my latest TMNT fanfic - Distant Shore

summary: Leo is reunited with a family he never knew he had. It's a lot to deal with.

rating: teen and up / fandom: TMNT Mutant Mayhem (2023) / chapters: 2/?

notes: this is only the first chapter of my mutant mayhem fic Distant Shore. you can read the full thing here on ao3! 

Respect was drilled into him at a very early age. Leo traversed daily life keenly aware of the temperament of the over-pressurized generator keeping him and his cousins afloat. 

Superfly worked hard to make life good. As the oldest, he was responsible for them. He was responsible for feeding them, keeping a roof over their heads, and keeping heads on their shoulders. Because of humans, he’d tell them. Humans hated them. Most wouldn’t even think twice about running in fear from a non-human. Some didn’t need much provocation to resort to violence. 

Leo was old enough to see it in everything. He saw humans chase rats out of doors with broom handles. Or, for the unlucky ones, Leo watched the ones killed in traps dumped unceremoniously into trash bins. 

For him, it was clear. He respected his cousin. No matter how far he took it, or how bad things got, it was always a matter of respect. 

Superfly never tolerated disrespect. That was provocation enough to resort to violence. And from that hard line of fear, to avoid his wrath, is where respect is forged. 

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.

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Seconds crawl towards 3am.

In the discomforts of deep underearth and surrounded by concrete, there is not a sound.

On the strike of three, as if he were holding his breath in his sleep, Leo finds himself jolted awake. Swiping his hand across his face, it comes back damp.

He tenses his fingers. Angrily, he wipes his forehead, his neck, and the back of his head.

It’s sweat. It’s sweat, now.

Where is he, he asks himself. Bebop? Rocksteady? It makes sense that they’re out, somewhere, probably. But… Even Wingnut? She’s never far.  

The fairy lights above him sway from how quickly he throws himself out of his sheets. It’s too quiet—where even is Mondo? This doesn’t make any sense. Maybe he was too fast because his head spins, and he lurches where he stands. He catches a chair and sways.

He sucks on his teeth and hisses. Shakes his head. A glossy, discarded comic book page crinkles under his toes.

The room stops spinning and—right. Right. He’s here now. Home-not-home with his family-not-family. He exhales, sliding the comic away with his foot. His brothers are messy. It was wrinkled and creased painfully already, probably tossed on the floor by Mikey when he was finished reading it on his pipe above Raph’s mattress. When he looks around, nothing moves, and not a peep can be heard from the three sleeping mounds around him.

His shadow glides over movie posters and trinkets as he rummages for his things. Raph emptied his nightstand for him, dragged it next to his bed, and told him it was his. He can use it. It’s fine if he uses it. As kind as the gesture was, it made him feel like a burden when Raph had said it so bitterly and couldn’t even look at him after. Raph dumped his things in a rather passive-aggressive pile next to his bed. Unnecessary, he thought, but it wasn’t uncalled for.

It’s only been a few days and everything he thought he ever knew is different. Everything, everything is different; he hates that it’s different, but his patrol routine is as familiar to him as a handle in his grip and a reflective glint at his hip.

He rubs the last of the sweat out of his eyes.

He wakes up for real this time. Slower now, Leo uses meticulous care securing his belongings. It’s not much. Everything, except for the swords, fits in a single drawer. Tucked away in a small satchel, amidst the little tools of his skills, are some fortune cookies. They’re just yellow crumbs in plastic wrappers now.

Someone sighs.

Leo’s eyes flicker to the bunk beds to catch Raph turning over. He waits. Then, once nothing else happens, he eases the drawer shut.

He makes his bed quietly. He was raised right, after all. By Scumbug, anyways, because most of the other guys couldn’t be assed to tidy up the bed piles. Leo guessed she was sort of motherly like that in a weird way. He never did mind.

As he stands, his knees ache when they’re reminded of previous dislocations. He pats his knees, there, there. It’s okay. Walk it off. Always walk it off. He’ll be fine.

Carefully, he walks to the curtains. It’s quiet, still, just as it always was at this hour when everyone was too tired for any mayhem or late supply runs. That's a good thing. He always preferred doing patrols on his own, anyhow. He doesn’t know what the deal is with his brothers but it’s obvious they’re still resting from almost dying alongside every human. 

Donatello had the largest crack in their shells out of all of them. Leo was spared from the worst of it.

It doesn’t matter why. Leo shakes off that guilty feeling. He helped his brothers with the injuries on their shells. The road rashes too. The road rash was the worst of it. Raph’s hands were blistered in it. 

