Archive of Our Own

The thing is, Leo has always been able to turn on the charm in a dime. That’s kind of his whole thing.

It’s like one of those knee-jerk reactions to fill an uncomfortable silence with a witty remark, bringing the mood up even if only a smidge, it’s always worked a treat in those sticky, uncomfortable situations he often found himself in. 

So when he’s on flat on his shell, feeling the heavy foot of the Krang press tight against him, punching all the air out of his already burning lungs, he knows he has at least one more good joke left in him.

“Damn bitch, you live like this?”

He knows it’s a reference that breezes entirely over the alien’s head, totally unappreciated and unreciprocated as it roars in his face and whirls him up into the gravity-less air only to slam him back down again.

Prison dimension was not fun. Self sacrificing and all that jazz? Not normally his style, but the tiny bit of strength it gives him knowing his brothers were on the other side of that key, safe and sound?

Totally 100% worth it. 

He chokes out a breath as he skids to a stop; limbs flail about uselessly, like one of those rag doll web games he and Mike would spend endless hours entertaining themselves with on Don’s computer as kids, he goes entirely limp even when he tries to will himself to move. 

“You insufferable little brat! ” The Krang isn’t done with him yet it appears, as pink, wet tendrils drive around his neck, yanking him upwards in one swift motion.

Leo’s sure he feels something crack and break but whatever pain bursts in that moment is swallowed up by the rest of his body buzzing with each ache and hurt already brought down on him.

“You know…” Leo manages to cough up the words around a sly, sliding smile. “I get that a lot?”

The Krang throws him with force — weightless for only a moment as he soars through the air, he wonders how long he could really endure until his body would give in. 

He connects with the ground, knocking the wind, the everything out of him as he rolls for what feels like absolute miles.

Somehow, he still has his photograph still crushed tightly in his palm, fingers working on every reflex to stay furled around it like it were the key itself.

The Krang slides over him, looming over him with sheer size that it almost swallows Leo up whole in its shadow. “You,” it hisses. “Will die here!”

Leo can’t lift his head anymore. Everything is too heavy and cumbersome and all his remaining strength is shunted off into making sure he doesn’t let go of that picture in his hand.

He laughs. Something wet bursting in his chest. “That,” he huffs, “was kind of the point.”

This is it , he thinks simply. This is the moment I die. 

He feels the Krang pick him up by a shoulder, tossing him high, and all Leo tries to think about is what his last thoughts should be.

It doesn’t take long for an idea to pop up in his head; he always was good at thinking on the spot.

He squeezes his eyes tight, brain pulsing heavily in his skull as his body comes back down again, smashing hard against the ground, cheek pressed wetly against something solid, he thinks of his family.

It isn’t so much like in the movies where it’s all the greatest highlights sounding off in his head to spur him on. 

It’s little meaningless snippets he must have somehow saved up over the years. Donnie laughing hard enough to shoot milk out his nostrils. Mikey crying over his first Studio Ghibli movie with him. Raph getting the hiccups so bad he nearly chewed a hole in the couch out of frustration. 

His eyes are wet and there’s the feeling in his lungs returning to shake out a sob. He knows he did the right thing — he knows he has, but boy , he could do with a quick fix to this where he was back at home, smothered by a tangle of multiple arms wrapped around him where it felt safe and unbreakable, no matter what big, pink, squishy mother fuckers from space tried to do to destroy it.

And yeah, Leo was a million worlds away from home and that particular force, but he still felt it even from here because that’s how big his family loved him, even when he’d screwed up. 

He’s floating, no longer aware to hazard a guess in which direction he was going, when he’s pulled back down again, something wet and warm snaking around his ankle, crushing the bone in a quick, tight squeeze. 

“Why won’t you just die!” The Krang pulls him close enough for the gooey tip of his tongue to lick across his face, for his hot, stale breath to dance rancidly across his scales. 

Leo grimaces, as best he can when every micro movement in his body feels impossible, and tries weakly to pull his head away on pure instinct alone.

“You tell me, man.”

He goes to take one last breath to rattle about in his broken, aching ribs when he feels the air shift , something hot and cold pulsing through the atmosphere in an almost dizzying way.

His head tips all the way back, lolling almost lifelessly on his shoulders where he can upside down-watch something golden and amazing crack open just a few feet away from him.

