to do.”

“Man, I’m so sad we’re missing out on the fun conversation they’re probably having,” Mikey says from the front passenger seat, turned around beneath his seat belt to chat with Leo in the back.

The driver gives him a few sidelong looks every time the road bumps and bends down the hill. He’s probably wondering why Mikey scrambled urgently into the front seat in the first place if he was just going contort himself uncomfortably to talk to Leo the entire ride. If he asked, Leo would explain that as the youngest of four, technically five, Mikey was hardwired to fight to the death for the front seat on any occasion. But he doesn’t ask.

And because Mikey’s not paying attention to what’s in front of them, Leo sees it first through the thinning fog. He thinks it’s a tree trunk at a glance, tall and slender and curving oddly where it rises above the others. Then it moves, bending as if in a wind, and by the time it twists around to face the car, Leo realizes it’s not a tree at all.

“What,” he says, feeling entirely too small in the open-top Jeep.

Mikey, who went through a dinosaur phase that lasted the entirety of his pre-teen years, points at it and declares, “Sauropod!”

“Animatronic,” Leo says, “right?”

“Right,” Mikey parrots automatically. Then, more slowly, “I mean, it has to be. Right?”

“Right,” Leo agrees, but his heart isn’t in it.

The first Jeep has slowed to an abrupt stop, and theirs slows to a stop behind it. The dinosaur trumpets at them, like the elephants at Mikey’s zoo, and half a dozen other slender necks rise out of the mist at the call to peer in their direction.

Leo’s never seen an animatronic pull leaves off a tree with its teeth and chew them with all the self-importance of a cow at pasture. Its head is some thirty-feet above them, but Leo can see the animal alertness in its eyes from where he’s sitting. It’s living and breathing and eating.

He’s thinking of the NDAs it took to get here, the bioengineering company GrandNex acquired five years ago, the absolute secrecy surrounding this project that seemed a little overkill no matter how transportive the theme park promised to be.

Ever since he was a little kid, Leo’s always had a nose for problems. He could sniff one out like a scent hound tracking down game. He wasn’t always the instigator, but he was always the first one on the scene. He was always the one leading his siblings headlong into what promised to be fun or trouble or, best of all, both.

This, he finds himself thinking, as Mikey clambers out of the Jeep for a closer look, as Draxum shouts something unintelligible from the other car, as the house-sized sauropod cranes its neck away from them and lumbers a troublingly swift step away for another leafy bite, is gonna be trouble.

—

It’s a relief to finally dump his suitcase next to one of the beds in the suite they’d been provided while Mikey bee-lines straight for the clunky air conditioning unit on the wall.

The Safari Lodge is in the same block as the Visitor’s Center and fully unstaffed this far out from the grand opening, but it’s the only one of the three guest resorts on the island that isn’t still currently under construction. A few of the rooms have been fully furnished for the sake of the first handful of unofficial guests and seem comfortable enough.

But Leo can’t help but notice that the window overlooking the lodge pool is very small and barred from the inside. The slant of light falling over the beds draws his eyes to the pyramid skylight, also reinforced with metal bars. Frowning, Leo looks over his shoulder at the suite door. Solid steel, with a number of deadbolts.

“Where the hell are we,” he says out loud.

“I’m saying! The laminated glass in the windows is a little much, right?” Mikey pipes up from where he’s still crouched by the aircon. “By the way are you still scared of spiders?”

“I’m not scared of anything. Wait, why?”

“No reason,” Mikey replies, trapping something under a complimentary mug from the coffee bar. “Let’s go get wined-and-dined.”

The Visitor’s Center is a short walk down the road, and that’s where Leo and Mikey were told to head once they unpacked—and they will. Eventually. But if there’s one thing every Hamato is, it’s too curious for his or her own good. They’re all snoopers at heart. April went so far as to become an investigative journalist and now her snooping wins her awards.

They start by poking around the lodge. The kitchen is one in name only when they take a peek in, stainless steel counters and cavernous empty spaces where commercial fridges and flattops and fryers will go eventually, and the walk-in fridge and dry goods pantry are unstocked. It feels like a liminal space in a way, like stepping into a twenty-four hour supermarket in the dead of night and finding yourself wandering the aisles alone.

Most of the rooms are full of pallets of plastic-wrapped furniture and huge unopened boxes of bulk supplies. Every single one has a door that looks like it was built to withstand a surprise visit from the Terminator and windows too small to fit a body through even if you could find a way to remove the bars.

Mikey finds a back door and has to give it the shoulder when it sticks in the frame. He spills out into a lounge area that trails down toward the oddly-shaped in-ground pool. It isn’t fenced-in, which is every EMT’s worst nightmare when it comes to a facility marketed toward families potentially with small children, and the first thing Leo is jotting down in the mental notes he’s taking back to Donatello for their write-up of the place.

Speaking of small children, Mikey says, “Look. We have company.”

There’s a little boy staring at them from the other side of the pool. He’s dressed in a short-sleeve sun shirt, shorts and canvas sneakers that might once have been white that are stained irreparably in the way of all white canvas sneakers. His brown skin is darker than Leo’s, slightly lighter than Mikey’s, and interrupted by pale patches of vitiligo around both eyes and the right corner of his mouth. They might have missed him in all the shrubbery if not for his shock of white hair. His expression is so serious that it borders on a scowl, and reminds Leo immediately of his twin when they were much younger.

He shrinks the second they make eye contact, as if he’s expecting to be scolded for existing.

“Hey, kiddo,” Leo makes sure to say in his least-scolding tone, “you see something cool over there?”

The boy blinks, and looks down at whatever has him crouched sentinel by the closed-up pool. He looks back up and announces gravely, “A bug.”

All the frequent rain has resulted in standing water collecting in the flowerbeds and on top of the tarp covering the pool and along with the persistent humidity it’s probably a busy breeding ground for mosquitoes and roaches. But when they circle around, they see that the boy is actually studying a heroic-looking beetle that’s making its unhurried journey across the bowing leaf of one of the decorative plants.

“Wow, look at that,” Mikey says, crouching opposite the kid. “You know what it’s called?”

The kid is watching the two of them closely with his mouth turned down, waiting for the trap. But he decides to play ball and shakes his head no.

Mikey takes it all in stride, and says, “It’s called a Hercules beetle. It’s a type of rhinoceros beetle. They all have funny horns on their head like this guy.” He points out the lobster-claw shape of its head, falling back into teaching mode. Normally he’s showing off cute fluffy mammals to eager-eyed little kids, but he can be a bug guy in a pinch. “They can carry hundreds of times their body weight. Isn’t that nuts? They’re like little superheroes.”

“I don’t know about little,” Leo interjects. “That is the biggest bug I’ve ever seen.”

“Not bigger than the spider back in our room,” Mikey says cheerfully. “If we were paying to stay here they’d probably charge us for an additional guest.”

They’re a floor and several doors away from that room and Leo still has to fight the urge to climb onto one of the nearby deck chairs. “Pardon?” he says pleasantly instead.

The back-and-forth has coaxed a smile from the kid. Or what Leo assumes passes for a smile, anyway. His serious little face has relaxed into something more age-appropriate for this tiny person who can’t possibly be more than nine years old. His hands uncurl from where they were gripping the dirtied knees of his shorts, resting there comfortably instead.

“I like spiders,” he offers carefully. “They look scary but they’re good for the environment. My mom said they guarded her garden.”

This elementary-schooler is schooling Leonardo. It’s adorable. From the look on Mikey’s face, his brother is in agreement, and they probably could have sat there next to the gross pool tarp and weirdly vibrant plants and talked about bugs for the rest of the afternoon, but a sharp voice from the direction of the lodge snaps, “Giorgio!”