Raph had yanked his hands away from Leo when he tried wiping it with alcohol. Their dad had to step in to finish. He feels guilty about that.

So. They were hurt. Ultimately recovering just fine. It's fine if they didn’t do patrols. He wasn’t going to ask about the lack of patrols. He’d rather be left alone about it. All this change shouldn’t stop that, he thinks. The one thing he’s done for as long as he can remember has to stay. Sure, he’ll have to relearn the perimeter. He doesn’t exactly know where he is in relation to the surface. All his usual haunts might be gone. A lot of buildings got destroyed during Superfly’s plan.

Superfly’s failed plan.

“Leo?”

Shitshitshitshit. Whatever happened to resting?

Leo jolts. Mikey’s head is peeking out from his perch on the bed above Raph’s. He’s taken his mask off, and Leo thinks this is the first time he’s seen his bare face, but… That’s not true, is it? He just doesn’t remember.

The other two are sleeping. Thankfully, Mikey keeps his voice down. “Where are you going?”

Leo stifles any sign of panic on his face, shoving his hands behind his shell. It’s probably just the fact that it’s late, and they’re tired, but Leo feels a little guilty. He knows rationally that it’s perfectly normal that he doesn’t remember a face he hadn’t seen since he was a fresh mutant. But he wishes he did. At least, that way, he could say that he missed it.

Leo struggles to think of an answer. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Are you going out?” Mikey sits up in bed now, a lot more awake. Crap. “Why do you have your swords?” He really, really doesn’t need Mikey asking why he has his swords. Is he going to tell the others? Will they be mad? Will their dad be mad? 

“No- my uh,” Leo shrugs, thinking of any excuse at all, “I’m just going for a walk. My leg was hurting. I guess I’m just feeling cramped… Fresh air, you know?” God, he’s stupid. Mikey’s going to tell. They’re all going to think he’s weird and be mad at him.  

“Oh.”

It makes his skin crawl. Defensively, he thinks that it’s not really anyone’s business why he wants his swords on him. 

Leo cringes at his own lack of response. He was never good at filling in these awkward pauses. Usually, he didn’t need to. In a shipwreck of nine mutants, someone was always quick to fill in the pauses.

“Were you having nightmares again?”

“What?” 

Leo’s cool neutral breaks into a puzzled gawk. Mikey blinks at him like Leo is the one being weird right now. And, maybe he is. Leo was never really good at lying. To make up for that, he withholds as much emotion as possible whenever he’s confronted with anything. The less anyone can infer about him, the better. He finds himself doing it even when he doesn’t mean to. 

It’s easier to let the question wash under him by ignoring it. 

Untensing his shoulders, Leo schools his face into something a little less readable. He looks away. Mikey sounds seriously worried when he eventually asks if he’s coming back.

Weird comments aside, like very aside- because, seriously, has Mikey been watching him sleep? That’s being pushed to the furthest reaches of his mind, never to be brought up again. 

Leo needs to attempt damage control. 

“Yeah,” he whispers, “I’m just going for a walk.”

“Up there?” 

Mikey means the surface. He says it like he doesn’t want Leo on the surface, like it’ll break his heart. Fuck. He’s not used to this feeling. Why is Mikey making that face and why does he feel compelled to-

“No,” he relinquishes, “No, man. I’m just using the bathroom. I’ll be right back.” This time, Leo even tries to sound comforting. It feels weird. He doesn’t know if he's doing it right.

Why is having younger brothers so complicated?

But, somehow, it works. Mikey looks relieved. “Right,” he says, smiling. He slumps on his pillow. “Sorry. I don’t really like the dark either. Sometimes I take my nunchucks, just in case. You know?”

That much was obvious. Christmas lights drape around Mikey’s bed, and his wall is covered in glowing stars too. Honestly, with the fairy lights hung from the ceiling pipes, it was kind of overkill. Leo preferred the dark. Donnie also had a lot of gradient lights coming from his tent. It seemed Raph and him were the only ones preferring the dark. 

Stiffly, Leo flexes his fingers around his shoulder. 

“Yeah,” he says, “I know.”

.

.

.

Patrol is a bust. 

Leo washes his hands in the bathroom sink, and tries not to think about how Mikey is waiting for him to come back. The water rushes cold. He scrubs under his nails. 

It’s cramped. Everything here is cramped. He couldn’t ignore the homey charm. The dinginess is familiar, and wet, and Leo was used to that. But suffocating closeness, elbows never to far from bumping into something. It’s hard to breathe comfortably. 

