#for me it's intangible grief

[paranormaljones]

I know this is weird but I really want to know. This is a serious poll. Obviously don't feel pressured to elaborate on any of these answers, if you choose to answer. But I'd appreciate a reblog.

(Edit)

@ everyone who has used this poll to lay down the burden of what's haunting you: I love you and we are all sitting around a glowing campfire together under a canopy of stars, wrapped in healing and in blankets. You and your ghosts can rest here.

[somnimagus]

My page for @sheikahzine; about Impaz's duty to her village, empty of people and full of memories.

[id in alt text]

[ghostlychief]

paper hearts

simon "ghost" riley x gen!reader

summary: ghost loves you, but you're tired

warnings: bittersweet angst?

---

“Don’t look at me like that.” Your arms are crossed over your chest and you cast your gaze downwards, your eyes locking onto your socks. They must have become the most interesting thing, because your eyes wander along the blue swirls covering your toes, trying to find anything to anchor on to, anything besides Simon.

“How am I looking at you?” His voice comes out gentle, making your chest pinch.

“Like you love me.”

Your eyes travel back up to him, and you instantly regret it. When you meet his gaze, you notice that his lips are downturned and he’s missing the usual creases by his eyes that always appear whenever he’s looking at you. Instead, his under eyes seem to have darkened.

A sigh leaves your lips. “I just don’t know anymore,”

“That’s okay.” His acquiescence tightens the pinch that rests under your heart.

You shift your weight onto your right leg. “Is it though?” You feel like you’re going in circles with him.

You give yourself the excuse that if it was raining, you would let him in. Though tonight, the sky is clear and filled with stars, and there’s not a breeze in the air, so you keep the imaginary boundary up, somewhat shielding yourself from the intangible grief that fills the air.

He takes a half step back and runs his hand through his messy hair. You figure he hasn’t been deployed in some time, since you can see the slightest of curls starting to form in his hair. His hair was always an indicator of when he was leaving, before he would set off to wherever the hell he goes when he leaves you for months on end.

“I thought you died, Simon. And then I didn’t hear from you or anyone for over two weeks. I didn’t know what to do and I couldn’t talk to anyone about it either because even I’m not supposed to know what your job is.”

You shift to your other leg. “Do you know how exhausting that is?” You refuse to let any tears fall from your waterline.

You keep going, “Every time you smile at me, I memorize it. Or when you hug me, I memorize the feeling of it. I remember each moment that I have with you because whenever you walk out that door, I have no way of knowing whether that was our last moment together and you take a piece of me with you each time you leave.”

The damn cold has made your nose runny so you let out a sniff. “I feel like I’m falling apart, Simon.” Your voice cracks and you hate yourself for it. You curl your hands tighter around your middle.

Simon brings his hand up to gently cup your elbow and he starts to say something but you hold your hand up, “I know what I got myself into, Si, I do. And I’m sorry that I’m being selfish right now.” He starts shaking his head.

“I can’t imagine what you go through during your missions; all the horrors you are privy to everyday,” You look out behind him, to the street light that keeps flickering, threatening to burn out completely. “But this is hard for me, just as I know it's hard for you.” Your eyes are back on his and they look watery.

His hand is still on your arm, the warmth seeping into your skin. When he replies, his hand softly squeezes you, “You’re the love of my life, but I’m fine with not being the love of yours.”

The pinch in your chest grows even more, and you no longer know if you can contain your tears or not. “That’s not the problem, Simon.” Your eyes flicker back to the street light; it’s still flickering ever so slightly. “I just need some time, okay?”

You take a step back, and his hand drops from you. He’s still looking at you like you held up the stars and the moon for him, but he nods, “Okay.”

Once he’s off your porch and has driven away, you look towards the lamppost, only to notice that the bulb finally burned out.

[mokulule]

Trauma Tuesday

This week in Trauma Tuesday I figured why not give Jason some dissection trauma for a change. So warning for that.

DP x DC, dead on main

Next to his parents a man’s body laid on a steel table, chest cut open, ribs broken and sticking up. Everything was glistening red.

“His heart’s not beating,” Nightwing said faintly in horror as they all realized they were too late.

“What have you done!” Danny exclaimed in despair. “Why? He’s human!”

There were lines. Lines he’d hoped his parents wouldn’t cross. Liminal or not, somehow Danny hadn’t expected they’d kill him. Experiment yes, but cut him open so he bled out?

“He’s no more human than you!” His mother snarled.

And that had Danny’s head snapping to the body. Could it be?

He zipped over and pushed his parents away with a shield, instantly they started shooting at him and his shield. He willed it to hold against the ectopowered blasts. Then focused on the body.

If he was no more human than Danny, that would mean- a tiny wisp of cold air escaped his lips as he found it, his core. Small and malnourished and somehow running on the worst ectoplasmic slough-off he’d ever seen; it was fucking beautiful.

“Hey,” he whispered reaching in intangibly cradling his hands around it where it was inside the heart itself. A consciousness shifted inside and Danny felt a wave of relief and he choked on a laugh or a sob, he wasn’t sure.

“He’s alive,” he shouted over the blasts against his shield.

“His heart’s not beating! Even if you could start it-“ Nightwing didn’t have to continue; they could all see what had been done.

But they didn’t understand.

“He’s not gone,” Danny snarled, “Deal with them.” He tossed his head towards his parents. “And I will deal with this.”

He had a core. He wasn’t just liminal. He was like Danny; that was why they’d cut him open.

-

Jason felt floaty, cradled safely in a way that was hard to explain. Distantly in his chest there was pain. It made no sense what was going on?

There was a flash of relief and then a soothing hum met the question, and an echoey voice spoke:

“Try to relax, you’re very bad off.”

Bad off? What had happened?

A shudder of grief ran over him, was the voice crying?

“I’m so, so sorry, they hurt you because you’re like me.”

There was more to the story, a complicated knot of feelings: grief and disappointment, loss, betrayal.

“But look at you, you’re so amazing.” There was a wave of pride and love, large and encompassing and Jason had no clue what to do with it. He felt- he didn’t know how to describe it: Full? Bursting? Like he was about to cry. What had he done to warrant that?

Why? Why would you?

“You are of mine, and that in itself is enough. But you are even like me.” There was a sense of wonder and longing, tickling at the edges of his awareness.

“You are so resilient, somehow you’ve managed to survive even crippled by poisoned ectoplasm.”

He got the distinct impression of a feral smile.

“Let’s see what your core can do with the good stuff.”

It felt like a shock to his chest. A jumpstart and suddenly he felt it. The ball of energy that was him, his essence, his core, and the steady stream of energy being poured in. He was more his core than he was his body.

His body, which he knew wasn’t supposed to be like this, cut open, bleeding, dying. But his body was human and human bodies required so much more than just energy to heal, how was he-

“Don’t worry. Trust, Jason. I’m giving you the energy, just trust your core to know what’s right.”

A frisson of worry shot through him.

What about you?

He felt another smile, and beneath that more affection. Somehow, despite not quite feeling the pain from his gaping chest he could feel fingers tenderly running through his hair.

“It won’t hurt me, I’m also quite resilient.”

-

So as implied here there’s a reveal gone bad in the past between Danny and his parents. They now work for the GIW.

The rest of the story you’ll find out later, there’s probably some other bits here and there that would be good for Trauma Tuesday.

[crustyfloor]

This scene of Till innocently peaceful with such a big smile feels incomplete to me after the events of round 7--But more true to his character rather than a comic with his final thoughts like Sua and Ivan had, it's cruel, brief, like a flashback, and it's bittersweet. Till is probably going to be reserved and ambiguous till the end. He wouldn't be able to bring himself to think about and reflect on his regrets and traumas; that's Till's principle; living in stubborn, childish beliefs, and in those truths, he finds escape into solace, even if it's unlike his reality, it's how he copes enough to make everything bearable for the next day to come. This image feels like a reflection, a memory of when he was happier in life. In Till's final moments, he thought about his and Mizi's childhood, the moment he fell in love with her was when she smiled at him with such radiance, the same moment, he felt like his heart was reborn; it was like he could breathe and smile solely for her. Till thinks back to these moments, these fleeting moments of peace because he can't let them go, he can't let go of the comfort of that familiarity.

--"Oh in a blink Gone. Blink and Gone, relish the present."

This image does bring me back to a lot of lyrics in Round 7. But this one in particular, a line that talks about living in the present before the moment slips between your fingers, in a blink, gone. But Till lives in the past.

Till doesn't think back to round 1 when he killed that alien guitar for Mizi, even though it was fully his decision, even though it was so gratifying seeing "Till win" and Mizi's acknowledgment, do you think he would have done that if he wasn't desperate and just doing what he felt like he had to do to survive? Because he had to stay by Mizi's side in her darkest moment like she was the one beacon of hope and happiness for him?

Till only suffers when he thinks back to round 6. When he's reminded of regret and pain. So, he represses the very memory of it to protect himself, he can't bring himself to even acknowledge it at all until he's forced to, when the aliens were intimidating him with Mizi's missing poster, he fights back out of anger. Just having that weakness, his guilt, and his grief used against him feels like a different kind of collar. Till thinks back to these warm, intangible memories of his childhood because life on stage was never something he could make his own, he didn't want to live for anything Alien Stage offered him, power, fame, etc. Despite his passion for music, Till is gentle and emotional at heart. This throne that is elevated high by bloodied corpses, a life living stagnant and trapped under the suffocating palm of an Alien, at the very top but inexplicably expendable, was never Till's vision of a life worth living. That's why he fought like hell for the life he wanted, for the life that he could've had. It really drives the point home when his final thoughts were centered around those moments when he was the happiest in his life.

It is so hard to feel the beauty, the warmth, in this image when everything around him is inauthentic, and it's off-putting because of the underlying details, especially since because of his gown, this scene might have taken place after one of those experiments or 'classes' it's a very subtle reminder of their reality. But his smile is so real in the moment without the collar, without the pain... he looks so carefree and full of life

And he scrunches his nose when he laughs *gets shot*

[acefaun]

Hello! If you’re up to it, may I please request a romantic drabble of Smaug finally finding his soulmate in quasi-human!fem!Reader (who is a kind and sweet person who also has a dragon form)?

Smaug~ Soulmates

Synopsis: Being half human and secretly half dragon means that you sometimes are faced with atypical situations. Being soulmates with a terrifying dragon that just destroyed a city is one of those situations.

🍃Masterlist🍃 Quasi-Human!Fem!Reader! A/n: I have such a soft spot for soulmates that have no choice but to love each other! I love hurting my favorite characters as much as I love forcing love and affection upon them. 🥰 And my favorite kind of MC’s are the hybrid/mixed species MCs. AND DRAGONS. DRAGONS. YES. AH. Everything about this just stole all of my attention the minute I laid eyes on it and my brain went “Plot? Location? Sweet romance that follows whatever mischief I stir up first?”  And, my brain alternatively went “Dragon loaf!” from a picture I saw on pinterest. I also didn’t edit any of this or reread it because I was in the emergency room when I wrote it; so, we’ll have to put up with my word-vomit for now. ✨ Enjoy!

–Word Count: 3,805–

The early morning in the forest of Mirkwood was cold as glowing, golden eyes peered through the oppressive darkness that smothered everything just before daylight would hit the above canopy. Wary creatures knew to stay their distance from the seeming human that possessed the nearly intangible inhuman aura. 

Despite how the golden glowing eyes pierced through the darkness, it wasn’t a harsh or sharp glow. These eyes were kind and warm, like the soft golden glow of a harmless firefly. Curious creatures would dare to venture closer for a look, but only a fool would approach the kind traveler maliciously.

At the way I moved like a shadow through the night, one could imagine I was similarly shady or suspicious in character. However, my life wasn’t as secretive as one would imagine for someone who was quasi-human. After all, it was rare for me to bring up my other half so casually. After all, what would be the point of bringing up something as taboo as a dragon…?

Maybe this was why I chose to live a lavish life in the comfort and riches provided in the city of Dale. It was a proud and prosperous city that sat just at the foot of a great mountain, Erebor, the home of the dwarves.

As a half-dragon, there was always that internal desire for treasure, for shiny and rare items. In all my time, I’ve never found more treasure than that which lies in Erebor. Though my constitution was only half dragon, simply living beneath the mountain nearly overflowed with gold, my desires were sated. After all, I was a mere human. How could I crave something I’d never truly experienced before? And I promise, I’d firsthand never experienced the mountains of gold that I was sure were in that mountain’s core.

I was sure that as long as I could keep this mountain for myself, my self-proclaimed treasure hoard within the mountain would be safe from the greedy hands of others. After all, the dwarven King within the mountain proved greedy enough not to want to part with even a single token—this was how I was assured that my treasure would remain untouched and unsullied by the mortals. My treasure had no chance of parting Erebor or being owned by anyone else.

These facts assured me of the security of my treasures, which is why I felt confident with each journey I took outside our Kingdom’s borders.

Perhaps I was a little too confident on this last trip outside… As I returned, there was something unexpected occurring. My trip back to Dale was filled with odd occurrences. As a quasi-human, my memory was sharper than most, as were my senses. That was why I recognized the faces of many of the Dwarves and Dale citizens who were fleeing away from Erebor. Many were carrying very little belongings and nearly all—if not all of them—were distressed, heartbroken, and grief-stricken.

While people leaving wouldn’t usually ring any alarms for me, the vast numbers told me something dreadful must have happened. Each step home struck me with more and more anxiety and concern. While I wished for it to be something simple—something with an easy solution—the flames and smoke that rose from my home were enough to clue me into what happened. 

I desperately wished to be wrong.

On my way toward the mountain, a man stopped me, his eyes solid and sharp as he warned, “I’d turn around, traveler. There’s nothing but despair left in the wake of the dragon… There’s nothing for anyone here.”

My eyes darkened in determination. So it was indeed another dragon who dared to destroy my home… my territory. My draconic instincts rarely flared up, but I couldn’t help it, as my home was left in such a state. All for my treasure.

While I was off on my journey, this dragon decided to come in and impose chaos and destruction unto my home. Glaring at the remains of my home, I decided, “I’m going into the mountain.” 

Setting off on my revenge trip to face the dragon invader, the man shouted, “W- Wait…!” His eyes followed me, shocked that I would disregard his warning and proceed toward the danger. “Turn around! I’m warning you! That monster Smaug will kill you before you can step foot into that mountain! It’s suicide-”

I cut off his frantic warnings with a single look, my draconic eyes flashing dangerously. Rather, I shared my own warning, “You’d best leave now. I’m returning to my home.” My voice had a slight gravel to it as I reached the end of my sentence. 

My draconic aura was shining dangerously strong as I walked through the fallen city of Dale, withholding my dragon form for the moment. My eyes flickered among the debris and the dead, recognizing familiar buildings that were still smoldering and streets where familiar sights were reduced to rubble. 

As I left the gates of Dale, heading toward the grand entrance of Erebor, the ground vibrated subtly under my feet. I paused, glancing down as these vibrations grew in intensity until a large figure emerged from the mountain, spreading its impressive wings before taking to the sky. 

Smaug.

The one who was the cause of such horrors—the reason dragons were taboo and monstrous among the weak little mortals.

Huge, intimidating, and destructive—the qualities of a dragon. 

Seeing this dragon soaring so possessively over my home, I growled. Darting forward with the desire to protect what I’d claimed as mine, I shifted into my dragon form, my limbs extending and wings spreading magnificently behind my huge form. As a half-dragon, I was less than the size of a true dragon, but at this moment, all I could feel was the sensation of a true dragon flowing through my blood. 

My species mattered little in this moment, where I charged forward with the intent to take back what was mine. I was kind-hearted, sure… but I loved my home enough that avenging my home was the least I could do in this situation. I wouldn’t let anyone take everything from me. 

For once in my life, I attacked without mercy, without any sympathy in my heart. And for a brief moment, my small size was irrelevant as I struck Smaug from behind, pinning the fire-breather against the side of the mountain where debris rose and scattered around us.

Smaug moved quickly and violently, disentangling himself from my hold. His chest glowed dangerously with the threat of his life-taking fire; however, unlike all those merciless times before… it never came forth. His attack stalled. His eyes were glued onto the dragon that struck him from the sky.

In turn, my eyes were likewise glued onto him. Our gazes were fixed on one another. 

Only one word was silently communicated between us like an unspoken link.

“Soulmate.”

I immediately stepped away from Smaug as we regarded one another from a short distance. Both dragons were searching for something. Dragons were rare creatures, so encountering each other at all was a significant occurrence—and this… soulmates… It couldn’t have been a coincidence.

My tail wavered behind me as I observed this dragon. I was sure he was having the same experience as me. Only, with what I observed from the city, I wasn’t sure this dragon was capable of feeling emotions necessary for a soulmate. 

Soulmate.

The word repeated in my head. My soulmate, the one I was destined to be with, was a dragon whom the people of my city and home considered a monster. Of course, I knew I wasn’t truly like the people I lived amongst, but it was my home nonetheless, and this dragon—my… soulmate—came and ruined everything I had. The thing that struck me the hardest was that dragons had soulmates at all. Wasn’t that supposed to be some kind of myth or legend? Yet, I was seeing it with my own two eyes… No—More than that. I felt it in my soul. 

“My soulmate,” I heard Smaug speak out loud for the first time. His voice sent shivers down my spine, yet his presence oddly comforted me. A hum of appraisal rumbled in his chest as he exhaled. “You are not a dragon.” 

My eyes narrowed. That was the first thing to leave my soulmate’s mouth? An insult? Well, I suppose it could have been worse… I suppose fire could have left his mouth first, as it did to Dale and Erebor. Still, it was difficult to judge where this conversation was heading. “I am a dragon,” I firmly replied. 

“Not fully,” he observed. Things fell silent between us for a tense moment. Well, it was tense for me. I had been around humans for so long that I’d long since lost the ability to read a dragon’s body language or expression. But then he spoke again, “My soulmate is a human in the skin of a dragon. You speak like them.”

I tilted my head, almost in genuine curiosity. “And you’ve spoken with many humans?”

“One.” He briefly glanced away. “My soulmate.”

Another quiet pause passed between us. I wasn’t entirely dragon, but he was. Despite being soulmates, I was still wary about this dragon, unsure of his intentions. 

As expected of a soulmate, or maybe it was his constitution as a dragon, he could sense my wariness around him. My stance could have also given me away with the way my head was lowered, appraising him for any movements or actions. Human or not though, I could see some sort of displeasure in his eyes. I was anxious to know what was going through his head, but he didn’t elaborate. 

Tilting his head, matching my curious movement, he broke the silence between us, “I am not fond of humans.” That singular sentence assured me of the fate of our soulmate bond …until he spoke again, half grumbling to himself as if convincing himself of this fact, “But this quasi-human… You are mine.”

It was very clear he disliked my human side regardless, though his eyes held his possessive nature. It was clear neither of us expected to meet the other here, so I had a single question to ask him. “Why did you come here to destroy my home?”

A scoff left his lips, sounding more like a withheld growl deep within his draconic chest than the sound a human would make. He didn’t outright answer my question as he turned his gaze back to Erebor. “Foolish soulmate. Do you know nothing of your own kin? To not know why a mighty dragon would wish to lay claim over a mountain such as this. You truly are a human in dragon skin.”

“The trove within Erebor…” I muttered, knowing his reason. Dragons were possessive of treasure, of gold. Significant quantities of it were said to attract such beasts and call destruction to any greedy soul who would dare amass such wealth—though only foolish souls, such as those tainted with dragon sickness, would make such a mistake. Though, spotting the missing scale on his left side, my eyes narrowed knowingly. “Was it worth it?”

He ignored my pointed gaze. “To not only stake my claim here… but also find something more valuable than any gold… Yes. It was worth every life and every crumbling stone and every billow of smoke that rose from my flames.” He raised his head proudly, raising his wings as if showing off. “I could not have been more fortunate.” He wouldn’t mention the thought that perhaps it wasn’t the gold in Erebor that attracted him here to this specific mountain of gold. Perhaps his sense as a dragon led him to his other half, his little treasure, the most important thing a dragon could find in their lifetime—the one precious rarity he would be sure to protect at all costs.

However, there was a thought that lingered for me as well… I had always been a resident of the city of Dale. I’d never admit it in so many words, but it was for the same reason Smaug had for coming here the way he did. The richness of this city attracted me and kept me here. While I never would have dared to try and take the mountain for myself, Smaug did take it for himself.

Despite all I lost in Dale, the dragon half of me resonated with Smaug. Morbid curiosity ate at me to know what it meant to have such extravagant treasure for myself—for us. Me… My soulmate… Us.

My eyes flickered up as I heard a rumbling laugh come from the throat of the dragon across from me. “Something’s amusing?”