Those tears he’d been biting back now falling freely from his eyes. The last breath isn’t actually his last, but comes out all wobbly and waterlogged nonetheless as his chest spasms, and his body continues to protest against everything that tells him to just lay down and die.

“Touching,” the Krang spits the words at him, holding him in a death grip, shaking him to lift his head upwards again to face him again. “Yet a sorry excuse for a rescue mission.”

A rescue mission was a rescue mission, regardless, in Leo’s eyes. Electricity crackles and burns from behind him, and over his own rushing pulse thrumming at his temples, he swears he can hear his brother’s voices.

“ --eon!” That sounded like Mikey – thick and warbled through his own blubbering tears, it gives Leo an edge on his remaining strength to weakly lift his arms up and push hard against the Krang squishy form.

It doesn’t do so much to free himself from its grip, but enough to send them both tumbling backwards with a pinched gasp ripped from the alien as he tries desperately to right himself.

“Listen, dude,” Leo rasps. There’s something sickly and metallic tasting crawling up the back of his throat that continues to persist even when he swallows three times over. “We don’t really do sorry excuses on anything. Not in my house.”

The Krang responds by wrenching Leo sideways, letting his leg go to toss him through the air once again.

As he goes, he watches the crackling portal shrink away from sight, nothing now but a glowing pinprick as he tries to find some way to slow himself down. He’s smashing through something hard, pain buzzing across his shell and carparace, punching out the breath left in his lungs as tears burn hot behind his eyes.

He lifts his gaze up as he starts to slow to find the portal fizzing; whatever was happening up there was on a time crunch, filtering out before his eyes.

He’s readying himself for the next blow; tensing up the last of his muscles he still had control over for the next beat down that doesn’t come. The Krang doesn’t swim over to him to wrap itself around his body or scream in his face like it’d been doing so for the last few agonizing minutes.

It’s– it’s heading towards the portal.

Leo’s brother’s are smart. He gives them their due credit even when they are in fact in earshot to gloat about it in his face, but sometimes their smart choices aren’t always smart for him .

This was indeed a rescue mission, one Leo was thankful for, but in terms of execution, it was causing something icy to rush through his veins as he watches the big, pink blob excitedly rush its way over to the glowing haze where he knew his brothers awaited him before he could get to it first.

“No,” he says with a singular breath; photograph still wrapped up tight beneath his fingers, he pushes off from whatever he’d slammed into, just broken fragments remaining of both the ground and himself, he’s gliding through the air to catch up with the Krang with a fierce determination that makes him feel faster than light .

He lifts an arm, wrapping his free hand around a tendril, almost letting it slide right out through his grasp before he gives it a sharp, hard tug, holding onto it fiercely.

The Krang shrieks, spinning around with fury snapping towards him like a rubber band, slowing itself down to try and bat Leo off its tail.

“Hey!” Leo says around a loopy smile. The portal pops and bursts, growing smaller, shrinking in on itself like a collapsing black hole. “The whole grab’n’go thing? That is fun!”

He then musters up enough strength the sling the Krang sideways, spinning it away from his brothers that call for him with strained, desperate voices.

“Leo!” Raph is so clear there in front of him, in perfect 4K picture perfect vision and totally not some sort of mirage on account of his brain omelet right now  – Leo didn’t think he would ever actually see his brothers again, retaining all of what he could to memory in his final, fatal moments. “Leo, hold on!”

He goes to reach in to close the six feet gap between them with his own knee-jerk reaction to work against Leo’s; he was always ready to move in on his little brothers when they needed him most, and as much as Leo was willing to admit he so needed his big brother, he was still even more willing to push him away if it means he was pushing him towards safety.

So Leo moves like there wasn’t a single inch of hurt racing across his body with every movement. He moves like he’d just been dropped in on a whim and wasn’t about to sacrifice himself a second time over for everything that felt a billion times bigger than himself as he swiftly dodges Raph’s grasp. 

“Nardo, don’t .” There comes Donnie’s voice, wavering on pleading and sharp because even without the perfect view of what was happening and what he was about to do, Don always worked on his wavelength, tapping into that twin intuition that he claimed to be phooey, Leo has to chose to ignore him this time around because if he lets in on that begging, he might just go ahead and do as he says, which he can’t afford right now.

“Leo. Leo, please.” Mikey is there, face wet and all screwed up. His body is trembling with the force of a hundred and one category ten level earthquakes, the hurt of it all ringing sharp though Leo like a bullet. “I— I don’t think I can—”

Behind him the Krang roars with anger, yellowed teeth bared, its black little pupils shrinking away in the glossy, hazy whites of its eyes. It's angry and it's out for blood . 