First, home was the streets. In alleyways out of sight but always in danger. Pretty soon, home was a graveyard of ships marooned on the shores of Staten. Life could only be so good in hiding. But Superfly was smart, too, and it was only thanks to him that they could score in on all of life’s pleasures that humans were too greedy to share. 

Leo remembers it began with nice couches. Long and sleek ones, in private rooms with humans. 

Superfly got involved in what he liked to call The Business. Business started before Leo was old enough to really remember how it began. It was a bloody thing. A noisy thing. It was more dangerous for them than it was for the humans they worked with. When Leo was old enough, he got off the couches and played a role in it too. 

He scrubbed. He couldn’t get Raph’s hands out of his mind. Where Raph flinched, Leo did not. 

.

.

.

Leo hardly twitches as Raph’s sai flies past his head. 

His eyes flicked off the phone screen as the metal tinked on the wall to his left, then clambered noisily at his feet. Why their dad trusted Raphael with sharp objects is a mystery to him. 

Mikey took it with a lot less grace. 

He yelps, clinging to Leo’s arm and sending them lurching to the side of the beanbag chair. Leo fumbles and catches Mikey’s phone. Then he struggles to pause the YouTube video they were watching together as Mikey squawks about what Raph’s problem is. 

“I’ll tell you his problem!” Donnie interjects, hackles raised and gesturing. “Uh! His problem is that he doesn’t know anything about feng shui. I keep telling him—” 

“Feng shui? I put the posters up, they’re up, stop touching- hey!”  

“You put them all in a line! It looks ridiculous, man, I’m fixing it!” 

On what Leo would consider Raph and Mikey’s side of the room, his brothers tussle in front of a wall of movie posters. Originally, Raph was helping Mikey move their things around. Mikey was the one who wanted to rearrange their wall, but, as Leo was quickly learning, what Mikey says he wants to do will be very different from what he will do. Only a few minutes into taking down posters, Mikey became distracted by Leo’s question about one of the movies.

Raph didn’t seem to mind. Leo was pulled to sit next to Mikey to watch trailer videos on his phone. It was pretty interesting. Leo’s cousins had a television, and they’d seen plenty of movies on it, but he had never used a phone before. He didn’t realize there were way more movies than he thought existed, and he could watch the trailers for all of them on a phone screen. 

Mikey let him hold it and said it was a literal travesty that a teenager had gone without a phone for so long. 

Leo said it was fine, there was plenty else to keep him busy.  

That was when Donnie had walked in, sounding a lot like he was going to tell Leo something, but was immediately distracted by Raph’s decor preferences. 

“I could do a lot less with the micromanaging!”

“Uh-huh, yeah, you could! That’s why I’m helping. If I have to look at this every day—”

Raph groans, “You don’t see me nitpicking your side of the room. Which is- it’s totally unfair you get a whole side, I’m just gonna say.”

Mikey doesn’t have anything to add to the conversation besides an exaggerated eyeroll. He nudges Leo’s shoulder and holds his hand out without much care to intervene, asking for his phone back. 

Leo feels a heat of concern warm the back of his neck. Feeling quieter than he already was, Leo protects the phone to his chest. His sight lands on Raph’s hands, which don’t seem to be drawn towards the remaining sai on his belt. “Um, should we-“

“I hear fighting!” Splinter calls from the living room. “Why do I hear fighting! Leonardo?”

Leo sits up, rod-straight. 

“Oh yeah, dad said to come get you.” Donnie says, easily, not even paying Leo any mind as he yanked his hand from Raph’s mouth. “Ew! DAD! Raph licked me!” 

He doesn’t hear what comes next. Sometimes, Superfly's yelling bellowed the shipyard, thicker than the fog that hid them. The only thing he could do was avoid the receiving end of it. He got pretty good at that. Splinter’s call was soft, curious, and only loud enough to reach him from the living room. It wasn’t safe to decide yet if he should hide from it, too. There aren’t that many good hiding places here. He already checked. 

“Leo? Come out, I need to ask you a-” Splinter cuts himself off when he sees Leo peeking out from the doorway. He smiles so brightly, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “There you are. You’re so quiet.” 

He doesn’t step all the way out at first. Just enough to see. If Splinter’s eyes narrow, if his voice raises, he’ll bolt. He clutches the curtain in anticipation.

Splinter just beams at him.

Scumbug is with him. She holds a wide-open book in her lap. She smiles at him But she’s almost always smiling. It’s not a reliable reading on the situation. She holds her hand out to him to take, gesturing for him to come closer. 

It’s comforting to take Scumbug’s small hand in his own. It calms the turning in his stomach. He eases himself into the spot she makes for him between her and Splinter, and he figures it must be for her own security. His thumb strokes her palm. 

