Morning Keeps You

By Kay

Disclaimer: I don't own TMNT. It's a real pity, but somebody has to do it.

Author's Notes: Leonardo's POV, fourth movieverse after he's just arrived home from the rainforest. It has no point. I just felt like writing something that I didn't have to concentrate on for a second. XD Ignore the sap and way-too-involved imagery, sorry.


You get up before the sun does, shaking off the last remnants of a dream where the sun filtered through the trees and dotted your skin like freckles. This place is cold, not hot; silent, not awakening with the calls of life. Once it had been home, but now it seems too much a tomb.

Eventually, it will become a home again.

Your father breathes deeply in his sleep. Michelangelo, loudly. The light under Don's door is out and Raph's hammock creaks gently with the movement of a body. In this spell, you leave your belt and bands on the bed, taking nothing with you but the blades that are eager to serve their master this hour before day. The kata are simple, pure. As you complete them, your eyes close and grace lends your feet the way, images of cloying leaves creeping up from the ground surrounding you. You trace the branches against the sky's seeping gold with each sword. Puncture the emptiness. Expose the space around you.

Sweat covers your body in a light sheen, mingling with that which came with the bed sheets and hours of night. Once, when you were young, each slide of ninjaken would breathe with the pulse of your brothers' names. In time, the sounds had become so seamless that now they are instinctive things, noiseless murmurs in the back of your mind where the skull meets your second softness. (The first, protected by plastron and hours of meditation, pounds in your ears.) You try to guess which move has become which brother; the flat side of the blade deferring for Donatello, the strong block thrumming with Raphael. It has been so long since you've found Michelangelo; the joy long bereft. Sometimes you practice longer than your share simply out of hope.

Time passes. You break, meditate the last stretch. Make Master Splinter's tea. His shuffling behind his door is a distant, comforting nudge of normality.

So this is life again. 'Welcome back,' you whisper. 'What do you do now?'

So often, hadn't you dreamt it? In the rainforest, the moist and beautiful wreckage of the earth. For a world so full, it had lacked the few things you needed most, and so often you had closed your eyes to center yourself only to hear the laughter of your family ring out amongst the trees. Had you run from it? Towards it? Sometimes you aren't even sure. You wish they could have seen it. The columns of bark and root, the fresh of the green. A plate of gold and paint laid out under the canopy. Even now, you wonder how to mesh that life with the one that meets you once more in this underground prison that seems so familiar and stifling at the same time.

It begins, you murmur over the soothing whistle of the teapot, with another minute and another step. It is, perhaps, the only lesson you brought home with you from the tangled jungles. That, and sleep with your shell to the east even at sunset, and to never forget that as beautiful as the forest is, it is always empty.

This place, as cold and silent as it is now, could never be empty. In fact, it is too much. Too full. Not merely a piece, but a bone.

Your brothers are stirring. And though you cannot see the sun any longer, the press of its return sings in your blood and you know morning has come.


The End