#yellow writes

"You don't get it," Raph says softly, a rare vulnerability breaking through the tension. "You don't know what it's like to be the family screw-up."

Donnie turns partly on his side towards Raph, fidgeting indecisively with the edges of his blanket. He's so tired. He doesn't know how to have this conversation.

Then stop screwing up, a part of him wants to say, and he wonders when he internalized such a harsh view on life. He knows, at any rate, that his first thought born of months of quiet frustration isn't the right one.

Thankfully, Mikey is there, curled up on the couch instead of in the pile of blankets on the floor.

"Nobody ever said you're a screw-up, dude," he chortles, as if the idea came out of nowhere and has no merit. It probably doesn't. At this late hour, Donnie can't tell.

Raph snorts. "You don't have to say it. I get it. I don't blame you."

Donnie extends a hand, as if they're little kids again and he's going to hold his brother's arm while they fall asleep, just so they both know they're not alone in the dark, that at least one person will still be there in the morning. At the last moment, he remembers he's an adult, and the open hand becomes a pointing finger resting firmly just inches from Raph's plastron.

"You," he slurs, "Are very good at sleeping. You should teach me sometime."

Raph snorts, and when he speaks again it's just a touch lighter than it was.

"I'm not as good at sleeping as you think."

Donnie says nothing, because what he really meant, and they both know it, is that Raph is good at keeping secrets. Any further details or questions about what he does while the others are sleeping would be throwing a lit match in a tank of gasoline.

"You're good at lots of things," Mikey protests. "Like fighting."

Donnie's eyes open wider in alarm. He sees Raph mirroring his expression, and they quickly look away from each other. They know what Mikey meant, that it was a compliment to Raph's skill in the dojo and nothing else.

"Soon," Mikey yawned, "Leo will be back and we can all fight together. Just like old times."

Donnie grimaced. If Mikey had been just a little more awake, he might have reminded him, for his own sake, that old times were never coming back. Or perhaps, if he himself were a little more awake, he wouldn't have.

Soon Mikey is snoring softly, leaving the ghost of old times between his remaining brothers. They used to have fun on nights like this, staying up late talking and watching movies, refusing to retreat to their own rooms, pulling their blankets out to the shared space and finally falling asleep together. Now it feels a bit like a joke, and Donnie can't figure out what they did wrong.

"We don't need Leo," he states firmly.

"I know," Raph snaps, and Donnie's irritation spikes because over the past few months it couldn't be more obvious that Raph does not know. Maybe if he can explain it better he can finally fix this, and they can all feel at home here again.

"We're allowed to miss him without needing him."

Raph sighs, and he sounds as tired as Donnie feels, and even more bitter.

"You need sleep," he says instead of answering. "Step one: close your eyes."

"Mm, too complicated. Do you have a beginner's course?"

"Yeah. Stare at the ceiling thinking about all the ways you screwed up, and hope no one notices."

Donnie rolls over to stare at the ceiling, following directions and giving Raph some vague semblance of privacy. "I don't think you're a screw-up."

Raph is quiet. He's clearly going to let Donnie think he fell asleep.

He doesn't believe him. Maybe if he'd answered quickly and confidently when it first came up, but not now. He can't take back his initial thought, which he's half-convinced Raph could read on his face, even in the dark without directly looking at him.

He screwed up.

Early in the day, just like always, there was a quiet bustle around the staff dorm as the staff of Duel Academia all shuffled around, readying themselves to switch on for the day. A quiet chatter, a dull pillowy tiredness as the remnants of slumber were shaken off, the quiet clacking of cutlery as the members of staff ate. 

That’s what Tome awoke to, as she had now for years. 

Most members of staff used the dorms in one way or another, usually as their main residence and respite from the students. That being said, it wasn’t unheard of for some of her colleagues to use it more as a storage area than a living space, instead preferring to hole themselves away in their studies where they had fashioned makeshift homesteads in. It tended to be those people whom she would often come across complaining about sore eyes or backs while making no move to fix the cause. In her first few years at the Duel Academy, she had simply let the mutterings pass by, though these days she was much more inclined to give them a good scolding about their terrible habits. 