A harried-looking woman in the familiar business-casual attire of khakis and a blazer is standing at the back door. She has a high-visibility vest and a hardhat tucked under her arm, clearly either on her way to or from some sort of work site. There’s a girl of maybe ten or eleven standing with her, clearly her daughter—they have the same delicate features, and the same displeased scowl.

The kid—Giorgio—stands to attention immediately, hands back to their nervous clutching at the hem of his shirt this time.

“I told you not to bother the other guests,” she says shortly. “Get over here, please.”

Giorgio obeys at a quick clip and the woman gives him a stern look as she steers him by the shoulders to stand in front of her. Her expression is visibly displeased by the state of his muddied clothes, but she doesn’t scold him further, nudging him over next to the older girl instead.

To Leo and Mikey, she says, “I’m so sorry about that. My nephew tends to wander. He always ends up someplace he shouldn’t be.”

“We’ve all been there,” says Mikey, who definitely used to be one of those kids who bolted in any direction any chance he got and was the reason that Yoshi finally abandoned his morals and bought a child leash in the shape of a plush monkey backpack.

“And he wasn’t bothering us at all,” Leo can’t help adding. “He’s a really smart kid.”

Giorgio peeks at them through his unkempt hair. Some of the tension in the woman’s shoulders goes slack at that. She sounds surprised when she says, “Oh? That’s good. We have to go, but enjoy your visit.”

As the little family leaves, Leo hears the girl say, “It’s Gio’s fault we’re late, like always. I told you not to let him come.”

“I can’t just leave him home alone because you said so, baby,” the woman says wearily, as if it’s an argument they’ve had a hundred times already, and the door closes behind them.

Leo has seen families in all shapes and sizes pass through the ambulances and emergency rooms he’s worked out of over the years, and he knows better than to judge any parent based on one extremely limited interaction. So he tries not to let it bother him, the way Giorgio clammed right up, the way his aunt and cousin talked about him like he wasn’t even there.

At least he knows that little boy has a mother with a garden who teaches him not to be afraid of spiders. Hopefully he’ll get to go home to her soon and tell her about the beetle he found.

—

The Visitor’s Center is an imposing building made out of solid concrete, with a cone-shaped roof and faux fossils carved in relief around the massive reinforced double doors. It looks like it could double as a bomb shelter in a pinch, and calls Leo’s mind back to the high-voltage perimeter fence they had to pass through to enter the park, and the reinforced doors in all the rooms at the lodge.

Overall? Weird look for a family-friendly theme park. Leo quietly adds a tally to the whiteboard in his brain where he’s keeping track of weird things.

Leo and Mikey step into the entrance hall, a cavernous rotunda with high ceilings to accommodate a couple of museum-grade dinosaur fossils suspended by cables. There’s scaffolding and a small crane crowded into room, plastic tarps and sandbags and folded ladders cluttering the fine black marble floor, but a telling lack of a construction crew. The only person inside is a security guard who nods them up the staircase curving around the side of the room.

The investors meant it when they told the contractors to hit pause on production. Leo half-expects to find a mug of coffee still steaming in the break room and the word ‘Croatoan’ carved into a table somewhere.

They meet Draxum on the mezzanine level. He looks ready to breathe fire at the next person who inconveniences him in any way. It probably in part has to do with Warren Stone talking in his ear about press junkets and market research and social media—he has big plans for the official park TikTok account. As the first one to arrive, Draxum is the unlucky captive audience.

As funny as it is to watch, Leo’s gonna be stuck on a flight home with the guy. He’ll probably have to hear all of it secondhand.

Thinking along the same lines, as usual, Mikey comes to his rescue.

“Hey, here we are!” he chirps. “Sorry we’re late! We got turned around.”

Anyone else would have made that sound extremely sarcastic, because you can see the Visitor’s Center from the lodge and it’s barely a two minute walk from one building to the next. But since it’s Mikey it only sounds sheepish and good-natured, and while Draxum clearly isn’t buying it, Warren only chuckles. Somehow he makes even that feel condescending.

“Taking in the sights, huh? I don’t blame you! There’s a lot to see, it’s a shame you only have the weekend here.” He checks his phone, and says, “They should have the informational tour all queued up for us now. Follow me this way, you’ll love this.”

He leads them down the hall, past rooms that are still covered in plastic and primed for paint on the walls, and then waves them through a door labeled Showcase Theater. Inside there’s a cluster of about fifty auditorium seats in front of a large blank screen, and also a short round middle-aged man with an impressive mustache who waves at them enthusiastically.

“Oh,” Warren says, with a measly fraction of the corporate zeal he’s had up until now, “that’s Todd.”

“Hello!” Todd says cheerfully. “I’m glad you’re here! I’ve never liked going to the movies alone. It’s always a better experience as part of a crowd.”

Todd Cape introduces himself as a conservation officer, hired by GrandNex as the park’s game warden. It makes Mikey frown, even as he politely shakes Todd’s hand, the question visibly darting through his brown eyes—game warden?

If Jurassic Park was labeling itself as a wildlife preserve, Todd’s presence there would make sense. But this is very much going to be a theme park, with resorts and restaurants and attractions.

“Had some free time today, thought I might join the tour and give Warren a hand,” Todd explains.

“Quiet down,” Warren says, waving them into the rows of seats, “the show’s about to start.”

The film that starts up is a cartoon, starring a 2D animated character that introduces himself as Mr. DNA. They all turn as a unit to look at Warren, who’s tapping on his phone.

“Yeah, it’s geared toward kids, but gives a decent overview of what our team here has accomplished. I’ll take questions at the end.”

It shows on Draxum’s face how much he visibly and vehemently hates this guy. Leo very carefully doesn’t make eye contact with Mikey. He’s curious despite himself and Warren definitely seems like the type to kick them out of the tour for hurting his feelings.

In his defense, the cartoon isn’t bad. It explains in broad strokes that partial dinosaur DNA strands were recovered from prehistoric parasites that had been preserved in fossilized amber. Since it was impossible to clone from an incomplete gene sequence, GrandNex’s team of geneticists filled in the gaps with the complete DNA of other animals—the video named a frog as an example—until it was whole.

Mikey absorbs the information with his head tilted slightly to one side in a way he’s probably not even aware of, like a service dog who just caught the scent of an impending medical emergency.

There’s a brief disconnect where the video stops and the narration continues through the speakers, and Warren looks up from his phone and says, “Oh, shoot, sorry. All hands and feet inside the ride, please.”

He presses a button behind the presentation podium he’s lounging on and safety bars move down over his audience’s laps, clicking into place. With a gentle lurch, the auditorium seats begin to move sideways along a track a few seconds behind the audio cues.

It takes them past a few double-paned windows, the first one looking into a room that must be the laboratory, with one section lit under cool blue UV lights and guarded behind a security door, another with people in white coats working at microscopes, and a final area that looked like it must be the hatchery. Mechanical arms were automatically rotating large, smooth eggs under a heat lamp.

“I wanna see the eggs,” Mikey says urgently, already starting to squirm for freedom.

“Tour’s not over yet, Miguel,” Leo replies. He jiggles the safety bars to make a point, which resoundingly do not move. “And these things were made to keep unruly toddlers much like yourself firmly in their seats, so give it up.”

“Thank you,” Warren says pointedly from the podium. Which makes Leo want to try lifting the bars with Mikey just on principle.

The next window gives them a view into the control center, a darkened room filled with blinking consoles and rows of computer screens, and an impressive digital map of the park spread along the wall, broken into sections and seeming to update in real time. Despite all the computer stations, there were only a handful of people inside. Kendra is sitting at a desk near the door, telltale lavender hair washed out to white in the glow of her computer and characteristic scowl on her face. Two others are on their feet, facing the map with their backs to the tour window.

One is a young woman with pale orange hair cut in a wavy bob, diamonds glittering at her earlobes and her throat. She’s dressed sharply, in blazer, slacks and heels, and the burly man she’s speaking to seems to defer to whatever she’s telling him with a lot of head nodding.

