Jars \\ Rottmnt!Leo

Nine \\ Fireflies

He hadn’t worked hard enough. That’s how they’d got here. How Raph had fallen unconscious and Tanya had to take him to the lair on her own. That’s how they’d gotten separated from Donnie, Mikey, and April. That’s how you were so far out of reach.

He hadn’t done enough.

“What the hell was that!” Casey yells. Face contorting in anger as he stares at the red-eared slider who keeps shrinking in on himself.

“I was trying to get us out of that fight and into the building!”
“Some good that did!”

“I did everything right.” Leo mumbles into his arms. Trying to bury his head in his arms until he could figure this out. “How could it go so wrong?”

“Because you weren’t listening to your team! You don’t have all the answers all the time!”

“But I’m the greatest ninja warrior the world has ever seen.” Leo says, a little hurt by Casey’s statement. Lifting his head to look at the boy who looked up to him. “You said that.”

Casey takes one look at the red-slider in front of him and glares. His voice infected with bitterness.

“I was wrong.”

Leo looks up into his eyes, and sees that within Casey’s eyes lies disappointment. Lies doubt and anger. He can’t breathe. He feels like he can’t see. The world was ending, and for the first time it genuinely felt like it was ending.

Everything from the past year came crashing down on him with such a simple statement. I was wrong. Aren’t those the words he’s been looking for the past twelve months?

“What?” Leo breathes as he barely brings himself to look at the boy from the future who stands up angrily, wheeling on the red-eared slider whom he’d come to realize was not master Leonardo. This was just Leonardo. This was a boy who was in over his head.

“You’re impulsive, you’re arrogant, and you don't see how every decision you make affects the people around you! You want to really know what happens in the future?”

Casey did not genuinely care what Leo thought on the matter, and continued anyway.

“Everybody dies fighting the Krang.”

Leo feels his heart crumble a little more with every word spoken. They all die because of him?

“The world needs master Leonardo.” The boy says, pulling out the old, frayed portrait from his attire. Glaring at it before throwing it in front of Leo. “And all we got is this guy.”

Casey storms off and starts digging through the rubble of the subway tunnel while Leo picks up the portrait lying at his feet. It was a simple thing. It looked similar to the one Mikey had made all of you. He felt as his eyes stung with venomous tears. The poison not meant for you, but for him.

He clicks open one of the pouches on his belt and retrieves the portrait his youngest brother had made. There were a few people missing, but it was still family. You were still family. To all of them.

He grips the portrait with you in it as he tries to hold back the tears biting at his eyelids. Biting his bottom lip to keep it from quivering and letting any sound escape. Why was he so mad at you? What had you done? You’d kept him safe. You’d done what you could to protect him. You’d only tried to help him, help his family. You had tried to save two worlds, by forfeiting the one you had made for yourself.

Why didn’t he listen?

He looks up at the boy tearing at the rubble, an endless amount of hope within his angered being. He saw so much of you in this one person. He saw so much of you in everyone. If he had just stopped for a moment and let himself focus on the past, maybe you wouldn’t be captured, maybe you both would still be living in your shitty apartment, maybe his brothers would be safe, maybe Casey would have never had to live through what he had.

Maybe that’s why the little glowing bugs kept flying into the jar over and over again. Because he wasn’t mad at you, he was mad at himself. Standing and putting the photos away, he takes a breath.

He’s going to finish what you started. Saving two worlds by fixing one.

He pulls away some rubble as Casey refuses to look at him. Attempting to bash in the wall with his boot. Leo begins to plead with the boy.

“Look. I know I’m not the Leo you knew in the future, and maybe I never will be. This whole time I was so sure that the problem wasn’t me, that it was everyone else. Truth is? I’m exactly what you said I am. I’m selfish, I’m arrogant, and you’re right. I can’t see how my actions affect the people around me. I don’t need you to forgive me Casey. Trust isn’t cheap. But if we’re going to survive this? If our family, our friends, and the world are going to survive this?”

Leo hits the wall as hard as he can with his shoulder as Casey hits it with his boot again, and it crumbles further. Opening to a dark elevator shaft. Leo extends his hand to the boy.

“We’re gonna need to do this together.”

Casey accepts Leo's hand and Jumps into the elevator cable. The red-eared slider takes a breath. Feeling the cool of the dumb matching necklaces you’d gotten for him and you. It was the dumbest clique. Dumber than you both sharing a bed when you barely knew each other. But that’s why he loved it so much. You were everything he wanted.

He realizes now he’d done what he always did with anything he loved. He made it his everything. Every particle of his being had become you. He’d hyper fixated. Like with Jupiter Jim, or skateboarding, or Hellboy and Corpse Bride while he was in your universe. He’d made you his everything. It was exhausting.

He’d gone wrong there, making you his every waking moment. That was okay with things, with fictional people. But with real, breathing, blood-pumping people?

You’d given yourself distance, not because you were angry at him and needed space, but because you were right.

You can’t be his everything.

The day he stumbled into your kitchen, was the day he’d screwed up what you both had, because he forgot someone as amazing as you can be real. He forgot compassionate people exist, that someone could love him, and that someone could see all of his insecurities, all of his doubts, all of his anger and all of his sadness, and still care about him anyway.

He forgot he was more than a face-man for his team. More than dumb punchlines and well timed one-liners.

You sent him back through that portal, because that’s what he had become. Punchlines to a joke and one-liners for laughter. He wasn’t Leo. He was what he thought you loved and he thought you loved a face-man.

He opens his eyes and jumps onto the elevator cable, shimmying upward.

You may not like it, but you were right. He hadn’t ever loved you. Because the person that had ended up in your living room wasn’t really him. He’s not the charming facade he puts on, he’s not the presentation you saw, he’s not quick compliments and jokes to cope.

He’s brave, and he’s stupid, and he didn’t fucking say ‘I love you’ when his partner needed him most.

Death could come to collect him for it, but he was going to say I love you back.