He knows, for certain, that he's in a jungle. He can't see; his eyes swim with afterimages and sliding scenery, like he's viewing the world through a fishbowl, but he hears the screeching howler monkeys, the whisper of air moving through underbrush, claws skittering across fallen tree trunks. Somewhere behind him, great curtains of vine rustle with movement.
He blinks rapidly, trying to clear his vision, but dapple-lights flicker over his face and send the world into patches of darkness. Swallowing the bile in his throat and the pounding blood in his head, he pushes forward on wobbly legs. The vines roar in the distance.
"Fantasma!"
"Yōkai!"
"You will not escape!"
He stumbles, the world tilting at an angle until it feels like he's upside-down. His shoulder bumps into a tree and he leans there, his eyes wide, breath puffing into the unbearably humid air. He lifts a hand and grabs his left arm, feeling for the tickle of the feather attached to the dart that's still lodged in his flesh.
With a groan, he yanks it out and throws it onto the jungle floor. Blood dribbles out of the puncture wound, painting a thin red line over his skin. His mind is spinning...
"Leo!"
He shakes his head. Not now.
"Leo!"
"No," he says, licking his lips and squinting up at the blurry rays of light seeping through the canopy. "You're not supposed to…"
"Where are you?!"
Everything's spinning. Leonardo grits his teeth and slides down to the floor, his shell grinding against the hard wood of the tree.
"Yōkai!"
The vines are rustling, but Leonardo passes out too quickly to hear anything else.
—
Hands are hooked under his armpits, pulling at him, dragging him through the dark. He growls pitifully and tries to struggle away. The hands tighten, turning his growl into a whimper as the bruises spotting his underarms flare with pain.
"Quiet," someone whispers forcefully. He gives a ragged breath and goes limp. There's a moment of stillness, the sound of shifting ferns, and then the pulling starts again.
—
He knows, very likely, he's in a cage. He's blindfolded with a strip of cloth wound so tightly around his skull that it gives him a constant headache, like someone is trying to squeeze his brain out of his ears.
"Do we even have ears?" Mike asks somewhere near him.
"Technically, yes," Don answers patiently. He doesn't say much after that.
Leo pulls at the ropes binding his wrists and ankles for the hundredth time, but all it serves to accomplish is rubbing deeper pits into his already raw skin. Pain lances through his limbs; he latches onto it. Pain is real. Pain is real. Pain is…
"Brothers..." he scoots backwards until the curve of his shell lodges between a pair of iron bars and bows his head. "Help me."
"We'll get through this," Raph's rough voice cuts in. Leo hears the sound of grinding metal, as though his strongest brother is sharpening his sai. "They ain't keepin' us here forever."
Something small whacks him in the temple and bounces off. He flinches, more out of surprise than pain. A child's laughter echoes cruelly through the air.
"Papa, look! He likes peanuts!"
Leonardo growls, a deep, dark vibration in his chest, pitches forward, falling onto his face like a stupid animal. He doesn't care. Fiercely he drags himself across the gritty floor, blindly snarling at faces and people and things he cannot see.
"Get the damn kid out of here!" someone cries, followed by the creak of his cage door opening, and he bellows, thrashing as hands slam him into the wood floor and hold him down. A needle scythes into his arm, instantly filling his brain with static that roars like an ocean.
Where are his brothers?
"Guys," he gasps feebly, "help…"
"Sorry, Leo," Michelangelo sadly whispers into his ear, his voice drowned out by the blossoming jungle chant in his mind. "We can't."
—
"Why?"
Dark eyes pull away from the horizon to look at him with a hard glint of moonlight. "I told you to—"
"Why now?"
The figure stops, and Leonardo can easily feel the arms tightening him against his chest tense up. He scoots back up against the decimated wall they're using for cover, tucks Leo's feet in like he's an invalid. His voice is soft when he speaks again.
"You know who I am?"
"Nnno," he slurs out, feeling like he's trying to talk and think through a ball of lead. "Not...here."
—
He thinks, almost certainly, they won't dissect him.
He can hear their voices now, because they never shut the door that's somewhere on his right. A male and two females converse every night, slamming their hands on the counter, their shoes scuffing against the floor as they pace vigorously back and forth across the linoleum floor. Every night they argue about the same thing.
"Inhumane! This is abuse," the man always insists, and it's a small mercy that his voice usually seems to carry the loudest.
"I don't know how we even got into this mess. Frederico can't handle his new pet anymore and it gets pawned off to us? What are we supposed to do with it?"
"There's so much we could learn," reasons the third voice calmly. "He's intelligent. He speaks. Haven't you heard him ask for his brothers?"
"Intelligent? We've fried his brain with enough drugs to bring down a herd of rhino! Even if there is more of them out there, we're never going to learn about them."
"What do you propose we do?" The first woman shoots back.
"I don't know! Let him go. Put him out of his misery. Something." The man's voice hushes, as though he's afraid of some invisible third party overhearing. "The villagers know. They're saying we keep a ghost down here. It's bad luck."
"Superstitious nonsense," the second woman mutters.
After a while, he realizes they're talking in Spanish. It seems to make more sense from then on… until they start talking in Japanese. And then Italian, and Polish, and languages Leonardo's never even heard of, things he's sure he's making up in the fog-layered depths of his brain.
"Brothers," he pleads in plain, simple English.
He doesn't get an answer.
—
"What do you mean? What's not here?"