As Mr. DNA explains how sophisticated the park automation is, everything from the electric cars to phones to door locks monitored and controlled from this one little hub, Mikey says over him, “Who is that?”

“Frida Grand,” Todd says before Warren has a chance to look up from his phone and catch up to the conversation, guessing correctly which of the two piqued Mikey’s curiosity. “There’s no one Ms. Grand trusts more to oversee operations here when she’s away.”

“Her daughter?” Leo asks. He hadn’t heard about Lena having any children. He did his homework before signing those NDAs—which culminated in a sleepless night of Googling and bothering his dad in the group chat for insider info—and Frida’s name didn’t pop up anywhere.

“Niece,” Todd corrects. “You likely won’t get a chance to meet her before you leave tomorrow, they keep her pretty busy.”

Frida turns her head just before the car continues past the window completely and looks right at them, eyes dark in the low light. For a brief, suspended moment, she looks oddly familiar. Then the ride moves on.

The last leg of the automated tour is a virtual walkthrough of a map of the park, a simplified version of the one in the control room, with information about where gift shops and restrooms were located, and encouragements to visit Les Gigantes for a fine-dining experience headed by celebrity chef Rupert Swaggart.

Warren brings the lights back up, rubbing his hands together and talking quickly, as if to head off the wave of excited questions he thinks is coming.

“And from here, visitors would go straight to the main attraction, obviously the park drive. We’re workshopping the name Safari Tour, but it doesn’t really have the zing we’re looking—”

“EGGS,” Mikey says, finally springing free of the safety bar and climbing over Leo, who didn’t get up in time to avoid becoming a speed bump.

“Ugh,” Warren mutters, deflating. “Yes, fine, this way.”

—

Baxter Stockman is only a few years out of grad school and he looks it, a coltishness to him that puts Leo in mind of a kid playing dress-up, the way he and Raph used to get into their dad’s old clothes and pretend to be movie stars. He squares his shoulders when the tour group enters the lab and puts on a nervous smile and barely lets anyone make an introduction before he’s spilling haphazardly into a well-rehearsed speech about his work.

Three things are obvious right off the bat. One, that Baxter is extremely socially awkward, fidgeting with a broken pen and avoiding eye contact. Two, piggybacking off the first thing, he wants this situation put behind him and these strangers out of his lab as soon as possible, and will jump through whatever hoops he has to as quickly as possible to make that happen. And three, he is undeniably brilliant.

Leo studied genetics in med school, so it doesn’t go completely over his head, but he knows what it sounds like when someone is in their element.

“Oh, look, look,” Mikey says, smacking Draxum’s arm because he’s the body standing close enough to be smacked, “this one’s hatching, look!”

He’s clustered in close to one of the heated tanks, watching avidly as one of the eggs begins to wobble and crack tellingly down the side. A tiny wet snout appears, and then the claw of a foot, and warbling bird-like cries begin to sound as it struggles to make any further progress. Baxter puts on a pair of rubber gloves and leans in to help it get free.

Mikey makes a surprised, alarmed sound in his throat. There’s a myriad of reasons he knows like the back of his hand not to help a baby animal out of its egg, even if it seems to be struggling—you could damage the impossibly delicate blood vessels, you could give it an infection, if it hasn’t absorbed its yolk sac yet you could interrupt that important process—but he also knows that it isn’t his place to tell Baxter how to do the thing he has literally invented and seemingly perfected.

So he watches with wide eyes as little bits of the shell come away, holding his breath until its over and the baby is no worse for wear, blinking big reptile eyes around the room.

“Most dinosaurs have an egg tooth, but baby raptors don’t,” Baxter says, noticing Mikey’s relieved exhale. “They can poke a hole in the egg with their snouts, but at that point the nursery staff has to step in.”

“Uh, that’s,” Mikey starts. Since he can't find a nice way to say ‘bizarre,’ he switches gears. “What do they do in the wild?”

“They don’t breed in the wild,” Baxter says simply. “All the animals in the park are female. We’ve engineered them that way, by denying the developing embryos the extra chromosome that would otherwise create a male.”

“How many different species do you have on the island?” Draxum asks.

“Fifteen, I think,” Baxter says, his confidence wavering more with every second Draxum stares him down.

“Fifteen you think?”

“Well, sometimes the dinosaurs have to go back to the, the drawing board, so to speak. Sometimes we run into problems in the code that need to be corrected. This velociraptor is version 4.3,” he goes on, indicating the baby that Mikey is cooing over, “and we’re thinking about moving to 4.4 soon. They’ve been, um, pretty tricky.”

“If you’re interested in the velociraptors,” Todd says suddenly, too brightly, “you should see the adults. Their pen is a quick walk from the Visitor’s Center, we could be there and back in a jiffy.”

Warren and Baxter both frown at him, and Warren says, “There’s no need for that.”

Todd lifts his hands placatingly. “I was only offering, didn’t mean to step on any toes.”

But Leo thinks Todd wouldn’t have offered in the first place if he didn’t think it was important. There’s been a nervous energy to him this entire time, something bottled up that he’s looking for an opportunity to pour out. Probably the reason he joined the tour in the first place was to offer them this. It must be important if he was willing to put up with Warren for any amount of time he didn’t strictly have to.

So Leo says, “Hey, raptors. I’m down.”

“Let’s do it,” Mikey adds. He never needs to be read in on anything Leo’s up to, he’s just automatically up to it, too.

“Obviously we need to cover as much ground as possible in our inspection,” Draxum says haughtily.

Warren tries arguing for all of two minutes before visibly giving up on them as a group. He says, “Fine, sure, do whatever you want, not like I have an itinerary or anything. Todd, get them back for dinner by five or Ms. Grand will be informed that you’re the reason she was kept waiting. Everyone else,” he says to the lab at large, Baxter and the handful of other technicians who seem to mostly be tidying work stations, “the ship to the mainland has begun loading and departure is at 1600 hours. The last shuttle leaves from here in about fifteen minutes. Be on it. They will not wait for you.”

—

Leo’s hit with the late afternoon humidity like a slap in the face the second they step outside, and it’s probably turning his curly hair into a horror show, but he almost prefers it to spending another minute being led around by Warren Stone.

At the back of the Visitor’s Center is a garage full of gas Jeeps and metal storage lockers. The gravel drive joins a side road that doesn’t seem accessible from the main one, winding away into the trees, and eventually opening up into a clearing where a huge metal and concrete cage sits.

It looks like a miniature colosseum, towering walls and catwalks creating a pit in the center, and a fortified guard tower on the far end.

“This is where they live?” Mikey demands, as horrified as anyone would be whose full-time job it was to design happy homes for zoo animals, only to be confronted with what looked like a zoo animal-shaped maximum security prison.

“Only for now,” Todd says, leading the way up the stairs to the viewing deck. “Originally we had them in a paddock like all the others, but they started to attack the fences when handlers arrived to feed them. We moved them into this unit while the main thing is reinforced.”

“That’s generally stress-induced behavior,” Mikey says. He looks troubled, craning for a glimpse of the raptors through the thick foliage in the pen. “The first thing I would take a look at is their environment. Is something missing from it that’s causing boredom or frustration? Is the enclosure itself in need of a redesign? It’s a lot of trial and error, especially in this case. Do you know what changes they’re making to the raptor paddock?”

Todd smiles ruefully at him, shrugging his hands into his pockets. “As far as I know? Bigger fences.”

While they stand there watching, a crane demonstrates the new feeding method, since it can’t be done by hand anymore. A three-hundred pound cow is lowered into the pen, disappearing from view through the thick leaves until all that remains to be seen is the cord. It hangs there like a fishing line for one minute, then two—

And then with a horrific shriek, the cord begins to jerk around, something attached to the bait on the end—Leo can’t see anything, but he can hear the frenzy of snapping and crunching and tearing.