Leo’s specifically.

“Guys,” Leo says, all of his words rushing out of him at once. “Guys, please. Go . Before its too la—”

The Krang reaches him and pulls hard enough to dislodge the last of his words right from his chest with a startled, scared gasp. His brothers blurring away from view, their voices however remain crystal clear as they scream for him. 

The Krang pulls and pulls, trying to clamber over him like nothing but a teeny, tiny obstacle to get to that closing, thinning portal.

But Leo clings on with every fraction of his waning might, wrestling with the alien to save it from escaping there with his brothers, knowing that as long as he could hold out until Mikey’s portal wigged out, things would be okay.

It would certainly suck for him, in the very brief and short term end of the stick, but it would, in the end, be okay in the grander scheme of things, he supposed.

“Let go of me you cretin! ” The Krang practically back hands him across the jaw, copper exploding fast on his tongue where his molars embed themselves in the inside of his cheek. “No!”

Leo, tangled up in a melee of desperate, flailing limbs, strains his head upwards just in time to catch the frightful expressions of his brothers one last time, Raph’s outstretched arm yanked back hard by Donnie before the portal gives one last spectacular spark and disappears into thin air.

He’d missed his opportunity. They’d tried to save him, but they’d been a fraction of a second too late. 

Leo smiles, tears framing the sides of his mouth before it is smacked right off his face with a wet tentacle.

“You idiot! You stupid, useless, moronic idiot !”

Leo hums, a strangled sound passing up through his raw, scratchy throat as he manages a wonky smile.

“Don’t know ‘bout that, bubbalicious,” he tells him with a sigh, flexing that funny muscle one last time before it turns to waste. “That’s about the smartest thing I ever did.”

The Krang screams, outraged and defeated, Leo awaits its finishing blow, somehow still holding onto his photograph, he clutches it close to his chest and hopes that on the other side, they’re able to forgive him, just this one time, in full.

The Krang doesn’t kill him outright in a blind, seething rage. It’s the kind of animal, he soon comes to realize, that likes to play with its food, knocking out the last bit of Leo’s strength with each bone crushing smack, push and pull.

His head is swimming, weightless in his skull, untethered to the pain that burns around him, now just a number cinder as he once again tries to think of a quieter place like home. He thinks about the long, late nights of watching telenovelas with his Dad. He thinks about the time he came out to April, the first time ever to anybody. He thinks about the cute little bunny waiter he was building upon wavering courage to ask him for his number next time he stopped by Run of The Mill.

He thinks about how in the other timeline, the one that was supposed to be because of his screw up, Casey had told him that his brother’s had died trying to stop the Krang. He thinks about how they’d already skewered the time space continuum in the best possible way because if it meant that whole, messy, terrifying future had been erased, and his brothers could live, then Leo was happy to die over it. 

He was ready for it.

At least, he was sure he was.

The Krang slams into him, pushing him further and further with all of it’s might as it screams right in his face – a deafening, piercing sound that rips right through him, echoing off the inside of his throbbing skull, all of it’s heavy, laborious weight on top of him as he collides heavily with concrete again, stealing the air right out of him in a whispery cry. He thinks he hears the Krang say something to him as it wraps its slippery limb around his throat again, pushing against already broken, fractured bone, but whatever he says goes unheard as his ears pop and ring, deafening him so suddenly he squeezes his eyes tight as the aliens face gets closer to his.

He opens his eyes and feels instant panic lace through him when he recognises that the photograph he’d been so protectively holding was gone.

The second thing that he notes, a few agonizing minutes later as he tries to swallow back his heart that’d climbed up in his mouth from sheer panic, was that everything was different .

The once dark, swirling abyss of dark blues and blacks were now washed out, everything more muted and lighter. He was still floating; an untethered wisp in the wind and yet he could feel no pain radiating through him – no etching numbness crawling from limb to limb.

No fear ringing true in the back of his head everytime the Krang would swim back over to him to toy with him some more.

He looks around at the milky nothingness. There didn’t seem to be any Krang here at all.

Heart rate still spiking heavily at his wrists, pumping at a million beats per minute, he tries to gauge an explanation as to what’d happened here.

He didn’t feel the familiar magnetic pulse of a portal – he hadn’t felt anything change.

