(A/N: New, updated version!
This is NOT spoilers for my other Foot!Leo AU Antithesis. It's just little memories and tidbits of what made him the way he is and of his life with the Foot Clan, things I can't go into depth with in the main story but want to.
This is not a happy thing meant for children, if you catch my drift.)
"Evil". It was Raphael's favorite word. He gasped it out when Leonardo had him lashed and bound to the headboard of their crappy motel bed.
He screamed it after hours of being held on the brink of climax with no relief.
He moaned it while he watched his cock vanishing inch by inch down Leonardo's throat.
"Evil... Yer so fuckin' evil, babe..."
Leonardo hears, and remembers, and wonders-
Sometimes, he remembers hands.
Sometimes, he remembers hands and feet like his own, a pile of squirmy limbs and poking fingers.
Sometimes, he remembers cold, wet, darkness, damp fur, and a warm husky voice.
He remembers the cold-
The throne is cold. It's big and golden and it looks pretty, so pretty, it's no wonder Karai wants to play on it, but if they're caught...
"Rah-ee! Rah-ee please!"
"Just for a minute! Don't be a scaredy cat!"
He can't help it. He follows her. He always will. She's mommy and sissy and he'll always be right behind her.
He climbs up after her. He puts his hand on it. The throne is cold. He looks up, sees his reflection in the shining metal and he thinks-
"Our hands don't match..."
"Don't make that face. It's ugly."
He's getting frustrated. She's not listening. She never listens to him. She's always getting them in trouble and making him take the blame.
"Look!" He grabs her wrists, and she cries out.
"You're hurting me!"
"You're hurting me."
The other turtle's lips are bloody, their kiss still wet and red around his mouth. Raphael looks like he's been tasered, and Leonardo can see the anger and fear warring with desire in his golden eyes. It's delicious and exciting and beautiful.
So beautiful-
He watches Karai preen and primp in her mirror, knows that she's aware that he's there and is choosing to ignore him.
The dress is black and red. The colors of their Clan. She smooths her hands down her curves, and he feels the animal in him surge, wants to rip them from her limbs. She puckers her burgundy lips for his benefit, and he knows she's going to seduce someone, lay in someone else's bed tonight. Offer someone else what once was his, and she's flaunting it in his face.
She smooths her hands down her curves-
"Our hands don't match!"
"You're hurting me!"
"Why am I green?! Why am I... Like this?! Answer me!"
"Let go!"
Why aren't they the same?! They've always been the same, haven't they? They've always been-
She cradles him in her lap, and draws nonsensical pictures on his hard belly while she teaches him words. The crayons tickle.
"O-ka-san. Mommy."
"O-ka-san. Mom-mommy."
"Ane." He waits, but she doesn't explain that one.
"A-Ane. What... What that one?"
She smiles. "It's the same."
"The... Same?"
Mommy. She's Sister and Mommy. She's Mommy, and Daddy is-
The cuts burn, worse and worse each time he adds a new one. His silvery mask is soaked with tears and his fingers are trembling, fumbling the little knife between his thick fingers.
"F-Father," Leo sniffles, "Father-"
"Your tears mean nothing to me, mutant." Father snarls coldly. Mutant, he's mutant now, because he failed. As long as he is mutant, he is worthless. "You have failed me, and you must pay your price."
Leo bites down on his lip, and presses the blade to his flesh once more. Anything not to be simply "mutant".
Red stains green. He is seven.
Leonardo is seven when he kills his first man, and it shakes him for days. It won't leave him alone. He sees the spray of blood in his dreams, waking up with tears leaking down his face and knowing what he did was wrong.
By the time he is nine, he can kill three without blinking, and he sleeps soundly afterwards.
Red stains green where it drips down his thighs, hot and burning like oil but he couldn't bring himself to move, shake it off. His legs don't work.
His eyes are open, but he isn't seeing anything. Everything burns. His assailant lights a cigarette, blows the smoke in his face, and that burns too.
"Welcome to the real world, Leo-Kun."
The smoke burns his eyes.
"Put it out."
"What?"
"It burns my- put it out."
He doesn't give her time to complain as he reaches over her bare back to knock the stick of incense out of the holder with a flick of his fingers.
A flick of his fingers- that's all it takes. A flick of his fingers, and the darker turtle is on the ground, coming apart under his gaze.
A flick of his fingers, and Karai sinks her teeth into his shoulder to muffle her scream.
A flick of his fingers, and more blood is steaming down to pool in the crease of his arm.
He watches the expression on the face of the man above him go from drunken lust to shock and pain as the knife slips slowly, quietly beneath his skin, between his ribs, drowning his lungs and his scream in a rush of blood, deeper and deeper, until the hilt rests home.
He takes a minute to be proud of himself. He will be spared another lesson tonight.
He is fourteen.
He's barely awake, and even that he's not sure of. The plastic mask is so big it covers nearly all of his face, and the air coming out of the tube at the end tastes sharp and sweet. He would struggle if he could, but his arms and legs won't work, and wasn't he dreaming, anyway?
"He has been asking questions. I will not stand for it."
"Nor should you, Lord Shredder. By the time this is over, it won't remember a thing, or want to."
And he didn't.
"I gotta go."
Leonardo watches the red masked ninja gather his things and prepare to leave, to skilled to let the horrid pang of emotion that strikes him show on his face.
He's leaving to go be with his family, his brothers and his Master who is also a father.
He tells himself that he has all that, in Karai and Shredder, but it doesn't ring true. He doesn't know if it is spite, envy, or whatever else that makes him rise to his feet and distract Raphael with his body, keeping him right where he is.
"Leonardo, I'm doing this because I love you."