He thinks of that quiet, curious little boy he met a few hours ago, crouched by a closed pool and patiently watching a beetle climb a leaf like it was the most interesting thing in the world, who, according to his aunt, is often wandering into places he shouldn’t be, like every other child who has ever existed.

He imagines, for just a second, that little boy wandering anywhere near this pen and immediately feels his stomach churn with nausea.

Todd never turns his back to the cage. He brought them all out here for a reason, even if he doesn’t seem willing to say it outright.

Leo can’t help but ask, “Was it a raptor that killed him? The man who died here?” When everyone looks some degree of surprised at him, he says impatiently, “Sorry, were we still pretending he fell under a machine? Why would an accident that happened during construction call the general public’s safety into so much question that the investors would demand an audit? Drax, I can’t believe you believed that, I thought you were nodding along to be polite.”

“One of the animals killed him?” Draxum asks in a low voice. “How?”

Todd’s tone matches his when he replies, “It happened when we were moving the big one from the paddock into the pen. She rammed the door and caused our gatekeeper to fall. The crate shuddered back from the wall with the impact, and created a gap that couldn’t have been more than a foot wide, but it was enough for her to reach through and—well.”

“Attacks happen,” Mikey says quietly. “A keeper in the wrong place at the wrong time. We can study their behavior, but we can’t predict it a hundred percent of the time. They’re still wild animals.”

“But your guys in the lab talk about them like they’re super-sophisticated LEGO sets,” Leo tells Todd. “They plugged together animal parts until they had something that looked like a dinosaur. And whatever doesn’t work just gets phased out in the next patch. What did Baxter say back there? This is version 4.3.”

The crane that lowered the cow into the pen winds the cord back up with a strained whine. The livestock harness limps back into view inch by inch, torn to shreds.

“It’s a nightmare waiting to happen,” Draxum says grimly.

He sounds as though he’s made a decision his partners at the firm are not going to enjoy hearing. Todd sighs, some of the tension he’s been carrying in his shoulders the entire time they’ve known him finally going slack now he isn’t the only one reading the writing on the wall. Even if it isn’t enough to change everyone’s mind, at least he changed one.

Don’t relax yet, Leo wants to tell him. We still have to survive dinner.

—

The VIP dining lounge is on the uppermost floor of the Visitor’s Center. The chef is already delivering a tray of appetizers to the table when Leo’s group shuffles in.

The dark walls and low ambient lighting create an atmosphere that toes the line between intimate and cave-like. There are digital screens on every wall advertising the park with slow-moving slideshows of planned attractions and future locations, except for the screen at the head of the table, where the CEO herself has deigned to join them on a video call.

“My, my, there you all are,” Lena Grand says by way of greeting. “I was beginning to think we would need to call a search and rescue.”

Warren gives Todd a pointed look.

“Ah, I’m sorry Ms. Grand,” Todd says as they take their seats, always agreeable, “I got too much into the spirit of things and offered another leg of the grand tour.”

“There’s no such thing as too much spirit,” Lena chides him. “Now, firstly—introductions would be superfluous, wouldn’t they? We all know one another, for all that some of us have never met.”

She’s in her sixties and still the kind of beautiful that stops people in their tracks, a throwaway elegance in the way she sips from a flute and smiles, nothing smudged and not a hair out of place. She wears her wealth subtly, but Leo knows if he were to Google that simple rose gold necklace glinting meekly at her collarbone, he would find it was probably a Van Cleef worth thirty grand.

He can’t afford to forget who she is. He’s glad she wore the necklace, especially as she favors Leo and Mikey’s side of the table with an expression he would be tempted to call affectionate.

“You both look so much like your father,” she says warmly.

Draxum squints at them suspiciously, clearly never having been the type of guy to keep tabs on Entertainment Weekly. Mikey offers, “Dad and Ms. Grand used to date.”

“Ah,” Draxum says after a beat. His expression manages to communicate succinctly that he could have died happily not knowing anything about Lena Grand’s romantic history.

“Lena, please,” she insists, then sighs, as moonstruck as one of the characters she used to play in the movies. “Yoshi was the first great love of my life, you know. The one that got away.”

“That’s exactly how papa tells it, too,” Leo says with a smile. Mikey coughs to hide a surprised laugh. It’s not not how their dad tells it. He just makes it sound like his escape involved at least one hostage negotiation.

“Can we please get back on track,” Draxum grits out, not a question.

“Yes of course, Baron, I know how small talk tends to give you hives. Go on then, tell me about my park.”

Lena leans forward on her folded arms, to all appearances eager to hear it. Mikey glances at Leo, then across the table at Todd and Draxum, who are already looking back. There’s an elephant in the room demanding to be addressed.

“It’s like something out of a sci-fi movie,” Mikey begins. “Like, I can’t stress enough how amazing it was to drive down the hill and see that dinosaur. I mean—a dinosaur!”

On the screen, Lena Grand’s smile widens and softens around the edges—the Michelangelo effect at play. Mikey sits forward in his chair, looking up at her with that earnest resolution that means he’s made up his mind, but he’s going to be very nice about it.

“I understand the vision, I do, but—we don’t know anything about these animals. How could we? They’ve been extinct for sixty-six million years. And I haven’t met a single ecologist on your staff. There isn’t a single person here whose job it is to track and study the way the animals and the environment interact and respond to one another. You’re flying blind.”

Draxum is listening intently and Todd is nodding along on the other side of the table, a downward turn to his mouth and concern that ages his usually-cheerful face by a solid decade. Warren looks as offended as someone who just insulted his mother, spoon suspended halfway to his face. Leo risks a glance at Lena, whose warmth has already evaporated.

“You only have one veterinarian,” Mikey goes on. “At my zoo, we have teams of them. We have curators and horticulturists and trainers.”

“Trainers?” Warren cuts in skeptically. “You want us to teach the compys to stand on their hind legs for a little treat?”

Leo, who both used to help Mikey study for all of his finals and is also one of the first people his little brother calls to ramble or vent about work-related things, has enough secondhand information to confidently say, “You’re already training them. Your dinos hear a Jeep or jingling keys by the fence and they know that means a human is coming—it’s basic conditioning. They need cognitive stimulation or they’ll get bored, and then aggressive. That’s probably why the raptors are so… like that.”

“Captivity isn’t natural,” Mikey adds. “Tons of time and effort goes into behavioral husbandry programs. You poured all your efforts into containment, and built electric fences and concrete moats to keep them from escaping. But if their enclosures had everything they needed, the animals probably wouldn’t even want to escape. If they did get out, they wouldn’t want to go very far.”

“I read about a clouded leopard that got out of its enclosure at a zoo and sat in a nearby tree until it was found by staff,” Draxum says.

“That was a happy, curious leopard,” Mikey tells him.

“Roll a log full of hamburger meat into their yard and let the dinos go to town,” Leo says.

“I’ve told you, Ms. Grand,” Todd says, “your biggest concern can’t be what looks nice and how efficient the automation is.”

“You can run this entire park with a team of twenty people,” Warren says, scowling openly now. “That’s a marvel of engineering, and it keeps costs down, which may mean nothing to you, but means a hell of a lot to our investors. This is a business we’re running, you know.”

“A business that we have yet to determine you’ll be running,” Draxum reminds him coolly. “Your investors are waiting for my word on the matter. And I have yet to be impressed.”

It’s a stone-cold thing to say to someone who just spent the afternoon showing him living, breathing dinosaurs brought to life specifically to showcase at this park and no other in the world. If that doesn’t impress a middle-aged lawyer from Jersey, what will?

