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colibrie · 5 months ago

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Uncharted Territory, part one.

All love and credit to @trilobitepunch, for the amazing art work,the listening ear, and the endless encouragement. You are amazing Trilo!

“I’ve got snacks!”

Mikeys cheery voice cut through the racetrack of his thoughts, shepherding Leo’s attention back to the bustle and hum of the fuel depot. His younger brother was skipping towards him, boxes of ration bars and a few brightly colored bags filling his arms to near bursting.

“The selections not that great,” Mikey continued, cheeks puffing in annoyance as he reached Leo, hopping comically on one leg as he fought to open the cargo hatch with his toes. “But I did manage to finagle two boxes of the better rations out of the shop keep, aaaaaand she even threw in some of those sweet sticks I like!”

“The ones dad banned you from having because of that time you were literally bouncing off the walls?” Leo teased, leaning casually against the ship’s hull as he flashed a smirk at his baby brother. “Force help us all.”

“Leeeeo!” Mikey whined, beak wrinkling in embarrassment as he scowled affronted at big brother. “I was six! Don’t be a jerk!”

“Hey, as the only other person stuck in an incredibly small ship with you for the foreseeable future, I think I have a right to be concerned!” Leo goaded, reaching out to casually flip the fuel valve off as the warning chime sounded.

“Just for that, I’m gonna hide the good rations from you,” Mikey shot back as the hatch finally opened with a soft hiss. “You get the spinach and spiva protein flavors, while I get the strawberry and chocolate.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, you got strawberry?!” Leo squawked, arms flailing as he spun around, feet briefly slipping on the steel grating. “Hand em over!”

“No!” Mikey jeered, sticking out his tongue as he shoved the boxes and bags into the hold.

“Miiiikey.”

“Who’s the funny one now Leon?!”

“Your face,” Leo muttered lamely, pursing his lips into an exaggerated pout as he disconnected the hose. He projected a cloak of sulky energy, shaking his head with covert fondness as Mikey crowed in triumph and bit into one of his sweet sticks. He could let his little brother think he’d won this round. At least one of them deserved to laugh through this.

He blinked, and the world fell away once more.

Crimson blades reflecting off obsidian armor. The wall crumbling under his shell, like wet tissue paper. Screams of anger and fear as the darkness closed in, air cut off as something heavy twisted his lungs…

“So!” Mikey’s voice snapped Leo back once more to the fluorescently lit present. The smaller turtle had ducked under the shuttle’s wing and now stood at his side, oblivious to Leo’s lapse in attention as he worked with way through his treat. “What do we do now?”

Leo quickly turned away, scowling at the fuel hose as he wound in back into the holder.

“What do you mean?” he asked, proud of how even his voice stayed as he worked to get his face back into a casual smile.

“I mean, we’ve covered step one, right? We’re far enough away from home that no one will recognize us. We’ve got a full tank of fuel and enough rations to last two weeks if we play things right. What’s step two? How are we going to get Raph and Donnie back?”

“First off, we are going not talking about things where anyone passing by could hear us,” Leo chided under his breath, turning back to Mikey with a roll of his eyes.

“There’s hardly anyone around!” Mikey protested.

“And there are even less people around in hyperspace,” Leo retorted, flicking his fingers in a dismissive shooing motion, “so go start the pre-flight checks so we can get out of here.”

“Ugh! Fine! Be that way,” Mikey groaned, stomping away towards the cockpit with an energy only the youngest member of a family could muster.

Leo watched him go, sucking in a subtle breath through his teeth once his sibling was safely ensconced within the metal walls of the ship. He let his body sag for a second, leaning his temple against the riveted metal. Exhaustion seemed to press in from every angle, cheerfully reminding him of how large his sleep debt had grown in the week since they’d left their home and their father behind. How many nights his insomnia kept him awake, listening to Mikey’s squeaky snores while his thoughts raced at double time. Hours spent staring out the view screen as stars blurred past, fighting to keep his gritty eyes open as incomprehensible nightmares hounded the darkness behind his eyelids. What little sleep he had found was haunted by his twins’ parting words, repeated over and over like a tattoo beaten into his brain.

Find me. I need you. Find me. I need you. Find me. I need you. Find me, find me, find me…

I’m coming. I swear.

“Cmon Leon,” he muttered, pushing himself upright, shaking out his sluggish limbs and angling body towards the hatch as the engines hummed to life. “You got this.”

