A/N: I'm going on a trip for about a month and while I will be able to check different stories, I won't have the time to actually write. So, I thought to give you something to read! XD
Also, I wrote this chapter listening to Kiss Me by Sixpence None The Richer on an endless loop, along with a bunch of other nostalgic songs, and I actually feel like I'm in a good mood! ;D
"Hanging By A Moment."
It starts fairly innocent at first, just the faintest brush of Leo's lips against his cheek. He doesn't even notice it, but Casey does, and the blush has reached his ears by the time the feeling's gone. Or – five times Leo kissed Casey, and one time Casey kissed him back.
I'm livin' for the only thing I know
I'm running here and I'm not quite sure
Where to go?
And down I know I'd like to be in tune
Just hanging by a moment here with you
I'm falling even more in love with you
Letting go of all I've held onto
I'm standing here until you make me move
I'm hanging by a moment here with you
"Now," Leo starts, giving him a rag, "take this and try to clean them as good as you can," he instructs in that leader voice of him, but Casey can recognize the hint of playful allure in his tone and smirks.
He takes the rag in his hand quickly, before his fingers can linger on Leo's hand for longer than it'd be appropriate. It's a day off – more like, Casey overslept and missed his first four classes, so what's the point, anyway – and while he could be hanging out on the topside with the sun blazing his skin, he is down here, on the dojo wiping weapons as Leo brushes the tatamis.
His hands are red, raw, and dirtily prickled from all the effort and he can't help but wonder why they're the only ones here, spring cleaning the dojo. "The others won't help?"
He probably says something wrong, because Leo ceases his motions, neck tensing. His features relent as he tosses a glance towards Splinter's old room before sighing. The next sounds out of his mouth are words uncertainly soft, making Casey's throat close, "T – they don't like staying here more than they should."
He looks around, expectantly bashful, like he's waiting for some divine force to save him from the awkward position he is into – or make him feel better for this situation with a caress and the faintest peck of lips.
Casey doesn't want many things – but in the silence and green light of the dojo, where the pipes from above pump with water like his veins with blood, the guys sip coffee and energy drinks in the kitchen, pretending they can't understand and Leo stands in front of him, looking at him with an apologetic gaze – he wants to be this thing for him, so much.
And he wants to say something, too – he wishes he could find the right words to express what he feels – and with Leo staring at him like that, he almost feels confident enough to do so – almost, because he doesn't.
It's scary – to know, finally, what to say, but not knowing why you want to. Because, sometimes, Casey doesn't know why he wants to say the things he imagines, or why he does the things he does. Sometimes, he doesn't feel the need to tell Leo anything, sometimes he wants to scream at him – on top of his lungs – about how he plans to stay and stick by their side and by his side forever, and other times, the thought of saying that scares him.
He doesn't know why Leo makes him feel this way – unlike any other mindless, pure crush he's had. Maybe it's because it's his first guy crush – or his first mutant turtle guy crush.
Maybe it's because, deep down, he knows it's more than a simple crush – and more than a crush means shattering, destroying and leaving – and Casey's tired of abandoning ruining things.
Leo shakes his head a bit, biting his lip and leaves his broom down to kneel in front of him. "Sorry, Casey," he says, pronouncing his name so much like taffy on his tongue that it makes Casey's arms shiver. "It's just been a long week."
The smile he offers him is tentative on the mouth, but nonetheless genuine and fond. It makes him look younger – makes him look his age.
Casey smiles back, childlike glow gleaming in his eyes. "Leo?"
He lifts an eyebrow, "What?" I wonder if we think of each other at the same time.
"It's Tuesday."
And Leo's smile splits into a lovely grin of warm exasperation as he huffs a laugh behind his hand – it's a rare, fleeting image, which Casey's mind snaps into his memory like a photograph and swears to do all that he can to see it again and again.
They finish cleaning reminiscing old stories that fill the space with giggles and their hearts with warmth.
"– and then, I knocked him out with a –"
"I thought Raph knocked him out," Leo interrupts, with raising eyebrows and a grin trembling on the edges of his lips that blows into laughter one more time as Casey shrugs, "I've heard it both ways."
Leo leans against him for support as they quiver next to the tree and his beak gently touches his cheek.
And perhaps it's the whole ambiance they've created around them, or the fact that their bond feels so easy – to both of them – easy and not confusing or forced or overbearing at all – that Casey doesn't flinch or scrunches in awkwardness, but instead a smile graces his mouth as he actually meets Leo's blue eyes.