“I can see tensions have gotten high, and there’s no need for that,” Lena says suddenly, her first contribution to the conversation since it took a turn to the left. She steeples her hands under her chin, every inch a former star of the New Hollywood era, her waves of white hair framing her dimpled smile as effortlessly as it seemed to on the movie posters. “While admittedly these aren’t the glowing reviews I may have been expecting to hear, I did ask for your honest opinions. And we still have the rest of the weekend to convince you, don’t we?”

Leo can’t see what another day or two might do to change their perception of the place, and from the looks on their faces, Mikey and Draxum can’t, either. Todd just looks tired and frustrated, like he’s been going in these same circles for months. He probably has.

“Go on the park drive tomorrow, the real thing,” Lena says, “and you’ll see exactly how well-taken care of these creatures are. Miles of space, food brought to them on a pedestal, the whole nine yards. Warren, you’ll arrange everything, won’t you?”

“Of course, ma’am,” Warren says. He’s been nodding along with her since she started talking, a bob of his head that made his blond quiff bounce in time. “It’ll have to be fairly early in the morning, since that tropical storm is due to hit us tomorrow night, and they’ll need to be on the copter by three at latest to avoid it. But it shouldn’t be a problem, I’ll get our guys in control to start setting up now.”

“Perfect! Oh, just you wait,” Lena says brightly. “You’ll never forget what you see here tomorrow. I’m eager to hear your thoughts! Toodles!”

For someone who’s eager hear their thoughts, she disconnects the call quick. Leo thinks he wasn’t imagining the dark anger she gave away in brief lapses of her remarkable self-control—the whiteness of her knuckles where they were clasped together, the way her tone had cooled and didn’t quite match her charming smile. It’s likely that she’s very rarely said ‘no’ to and she didn’t like the way it sounded.

“Okay, well,” Todd says, “I suppose I’ll see you all bright and early then!”

“What? You don’t need to go on the ride, you work here,” Warren says.

“He’s going,” Draxum says with the finality of a gavel falling on the block. “It’ll give us more of a chance to discuss things. As a matter of fact, I’d like to meet with your ‘guys in control’ while I’m here.”

“Oh, that’s just this way,” Todd says brightly, and leads the way around Warren with Draxum following close behind. Warren blusters and rushes off after them, saying things about security clearance and disrupting the ecosystem of the engineers’ workspace.

Leo glances at Mikey, who glances down at the appetizer tray on the table, tiny tortilla cups of ceviche that are soggy and lukewarm by now and listing wetly where they sit.

“We didn’t get to finish dinner,” he says sadly.

“There’s a kitchen around here somewhere,” Leo replies.

They go downstairs and wander through the rotunda with a nod for the security guard who doesn’t look up from his book to nod back. There’s a restaurant on the main floor that seems to function as an employee canteen for now. A young woman in a park polo waves them into the kitchen with a smile and boxes two of the standard staff meals to go—casados with chicken, rice, beans and mixed picadillo, along with the last piece of a caramel tres leches cake that Mikey looks ready to kill and die for.

“Note to self, eat down here next time,” Mikey says, holding his food like someone might try to take it from him.

“Weren’t impressed by the cold fish soup?” Leo says faux-sympathetically.

He’s teed Mikey up perfectly for an impassioned rant about ceviche that Leo knows the ins and outs of already, simply by virtue of knowing Mikey. He sinks into the familiar sound the way most people would sink into a hot bath after a long day.

At around six PM, it’s already getting dark, and automatic lights have flickered on outside. The last thing Leo is expecting to see as they near the lodge is the tiny figure huddled on the front step.

“Giorgio?” he says. In the corner of his eye, he sees Mikey’s head whip around in surprise to look where he’s looking. When the little boy scrambles to his feet, wringing his hands nervously, Leo makes an effort to soften the next question. “Hey, what are you doing out here?”

He doesn’t answer right away, brown eyes darting between Leo and Mikey, who crouches to be on the kid’s eye level with one of those warm smiles that could disarm even the most jaded and guarded of souls.

It’s not like they have anywhere important to be. So Leo sits, too. When they’re not towering over him, it’s a little easier for Giorgio to look them in the eye.

Finally, the kid says, “I’m supposed to get on the boat.”

Immediately, alarm bells go off in Leo’s head, but he tries not to let it show on his face. The boat that almost certainly isn’t at the dock anymore, leaving for the mainland a day early to beat the storm? The one that Warren had explicitly warned the lab technicians not to miss the boarding time for?

Slowly, they eke the story out of him; he and his cousin got into an argument—this Leo absorbs without giving away a hint of the skepticism he’s definitely feeling, at the idea of this recalcitrant, soft-spoken child getting into an argument with anyone, let alone a much bigger kid—and Aunt Ari decided to separate the two of them, keeping cousin Vi with her while she wrapped up work and sending Giorgio back to the lodge to pack his things.

A car was supposed to pick him up, he tells them, along with the family’s luggage, but the suitcases were already gone when he checked the closet, and a car never came. He was sitting in the lobby looking out the window to make sure he saw it, he stresses, as if to head off the assumption that he was just messing around somewhere, and it never came. Then he started to get nervous so he waited outside instead.

Leo tries to think about it fairly. It’s not like Giorgio was walking alone through Disneyland. This theme park is empty save for a handful of people that Ari must know and work with, and all the roads lead back to the same central place. Maybe they weren’t far from the lodge when she sent her nephew in that direction, maybe she thought she’d get a ride with a coworker and Giorgio would make it to the ship long before she did.

Nevermind that in the few minutes Leo had known him, Giorgio had already proven to be the type of kid who was easily distracted by a cool-looking bug, who his aunt had told them liked to wander off. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to see something enticing in the trees and take off after it. He’s a little kid, that’s what they do.

“It sounds like your aunt got the wrong information,” Mikey says, softening the blow. “She must not have realized the car had already come and gone.”

“It’s gone?” Giorgio says, stricken, but not surprised. The worst-case scenarios he’s been making up in his head and sitting with were probably the only company he’s had for hours.

“Hey, don’t worry, we’ll fix it,” Mikey tells him, all fast, and then immediately turns to look at Leo, the resident fixer. Giorgio mirrors him, eyes big and brown and worried.

Can’t have that, Leo thinks.

“Of course we will.” He pushes himself to his feet, and the problems to solve line up in his mind’s eye in order of importance, starting with, “Have you had dinner, big guy?”

The kid blinks, not expecting the question, and after a moment he shakes his head. “Aunt Ari said we’d eat on the boat,” he says.

“How about you eat with us instead?” Leo says, and holds out his boxed meal until Giorgio gets the clue and takes it in both his little hands. He looks from the box he’s holding over to the identical one in Mikey’s hands, and then back up at Leo.

“It’s yours,” Giorgio says slowly, seeing through him.

“Nah, it’s just extra food they didn’t want to go to waste,” Leo lies. “I ate already, couldn’t eat another bite.”

Mikey’s got a glint in his eye that Leo knows means that he’ll be splitting Mikey’s dinner with him or else suffer the consequences, but his little brother doesn’t give the game away to the boy who needs convincing not to go hungry for the night.

“Oh,” Giorgio finally says, then, shyly, “thank you.”

They steer the kid back inside the lodge, Mikey scooping his bag up for him as they go, and get him tucked away in their suite with dinner in his lap and a Ghibli movie playing on Mikey’s laptop to keep him occupied. He slowly forgets to be nervous, asking questions about the film that Mikey’s quick to answer, and Leo steps into the bathroom to make some calls.

Giorgio had dutifully recited his aunt’s number when asked for it, but that call goes straight to voicemail. Understandably, since service is spotty on the island, and Leo’s only got a single bar of 4G at random points throughout the day.

But he still has Draxum’s phone number from back when the guy showed up to hire one of the Drs. Hamato, and he’s probably still up at the Visitor’s Center menacing people. The call goes through.