“Good job on the pre-flight munchkin,” Leo called, plastering a bright grin as he sauntered through the door. “Now outa my chair.”

“Doesn’t have your name on it,” Mikey supplied the rote reply, fingers tapping a happy beat on the consul. “I can launch us.”

“Not on your life brat,” Leo answered as he shoved his brother out of the pilot’s seat, snickering at the indignant squawk that followed.

The controls were comforting weight in his palms as he smoothly guided the ship up and out of station, the restless need to move in his soul settling slightly as velvety folds of the cosmos greeted them once more.

“Can we talk about things now?!” Mikey asked peevishly, flopping into the copilot seat.

“Sure. We can talk. We can talk about the stars, or the latest holo’s. Or where you put those strawberry ration bars. Or-”

“Leeeeeeeo,” Mikey cut in, drawing his brother’s name out in a sing-song tone that barely covered the hard edge reflected in his smile. “What’s the plan? I know you have one, you always do.”

“Of course I have a plan,” Leo hedged, careful to keep his eyes forward and smile easy as Mikey eagerly leaned in towards him.

Perhaps “plan” was a generous way to describe the looped track of findthemfindthemfindthem that had dominated his mind from the moment he’d stormed away from their father, drowning in a hurricane of disbelief and fury. He could not remember where he’d gone to wait out the remainder of that day, or what he might have done. He could barely remember sneaking back into the house to fill a bag with clothes, food, and a few meaningful trinkets. The need to move, to do, to fix things had simply been to great for rational thought to penetrate.

Finding Mikey waiting by the shuttle that night had been like a bucket of ice water to the face, the tempest of his emotions spluttering under his baby brother’s boundless spirit and unyielding will. Every smile, laugh, and hug soothed the embers further, calming the storm enough for clearer thoughts to fill his sleepless nights. Thoughts that wasted little time in confirming just how supremely stupid he’d been acting. Donnie and Raph out matched them in both strength and training, and if their last meeting was any indication, neither was likely to be open to simply talking things through. Mikey’s force abilities were fledgling, and Leo’s were inconsistent and unstable at the best of times. Following his feelings would have led him straight into an early grave. and now it wasn’t just Leo’s shell on the line.

Leo could admit, if only to himself, that he was still flying utterly blind through this. He did not have a plan. No clear course to retrieving those they had lost. But Mikey didn’t need to know that. Leo was nothing if not a proficient performer. Short a plan, he reached for his next best skill, improvisation.

“We are never going to match the people who have Raph and Donnie as we are now. They've proven they can wipe the floor with us,” Leo started as he sat back in the pilot’s chair, idly scooping up a spare gasket to roll through his fingers as he stared hard out the view screen.

“What’s this “with us”? I seem to recall only one of us getting their shell beat,” Mikey answered with a proud smirk, only to let out another squawk as the gasket nailed him between the eyes.

“As I was saying,” Leo grumbled, “If we want to stand a chance of saving our brothers, we need to get stronger. And to do that we'll need a proper teacher.”

“But who could do that?” Mikey questioned, absently chewing on his lower lip as he cocked his head in thought. “All the Jedi are dead.”

“Splinter survived with two kids in tow,” Leo countered, smiling his most confident smile as he piloted them away from the fuel station. “If he could do it, I am sure there had to have been others who got out and went to ground.”

“Yeah, but… finding a random Jedi hiding in the galaxy… isn’t that is like finding a needle hidden in an ocean of needles?”

“You’re right,” Leo acknowledged, thinking hard. “But we aren’t looking for any random Jedi. We… are… going to find Master Karai. She was Da-Splinters Master. If anyone survived the purge, it would be her, I know it. We just need to find her somehow.”

“Oh!” Mikey perked up, sparks dancing in his smile as he reached out and unsteadily called the holocron to him with a wave of his palm. “We can use dads holocron and the force to find her!”

“Huh?!”

“If she was dad’s master, then he must have gone a lot of places with her. Places she might have gone to hide when the temple was destroyed. If we use the force to look through the maps, maybe it will tell us which one.” Mikey reasoned, tongue poking out between his lips as he tossed the glowing cube between his palms.

“A nice thought, but that's not how the force works Mikey,” Leo declined with a shake of his head.

“How do you know?”

“I just do.”

“How come?”

“It just…doesn’t?”

“That doesn’t sound like a good reason to not try. The recordings of Master Plo Koon said that the force is in everything.”

