A re-upload of a three-year-old oneshot that got deleted! It's been edited just a tad while I was at it, but mostly this is just me not wanting it gone. I have a soft spot for nostalgia, apologies for any inconvenience to email alerts.
Sometimes, as he lay staring up into the night's darkness and lingered in the place between sleeping and waking, Leonardo could convince himself that he no longer remembered what his brothers sounded like. There would be a brief moment of panic, of scrambling through his memories, and a sigh of relief when he finally latched onto a sound byte in his mind, though the memory of panic often lingered long into the next day.
Leonardo found it strange that he could forget those voices, those moments when they were all peaceful and laughing, yet he could never forget what it sounded like to hear his brothers scream. In the end, he supposed it didn't matter because no matter how hard he tried to keep his brothers from having to suffer, parts of them would always refuse to be protected.
And if he couldn't protect them, what was his purpose?
In an entire life spent fighting alongside his brothers, only Raphael made Leonardo think about words.
Donatello knew words, knew the meanings and the roots; he could spend hours staring at definitions, finding ways to use them to his benefit, building his vocabulary because he had never quite been able to learn enough for his own tastes. Michelangelo, too, knew about words, though in a different fashion. For him it was not the number of words used nor the definitions one could memorize: the matter was in feeling the things you were going to say and trusting that those around you would know the feeling.
They were simple, and they were complex. Leonardo understood Donatello and Michelangelo. He understood himself, to an extent, and so did not dwell on it. There was nothing to consider.
But when Raphael stood off to one side with his arms crossed and his teeth flashing in a caustic grin, he wondered about the words that marched behind his brother's eyes, and he wondered what words suited him best.
Nobody else could do that.
Raphael had cried that night without caring if he would be heard. He'd stumbled through the door and into the shower and the water had turned red as it slithered down the drain, and Leonardo wasn't entirely sure what had happened. His brother turned the water red and cried and that in itself was alarming because Raph never cried, not since they were very young.
He didn't know what to do, so he stood in the doorway helplessly after the others had decided to give their brother time and space.
It had felt like an intrusion, standing outside the door and watching his brother fall to pieces; but he watched regardless because the sight had been transfixing.
He'd wanted to know. To see what his brother was like when there was nobody left.
And he'd discovered that Raphael didn't cry quite like anybody else; didn't let tears fall stoically or sob into the nearest living body. His tears were the tears of one who didn't understand why they had to be crying, escaping in short bursts of cracked glass and angered grief, in harshly choked sobs that could rend a heart to pieces. He felt the reason behind every cracked breath, even if he couldn't name it.
Raphael cried like something that had broken, and it was beautiful.
Leonardo wished he'd never had to see it. He forced himself to walk away.
He'd learned years ago that he defined himself by his brothers. He trained to protect them, considered them in everything he did, and did all he could to make sure they lived to see another day.
It was all he knew. All he'd cared to learn. A leader keeps his team together. The eldest takes care of his brothers. That was his life.
If they fell, he fell with them; cushioned the landing and helped them claw their way back up.
If they were in need of something he could give, he gave it wholeheartedly. He was as happy as he could make them, because he couldn't be happy knowing they weren't.
If they were broken or hurt, he was also, and he did everything in his power to see them both healed.
And if his brothers made mistakes…well…His job was to keep them safe from their own judgment.
It was another lesson he'd learned early on: one was their own harshest judge. They became their own worst enemy and became divided as a result. It took more than quick words to change that.
If he couldn't keep his brothers whole, he himself couldn't be whole.
That was the way it had to be.
His brother kept a box of little things he found in the sewers. Leonardo had stumbled upon it by accident once, left haphazardly in the middle of Raph's bedroom floor. The contents spilled out into the open and he'd quietly set about putting them back, turning things over in his hands like precious gems.
Torn shoelaces and cracked buttons, colorful strings that had somehow traveled from the surface to their place below ground, small lengths of plastic and snapped rubber bands. Leonardo had carefully sorted through them before placing the box back where he'd found it.
It had been strange, the little box of useless odds and ends, all tattered and secondhand. But apparently not enough so for his brother to cast them aside as garbage. Leo wondered if that said something about Raphael's supposedly pessimistic take on life and fighting.