If a dragon could hold a smug expression on their face, Smaug certainly did. Gazing down at me with all his draconic pride, he answered, “Nothing, to me, is more amusing than seeing my quasi-human of a soulmate struggle to accept the tug in their soul.”

I stepped forward, my claws grazing the stone beneath my feet, as I stood face to face with him. “If you’re questioning whether or not I’ve come to terms with being the soulmate of a pure-blooded dragon… I have.” My statement surprised him enough, leaving us in silence before I added, “Despite not being fully dragon, there’s a tug in my chest… an undeniable desire to be by your side. I have accepted the tug in my soul. Maybe it’s you who can’t accept my human side.”

“You misunderstand, treasure,” he mumbled the term of endearment as he leaned challengingly closer, our noses a few breaths apart. “Perhaps you are part human… But I am a dragon. And I readily accept every treasure that comes into my possession. You are a welcome, however unexpected, gift.”

“Possession?” I repeated, my nose almost scrunched up in offense. “Excuse me…?”

“Don’t be surprised,” Smaug attempted to sound assuring, but from a human perspective, he really sounded full of himself. “You should consider it a compliment to be held in such high regards by one such as I.”

“You call being a possession a compliment?”

He hummed curiously at my complaint, though posed a question himself. “Do humans not have similar concepts of ownership?” He elaborated, “To belong to their soulmate in such a way that they are treasured above all else… placing their life above all other.” Seeing the concept begin to connect in my mind, he added thoughtfully, “Humans are considerably greedy when it comes to their gold. Do you mean to tell me they do not feel similar in regards to their mates?”

My gaze hardened as I looked away from him. I hated how he was making valid points from a human perspective. How did he even have a human perspective? Maybe he was more sympathetic that I imagined for a dragon to be. Though, that may have been inconsiderate of me, considering I, myself, was a dragon with a human side. Maybe I was the one being close-minded here.

“I- That…” I trailed off. Perhaps it would just take time for me to understand the meanings in his words. After all, it seemed that dragons might not be entirely different from humans. After all, we’re both just living creatures that experience different desires and have different necessities. But we’re both alive, and all living things were prone to some form of possession. Huffing in disgruntlement, I decided, “You word things oddly.”

His deep chuckle sounded far more amused this time as he managed to confound me with his surprising ability to understand. “Perhaps I do,” he agreed without much reluctance. It wasn’t like he often had conversation with others. “However, I feel that you’ll come to understand a dragon’s form of endearment in time. Being part of my hoard is not a thing of offense, nor is it bad. If you cannot understand my words, trust my actions. I will keep you safe and I will provide for you, my treasure.”

It was beyond evident in my words and actions that I had never before embraced my dragon side. My movements were unsteady and faltering, not unsimilar to a hatchling learning to walk. In order to blend into human society, I had never acknowledged my dragon form, neglecting it as if it were a burden to my existence. Which, it may have been, had Smaug not shown up to change that. 

I raised my head, retreating from his sudden approach. Though, Smaug’s movements were more graceful than mine as he moved beside me, using his wing to usher me beside him. “Come. I will show you what you have yet to experience as a human. There’s much for you to learn.”

Part of me wondered if he knew the human phrase ‘to take someone under your wing’ as a form of teaching. It was strictly a human thing, of course, so I doubted he would understand it—aside from perhaps taking it literally. I was literally under his wing, after all as he guided me into the mountain that I’d only ever looked at from afar. 

This mountain was like a physical representation of my draconic blood. It was something that I acknowledged as existing. It was something I owned and accepted as my own without saying it outloud or having anyone else know of. But now I was in my dragon form, entering the mountain that I had long-since claimed as my own. My soulmate stood strongly beside me, guiding me each step toward my predestined fate. He could show me what dragon life could be like.

That much was proven as he took me into an illuminated great hall, filled to the brim with gold and treasures stretching from wall to wall, corridor to corridor. The lot of it put together was far greater than the entire mass of Smaug himself—and me included. It stirred something… possessive in me—a feeling I couldn’t quite put into words. It was a desire to have complete dominion over this space of treasure. 

“That’s how it feels to… desire…” I murmured almost imperceptably. 

I curiously watched as Smaug bypassed me, settling down within the piles of gold. The sound of shifting coins was pleasant to hear and it was even more pleasant to physically feel the texture of the cold metals and stones beneath my claws. I was sure if I were in my human form, I’d likely drown in this sea of gold and treasure. Indeed… the dwarf king under the mountain was a greedy soul—a soul that now consumed my heart. 

I couldn’t resist the stimulating textures beneath my form as I joined Smaug, settling atop the gold, just to worm my way further into the cold comforts of the material wealth. 

His eyes remained affixed to me, observing my every action and reaction to the environment around me. After all, he was more than curious to see how I was going to settle into my inevitable draconic desires. It was going exactly as he expected it to go and his chest practically swelled with pride and affection for his soulmate.

Though, despite my internal frolicing in my dragon form as I curiously explored my surroundings, I had a thought as I glanced at Smaug and pointed out, “You’re going to show me how to be a dragon and show me how to embrace that natural side of myself.” I curiously inquired, “But that’s not all I am. I’m also a human… Do you accept that side of me as well? Or just the dragon…?”

Pausing, he lifted his head to get a better look at my slightly human eyes. He wasn’t as disgusted as he imagined he would be. Had anyone told him beforehand that his soulmate was half human, he would have scoffed and never entertained the idea. But seeing me with his own two eyes… He quietly mused, “Huamns and similarly small species are fragile and easily broken creatures. Yet, you are mine. So, let me word it in this way… You, a dragon, I will possess. Conversely… You, a human, I will protect.” He would do everything for his soulmate and he hoped he could communicate that well enough.

“That’s… one way to put it,” I considered, my tail wrapping around my loafed form. “And, not exactly wrong.” At least he had some idea on what it meant for me to have a human side. And at least he understood that humans were extremely fragile compared to dragons. That reassured me that I’d be safe in my human form around Smaug as well, considering his magnificent size. “Thank you,” I mumbled quietly, leaning closer to him, his warmth radiating onto me. “I used to think being a dragon meant that all my dragon side was good for was being territorial and desiring a hoard of treasure…” I paused. “I wasn’t entirely wrong either. But… I’ve still got things to learn. So… Maybe I can teach you more about the smaller life too?”

He let out a soft exhale through his nose that was slightly audible in the silence of the room. But he didn’t reject the idea. Instead, he reluctantly accepted my quiet wish, “If that is what my soulmate desires… I’ll endevor to learn more of the smaller life and to tolerate your humanity.”It seemed like it might have been a hassle to consider. A dragon needing to accommodate the needs of a quasi-human… It really seemed unrealistic. Until it came down to it, and a dragon really is quite willing to do anything for their treasure.

[chronically-persistent]

I hate being sick. That’s probably not surprising to most people but to some I’m sure my life looks idyllic. I don’t work 9/5, I don’t pay bills, I don’t cook for myself most of the time, I sleep 12 hours a night. Yet, they don’t see what goes on under my skin, feeling like a part of me is dying every day. When I’m too exhausted to move or even breathe, when I feel my muscles seize up and stop working. When I can barely eat and become paralyzed with pain.

Being chronically ill is being imprisoned in your own skin. Yearning for more and being chained to an intangible wall. I always try to spread positivity here but sometimes it’s hard to ignore the weight of our circumstances. This is a reminder that grief comes and goes in waves, and you should never be made to feel bad for feeling bad.

We’re going through it every day, and it isn’t always sunshine. But I’m glad you’re here.

[gghostwriter]

Entangled Strings of Fate

Chapter 8. Time heals (almost) all wounds

Spencer Reid x Fem!Original Character

Summary: Caltech, Pasadena - Cleo considers herself a woman of logic. With an IQ of 158 and an eidetic memory, how could she not. But meeting Spencer, the boy genius to hers, had her believing in intangible theories like the invisible string and the fates. Now, if only he would notice the depth of her feelings. Set in Caltech, pre-season 1 and will progress from there. w.c: 1.9k a/n: ngl i had a hard time taking this fic off of hiatus. There were some instances where I just wanted to drop it all together but i persevered so here we are, slowly back in the game. The updates would be irregular since I’m also working on other ideas behind the scenes but hope you all still enjoy and support. Comments & reblogs are greatly appreciated! previous chapter || series masterlist || next chapter

”If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” - Frederick Douglass

Change was a peculiar thing.

If Spencer Reid was to describe it from his own experience dealing with his fight with Dilaudid, he’d liken it to the well-known ‘five stages of grief’—denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and acceptance. His progress was never a linear thing, there were days his emotion would swig back and forth within stages like some sort of pendulum. He resented it. It made him feel weak, resentful, and angry. At the world, at the people around him, and most of all at himself.

The first and second stages were denial and anger. Two emotions he regrets to know too well and deflect to others poorly. 

“Reid,” Morgan’s tone coming off harsh from restrained anger. “What was that? I just saw Cleo—” he pointed behind him towards the door. “—rush out and crying.” 

He scoffed. “Nothing. It’s nothing for you to worry about.”

“Yeah, well let’s talk about the elephant in the room then. Since when had you had those?” Morgan nodded his head in the direction of the medicine bottles left haphazardly on the coffee table.

“Since Tobias,” he shrugged nonchalantly, opting to go with a half truth and a half lie to try and throw his fellow profiler off his trail. Not that it would ever work with how tenacious Morgan was. “He must have slipped it in my pockets before his murder—”

“Murder?” Morgan picked up on his specific choice of wording. 

“—and its not like I used it.” 

A lie.

“Kid, we both know that was self defense and Cleo told me the truth, don’t like to me.”

Spencer averted his eyes, finding all the scuffles on his floor suddenly interesting. It was indeed self defense, he knew that, but Tobias didn’t deserve to be killed—not really. He wasn’t like the rest of the unsubs that they have hunted down. He was just a victim of bad fate and his own fractured mind. Inside, the real Tobias still saved him and for that he felt grateful and regretful that his way of repayment was made through by a bullet. 

“Reid, I thought you were getting better. What you went through was traumatic but this isn’t the right way to cope—drugs and pushing away probably the person who cares for you the most. This isn’t you, Reid.”

“Yeah well, maybe this is the new me, have you thought about that?” He glared at Morgan. “I don’t even know why you’re here lecturing me about keeping secrets and coping, we all their own demons locked up, don’t we? The members of the BAU aren’t really known to be the most trusting and forthcoming with our pasts. We brush the trauma all under the rug and hope it doesn’t catch up to us.”

Morgan sighed as his shoulder dropped, all the fight in him leaving. “Come talk to me when your anger has passed—” he stepped back until he was almost by the door. “—and Reid, let’s hope this isn’t the new you ‘cause if it is—” he trailed off, shaking his head.

As the soft closing of the door echoed through the apartment, Spencer felt relief. Relief in being free to do what he wanted without judgement and relief to unknowingly hit rock bottom as his trembling fingers reached for the sealed bottle of Dilaudid. 

———

The third stage was bargaining.

Spencer didn’t know how he got here. Here being the present without the two strongest pillars in his life, Cleo and Gideon. One he pushed away and the other, leaving him behind with just a letter to his name. 

The team felt incomplete. He felt incomplete. 

As a man of science, he didn’t believe in higher power or the cosmos but one late night, he found himself on the rooftop of his apartment complex, cursing the stars and bargaining for the past to come back to the present.

If the star placements that night were different, maybe the present would be too. If he had worn a different combination of socks, maybe Cleo would still be by his side. And if he had not separated from JJ, maybe he would be here—at rock bottom.

It was a place he never thought he’d be in. Did he really have 187 IQ for nothing? Was all those knowledge in his expansive brain useless in recognizing wrong decisions made? 

He sighed as he watched the sun break the horizon.

Another day powered with no sleep.

Another day of wishing things had been different.

And another day of missing the one he pushed away.

———

The fourth stage, depression, hit when he least expected it and with it, came an immense regret that threatened to pull him under it’s ravaging tides.

By definition, depression was a general emotional dejection and regret was the act of feeling sorrow. Easy to understand in wording but difficult to explain when both were cruising through his body.

If Spencer was to explain what both were beyond it’s dictionary definition, he would liken regret to a bone injury that was never reset right and depression to deep, self inflicted wound that had been picked on numerous times that caused it to scar permanently. He felt himself riddled with both—fresh and old, reminders of his inactions and wrongful judgement. The optimists would wade through it and wear their progress with pride. These so called life battle scars that lead them to a better future but he wasn’t one of them.

No, he carried his with such shame causing his shoulders to hunch further forward from the accumulated weight of his whole life’s misfortunes. The heavy, heavy weight of sorrow from not being good enough for his father to stay. Remorse from not being strong enough to carry his ailing mother’s load and having her admitted in a facility. Disappointment from choosing the easy way out of his drug addiction—lashing out and using behind closed doors. Heartache from pushing away the only person in his life that cared enough to be angry and concerned, Cleo—his constant, his number one supporter. 

A rhythmic knock on his door pulled him out from under the waves. Blanket draped over his body, Spencer sluggishly made his way to it—ignoring the hunger pains in his empty stomach. It was nothing compared to what his heart was going through.

“Spencer,” Garcia uttered as she took in the boy genius’ form in worry. 

He cleared his throat, rough from the lack of use. “Garcia, what—what are you doing here?” 

“Taking care of you since it’s obvious you’re not going to,” the tech analyst maneuvered her way through with a Tupperware on hand. She headed straight to the kitchen regardless his small protests.

Garcia worked fast in plating him soup and a slice of bread. If this were a normal evening, he’d feel grateful and enticed by the smell but this wasn’t so all he felt was an urge to retch. 

“I don’t want it,” he mumbled, shuffling further away from the source of the stench.

She sighed. “Reid, what day is it today?” 

The question threw him off a loop. What does that have to do with forcing him to eat?

“Friday. It’s just Friday.”

“It’s Sunday,” she walked closer until he was reaching distance. “I’ve been calling you and you haven’t been picking up so I took it upon myself to visit you instead. Now—” dragging him to the dining table. “—I need you to eat. Even a little bit ‘cause I know you haven’t eaten at all.”

He brought a trickle to his drying lips. It was chicken soup and if he didn’t know any better, it tasted familiar. Homemade, even.

“How is it?” Garcia asked.

“Did you make this?”

Her eyes widened before her hand waved in front of her face in jest. “What? No—no, I got it from the restaurant near my apartment.” 

That was a lie.

A lie that Spencer didn’t question. He had lied about worse things and he had no right to question where the soup really came from when he knew the answer.

From Cleo. 

Or at least it was Cleo’s recipe.

The thought of her still being part of his life, no matter how inconsequential, warmed his insides more than the chicken soup had. 

“Do you think I’m bad for taking those drugs?” 

She gave a brief pause, enough to have Spencer worry. “No. I don’t have the right to judge you on your actions but—”

“But?”

“—it’s sad that other people bore brunt of your anger, which wasn’t your fault but wasn’t your greatest moment either.”

“Do you think—” he downed the last few spoonfuls. “—she’d forgive me?” 

It was what kept him awake most nights. The thought of never being part of Cleo’s world any more than a passerby was a living nightmare he hoped to escape from. Losing her felt like he lost his own limb. It threw him off balance. It broke Earth’s gravitational pull to his self. And when he does sleep, he wakes with this fog that he never pushed her away—never hurt her like a phantom limb before he drops back down to reality.

She reached into her glittered purse, rummaging through before she found what she was looking for. “I’ve been keeping this with me since that night and I think it’s time I give it to you.”

The single piece of paper looked worn at the edges and its folds. It looked non-descriptive. It was the contents that mattered. That truly mattered.

Law Enforcement: Narcotics Anonymous

(555) 657-02149

  All hastily written in Cleo’s loopy handwriting

“Oh.”

———

The final stage, acceptance, came with a physical change in the team. A new old member was stepping up to the plate in Gideon’s place.

David Rossi.

He had been feeling like his past self for a while now. All in thanks to the support each member has extended to him. As he started his climb up from the abyss of addiction, he had realized that his team—Hotch, Morgan, JJ, Garcia, and Emily, were there to cushion his fall should be falter and as the warmth of daylight hit his face on the way up, he wondered why he decided to stay in the darkness for so long. 

Why he had to lose two pillars before realizing that this is where he belonged? That this is who Spencer Reid is—a paradox of good and bad, a person who chooses the good no matter his demons.

And although adjusting to a new BAU member would take a while, he felt optimistic that everything would turn out just right. That it was time to finally let go of self loathing and make amends to those he can, no matter what the outcome.

That was how he found himself penning a letter to the one person he hadn’t seen in months.

To the one person who mattered after his mother. 

To Cleo. 

Comments & reblogs are greatly appreciated!

[greenorangetree]

a lot of people have said that the den o ending took away from the emotional impact of the set up for it. i honestly dont quite think so.

i think the imagin getting to live is another heart touching part of their story. they are imagins, intangible sand creatures who prey on people in their worst moments, twisting their deepest wishes in order to go back in time to the absolute most important time in their lives to destroy the timeline from there, yet clearly have chosen to do good--they have love and affection for their contract holder and do not want to simply use him for any ends of their own, they have chosen to sacrifice themselves in order to save this timeline, a time they are not even from, a time with happy and sad moments alike, all because of what being a part of den o has done to them. they have grown from the uncaring and often cruel imagin they were at the start, hurtful to ryotaro by using his body as they felt, hurting him physically, trying to kill him, etc, to beings who genuinely adore ryotaro as a part of their family in a way. getting in one last defiance to their nature by getting physical forms and a FUTURE because they chose to save this timeline and created memories with people instead of destroying it entirely, that twists my heartstrings and definitely made me cry on my first watch and my many rewatches of den o.

now why do i say all of this about den o's ending? i want to mention how much i love it already and that is why the version of it where the imagin dont get to live absolutely would have CRUSHED me.

think about it:

- ryotaro is absolutely crushed. he has always been destined to be alone by nature. he is a singularity point. he can remember everything while everyone else forgets. his family died at an early age, his sister's fiance left and took with him his sister's happiness, who, mind you, is his only relative left, and also had to drop out of high school because of that. the one time he gets to make some close connections with anyone, who also remember because they were theyre with him and had his back through all the bullshit that was thrown at him? they get erased alongside the rest of their kind. they fought so hard to save the timeline, a timeline they didnt belong to, just because ryotaro showed them that they could do better than their own natures? who fought despite ryotaro's fear of losing them? this would absolutely destroy ryotaro. how could he go back to living life while also grieving the loss of the intangible demons that lived in his head? every little thing they left behind-- momotaros's wardrobe that he spent all of ryotaro's cash on, gifts left from urataros's paramours, kintaros's weights and gear, the drawings ryutaros made-- all of these tangible things that were left by the imagin, who didnt get to live for themselves without being tied to ryotaro as their only anchor for existing in this timeline? seeing them without the imagin who they belong to would be absolutely devastating.

- airi, who has gone through this intense period of grief before over something she couldn't remember or understand, once again has to deal with it, except in her brother. she can't really understand what hes been through, but she can remember those times when her little brother wasnt acting quite like himself, but rather someone quite younger and more impulsive, yet clearly loved her with a passion, just like her brother does. she can only do so much for him, like how he had to do for her merely a year ago. she can't help him through the worst of it, but also has to deal with her own memory problems and lingering grief over her fiance.

- hana would have to go back to being alone. she has no where else to go, as her future and her timeline is gone, erased. living alone on the denliner in the time before ryotaro and his merry gang got on board would havr been hard. she had just lost everything in her life, after all. but now, having seen the denliner full of life and color and energy with those imagin, having to go back to the cold, empty, sterile interior of the denliner's dining car? even naomi is crushed by the loss. it hurts to lose everything once, but this life that shes managed to rebuild in some sense of normalcy had made her happier, nicer. losing it all again in one fell swoop, once again powerless to do anything, that is absolutely despair inducing.