“It is, but it is not like my magic tricks Angelo. It can’t just make things appear,” Leo tried to explain, struggling to dig back into hazy memories of temple classrooms and supreme boredom. “They told us Jedi masters could use it to pick out individual force signatures in a crowd, but only if they were familiar with the person or knew what to look for. I mean, not even Grandmaster Yoda could find someone all the way across the galaxy!”

“Master Plo also said the force has a will of its own. What if the force wants us to find her?” Mikey countered, staring hard at the holocron before looking up at Leo with hope burning strong and bright. “It led Raph and Donnie to us, I know it. And, I don’t think it would have done that if it didn’t want us to help them. If finding Master Karai is what we need to do that, then I just…I have a feeling the force will steer us in the right direction.”

“Mike…”

“What do we lose by trying?” Mikey coaxed, holding out the holocron.

“It’s…yeah, okay. Sure. Knock yourself out,” Leo sighed, looking away with half shrug.

“We. We can knock ourselves out. Because we are going to do it together.”

“Uh, no we are not! Do I need to remind you of all the reasons why it would be really bad for me to try to use the force? Particularly in a tiny ship in the middle of outer space?!”

“I don’t remember her. Not like you do. And you were the one who just said that a Jedi needed to know the person they were looking for. You don’t have to do anything big, just try to focus on your memories of her. What did she look and sound like? How did she feel in the force? Tell me about it, and I’ll handle the razzmatazz side!”

Maybe it was the sleepless nights, or the lack of better options no matter how hard he scoured his brain for one. Maybe it was that he had never developed a full proof defense against Mikey’s “please” face. Either way…

“Fiiiine,” he groaned, engaging the autopilot with a flick of his wrist before flopping back in his seat. “I want it on the record that I am humoring you, because there is no way that is going to work. And I am calling the right to rubbing it in when it doesn’t work.”

“And I will be happy to make you eat an “I told you so” sandwich when it totally does.” Mikey replied, beaming. “Now let’s do this!”

Leo reluctantly swiveled the pilot’s chair to face his brother, knocking their knees together. Mikey released the cube, the device opening as it rose to float between them.

“Man, this is stupid,” Leo muttered, begrudgingly holding his hands out, palms turned towards the cube as though warming them on the world’s worst campfire.

“You’re being stupid,” Mikey replied absently, copying Leo from the other side. “Stop complaining and tell me about Master Karai.”

“What’s there to say? She was a dedicated Jedi. She was awesome with lightsaber combat and could be strict when it came to training.”

“How did you meet her?” Mikey coaxed.

“She volunteered to take shifts in the creche whenever she rotated back to the temple,” Leo replied, taking a deep breath to steady himself before reaching back into cobweb covered memories. “She could be a bit awkward sometimes, but she…she cared.”

Leo smiled faintly, eyes slowly losing focus as his attention turned inward, mind wandering further down the paths of remembrance.

“She was loyal to the council, but she never really followed their stances on not forming attachments. Even though she wasn’t in the creche often, she was one of the few people who took the time to understand the four of us. Our personalities and what we needed as individuals. You used to spend time between her visits drawing her all kinds of pictures, then you’d make her sit down and go through each and everyone of them. She’d give you her full attention, every time.”

“She sounds nice,” Mikey murmured, eyes falling to half-mast as he tried to reach for that fickle feeling of the force inside of him.

“She was one of the few that had the patience to understand Donnie, to see him for the genius he was. She never scolded him for things he couldn’t control. She tried to learn what set him off, and tried to get things that would help him cope when I wasn’t there, even though it was against the rules. And she was always there as a listening ear for Raphie. He always looked out for us, but Karai was the one he went to most with his problems. She could always tell when he was getting upset, and she’d take him somewhere to let him blow off steam.”

“And what about you?” Mikey mumbled, closing his eyes fully as something warm bloomed in his chest. Something that crackled like the brightest bonfire, filled him from head to toe with warmth. It swirled in his veins, happy to dance, happy to be, yet unhappy to be so alone. It stretched instinctively towards a distant, cloudy aura, a weak glimmer of deep blue lightning flavored with ozone and storm winds. Seeking, searching.

“She got me,” Leo trailed off.

Lightning blue flinched, shying away as the golden fire prodded it.

“What did she look like? What did she feel like? Do you remember?” Mikey mumbled, fire following some unspoken instinct to keep going. Between them the holocron began to rapidly cycle through maps.