“What kind of impression is that to leave on your poor students?” Was a phrase she found had become almost second nature to her. Kabayama had once teased her that she must say it in her sleep, though no evidence had come of such.

In any case, he wouldn’t know, as the only other staff members who tended against using the dorms (despite having rooms) were the heads of the student dorms like himself, who had their own rooms in their respective dorms for the ease of dealing with students. 

Even Pharaoh had a room, despite being a cat. In truth, it wasn’t actually his room, but the late Daitokuji had put up the cat’s nametag under his own. With the way the cat would often wander in despite officially residing at the Red Dorm, the dorm residents had elected to simply leave it as was. Really, it was a toss-up as to whether he was there solely to get some peace and quiet from the teenagers of Osiris, from habit, or something else. To be quite honest, despite liking them, Tome couldn’t claim to know much about cats. In her mind, she liked to think that the lazy tabby missed his previous owner, in his own way. 

Her own room was rather clean, as always. She didn’t really own many possessions in the first place, having thrown out a lot of her things before she came to the island. 

“It’s because it’s an island,” she told herself, at the time, “there’s limited space.” 

At the time, it was a convenient excuse, just like the job itself, to remove herself from her previous life. Uproot everything and become someone else. It was never too late to discover yourself, she had read in a book around that time. The stars just align like that sometimes, she thought. She had just about not taken the job offer, having fallen into a routine and complacency with her then-current job despite herself.

It felt like an age ago, that part of her life, and she supposed to the students of the Academia it would seem as much, too. However, being the age she was, the years felt much less substantial, despite the undoubtedly important things that happened during them. 

She would hazard to say that it started about a decade ago, perhaps just a bit more than that. Before the Academia had first opened its doors, at the very least. 

All of her friends had long since settled in with husbands and children, quitting their jobs to become full-time housewives. They were all happy with their arrangements, despite their occasional gripes about child rearing and their husbands – not that she’d know anything about it, herself. When they met up, they would always bring their children and try to encourage her to meet someone, to settle down herself. 

As much as she did like children, and she really did, she couldn’t imagine herself dedicating her existence to raising one. It was much different looking after someone else’s children than it was to have one, after all. 

That all being said, it wasn’t like she was much of a career woman. Much like her friends had been, she had been a temp worker for a company. The same one for years, contract constantly renewed yet somehow never getting an offer for a proper full-time job, while many of her younger peers would get the offers instead of her. 

It would just get worse, she realised at some point, after years of being passed over and getting no answers as to why. She wasn’t getting any younger, her experience didn’t matter to her company – she didn’t matter to the company.

It was maddening. 

At the time, she had a slew of hobbies she had half-abandoned. All through her life she’d searched for that one hobby. Music, art, knitting, sewing, hiking, carving – if you could name it, she’d probably given it a go at least once. If you could name it, she’d probably also abandoned it, skills and knowledge on the subject half-baked at best. 

It was around this time, pondering quitting and generally being in a state where she had no clue what she wanted of herself or her future, that she came across Duel Monsters. 

‘Came across’ would perhaps seem a crude way to put it, though she couldn’t really say there was a better way to put it. She had been vaguely aware of it when it first started to make a name for itself, though she had always considered it a hobby for a younger generation than her. It stayed that way for a while, too, and even when she became more involved it wasn’t in the way she would have expected. 

She’d come across Duel Monsters, that much was true, but she didn’t do much with the awareness until a few years after, when she suddenly found herself working in a card shop. Not the shop at Duel Academia, not just yet, but a different one that was near where she lived. 

It was an odd leap. She had seen the job offering advertised in the shop’s window while she was coming back from shopping one weekend and maybe she was feeling particularly at odds with herself that day, just enough to give her that rush of resolve and confidence to go in and inquire about the opening. 