- and of course, sakurai yuuto. unlike hana, he really IS alone. hana has naomi, owner, any passenger who boards the denliner from time to time, but aboard the zeroliner? just him and deneb. without deneb, he is truly alone. he doesnt belong in the timeline anymore. it was his own (future self's) doing, after all. what life he had, he chose to leave it. for all the time he spent protecting time, he had his partner with him. he cooked and cleaned and tolerated yuuto's aggression. he may not have been the nicest, hell he hated deneb's over enthusiasm, his overbearing compassion, the shittake mushrooms in his food, and showed it through violence, but what was he supposed to do without the one who's been through it all with him? whos been his carer, his one connection through it all? deneb was someone who, knowing his fate, left behind one last meal for yuuto, and simply requested he eat his mushrooms, too kind for his own good, and is now gone forever. yuuto isn't a singularity point. he cant change things or protect the way ryotaro or hana can through their memories. but he has done everything in his power already to protect his former time. he has already sacrificed it all--the memories of himself, memories are time, after all, and it is the most he can ever give. he has never felt more powerless. he has felt lost, just doing what his future self had told him to do without any real connection to what he was protecting, sure, but never has he felt so useless in the way he feels when he couldnt even protect deneb's existence.

yeah im going through it, the den o time tripping ride! honestly this was a fun brainworm to have lol

[rebellenotes]

Grieving What You Cannot Touch

I’ve always found it strange how we’re taught to grieve for tangible losses—a person, a place, a thing—but never for the intangible. Nobody tells you how to mourn the parts of yourself you’ve outgrown, or the life you thought you’d have, or the innocence that quietly slipped away when you weren’t paying attention. It’s an ache without a name, a grief that doesn’t fit into tidy boxes like funerals or goodbyes. And yet, it lingers, just as heavy, just as real.

I feel like that type of grief is often closely related to nostalgia. Or rather that nostalgia is, amongst other things, the experience of grieving the past. But it’s not just about longing for what was—it’s about grieving what never was. The version of your life that didn’t come to pass, the connections you hoped for but never formed. For me, it’s the emotional relationship I never had with the male members of my family, particularly my father.

Growing up, I never experienced the father-daughter bond I’d see in movies or hear about from friends. My dad was always emotionally unavailable—distant in a way I couldn’t name as a child but felt keenly in the space between us. I’ve recently learned that when I was 2 or 3 years old, he was in and out of the hospital due to his cancer. During those formative years, my world revolved around my mom, not my dad. And as I piece these things together as an adult, I can’t help but wonder how those early days shaped me. Did I subconsciously decide, even as a toddler, that I couldn’t rely on male figures for emotional connection? Did I carry that into my relationships later on?

The grief here isn’t just for the past; it’s for the ripple effects it has in the present. I grieve the father I wish I had, the kind of dad who would have taught me how to trust male figures, how to feel secure in their presence. But I also grieve the way that absence shaped me into someone who still struggles with those connections today. It’s not a straightforward pain. It’s layered with love, disappointment, and a quiet understanding that sometimes people can’t give you what you need—not because they don’t care, but because they didn’t know how.

This kind of grief is tricky because it’s not rooted in a single event or moment. It’s a slow, quiet loss that stretches across years, shaping you in ways you don’t realize until you look back. And when you do, it’s not just sadness you feel—it’s a mix of everything: anger, longing, confusion, acceptance. You grieve what you didn’t have, what you didn’t know to ask for, and what you’ll never fully get back.

And yet, in grieving, there’s also clarity. There’s a sense of giving yourself permission to name the loss, even if it feels abstract. To say, “This mattered. This hurt. And I’m allowed to feel it.” Because mourning isn’t just about closure—it’s about honouring the weight of what was missing, even if it can’t be replaced.

But how do you fix something so… floating? Something so abstract and unfathomable for a lot of people. How do I tell people I grieve the loving father-daughter relationship I never had? People respond, “I’m sorry for your loss,” and it feels comforting, until I realise they assume my father is gone. But I’m not talking about the physical presence of my dad. I’m talking about the absence of a loving connection between us. 

How do you grieve something that technically exists but doesn’t feel whole? It’s not a loss in the traditional sense—it’s not someone who passed away or a relationship that was severed. It’s something more elusive: the absence of what could have been, of what you needed but didn’t receive. It’s mourning potential. It’s grieving love that never bloomed in the ways you hoped it would.

I’ve tried to explain this to others before, and it’s always met with a kind of confusion. People are quick to console when they think you’ve lost someone physically. They know how to respond when grief has a name and a date. But when you tell them, “I’m grieving a bond that was never there,” they don’t know what to say. It’s like trying to describe the shape of an empty space, a void that only you can see.

And maybe that’s what makes this kind of grief so isolating. It’s hard to articulate, hard to validate, even to yourself. You start to question whether it’s fair to feel this way. After all, my dad was there, right? He worked hard, he provided for us, he was present in the ways he knew how to be. So why does it still feel like something is missing? Why does it hurt so much to see other father-daughter relationships filled with warmth and emotional closeness?

That’s the thing about intangible grief—it doesn’t adhere to logic. You can’t reason your way out of it. It lingers, sneaking into quiet moments, catching you off guard when you least expect it. It’s in the way your heart aches during Father’s Day commercials or when a friend talks about their dad being their rock. It’s in the little pang of envy you feel when you see those bonds you never had, knowing they represent something you’ll always yearn for.

I’ve also frequently grieved the way my life could have looked if I didn’t have anxiety. If my depression didn’t make me sleep all day to escape the real world. Sleeping At Last once sang “How do I forgive myself for losing so much time?,” and I can’t help but relate so hard it feels like my heart is going to cave in on itself in pain. 

How do you cope with such grievances? I wish I knew, but I’m learning that coping doesn’t always mean finding answers. Sometimes, it’s about sitting with the pain and letting it exist without trying to solve it. Grieving intangible losses—whether it’s a relationship, a version of yourself, or time you’ll never get back—isn’t something you can fix. It’s something you have to feel, piece by piece, day by day.

For me, part of coping has been allowing myself to mourn without guilt. To acknowledge that these feelings are valid, even if they don’t fit into the conventional mold of loss. I remind myself that grief isn’t a competition—it doesn’t have to be “big enough” or visible to others to matter. It matters because it matters to me.

I also try to focus on what I can rebuild, even if it’s just in small ways. I might never get the father-daughter relationship I longed for, but I can work on fostering meaningful connections with others. I can let myself feel the hurt without letting it harden me. I can remind myself that grieving isn’t about staying stuck in the past—it’s about making peace with it so I can carry it differently.

As for the time lost to anxiety and depression, I try to show myself the same compassion I would offer a friend. It’s easy to blame myself for the days spent hiding under the covers or the moments I missed because I was too overwhelmed to participate in life. But blaming myself doesn’t change the past—it only adds to the weight I’m already carrying. Instead, I try to focus on the moments I can reclaim, even if they’re small. A walk outside, a conversation with a friend, a little step forward.

I think that’s the hardest part about grieving intangible losses: the fact that there’s no closure, no finality. It’s a process, not a destination. It’s messy and nonlinear, and some days it feels like you’re back at the beginning. But even in those moments, there’s a kind of resilience in simply continuing. In saying, “I’m still here, and I’m still trying.”

And maybe that’s enough. Maybe grief doesn’t need to be fixed or resolved—it just needs to be acknowledged. To hold space for what was, what wasn’t, and what still could be. Because in that space, there’s room for healing. There’s room for growth. And maybe, just maybe, there’s room for hope too.

[sillydestiny]

Whispers of Remembrance

cale x reader

angst

Cale Henituse, a man burdened by the weight of his unfulfilled dreams, stood alone in front of a tomb, his heart heavy with grief. His one and only aspiration was to lead a peaceful life, a life filled with love and joy alongside his beloved Y/N and their children. However, that dream seemed forever out of his reach, shattered by the cruel hands of fate.

It had been years since the war with the White Star, a battle that claimed the life of his dear Y/N. Cale could still vividly recall the harrowing sight of Y/N sacrificing themselves to protect him, the anguish etched deep within his soul. The image haunted his every waking moment, a constant reminder of his failure to safeguard the one person who meant everything to him.

In the aftermath of that tragic day, Cale had held on to a glimmer of hope. He believed that once the war was over, he would be able to return home with Y/N, their dreams finally within grasp. But life had a cruel way of dashing one's hopes, and Cale soon realized that his beloved Y/N was forever lost to him.

As Cale gazed upon the name engraved on the tombstone, a bittersweet smile tugged at his lips. Memories flooded his mind, memories of Y/N's radiant smile, their laughter, and the warmth of their voice. Yet, deep down, he knew that these recollections were mere echoes of the past, fleeting and intangible. Y/N was gone, and nothing could bring them back.

"Forgive me," Cale whispered softly, his voice laden with remorse. "I couldn't protect you."

Suddenly, a warmth enveloped Cale from behind, as if someone had wrapped their arms around him in a tender embrace. Startled, he turned around, his eyes filled with both hope and disbelief. "Y/N?" he called out, his voice trembling with longing.

But there was no one there, only empty air and the silent stillness of the cemetery. Cale's heart sank, reality crashing down upon him once more. Tears welled up in his eyes, a mixture of grief, frustration, and love.

"Don't blame yourself, Cale," a whisper carried on the wind, barely audible yet unmistakably Y/N's voice. Cale's heart skipped a beat, and he strained to catch another trace of that ethereal sound, but it was gone as quickly as it had come.

Could it be his imagination? Or was it something more? Cale couldn't help but wonder. Regardless, those few words ignited a flicker of strength within him, a newfound resolve to carry on and honor Y/N's memory.

With a heavy heart and tear-stained cheeks, Cale knelt before the tombstone, tracing the engraved name with trembling fingers. "I will fulfill our dreams, Y/N," he vowed, his voice filled with determination. "Even if you're no longer by my side, I will live a life that would make you proud."

[klunkcat]

Forget-Me-Nots

rise of the tmnt tags: hurt/comfort, post movie word count: 18.8k characters: mikey & leo, minor leo & don

Leo’s maybe not as alright as he would like to believe. It’s just that he’s been misremembering a lot of things, small sections of his brain just smoothed over somehow, missing all of the regular information.

It also just keeps happening.

read on ao3 here

This is a fic I wrote basically entirely for @goodlucktai so thank you as always my sun and moon for your constant inspiration <3 Turtle brain rot lives within me permanently and will never die probably

____

At the center of it all, Mikey doesn’t regret it. He knows how angry his family would be, has actually watched from the outside how devastating it is to lose any one of them for a single second— the four minutes and seven seconds after the Krang ship exploded and before he cracked open himself to drag his own portal into existence were their own swan song. He felt the way the world coalesced into a singular black hole of grief that felt impossible to move underneath. He knows this changes all of his family in awful ways, that it'll rewrite them all fundamentally, and the thought makes him want to scream and apologize immediately after his choice solidifies in front of him, but he can’t possibly bring himself to pick anything else all the same. It's not that this is different, but it also is entirely. 

He thinks the problem is, at its core, the fact that he refuses to regret it at all. 

Getting Leo back is an impossibility— Mikey reached through and pulled the millionth of a million chance through and made it possible anyways, because it’s Leo. Because it’s his big, stupid, self sacrificing older brother who never even asked them how they’d feel before diving off on his own. Because a world without Leo and his whip crack jokes and larger than life energy is one he can’t stand to be in a second longer than he already has. Mikey makes it possible, because there’s no other option he will accept. 

He can see it later, all the words Donnie used to describe the choices and paths he burns right out of reality, bright and bold against his skin; there are branches, there are branches of branches. Each one of them splinters up his hands and arms until he can find the one where Leo makes it back. It hurts, and even with Donnie and Raph at his sides, it almost doesn’t happen at all— in fact, there’s many times it doesn’t. 

Mikey’s not supposed to be able to do this, not yet— he can see the years he spends honing this in Casey’s world, all the time and training and drain it puts right on that intangible ball of fire that makes up all of them. There are so many worlds where he can’t figure it out in time at all, but Mikey blazes through those anyways. If he can change things he will, and he will change them again and again until everyone he loves is safe and fine and home. It takes a lot of tries. Maybe that should have been the first warning sign. 

It starts with tingling in his fingertips. Fuzz, somewhere just at the end of himself that by day two, when Leo is conscious enough to hold a conversation in Donnie’s med bay, he almost misses when it gets worse. The shocky feeling is just the adrenaline, probably he thinks. It had been a really intense few days. By the next morning, attempting to text Cassandra and watching his phone fall from his hands for the second time, it hits him that he can’t feel anything in his hands at all.

By lunch, it’s at his elbows, dinner at his shoulders. He realizes that there are whole conversations skipping past; he’s awake and then he’s in bed, then he’s standing alone in the kitchen and he thinks he maybe hasn’t moved in entire days somehow without participating in any single moment of it. His family won’t look at him directly unless he speaks— he realizes what this is, what the burnt out remains of all those worlds had left him with. 

He still can’t pretend he regrets it, even then. 

He should tell Dee, or Leo, or Raph— Dad, Casey Jr., Barry, anyone at all— it’s been too late for a long time already, he thinks. A thousand other worlds where Mikey hits the redo all going 180 on the freeway and smashing into one at hyper speed. He has told everyone, he hasn’t told anyone, he’s redone it all twenty, forty, one hundred, two thousand times— there’s one world where Leo makes it back okay, there’s only one where nothing else goes wrong, and it’s the one where Mikey can’t. 

(There’s a part of him that’s scared, he can admit it. The idea of never getting morning breakfasts, excited team hi-fives, late night living room sleepovers; a million never's of an infinite number of days he’ll never know, it’s enough to cave in the whole of his heart. It’s worse to imagine all those mornings without his big brother, knowing he could have tried.

Besides, he’s Hamato Michelangelo. He’s got a whole house of brothers who taught him about being brave. He’s learned from the best.

When Mikey was younger, his favorite place in the entire world had been the hammock Leo strung up in their shared bedroom. It had been ratty in the way that made it feel extra soft, wide enough to fit all four of them if they curled up. Mikey would fall asleep half thrown across Raph’s shell, arm outstretched to wrap his hand around Leo’s wrist. Don breathing slow and soft on Leo’s other side to lull him to sleep. 

Whenever things were stressful he’d imagine that— the warm cocoon that held his favorite people. The way the light from the hallway as Dad said his goodnight's would bleed through the blue-gray cloth and turn it red and purple and orange, too. The way childhood took time and stretched it out long and infinite, it felt untouchable. 

It’s harder to remember now. The warmth feels like grains of sand he keeps letting slip through his hands, no matter how hard he fights to keep it. 

Another moment he’s supposed to have. Another, and another.

Maybe it’s easier now with the choice already made to feel scared but, he’s somewhere outside himself in a timeline that doesn’t exist anymore and he’s alone. He’s realizing, curled up on the asteroid, floating through expanses of nothing, flickering through a thousand branches of timelines that can’t happen anymore because he broke them, that he’s not sure he’s ever actually been alone.)

It’s fine, is the thing, really. There’s a difference between the slow slide of your family being ripped out right from the center, and this slow blink into something else. They don’t even notice it happen. 

____

“Come on, Raph! It’s just a quick little trip around the corner. What’s the big deal?” 

Raph levels him with a look, it’s the highly specific and patented ‘exasperated older brother stare’ he perfected and should have patented when they were five years old. Typically, the look spells a whole lecture on the importance of respect and believing in the team or something else equally as heartfelt and long winded. The Leonardo flavor to it lately means the chasm in Raph’s forehead is particularly darkened and wearied with concern, and the most he seems to be able to bring himself to do is sigh. 

Leo’s not a fan of the way this whole thing shook them all so deeply, if he’s honest. The tentative way his brothers all lurk nearby has him vaguely itchy with concern right back at them. Besides, he is feeling better, really. Don gave him the all clear this morning to get out of the pseudo hospital bed he’d set up, with stern orders to use a crutch to manage his busted knee as much as possible. He’s a pro with the crutches already, he’ll have them all know. Maybe his back flip up to the second floor had landed a little awry, but he hadn’t fallen over. On his face, anyways. 

No one had seen it happen.

“Leo, Donnie said you were allowed to hang out in the living room. The living room in our house.” 

Leo waves his hand in the air. “Eh. What’s the difference really?” 

“About fifteen point four miles, actually.” Don pipes in, peeking around the corner. “Fifteen point three of those you are not allowed to walk.” 

His family — you gotta love ‘em, but sheesh. Overprotective could be their new motto. So a guy gets teleported to a prison dimension and nearly doesn’t make it out, people have had crazier summer vacations. They’re all acting like if he moves around too much he’ll collapse into a pile of dust on the spot.

He flops backwards on the couch with an over dramatic groan. “It’s boring in here!” 

“So read a comic then,” Raph says, still frowning but in a more pleasantly annoyed kind of way. “Or… learn how to knit. I don’t know— you’re not moving, tough luck.”

“You want me dead,” he says, unthinkingly to the ceiling. To his credit, it doesn’t even take the awkward pause or the tell tale sign of his twin shuffling his lab door closed to make him realize he shouldn’t have said it at all. It’s the type of joke they always make, but Leo still catches the hollowed out look of pain in Raph’s eyes even as he glances away. 

“Sorry,” he tries, just to have at least said it.

Raph shakes his head, swallowing roughly. “It’s cool, just. You— you went through a lot, Leo. At least try to rest, okay?” 

Fine. He sighs, overly loud just to be a pain and re-shift the vibes back into some modicum of the correct orbit. “House arrest. Unjust, I want my lawyer.” 

Raph’s eyes brighten, something less haggard falling away as he turns towards the kitchen. Bingo. “Yeah, yeah. Tell it to the judge.” 

“Where’s Dr. Delicate Touch when you need him, think he’s got a law degree under that PhD?” 

Leo leans back, casually stretching himself farther onto the couch with as much feigned grouchiness as he can muster. A flash of orange catches the corner of his eye— “Ah, Ang! Tell Raph I can totally hang out at April’s. He wants me to steal all of your comics, you know. He said I should go into your room and take all of them while you weren’t looking. I heard him!”

He’s half expecting Mikey to gasp dramatically, or play into it by breaking down into an over dramatic eulogy and demand an apology from their oldest brother. Their usual bit involves a lot of Leo siccing Mikey onto the others like a particularly emotionally lecture filled chihuahua, something that Mikey gleefully falls into. The silence surprises him, mostly he realizes because it doesn’t. 

He peeks one eye over the back of the couch.  

“Oh,” Mikey says, blinking at him like he just realized Leo was speaking. “Ha— good one.” 

His baby brother seems lost in thought, which is typically not a good sign for anyone involved in the Hamato household. Leo’s heart shifts sideways and funny, instinctive reactions buried deep. “Hey, you wanna ditch out and join me here on lockdown? We can watch your favorite cup stacking videos, if you want.” It’s a momentous offer, Leo hates those videos. 

Mikey sort of just… stands there for a moment. Shakes his head, and seems to process Leo’s words in real time. “Oh— no, that's okay. Sorry, I said I’d help April with her art project.” 

Leo humphs loudly, crossing his arms— or at least halfway crossing them, the bad one shrieks at his boldness and he leaves it alone after a moment. The intent is there, probably. “Fine, sure whatever. I’ll just rot here then.” 

Another long awkward pause follows, Mikey staying still, staring just left of Leo’s head. There’s a very quiet feeling in the back of Leo’s mind he can’t place. “Angelo?” He hedges. 

Mikey blinks up at him, expression shifting too quickly for Leo to catch before his million watt grin is back. “Sorry, what?”

Leo squints. “Okay, change of plans. You. Me. Sitting here all night. Re-runs. I’m putting you on baby brother jail duty, it's a very serious role. You have to pretend to keep me in line, and then when the moment strikes, bust me out and go on a wild goose chase halfway across town to restore our former glory.” 

It earns him a tiny giggle from his baby brother at least. “Maybe it’s better you take it easy, Leo,” Mikey adds in, patting his head only semi-patronizingly, to his credit. “Raphie’s just worried about you.” 

Ugh. “Ugh,” Leo says, for emphasis. He tosses an arm across his eyes. “Fine, I’ll just wither away here on this couch all alone while you’re out having fun, whatever.” 

“Naw,” Mikey says. “Never have too much fun without you, bro.” 

Leo frowns at Mikey’s back, as he ambles off towards the half pipe sort of aimlessly. The sudden burst of earnestness is not unwelcome, really, or all that surprising. Mikey and Raph have always been his most emotional brothers. The way Mikey says it is despondent in a way he doesn’t enjoy, though. Like he’s tired. No, more than that— there’s something to Mikey that seems absolutely exhausted from Leo’s vantage spot from the couch. 

His shoulders slump downwards, lacking all of the usual flip switch energy and crowing enthusiasm their baby brother carries with him like a cape. It makes Leo feel— bad, he thinks. Nervous.

Maybe it’s one of those things Raph said that he needs to consider. Charging off into a death portal on his own with a tearful goodbye? Might have been a step too far into traumatic for his babiest brother. Maybe all of his brothers need to work through it on their own a little. He knows Dee has been spending more of his time in his labs than usual lately, that he’s working on a thousand and five back up plans for any scenario remotely like this ever again— as if they stumble across multi-dimensional horror show a-holes every week. Raph has been training extra hard, channelling as much of his focus into some theoretical improvement as he has been with hovering around Leo in case he keels over and perishes or something. 