People hurt the ones they love. It's one of the first lessons he learns, written on his green flesh in bruises and gashes.
"I hate you!" she snarls.
He knows she means love. Because she hurts him.
"I hate ya!" Raphael snarls.
He thinks he mean love. Because he hurts him.
"I love you, my son."
He isn't sure what that means, even though it hurts him to hear it.
He remembers Sister telling him that stars could grant wishes, that if he said a special song, what he wanted would come true.
Dirty, forgotten, hurting, Leonardo crouches by his open, barred window, looks up at the stars twinkling away, sings the song through his tears, and begs them to kill him, steal his breath away late at night and take him to wherever they are, far from his home.
She's not supposed to be doing this- holding him, hugging him, letting him muffle the sounds of his sobs against her still covered chest.
She's supposed to be teaching him, instructing him in the ways of flesh, but all she does is let him cry in her arms, mumbling over and over about how she can't do this, she can't ruin him. He knows she's leaving tomorrow, replaced by someone who will ruin him, but while she's there, Miss Laurel lets him call her Mother, and strokes his shell and apologizes for things that aren't her fault, which only makes him cry harder.
"And these?" he asks, careful to sound innocently curious as he strokes the star shaped marks on Raphael's knuckles.
The darker male grunts. "Punched a mirror. Didn't like what I saw."
It was a question for his benefit. Leonardo knows exactly what those shapes are, because he has a matching set.
They give him words that help him turn his reactions and emotions on and off. When he thinks them, he can go from ready and wanton to cold blooded and focused in an instant, seamlessly. The turn on word becomes "Steel", and the turn off becomes "Red".
When he meets the leader of the mutant family, he thinks the Gods must be laughing at him.
When the word "Red" stops working and does the opposite of what it's supposed to do, he thinks he's in serious trouble.
"Karai-"
"Hush, please hush."
"Karai I don't want to-"
"Yes you do! They told me, they told me all boys like this. They said you do it with people you love and you love me, don't you?"
He does, he does. So he lays there and let's her do what she wants, listens to her whispering 'please don't leave, please don't forget me', because he loves her. She's Mommy and Sister and he loves her.
The smoke burns his eyes, and that's when he cries, tears spilling out of his eyes with no sound and seemingly no end.
"Welcome to the real world, Leo-Kun."
I'll rip your throat out, he thinks. He is thirteen, two days ago.
The letter crumples slowly in his fist as the first tears start to form.
Don't write to me anymore. I need to forget you. You're not really my brother anyway. You were a fun pet, I guess, but now you're gone. So I don't care what he did, or what happens to you. Stay over there, for all I care.
K.
For the third time in his life, he feels the stirrings of agonized hatred well in his heart, eating away at the last vestiges of Hope left. The moisture that falls from his eyes is bitter and burns. It's the last time he cries for years to come.
His name is Leonardo, but he tells them before they start- the men, the women, the marks, the missions- to call him Leo. It makes it so much easier to kill them after.
He's numb when Raphael parts his legs and takes him, but pain knifes through his heart when he kisses the scars on his arms afterwards.
The purple one is sneering, near incoherent, furious as the smaller one tries to stop him from leaping at Leonardo, at his death. Because Leonardo will kill him, without a doubt or smidge of hesitation. Donatello, he thinks his name is.
"MONSTER! LIAR! SNAKE! HE DOESN'T LOVE YOU! NO ONE WILL EVER LOVE YOU!"
Leonardo smiles, because he knows that. He's known that for a long time.
He's broken, beaten to a verifiable pulp. The blade of a dagger is snapped off in his arm and one of his eyes won't open and the other is blinded by red. His throat tastes like metal, his jaw feels loose, there's a gash in his side, under the plates and he can barely breathe and it hurts, it all hurts so bad...
But Father is watching, and Sister, and the whole clan. He has to win. There is no other option.
Leonardo staggers to his feet on legs he can no longer feel, and picks his sword off of the ground to face the last, sai wielding opponent.
He's yelling, begging, screaming to be let out, that he'll be good, that he's sorry, even as the other mutants rattle the bars of his cage and bash their heads against the metal, denting it, clawing at him desperately with slobbering fangs barely grazing his skin, driven wild by the scent of his blood.
He is eight.
The Dragons like to laugh at him, all the time, behind his back and to his face. While Hun speaks to his Father during meals the ones he brings with him snort and chuckle and throw things at him, call him horrible names. Jug does it every time, like it's his favorite sport.
One day, Leonardo calmly puts down his spoon, walks around the table, and breaks Jug's neck before the Dragon can get the first syllable of 'Mutant Freak' out of his mouth.
The Dragons don't laugh at him anymore.
His dreams are filled with color. The bad ones are red and black and silvery, like the sheen on his swords, the blood and the paint and the fire.
The good ones are full of blue, and green, and maybe a little bit of red, but it's different in those in a way he can't explain when he wakes.
Curled into a tiny ball in the corner of his punishment cage, Leonardo is too terrified to scream as he watches the mess of deformed flesh on the gurney writhe and howl under the scalpels and saws and toxins. He watches, and learns what happens to bad freaks that don't behave.
He is six, or so he is told.
"You can call me Leo, if you want."
"Oh... Uh, alright. Alright, Leo."
The smoke burns his eyes as he watches the buildings catch fire one by one, but he doesn't cry. He smiles, and imagines he tastes blood on his teeth, but there's nothing there, not this time.
His name is Leonardo, he is two days removed from turning eighteen, and he is home bound. New York bound.
(A/N: No real spoilers for Antithesis, I just wanted to do something from Leo's point of view and dig into his background a little bit. I tried to be as anonymous as possible. Feedback would be awesome.)