It wasn’t soon after that she found herself with a lower paying job where she didn’t even know how to use what she was selling properly. 

For a time, however, she found herself content in the job. It was slow-paced, but she was never bored. More than anything, she supposed that she finally felt appreciated – as though her work meant something. 

What Tome always loved most about working in the card shop – both that first one and the Academy shop – was that she could see the results as soon as they happened. She didn’t know how to play the game, but she knew the products well, and she would often chat with patrons of the store about the new products while they would comment about how good they would be to their deck. Even though she didn’t really understand, what she could understand was their passion, which in turn just made her even more passionate herself. 

Sometimes, when it was a particularly slow day for the shop, a patron would rope her into a game, sometimes young children, sometimes young adults who were regulars at the store. She never became good, per se – she never really had the head for the specific kind of on-the-fly strategy that one needed to become as such – but she enjoyed engaging with the shop’s clientele in that sort of way, listening patiently as they walked her through the mechanics of whatever deck they’d cobbled together for her on that day. 

It was a song and dance that she was convinced she would end up staying in until she eventually retired – whenever that ended up being. It wasn’t until a few years at the job that she found out about the Academia beyond the fact that it was being built.

They were looking for staff, at the time. Most relevant to herself, they were looking for someone to run the card shop. It would, in technicality, be owned by Kaiba Corp, but the reality was that they were looking for someone who would act as the owner. 

It would be a leap and a jump, a different kind of responsibility from what she was used to. That’s what she thought. Someone her age, with only what she viewed as a barely passable knowledge of the game’s mechanics, working at a school on the subject? She only applied late one night, not expecting much. Just a what-if. A bit of whimsy, surely. 

When she got the interview offer, she was stunned. When she got an offer? Now that’s when she was sure she was dreaming. 

The problem came when it seemed that everyone else thought so, too. 

Her family had never quite been the most supportive. Both of her brothers had gone on to work lucrative office jobs much like their father, while her mother had always been a housewife. It was a very classic family set-up, one that mirrored just about all of her friends’ at the time. 

When she first decided to go to university like her elder brother, her parents were unsure. It was what everyone was doing these days, she’d convinced them, many women were going to university now, it wasn’t like when they were her age. It’s not like she would be moving away from home, or going out galavanting with men (a concern her mother had constantly brought up even after she graduated). She just wanted to learn more, that was all! 

She just about quit before her final year despite having had to argue her way into the university in the first place, though it was only the fact that she’d gotten into an argument with her mother about how she’d ‘always known that university was a waste of time’ that had made her continue out of pure spite. Looking back, it was an episode that was likely long-coming. It was the first time she could think of when she’d properly yelled at either of her parents. Before university became a subject, she’d always just gone along with what they wanted. 

It wasn’t as though they were particularly demanding parents, not at all, but they were definitely set in their ways and similarly very scared and worried for her as not only their child, but perhaps most importantly their only daughter. She knew, always, that they wanted the best for her, but as the offer to work at Duel Academia came in, that was what really made it sink in that sometimes good intentions aren’t enough. 

When she brought it up at first, they had taken the news in an oddly subdued way. She’d never told them about having left her office job despite it having been years, so she’d thought at the time that perhaps she’d just dumped too much on them at once. A week later, she visited home only to be faced with the entire family – her brother’s wives included – as though staging an intervention. 

It started as a conversation. She knew how to give presentations, she knew how to lay out the facts and how the pros outweighed the cons. It crescendoed into an argument. She knew how to deal with children screaming and yelling, but not adults, not like this. There was no grinning and nodding that she could do to get through it. It was uncomfortable for everyone except for her parents, it felt like. Her brothers stood by them, trying to calm them down to a normal level while her sister-in-laws sat by, possibly even more uncomfortable than she was. Honestly, she was pretty sure that her brothers and sister-in-laws hadn’t even known that it wasn’t simply a family gathering until their parents started getting riled up. 