Mikey has been— actually, he’s not sure what the guy’s been up to. Hopefully art, or skateboarding, although seeing him now, Leo’s not sure he’s been doing much of either. 

“Hey, Mike?” He calls, and Mikey pauses halfway through the door. The sight makes him worry, somehow. 

Mikey turns instantly, “Yeah, Leo? Did you need something?” Like he’d come back in a heartbeat if Leo really needed him, cancel all of his plans and stay glued to his side like Leo kind of wants, embarrassingly. Like he's just waiting for Leo to ask. Maybe they all need to work through a little bit of something. 

He swallows, pauses. “Nah, I’m good. Tell Ape I say hi, okay?” 

Mikey smiles, “Sure thing, bro.” 

____

The days after the incident in New York had everyone tense — news outlets are afraid to talk about it directly, hesitantly breaking news of clean ups and building reports. Their web of distant contacts begins poking through day by day— Leo got a fairly heartwarming message from Hueso that tells him that his family is also at least partially included in whatever footage was retained from everything. It seemed like most of New York has grouped them in the aliens category, and summarily proclaimed them all ‘returned home’, so there’s no immediate danger at least. 

Their usual ragtag crowd of other local mutants seem to know exactly what happened, more or less, which has granted them some pause in their usual problem-dealing. Something something local heroes, supposedly. Hueso even gives him a coupon. 

Casey finds his way down to the lair, then up to an apartment that April helps him set up with her mom and Cassandra after that, and learns how to text painfully and awkwardly with emojis, much to Leo’s horror. Leo’s bruises fade from angry black whorls to yellow queasy splotches, Raph’s eye gets a full all clear from Donnie, and the world keeps turning. Albeit, with a very intense and serious lecture from Dad about Leo taking it easy, slash being grounded for the next month to launch it all into a particularly odd spin. 

He’s been grounded before, he knows that’s not what this is. 

The protectiveness makes sense, even though it chafes at him and makes him grouchy the longer it goes on. April cancels said regular movie night at her apartment and forcefully shoves everyone into their lair so Leo doesn’t have to move, and Dad’s grounding conveniently doesn’t extend to April either. Mikey bakes all his favorite foods constantly, making the kitchen glow with warm spices and sugars. Raph carefully leaves pamphlets on proper stretches out on the coffee table, and Leo’s favorite blanket is always freshly laundered. Don, in his brusque way, finds excuses to sit near him at night so Leo can fall asleep being surrounded by people he cares about. He can’t fault them for it, really. Maybe underneath the bravado and the sheer amount of ‘not thinking about it’ that he’s doing there is a part of him that craves the intense levels of attachment everyone is giving him.

It’s fine like this, he doesn’t want to leave them either. He almost did anyway. 

Before the Krang, before Casey Jr., before the Shredder, the most harrowing experience they’d dealt with was hibernation instincts, learning how to cook food properly. Heat and avoiding illness. The beauty of having a brainiac twin and a dad that had navigated the world of finances and income before everything else, meant that they hit the ground running early. Maybe they’d all been a little bit sheltered, in hindsight. 

Something about growing up with yourself and your family and your whole world in your pocket.  Maybe you start thinking that maybe the world can’t touch you either.

If they’d asked Leo, he’d have said it didn’t matter— turtle luck, true to form and all that. Sure, things had gotten real apocalyptic bad end for a second there, but nothing permanent happened. They’d saved the day, Leo was fine, Mikey had cracked some insane magical connection no one else in the world could do and Raph came back. 

Bruised, sure. Scared, absolutely. Fine all the same. Or at least, he figures it should be fine.

He can see it in their eyes no matter how relaxed he made sure he looked, no matter how loud he talked. The what if, hovering over everyone, waiting to drown the whole room if they let it. Maybe a few degrees off from fine, but whole.

The photograph he carried everywhere now was starting to bend a little, just the hint of a crease where his thumb had pinched it too hard in the middle of the night. Leo figures he understands how they feel, even if he didn’t live through it. Somewhere out there was a Leo that had for a moment been entirely alone. They have time to fix it now though, he figures. The rest will fall into place.

“Whatcha got there?” April leans over the couch towards him. Raph is dozing to the quiet credits of whatever movie they’d been watching — the name of it escapes him, it hadn’t been very good.  They'd all jumped on it because it was something Casey said he’d seen a poster of once, which then started a whole conversation about how he’d never even seen a TV show, and how movies stopped existing because there'd been so little electricity to even play them on, and that had been so sad they’d all bundled him on the couch together to put it on immediately. 

Casey is tucked under Raph’s arm, chin tilted down and sleeping quietly himself; Leo itches for a camera. Don must have wandered off, his blankets still spread out by the foot of the couch— if he squints he can see the blue light of the lab filtering under the door. The light feeling in his chest sinks at the sight. 

Leo turns the photo towards April. “Just a bunch of weird looking mugs and some handsome bald guy, you know how it is.” 

April scrubs her hand across his head. “We should get that framed. It’s a good one.” 

It is, he thinks. It’s perfect. They have a lot of selfies from over the years, mostly silly ones. Blurry Leo’s diving away from angry Donnie’s or prank evidence, or the few Dad keeps in his special binder he thinks none of them know about from when they were younger. They have so many he usually doesn’t even think about any of them in particular. Sometimes the thought of that makes him want to lock this picture in a box somewhere, bolt the door shut and lie down very still. 

“You’re just saying that cause you’re in the middle,” Leo jokes. April winks back at him. 

Looking down at the photo again, there’s a well of warmth bubbling through him he can’t name. His family, all in one piece, grown one puzzle portion larger with Casey lately— he fits, too. Like a space they hadn’t realized was missing. Him and Sunita and Cassandra, and, begrudgingly if Leo has to play nice, Barry he supposes too and— 

Leo frowns. The photo looks… off. Too much space on one side. He doesn’t remember being in the middle, actually, he’s pretty sure he was on the side— Did he bend it too far? He squints, moving his thumb. No, it’s just, off somehow. Like one of those newspaper games, spot the difference, except there’s a pit in his gut like something important happened. April’s expression slow glides into confusion, but Leo can’t even say what it is that’s wrong, only that there’s a portion of him that is suddenly and abruptly convinced that the picture he carried to hell and back is wrong— 

“Did either of you want some popcorn?” Mikey’s voice cuts in, shoving a brimming bowl towards them. “Raphie fell asleep before he could eat his. Well. I kinda hid it from him.” 

“Oh, thanks, Mike,” April bends forward happily.

Leo blinks back— no, the picture is fine. It’s fine, there’s everyone’s faces smiling back at him, not a thing out of place. He is in the middle, oh. He’s maybe more tired than he thought, is all. Jeeze. It is late, he reasons, and the painkillers Don’s been aggressively-minus-the-passively implying he will be hunted down for ever missing make him drowsier than usual. It’s that residual nightmare problem he’s been having, too; night time makes him jumpier, like he’s on a time limit to prove things are really here. Maybe the sleep aid’s Dee mentioned would be a good idea, he’s just afraid of not being able to force himself awake when the dreams take a turn. 

“Want some, Leo?” Mikey’s eyes shine in the TV light, reflective and almost full white with it making him look almost the full alien New York is convinced they all are. “I put extra butter on it for you.” 

“Thanks, buddy.” 

____

The dreams always start out the same. He’s not in the other dimension, not yet — he’s on the ship with his brothers. He’s watching Donnie take a hit, and calculating in split seconds the likelihood that any of them will get out of this at all with dread so violent in his chest it feels like the world is cracking in half in front of him. He knows— he knows, he knows. There’s only ever one choice to make, and he makes it.

Then, sometimes, the earpiece crackles to life. It’s his voice, it’s the Krangs, it’s Draxum’s and Shredder’s and everyone’s tangled together. He’s saying goodbye, but they aren’t through the portal yet— he’s miscalculated the odds and there’s no one on the other side of the line. 

He’s alone even before he’s actually alone, there’s no one to even say goodbye to. 

Or, someone doesn’t leave. Raph stays behind and he’s so overwhelmed with relief and gratefulness he almost misses watching the Krang skewer him directly before his eyes again. Donnie can’t get a block up at all, and the hit launches him faster than Raph can catch up. April’s there and she takes the hit instead. Someone else takes his place, someone else figures it out first and makes him stay behind. 

Or, he never left. He goes through the wormhole and Casey closes it and no one ever finds him at all. Because he made it up, because he’s still there. 

One night he wakes up, and he doesn’t remember how they got him back in the first place. 

___

“Hey, Leo. You want to try running through some training today?” Raph leans across the hallway — Leo’s been itching to move, to do anything. His injuries have all but healed up, the concussion tucked nicely away; despite Donnie’s stern insistence otherwise, he’s got a clean bill of health. He practically leaps to his feet at the words and very aggressively ignores the immediate head rush that follows. He's been sitting around for far too long, honestly, he's determined not to lose an ounce of his usual pizzazz.

“So I can kick your butt, you mean?” 

Raph snorts. “That’s the kind of big talk I like to hear. Just easy ones today though, okay? Butt kicking is a next-month kind of goal.”

“Come on, Raph, I can wipe the floor with you any day.” 

“Uh-huh.” The silence that follows is biting, touché big brother. 

“I can! Few weeks off isn’t enough to unsizzle this sizzle.” 

“Another wholly scathing comment battle where we all remain interestingly unscathed, I see.” Don slinks from the kitchen to the living room, typing furiously at his wrist the whole time. 

Perfect, Leo thinks. Everyone together, the absolute ideal way to burn off the wildfire forming under his skin. Get two birds with one stone in making sure they’re all okay just the same way they’ll be nervously poking at him— turnabout is fair play and whatever, but he’s just as worried back. Everyone’s been… odd, since the Krang. He just wants it to feel right again for a few seconds.

“You too, Donnie. Get your gear, let's make this a full on Leo power hour special. My portalling is even better now; while I’ve been sitting around watching Jupiter Jim reruns I got some crazy ideas. I'll have you know it’s ripe with cosmic…. Idea making. Juice.” 

“Are we just making sounds? Is that what this is? These are just sounds you’re making.” 

“Oh come on, as if I can’t take both of you with one arm behind my back.” 

Don rolls his eyes, making a show of crossing his arms. It’s nice, actually. They’d all been too raw with nerves to be snarky or throw any barbs around. Sass from Donald is basically a gleaming thumbs up for ‘things are actually okay’, so maybe everyone will get the hint too. “Maybe I should check if you have a fever, you’re acting…. Oh that’s right, entirely delusional is a personality trait of yours.” 

“Hoo hoo! Fighting words, I see how it is, ‘Tello. Let’s make it a full bet then, three on one. Where is Micheal anyway—” 

He pauses— Mikey stares at him from the railing, kicking his feet happily from the ledge. Right, because he’d been there the whole time. Duh. No one else seems to blink either— maybe Mikey had done some practising while he was out of it. Really honing in on that mystic warrior side, kudos to him, really. 

“Hey, you wanna help me prove a point to these bozos?” 

He grins, the same way he always does. “Can I be on your team?”

Leo makes a show of rolling his eyes with a sigh. “Man, harshing my whole solo hero against all odds shtick there Michael, but yeah I guess.” As if he’d ever really been able to say no to those big green eyes. 

Leo shakes his head. Blue. Mikey’s eyes are blue. Of course they are— they’re gleaming and bright in the photograph he carries right over his heart, he’s looked at them nearly every day for his whole life. Silly. 

Maybe training today is not up there with one of his better ideas actually, but he’d rather volunteer to do Dad’s laundry than admit that now. 

“You sure you’re up for it?” Mikey asks, and Leo does not jump— he does not— but does feel his heart rocket directly into his teeth as his brother appears suddenly beside him. 

Leo clicks his tongue, playing his sudden jumpiness off and waving his hand dismissively. “Up for what? A nice easy warm up where we absolutely show these clowns up? Sure, afterwards we can get ice cream from that place you like, easy peasy.” 

“Ice cream?” Don cuts in with a snort. “You want to deal with that inevitable explosion, be my guest. More of a punishment than a reward, though, I’d say.” 

“Yeah, Leo,” Raph tilts his head, losing some of his easy playfulness. “Kind of cruel to throw that in his face.” 

“Huh?” He whirls towards them both. “Cruel? Me? What’s wrong with ice cream?” 

Mikey huffs. “You know I can’t have dairy.” 

What? No, Leo definitely wouldn’t have missed that big of a development, no matter how whacked out he’d been— Mike’s favorite place in the world outside of the pizza parlors was the ice cream shop by April’s that sold absolutely unhinged combinations of flavors. They went there all the time after practice, it was their together thing. Leo once chugged a whole twenty dollars worth of pickle flavored ice cream milkshake just to make Mikey laugh and— hadn’t he? Or….

Leo frowns to himself. “Right.” He shakes his head again, squinting at Mikey. “Doi, I was saying… Mikey’s shop, you know. The candy place you like. Jeeze. Can’t talk today.”

Mikey brightens up instantly, “Ooh, can we get the big jawbreaker this time?” 

“Course,” Leo nods, trying not to frown. “I’ll buy you the biggest one if you want.” 

He has the strangest feeling about this, like deja vu. Two of him walking in the same fun house mirror paths at once. Mikey skips ahead towards the training room and something— there’s something off— 

“You sure you’re up for it?” Raph interrupts, placing a hand on his shoulder as he approaches. The Raph Chasm is back, great. “You look a little pale, bro.” 

Don leans in also, tapping even more intensely on his wrist tablet. “Seems fine. Temperature is normal, no signs of reopened injury. Heart rate is a little elevated—” 

“Dude,” Leo gapes at him. “Did you— did you chip me again?”

___

His dreams get weirder as the days go on. He figures it’s something to do with his brain trying to settle in, like it’s run out of plausible events and has to start throwing weirder and weirder potentials in the mix just to be sure.

He’s in the prison dimension now when it starts. He’s there, and he’s holding onto his photo, and the Krang Leader is approaching with shockwave levels of thunderous rage. It always goes the same: 

Leo is cornered, he’s alone. He’s waiting for the next hit, the next punch. He can’t remember if this is real, he can’t remember if he leaves. He knows he’s alone, he thinks it might be forever. Then, the Krang vanishes— he looks around, and he’s on a rock in the dark, an unthinkable distance from home. 

No Krang, no family. Miles and miles of scrapyard wasteland space, and nothing but himself. It’s somehow worse, this way. 

Then, sometimes it shifts. His brothers are all there, god— his brothers are all here. Sometimes it’s Dad, and he’s trying to take all the hits himself. Once, Casey. It’s terrifying to be alone but he always hates those ones, the ones where he somehow drags everyone else down here with him. 

The worst one is when it’s Mikey. He must have taken the hit from the Krang himself, he’s banged up and barely moving— smiling at him behind a swollen eye. 

“It’s okay,” He says in this one, it’s the only one where anyone talks. “It’s going to be okay, Leo.” 

___

Leo’s maybe not as alright as he would like to believe. It’s hard to think of the shape of whatever it is, let alone admit directly; he’s forgetting things, is the sum of it. He forgot where Donny’s new second lab was the other day, unthinkingly walking directly in with a question he’d instantly forgotten and nearly set off the project Don was working on. He forgot that Raph has a new motorcycle, and that he drives it around most nights after dinner and that he doesn’t spend a lot of time at home. He forgot that really, he’s the only one that watches Jupiter Jim, and wrestling, and they haven’t gone topside together in ages.

It also just keeps happening. 

“Are you coming over?” He says, breathlessly into his cell propped up with his shoulder. The stack of pizza boxes he's carrying sway dangerously as he leaps down another sewer grate. 

“For what purpose?” Cassandra’s voice rings back. 

Leo shoves the latch for the lair with his foot. “You know, the big Re-re launch of the Luo Jitsu: Stars in Five Separate Dimensions, the game the movie the game the sequel. Duh.” 

“Do not ‘duh’ at me when you are speaking entire nonsense.” 

Leo laughs, rolling his eyes. Cassandra’s brand of humor has taken on a new thread with her division from the Foot. She’s apparently going to mechanic classes now, and sass lessons if these conversations have anything to say for it. “Nonsense, she says. Fifth biggest Lou Jistsu fan I know, and she’s pretending not to know about the largest night of the past two years. Sure.” 

The pause throws him off. He can hear her brain whirling across the line. “Are you referring to the biggest gaming night of the year when the new hockey immersive VR game becomes legal to play in four states? That’s next month.” 

“What— No,” he pulls his phone away from his face in disgust. Yes, it’s Cassandra’s icon, and her voice but honestly, this could be a bodysnatchers moment. He’s had weirder weekends.

“Then no, I do not know what you speak of. Should you like me to come over and resoundingly beat you into a pulp over video games, I accept.” 

“I—” Leo’s brain… skips. Resetting. Another thought lines up neatly in the space between. “Right. Yeah, I — man I don’t know what I’m talking about. Just come over and play Mario Kart or something fun. I have pizza.” 

“I don’t mean to alarm you, but you usually have pizza,” She says, because snark lessons are working over time apparently, and hangs up. 

He’s positive for a long moment that he’s dreaming— that’s what gets him. The line between the skipping do-over dreams and these blips of forgetting are getting more and more unclear. He’s in space and he’s alone, and then he’s awake and Donnie’s new invention is in the living room, and he remembers that they don’t use it for a whole lot these days anyways. He’s with the Krang and he hurts and then he’s awake and his brothers aren’t around and it hurts anyways. He doesn't remember home being so cold, but it is and it's real and maybe Leo's just losing his mind.

It’s just that he’s been misremembering a lot of things, small sections of his brain just smoothed over somehow, missing all of the regular information. He wants to tell Donnie, he should tell Don, it just— it seems like a much larger deal than he knows his genius twin could possibly actually deal with. He might be an honorary MENSA member, but he’s not a brain surgeon at the end of the day; it’s easier to go along with things when he can, until he can’t. 

It’s not even clear why he doesn’t remember, he didn’t get that bad of a concussion during the Krang events— most of the punching had been to his sides and chest actually. He’d been totally fine the first few weeks. It’s like a slow settling poison, whatever this is. He’s partially convinced himself it’s just a lack of sleep, or that he’s missing some sort of key vitamin; he really needs to start eating genuine meals instead of boxed things, honestly. He can’t tell Donnie, because if it is his brain he knows Donnie can’t fix it. He won’t do that to him until he has to. It’s his problem, anyways— it never seems to be about anything major at least. He’d caught himself nearly calling April over to the lair, as if she’d ever been over to their new place after the old one was destroyed. He remembers there wasn’t an old lair, April just hasn’t ever come over. He sets up too many chairs for game nights and no one shows up, because some part of him forgot that they hadn’t hosted a family night since he was six. 

Through it all, there’s a constant ever-lying thrum he can’t name.

“Hey, uh, Dad?” Leo calls, stepping into the living room. He’s shuffled the pizzas off into the kitchen, and remembered that it’ll really just be him and Cassandra probably. Again, evidently. Don is doing something in the lab, his old one downstairs, and made it clear after Leo’s last interruption he had to be invited first— a rule they’d never had before. Leo had always been able to tromp through his twins space as easy as breathing. Raph is out, as he is most nights. The lair is quieter, the thrumming so loud he can hardly think. 

“Hm, Blue? What is it— oh, did you want the TV for something?” 

Leo shakes his head, hovering awkwardly beside the couch and tapping his foot with anxious energy he doesn’t even understand why he feels. This is a bad idea, he thinks. The thrumming is prickling at him like knives pressed outwards, though, and if he doesn’t tell someone he thinks he might snap entirely down the center of himself anyways. It’s still a bad idea, it’s the only idea he has. 

“Can I talk to you, about ah— something?” 

He winces at his own words, and watches Splinter shift, expression dropping serious and worried all at once. He turns the TV off and pats the space beside him on the couch. “What is it, my son.” 

Shell, he hates this. Either Dad will think he’s insane or immediately tell Don anyways and none of it will matter. He bites his lip. “I just— I’m worried about Raph,” he ends up saying. 

Dad blinks, his face twitches into something more thoughtful. “I do not know what he does being out so late every night, but I’m sure he is safe.” 

Leo nods, pulling at loose thread on the blanket throw. “Course, yeah. I mean, that guy is the biggest worrywart I know, it’s just— do you, uh. Do you remember if he always… went out so late?” Leo doesn’t. Leo has been told it’s what Raph does and stared at as though he was the one out of touch until he found himself nervously playing along, but he doesn’t remember knowing any version of Raph that would leave so often. Any Raph that acted like couldn’t stand one more second of being around his family. 

Understanding flickers across Splinter’s face, his ears drop. For a moment, Leo’s overeager heart soars. 