His heart rate suddenly dips, stilling almost instantly like it were perhaps never there at all.

Ah . He thinks. So this is it then .

It’s a peaceful, lonely kind of feeling as he kind of just bobs about for a minute, waiting for something to happen. The afterlife, it would appear, was pretty dull after a few, long minutes of nothing, and as time stretched forward, the chasm of longing widened deep within his chest, the primal, wanting instinct to be saved from this place cracking him open like a nut.

But he’d chased off that chance, twice now. There was no going back: his brothers could reopen that portal somehow and drag his body back to their world but… but this was it for him now. An endless eternity of nothing.

Until something does happen. Curling in on himself, he feels a sudden warmth burst through him, like a sunbeam shooting through his carparace out through his shell. It pings his eyes open, parts his mouth for a sudden, gasping breath.

Wait . He thinks coldly. They didn’t– did they?

There’s suddenly a pair of big, familiar hands hooked around his arms. A quickening pressure on his chest that pushes life back into his static lungs.

He gasps again and this time all the feeling returns to his body, slamming into him like a freight train as a sob crawls from out of his wobbling, aching chest.

“It’s alright, don’t move.” Raph hovers above him, face wet with tears, bottom lip chewed to high hell, he’s cradling Leo’s limp body in his arms. Leo’s eyes manage to skate past him to stare up at a darkening, starless sky. A sky that wasn’t bursting with red flames or widening to a deep abyss of hell. This was his sky, his world. His brother holding him closer than close right now.

“Hm–wn..” He tries to speak but it’s like his tongue grew at extra forty pounds in the last twenty seconds, and everything comes out loopy and thick and not at all comprehensible.

“It’s alright,” Raph assures him again, his touch is feather light when he sweeps a thumb over his cheekbone, like it were afraid to touch him at all. “We’re goin’ home, buddy. We’re goin’ home.”

Leo sighs, letting his eyes slide shut, feeling the beat of his heartbeat dance around in his chest once, eyes fluttering shut as he once again, becomes weightless.

***

When Leo wakes, it’s four days later in the med bay with a makeshift breathing tube wedged deep down his throat. He knows not to panic – he’s seen almost every poorly acted hospital-drama on TV where people have awoken to try and yank the thing out of their mouths, yet even with the plethora of medical knowledge that he wields, Leo instantly gives way to panic and fear and he tries to sit up and choke out a breath that won’t come.

“Easy, easy!” April is there at his side, a warm, bandaged hand pressing gently against his chest that seems to also be wrapped up tightly. “Sit back. Out your nose, hero boy.”

Leo does as he’s told, tears pricking at the corners of his eyes that dart furiously at the room to drink his surroundings in.

“You’re home,” April tells him calmly. When he looks at her, she’s forgone her glasses, a deep already scabbing gash swelling across her eyebrow, no doubt paving the way for a badass scar in the future, she also wears a concerned frown that pulls her mouth downwards. An unnatural sight.

“You’re home, everyone’s home.” She takes a steady breath as she manages a tiny, spirited smile. “We did it, Leon. You did it.”

Leo doesn’t get it. He knows he stopped the Krang but he was sure it was at the risk of his life. That was what that was, right? The white empty nothingness. The ending.

He feels his chest wobble, all his broken parts inside grinding together to rinse out a wince as he lays back down and tries to remember how to not throw up with this thing in his mouth.

“It’s gonna be okay, Leo.” She’s taken up one of his casted arms. There’s already a wonky line of marker pen traced around it in Mikey’s shaky handwriting. He really feels like he’s going to be sick. “Just rest,” she tells him just as he starts to get sleepy again, like magic. “We’ll be here when you wake up. Don’t you worry.”

Leo goes back to sleep, but only because he’s certain there’s a slew of drugs dancing about in his system right now – probably loaded up on everything they have because he’s sure he’d done enough damage back there to turn most of his bones and organs to dust and mulch respectively. But every time he drifts off to sleep, he’s forcing himself back awake, afraid that he’ll awaken either back in the dimension of hell with that ugly monster, or in that lonely peaceful world where it felt so definite.

He awakes and this time there’s Donnie looming over him. “I’m going to remove the tube,” he explains very calmly, no doubt more so for himself because once he starts, Leo is gagging and Donnie, the ever sympathetic vomiter, is puffing out his cheeks and taking big, gulping breaths until it’s finally over and he’s hastily wiping off the bile slick down Leo’s chin with an overly dramatic wad of tissues. “Try and not to speak just yet, you’re still–”

“What,” Leo rasps, talking over his brother somehow even when his voice was thin and wavering and so very far away sounding, “the hell happened.”

