Author's Note - Little shift in tone here, and another one coming up next chapter.
Thanks so much to everyone for the feedback. I see I didn't have to be worried about slash keeping people from reading. Apparently there are more people than me in the world who think slash is up there with rainbows and puppies and stuff.
Hey, Tri! Since the alerts are wonky and I can't send private messages, I'm answering you here. Sure! Feel free to send as detailed a critique as you like. Anyone else who wants to dig in and slap me around, go for it. I'm always trying to get better. Someday I'm hoping to do this for a living (writing, I mean, not necessarily slashing fictional turtles), and I'd be a pretty big hypocrite if I asked for feedback and didn't want the good with the bad. It's all in the name of improvement, right? (Best email it, of course, since this site is just a leetle bit unreliable these days.)
Now. Story.
First came the blast, then came the panic.
Afterwards? That was when the waiting began.
That was when Leo felt his thoughts beginning to regain a little of their normal meter and tone. As he sat, hour stacking on hour, waiting for his brother to open his eyes, he felt his own sense of equilibrium returning.
He was so used to being perfectly in control that being out of it for that little while had been jarring. Unable to control his thoughts, to form words, to take his normal place at the head of the group, directing his brothers and assisting Splinter…it was disturbing.
The return to placid thinking, the settling of rings in the pool of his mind, should have been comforting.
Perhaps it was. He wasn't giving it much thought. Though he had the silence and peace he could have used to reflect, he chose instead to watch Raphael's face, to think of everything that had shifted their lives around so entirely in the last day.
Raph wasn't safe yet. Don was quick to remind him of that. He slipped into shock, as Don predicted, but it didn't seem so bad to cover him, keep him warm. Speak to him quietly in case he could hear. And after a little while, Raph fought the reaction and slept deep but normally.
It was Raph he thought about most of all.
It was funny, but he couldn't remember a time he and Raph weren't at odds with each other. When they were young, and Leo would devote himself so wholeheartedly to Splinter and their teachings, Raph would stand to the side and smirk and call him teacher's pet. At the same time Leo would scowl and roll his eyes and call Raph a simpleton.
When Splinter chose weapons for them, Raph wanted the katana. When Leo was made leader, Raph was angry for weeks. He never got over that, actually, not the way he grew to respect and love the sai he was given.
They argued over orders, over patrols, over the right ways to handle attackers. They argued over strategy, over lessons. Over meals. If they talked about it, chances were they argued about it. Especially the last few years. Maybe growing older was making it worse.
Leo didn't remember how or why it started. He'd never questioned it. It was as much a part of his life as his blades, or the sewers.
It bothered him to sit there beside Raph's still body and not be able to give reason for a lifetime of fighting. It bothered him that he still couldn't remember what they were fighting about only hours ago, before that Purple Dragon had pulled his gun.
The fights, then, were nothing. Simple as that. They weren't relevant. They weren't important enough to remember.
But after the fighting, what was left? What was there in a lifetime of being brothers?
He couldn't think of much. A few jokes, a few nights having rare talks. Exchanging wicked grins though ten different enemies stood between them.
Raph jumping in front of a bullet to save his life.
Was that it?
It couldn't be. There was an entire life between them. They were young, maybe, but twenty years they had been awake and aware and brothers.
Leo could have named a thousand inside jokes between he and Michelangelo, and a hundred different things he and Don had done together, or talked to death. He could recite shopping lists of foods the two of them liked or hated. He could tell stories, laughing, about then as children. About Mikey drawing his outlandish pictures and Don, baffled, unable to tell what the drawings were of because, as Mike put it, he saw too much with his eyes.
He thought of those memories, and Raph was just a hazy figure in the background. A wallflower, watching and smirking, or frowning, angry or bemused, but hardly ever part of it.
That couldn't be right. It just couldn't. What was there he didn't remember right? Was his memory resentful of their constant fighting, blocking Raph out of scenes he should have been in?
He remembered being in a coma himself once. Lying presumably as still as Raph was now. Splinter told him later that they stood around him, his brothers and Splinter, April and Casey. They told stories, they exchanged memories. They all tried to wake him up.
But he always responded to Raph.
Splinter recounted that as if it were amusing. "I suppose the instinct to best your brother, to not idly accept his challenges, was too much for even unconsciousness to keep down."
Leo didn't know what any of it meant. He didn't know where he stood in his brother's life, or where Raph should stand in his.
He knew one thing for certain - that when Raph jumped in front of him and took a bullet for Leo, when he fell and seized and bled and might have died, Leo felt a sickness in his heart he had never felt before.
His eyes opened with a start, and he blinked around. "What…?" Memory was hazy for a few seconds, but it returned to overwhelm him, and instantly he leaned in to the bed, searching Raph for any signs of awareness.
"Leo."
He looked back, realizing then what had woken him up. Don was behind him, looking down at Raph.
Leo relaxed a little, stretching out his spine with a grimace. "Ow."
"Sleeping in a chair will do that," Don agreed, moving past him to sit on the edge of the bed. He reached out, his palm resting on Raph's temple. "I think it's safe to say we avoided infection. He doesn't have any hint of fever."
"That's good."