“She was about my current height. Long black hair. She liked to wear two strands down by her face with the rest pulled back. Light skin, black eyes. She liked to wear long green robes while at the temple, and we used to love to pretend to hide in them. She was…she felt like your favorite blanket after a day in the cold, or my favorite cup of tea. Soft and reliable, and safe…”

Fire hummed. Lightning sparked, finding that tiny, barely mended gap.

“She made us feel safe.”

For a moment, lightning touched fire. Something snagged, a loop of thread pulling tight. Mikey snapped his hands closed, holding onto it with everything he had. The holocron went still, washing the cockpit with a triumphant glow as it presented the chosen map.

“Omigosh it worked!” Mikey cheered, eyes snapping open to eagerly take in their new destination. They had done it! He had done it!

“Take that Le…Leo?”

His older brother was pale, beak scrunched and shoulders faintly trembling with pain as they curled inward. One hand covered his eyes, fingers digging deep into the sockets as the other hand clutched his chest. Sharp breaths whistled between clenched teeth as a slick of dark red rolled steadily from his nose. The impression of wind and ozone quickly fading away as Mikey scrambled out of his seat.

“Shell Lee, I’m so sorry! What can I do?!”

“It’s fine,” Leo mumbled, leaning away from Mikey as he pulled himself upright. Enthusiasm for their accomplishment fizzled out like a dying sparkler as Mikey watched, chewing anxiously on his cheek as he frantically ran through a check list of this brother’s symptoms.

“Are you dizzy? Nauseous? Is anything numb? What’s your full name? Where are we? Who is the-“

“Whoa Angelo! Slow down. Kinda to the first, meh on the second, no on the third, and I don’t need a concussion check. It’s the usual stuff. Mainly just a headache.”

“You sure? The way you’re holding your chest-”

“Yes, I’m sure. Relax Angie, or you’ll start getting wrinkles to rival Splinter.”

The balm of relief coated his nerves as Leo relaxed back into his seat, expression shifting from a pained grimace to an indolent grin as he casually wiped his face with the back of one hand.

“Plus, I didn’t blow anything up this time, so score me some bonus points!”

Mikey huffed, gently shoving at his older brothers’ shoulder before pushing himself back to his feet. Headaches weren’t new. Headaches they could handle.

“Do you want a stim shot?” he asked, glancing at the ship’s small med kit.

“Nah,” Leo denied with a dismissive wave. “We’re better off saving supplies, just in case. I’ll just nap it off once we set coordinates for… the Yakai system?”

“Yeah, that’s what the holocron landed on! Do you know it?” Mikey inquired, leaning in to admire the holomap that still floated between their seats.

“No but look at it Mikey. There’s nothing there. Just an asteroid belt and some low-grade planets.”

“Sounds like the perfect place for a Jedi to hide out!”

“Low-grade means no organic life dumb dumb. Nothing lives there.”

“But there isn’t any harm in going to look!” Mikey rejoined, straining to lean across his brother towards the autopilot.

“Ack! Mik-sto-getoff! We aren’t wasting the fuel.”

“Sorry, can’t hear you!” Mikey chirped, beaming as consul chirped to indicate the successful input of the coordinates.”

“Ohmi-”

“Lets just go and have a quick look! If we don’t find anything we’ll do things your way from there. Unless you’re scared to admit I could be right…”

“…Fine. But not only do I get to rub your face in it for eternity, you’ll owe me. Whatever I want, whenever I want it.”

“I can’t wait. Now go lay down. Autopilot says six hours till we reach Yakai.”

Leo whined and grumbled as he was prodded out of the pilot’s chair, dragging his feet as Mikey herded him to one of the benches.

“You nap, I’ll fly.” He insisted, pretending to ignore the dark bags gathered beneath his brothers’ eyes when he pulled off the blue mask.

“It’s not flying if the autopilot’s engaged,” Leo sniped petulantly, laying back reluctantly when Mikey pushed on his plastron.

“Whatever you say. Nighty night bro!”

#rottmnt #rottmnt x sw #rottmnt synthesis #rottmntfanart #rottmnt leo #rottmnt mikey #angst fairy writes #the boys are off on their great adventure #who needs a plan when they have improve?#“we don't need a plan cause we are being ourselves!”#“we be we baby!”#that is...apparently how the force works?#stay tuned to find out!

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