Donnie’s brow furrows tightly, mask wrinkling at the strength of his worry, “We got you out, Nardo,” he tells him like it’s obvious knowledge. Like there’s supposed to be a resounding, sarcastic duh sounding at the end of it. “You… you were–”

Leo knows what the next word is supposed to be. He knows because he was there, yet it still stings like saltwater drenching his body, covering every bit of broken skin he had. He screws his face up despite the ache that blooms behind his eyes, headache incoming in full swing.

“I told you to go,” Leo says shakily. All his fear and worry mixes up inside of him and makes the words come out like he were angry. He opens his eyes to watch Donnie’s crestfallen expression sink his gut a thousand miles down. “You… you shouldn’t have followed me again when I told you no.”

Donnie shakes his head. “What, and just leave you there? Leo.” His voice is fighting off tears, he can tell. “Don’t be stupid on this. Not with me.”

Leo knows the strength it took for them to get him back. He understands the lengths they went – that long extra mile when he skirted them the first time around. He knows all this, and even when they stand here now, safe and sound back at home, wrapped up in an impenetrable bubble, that cocktail of emotion still swirls about inside of him, making him drunk on fear.

Fear that he could have gotten them hurt again .

“What did it take?” Leo finally asks, tipping his head back, eyes drooping shut, he can still feel the way his twin hovers over him. “To get me back. What did it take?”

He knows there’s a reason why Mikey hasn’t been in to see him yet, Raph also. April had briefed him in a few short words that they’d been resting up too, but whenever Leo would gaze down at the workings of his little brother, scrawled across his cumbersome arm, he knew that something was up.

He lifts his eyes back open to watch Donnie’s throat bob. “Mikey opened the portal,” he explains. “Twice.”

A pause. The humming of the monitor at his bedside feels amplified in the silence.

“It took a lot out of him.” He then admits before lifting his head, showing off the glossy sheen in his eyes that he’s biting back with forceful determination – like the Donnie Leo knows.

“But he wanted to do it, Leo. He wanted to and he could .” He takes a breath, the kind that seemed to tether him to the moment. “And nobody died. Nobody had to die , Nardo so– so don’t–”

He stumbles, choking harshly on his words as his chest does a funny little fluttering thing and his whole face freezes before it crumples and then there’s the tears.

He doesn’t try to reach for Leo – a futile attempt nonetheless what with near enough full body cast taking up most of the bed alongside the slew of wires poking out of him, yet Leo wants nothing more to make that all disappear and have him crawl in here with him and let him curl up against his side like they were just ten again.

“I’m sorry,” Leo rasps, feeling useless as he watches his brother scrub furiously at his wet face. “I am. I… You have to understand, I was doing the right thing…”

Donnie drops his arm away from his face to scowl dangerously at him. “No, you weren’t.” He seethes.

And Leo will come to realize later that it was just grief talking there; some ugly dog baring its teeth at Leo because it felt protective and scared, not because it was wanting to be mean.

“Okay,” he says gently, trying to balm his hurt in some way. “Yeah.”

There’s a moment when Donnie composes himself, turning away for a small few seconds, and when he turns back to face him, he’s looking more like himself again besides the tumid, far away look still glazed over his eyes.

“When I bring Mike and Raph and Dad in,” he begins, swiping the back of his sleeve beneath his snout. “I don’t want any of that.” It isn’t so much a question, more like a demand.

And normally Leo would fight him on it, in good brotherly nature, but right now this feels like something he can allow himself to let go of.

“Alright,” he croaks. “I won't say anything.”

Donnie hums and says nothing more as he goes to fetch their other brothers and father.

***

They stay practically plastered at his side for the remainder of the day which somehow makes Leo feel pretty terrible.

It’s in the way that Raph won’t stop looking at him in that way, eyes constantly welling up before they had a chance to go dry again, or the way Mikey’s arms are wrapped tight in bandages up to his shoulders, and there’s burn marks spider-webbed up his neck, cracking through his spots.

Dad says nothing, silently petting his hand despite the fact he can’t feel it.

Mikey leans his head to rest across his broken leg, nuzzling in with a wet sounding sigh. “M’sleeping here,” he tells him tiredly, letting his eyes close. “Nobody try to move me.”