“Ah, I see,” Splinter says, patting his hand. “You miss your big brother, is that it?” 

“I— well, yeah, sure, but—” Splinter clicks his tongue at him affectionately. 

“It is okay to miss Red, I miss him too. And Purple, when he’s locked away in his room. And you, when you’re too focused on your training.” 

He knows, he knows, it’s just that it doesn’t change even when they’re here in front of him. It’s like they don’t fit now, and he doesn’t understand why. 

“Blue, families can change and grow with time, sometimes the changing leads them to… wild new things like motorcycles and teenage rebellion,” Splinter continues, and Leo hears it, the softness he uses when he’s imparting parenting wisdom, and the brakes can’t be stopped so— “Red still loves you, he’s still your family.” He catches something in Leo’s face despite his own attempts to school it, and his dark eyes flicker for a moment. “Is this…about the Krang?” 

Crud. Leo twists his face up to stop from doing something stupid like sniffling. “No. That was so long ago now, pshaw. Anyways, I know, obviously, I’m Raph’s favorite. Nice to hear anyways, though.” 

Splinter chuckles, patting his hand again. “You know that he loves all of you the same. And so do I, Blue.” 

“I don’t— yeah, I know—” There’s no point, he can’t do it. Leo sighs. “I just— can you talk to him? About not staying out so much? We used to, yanno, have movie nights and stuff is all.” 

Splinter hums, tapping his chin. “Schedule your movie nights at April’s so I get the big TV and you have a deal.” 

Leo forces a laugh. Do they even hang out with April like that anymore? Imagining a world where they don’t is awful, inherently cold and empty in a way he immediately doesn’t care to allow. “Sure.” 

There’s a pause, the thrumming is still there— the moment’s passed though, he’d only make Splinter worry more. 

“You know, this place used to be filled with a lot more… laughter,” Splinter says, after a moment. “I will talk to your brother.” 

“Okay,” Leo says in a breath. There’s something there, almost. If Raph can spend more time at home, maybe they can drag Don out, too. Maybe it’ll feel right, and he can let it go and stop checking the front door, and maybe his brain will start working so he doesn’t have to put all that weight on his twin brother anyways.

The almost’s never seem to make it anymore, though.

___

It starts to really hit him a few days later. 

“--earned it from you, big bro.” 

‘You can’t do this’ He threw himself forward but there was that flicker again, the sideways pull and he was alone on the rock where the Krang threw him except it was just him and— 

‘I have to, I’m sorry. You keep leaving,,’ and it sounded like a plea, like a cry for help disguised as a big brave step forward, and everything in him coalesced forwards like he’d only ever known how to do just that. Like he’d only always known how to bend and soften at that voice, like it broke every part of himself just to hear it wavering like this. 

He wakes up from a dream and he can’t remember it; there are tears pouring from his eyes and this big hiccuping sob lodged somewhere behind it, and he can feel it— the heart shaped puzzle piece that’s been scoured right out of his chest, an essential part, something he can’t be without, but he can’t even remember what it looked like. 

You don’t, he thinks. You don’t have to. Just let it be me, I chose it already anyways. You can’t take that away.

‘I can!’ it echoes off the nothing around them, off the something because they’re in the air again, and everyone else was pushed off but the two of them, and he’s holding the totem to lock the door and he’s listening to the broken comms on the other side. ‘Look at me, it’s okay. I’m the only one who can. And— and it’s okay. Because you’ll all just forget, so it’ll be okay. You won’t miss me—’

Of course I will. He’s angry, he’s furious and desperate, he’s not sure anything he says is reaching anything at all but he’s more certain of anything that it has to. I’ll miss you more than anything. 

‘I’ve already changed it, you can’t stop it. I just— I wanted to say—’ 

There should be alarms, he thinks distantly, panic and dread and grief white hot behind his teeth. Blaring red alert rolling alarms, because the world had ended and none of them were moving fast enough, and he was just going to forget again when he— 

“Oh god,” Leo gasps, throwing himself off his bed— catching his feet messily in the absolute tangle of sheets and crashing to the ground instead. His hands are trembling, there’s a pained animalistic noise tearing itself somewhere in his ribs because the thrumming has become a black hole in his gut. He’s nauseous in the same way he feels entirely gutted, devastated all the way through to his center and he needs to get to the bathroom, to Donnie, to anyone— 

He feels like the floor has just vacuumed itself through an airlock and there isn’t enough air anywhere at all in the world, and he can’t remember why. 

“--eo, what are you…? I swear to— Leo!” 

He has his hands pressed tight against his neck, he can feel his own heartbeat absolutely rabbitting underneath but it’s real. He can feel it and it’s real. He’s here, at least— if that matters. He can’t remember if it matters. The pain hasn’t gone anywhere even with Donnie in the room, like it usually does. Because there’s nowhere else for it to go, he thinks nonsensically. It’s gone, the place it goes is gone. 

“Dee,” he gasps out, pleading for…for nothing, really. For anything. 

“I got you, Nardo,” Donnie’s voice is closer, his hands are hovering nervously around the heaving galloping black hole that is all of Leo before settling on his shoulders. “Up we go, okay? Just, breathe. In and out, follow me.”  He pulls up a diagram, an unfolding square that refolds, breathing exaggeratedly along with it. Leo tries to wrangle himself into himself, feel around the pit of nothing in his chest, breathe long enough to chase away the gray in his vision at least. It feels pointless, breathing through a straw at the end of the world— he can’t possibly keep his heart beating one more second, but it does, and then it does again. 

“That’s it,” Donnie says, his hand rubbing circles against Leo’s neck. “Better, okay. Keep doing that.” He sounds anxious, tense in the ice cold–locked up way he gets. Leo’s chest aches. “You’re not running a fever, no proximity alarms were tripped so— bad dream?”

The cataclysm in his heart is stilling, like it’s being put to sleep more and more with every word. Every realignment of real and not real— part of him is terrified by this, like it wants to scramble it back. Leo shakes his head, still wheezing. Nods after a moment. Pauses, and embarrassingly bursts into tears again in spite of himself. 

“Woah! Woah, okay, okay. Got it, no questions. You’re fine, you don’t have to tell me.” 

He holds his hand out— it’s something they used to do, when they were little. Don had learned something about otters holding hands when they slept so they wouldn’t drift off, and Leo had gotten it in his head that since they were in a sewer, it was possible they’d float away at night too. He’d held Don’s hand every night until they all split off into their own separate rooms when they got older, palm to palm, holding onto Don’s wrist. Even after they had their own beds, Don would sneak in if he felt like Leo wasn’t sleeping good; they haven’t needed to in years. 

Leo latches himself onto his brother's hand like a lifeline. This is real too, he tells himself. It makes the horrified part of him wail with something like grief anyways.

“Okay, alright Leon. I’m not going anywhere, okay? Breathe.” 

Leo tries to hold each breath like water in his hands, imagine himself filling up that space inside him. The idea is so instantly horrendous, a murky swirling bog where something was— he doesn’t know why— it chokes him into another sobbing fit for a moment. “Sorry, jeez— jeeze. I’m sorry, ugh.” 

He can practically hear Don’s eye roll. “Can we get up off the floor now?” 

Leo nods, shakily. He grips Don’s wrist even harder, but lets himself be dragged back into bed. 

“Want some water?” Don asks; Leo stares down at their joined hands and feels a spike of panic in him. It must trip something on Don’s weird chip, he glances down at the screen. “Ohhkay. Nope, nixing that plan, sure. We can just dehydrate.” 

“Sorry,” Leo wheezes again. He knows Don is trying so hard right now, too, or he would have made some annoyed comment about hating unnecessary apologies. He stays silent, squeezing back just as hard. 

“Would you like to tell me what happened?” He asks, after a moment. 

Leo winces. 

“Or, I could invent some never before seen and heard of technology and just dive right into that awful little brain of yours and figure it out anyways, if you want.” 

Leo snorts. “You have that already. ‘S called being stuck with me.” 

“Hm. True. Doesn’t give me all the answers, though.” 

He wishes it would. Don’s brain could probably work out exactly what to do  in five seconds if he had the opportunity to mess around in Leo’s fuzzed out brain. Maybe that was the problem. Leo lets out a long breath, ducking his head to nudge against Don’s shoulder. 

“I think there’s something wrong with me,” he admits, to the space between them where their hands sit. 

“I will refrain from my default response of ‘beyond the usual’ or any other witty remark this one time, on the grounds that you’re kind of a mess right now. Know that I did think it for the record, though.” 

“Noted,” Leo smiles, waterlogged and wavering. 

Donnie shifts, pulling his free arm up around Leo’s shoulders. They fall silent for a second, just the wet and choked off sounds of Leo wrangling his own heart rate surrounding them. Don pulls him closer, a half hug. “You know. Whatever it is, I’ll fix it.” 

He squeezes his eyes shut, the ghost of that all consuming grief still wrapping itself around his throat. Donnie’s fixed everything since he was able to hold a screwdriver, his faith in his brother is as unshakeable as his understanding of cool action films, as his belief in his family. He knows his brother would try to fix it, and would get closer than anyone else possibly could. Maybe he’s not sure there is anything to fix.

“What if you can’t?” It comes out small. 

Donnie’s arm squeezes tighter, steel in his frame. “I will.” 

It’s nice, he thinks. To pretend like Don’s got all the answers. “I’m sorry I went through the wormhole,” He says instead. Sorry I almost left you, he says with the way he leans farther into Don’s side. 

Don lets out a sharp breath. “No, you’re not.”  He isn't wrong, Dee knows him best.

“I’m sorry that I’m not sorry, anyways.”

He can feel Don’s heart beating against his fingertips, can feel the sharp and bending curve of him at his side. Palm to palm so they don’t float apart— maybe Don’s grip is also tighter than usual. He can manage to feel bad about that, maybe, in spite of himself. 

“I’m used to it,” Don says, after another long moment. Subdued. As long as you come back. As long as you let me bring you back, he says with the squeeze of his hand, the way he won’t look at Leo at all. 

___

“Purple told me about your dream last night,” Dad says, looking worn and serious in a way that makes him look far older than Leo is comfortable with noticing. “Do you want to explain, Leonardo?”

They’re sitting around the kitchen table, and his head is in his hands staring down at the whorls in the wood. There’s a carving, he knows, just to his elbow that he and Raph had put there when they were kids, it’s just that for a moment he could have sworn that it wasn’t from Raph at all. He’d been lost staring at the cupboard for a moment with a dark, inkblot feeling around his throat until Dad had startled him out of it, looking at their old favorite mugs. He doesn’t remember his being any of these. He’s certain, for a moment, that his had been a hand painted one, lopsided by the handle. He can’t find it anywhere, though. 

He’d asked Dad when they’d thrown it out, and gotten a blank stare in return. 

‘The… the splotchy one,’ he’d said, panic lacing in behind his eyeballs with its intensity. ‘You know. I always drink tea from it with you.’ 

Splinter shakes his head slowly. ‘I am… sorry my son.’ 

A hysterical laugh frayed at his throat, he’d lost the fight in shoving it back down. ‘There’s a smiley face on the side by my thumb, you know. Don said it was ugly and we got into a big fight when we were like ten. I drink out of that mug every day, because it—’ He couldn’t remember where that sentence was going suddenly, like the words scooped themselves directly from his lungs. Evaporated. ‘I… I know it is. Where did you put it? Did— if Raph broke it, that’s okay, I can fix it.’ 

‘You’ve only ever used this mug, Blue,’ Dad had said, holding an Eeyore mug. Leo feels his mind snap in three places, reconnect. It’s slower this time, more painful. Maybe that’s him, breaking. 

‘Right,’ Leo laughed, squeaky and high. ‘Sorry.’ 

“They’re just dreams.” He says, like it burns on the way out. “I’m just not sleeping well.” 

“He’s been waking up every few hours,” Don throws in, because of course he’s been tracking that, too.

“Hey—” he tries, and catches Raph’s serious, unhappy face as he lifts his head. The way he looks frailer around the edges, exhausted the same way Leo is. Oh.

Raph sighs. “He’s jumpy. Confused. I thought…” He makes eye contact with Leo and looks away. “I thought maybe the Krang incident rattled him, was all. But it’s been months,” 

“My son,” Dad adds, before Leo can process any of that. “Why did you not tell me?” 

Shell, he thinks. Shit, for emphasis. “It’s just bad dreams,” he shrugs. “What’s there to tell?” 

Don snorts, crossing his arms. “Just bad dreams he says, as though regular disruption to your REM cycle bears no long term effects like, say, spacing out. Forgetting where my lab is. Dialing the wrong number when trying to reach me, your twin brother who literally programmed your phone.” Oh, right, yeah. He had done that. 

Burying his face in his arms seems like the best approach to all of this. The gnawing thrum is back, wilder like a firestorm in the back of his mind— it seems to get louder when he’s aware of it, he’s not sure what that means. 

“Leo,” Raph’s voice is tired, too. Why is everyone so tired? “You can talk to us, you know that right? We just want to make sure you’re okay.” 

“Stop being so,” Leo struggles to find a word in between burying his forehead father into his arms. “Reasonable. Ugh.” 

Splinter pats at his arm, comfortingly. He debates the merits of coming clean, then of feigning a sudden illness, or playing up some hidden head injury that miraculously resolves itself before Don can pull out any of his scarier tech. A wave of exhaustion pulls at him. “I’ll fix it,” Donnie had said. Maybe it’s embarrassing to want to believe anyone can fix this at all, but it’s his family, and this is the most he’s seen them in months and despite what everyone tells him, he doesn’t remember a time things were like this at all. He doesn’t remember a version of himself that would have been content to let it happen. 

There’s something there. An invisible wall he’s walking into while everyone else skirts around it. If only he didn’t keep forgetting what he was dreaming about— he lets out a long, long breath, dropping his head even lower until his brow presses into the wood directly. 

“I’m. Forgetting things.” He mumbles to it, shoulders high around his head. The silence that follows is long enough he almost thinks they didn’t hear him at all. 

Don clears his throat first. “Forgetting… what.” He sounds ominous, tight laced. Exactly what Leo was afraid of. He scrunches up his beak in response. 

“Everything. You, Raph— I don’t remember why April hasn’t visited. Or, or where your lab is. Cassandra doesn’t care about Lou Jitsu games, no one watches Jupiter Jim. It’s all— I don’t know.” 

Dad takes in a breath, Leo can hear him consciously making sure to keep it measured and slow.  “Is this because of the Krang?” 

Leo shakes his head, digging further into the grooves of the tabletop. “No, I — I don’t know. Maybe? Everything was fine, and then. It wasn’t. It’s like I’m—” Missing something. It’s like there’s a big glaring neon sign directly in front of him that he can’t see, some obvious clue like a protagonist in a horror film that the audience is throwing popcorn at. 

“Do you…. Do you ever imagine there’s like. A memory that you had, but something happened, and then you lost it. And you don’t remember enough about it to know what it was, but it’s like part of you knows that it's gone anyways?” He feels insane, he can’t look up at his brothers, he can only close his eyes and wish himself somewhere else where the black hole in him is quiet. “Sorry, that’s— I mean, maybe I am just tired. Just feels… different, lately. I keep looking at the front door like someone’s gunna walk in any second, isn’t that weird?” 

No one speaks, Leo sinks lower. 

What if whatever is wrong with him is contagious? What if saying it out loud is the thing that breaks this wide open on all of them. What if nothing happens at all, and it’s just Leo and his brain and some unknowable horrid thing wrong with him that makes him feel like half of himself is missing somewhere else. 

What if he’s right?

“You remember the other day, Raph? You said something about me reading comics, staying home from April’s and reading comics.”

“...Yeah.”

Leo digs his fingers into the back of his head. “I walked into Donnie’s lab because I couldn’t remember where the comics were, and it’s like I just, went through the door. Then— I mean, none of us own comics. Why did you say that?”

Raph starts, stops. “I… don’t remember.”

Don breathes, long and shaky. “I put a chip on you and Raph and Dad because I thought—” His voice is flat, quiet, and breaks neatly down the middle. Leo freezes, tenses on the spot. “I had this feeling. Like there was a problem I’d missed, like I hadn’t perfected something important. I drew all these schematics and they didn’t make sense— and I knew, they were for something specific, but I had no idea why or what. I have inventions I don’t remember making, too— I thought someone else left their things in my room but they all have my logo on them.”

“I asked April for tea,” Dad adds in, slow and confused. “Orange pekoe. I have never drank orange pekoe.” 

Don continues. “You told me you hate pro skateboarding the other day and I nearly vaporized you on the spot because I thought you were a clone. And then it was like, my brain just. Caught up. Remembered all these things that didn’t fit anymore.” 

Leo stares at the table, lifts his head up so sharply his vision swims, and stares at his brother. “Yeah. Yeah. Like, like you’re reading a new script.” 

Holy shit, he thinks. They all nod, slowly. 

“I thought it was me,” Leo says. 

Don shakes his head. “I’ve been doing tests. Measurements and scans— I can’t get a read on it so I haven’t brought it up yet.” He shrugs. “It’s… it’s weird, Leon. I don’t make measurement errors.” 

“But you have been,” Leo says, slowly. 

Don breathes out, heavily. 

“Your math,” Raph says, simply. Leo’s gaze shoots towards him; his big brother looks haggard, dark circles around his eyes that Leo hadn’t noticed before. “Donnie, your math. Why’s it always wrong?” He’s gripping the table top awfully tightly, Leo notices. White knuckled bone pressing upwards into the harsh kitchen lighting, like it’s the only thing keeping him upright. His big brother has always been unmovable, no matter what was thrown at them. He was okay, and would figure it out, and would help them brute force things back where they should be if they had to. He looks... small, suddenly. Just a kid.

“Woah, Raph, maybe you should take it easy for a second—” Leo starts. 

“Four,” Don cuts him off. He looks vaguely haunted as well now, eyes dark. “I keep dividing by four.” 

___

“I kept driving around at night to find someone, I was so sure they were in danger. Raph thought he was losing it,” Raph says, rubbing a hand across his eyes. 

“Me too,” Leo admits. “Thought Donnie was going to have to lobotomize me.” 

“Easy to do when you already are missing a brain,” Donnie mutters. They’ve moved down to the living room — invited Casey and Cassandra and April over, too. Draxum, despite Leo’s better judgment, is lurking somewhere in the kitchen area as well. Leo keeps holding Don’s hand, seemingly unable to stop now that the words are out there, and Don hasn’t asked him to let go yet either. 

Raph glances between them both, tense. “Stupid of me to not tell either of you. Should have known,” he offers with a weak smile. “We’re always in this together.” 

Leo shrugs, “Sounds like we all did the same thing. In my defense, I thought I was concussed.” 

“So,” April joins in, hesitantly. “You’ve all been… remembering things wrong, too? Because— I mean, you said that you were going to get Casey to guide me down here like I didn’t know the way, and then. I mean it was weird…” 

“Oh thank god,” Leo sags in relief. “You not having been here before was bothering me so much.” 

“And your dreams, Blue,” Dad cuts in, tucked up in his arm chair with a cup of steaming tea he hasn’t touched. He looks guilt ridden too, in a way Leo hates. “They’re not just about what happened?” 

“No, well. They are but. They… change? It’s like a hundred different versions of the same thing. Sometimes April’s there, or Casey, or no one is.” He shudders, a flash of some dream he had crossing his mind vaguely. “I can’t remember most of them anymore now, but it. I don’t know. I feel like. Something important happened, is that insane?” 

Casey looks at him searchingly, he always seems so heartbroken by all of their struggles in a way that makes Leo want to wrap him in bubble wrap until he’s 30. “Not more insane than anything else,” Casey says somberly. 

“Do we have, like, memory problems? In the future?”

Casey shakes his head. “Not that I know of. You all had stories about how things were that were pretty detailed. We had to memorize new map locations that came through pretty quickly, too.”

Everyone falls silent for a moment. April clears her throat. 

“And… and you think this is all happening, because…. Someone went missing.” 

Leo turns to look at Don— his brows are pulled so far down they’re basically a flat line, pinched in the middle as he works frantically on his laptop. It all looks like graphs and numbers to Leo. 

“I keep dividing by the wrong number.” He states, quietly. “There’s three of us, and yet I’m accounting for a fourth. It only happens when I’m not thinking about it, like—”

“Muscle memory,” Raph finishes. 

Leo looks out at everyone— there’s a reserved energy, like a thick fog of some kind of grief pulled down across them all. Maybe he’d expected someone to react like it was silly, make some kind of joke of things, maybe it would have helped make it feel less awful for it to be a big mass hallucination on their part. Leaky sewer pipe, or something. The severity is both aggravating and reassuring all in one. 

“I kept setting the table for five of us for dinner,” Leo says with a helpless shrug. 