And if he wasn't drifting inside of them, he would have noticed Leo's unsurely wrinkled forehead softening, but the only thing he pays attention to is how beautiful Leo's eyes are when they shine, brightly and confidently.
It's the third time it's happened – and Casey didn't know he was counting – but now, it's silly to think he wouldn't.
"How do you do that?" One of his brand new college teammates asks in the library – huh, library; who'da thunk? – as they all watch Casey do a full rotation of his arm. He smirks.
"Man, Jones, got no bones or something?"
Attention is not something he's used to, so he savors his friends' comments as he continues to flaunt and show off, just a bit. He proceeds to full arm rotate both of his arms – not just in stretching, but completely, as if he has no skeleton and his skin is gooey, and the hockey team cheers around him.
"C'mon dude, how?" The short one with the red hair – Brandon? Brendon? – asks with a huge ass grin and the others around him sneer and mop his curly hair with playful hands; he's the baby of the team, even though they're all the same age.
It reminds Casey of Mikey and that makes him feel like home.
It's strange for him – to see that he has close people all around him. It often makes him snicker, or cry, or both – and something really urges him to take April's invitation to move in together in her dorm. She needs a roommate and he needs his April.
But he can't let his sister. She needs him, too.
"Well, someone taught me," Casey says around a smug grin, and remembers the day Leo was teaching him.
It's gonna help you so much with the stick, he had said with a dreamy expression and backpedaled with a very quietly adorable, Okay, that sounded a little bit stupid, but the offer still stands. And Casey did agree that it sounded in fact, just a little bit stupid, but it was also so truly thoughtful of him that Casey could not give an absolute flying fuck about its stupidity.
"Who?"
My brother, Leo, he has on the tip of his tongue, but he swallows it, because the term doesn't feel all too right. "A friend," he settles for instead and his friends' smiles stretch wider.
"Hmm, a friend? I know what kinda friend you mean."
Their table shakes with laughter and whistles, and Casey rolls his eyes, cheeks colored a faint red. "Nah, it's not like that. He's –" he starts and stops abruptly, heart dropping roundly in his stomach as the crowd around him stills and stares.
"He?" Brendon says, with an unreadable expression and Old Hob besides him, team's first member and unclaimed mother hen of the group clears his throat.
Casey braces himself with an uncertain sip of his root beer, grunts lightly to appear collectedly cool. He knew he was weird, surely, on thin fucking hockey ice – it was too good to be true – and now, he's unmoved like a statue.
"Damn," Hob finally exclaims, leveling him a look under his cap and dreadlocks and the others around him nod furiously, lips pressed.
There goes the ice, Casey thinks, before he continues, his pair of brown eyes glinting with an impish delight and a malicious sneer creeps onto his lips, "Even Jones'll get a fucking boyfriend 'fore us."
The table rests in silence till Casey can't hold it anymore, exhales loudly, burps, and then, gawks uncontrollably, unable to keep a straight face, and beguiles the rest of the team in intense yells and jeers and good-natured calls – that stop once Casey feels a hand on his shoulder.
"Oh, he will?" He turns his face and meets April's incredulously taunting grin and arched eyebrow in question as she nudges him with her elbow and takes him by the hand to drag him around the hallways.
"Didn't know you and Leo were getting it on," she whispers dryly, feigning uninterested, but her blue reporter's eyes are knowing and Casey's breath hitches.
"Fucking dammit, April," he curses and she tightens her hold on his arm, stifling theatrically girlish giggles.
"How did ya know?" He asks her over the phone, later that night, fingers fidgeting.
Her voice is oddly comforting, but there's a sharply larky edge to it. "It's this thing I do sometimes when other people talk – listening. I know, revolutionary. You should try it sometime," she snorts and he responds back with an equally entertained huff. He likes to imagine one of her red eyebrows is raised sardonically on her forehead, accompanied with freckles.
And he guesses her face is set in a deadpan when she speaks up in the phone again, "Oh, also, I'm a psychic, you moron."
"Shit," he says in a tone barely below a whisper, since his little sister's sleepy head is resting on his shoulder. His muscles ache, but he likes and needs the feel and weight of his sister's head on him too much to say something – it's in moments like this he truly thinks he understands, Leo's burden. The hand that fingers her hair pauses when April clears her throat again.
"How did you know?" she inquires, softly.
"Uh," Casey searches and wonders where his ability to speak has traveled to.