“What,” Draxum says by way of greeting.

Disregarding that, Leo says, “Hey, Drax, it’s Leo. Uh, are you near someone who would be able to hunt down the phone number of a contractor for me?”

“What,” Draxum says again, with a slightly different inflection this time.

“There’s a woman here, first name Arianna, I think she’s an architect. She brought her daughter and her nephew to visit the park, and I think they missed the boat. I’m not sure where she is, but I’ve got the nephew here with me at the lodge.”

Draxum doesn’t answer for long enough that Leo takes the phone away from his ear to check that he hasn’t dropped the call.

“Someone brought children onto this island?” the older man finally asks dangerously. “Knowing that it was being audited for safety concerns?”

“Well, if she works here, she’d have to know that, right?” Leo replies, trying to find the middle ground between objectivity and tossing that woman under the bus for the worry she’d let Giorgio sit by himself with. “I’m worried she and the other kid are stranded somewhere. I called her and it went straight to voicemail.”

There is some dark muttering on the other end of the line, unintelligible conversation that sounds like a barked demand and a confused volunteer, and then an unfamiliar voice says, “Hello? This is Gus?”

“Hi Gus,” Leo says plainly. “Did you get any of that?”

“Some of it. Uh, I’m double-checking now, but as far as I know, everyone left who was supposed to,” he says, the clacking of a keyboard audible behind him. “Yeah, Arianna DeLuca—she scanned her badge at the dock at 3:37. The ship left on time at 4:00. Should I—do you need me to call her?” Gus asks. “Did she leave something behind?”

For a moment, all Leo can hear is a dull roar in his ears.

He stands there, holding the phone, listening to Mikey’s voice in the next room coax Giorgio into laughter, and comes to terms with it.

Then he gives Gus his number, asks him to pass it along to Giorgio’s aunt if he gets through to her, and then hangs up before Gus can pass him back to Draxum. He stands there and holds his phone and considers calling the aunt back himself, leaving a second voicemail that’s much less polite than the first. He lives inside the daydream of it for several seconds, imagining exactly what he would say, the tone of voice he’d say it in, until the urge passes. Until the blind fury simmers down into a more productive anger.

Then Leo pockets the phone and steps back into the main room of the suite.

He’s smiling, but Giorgio still takes one look at him and asks, “They left without me?”

Mikey sucks in a breath, expression pained. Leo comes over to sit on the edge of the bed.

“I’m sure it was an accident,” Leo says. “I bet she’s storming around that ship screaming at people to turn it around to come back and get you or else!”

Giorgio’s eyes drift back to the half-eaten dinner in his lap, the colorful, chaotic scene playing out in Castle in the Sky creating an incongruous tableau. He doesn’t say it out loud, but his expression is as transparent as one of those neon billboards in Times Square with the scrolling text: No she’s not.

“It’s her loss, you know,” Leo says, coming up with the idea on the spot and rolling with it, nudging his shoulder into Giorgio’s tiny one. “She’s gonna miss the tour.”

After a beat, the kid looks back up. Interest piqued despite himself. He’s accepting the fact that his family left without him far too easily in Leo’s opinion, but the gleam of curiosity in his face is much easier to look at than the overshadowed sadness had been.

“The dinosaur tour?”

“That’s the one!” Mikey jumps in. “You’re gonna get to go on it with us tomorrow, how cool is that?”

Giorgio’s eyes get round and moonlike. “I am? Really? My aunt said it’s okay?”

“Your aunt is gonna call me if there’s any issues,” Leo tells the kid, tugging on one unkept white loc fondly. “She has my number and she knows where to find you. Now, what dinosaur are you looking forward to the most? Do you have a favorite?”

Giorgio—Gio, he insists—claims he doesn’t have a favorite, but he talks an awful lot about the dilophosaurus. He can’t quite finish all of his dinner, but he finds extra room for dessert when Mikey presents him with the treasured piece of tres leches cake, as easily as if he’d always intended to give it away.

When he starts to nod off, they tuck him into Mikey’s bed. They leave the bathroom light on and the door cracked open, a bar of golden light spilling into the room in lieu of a nightlight. He falls asleep hugging one of the extra pillows, only a sliver of his face visible.

Mikey sits next to Leo on the other bed and says softly, “Poor thing. I can’t believe she left him. I’m glad he’s going on the tour with us, he deserves to have some fun.”

“Don’t say that word,” Gio said plainly, as if there was nothing at all remarkable about the knock-down, drag-out fight he’d instigated at the slightest show of teeth. Raph hadn’t known his eldest sibling very long at the time, and hadn’t learned yet what he would learn relatively soon—that Gio would give him absolutely anything he wanted if he was just willing to push and whine and ask nicely—so he very reluctantly let it go.

It didn’t stop him from telling their family all about it the second they got home. Donnie started making noises about hacking the Hidden City traffic cams to see for himself, while Mikey clamored for a play-by-play and Leo whined about missing everything cool that happened while he was stuck in the medbay, and the whole time Gio distributed dinner with a lack of expression on his face.

Up until the moment Splinter took his spotted face in both hands and said, “Well done, my Gray. You make your family proud.” Then tension Raph hadn’t noticed for what it was leaked out of his shoulders and the set of his mouth, and it was a much softer Gio who passed his father a plate.

Later, Splinter would tell Raph how it felt to fight in the Battle Nexus. How it felt to abandon honor, to kick and claw and use his teeth, just to survive another day. It is not something he ever would have wished for his children to understand, he would say, patting one of Raph’s massive hands gently. But if that’s what it took for his boys to come home safely, then he preferred it over the alternative.

“What makes him a Hamato is the same as what makes you one,” Splinter said with a rueful, crooked smile. “And your other brothers and sister, and myself. Loyalty to the ones you love. A sense of fairness in an unfair world. And the stupid, stubborn refusal to stay down as long as you have even one more second of fight left in you. Whatever that looks like.”

But it wasn’t something Raph would get to see very often at all. Gio never came out and said in so many words that he was more comfortable with long-range combat, but the bow he never left the lair without did that much for him.

It made sense for him to provide support from an overwatch position, which he did unerringly, unflinchingly, never missing his targets of shoulders and thighs and once, when he was feeling particularly mean after some botched robber pointed a gun in Mikey’s general direction, a knee.

While it took some getting used to, Raph can hardly remember what it felt like to walk into a battle without feeling his big brother’s eyes on his back.

Tonight, though, he wishes Gio was down here with the rest of them. Raph doesn’t know why the Foot Clan is robbing the Museum of Natural History but it can’t be for anything good. As a matter of fact, he doesn’t really care. He feels prickly and short-tempered and waiting for the fight to start.

Things with the Foot have been a little tense ever since the almost end of the world. However badly they feel about being made into squishy fleshy meat puppets by their alien overlords, it’s not badly enough to make up for the fact that they knowingly and willingly brought the Krang to New York City in the first place.

Leo can play the blame game all he wants, he can try to claim the whole pot the way money-hungry gamblers sweep chips to their side of the poker table after a winning hand, but Raph knows whose fault it really is. He knows who to blame for what he almost lost.

Even now, more than a year later, Raph’s temper rises the second he sees those stupid Foot ninja cowls. His blood starts to race with it, that eager violence left in him like a scar from the Krang parasite. He understands attack dogs.

“Well, well, well,” Leo says performatively. “If it’s not the Foot, climbing out of whatever hole they’ve been hiding in. What have you guys been up to? You gotta get on Insta, we gotta stay in touch.”

Lieutenant and Brute are slow to react, sizing the turtles up warily. The general public has no idea who fought the Krang off, but these guys certainly do. They’ve seen exactly what kind of fight the Hamatos can bring.