Raph nods. “Our training sessions— we keep leaving our backs open, and I couldn’t figure out why. Like someone’s supposed to be there.” 

To imagine it is kind of devastating in pieces and wholes, Leo thinks. Someone so intrinsically a part of them, someone they worked around unthinkingly, just vanishing like that. Without even the courtesy of letting them mourn. Everyone stays silent for another long moment, that veil of grief is heavier— they don’t even know this person, someone that left a crater so large whatever bullshit vaporized their memory from all of their minds couldn’t even be lifted fully. Like the planet lost its axis without them, like they were constantly bumping into an outline of a person without even realizing. 

“How does that happen?” Leo’s own voice sneaks up on him, he hadn’t meant to speak. Or maybe he had. He’s angry, suddenly, like shakingly, virulently angry— big red neon light style. “No, seriously. How— they just get erased from our lives like that? Without anyone even seeing it?” How did we not notice, he thinks, desperately. “It was one of us, right?” Leo turns to Don, to Raph, to Dad. “Like, like a sibling? And we just… what, forgot them? How does that happen?” 

“Leo…” Raph tries, holding a hand out. There’s an anvil in Leo’s heart, it’s sinking so far down with every step further into this reality he’s forced to reconcile with. 

“No! I— Come on, we don’t even remember them. There’s nothing at all left behind, and yet, because whoever this was mattered so much we still felt it— and that just happens? How does that happen?” 

It shouldn’t, he thinks of forgetting any one of his family and feels like his atoms are misaligned. The idea that any one of them could just be stitched over, skipped like a video feed; his stomach churns dangerously.

A chair drags noisy across the tile, and everyone's attention snaps up. “There are legends,” Draxum starts. “Mystic connections to time and space itself.” He meets Leo’s eye levelly— there’s a catch in them, too, Leo realizes. He doesn’t know why Draxum is included in these events, he made them, sure but he’d also thrown Leo off a rooftop. He’d been antagonizing them for months, and he’d gotten defeated by the Shredder, and they’d all moved on. There’s a gap in his mind, between that Draxum and this one; no explanation for his place here today except for that he is. Because whoever this was that they lost, he mattered to Draxum too, didn’t he?

“If said person possessed enough power, they could feasibly stretch across both the folding dimensions, hypothetically.” 

Don gasps, an aborted noise. “Like… a hole in time.” 

Casey freezes, sitting up taller. 

Leo thinks about his dreams, about being trapped in the nothing and not believing he ever left. Not remembering what got him out at all. A voice telling him that everything would be okay.

“It would take a lot of power,” Draxum continues. “Possibly too much. To change one thread in the thousands like that, I imagine such a feat would be felt across the whole tapestry.” 

“Maybe it already has,” Leo says, detached. Thousands of possible realities, changing and pulling in a million different ways— Leo and the Krang standing on an asteroid, a hundred different outcomes flashing back and forth on a loop, over and over. Looking at his own front door and waiting for someone to come home, even with everyone he loves sitting directly in front of him.

The last dreams, the ones he doesn’t remember— waking up feeling like someone died in front of him. 

He stands up, sudden and sharp— wrenching his hand from Don’s without thinking. “How do we stop it. How do— how do we change it back.” 

Draxum meets his intensity with a cool stare, holding a teacup in his hands carefully. “There may not be. I’ve never heard of such a way.” 

Bullshit, Leo thinks— “If they brought Casey here, they did it again. To get me back. That’s two times, that shouldn’t be possible either, from what you’re saying. So— so just do it again.” He clenches his fist so hard it hurts. “No one remembers how I got out. I should have died in there, with the Krang, right? We closed the portal, so—  But I’m back, because whoever this is brought me back. That shouldn’t have been possible. So we punch a hole through time again.” No one moves, Cassandra keeps his stare levelly, gravely.  “If it takes more power, we have the strongest team the world’s ever seen right here, don’t we?”

Draxum arches a brow. “A lot of effort for someone you cannot recall, is it not? It might put you all at risk as well.” 

It doesn’t matter, Leo wants to say. They did it for me first. He doesn’t care if it’s painful or dangerous or anything else. All he knows is that there’s a gaping maw inside him that he can see now reflected in all of his family where this person is supposed to be. Someone who changed their three to four, someone that made them have half-memories about movie nights and laughter in the lair and someone he misses so badly without knowing that his entire soul feels like it’s hollowed out without them. 

“Maybe this person wanted to go,” Draxum, crosses his arms. “You’d give up so much for someone you don’t remember?”

‘I just— I wanted to say—’

“He’s my son,” Splinter speaks up fiercely, protectively. Everyone falls silent. Splinter falls backwards a step, having leapt to his full height out of seemingly instinctive rage. He looks surprised with himself, then— quietly grief stricken, the same time as Leo’s concaving chest collapses like a burnt out star. 

“Muscle memory,” Raph whispers, agonizingly. 

It echoes around the still room. The hallways seem more expansive in the face of it— a ghost exiting the stage with a rush of air, or one finally being noticed. 

He’s lived in these halls for his whole life, packed in with his three most favorite people in the world to get by the way only their family could. There’s a scuff on the stone just at knee height by the entrance from when he tried to land a backflip on skateboard and broke his arm, theres lines reaching up to just barely five feet around the corner from it. Three sets: red, purple, and blue. 

Maybe now, when he looks around, he’s starting to notice all the empty places. Leo feels like his heart is squeezing through his ribcage with how hard it aches.

Leo squares his shoulders, turns towards his family— there are tears in Casey’s eyes, Donnie has stopped typing frantically and seems to be staring at nothing on the floor. The realization is rocking through all of them in differing stages of devastation. 

“My brother,” He wavers, choking back a well of emotion. “My brother is out there. We’re getting him home.” 

___

“Your dreams are crucial for this to work,” Draxum says. “We’re going to use them as a door.” 

Leo takes the tea Dad makes for him and wills his hands not to shake. 

“Everyone else will focus on Leonardo, follow that thought to where he leads you.”

His last dream is only remnants in his mind, but he’s not sure he could go through it again anyways. Good thing they’re changing it this time then, he supposes. Raph sits cross legged in front of him, closing his eyes with a deep breath. Leo’s hit with the horrible thought of losing any of them the same way, waking up and forgetting they’d ever been here to begin with. His palms itch. 

“Hope we have enough juice in us to pull him back,” Leo jokes, weakly. 

Casey sits beside him, spine straight. He leans a little towards Leo, bumping their shoulders. “I… I don’t remember him, but he must have been there. There’s…. There’s holes if I think too hard. If he was anything like the rest of you, he’ll be fighting just as hard to get back.”

The idea of some vague outline of his brother, an amalgamation of the two beside him, running himself to pieces lost in the dark is hard to swallow also. Raph clears his throat. “Maybe he just needs a bit of a boost.” 

April nods, plopping beside Raph fixedly. “And that’s what we’re going to do.” 

Leo looks at Dad, who’s been quiet ever since the revelation hit them all. Dad shifts, placing a paw on Leo’s shoulder— he looks tired, pinched, like someone closed their eyes and drew him with wobbling outlines. Leo knows how he feels, it aches all the same. He puts his hand on top of Dad’s. 

“Yeah, we got this.” 

Leo drinks the tea and breathes out. It hits him fast — at first, he’s floating in the dark; the difference hits him funny, he doesn’t exactly remember any of the dreams but he knows they start before the fight ends. He knows they never begin with him being by himself. 

It reminds him of a time when they were younger, when Dad had to go scavenge for food and scraps alone and leave them behind with stern orders to stay put. They never really did, of course. 

There was a day where it had been storming up top, he remembers the way the pipes groaned and rushed with the rain like growling monsters in the stone walls, warped by all the empty tunnels and spaces in the shadows. Dad had left to grab food for the next few days, in case any of the pipes did burst as the storm went on or a tunnel threatened to collapse. He remembers that Dad hadn’t wanted to leave them at all, he’d been nervous and anxious and promised to be back in an hour at most. They’d all felt it, staying bundled up for the most part instead of ambling off their creaking furniture or stealing the two markers that were half dried up with use. 

Don had been hungry, he’d had a mild fever, Leo thinks— Don had caught every bug that meandered through the grates in those days, before he figured out which vitamins they were missing and how much sunlight they needed. He remembers the way Don shivered, tucked in at his side. Leo had decided he would be the one to make Donnie soup, despite Raph’s protests. He’d squirmed his way out of the blankets, and taken a few steps towards their makeshift kitchen before the thunder rocked miles above and rattled through every part of New York.

He remembers the way that the generator they siphoned had cut out when he made it through the doorway. 

It’s silly now, maybe— his brothers had been a few feet away, he was still in his house. He could hear Raph calling for him, the sound of his big brother fighting the blankets and Dee’s dazed mumbles and complaints with it. He knew even then that he wasn’t really in danger. It was just that Donnie had just showed him the otter videos, and the pipes were roaring at him, and he’d never actually been anywhere he felt scared at all before. 

There’d been approximately fifteen seconds before Raph crashed into him, another thirty minutes before Dad burst back into the lair and brought the flashlights out from the side drawer, and lit candles for them. Fifteen seconds for Leo to imagine that he was completely alone. 

A much older Leo, then, riding the adrenaline off saving the day— holding a photograph close to his chest, comms fizzling in his ear— 

He’s on the asteroid, ah. This is familiar. 

He’s always here in his mind— the Krang stalking towards him, the light of the ship's explosion dancing like fireworks in the distance. He holds the photograph in his hand, because he’s alone, he’s so alone, but it was worth it. The Krang approaches, tail flicking as it practically curves over him in rage. He’s okay with all of this, really, if it means— 

“Get away from him!” Raph yells, and suddenly there’s a streak of red crashing into the Krang, knocking it through the rock. A flash of purple, and Don’s battle shell appears beside him.

“Could you imagine something more relaxing next time? Like I dunno, a boiling pit of lava? This isn’t nearly terrifying enough.” Don’s hand hovers over his shoulder, like he’s not sure where to put it for a second. Leo grabs at his wrist, overcome by relief for a moment before the words hit. Right, imagine. Because he got out, he didn’t bring his brothers here, they brought themselves. 

“I’m dreaming,” He reminds himself. 

“You are, which is good. My tech can’t really do anything special when we’re in a mystical mental plane, so. Do your, yanno, ‘thing’.” 

“We got the big guy for you!” April crows, he can see her backflipping off the Krang’s head, Casey swinging in to kick at its knees. 

Right. He was here, and something got him out— when he dreams this, there’s always things changing, always things that happen differently. He’s usually here alone, facing down the inevitable reality that there’s no more doors; it was his plan, to do anything to get rid of the threat, no matter what that meant but living it was different. It didn’t happen like this, he knows, but he made it out anyways.

He can feel his family around him, just like the kitchen and the dark. There’s fifteen seconds before Raph crashes into him. Fifteen seconds of him in the dark and— there was someone else there, wasn’t there? 

Leo hadn’t decided to make Donnie soup alone. He’d gone with someone, because… because his brother knew how to heat the soup up the way Dad did, and he was older so he could open the cans. He’d been holding someone’s hand as the room went dark. 

He remembers distantly in all of his dreams here, there’s always someone he’s arguing with. Someone he’s losing. Whoever his brother is, he’s been here with him all along.

“You know, you’re really not supposed to be able to be here,” A voice speaks up. It’s choked in that desperately sad and relieved way all in one that he knows, he knows because it’s— 

Leo’s eyes snap open. His brother’s are fighting the Krang with April and Casey and Dad and Cassandra, and he’s sitting at the rock with the photograph, except he’s above it. He’s looking at the dark, and there’s someone holding his hand. 

He blinks. Blue eyes meet his, teary and bright as always. “Mikey—” he breathes, instinctive, like the name is pulled from the very core of himself. 

His brother smiles a heartbreakingly grateful smile. “You’re really not supposed to be able to do that, either.” 

Leo whirls towards him, grabbing immediately for his brother as some unnamable panic crests over him. His hands sink right through thin air, but he can see him— god, he can see Mikey. 

There’s a light hovering orange around his brother’s form emitting a low glow, like he’s a stick on star. They put those in their bedroom, he remembers suddenly. They had them on the ceiling because Mikey had been afraid of the dark, Leo had carefully climbed all the way up on top of the rickety bunk bed and glued them all on without asking Dad, just to make sure Mikey wasn’t scared. He could still see the outlines of them years later. 

“How— Mikey, what happened, I— oh my god, I forgot you—” How did he let that happen, how could he? His only baby brother, their Angelo. “I’m so sorry.” 

Mikey shakes his head, he’s still smiling even though there’s a pinch to his face that Leo immediately can’t stand. “You didn’t, I made you forget. It’s okay Leo.” 

“It’s not! I— it was so messed up without you, I— Raph keeps ditching us and Dad’s tired and, and nobody reads comics anymore!”

Mikey laughs, wet and sad, and it’s still the best thing Leo’s ever heard. He can’t believe he went months without remembering it. When they get back, he’s going to put on all of Mikey’s favorite stupid videos and listen to him laugh for hours just to make sure he remembers it exactly right every day for the rest of their lives. 

Leo barrels forward, still trying to grab any part of his brother; he’s like sand, he’s like water, the pieces of him are streaming through Leo’s finger tips. “It’ll be okay now though, we— Raph will stay in if you’re here, and Don’s stuff’s in your room, but we can move it. He’ll make you a bigger room if you want, you know he will—” 

“Leo,” Mikey cuts in, carefully. Hedging. Leo’s heart crashes through into nothing, he swallows roughly. 

“No,” He tries for a laugh, he remembers this now. He knows what Mikey is going to say. “You’re wrong, stop it. You said— you told me that it was the only way, that we’d all forget.” 

Mikey’s shoulders lift and drop, slow and tired. “You did. It’s okay.” 

“It’s as far away from okay as it can possibly be! You said we wouldn’t miss you, but I did, Mike. I did anyways, we all did. We knew— there was this giant hole right in the middle of us. It shouldn’t be possible, you said it yourself— that means something, I know it does. So— stop trying to tell me to leave or, or whatever else you’re thinking. I’m not going anywhere without you, right now.” 

“I missed you,” Mikey’s crying now which activates every ounce of dread left in him. He looks exhausted, pale and drawn out even with the strange glow.  “Leo, I’ve been trying, you have to believe me.”

Leo shakes his head, furious with heartbreak. “Try harder, then!” His fists clench. He’s not having this same conversation again, he’s not waking up one more time feeling like the world just ended in front of him. He’s not doing this without Mikey, it’s not happening. “I’ll just keep coming back, you know I will. You see that down there?” He gestures at their family, fighting the Krang that isn’t even here anymore, just so Leo won’t have to face it by himself. “They’re not giving up on you. I’m not giving up. I won’t ever, Ang. Don’t ask me to.” 

“Leo—” He says with a sigh, like the decisions already been made. 

“Mikey, stop,” He practically growls, panicking; something crashes behind him, down below where the fights going, he doesn’t look. He refuses to take his eyes off Mikey for a second in case he decides to fade away again. There has to be something there. There’s something to this, he knows there is. Since Leo was small, there’s been a constant he’s held close. It’s proven itself over and over again; when Raph fought through the Krang control, when their Dad gave up the world to save them and they saved it too, every time his brothers pulled through the impossible. Together, they’re stronger than anything— he knows this, he knows it. Mikey put a hole in the world to keep Leo safe. The universe rewrote itself because he made it change, and it only took them a month or two to see the threads anyways. The thrum in him is louder again, but it feels tethered somehow here. Like he could wrap himself around the line of it in his chest and pull. 

“We’ll keep remembering, as long as it takes, you know we will. It doesn’t matter how many times we forget, we’ll always remember you I swear—  Michelangelo, you’re my only baby brother, you think something as stupid as the universe can take you from me?” 

The waterlogged smile he gets could power the sun, he’s sure of it. He leans his head forward, where their foreheads would touch if he could. 

“You have to come back. I don’t care what we have to fight, we’re getting our little brother home.” 

“I want to, Leo, I just— I don’t know how. Not without losing you.”

He wants to say he’d do it, he’d jump right into the black hole to switch places but he remembers how this always went. Mikey learned it from him, from Raph, from their Dad, after all. It wouldn’t fix anything to lose himself either— maybe that’s the lesson at the core here. Leo was never alone on the asteroid, because his baby brother was breaking through space to get to him. And Mikey should never be alone here.

“It’s okay, Angelo, I—” He swallows again, Mikey looks so, so tired. He’s been here for months, Leo realizes, watching them all skip over him and time rewrite without him—  He has an idea, maybe it’ll break everything but he would. For Mikey, he would. “When have we ever played by the rules, hey? Mad Dogs make our own path, right?” 

He'd do anything for his little brother, including break the universe back. Without hesitating, watching Mikey's expression shift from sad to confused, and just that touch of hopeful, he grabs that thread in him, the one that’s been bright and loud and constant for months, and he pulls. 

___

There’s a thunderstorm somewhere far enough— Mikey can hear it in the pipes, in the walls. He’d only seen the sky when it was like this once, rolling gray and dark with thick bolts of lightning scattering apart; through the sewer grates it had looked almost like TV static, far away and strange. It’s loud up there and down here, the water rushing past all the chunks of stone that make up their home and away. 

Leo doesn’t like it, Mikey knows. Every time it storms, his eyes get more white than dark. All big and round and alert, and he jumps at everything. He thinks Mikey doesn’t notice. 

Raphie says it's okay to be afraid of things, like going up top because it's dangerous and they can’t run away or hide good enough yet to be safe. Raph’s afraid of the little dolls that they sometimes find washed up at the bottom of tunnels, he says they have empty eyes and it makes him uneasy; Donnie says Raphie watched a movie on TV that he shouldn’t have. Mikey thinks he’s probably afraid of the monsters in the tunnels, even though Donnie says they aren’t real— he’s heard them, though. He’s sure of it. Donnie also says that people think his brothers are the monsters, which is silly. 

Donnie’s afraid of a big word Mikey never remembers— he says the sun will burn out one day like it runs out of juice and everything will freeze like an icicle forever. He says this like its obvious, but he spends a lot of time reading about it anyways like he can make it go forever if he tries. Mikey thinks he could, Dee made their TV work so it’s probably possible he can do anything. 

Mikey’s not sure what Leo’s afraid of. He knows the water is loud and sounds like the monsters are just outside the doors sometimes, and that they had to leave their old house because there was a pipe that was too old in a wall and it made all their food wet. Leo says he’s not afraid of water, though, and he cannonballs in as big and bright as Raphie whenever they swim in the big water spot down the way. Leo also says monsters aren’t real, and that he’d chase all of them off for Mikey if they were, and he doesn’t think Leo could do any of that if he was scared of them. 

He’s still jumpy when it’s stormy out, though, and never wants to go too far from their room when Dad leaves to find food or things they need. It sure seems like Leo is afraid of something, but Mikey knows his brothers and he knows that Leo is brave and funny and sometimes sneaks cookies from the top shelf for him even when he’s not supposed to. Leo’s not afraid, because it’s Mikey who’s always afraid. 

When Mikey was convinced there was a monster in their bathroom and had been too terrified to run and get Dad, Leo was the one who’d picked up his practice katana and charged in yelling. When Mikey and Leo had gotten stuck in the closet while they’d been playing hide and seek, Leo was the one who started telling him a big dramatic story so it would stop feeling so small. 

It is okay to be scared, but Leo never is. 

“Leo?” He calls— he’s too small to grab the big light, the one Dad says they should only use in emergencies, but it’s dark and Dad went to grab something outside, and Donnie’s been sick so he can’t fix it like he usually does. He thinks this is maybe an emergency. 

Mikey wasn’t supposed to even be away from his brothers when Dad went outside, but Leo had said he’d be right back before the lights went out and Raphie had asked him to check on him. The water is loud in the walls. 

“Leo? I— Raphie says to come back,” He tries again. His voice only wavers a little, and he’s pretty proud because he thinks he might actually be very scared standing in the dark by himself. He doesn’t remember their living room being so big, or the kitchen being so far away, but it feels like miles and miles. It’s cold out here, too. 

Something rattles around the corner near the kitchen. Mikey jumps before realizing it’s probably Leo— sometimes he plays pranks like that, hiding around a corner to jump out. He thinks it’s funny how loud Raph and Mikey will yell, but it’s not. Mikey made a promise to himself that he wouldn’t scream anymore so Leo would stop doing it— he squares his shoulders, and balls up his fists as best as he can. “It’s okay to be afraid,” Mikey tells himself softly.  