And when he does drift off, they don’t dare.

When Donnie leaves the room to go help fix up the bits of the lair that’d been trashed alongside their father, Leo knows there’s something big incoming in the way Raph stays there, still looking at him, gaze unwavering.

“I was told to not say anything,” Leo says quietly on account of the sleeping brother on his leg. “So I’m not saying anything.”

Raph sniffs. His voice when he speaks is all torn up and sore sounding, like he’d stood in one of the sewer reserves and just screamed and screamed for hours. Something in Leo’s gut curls up – maybe he had before this, who knows.

“Good. Cos I got a lot to say instead.”

His body still on high alert, seems to tense up from the incoming blow, like Raph was anywhere near as big of a threat as that bubblegum looking ass. He couldn’t flinch, even if he wanted to what with all the cast and bandages making him lay stiffly here, but he feels his stomach jolt at the anticipation.

“I tried to save you, Leo. You– you were in my reach .” There’s that sad, awful desperation seeping into his tone that reminds Leo of their conversation before the invasion: that You Fucked Up talk that still set his teeth on edge and make his chest feel tight.

He sighs, trying to sound as sympathetic as he could right now. “The Krang had me,” he tells him. “If you pulled me through, he would have come straight out with me – I couldn’t. I couldn’t let that happen Raph.” A sharp breath. “Not with you all there.”

It’s an awful what-if situation that loops back in his mind so often. What if he’d let himself be grabbed by Raph, sucked back through home free with the Krang on his tail, bowling the danger right back at them without a second to think?

He knew what it felt like to mess up – he didn’t want to do it again. Not ever. So he simply eliminated the chances of that happening to a very firm zero.

A hitch in his breath. This was what they were mad about, wasn’t it?

“It was suicide .” Raph blinks and the tears roll down his cheeks, his lip quivering. “Mike… Mike wouldn’t let up, even when I told him it was over, both times , he was so sure he could get you outta there.”

His breath falters, stuttering hard in his chest as they both look down at the same time at the sleeping turtle. Leo feels his own eyes burn keenly as he watches each little steady rise and fall of his shell with every breath.

“You can’t possibly think that we’d allow that, would you Leo?” Raph is pleading with him. And all his life, Leo has believed his brother to be the biggest thing ever. Taller than the highest mountains, stronger than the whole wide universe put together. But right now, in the dining room chair he’d pulled over to sit himself down in and watch guard, he looks so small, Leo thinks. So little and frail.

And Leo did that. He shrunk him down in size and spirit because, yeah , a part of him did believe that they’d allow it because maybe it was something they’d all wanted.

“There is never,” Raph says, standing up to move towards him, closing in on his other side where it’s Mikey-free to pluck up his arm and cradle it, “any universe where we’d leave you there, Leo.”

It’s said with so much conviction and love and truth that maybe Leo can let himself believe in it.

“I think I knew that,” Leo whispers wetly, clumsily trying to furl his fingers to lock with Raph’s. “You guys are too stubborn.”

Raph laughs, another sob laced there as his shoulders jerk and shake. “And you are too, Leon. You’re stubborn and so stupid strong.”

He huffs. “So don’t go thinking you’re not. You’re too thick headed to just die like that, little brother.”

And as he says it, he can hear the Krang now, voice angry and frustrated, asking him why he wouldn't just die and he’s reminded now of something he’d almost failed to remember back then.

Because he still had something to live for.

It was stupid Spanish telenovelas and making Don laugh so hard he’d nearly be sick, and it was cute bunny boys that blushed like crazy and movie nights with his little brother curled up in his side. It was being brave and being strong even when the world would crush him down into something that made him feel not brave and not at all strong – he was still going to get back up.

And he wouldn’t always remember that: he’d have days where he would need to be reminded and he had an entire family to love him and tell him that whenever he truly needed.

So when Donnie and dad turn with April and Casey in tow, and Mikey is blearily sitting up to be looped in the gentle hum of conversation that’s passed around, he feels it then: that power that was held in keeping that photograph in his grasp the entire time, that strength deep inside of him to bring him to his feet each time he was knocked down.

And later that night when everyone falls asleep in the med room on pulled together chairs despite his gentle protesting, Leo is able to turn his head and catches sight of the rumpled, creased up picture propped up on the side table in a colorful hand painted picture frame, standing proud against odds, he smiles, and finally rests.