The world was dirty and gritty and filthy and they would never truly find a place in it. More often than not he wondered why they saved half the people they did to begin with, when chances were they would turn around and do something equally as horrible as had been done to them.
Lost causes, all of them.
But if his difficult brother could believe that even the most broken, cast-off pieces of a society above them had a chance at finding a place…maybe it wouldn't hurt to give the world just one more chance.
Sometimes he just needed to look through the box's eyes.
"Is your arm feeling any better?"
"Still attached, isn't it?"
"Another few seconds and it might not have been."
"Way to think positive, bro."
"…you're going to get yourself killed someday."
"Says who?"
"Says any and all common sense, despite the fact that it seems to have overlooked you when you mutated."
"Since when could common sense talk? And when the hell did it get so pessimistic?"
"What, are you playing twenty questions?"
"Am I?"
"This isn't a game, Raph. You almost…you could have been killed."
"Wasn't."
"Could have been."
"But I wasn't. You worry too much."
"Maybe because you don't worry at all."
"Never said I didn't worry."
"Never said you did."
"Everything's a word game with you, Leo. Ever consider spittin' out what you want to say instead of prancin' around it like a coward?"
"You could have DIED. You- if we hadn't managed to find you-"
"There you go, prancin' around again."
"Damn it, Raph, shut up! Don't you listen to a word I say? Is it so hard to understand that we were SCARED?"
"You weren't scared. Don, maybe, 'cause he's always gotta play doctor and what if he didn't have the answer this time. And Mike? Course he was, 'cause he's still a kid: still pickin' the marshmallows out of his Lucky Charms in the mornin'. But not you."
"Why not me?"
"You don't get scared until it's stupid to be scared. When everything's goin' on, you don't got time for it: do what ya gotta do and get out. Five minutes later, that's when it gets ya."
"Don't be stupid. It doesn't work like that."
"…you're a stubborn, self-righteous, perfectionist, unemotional bastard. S'exactly how it works."
"That doesn't even make sense."
"Doesn't have to. You get it anyway."
And strangely enough, he thought he did.
Sometimes he was afraid Raph hated him. Sometimes he was afraid that an argument would go too far and his brother would never forgive him for it.
It was like a tiny itch, a niggling in the back of his brain that could sometimes be quieted and sometimes raged out of control. Their worst arguments happened when he couldn't turn it off.
He looked at them like tests, in the irrational childish section of his mind. Raph stormed off, like he always would, out into the sewers or to Casey's place or maybe he just stood outside the lair entrance for a while because these were the rare times when Leonardo didn't follow him.
Because the eldest wanted his brother to come back on his own. He wanted his brother to prove he did or didn't hate him or love him or really anything at all. To walk back in with a snide remark or an awkwardly casual statement because he couldn't stay away too long.
Mikey and Donnie would have wanted an apology, maybe forgiveness for their own harsh words, spoken clearly and sincerely. Raph and Leo worked differently than their brothers.
Coming back was the apology. Not saying he hated him was the forgiveness.
It was enough.
His brother had hugged him on the night before Christmas Eve. Or maybe he had hugged his brother. It was difficult to remember it at all, let alone who had done what.
They'd been looking over the random twinkling lights of the city, and he remembered that he'd been thinking Raph looked far too serious for the holiday season- which had to have been true, if he'd been thinking it. He looked serious and almost pained about something, even though this was usually the time when he was the most relaxed.
Then his eyes had flickered up to meet Leonardo's, and the memory of April's shattered window- how long ago had it been?- was playing so vividly there that he could almost see it reflected. It reminded him of how Raph had looked when Donatello had been affected by the mutant outbreak, or when Michelangelo had been on the ground in a motionless heap in the aftermath of Leatherhead's startled rage.
Even as Raphael seemed to realize how clearly his thoughts were being broadcast and tried to bury them with emptiness, the image burned into his memory and twisted his heart more painfully than he'd thought it could. Leonardo grasped his brother's hand in an irrational urge to keep him from slipping back behind steel doors of indifference, afraid and not entirely sure why, only aware that he wanted something he could use to take that rare painful expression off of his brother's face.
And the next thing he'd been aware of was a body pressed firmly against his.
There was a frozen moment of separation and inner shock, of warm breath that brushed against his face in little tufts of warm clouds, and he leaned forward again without a second's pause. The little voice raising objections in his mind feebly spoke up as the action registered.