Donnie says being scared of the dark is natural, that it’s some behind the brain thought that means other turtles survived longer. Being nervous was helpful, once. Him and his brothers are going to be ninjas soon though, and ninjas weren’t scared or nervous, they were careful. Dad always says that, to be careful and sure. Mikey tries to walk more slowly, quietly— not because there are ghosts waiting for him, but because his stinky older brother that likes to scare him might be. And Mikey isn’t scared, because he’s like Leo. 

The kitchen is strange in the dark, it’s wide and tall, and Mikey doesn’t think he’s ever noticed how high the ceiling goes. There’s an extra splotch of darkness at the very top, he imagines as a big bug waiting for him, and swallows nervously. 

He manages a whisper. “Leo…?” 

He imagines a different time, coming through the dark kitchen. Maybe he’d help Leo with the soup because Mikey wasn’t old enough to use the can opener or reach all the pans, but he watched Dad make it real close, and he knows you have to turn the stove handle to the right dot to make it heat up best. Maybe Leo would be here, and he’d jump out at Mikey and he’d be brave enough to not flinch, and Leo would ruffle him on the head the way he does. 

“Um,” He swallows again, willing himself not to cry as he takes in the empty room around him. The pots and pans look menacing hanging above him like this, like teeth waiting to fall, and the splotch on the ceiling is moving he’s sure of it. The rush of the water seems louder, too, like it knows Mikey’s here and his brothers can’t find him because it’s too dark, and Dad isn’t home to fix it. “This isn’t funny, Leo.” 

Maybe none of them happen, because Mikey is in the kitchen in the dark, and he’s waiting for Leo and he’s scared, and there’s no Leo at all. He turns to look for the door, to go back and wait with his brothers— it’s too dark, suddenly, to see where the door is at all. A pipe groans, or maybe a monster growls, and he squeaks, throwing himself at the nearest wall. He tucks himself in small, holding his knees close. After a moment, nothing moves— another moment, another nothing. 

The room is darker now, he can’t even see the splotch on the ceiling. He’s not sure he’s in the kitchen at all. 

“I’m lost,” He says to his knees, and presses his face into them to hold himself smaller. 

Dad will be home, and he’ll turn the lights on, and everyone will make fun of Mikey for being so scared, and Leo will pop out of the corner he’s hiding in and maybe Mikey will even cry. It’s okay if they make fun of him, as long as it's not dark anymore. As long as he stops being alone. 

He thinks he’s maybe been alone for a long time. 

“--key! Mikey, hold on!” 

Mikey blinks up, around— that sounded like— 

“Mikey, is that you?” 

He jumps, the kitchen— he can see it again— it’s still dark, but if he squints, he thinks he can see a figure on the other side, by the table. 

“...Leo?” 

The figure moves, uncurling itself from underneath the chair legs and shakily standing up. Mikey manages a brave shuffle closer as his eyes try to adjust— it is Leo, rubbing at his eyes fiercely and clearing his throat. “Jeeze, Mike. Way to sneak up on a guy.” 

Mikey almost doesn’t move for a second, feeling strangely out of place. “Mike?” Leo says, nervously, and all of the neurons in him rewire with a sharp burst in his chest as he scrambles forwards, throwing himself into his brother's arms. 

“It was dark! And— I couldn’t find you!” 

Leo’s hand comes up to hold the back of Mikey’s head, like he always does. “Hey— shh. Angie, it’s okay, hey? I've got you, always got you.” 

Mikey leans back, and scrubs at his eyes, trying to glare as fiercely as he can at his big brother in spite of the tears. “I was calling for you, and— and you couldn’t hear me!” Leo winces, something sheepish lacing across his face. There’s something else too, Mikey can’t read it so it doesn’t matter he figures. Leo always tells him, he always listens. 

“I heard you, I promise,” He holds Mikey closer for a second. “Sorry it took me a while— I always heard you.” 

He doesn’t know what that means but it appeases something in him anyways, he squeezes his brother as hard as he can. “Don’t go off on your own ever again,” Mikey tells him, muffled into his chest. “You gotta take me with you, too.” 

Leo doesn’t say anything for a long moment, humming quietly as he rubs Mikey’s shell. “I’m here now, hey? Not going anywhere, you’re not getting rid of me.” 

That’s good, he thinks. That’s where he should be. Here and nowhere else. Mikey’s not brave enough to be alone without him. 

He feels embarrassment wring through him. “I was scared,” He confesses, apologetic. Leo will probably tease him for it, when it’s light again. He’ll probably tell Raph like its a joke, but then stick more glow stars on the ceiling for him anyways. 

“Me too,” Leo says, quietly. “I was. I was really scared.”

Oh, Mikey blinks, rewires his thoughts. “Don’t have to be scared,” He tells Leo, because it’s what Dad says to him, too. “I can be brave and we can take turns.”

Leo laughs, gentle and quiet, his hug gets so tight Mikey debates telling him to let go, but— he’s shaking, a little, like he’s breathing all funny. He doesn’t want to tell Leo to stop if it helps. 

“Okay, little brother.” 

Mikey leans back, and takes Leo’s hand in his. He looks around the kitchen— it seems smaller, now.

“We can go now,” He says, and he’s not sure why. Leo’s mouth is flat and terse like it is when he’s really sad, but he manages a small smile anyways. 

It’s not as many steps to cross the room, and the splotch on the ceiling is just a shadow, really. He pulls Leo along behind him, squaring himself as bravely as he can. It’s easy, with Leo’s hand in his. It’s just a silly room, they make cereal bowls in the morning and sometimes Dad lets them put salt in the pot for spaghetti, and Leo makes silly faces when they clean dishes to make it fun. It’s a room in his house, and he’s safe here even when the pipes are loud and it’s dark. It's a room and Leo's here, and they're safe together.

He thinks about Donnie, waiting for soup. About Raph and his big worried bros, and the way he lets Mikey climb up on his shoulders to see up higher. He thinks about a hallway, and the twelve and a half steps to the stairs and the ten steps up to their floor, and the ten more steps to their bedroom. There’s something warm in his fingertips, in his chest, like he’s just had soup, or been bundled up in his favorite spot in their hammock between his brothers, and Dad is in the hallway turning off the light. 

The yellow through their ratty blue blanket always turns red and orange at the side, purple at the bottom. 

He can see the door to the hallway now— it’s not far to where his brothers are, and Dad said he’d be home soon. Mikey thinks he might be tired, though. He thinks he’s been tired for a long time. 

“I want to go home,” He tells Leo, from some place outside himself. His hands tingle funny, he thinks he’d like to rest, but the door is right there and he made it, and it’s glowing bright as anything— 

Leo’s hand is firm and warm and squeezes back, and he can take another step. 

____

Mikey wakes up warm. 

He stretches, reaches as high up as he can to touch the wall behind his headboard, same as he always does. He feels the grooves of the stone under his fingers, and the light vibration of the pipes behind it. He feels the stiffness in his spine loosen, uncurl, like he’s been tucked into his shell for too long.

It’s quiet, he realizes; his home is a ripcord of motion normally. Raph always gets up early and makes tea, and sits with Dad for a little while before Mikey ambles down to get breakfast going. He can usually hear music already, or Don’s electronics whirring if he’d pulled another all nighter, or the thrum of a TV. There’s none of that now. If he focuses, he can hear soft puffs of breath somewhere beside him. 

The realization doesn’t hit him for a long moment. He opens his eyes and sees his room, the outlines of plastic stuck on stars on the ceiling, the pile of comics tucked carefully onto his bookshelf, and — Leo. Sleeping with his head on his hand, leaning half onto Mikey’s bed from the floor. 

He blinks and— 

He’s standing on an asteroid, the one he lost Leo on. Some unthinkable distance away from home, caught high up in the air and all alone. The Krang is missing, because Mikey did it right this time, finally. He found the branch within all the branches that would get Leo home— the one where Mikey never existed to begin with. The only branch where Leo grew up being the baby of the family where his overprotective brothers never allowed him to even venture into self-sacrificial acts of heroism. The only one where Leo figures out a different plan.

They’re happy here, he knows. They will be happy here, even if Leo doesn’t believe him. 

His brother is all highlighter outrage and heartbreak, a full study in devastation in technicolor, and all Mikey can think of is that he loves him. That he’s glad he’s safe. That if this is the only gift he can ever give any of them again, a way to skip grieving at all, then he’s glad. He’s only sorry to be the one leaving first. 

“What are you talking about?” Leo’s voice shakes, his eyes are wild. He’s not supposed to even know what’s happening, not supposed to be able to talk to Mikey like this, but his brothers have always had a way of doing the impossible. “You’re not going anywhere, stop it.” 

“Leo, it’s too late. I’m– I’m not going anywhere, not really. You’ll see.” 

Leo’s expression twists further, it hurts to look at, it does, but Mikey makes himself memorize all of it just in case. 

“You think I’ll let that happen?”

“You don’t have a choice—”

“I don’t care, Michael. I don’t— what. My baby brother is badass enough to change space and time just because he decided to, and you think I’m going to let that one up me? If you can change the timeline, then so can I.”

Mikey smiles, despite himself. He wonders how it’s possible to be so afraid and full of love all at once, he doesn’t know how there’s room. "Leo, you have to let me go. It's okay."

His big brother is so, so sad. It aches and hollows him out to see it, he's never seen Leo like this before. Like the sun just burnt itself out right in the sky. “If I let you go, I'll lose you." He says, simply, horrifically. 

"Maybe that's how it's s'pposed to go," Mikey shrugs, hiccuping on a sob.

Leo's expression shifts, firm lines pouring in between. He leans close and pokes him in the chest, eyes flashing fierce. "It's not. It can't be, I won't let it. You’re not going anywhere, baby brother. I’m not doing any of this without you.” 

The world unravels apart in front of him and Leo’s eyes never leave his. 

“You awake?” 

Mikey jumps, hands curled tight into his comforter so hard it hurts. Leo’s staring at him now, expression entirely unreadable. 

“Leo, I—” 

He holds up a hand, swiping at Mikey’s chin gently. “Great to see you up. Worried we weren’t going to be able to wake you for a bit there. How are your hands?” 

His hands? Mikey blinks down at himself. His hands are a network of glowing lines, worse than before. Last time they’d opened up like fissures, pure gold creeping through before settling into paler scars against his scales. Now, it looks like his hands are barely holding back straight sunlight, more cracked lines than not. It doesn’t… hurt, though. 

“Okay,” He says, his voice is croaky and small. Leo smiles at him, rubs the top of his head in a smooth motion before standing. 

“I’ll let Don know you’re awake, he wanted to check in on all of that.” 

Leo hasn’t actually looked him in the eyes, Mikey realizes with a pang— instinctively, desperately, he grabs Leo’s hand before he can walk away. Some part of him terrified abruptly that Leo’s so furious with him it’ll be like this forever, never quite looking at him but too scared to leave. Like magnets constantly repelling each other. Leo's his best friend, just like Donnie and Raph, but he's always wanted to be as brave as Leo was his whole life. He can't be mad at him for doing what Leo would have done, did do a thousand times over, he can't.

“Don’t— um. Don’t go?” 

Leo’s shoulders hitch high, he’s staring at the doorway flatly. Tense. Mikey has an insane urge to apologize, desperately, but he’s not even really sorry. If Leo’s here then he did it right, it was worth it. If Leo’s here then Mikey made the correct choice, no matter what Leo thinks.

They stay like that for a long second, Mikey holding Leo’s wrist with both hands, Leo facing away. He can feel Leo’s pulse under his thumb, it’s settling some terrified white noise in his head, in spite of himself. He can breathe knowing Leo's here.

Actually, he’s breathing a lot— big heaving breaths that tear through him all at once. He can feel Leo’s heartbeat and he’s alive, and Mikey’s here, and he can see him and— he was so tired of being alone, of trying to be brave. Maybe he always believed Leo would find him, maybe that wasn’t fair of him at all. He just doesn’t want Leo to hate him for it. 

“I— I…” He tries, the sentences evaporating into nothing before him. 

Leo turns instantly, switching their hands so he’s holding onto Mikey’s wrist just as tightly. His eyes are wet, Mikey realizes. 

“Angelo—” 

“Leo—” Mikey stops, bites his lip. Leo doesn’t look angry, not really, but he’s not sure. “I’m. I’m just happy to see you.”

Something crashes across the flat dark of his eyes, splintering it apart like a lightning storm, all motion and sparked urgency. 

“I missed you so much,” Leo says, and pulls him into a hug. 

Mikey gasps, tears falling from wide eyes. “I thought… I thought you’d be mad.” 

“I am,” Leo sniffs, choking on a breath as he bundles Mikey closer. “I’m so fucking mad at you, but I love you and you were missing. Don’t ever do that to me again.” 

“You jumped first,” Mikey manages, some backwards anger from a reality that no longer matters leeching forwards. 

Leo shakes his head, hooks his chin on top of Mikey’s forehead. “Big brothers are supposed to do stuff like that. I knew you’d save my shell.” 

“No you didn’t,” Mikey argues, balling his fists up to push at Leo’s chest. “You didn’t, because I didn’t even know. You were going to leave me behind.” 

There’s a fraction of a space between them as Leo lifts his head, and it’s horrible. His eyes are swollen red, tears still streaming from them; he looks just as heartbroken as before, but Mikey’s fine. Leo shouldn't look like he's still losing Mikey when they're here together, that's silly, that hurts in a way Mikey doesn't know how to make better. He puts both hands on Leo's cheeks anyways, to keep him in one piece all together.

“Never,” Leo swears wetly. “I’ll always come back for you, you hear me? Nowhere you can go I can’t annoy you back where you belong.”

“Same for you,” Mikey insists, it sounds like begging. “I’m a badass mystic warrior now. I’ll just drag you back home.” 

Leo lets out a shaking breath, and Mikey sniffles too.

"I was trying to tell you that I loved you," Mikey offers, wobbling all the way down to the core of himself. "Did you hear me?"

His big brother's face twists, crashes to pieces and his shoulders shake, leaning all his weight forwards into Mikey's hands and closing his eyes. "Course I did," He says, as easy as anything. "Of course I did."

____

Leo has another dream. 

It’s softer— it’s not on the asteroid, there’s no Krang or portal or giant ship. He’s younger, skipping through the sewers after his Dad and his brothers. Dad has Raph’s hand in his, and Raph’s holding onto Donnie’s sleeve to make sure he doesn’t stray too far either. He gets distracted sometimes, by the details that pile up in his head. Raphie keeps an eye on Donnie though. 

Leo’s supposed to be doing something, he thinks. 

The tunnels are tall and wide, and there’s hints of lights through the grates high up above that make spackled golden dots on the stone. He peers closely at a puddle, the way the light seems to absorb it all in. When he looks up, his family is trailing farther away. Faint outlines in the murky distance— he needs to catch up, he thinks. Or when the rain comes we’ll get separated. 

Dad’s watching out for Raph, who’s watching out for Donnie, though, so they’ll be okay. It’s Leo’s job to make sure they don’t get separated. 

The tunnels are still light, but they’re long and the splotches of light look like sun through the tree leaves, and his family turns a corner. Leo’s alone. 

He wakes up, standing in a tunnel. 

It’s dark. Of course it’s dark— for a disorienting moment, Leo’s not sure he’s actually awake. The jumpcut between his last memories of ambling off to bed to now don’t seem to fit in any way he can make sense of, but the stone under his feet is cold and solid anyways. He knows this tunnel, probably. He knows all of the offshoot tunnels by their home like the back of his hand— he’s not lost. He isn’t. 

He is alone, though. 

The dream is still floating through his mind, a cloud that hasn’t fully let up and drifted off as it weighs thick and heady. A thundercloud, dropping low with all its gray and heavy lightning. They didn’t wander off without him, he knows— except. It’s just that they could have, couldn’t they? Any one of them could be cut clean through again. 

He knows the memory his mind had latched onto. His heart beats frantic and loud for a moment as he realizes. He’d been there with Mikey, it was his job to watch his baby brother; he’d been there with Mikey, but he’d forgotten again. How could he have forgotten, again? What if he hadn’t fixed it, not really, and any one of them could fade out of the forefront without him noticing? 

The tunnel is dark, and he’s alone— he knows this tunnel, his home is a few steps around the corner, and he must have slept walked all the way out but he can go back. He knows his brothers: Donnie, Raph, Mikey. He hasn’t forgotten them, he hasn’t. 

There were fifteen seconds that he was alone in the dark when the power went out. 

“Where do you think you’re going?” Raph’s voice bounces off the stone around them— Leo whirls around before his mind catches fully up, and Raph sweeps him up further into a bear hug with it. “Pretty sure you’re still grounded.” 

Leo blinks frantically, feeling the slight tremble of Raph’s arms around him. Donnie peeks his head over Raph’s shoulder. “So, turns out I didn’t remove the trackers on all of you that I said I did, go figure.” 

“Which I’ll allow this one time, on account of bozo activity.” Raph says. “But we will be revisiting at a later time, with Dad.” 

“What—” Leo turns his head. Donnie’s pretending to type on his wrist guard, but his eyes keep flickering up at Leo and away. Raph’s smile is tense at the edges. They’re here, they’re real, he hasn’t forgotten them, but then— 

Raph continues, he’s herding Leo forward and beginning the walk back home as he talks. “Maybe we give up the whole sleeping in separate rooms thing tonight and do a sleepover instead. We can put your favorite on.”

“I won’t even argue on which film is the best, this one time only,” Donnie says, magnanimously.  

Oh, Leo manages a shaky smile back. The ball of nervousness bubbles in his chest, he tries to swallow it down. “Better not be Punch Chowder then, because—”

“That’s only for criminals,” Mikey chirps in, patting Leo on the arm as they’re bustled forward. The knot in Leo’s chest relaxes. Everyone’s here, he didn’t forget them. The gratitude is nearly overwhelming, his knees nearly give out before Mikey swoops in under his arm, wrapping his own firmly around Leo’s shell. 

“Movie night sounds good,” He manages. His family, all where he can see them, can be sure he won’t wake up without any one of them. It sounds perfect. 

The lights are on, the tunnel is bright. He’s watching over Mikey and he’s holding onto all of them, and his hand is in Don’s. 

Yeah, he thinks. Everything where it’s supposed to be. 

[inconmess]

I've been building up this post for quite a while so I think everything in this post is kinda out of order and looks like a bit of a big word vomit... So sorry in advance. Also since it is kinda longer than I realise, I am putting it under the cut. And I am open to any discussion.

(Personally think I may have gotten a few things wrong and if so, please correct me?)

I think the thing about Orym and grief is... A part of him has never let himself grieve his loss properly. He has accepted that they are dead and will never come back, yes. He makes it a point to live up to them everyday, yes. But acceptance is not the same as grief, it is a part of it but not the same.

And this was an interesting discussion I was having with my friends and I feel that it strikes so true here, is the fact that you remember the worst moments of your life more vividly than the happiest moments because in your happy moments, you don't question what happened to you as much as you question your worst moments in life.

And Orym has lived with that question for six years. Now, the same could be said to Ashton and Imogen and Fearne and the rest of the Bells Hells really but as pointed out in this post by @caeslxys. (a really good pot btw) Even though the others have had their questions as to why a particular bad incident happened, Orym has had the shortest time to actually cope with it while for the others, it has been years at this point and maybe they have sort of come to peace with most of their shit before it came back to hit them in their face. And for some, it just hit them recently.

And for Orym the question of "Why?" resurfaces again and again the more he seeks out answers and when he does get the answer... I don't think anyone would really love to learn that the two most important people in their lives were dead because "it was just collateral damage. They didn't really have to die but they did." Not when you were having a happy, peaceful life. They signed up for this, yes. But it is also not fair to have your whole life cut short just because a big shot wants to test a theory.

And I am not trying to say that Orym bringing up his losses every time they have a discussion about the Vanguard is right or wrong because he has every right to and may be wrong at the same time because he is biased. Because at this point, he is very biased.

Apart from what I mentioned above, Orym watched Otohan kill his husband and father. He fought Otohan again and this time lost his life, Fearne and Laudna. He fights Otohan again and nearly loses Keyleth. Fights Otohan again a fourth time and knows that there would've been more losses if FCG hadn't sacrificed themselves. Not to forget Otohan killing Eshteross, something I think Orym internally blames himself for because she read his mind for the information. And even if Otohan is now dead, the loss stays.

I also think that seeing Will when he died had more of a personal impact than he realised because I know while seeing the dead person can sometimes bring some comfort, at the same time, when you are trying to live up to them, trying to answer questions that are just beyond you when you really haven't had the chance to completely grieve and accept, the grief possibly just hits you more.

SO while the Hells have had their personal losses with the Vanguard and Otohan, I think Orym has had the longest beef with the group among them all. He didn't know about the Vanguard 6 years ago, yes. He discovered their name along with the rest of the Hells. But loss wise, Orym was the first of the lot to suffer due to the Vanguard.