She left without their blessings on the matter. If they weren’t going to congratulate her, she decided, that was fine. She was beyond old enough to make the decision herself, when it would only affect her. The main reason she had thought to say something to them in the first place when she hadn’t when she previously changed jobs was because it required her to make a substantial move. 

Not long after, she found herself sorting through her house. A small ‘keep’ pile, versus the growing ‘out’ pile. Over the course of the following two weeks, she’d got rid of everything she had decided wasn’t necessary, knowing that by the end of the month she’d also be rid of her flat, instead on her way to an island where she would live until who knew when with no one she knew. 

It wasn’t until a few days before her departure date that she found herself sitting in her empty flat, wondering if she really wanted to leave on such a note. The next day, she showed up at her parents’ house once more and told them in no uncertain terms that she had accepted the offer and was due to leave the following day, no matter what they felt about it. 

Looking back, it all felt rather dramatic. She had been old then, but now that she was even older, it felt ridiculous. Perhaps that’s just what time and distance do, though. Even now, near enough a decade on the island and she couldn’t imagine her parents ever getting over it, even if they had begrudgingly come around to it, if only so that she didn’t cut contact with them completely having realised there was no changing her mind. 

She enjoyed it, though, even if instead of a flat she only had a room – a rather nice room, that being said. Her colleagues and the students were all such characters that there was never a dull day, and even though the past few years had been particularly odd on the island, she had never found herself wanting to leave.

The frights and struggles she’d endured over the years were worth it if she could stay in the place that she had chosen and carved out for herself. That’s what she was sure of. 

"You're not falling for this, right?" he asked as soon as they were alone. "You know it's a trap."

"I know," Leo assured him, "But it's also a chance."

"A chance? For what? Him to stab us in the back?"

Leo didn't answer right away. Instead, he moved with an infuriating calm, steady and unhurried, towards the kitchen.

He was making tea.

Raph followed, refusing to let himself breathe deeply and walk slowly the same way Leo was. "You know he planned all that so he could get on the inside. Explain to me what I'm missing, that we're going along with every step of his plan?"

"We won't go along with every step." Leo hesitated at the stove, calm aura slipping for a moment as he frowned at the unfamiliar buttons. "He doesn't expect us to know what he's up to."

Raph leaned against the counter, starting to feel a little more grounded. "So you do have a plan."

"I have a backup plan," Leo corrected firmly, "That I hope we don't have to use."

"Yeah, yeah, I get it. He never had a real home before, he's trying to look out for his brothers, and he didn't have Master Splinter to count on either. I know the score, bro. We'll give him a chance."

Leo dipped his head in a fraction of a nod. "I'll need you to hold back a bit, Raph. If our first plan fails, I don't want him caught completely off guard."

"Why? He sure thinks he's gonna catch us completely off guard."

"Raph."

"Look, he knows I don't trust him. He knows that ain't changing. He and I understand each other. It's you that's got me worried."

"I understand it's a risk."

Raph snorted. Leo's tea kettle started whistling. For a moment, they let it, feeling each other's uncertainty as the future hung between them.

Leo turned back to the stove, easy footfalls filling the small space as he retrieved two mugs. The noise of his movements floated around the kitchen. Raph remembered a time when he wouldn't let his guard down so much, even when it was just their family.

Now, someone who aimed for his defeat was just in the other room, and he moved with confidence and peace.

"You know," Leo held a mug out to him, "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind."

Raph held the steaming beverage close to his chest, enjoying the smell more than he would the taste.

"So let's not take out his eye. Let's just give him a flick on the forehead so he knows we ain't gonna take it all lying down."

Leo smiled grimly. "I promise we won't go in blind."

Raph closed his eyes, breathing in lavender and lemon.

"I know how we'r going in. I'm worried how we're gonna come out."