They must decide whatever scheme they’re up to is worth it, because Lieutenant lifts a hand to summon an origami ninja and then shrieks in surprise as he twists to dodge a bolt instead. He and Brute turn to look at it, embedded three inches deep in the brick wall behind them, in stunned silence.

“What the hell,” Brute demands, squinting in the direction it was fired from. “Okay, who the hell is that guy?”

“Oh, that’s our big brother,” Mikey says sweetly, spinning one of his chucks idly and watching the Foot like a hawk. “It’s his first fight with you guys, our hereditary enemy. This is a special occasion!”

“Aw,” Lieutenant says, reluctantly moved. Then he finishes his summoning with a flourish, and human ninjas slink out of the shadows alongside the constructs, and Raph doesn’t have to worry about anything except smashing as many of them as he can into the ground.

It doesn’t occur to him that Gio’s slow to answer them on the comms until the third time they check in with him and don’t get an answer back. Raph twists around to look urgently at Leo, who doesn’t need to be asked and opens a portal for him instantly.

On the other side is the rooftop Gio was sitting sentry on, only he’s pinned on his shell by a burly ninja in the black Foot cowl. He’s holding his crossbow sideways across his chest, trying to heave the much larger man off of him, and the angle’s all wrong—he can’t get leverage, he’s stuck until something gives.

Raph plucks the man off his brother the way a cat would a mouse, letting him dangle from Raph’s hand for just long enough for the realization to set in that he had royally screwed up his own night by messing with the wrong turtle. Then he takes great pleasure in connecting his other fist to the man’s skull and dropping him in an ungainly pile of limbs next to another unconscious body; the second half of the ambush that Gio must have dealt with on his own.

Gio is quick to sit up, chest heaving. His hand is clenched around his bow so tightly that it’s probably leaving lines on his palms even through the thick gloves. He darts a quick look around, taking in the roof and the bodies behind Raph, and then Raph himself.

It makes him think of a kid who learned to fight because he had to, because no one else was going to protect him. Who learned quickly that he was at an immediate disadvantage fighting people who were so much bigger and stronger than him. Who picked up a ranged weapon one day to level the playing field and never went anywhere without it and never let anyone get close to him again if he could help it.

This is the same guy who flung himself at a leopard seal yokai for looking at Raph in a way he didn’t like. Who perched on the edge of Leo’s hospital bed every time he started to cry in his sleep during the long weeks of his recovery. Who lets Donnie climb all over him and Mikey hug his arm and April hold his hand and Splinter pat his cheeks.

His personal space is a thing he guards relentlessly, and a thing he surrenders completely, depending on who he’s looking at.

The easily-incited anger Raph carries with him like a scar is smothered all at once. Love unfolds in its place, a patchwork blanket miles long and with room for everyone to crowd under together and Gio’s name stitched right alongside the others as if it had always been there.

“Hey, Georgie,” Raph says, an affectionate rumble entering his voice, “let’s go home.”

Their brothers are clamoring for their attention on the comms, talking about the dinosaur bones the Foot were trying to steal and how cool the bones would look in the lair actually, what do you guys think? Gio settles into his skin more with every noisy second that goes by.

He doesn’t need any help getting to his feet. He’s made of stronger stuff than Raphael will ever fully understand. If no one had shown up to help him, he would have survived somehow. Giorgio’s a Hamato, stubborn enough to never give up. He’s someone else’s soldier, taught the hard way that losing isn’t option.

But before anything else, he’s their Gio.

When Raph offers him a hand, he takes it. He would put the whole world in Raph’s hands if he could.

“Hey, Space-Case,” not-sensei says with sensei’s crooked smile. He almost definitely has a broken cheekbone, and two black eyes, and he’s smiling like he doesn’t feel any of it. “Sounds like you’ve been holding out on us. Slow and steady, life’s not a race unless you make it one.” 

Casey knows what it sounds like when Leo is worried, can hear the upset under the polished glass surface of calm. It shouldn't be comforting to know that, but it’s comforting to know him. He ekes in a breath, it scratches all the way down and it doesn’t feel like it makes a difference, but the success emboldens him to suck down another. 

“You were breathy on the ride home, I thought it must have been from all the smoke,” Leo goes on. “But I guess that was a trigger. Do you have an inhaler?”

“Y–” Casey starts to say, and coughs again, and Leo’s fingers tighten around his before he can panic. “Belt,” he gasps. 

“Okay, that’s enough from you,” Leo says a little shortly. Which isn’t very fair, Casey was just answering his question. Then he realizes Leo’s clipped tone is probably because Casey’s dizziness is overpowering his ability to stand upright.

“Going down,” Leo says to someone else, and instantly, Casey’s controlled fall is arrested halfway to the floor. 

The last time Uncle Rapha held him, he was much smaller and Raph was much bigger, but somehow it feels the same. He leans back in Raph’s lap, the solid plastron behind him bracing him upright, and clumsily tries to help Leo paw through the pouches on his belt. The third time Leo bats Casey’s hands away, Raph reaches around and holds them still. 

“Let’s let the boss work,” Raph rumbles softly. It’s a miracle that he has any softness to spare for Casey, of all people, who closed the door and left his brother behind it. Left his brother in the dark where the monsters live. “We’re still breathing, right, big man?”

“R—Right,” Casey says, but it’s barely got enough air behind it to count. 

“No inhaler,” Leo announces, already turning to address someone else in the room. “Donnie, metal cabinet by the door, third drawer down, should be one in there.” Turning back, he leans in and pins Casey to the spot with a look. “Keep breathing, Case,” he says. “That’s your only job. Don’t slack off now.”

“Why do we have one?” Mikey asks in a voice that shakes. Casey manages to split enough of his attention to regret scaring him. 

“Red used to have asthma when you were all just little turtles,” Splinter says quietly. “He outgrew it, but Blue always says—”

“It’s chronic, not curable,” Leo says in a falsely bright tone, the cadence of an ancient argument. He catches the box his twin throws over and wastes no time ripping it open and shaking the inhaler into his palm. Within seconds, it’s primed, and Leo is curling one hand behind Casey’s head and bringing the mouthpiece to his lips and ordering, “Deep breath.” 

He obeys, feeling the medicine go to work, and holds without exhaling for as long as he can. It’s not long, barely five seconds. Leo shakes the canister and has it ready for him again when he’s ready to suck in another desperate puff. 

“Okay,” Leo says, studying his face with back and forth flicks of bright gold eyes. “You’re okay, Casey. Breathe.” 

“Breathe… breathe,” sensei says, large fingers combing Casey’s hair back from his sweaty forehead. His hand is calloused from the hilt of his sword, rough with scars that didn’t heal well, and gentle. 

“Look at the stars, kid,” he adds, their family’s little joke. There hadn’t been a clear night since the war started, the skies overcast with smoke and ash and pollution from the Technodromes, but every single room Casey had ever lived in had glow-in-the-dark constellations on the ceiling. 

“Look at the stars,” sensei says. 

There aren’t any, Casey wants to cry, maybe would if he had the breath to. There aren’t any anymore. 

Instead he inhales and exhales, carefully, counting each second in his head. The tension seeps out of the room like water through a sieve. Splinter is talking about hot drinks, April is talking about calling her mom. Four bright lights stay sat, a constellation that Casey is somehow in the middle of. 

“I haven’t had an attack in years,” Raph murmurs. He’s rocking Casey very slowly and doesn’t seem to realize he’s doing it. “Since I was—six or seven, maybe. You kept one this whole time?”

“Correction, the medication expires, so he has consistently replaced one this whole time,” Donnie says, and sways disinterestedly with the force behind Leo’s disgruntled shove of his shoulder. 

“Oh,” Raph says. “But why?” he asks a moment later. 

“So I could say I told you so when you ended up needing it,” Leo replies disingenuously. 

