Disclaimer: Not mine, someone else's.

Title: TMNT: Mafioso.

Rating: T

Pairings: April/Casey…. Cuz they're already together, and now; Mikey/Angel.

Genre: Crime/Family…. It can be considered a little bit humor too

Summary: Splinters dead, Michaelangelo is the new leader of the Dragon-Foot clan, Leonardo is a bartender, Raphael is a loan-shark and Donatello's gone rogue turtle. Anything else? Oh, well Casey and April own a nightclub if it means anything….

Day ten

Leo stared at his swords in a trance; his eyes ran along the steel he had forged a long time ago. He hadn't held his swords in years until two days ago, and now his former weapons held some kind of spell on him. The power he felt with his weapons again, the power of knowledge; his weapons were dangerous and he knew exactly how to use them.

He had gone to rescue El from Mikey, yet it turned out to only be a misunderstanding…..

'Mikey, that's right.' Leo remembered with a pang, now he remembered the reason he stopped being a ninja in the first place; he hurt Mikey, these swords he held in his hand had been what carved the scar into his little brothers face. He put his swords pack under the couch and sighed; he couldn't sleep, he was too restless, even after a long night of work, and it didn't help that Shadow and Cody were at school so he had no company either.

Lying on his shell on the couch, the blue-masked turtle opted to stare at the ceiling instead. 'Only a warrior wields swords.' Leonardo thought 'I'm no warrior, not anymore – the moment I stopped being a brother, I could no longer even be considered a warrior.'

"I wish I had a drink." Leo moaned – he hadn't touched a drop of alcohol (except for his job, of course) ever since Mikey came and warned him to stop drinking, and while quitting cold turkey had always been Leo's specialty, without training he had a lack of outlet for his depression.

'What a waste of training I am' Leo thought, and hissed in pain when he felt a bruising pain on one side of his hip 'Doc probably fell on his side – again.' He rationalized; Doc was a talented ninja like the rest of them…. But unfortunately, that ridiculous-looking snowsuit constricted his movements and his continually mis-calculating how far he could jump (because he kept forgetting about the snowsuit) and ended up right on the ground. 'Not that I don't appreciate Don's Batman-like war on crime, but how long will he keep playing vigilante? Doesn't he realize how much he hurts himself…?'

"I…. I didn't even realize how injured Doc keeps getting… Until I felt his pain." Leo realized aloud; his voice was raspy from his lack of speech. This whole time, he thought Doc was just fine, but now that he thought about it, how many times had Doc come into the Green Ninja and was covered in bruises, blood, or was limping? Every time. In fact, he think Doc told him he was shot, but at the time he had been too inebriated to really say or do anything, except nod his head numbly.

"Oh god," Leo said as things dawned on him "I've been so absorbed in wallowing in my own misery, I forgot to be a brother." The leaf green turtle got up from the couch and headed out; he and Doc were going to have a little talk. He may not have been a ninja anymore, but he'd be damned he wasn't a brother.

Doc was driving the Battleshell when he suddenly heard a bump at the roof. "What the shell?" The goggle-wearing genius said and slowed down. He almost had a heart attack when the passenger opened, filling the battleshell with wind, and then it closed when the person who opened it (from the roof….) climbed inside. "Leo?" Doc said in disbelief, but indeed, it was his reaper-garbed brother sitting next to him…. Who had jumped on the roof of the Battleshell….. On a busy freeway…. And the nearest highway bridge had been five miles back…..

"We have to talk." Leo said and took off his reaper mask, looking at Doc seriously, though his voice was still pretty scratchy from misuse.

"So you can actually talk now?" Doc inquired – in the past few years, there was one instance Leo had gone three whole months without saying a word or making a sound. Lately, he's been slightly more talkative ever since the Ancient One put the spell on them.

"Don't change the subject – Donatello, I'm worried about you." Leo said, using his brothers full name for emphasis.

"What's to worry about?" Doc asked coyly.

"Don't play stupid, genius." Leo said "This vigilante stuff is hurting you, it has been hurting you for years. You need to stop, this isn't you. For god sakes, you're supposed to be the techno turtle, yet you haven't so much as looked at a screw-driver for god knows how long!"

"Oh, so you believe in God now?" Doc sneered; Doc, because of his scientific mindset, was a devote atheist; to him, their very turtle-y existence screamed 'no God here'!

Leo narrowed his eyes; he'd done a lot of thinking in the past few years, and had contemplated on a lot of things to, and he contemplated religion as well and done some research – yes, Doc wasn't the only one who did that – and had actually found some faith. He never told his brothers until now. "I have faith there is a god." He answered "But that has nothing to do with this conversation. I'm no genius like you, Doc, but don't think I'm an idiot; I can see you're trying to change the subject to avoid this one."