“Sorry, um. Were we too loud?” 

“I don’t mind loud.” Splinter starts.  “But there are rules. Oooonly fighting in the dojo,” he waggles his finger. They can still hear fighting in the bedroom. “Fingers in eyes, no. Biting, no. Licking… Well.” He sighs, speaking from years of experience. “Is gross, but I’ll allow it.” 

Gross. Leo nods, looking around the living room, squinting. This couch is worn in. Fluffy and fraying ends along the edges, unlike the sleek leather couches he was used to. Where the furniture is sparse, there are loads of framed photos hanging on the bricks and pipes. He isn’t in any of them.

Everything is out to see, pillows and weapons lying about, the kitchen behind them, the small bathroom, the exit—

“Where’s the dojo?”

“We’re in the dojo.” Splinter says. He takes the wide book from Scumbug and flips to the beginning. “Anyway. I was showing our family photos, I think she likes them!”

Splinter lowers his voice between them. “She does like them, right?” 

Scumbug excitedly leans over to see the first photos again, the book being placed in his lap. Now that smile makes sense. Superfly didn’t allow photos. Cameras were against the rules, and so were most flip phones. Superfly was the only one with a personal rotation of burner phones. 

Scumbug buzzes next to him like she wants to speak to Splinter, but he looks at her hesitantly. It goes over his head, and Leo can appreciate the effort to appear as if he wants to understand. 

“Oh, yeah. She uh,” Leo rubs the back of his neck with a jittery smile, “She says she’s jealous. We don’t have any photos of us.”

Any security footage of them was always scrubbed.

Scumbug also gushes about how adorable he looks with all that baby fat, she forgot how cute and chubby he used to be when she and the others first found him. 

And be damned if he isn’t a faithful interpreter. 

But he does not say that part out loud. 

Splinters starts carefully, and Leo is sure this is going to be where he gets kicked out. The book is gently placed in his lap. It’s hefty.

“I wanted to show you our family photos. Later we can take more.”

Leo winces at that. “Later?”

“But first, I want to show you these. They are special to me.” 

The first photo is of all four of the boys. Donnie is mid-blink, Raph is scowling at something just off-camera, Mikey is holding up what might be a popsicle in both hands like a trophy. And Leo—the other Leo—is just a blur running towards the camera. A single blue eye is in focus. 

His throat goes dry. He doesn’t realize he’s holding his breath until Scumbug leans against his arm, still buzzing quietly. She makes a small noise that’s probably meant to be encouraging.

Splinter doesn’t say much. Just lets the photo speak. He’s watching Leo, not the page. The weight of the book, the photo, the moment. It all starts pressing in from the edges. Leo flips the book closed with more force than he means to. 

“Can we—uh. Can we do this later?” he asks quickly, words crowding into each other. “Just-maybe not right now?”

Splinter’s gaze softens. He nods. 

“That’s okay,” he says. “But…before you go. Would it be alright if I had a hug?”

Leo tugs his fingers nervously. “I...” 

Splinter adds, gently, “I know you said you’re not a fan of touching. But would you let me?”

He hesitates.

He doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know why it’s so hard to say yes.

Scumbug nudges him again, and something in his chest surrenders. Slowly, awkwardly, Leo leans into his father’s arms. His dad holds him like he means it. Like he has time.

His hands are warm, encompassing. They settle around Leo’s shoulders, then move in small circles over the curve of his shell. Soothing.

Leo holds very, very still.

His father’s hand finds it. An old scar, long and jagged and ugly once. When it was fresh, it had spanned the length of his shell. Years later, it disappears beneath Dad’s steady palm.

Splinter says nothing about it. Just strokes over it once. Once more. Then stills.

“You’re okay?” he asks, low and quiet.

“Yeah.” Leo stares the middle distance over Splinter’s shoulder. It feels awkward to lean down for a hug. “Yeah, I’m good. I can go now, dad.”

He makes it sound like an accident. Lets it hang between them. Splinter doesn’t react much. Just exhales. Maybe smiles.

“I’ll let you get back to your brothers.”

Leo pulls away too fast. The motion stutters, ungraceful, out of sync. He can feel the moment closing before he’s ready, before he’s figured out what it meant or how to hold it.

But Splinter lets him go. That’s okay.

Leo swipes his hands down the sides of his pants, steadying himself. “Right. Sorry for the noise, I’ll… Say something. I guess.” The fighting in the bedroom has gone suspiciously quiet at this point so maybe he won’t say anything at all. “Maybe we can all do something together after dinner?” 

Splinter strokes his chin hair then brightens up. “I’ve got just the thing!”