Leo's arms squeeze tight around them for three seconds, four—and then they fall loose. He slumps forward and would have hit the ground if Donnie and Mikey didn't scramble to support his sudden deadweight.
They push him back upright, and then ease him into a careful lean against Raph's cracked plastron. Raph wraps sore hands carefully around Leo's slim shoulders, hyper-aware of every cut and bruise on his little brother's battered body.
Leo's head lolls as if he's asleep, or—as if he's asleep.
The giddy relief of an extremely close victory drains away in favor of fear. All three of them are shaking with the leftover dregs of adrenaline.
"What's wrong with him?" Mikey asks shrilly. He's clutching Leo's arm like he doesn't trust Leo to remain solid if he lets go.
"You want that list alphabetically or in descending order of how much each issue complicates my life?" Donnie replies shortly, lowering the lenses of his goggles over his eyes.
If it were anyone else, Raph and Mikey both would have snapped at the inappropriately irreverent tone—but it's Donatello. They know how he wears his worry. Whatever he's picking up with his scan, it's causing his lips to thin, and lines to tighten around his eyes.
He's an engineer, not a medic—Leo fills that uncredited role—but Donnie is Leo's usual extra set of hands in the infirmary, so he picked up a thing or two. Raph can tell, from the careful, deliberate way he touches his twin's neck and feels around the base of his skull, that Donnie is mentally rehearsing everything he knows about head trauma and spinal injuries.
"It should be safe to move him," he finally says, sitting back on his heels. Absolutely none of that worry, poorly moonlighting as dispassion, has left his eyes. "I want him back home in the medbay immediately. Like, a week ago immediately. But," he adds, uncomfortable being the voice of comfort and doing his best with it regardless, "he'll be okay."
It's like Raph's shell was too tight right up until that moment, crushing his lungs and restricting his air. And now he can breathe again.
"Of course he will," he chokes out.
"It's not a medbay if it's not on a spaceship," Mikey replies absently, doing a decent job of sounding like he's not on the verge of hysterics as he helps tuck Leo safely into the crook of Raph's arm. "You normally just call it the spa."
"Ninety-nine percent of the time we only use that room for mud masks and manicures. So sue me."
"Alright," Raph butts in, not unkindly, "we can argue about it later. I'm sure Leo will have some key points to add. Donnie, the tank is out of commission for the time being—do you have any other ride you could call for us? If not, we might need to, uh—borrow one."
He can't even bring himself to feel guilty about it. He would do a lot worse than steal a car for his family, even if it sets a bad example. Donnie's frown deepens as he taps on his holo-gauntlet, which Raph takes as a sign that he doesn't actually have a secret fleet of vehicles he can summon from now that most of his tech has been soundly smashed by the Krang.
"Way ahead of you, mister," a voice chimes in from the comms, and as one, the turtles glance at the glowing emblem on Raph's forearm.
"April?" Mikey's voice shoots upwards gladly. "Hey! You're okay!"
"Of course I am, what's a little city-wide alien invasion? I went to public school. And you boys need to update me pronto! Splints and I have been losing our minds over here! We got Leo back?"
"Yeah, we got him," Raph affirms. He holds Leo a little tighter. They very nearly almost didn't get him. "You can thank Mikey for that."
Their sister makes a choked noise, what was clearly a sob before she strangled it into submission. "Angelo, you're getting one helluva hug from me the second I see you. Brace yourself, baby."
"Consider me braced," Mikey says. His smile is shaky, but he manages to keep it.
"We just picked up Future Boy, and we're on our way to you now. Give us two shakes—maybe three. Traffic's kind of not great."
"Ten-four, Apricot," Donnie says, and then the comm goes silent, and the three of them just sort of look at each other.
With help on the way, and nothing to do but wait, there's time for the hurts they've been too busy for to finally settle in.
Raph can barely keep his right eye open, it burns so much. His left shoulder is a solid ache. Mikey's hands are still shaking, and Raph thinks maybe it has less to do with adrenaline than he thought, and more to do with that golden portal he tore open out of sheer stubborn, inexhaustible love. And Donnie is sitting in that tense, stiff way he only does when his battle shell is hurting more than it's helping, his mouth set in a firm line that Raph knows means he's gone nonverbal for the time being.
Still… still.
They're alive to feel it all, the pain and relief and fear and love. They're together. The sun is setting, brilliant and golden in the sky, and their proud, unconquered city shines beneath it.
And Leo's breaths are warm puffs against Raph's shoulder. His plastron rises and falls evenly with each one. The whole right side of his face is puffy and swollen, and there's a crack in his shell that Raph is worried about, but he's alive. He's sleeping, and he's safe, and by the end of the day he'll be home.
Raph shifts him up a bit, ignoring the sharp look Donnie shoots at him for it; just enough that he can plant his cheek carefully on the top of Leo's head. Mikey scoots closer, sandwiching himself between his two eldest brothers. He lifts one of Donnie's arms and drapes it around himself snugly. Don sighs through his nose, but leans in instead of away.
They won, and they won without losing anything they couldn't come back from.
The raucous, manic beeping of a car horn draws Raph's attention to the unfamiliar cargo van galloping towards them at what is very much not the speed limit. It brakes with an angry screech and a long stretch of tire marks scrubbed into the asphalt lot, and April, Splinter and Casey pile out like a squad of Navy Seals, leaving doors hanging wide-open behind them.