He doesn't have the answer to this – guesses he'll probably never have it – but his clock is ticking midnight, his ceiling stars glow, his sister's breaths smell like pumpkin and fairy toothpaste mingled together, his sneakers are untied – and the image he sees beneath his eyelids when they close, is Leo kneeling down with an affectionate simper and rolled eyes to tie his laces. – As if, his life is tied with his, irreversibly.
Now, in the quietness of the room, that kind of future doesn't seem or feel overwhelming and absurd – but just another natural step take – if Leo gives him his hand. Can April's powers figure out Leo's feelings, too? Should he ask? Is that why April is talking to him, now? Does she know?
His mouth finally works and his chest feels at ease and relieved and full altogether when he snickers and doesn't waver, yawing, "He's my Prince Charming."
And April's insanely loud and funny cackles, along with cheeky and loving remarks, such as, Okay, Cinderella, and You always had a thing for blue eyes, or I love you, Case, really, are the last things he hears before falling asleep.
In the snowy nights of November, they stay together – Leo and him – cuddled on rooftops, wrapped with scarfs and beanies and thick coats that battle the cold with their swift textures.
It's one of those rare times, which are starting to become as common as New York City starless skies – when Casey can't stay at home because it hurts – and Raph isn't there to bear his painful weight with muscles.
But the phone on his hand appears just as easily as Leo shows up in front of him, a panting mess that adorns his sweaty palms and a toothy smile that only widens when he shakes his shoulders and deliberately winks at Casey, as he passes him KFC take-outs. "You texted, didn't you?"
He's here. He's sticking around. And Casey isn't sure why this surprises him – but it does.
Their knees bump and jerk together while they eat – and Casey can't help but smile despite his gritted teeth – because Leo's hot saucy mouth is scrunched in food and cuteness – and his posture is slumped, the tension that never leaves his body melting and dripping down on the rooftop.
His eyes glance around, shifting, but the breaths he exhales to see them take form in the cold air are warm with feeling – as if he's trying to hide in plain sight from the excuses he makes to sneak away, just so he can, for barely some minutes, find time to breach the surface of obligations, responsibilities and burdens that shadows above him like the veil of an ancient tragedy and gasp for clean air he can only find away from his capital-L Leonardo.
Casey's hands grip the edges of the rood and it buzzes under his grasp – or maybe he imagines it. The trembling continues, but he doesn't protest nor moves – because he gets Leo, he knows. Breaths come easier to him, when he opens up the hidden bottle in his coat and almost throws it towards Leo's side.
The wrinkled nose and pressed, lemon-sucking lips he gets in response are adorably adorable and his narrowed eyes, decorated with the blue, cheeky bandana remind Casey of his grandma's old yoga friends – when they'd lecture him for his dirty, oily hair.
He bits his lip to keep from laughing when Leo makes a face as he sips down right from the bottle seven mouthfuls, the alcohol burning his throat like a cigarette and his mouth smelling like katana steel and fire. "Sorry, Leo, I hafta."
"Ugh," he says with feeling, "You literally don't."
"And yet I literally do," he wiggles his eyebrows semi-suggestively, drinking, and then, with much more seriousness blazing his eyes and a low shrug of the shoulder, "I'm getting cold, 'kay? Not all of us have the skin of a warrior."
Leo nods, almost solemnly, and there's something missing in his eyes when he stands up, that Casey can't seem to recognize. But his face looks fuller – greener and brighter – and the way he spreads his chest out is not so much in authority as in pleased bliss. Casey thinks he's done well.
"You didn't eat all of it, dude," his smile is sadly loopy, lazy from the alcohol as his head tilts first to Leo's KFC wings, then tips back briefly – it pounds when he tries to hold it up.
Leo drops his gaze on his palm and his eyes rise, fixing some spot down the alley street as he jumps off the roof with the grace of a cat.
Casey's head swirls when he tries to lean forward and squint his eyes in confusion – but his heart tightens when he watches Leo using all the elegantly scary ninja skills that make him what he is and have shaped him into this, to cautiously leave the take-out on a homeless' bench.
He handles the box with care and aliveness as he slips it out of his hands, hanging upside down as he does so.
And Casey's pretty sure his Adam's apple is doing the same jumps around his throat – because he doesn't think he has met someone like this, a person with unadulterated devotion to the same world that has been rough – as gentle and sincere as Casey's sister when she talks about dolphins, ponies, and friendship being magic and something pure flickers in her eyes, like hope and joy.
