Anonymous prompted: LeoxApril - "Stay with me", please?

ooo

SAINWverse, inspired by sleepingseeker and her wonderful fic, Aftermath

"Stay with me."

Leonardo turns to look at her from behind the tinted lenses he always wears now to protect his damaged eyes.

April is seated at the battered, scarred table, her head bowed. The greying locks of her hair hang on cheeks that were once round but are now sharpened from years of too little food, too much grief. Her mouth is set in a sorrowful line. He cannot see her eyes.

He knows he should go. That to stay only to sate the selfish craving that beats below his plastron is wrong.

But it is a different world they live in now. One where ideas like honour and duty and sacrifice have little relevance, and even less meaning. And he has spent so many nights alone.

When he places a great, calloused hand over her own careworn ones, she raises her head and looks up at him, and the clouded storm of her eyes breaks his heart. Once, those eyes were so vibrant, so alive, so joyous, sparkling with love and affection, intelligence and passion. Now they are so sorrowful, so dim and so very, very tired. His heart is a stone in his chest as he lifts his hand and gently strokes her cheek with one rough finger.

"Yes," is all that he says,

And for a moment, a brief, dazzling moment, like the sun twinkling through the noxious polluted skies of this terrible reality, her eyes clear and the April he remembers glimmers there, beautiful, brilliant and perfect.

It is enough for him to grasp her hand and yank her to him, wrapping aching arms around her as their lips mash together and they kiss with furious longing as they strive desperately to comfort each other in the only way that seems left to them, two lost souls, broken-hearted and betrayed in a world that has forsaken them and everything they ever believed in. It doesn't matter that her eyes had darkened again before he had even grabbed her. In that short, heart-wrenching moment he had seen how badly she needed him, and that had been enough to quiet his guilt - for now.

She kisses him with hopeless yearning, her fingertips digging into the hard muscle of his arms as he frantically undoes her jeans and pushes them down. Even with the corded muscle she has doggedly acquired through relentless calisthenics and whatever protein she can find, she is too thin now. Her body is hard, her skin is dry, but to him she still feels fragile as glass as he grasps her hips and lifts her onto the table.

They continue to kiss, fervent and frenzied, as though they dare not even stop to catch their breath, in case they come to their senses. For a moment, he thinks he should slow down, caress her, kiss her all over until her body sings with pleasure, that he should savour this as though they are making love. But she has grasped the rim of his carapace, is urging him forward, sobbing hoarsely as they kiss, her thin chest heaving against his plastron, so instead he silences the remnants of sentiment, cups her buttocks in his hand and thrusts into her.

April wraps his arms around his neck as he begins to move, the ropey muscle of his legs tensed as they anchor him while he thrusts, hard and deep within her. His hands move from her buttocks to wrap around her back, holding her as close and tight as he can as their wretched tears mingle between their lips. She is gasping and thrusting back against him, holding onto him as if he is the only thing that is keeping her anchored to the world, as though, without this desperate union, she might simply drift away, to be lost as Donatello had been. Soon, the hot torrent of ecstasy is spreading through him like a fire, blistering away the grief and the anguish, smothering all his bitterness and resentment beneath a burning deluge of bliss. The remnants of his conscious mind knows it won't last, but it doesn't matter, not right then, not when all is sensation and savage instinct, not when, for a little while, he can simply forget.