"That's amazing." Don sent him a faint smile. "I'd ask if he's moved at all but I guess you wouldn't have noticed."
"I would have." Leo spoke confidently. He hadn't been sleeping deeply.
Don raised his eyebrows, but turned back to Raph. "We've got to keep him hydrated. We might have to force him awake if he doesn't come to on his own soon."
"Can't force Raph to do anything he doesn't want to do," Leo said absently, his hand finding Raph's right where he'd left it over the covers.
Don murmured agreement. Satisfied, he stood up. "You might consider going to sleep in a real bed. Me or Mike can sit in with him, if--"
"I'm fine." It was the truth. He felt stiff a little, but rested.
"Okay. For now." Don lay a hand on Leo's shoulder. "Call if you need--"
"Don."
Don paused beside him, waiting.
Leo hesitated, regarding Raph's face. "You said you've known for a while that he…how he felt. About me." He was hesitant to speak the words out loud.
Don didn't need him to. "Sour grapes."
"What?"
Don smiled, nodding at Raph. "Sour grapes. That's how he deals with things. If he wants something and can't have it, he does his best to convince everyone that he never really wanted it." He looked back at Leo. "You remember what he said about the katana when he got over not getting to train on them?"
Leo thought about it. "I remember a few less than flattering remarks about oversized steak knives."
Don nodded. "When Splinter didn't choose him as our leader, he suddenly decided we didn't need a leader, and he set out to break every rule given to him." He smiled rather fondly down at their unconscious brother. "Remember when he saved that one girl from a couple of drugged up guys trying to grab her?"
Leo chuckled. "Which time?"
"First one." Don's smile faded. "We were maybe seventeen, and he wasn't even supposed to be up alone. He came home furious because this little girl had hit him and called him a monster after he saved her."
Leo's laughter vanished. They all had those stories, and they'd been more than a little painful the first few times, before they got used to it.
With a start he realized what Don was leading up to. "Right. He refused to go up for a few weeks. Said he hated humans and their whole world."
Don sighed. "Sour grapes. Then, maybe four, five years ago? All the sudden he couldn't agree with a single thing you said. Everything was a fight, as if he didn't care about you at all."
Leo nodded.
"It's just his way of dealing with things." Don shrugged. "But this time it kept going, on and on. It didn't go away. I knew it had to be something big. And then…"
"Then what?"
Don hesitated. He glanced at Raph. "Never mind."
"Don. What?"
Don smiled. "Not mine to tell, Leo. Just…trust me. I know what I'm talking about."
Leo sighed, knowing he'd get no more out of him.
Don left them to their silence, Leo and Raph. Leo tossed over what Don said. Sour grapes. It really was Raph's habit to deal with things that way. Even things he managed to get for himself. He never liked to let on how important they were, so that if he lost them no one would realize how much he was hurting.
His sai, for one. Raph would have been the first to call them overgrown salad forks, but when he lost one in a battle it bothered him so much he obsessed.
Leo had always known that about him, in an unacknowledged way. He knew Raph's bitterness came from something besides anger. He knew that when Raph claimed not to care one way or another about something, he was almost always lying.
He never thought of it in terms of himself.
Was that his answer, then? Was that why in his memories Raph was always a remote presence? Had Leo himself been a sour grape for Raph to deal with?
Maybe it wasn't Leo's faulty mind. Maybe Raph had distanced himself, had fought, on purpose.
His hazy memories, after all, meant nothing when stacked against the image of Raph on his back in an alley, bleeding and smiling because it was better that he die than Leo get hurt.
Love you, he'd said. Never said it before. Should've.
A life spent defensive, on edge, pretending to hate. Bitter, mad. Distancing himself from Leo because somehow, for some reason, he saw something in Leo that he loved.
It seemed impossible.
Mutations. Aliens. Magic, other dimensions. God, what in their lives wasn't impossible? Those lives themselves should have been impossible, but there they were. And there Raph was, wounded with a bullet meant for Leo.
Never said it before. Should've.
Leo became aware that he was smiling, that it was big and sincere and that even Raph unconscious in front of him couldn't dampen it.
He'd never been anyone's sour grape before.
And Raphael…he was dark, and strong, and so silent in Leo's memory that he might have been a stranger. Someone Leo could get to know. Someone who loved him.
He reached out and took Raph's hand, sliding his fingers over the rough skin, twining their fingers together. His other hand stroked, light, back and forth down Raph's forearm. The skin was softer there, the muscles relaxed.
He leaned in, gazing at Raph's slack face, naked without the fiery red band and glaring eyes. "Come back to me," he said quietly, the words light from the smile they passed through. "Come back and let's have this."
Raph's face shifted, dropping towards him as if he heard the words.
Leo's smile only grew. Of course he heard. Raph had called him back from blackness once, why shouldn't Leo do the same for him?
Warm in a way new to him, happy despite the horror of the day, Leo reached out to Raph. The pads of his fingers smoothed down his cheek. "Raph, come on. Come back."
The muscles of his face contracted and relaxed, and Raph's mouth moved soundlessly.
He would have to call for Don, Leo knew. But he had a moment. He had time enough to wait, to see…
A sliver of brown, bright and glazed, appeared between widening eyelids.