When Leo has returned, as fast as he left, he kneels next to Casey, arms brushing. His drunken daze tries to follow the shape of him and meet him – and Leo half-smiles as he does, cheeks fondly raising at the corners of his lips.
He places his hands on his knees as he squats beside him, palms turned and open. It's such an innocent gesture, and when he shakes his head warmly, mouth in a thin line, as Casey points with his nose to Leo's scarf and lack of coat – that's perhaps not-forgotten in the alleyway – Casey's heart tightens.
His kindness still hurts, sometimes.
"It's not much," he starts, interpreting his wordless commentary, "but it – it feels right, y'know?"
His hand moves to take Casey's gloved one and grips it, for the shortest of moments, as if he's hoping he'll make sense, his emotions will travel through his fingers and drip on the tips of Casey's, waiting for him to explore them.
Casey thinks of the hand on his – the hand that can handle all pain and war – a hand that is a weapon – heavy and pebbled, raspy to touch, yet, big enough to carry the whole world, and maybe Casey's heart – and he smiles back, fully and yawnily.
He hopes his smile isn't lost between the idiotically silly expressions that the alcohol manages to force out of his body and his eyes flutter shut before he can see a change on Leo's features, see them soften for him and sharpen for the world around them as his arms draw a bubble around them.
Those same arms wrap his body gingerly as Leo lifts him over his shoulder and hops around rooftops so fast, like Casey is nothing but a weightless rag doll on his muscles.
His feet make sounds like tires when he stops at Casey's stupidly small room balcony and they gravel while he lowers Casey carefully next to the banister.
His eyes snap open, but they are unfocused and dizzily bleak as they agonize to name the things he sees around him. Leo's face is blurry in front of him when he ducks his head to speak lowly to him, as if he's one of his brothers – someone he loves.
"Thanks for the fun evening, Casey. Good night," he murmurs, cupping Casey's cheek in his hand, running his fingers on it, and before the touch can fly away, Casey catches his wrist in a rushed, alcoholically-driven, imbecile movement, canting his head to lean into the touch soothingly.
The whole night stills around them, earth stopping and sun waiting on the corner of the deep sky as Leo stands expectantly, staring right into Casey's eyes, endlessly open, and Casey's heart misses a few beats.
His mind and body are begging him to make a move – his head swimming into a fancy cocktail of fuzzy feelings and slurring words that flash around him, and Casey is torn – between telling him to stay here, invite him in his bed and his embrace or plead him to take him with him, down in the lair, where breathing doesn't hurt and they can take hot baths together to heal the cold, the scars and their hearts.
He wants to sing him sappy melodies from the Disney movies he watches with his sister, drawl out his affection and love for him, praise and hold him for helping others simply because it should be done, and because it is the right thing to do, without shreds of doubt or hesitation, make him promise he'll try to help him and swear he'll do the same in return – wants to tell him that he understands, now, why Mikey calls him a superhero, and Raph and Donnie laugh – but never in mockery.
His mouth is cowardly traitorous, though, as Casey recoils slightly from his hand, lifts his eyes from where they've wandered on Leo's lips back to his eyes and tosses an apologetic glance, mouth crooked awkwardly.
"K, g'nite," he says through pressed teeth and shuts his eyes tight in guilt before Leo can see the shame and disappointment gleaming in them – or the truth and strip him bare.
But the only thing he hears is Leo chuckle, a rumbled, light-hearted sound that echoes around the air and seeps into his ears as languid heat suddenly envelopes him. By the time he's gone, Casey has dived into his bed, Leo's scarf still surrounding him with his smell and warmth.
The next time he tries to reach the lair, shivering with the cold, hands tucked in his puffer jacket and bandana icy to his forehead, Raph corners him before he can get in, lips curled.
Casey's panting breath turns hitched and sharp when Raph holds a phone in front of his face – twirling it lazily but slowly enough so he can see – it's Casey's text to Leo.
Before he can articulate a word, utter something that most probably is bound to be beyond lame – Raph opens an arm big enough for Casey, drags him in and presses him to his plastron – hard and gentle, just like him – brushing their foreheads together in familiarly foreign gesture.
"Thank you. He could do much worse than a freezing popsicle," he mutters in Casey's hair, barely more audible than a sigh and Casey closes his eyes, hugging back just as hard and giggling soundly.
"Leo'll kill you if he sees you with his phone, and just so ya know, I ain't stopping him, meathead."
"If you hurt 'im, I'll kill you."
A/N: So, what happens next? ;D