He wondered if he should stop himself then, almost retreated in a haze of panic and confusion because this certainly hadn't been what he planned on doing and he didn't know how he was supposed to not talk about it again. Or to pretend that it wasn't oddly comforting to him as well.
He'd never been very good at pretending.
But…but this was also Raphael, who was impossible to find words for, who came between him and the Shredder without thinking twice about it and never expected a word of thanks because it was just what he did. On a rooftop, in the snow, listening to out-of-tune carolers and Salvation Army bells as the sounds drifted upwards, he found flashes of image and sound, phrases that connected to nothing in particular and memories that slammed into his brain like a sack of bricks.
Stubbornly flickering flames sending strings of melted wax down the sides of dojo candles, heavy dark clouds lingering in the distance, the thickness of the air when a storm was approaching. Wounds that hadn't entirely healed, but enough so to practice if you could ignore the slight sting of stitches pulling. Raphael was fireflies on summer nights, the ancient creaking rope holding up the tire swing even though it swung like a rope on the gallows.
He was poem and stink and grating noise, solid heavy wooden doors, hundreds of red-tinged used bandages laying on the bathroom floor and the rough ridging of scar tissue from the cuts he bandaged himself. Car horns in New York traffic, rooftop gargoyles that were never going to fly, clashing metal and growled curses in the darkness and sparring sessions when everybody else was asleep. The harsh intake of breath when someone woke up from a nightmare, the almost-numbing sting after taking a solid punch to the face.
He was folded arms and harsh barking laughter, he was whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches, and Raphael always saw fit to save the people who couldn't save themselves. The box of tiny broken things that only he could find places for in the end.
Always fighting not to be read, always trying to take care of himself, always too stubborn to openly care Raph, who smelled like leather and felt like stone and tasted like steel and made him act his age instead of just being the leader; and Leonardo thought that if it wasn't him- if it wasn't Raph out of everybody else in the world to balance those parts of him that were logic and ice and see saints and angels and martyrs and holy men where no one could- then maybe there just wasn't supposed to be somebody.
So he silenced the little voice and let the consequences be damned.
This once…just this once…he wouldn't think about it.
A wise man had once said 'the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference.'
When Leonardo first heard the saying, he'd dismissed it as trivial. But over time, after arguing and waiting and then fighting next to each other, his fear of hatred inevitably evolved into a fear that Raph would stop caring altogether.
That maybe someday he would come back through the door with barely a glance in his older brother's direction and a monotone apology. It was nearly enough to give him nightmares, sometimes. Looking through childishness and insecurity, Leo could find a million instances in which his brother seemed to be giving up, tired of fighting and tired of him and completely emotionless.
The idea of Raph being emotionless struck a terrified chord within him and he responded by rising to the bait more than he ever had. Even if Raph would end up hating him in the end, hatred was at least something.
So he continued sending his brother out of the lair and waiting for him to come back, continued waiting for proof that he wasn't one of a million enemies that would just be forgotten in the end. He was something, he was a rival, he was a friend, he was a challenge and everything that could fall in-between.
Mikey and Donnie would never have let an argument with a brother go so far. They would have exchanged apologies halfway to the point where Leo pushed Raph over the edge and they would have forgiven each other.
Sitting up until his brother returned was the apology. Not receiving indifference was the forgiveness.
After he'd been gone for two years, neither of them were sure it was enough anymore.
"Do you ever get scared, Raph?"
"Of what?"
"Of anything."
"Nothin' here to be scared of."
"Not anything in here. Just…anything."
"You don't make any sense, Leo."
"I thought you weren't breathing, earlier. You were just lying there, not moving…all that blood…you looked dead."
"But I wasn't. Still breathin'. Blood wasn't all mine. Nothin' to be afraid of."
"But…but what if you hadn't been breathing? What if we'd been too late?"
"Probably wouldn't've made any difference to me."
"Don't joke about that! It's not a joke! I- we thought you were-"
"Calm down, Leo. You're makin' a big deal outta noth-"
"It isn't nothing, Raphael! Do you have any idea what it's like…not knowing if you'll have to wake up tomorrow and leave your room and be less than you were? Haven't you ever been afraid you'll lose somebody?"
"Not gonna lose anybody."