Doc sighed but said nothing else.

"You'll give up vigilanteism." Leo ordered; he cringed back in surprise when Doc whipped towards him and gave him a glare intense enough to rival El on a bad day.

"So you think you can order me around? !" Doc snarled "We're adults now, Leonardo! We're not teenaged ninja-soldiers, you can't give us orders anymore and expect us to follow without question or opposition. You're not even a ninja anymore, and we're too old for a leader Leo! Back off!"

"I'm not trying to be a leader." Leo responded in a soft tone "I'm trying to be what I was before I was ever even considered a ninja – a brother. And as your brother, I'm worried about you Doc, I care too much to let you hurt yourself anymore."

Doc let out a humorless laugh "Now you care?" He hissed "Where was your 'brotherly care' when Mikey joined the Foot and went crazy? Where was your concern when El decided to run away, live on the streets, and got involved with drugs, trash and junkies? Where was this love of yours when I was left alone in the sewers, worrying day and night about all of your safeties but now able to be in the same room with all four of us? !" Leo was too shocked to respond, so Doc added "Oh that's right – it, along with your words, drowned in the alcohol that you guzzled in buckets at a time. Isn't this the first time you've been sober in years?"

Leo was still silent – because it was true, this must have been the first time in years he wasn't drunk, hung over, or buzzed.

Doc took his brothers silence as a yes "Does that mean this brotherly love you've sudden re-claimed after years is conditional? You'll only ever give a shit about the rest of us when your not on the bottle?"

Leo was dumbfounded – and suddenly, his shame and guild increased ten-fold.

'Failure – you do everything wrong, you can't be a ninja or a brother. Useless shit you are.' A dark little voice harshly told Leo.

"I-I'm sorry Doc….." Leo told him, his voice getting quieter and quieter with every syllable. He would have said more, but he found himself unable to conjure up anything verbally. Doc didn't do or say anything else, in said he looked foreword to the road again, ignoring Leo and paying attention to traffic again.

After a few moments of strained silence, Doc snapped "Don't you have to ninja poof away or something?"

Dejected, Leo opened the passenger door and rolled onto the road, closing the door with his feet and swiftly grabbing onto the bottom of a car after rolling under it. The car, with the drive blissfully unaware of a hitchhiking turtle, drove him away in the opposite direction that Doc was going.

'I do everything wrong…' Leo thought, sitting on the ledge of a building, a sad look behind his reaper mask 'I should be the one cast out of the family… God, I am such an idiot!' What the shell had he been thinking when he exiled Mikey? Or when he practically abandoned his brothers? He didn't even try to do anything when their little family fell apart, he'd been to boozed up to realize he could've.

'And what do you suppose you do about it? Moping will not help you.' A voice in his head nagged at him.

'But what can I do?'

'Be a brother again.'

'I tried that... And Doc, the gentlest and most forgiving of my brothers, rejected me.'

'Patching together your brotherhood cannot be done overnight – take small steps at a time.'

Leo pondered on that prospect for a while; it was true, after everything his family his family was currently going through, it was not like he could fix it in one lecture, this would take time and energy. But that was okay, his entire life nothing had ever mattered to him more than his brothers, not even training (there were times when that didn't seem so, but at heart that was always his objective).

Leo squinted at a particularly tall building – Oroku Saki enterprise skyscraper.

'I need to talk to Mikey – get it out of his head that he was exiled because he was evil.' When he heard Mike say that he was convinced he was exiled because 'he had been evil the whole time', he found that piece of information to be crazy; Mikey…. Really had believed the whole thing was his own fault, he didn't blame Leo at all.

Leo was about to roof-hop to the Japanese-looking skyscraper that used to belong to Oroku Saki but now belonged to a mentally unstable mutant turtle, but then an alarm rung on his shell cell and he groaned; it was the alarm he had set to alert him when it was time to go to work! He looked to the sky and saw it was indeed already sunset.

He would have to talk with Michaelangelo tomorrow.

So Leo came to realize how much Doc was hurting himself being vigilante... Can you guys see Ancient Ones reasoning for the pain-empathy?

Again, sorry that Leo and Mikey have hogged the attention in the majority of the fic, but I remembered that I had earlier written that the root of all of Michaelangelo's insanity was that he was convnced that he was evil and that was why Leo exiled him. I mean it, he's completely convinced its true... See in the chapter.

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