Framed against the night sky by foxtail reeds and barbed wire, the figure stares down at him, mouth pulled into a tight, serious line. Leonardo swallows back some of the thick fuzz on his tongue and tries to answer; his mind blinks out like a light and he starts slipping away instead.
"Leo!" the figure sharply says, grabbing him and straightening him against the wooden pole. "They're almost here, all right? Just stay with me. Look, do you recognize me or not?"
Eyes screwing shut, he gives a short nod. "Mikey…"
"Right, okay, good. So just stay with me, okay? Leo, what's not here?"
Leonardo's eyes slide open. His hand lifts from the ground, raw rope-marks glistening and plastered with dirt, and grasps his brother's wrist.
"You."
—
"Do you have brothers?" A woman asks in Spanish.
"No," he says.
"I won't hurt them. I promise."
She's lying, of course. He's such a fool. He's given them all away, mewling like a pitiful creature for them to come rescue him. He understands now. He knows what he must do. He opens his mouth, but then his head jerks to the side at the feeling of someone next to him.
"Don't," pleads Mikey, his touch ghosting over Leo's forearm. Fingers grip him, an ethereal sensation that fades into loneliness. "Leo, don't do this."
He grits his teeth and shakes it away. Let the jungle swallow everything he is. Let nothing but a ghost be left behind.
"Well?"
"No," Leonardo repeats.
—
"Oh, Leo. What happened to you?"
He's passed from one set of hands to another. His new handler lifts him at the elbows, a third party gathers up his legs, and they carry him through the night like a piece of furniture until he's deposited onto a cool, metal surface somewhere above the ground.
"Why isn't he sayin' anything?"
"He thinks this is all some kind of dream. He's not right, Raphie. They did something to him."
"No," he whispers, staring up at the line of dark dots bolting the gray ceiling panels together. "You did."
"Us? What the hell is he—"
"Shh." An inhumanly gentle touch brushes across his temple. He jerks away from it as though it were a flaming coal. "What is it, Leo? What did we do?"
Leonardo closes his eyes, willing them to go away. It's not real.
"You came back."
—
"I'll let you go if you answer the question," the voice says in Japanese, but it's not coming from a woman anymore; it's in the air, around him, pressing in like a vice from the blindfolded corners of the room. (or is that him?) "Do you have brothers?"
"No," he says.
"Liar," Raph says.
"Liar," Don says.
"Liar," Mikey says.
—
"You shouldn't be here," Leo insists, his head resting against the cool metal wall of the truck as it rumbles along.
Stirring a pot of soup on an electric burner, Donatello stops to give him a long, measured look. "And yet we are."
He shakes his head. "Sorry."
"For what?"
"I blew it. I tried to fix it..." he swallows, eyes clenching. "I'm sorry."
The clank of the soup ladle against the pot's edge prompts his eyes to open again. Don leans forward, tiredly rubbing his face with a grim smile that doesn't quite make it to his eyes. "Of all the things... I shouldn't be so relieved." His gaze darts to Leo, seizing him there like he wants nothing more than to come over and touch him, make sure he's real. "It's not your fault, Leo. It never is."
Donatello doesn't lie, but he's often mistaken. He's only right about one thing: none of this is real.
—
"Do you have brothers?" it asks.
"No."
"Liar."
—
They think his brain is damaged. It's what the humans thought, too, talking amongst themselves and thinking he couldn't hear. They're no better. He hears them packed tightly together in the corner of the truck, muttering to each other. Even in his periphery he can see them glance worriedly towards him from time to time.
What does it matter? He wasn't strong enough. No matter how hard he tried to let them go, he made his brothers come back to him.
—
"Do you have brothers?"
"No."
—
"What the hell do you want from us, Leo?"
He lifts his head, stares into the smoldering gaze of Raphael's face. Oh, how he misses his brother. It's the weakness, bleeding through. Gritting his teeth, Leo forces his eyes shut and presses his forehead harder into the metal wall, absorbing the coolness into his pounding skull.
"I'm talkin' to you, Fearless. Come on. Help me out here." The voice turns deceptively gentle, and he feels a large hand come down on his shoulder. With a gasp of stale air, he jerks away, pressing himself harder into the skeletal framework of the truck. Iron bars. Iron bars. The jungle chants in his ears.
"Why do you keep coming back?" he breathes, eyes slitting open. A blurry image of red and green forces them shut again.
There's a growl of frustration, knuckles cracking as Raph clenches his fists with enough force to bruise his own palms. His weight shifts on the floor as he rises.
"You want us to go so badly? Fine. We'll go. But we ain't goin' far. When you get your head outta your ass, you come find us."
—
Hands on his shell. Pulling. The man's voice yells for someone to hurry, there's not much time left. He's sorry for everything. Just go.
Liar.
—
"Do you have brothers?"
—
He wakes up, a thin cotton blanket bunched around his shoulders. The ropes cut as he shifts in place to blink at the midday sunlight streaming through the cracked sliding door. They're gone, just as he knew they'd be.
Liar.
He'll prove it.
Leonardo climbs slowly to his feet, vines rustling, leans on the wall, uses it to pull himself along the jungle floor. Crouching down, he uses what little strength he has to pull at his bonds with all his might. The metal door slides up and disappears into the canopy.
"Brothers," he calls, and closes his eyes, and waits for an answer.
A/N
Happy Halloween! This is an older project I've revised half a dozen times over the past few months, but I feel like its tone matches the festivities well enough. Thanks for reading!