"You don't know that. Nobody knows that."
"I know it. S'why I'm around."
"What?"
"Only thing I need to do is make sure I'm first between your sorry shells and someone else. Not as hard as it sounds, either."
"And what happens when you don't get there in time?"
"It's not an option. I'm gonna get there."
"…and what happens when you get killed doing that?"
"Better me than one of you. Same thing we'd all think."
"No. No, that's not fair. You don't get to leave us like that. You don't…promise me you won't do something like that."
"Why the hell not?"
There had been a million options ringing in his head like white noise: you're not the oldest, you're not the leader, it isn't your responsibility, it's a stupid idea, you don't know anything about anything... In the end, he chose the one that made the most sense.
"You're a stubborn, self-righteous, hotheaded, emotional bastard. How do you expect us to want to live in a world without that?"
Raphael didn't have an answer.
During the times when his brother was seriously injured or late getting home, he would sometimes look for that box of useless odds and ends. The door wouldn't creak as he opened it and he would creep in each time with less hope than he'd had the last.
There were times when he needed to be reminded of Raphael's reason for fighting so that he could remind himself of his own reasons. He wanted to know that someone as dark and jaded as Raph could still find use for things that had no real purpose.
But he never found it again.
Leonardo wondered why his brother still fought, then.
Leonardo didn't understand how he was supposed to look out for his brothers when they were so clearly impossible to deal with. In the end he'd had to learn to simply accept it as fact. His brothers were stubborn brats.
And on days when it was his job to lead practice, they always found ways to get under his skin with tiny barbs that made him feel like he'd somehow failed. If Mikey didn't want to do something, he whined until his brother gave in. If Donatello didn't want to do it either, he always managed to talk both of their ways out of the situation. If Raph didn't want to do something, he told Leo to fuck off and just didn't do it.
But he never left on the days when Donnie and Mikey were both gone. Leonardo wondered if he'd ever thanked him for that.
He was glad not to have to explain that he actually hated training alone. Raph understood.
The shower was still running when he came back. He listened to the guttural sounds the water made as it drained and wondered if Raphael knew it was coming away clean. It had probably been clean for a while now.
His brother probably didn't care.
Leonardo took a half-step forward, hand coming to rest on the doorframe as he hesitated. His other brothers were most likely right: Raph probably needed to be alone, and talking could just make things worse. Trying to talk usually did make things worse.
But at the same time that the thought of turning away again occurred, a block of ice dropped into his stomach and spread through his veins. This fractured being, this horrifying and heartwrenching and beautiful sight: it was still his brother.
Still HIS Raphael, who smacked Mikey over the head and dragged Don out of the lab. Watching Raph stare blankly at the drain with faraway eyes, he felt something come to a resolution within himself. Bloody water didn't make a difference. He'd still be who he always was, when this was over and he'd been put back together. It was Leo's job to help reassemble the pieces.
Raph choked on another broken sound of frustration and the ice spread to his heart. The shower was still running. He ignored it, sat next to his brother, and gently picked up his hand.
He came to realize, over time, that Raphael wasn't about words at all. He spoke through actions, through half-hearted glares that truly meant regret and clenched fists that spoke of hurt far more loudly than he'd ever be able to speak.
Raph was about one-shouldered shrugs and oiling door hinges behind Donnie's back, smirking when he thought nobody knew he was secretly letting Michelangelo beat him at his best video game, understanding that Leo didn't want to practice alone and sticking around, even on the days when he just ended up sitting around while his brother meditated. There were even days when he took the time to patch up the small holes in Master Splinter's clothing, and Leo was sure that if he knew anyone knew he'd never be able to actually explain it.
He wasn't known to be good at words, anyway, so Leonardo didn't call him out for doing things the best way he knew how.
On the nights when he had to strain to remember his brothers' voices, Leonardo never slept. He would stare at the ceiling, at the doorframe, at the silhouette of his hands in the darkness, and wonder what kind of person forgot what their families sounded like.
The answer came from the source of the question, telling him that he was just tired, that somebody didn't just forget things like that, and he tried his hardest to believe it, even if he never entirely could. Nights like those made him worry the most about being able to really come back home.
Then, on some nights, his door would open and a familiar weight would settle next to him, and he would forget what he'd been so worried about in the first place.