Casey could say that sensei carried an inhaler in his kit every time he went into the field. Even after Uncle Raph died, he stayed in the habit. It saved Casey’s life once, the day they discovered he had asthma in the worst possible way. Sensei didn’t say I told you so to anyone. That was never the point.

“He loves you,” Casey says. “That’s why.”

For a moment, none of them speak. Then Mikey’s smile fills the room like stubborn sunshine finally breaking through rain clouds. Donnie says, “Intelligent beyond your years. I understand now why Future Me kept you around.” Leo seems to be considering the pros and cons of sinking into his shell and never coming out again, hunched small and embarrassed beside his big brother.

Casey can’t see Raph’s expression, but he can imagine what it looks like. He knows the feeling.

It occurs to him, abruptly, that Draxum only saw the turtles very briefly after their mutation, before Splinter stole them away to a kinder life. Gio is older now than he would have been back then, but not by much. Draxum thought of them as weapons at first, not children, but the last few years of coparenting unruly teenagers have informed his opinion. There’s something very complicated about the way he studies Gio. 

Raph understands Mikey’s affection for the old goat, and he understands Splinter’s grudging tolerance, and thinks he himself lands somewhere in the middle of the two. Raph will never be able to forgive him for Leo’s fear of heights. Raph will never be able to thank him for those tireless hours he spent healing Mikey’s hands. 

If he asked to hold Gio in this moment, Raph would probably let him. But it’s a relief when Draxum only nods to himself and heads for the door without another word. 

“Always a pleasure to have you in our home,” Donnie says loudly. 

“Isn’t it, though?” Mikey says, either not catching the sarcasm or electing to ignore it. 

“You guys are setting the worst example for our little guy,” April says, as if she wasn’t in the thick of the commotion all of five minutes ago. 

“Nuh-uh,” Mikey says maturely. “We’re the best role models in the greater Manhattan area, right, Georgino?”

Equally as surprising as when he put his arms out to be picked up back in the market, Gio opens his mouth as if he’s going to answer, and then quickly snaps it shut without speaking, like he suddenly remembered he wasn’t supposed to. He turns his head to tuck his face against Raph’s plastron, probably because everyone’s looking at him. 

“Hey,” Mikey says in a softer tone, some of the joy bleeding from him in favor of something with tender edges. But it only makes Gio press his face harder against Raph’s scutes, tiny shoulders creeping up to his ears. 

“Hey Georgie,” Leo singsongs abruptly, and waits until one big dark eye peeks out at him to go on, “wanna see another magic trick?”

Gio nods, maybe because he actually does want to see one, or maybe just to be polite, or maybe just because Leo’s the one asking. Leo shows Gio his empty hands and then reaches past his spotted cheek to pull a snack size Kit Kat out of thin air, like a street magician making a coin appear from behind someone’s ear. 

“How’d this get back there?” he says, playfully grandiose, unwrapping it perfunctorily and putting the prize in Gio’s tentative hand. 

Leo has never had a sweet tooth, but nowadays he always has at least a couple of Laffy Taffys in his pocket, so he can read the jokes on the wrapper and Gio can eat the candy. Raph is glad he has something that’s less of a choking hazard to offer the kid, that he thought that far ahead about even this. 

Gio takes a bite of chocolate wafer and his eyes get huge and round. He stares at Leo like he’s literally never tasted anything like it before and crams the second bite in his mouth before he’s quite finished with the first. 

“Woah, slow down,” Raph half-laughs. 

“Yeah, there’s plenty more where that came from, kitkat,” Leo says. 

“You’re gonna spoil his dinner,” Mikey complains, noticeably doing nothing to stop Leo from unwrapping another chocolate. His red eyes are studying the scene carefully, clued in to what Raph has largely guessed already, what Leo has probably figured out before any of the rest of them—that there is something here worth worrying about—but he smiles all big and scrunches his beak when Gio glances his way. 

From elsewhere in the lair, a door slams. Raph suddenly remembers that they had texted Splinter the bare details when they got home and then proceeded to completely forget about the group chat that has probably been blowing up ever since. 

“Heads up, boys,” April says grimly. Donnie takes three decisive steps backwards that put him solidly behind Raphael, and then, as an afterthought, a metal limb unfolds from his battle shell that draws Mikey back with him. Coward. 

Gio looks from Leo up to Raph, chocolate smudging against his fingers the longer he hesitates to eat his last bite of candy. He looks worried about whatever has made Donnie and Mikey hide, and doesn’t know April well enough to understand that her warning was half a joke, and doesn’t know why Raph and Leo haven’t reacted at all. He doesn’t know what cue to follow. He’s waiting to see what they’re going to do. 

“It’s okay,” Raph tells him gently. He’s rumbling, deep and low in his chest, and doesn’t know when he started doing that. “Remember we told you about our dad? That’s him. He might be loud at first, but not because he’s mad.”

“Sometimes you can have really big feelings that aren’t mad or sad, and it’s hard to make them come out quiet,” Mikey pipes up from behind them. Raph feels a familiar weight on his shell, slight and crawling upwards, a second before Mikey’s face pokes over his shoulder. He beams, and adds, “Like when you’re so happy you burst out laughing!” 

“You got lost once, and he was really worried,” Leo says. “He’s gonna be so happy to see you. He can’t wait, that’s why he’s running all the way here.”

Splinter is mid-lecture by the time he makes it to the den. They could kind of hear it as he was making his way down the tunnel, mostly indistinguishable and bouncing around off the brickwork and creating an echo effect that only made it more distorted. The tone was loud and clear, though. Splinter was ticked off. 

“—all of my children have cellphones and for what? For what? They are lucky I do not pay for them because I would certainly stop paying for them now! Money down the drain!”

“Oh my god, we didn’t check our messages for like half an hour,” Leo mutters under his breath. 

“I heard that young man!” Splinter snaps as he finally rounds the corner. Talking right over Leo’s wounded “HOW?”, Splinter goes on, “You had me worried sick! What sort of message was that, hm? That my Gray was cursed by some miscreant in the Hidden City, and you called Baron Draxum before you called your own father, and then refused to—to—”

It’s glaringly obvious when he finally lays eyes on Giorgio. His mouth hangs open, then snaps shut, and Raph has that realization he had before with Draxum. Once upon a time, all the turtles were this small, but Draxum never got to hold any of them. Once upon a time, Gio lived when Splinter thought he had died, only he got lost and grew up somewhere out of his father’s sight. 

He must have grieved for this baby, Raph realizes. He must have mourned him. Even when Gio came home, there were memories and milestones Splinter would never get to have with him that he had with his other boys. 

“Oh, Gray,” Splinter murmurs. “My little baby Spot. Look at you, sweetheart.” 

Leo looks completely disarmed by the tone of voice, and Raph isn’t far behind him. He hasn’t heard that voice from dad in years, since he was a little turtle himself. It’s different even from the gentle way Splinter talks in the medbay when one of them is hurt, or at bedsides after bad dreams. 

And it’s not surprising when Gio drops the candy he was still holding onto and stretches out his arms again, more hopefully than when he wanted Raph to lift him, more urgently than when Leo offered him a treat. Parents are something that little orphans probably dream about. And here’s a parent, looking right at him, talking as if he loves him. Gio’s reaching insistently, even wriggling forward like he’ll tip out of Raph’s grip completely if he has to.

Splinter is in front of Raph in the blink of an eye, lifting Gio out of his arms and tucking him close. He makes it look so natural, as if his arms aren’t made to make movies or fight endless battles in the Nexus, actually, they’re meant to do exactly this. Hold little turtles and rock them slightly, sticky smudged fingers and all. 

His eyes are wet. Raph is eighteen, and definitely still not old enough that he can bear to watch his dad cry. He reaches blindly for a nearby sibling, finds Donnie, and curls an arm around him. Tellingly, Donnie allows the hug without so much as a token hiss.