A/N: "Nightmare-noun: a frightening or unpleasant dream; a bad dream that brings out strong feelings of fear, terror, distress, or anxiety; a dream which causes one to wake up in the middle of the sleep cycle and experience a negative emotion, such as fear."

"Comfort-noun: a state of physical ease and freedom from pain or constraint; the easing or alleviation of a person's feelings of grief or distress; verb-ease the grief or distress of; console"

That's what this story's gonna be about! Nightmare comfort!

Stephanie: She's been excited about this for a while...

Uh huh! It started kind of with me noticing a little Leo/Mikey interaction in "Attack in the Sewers" (Mikey woke up screaming about the Shredder, and Leo said "It's okay, it's just another nightmare"). I'll be doing this for any episode I can come up with a good nightmare for, but if you guys have requests/ideas, lemme know!

Disclaimer: Nope. Otherwise "Pizza Face" would be airing Sunday.

Mikey looked around in confusion at his surroundings. What was he doing inside the Kraang building? Why was it so empty?

Where were his brothers?

"Useless!"

What? Where had that come from?

"Leo? Donnie? Raph? C'mon, guy, this isn't funny! Where are you?!"

Suddenly something started appearing on the edge of his vision. Three somethings. His brothers.

"There you guys are!" Mikey turned to face his brotehrs and started running towards them, but something felt strange. "Where were you?"

"Why do we even keep him around?"

"He's just a waste of space."

"All he does is cause problems."

They were acting as if Mikey wasn't there, and he didn't need to be a genius to figure out they were talking about him. Why were they saying these things?

"I have an idea, follow me."

Leo always was the one in charge, and despite knowing they didn't want him to be around, Mikey found himself following his brothers as they ran up to the roof of the building…

…Where they found Shredder.

"Guys, what's going on?!"

"Wow, I thought you would've figured it out on your own."

"Well, you always were a little slow on the uptake…"

Before they could continue, the older three started fading away as Shredder took a step forward and swiped his claws across the youngest turtle's plastron, leaving a pair of large gashes.

"Guys!"

"Pathetic!"

"Why do we put up with you?"

"Least you won't be a problem now!"

Mikey's eyes filled with tears, the words stinging more than the pain of the slashes on his chest. Did they really mean all of that?

The taunts continued as Shredder came in for another strike, but Mikey didn't do anything to stop it. He always tried to make his brothers happy, and if this is what would make them happy, then so be it.

"Mikey, wake up!"

"Horrible ninja!"

"Calm down!"

"We'll be better off without you!"

"You're having a nightmare!"

The final strike came…

…but never hit.

Mikey sat up suddenly in his bed, nearly bonking heads with Leo, whom was sitting on the bed next to him.

"Are you alright, Mikey?"

"Why do you care?"

Leo physically jerked back at that answer—where had that come from?

'Must have been the nightmare...' the leader thought to himself as he let out a breath. Mikey always had the worst nightmares out of the four of them—Donnie claimed it was because he often suppressed his negative feelings, so they came out in the form of nightmares. [1] They had tried to get him to start sharing those emotions with them, but he just continued being the goofy little brother they all loved despite him getting on their nerves.

"You're my little brother. I'll always care and worry for you."

Mikey mumbled something under his breath Leo couldn't make out, though he could hear the word 'Shredder' in there. Mikey must have had a nightmare about that fight against their father's enemy.

"Was it Shredder? Mikey, we all made it out alive, and next time we fight against him, we'll be ready."

"…You left me to him…wanted him to destroy me…"

What? Where would Mikey get—

Oh. Cue the guilt.

"Mikey, we would never do anything like that." Leo reached to embrace his little brother, but stopped midway with the younger flinched back. "We shouldn't have said any of the things we did."

"But they were true; I was being annoying, I did make the mission more difficult than it had to be, and it's my fault we almost died."

Leo let out a small sigh, he didn't know they had hurt their little brother this much, but he should've—they all should've.

"You know what else, though? If it wasn't for you, Donnie wouldn't have been able to get into the computer system, and we wouldn't have known about the bomb. Plus, you were the one who knew which wire Donnie had to cut. You were able to save the whole city!"

"But the fight with Shredder could've been avoided if I didn't waste all of the smoke bombs, and-"

"We were too hard on you. Don, Raph and I all have allowd the world to scrape away our innocence until we didn't have much left, but you didn't. And we forget that sometimes. But we appreciate and love you to the ends of the earth. No matter what we say, that will always be true, and nothing will ever change that. You have a special gift there in being able to see the good in everything, and don't let anything that we say or do ruin that."

After he finished talking, Leo looked away from his brother, unable to look at those tear-filled eyes anymore. He hoped he got through to his baby brother. If he didn't…

Suddenly a hand wrapped itself around his wrist, and soon enough, the oldest and the youngest turtles of the Hamato clan were locked in an embrace.

"Leo…can you stay here tonight?"

Despite the situation, Leo smiled to himself; his brother forgave them.

"Anything for you, otouto."

[1] This is true, I'm just just pulling stuff out of my butt.

A/N: Hehe, you get to see my Japanese speaking abilities at the end of this! ...I may be into double digits with words I can say...

So this chapter was a bit based on my slight frustration towards Leo, Don, and Raph after I first watched "The Gauntlet" (which was the first TMNT ep I saw)..I've always been protective of Mikey...which is why he'll be featured in most of these chapters! JK, it's because of that little fun fact I shared, though the others will appear a bit, too.

Anyway, love y'all!