It's all chaos for the next handful of minutes, everyone talking over each other, lots of "are you okay?"s and "I'm okay, are you—"s. Splinter takes one look at Leo's poor battered face and orders everyone back into the car.
They have to fold the middle row of seats down for Raph to fit comfortably. Donnie slips away to the driver's seat, jittery and overstimulated. It'll make him feel better to do something with purpose. Mikey's starting to cry in earnest, now that they're surrounded by family and he feels safe enough to cry, and April bundles him up in a hug that looks like it might last a couple days.
They're halfway across the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, under the indigo blanket of twilight, when Raph realizes Casey has been very quiet.
As a matter of fact, he hasn't heard Casey say a word since the kid was crying on the comms, begging Leo not to go away.
He glances over his shoulder at the back row of seats. Casey is sitting on April's other side, hunched forward, arms wrapped around himself as if he's staving off the cold. His eyes are glassy and freshly traumatized and Raph realizes he's let something pretty important slip.
"Hey," Raph says, his heart hurting for him. "Casey." When Casey startles at the sudden address, and his gaze darts up to meet Raph's, the snapping turtle offers his hand. "It's okay. Here."
His hand is huge, and he knows that his size can be intimidating for people who don't know him. He's half-expecting Casey to hesitate to take it. But the boy lurches forward off his seat at the invitation, like there's a string knotted around his breastbone, tying him to this little ragtag family of mutants and misfits. He puts his hand in Raph's without missing a beat.
Raph works off Casey's heavy glove and then guides his scarred, five-fingered hand to Leo's arm.
"If Leo was your sensei, I'm guessing he taught you how to take a pulse," Raph says lightly. Sure enough, Casey's fingers curl, the first two pressing against the palmar side of Leo's wrist in the automatic, unflinching manner of a field medic. The proof of life beats there, steady and solid. "See? He's alive. And he's gonna stay that way. You don't have to be scared."
Casey blinks, and it dislodges a couple tears from his eyes, but he nods. He's staring down at their hands on Leo's arm, an odd expression on his face.
Belatedly, Raph realizes he's still holding Casey's hand, and he lifts his own away quickly.
"Sorry," he starts, but Casey is already shaking his head rapidly.
"No!"
His voice breaks the pocket of stillness they've been sitting in; Mikey lifts his head off of April's shoulder to fix them with a watery, curious look. Donnie's eyes dart to the rearview mirror, narrowed in suspicion, like he's just looking for an excuse to ground one of them for getting rowdy. The driver's seat always gives him an inflated sense of authority.
Immediately, Casey looks mortified. "I mean—uh, nevermind."
This is a much better expression on him than that grief-stricken one had been; so Raph raises an eye ridge in a silent go on.
"Um—well, I just remembered—you used to hold my hand when I was little," Casey mumbles, very fixedly not meeting anyone's eyes. "I always wanted to run after sensei and you were worried I'd get hurt. Then you weren't around anymore and I had to learn to be careful on my own." He shrugs, smiling crookedly at some bittersweet memory from his displaced past in an unwritten future. "I really missed you."
The world he came from is gone and won't ever come back, and for all that that's a really, really good thing, it's also kind of sad.
Master Leonardo doesn't exist anymore, not as Casey knew him. But Casey still looks at Leo the same way Mikey does, like Leo could hang the moon in the sky if it ever occurred to him to try.
The people that Casey loved were real. They raised him, and risked everything to save him—to send him back to a better, brighter place. And he carried their hope and determination with him every step of the way here. Now he can put all of that down, but that just leaves him with nothing but his empty hands.
Raphael has cried a lot today already, but this just about sends him over the edge all over again.
"No need to miss us anymore," he says firmly. "We may not be the people you knew before, but as far as I'm concerned, you're family."
"Seconded!" Mikey chirps immediately.
"Thirded and fourthed, as I am Nardo's legally-appointed proxy," Donnie adds from the driver's seat, the first thing he's said in over an hour.
"Aw, it's unanimous," April declares. "You went through hell with us, Jones, and you came out the other side swinging. That makes it official."
"We'll get you a Hamato clan T-shirt," Splinter says irreverently, his paw resting on Leo's forehead, thumb stroking absent circles against the sleeping slider's bruised temple.
"It won't be what you left behind," Mikey tells him, sounding better for having gotten his tears out of his system, and, as always, light-years ahead of the rest of them in the arena of emotional maturity. "We can't be your teachers. But we'd love a chance to be your siblings instead."
Casey looks bowled over by them, and uncertain, and desperately wanting. Raph bumps their shoulders together, trying to nudge him over disbelief into acceptance.
"What, you think I can't wrangle another little brother? Please. If I can handle the twins, I can handle anyone."
"Pardon?" Donnie interjects. "You're throwing me under this bus? Me, the most low-maintenance member of this entire family?"
"You've never been low-maintenance a day in your life," April says with feeling. Mikey snorts, then starts laughing at the offended expression Donnie aims at them in the mirror.
Casey laughs, too. It sounds like it was surprised out of him. It feels like a victory as big as that whole thing with the Krang was.
Raphael is looking forward to this new future they made. He's glad they're going to see it together.