This is not me trying to put an exact scale or measurement of the loss cuz it is intangible and stuff. But he's been dealing with it for 6 years. Maybe not for harbouring revenge, but the resentment hasn't completely gone but rather festered the more he seeked answers. So he is going to be extra jaded.

But not to forget the fact that up until Bordor, he did try to see the Vanguard's point too, still kinda does (the locket he took from a Vanguard member as a reminder) but I think by the time of Bordor's betrayal, he's had too many losses with the Vanguard to actually care of their point of view because all he's seen of their group is innocent people getting killed or almost killed for no reason at all.

Bordor's beef as a person from the Vanguard had been against Laudna, Orym and Ashton but he still nearly killed Prism and would've probably marked it off as collateral if she'd died. Dropping off the locket with Bordor doesn't mean that he left all his empathy but at the same time, like he mentions, they are at war. And war doesn't really discriminate amongst people. It just takes.

Like he said to Imogen, I think he still tries to believe the Vanguard can have some people who are good and not all of them are evil but all he's know from the Vanguard at this point is loss and Liliana's blind faith towards Ludinus or Predathos doesn't help.

So back to the recent episode.

Do I think that it is wrong for Orym to bring up to Liliana about his dead family as an answer to her response. No. Do I think it was a wrong time to bring it up? Maybe. Because Liliana was not being confrontational but Orym was turning confrontational the more the discussion happened.

But the thing about Orym saying it to her face is that... It is one thing to know that there have been deaths and even if Liliana didn't directly cause it, she was a part of the group that did and brush it off as collateral damage. And no one does a census or survey post the "collateral damage" on how it affects the other person because now, they have what they want to there is no use to go back there.

And Orym is kinda like that mirror which is like... "SO you had a loss because of the gods and now are going around leaving collateral damage you want to fix stuff? Guess what? Your collateral damage was my life that you just uprooted just like the gods/god people did yours, so are you really any different from the people you hate and the change you want to bring about?" (which is kinda the parallel between Orym and Bordor I find really interesting because this is a cycle that is never ending at the end of the day)

And did Orym need that outlet? Hells yeah. GIVE THAT MAN A HUG!

[flowers-of-io]

Things I wrote (and posted) this year

My fic year in review, sorted chronologically! I'm quite proud of myself, I have to admit. I tried some new things this year and even if I wouldn't say there are many *masterpieces* on this list, I still appreciate how varied it is.

Here's to an even more diverse 2025!

the witnessed and the tricked

Rated T | prompt: Witness Me

Savathûn steals the Veil and feels really good about it. Nezarec dies like a loser. The Witness ignores all of this.

Savathûn laughed. She laughed so brightly and truly, her voice thundering like the sound of an avalanche approaching, rippling across space like magma rushing out of a volcano. Outside, the world was ending. The Deep had arrived to state its claim--oh, what a boring development, what a dull and wholly expected turn of events, and what a sorry display of ineptitude the Final God of Pain was making of himself, spluttering and wheezing at her feet. She kicked him in the face for good measure. He grasped weakly at her ankle, gargling out curses through a ruined throat, and tried dragging himself after her when she turned to leave, but the lack of two limbs and several vital organs prevented him from getting very far.

when do ghosts have nightmares

Rated T | 1016 words

Toland gets a taste of his own poison.

Eris asked him that once, not in a letter but a mournful scream sent drifting on the waves of the vast Sea. She must have been worlds away, because by the time they got to him the words had already built up and swollen into a deafening roar that crashed and swept him away like a ship amidst a rainstorm. He did not answer, and neither does he now.

a chorale, a double-stop

Rated T | 651 words | prompt: yesterday/today/tomorrow

Freaky Black Garden rarepair fic!

“I missed you,” she says. Radiolaria spills from her mouth.

Kabr cups the back of her head and brings their foreheads together.

“How come?” His voice is a song too, melting into her as their feet melt into the brook and dissolve into arc and sillica. “I’ve been gone for barely a minute.”

Dark Mirror, chapter 5: The Communion

Rated T

Accidental Best Friend Acquisition, Lucent Brood version.

“Aren’t Ghosts usually busy with looking for their Lightbearers, or something?”

The Ghost went quiet for a second, something about its cheery demeanour shifting.

“My Lightbearer is dead,” it said stiffly.

as grief is large among the grieving

Rated T | 1246

You know how in that D1 mission with Crota's funeral you can find Ir Yût in one of the towers? Yeah.

The Song becomes her. For one suspended moment she is bodiless, pervading, seeping through the air in tender wisps and passing through stone and skin and crystal—deep beneath, where the worm lies, where soulfire licks bone. The beauty of it, she’s always figured, the true beauty of the Song is that it knows no borders; that when sung right, it is all-encompassing, radiating like starlight across time and space until a will strong enough to smother it arises. The truest form of art: will channelled without shape or substance, intangible beyond the ruin it leaves in its wake.

Field Research

Rated G | 1274 words

The Crimson Days are upon us, and Eido is on that ethnology grind.

By some miracle, they found a table snuggled in the far corner of the room, under a fern in a hanging pot. Eido bumped her head against it as she sat down.

“There are many people here,” she remarked, rubbing at her forehead.

Brilliance, Brilliance

Rated G | 1187

The Lucent Court is celebrating. The yuri is toxic.

Through all her years of studying the Hive, Eris wouldn’t have thought they danced. Maybe it would have occurred to her earlier if she'd ever discussed it with Toland; he's always seen them as both more and less than she has, not only mindless beasts and not only gods. He would've said, of course they dance, they're a complex, highly advanced society, the kind that had built palaces and dreadnaughts before the Earth was even created. They have music and art and insanely complicated biotechnological mechanisms, philosophy and cuisine—why wouldn't they dance?

Notes of the Remembered, chapter 4: Pretences

Rated T

Mulled wine and not-confessions.

“I’ve told you before about how the Hive see death.” She gently rocked the mug and watched a slice of orange rise to the surface and ruin the image of the Traveler-less sky reflected in it. “Our mythoi are not so different, at the heart of it. The Hive believe soulfire is the immortal part of a person, the connection to the Sea of Screams, but unlike one’s Ascendant form, it can’t be destroyed so easily. Death is only and forever an ending, but the essence persists… Funny, when you think about it, that something endowed to us by the worm gods is at the core of our faith in the afterlife.”

Órthos

Rated G | 1846 words

Two old men talk about devotion.

Kuldax's eyes, gleaming and clever with age, narrowed under the brow of faded chitin. He was old, and he knew kings and their ways. Thus he spoke, “The Hellmouth is an empty husk. It is solely the vestige of the Deep that Xivu Arath wants it for.”

“Primarily, not solely,” the Warpriest corrected, for he too knew the ways of kings. “Through ruin and hunger you’ve remained faithful to the bladed path. She will reward that.”

“There is no mercy other than the mercy of death,” Kuldax said. “All else is debt and future boons. If it is ruin and hunger that shall claim us, then it must be so. But never again,” these words he spoke sternly, because he was old and not afraid of death, “will it be the whim of a Queen.”

unless you play it good and right

Rated G | 1729 words | prompt: kissing as encouragement

Happy zaiatl content before everything went to [LOUD BUZZER NOISE].

“Ha.” She said it flatly, but the edge of her fingernail dug into Zavala’s cheekbone and it was enough for his breathing to fall out of sync. Incredible—how easy it was, how the world around him suddenly shrunk down to just the two of them, and his vision turned sharp and hyper aware like on the battlefield. “I do not tend to braid love with politics, Commander. It is a ruthless game.”

“Indeed.” He tucked his face into her palm and pressed his lips against the thick line of the scar there.

XXXV

Rated G | 720 words

Xivu asks the useless question.

Shutting her out of her throne world, really now. She had an unfinished dice game with Haroktha. The flow of tribute shuts her parasite up, but there is still a cacophony of voices yelling in her head; worms her gods and the Deep Itself and her confused adjutants all screaming like thrall set on fire and asking how, HOW, how did she do it and how did you let it happen and how could you not see this coming. The constant noise blinds her almost as much as the pain does. It is harder to tune them out now that she is locked out from her own mind palace.

Dark Mirror, chapter 6: The Mirror

Rated T

A day in the life of a Lucent Brood Acolyte, rather (affectionate) than (derogatory).

Something glinted in the corner of his eye, and instinctively Dornuk turned to check on it. By the gate in the far distance, sunlight was reflecting off the heavily ornamented horns of a Wizard—Ascendant, judging by her height, clad in wormsilk and siver chains and a number of other utterly useless decorations that shimmered and tinkled. She was very diligently licking a column.

“Why,” he wondered aloud, rather than asking anyone in particular.

SHE SEES

Rated G | 253 words

A conversation about home and rebirth.

I have a vision. A brilliant garden. Vitreous strongholds built from osmium and Light. We will rise and meet the Traveler. We will save the Hive the way you said the Traveler saved us, the way it wants us to save it.

Come in Time, chapter 11: Temptation (part III)

Rated T

The end of love.

It was easy, following her. She was the needle of your compass always pointing north, a metronome steadying you when the world was all fury and noise, a razor blade cutting through your doubts and questions and fears until they were nothing but unambiguous truth. She knew what she wanted, and she wanted you by her side.

She is gorgeous even now, dark hair ruffled by the wind and gaze sharp like a shard of glass. She is all power, furious power—an archetype of godhood rather than a woman, an alien figure you have known for years but do not recognise, a house on fire with blown-out windows lit up by the blaze. You have never asked yourself, before, how it would feel to lose your way. You do now.

Come in Time, chapter 12: Evitable

Rated T

Rekkana attempts to explain the concept of chronomancy to a very unimpressed Tevis.

“So what you’re saying is you guys predicted Six Fronts in your sleep.”

“Technically yes.”

“Amazing. Why did the Consensus kick you out, again?” Tevis tilts counterclockwise and peers at her with his single, squinted eye. “Something about a vision of the Speaker becoming corrupted by the Darkness, and the plot to assassinate him?”

This Book Is Full of Lies, chapter 13: Reckless Oracle

Rated T

The team moves into the Scarlet Keep, Eris gets a cat, and Ór gets oneirologic torment.

“So, I guess this means the Daito rabbits and the spectral cats know each other,” Crow wonders aloud, half amused and half genuinely puzzled. “Do they... travel between Luna and the Dreaming City to visit each other? Or is there a separate plane of existence that they meet at, like an Ascendant Realm, but for little guys?”

“It is possible that the Awoken—oh,” Eris gasps when the cat leaps nimbly from the crate and onto her outstretched arm. It weights nothing. With careful paws it climbs up her forearm and shoulder and settles around the back of her neck like a scarf, purring softly. Gingerly, she raises a hand to rub it between the ears.

This Book Is Full of Lies, chapter 14: Leap

Rated T

Savathûn's Brood watches a choice being made.

Aiat! We are Her Brood, and our hearts are of Hers. In our minds we hold the substance of Her teachings and the anti-matter of Her lies. Aiat! The Deep has deceived us, and thus She has conquered the Deep, for She is the Queen of Deceit.

To be of Her Brood is to be entuannei: that is, to know the-space-between, to lie upon a truth until it changes its substance, until the only truth that remains is one which cannot be denied. Aiat! We are of Her, and our souls tremble with the fear of inexistence; we are of Her, and our hearts surge at the promise of life.

FEARS TO LIFE, chapter 1: i'm not going down with the rest of you

Rated T | 738 words

Toland knows what he will do after Crota.

"‘You’, hm." Eris crosses her arms. "Then it's true what Eriana says, that you don't plan to wage this battle alongside us."

"My path leads elsewhere."

"Deepward?"

"As ever."

Ikora Week 2024: Moment

Rated G | 301 words | prompt: memorable moments / wisdom

Ikora and Osiris reunite.

She has played this moment in her head hundreds of times. Curse her wandering mind, perhaps, or her bleeding heart; never once has it done her well to overthink, and there is nothing she has thought about more than the freeze-frame of Osiris on the steps of his jumpship, fifty-seven years, four months and twenty-two days ago.

Ikora Week 2024: Unexpected, Welcome

Rated T | 733 words | prompt: favourite ship / supernova

Asher hasn't used the Light since the accident.

Asher passes her a glance, then looks back down at his palm. His eyebrows are pulled together in a deep frown. Slowly, he brings his Vex hand up and cups it together with his good one. Ikora realises she is holding her breath, and wills herself to relax.

The air between his fingers swirls and then is sucked into itself as a tiny singularity begins to form. It is miniature and unstable, but it's there, eddying and tugging at the air around it greedily. Asher gasps, and she pretends she didn't hear it.

Come in Time, chapter 13: Convergence (part II)

Rated T

Alemyr and Praedyth converge in the Black Garden.

He says thickly, “Sometimes I want to go back so badly.”

Her arms curl around him in an embrace that smells like lavender and the Tower.

“You don’t have to.” He lets the tears fall and sink into the linen of her robe, darker spots on dark blue. “You are always there.”

you and me at the end of the world

Rated G | 3368 words | destinytober prompts

Stories from the Pale Heart and elsewhere.

the landing

Immaru doesn't care. Immaru escapes through the window and flies off into the night, and he doesn't care as he glides under the brilliant purple-blue expanse of the sky, and above the dark and angular landscape, and not even when he finally curls up in the palm of his Lightbearer, shivering and angry. He really could've gathered some intel while he was there. It's not like he'll be sending anyone out there to snoop around in the nearest future, anyway. He doesn't care.

the blooming

I can already hear you accusing me of overmetaphorising. There is no end of the world! The cosmos is infinite and Guardians make their own fate. Even the radiolaria in their little bronze caskets may soon have to make peace with this fact. This is the beauty of existence: it keeps going on, and on, aimlessly and for no reason other than it just does. Arte pro arte--but oh, what beautiful art it is indeed! We have always appreciated this majesty, me and her. You could say it was the love of life which brought us together. Would you believe that?

(You'd do well brushing up on your Symmetrist writings. The sword and the bomb share some very basic principles.)

the lost city

"Shouldn't you be takin' some time off, anyway?" A handwave, its shadow flickering over the table. "I'm sure our Hunter Vanguard there can manage on his own for a bit."

"I'm good."

"Oh come on." There is a longer beat of silence, distracting him enough that he moves on to the next report, and then words like a blinding grenade: "If it's about dealin' with grief, that ain't the way to do it."

the outskirts

"You know," he says, "that's not really what I pictured when I said he might find the greatest Guardian of all time."

"What, a prince of the Reef?"

"A Hunter Vanguard."

the refraction

—and he [wakes] in a place that is a time that he/they/he has never seen before. An emerald meadow. Flowers like blood. Sky with no ceiling, white rivers, glass plains echoing with a—

[Define: wakes. Sudden transition into alertness from a period of dormancy.]

—song on the [wind] like the sighs of a giant. Still. Everything is still when you [are] Vex, charting moments like points on a map and skipping between them without any movement at all. He breathes in—tastes salt—sees white and green and red and feels something electric trickle down from his nostrils.

the abscess

You took your vengeance, dead thing. You razed and killed. You took my friends and you took my Father and you took my children and you took pleasure in our suffering, over and over. Bathed the Shore in our blood.

It brought you glee, I'm sure. This destruction, this fury. Intoxicating. Your uncontrollable bloodlust, taken out on all held dear.

Dream No More

Rated G | 1437 words

Three travellers come to Hallownest.

For herself, she chose a chamber on one of the upper floors, small, but with a lovely view of the rain-drenched capital. Settling in the royal guesthouse next to King’s Station might’ve been the more obvious choice, but Hornet couldn’t bear the thought of entering it yet, not when she didn’t know if any of her mother’s things would still be there. The whole city was a minefield of memory, really; though while she’d previously dreaded the inevitable confrontation with the past once she’d have returned, now she found the experience overwhelmingly cathartic. She only cried once, in the gardens, when she saw Hollow nipping insistently at the overgrown hedgerow with a pair of rusted shears like it was the most normal thing in the world for them to do. She failed to explain it when they jumped up to her with great alarm, their single spidery hand patting her form to check if she was hurt.

Planetomachía

Rated G | 2235 words

Four gods duke it out with the Nine.

You know, my dear, in four thousand years they will still be telling this story. One most certainly cannot deny it grandeur, both in the setting and the circumstances—yes, yes, I know. It didn’t really change much, and there will have been so many greater battles since, but this is not how legends are made. A legend must be a good story, first and foremost. It must slide smoothly off the tongue. Fire and darkness, love and horror, blood and glory—this is what keeps a myth alive. Nobody cares if the war with the Taishibethi was in any way crucial to the Hive’s crusade; what they remember is Emperor Raven splitting open a war moon, this one bright moment of power and gore caught in a frame. It did not save the Tai from extinction—but it is still remembered, still passed on between generations, millenia down the line.

[angelfevr]

nobody sent me an ask for one of the games i rbed (no pressure btw!!) so im just gonna write down what my answers Would be if someone did >:3

(1) share an excerpt you're proud of, and elaborate on why.

Yume takes the spotlight from Briar again, again, again. Audiences sympathize with villains. Not this one. 

well first off, i like the repetition . honestly the repetition in this was fucking stellar if i do say so myself <3 but also the fact that briars an actress and she plays a villain in an upcoming production, who mirrors her struggles so closely she'd rather punch her reflection than face the truth

(5) describe what [project] would look like if it were bad. (alternatively: list out what hypothetical horrible interpretations of the work would look like. fake socmedia discourse emulator optional but encouraged.)

honeslty this is my worst fear . i recently posted a fic where akane is so tied by grief that she ends up kissing junpeis corpse and .. ngl i thought i was gonna get harassed bc of the subject material even though i try to make things respectful and all that . i just like exploring fucked up subject matter!! nothing 2 see here

(9) who are your favorite characters from [project]? what do you want most from them as characters: to have them heal and be content/happy, or to run them under a cheese grater? how does this compare to what they undergo in the story?

i loooove ruri a lot, im so happy w how i developed her. shes soooo sigma klimcore and i want her to heal AND run her under a cheese grater <3

(11) is there is anything intangible or inanimate in [project] which qualifies as a character in its own right? (ex: a specific theme, setting, etc)

yes!! this is how i describe the chronis household in a short story i wrote recently

(19) what text/message have you sent about [project] which is most unhinged or incomprehensible out of context?

i forgot i wrote this:

guitar is temporary, briyume is forever >:3

(20) do you think there's anything about [project] which is predictable from your previous works/interests, or to anyone who knows you well enough? if the work was written by someone else, what would a recommendation designed to personally bait you look like?

oh absolutely . in the case of re/wind, ruri is basically modeled after sigma zero escape with how they both attempt to remake those theyve lost, except ruri is more of a flawed mother while sigmas a piece of shit GHFJDGHFDJ also the fact tht its a ghost story!!

idk if anyone knew me from 2020-21 (and if u did.. im so sorry) but me and a friend had an hxh au centered around kurapika and pairo where pairo came back to earth as a ghost . its a similar premise to aruri but ofc very different in terms of dynamic

if someone used re/wind as a way to bait me itd prob be like, old lesbians, time related metaphors/imagery, so on and so forth

[ternfic]

Penance

Chapter Thirteen: Hell’s Bells

“Alastar.”

“I know.”

“Alastar, I know these people.”

“I know, Cary.”

“They’re all-?”

“Dead Master Builders. Yep.”

Sirius squeezed off several warning shots into the oncoming horde, biting his lip and stepping back until he bumped into Good Cop when the shots had no effect. “Ah,” Good Cop said. “Just a moment-” He swiped the pistol out of Sirius’s hands and popped the cover off. “Sir, do you still remember how to fence?”

“Well, it’s been a few years, but I should-” He paused. “…You know, a crowbar isn’t exactly designed with fencing in mind-”

“Unfortunately it’s the best we’ve got for now. Think you and Cary can hold them off for a couple minutes?”

“Are you out of your mind- what are you even doing?”

“Making some adjustments and hoping Cary doesn’t decide to strangle me for it afterwards,” Good Cop quipped as he conjured tools made of magic to do… whatever he was doing to Bad Cop’s laser gun. Bad Cop quirked an eyebrow at his brother, but said nothing, instead taking the crowbar from Sirius.

“Hey!” the President protested, but fell silent when Bad Cop broke the hooked end off before handing it back. “…I can’t see how that little piece is going to do you much good.”

“Not like this it isn’t,” Bad Cop agreed. Sirius stared as he fashioned a pair of brass knuckles from the broken piece of iron.

“You’re sure that’ll work?”

“We’re about to find out.” Sirius sighed and rolled up his sleeves, giving the iron bar a few test swings. When he glanced back up, they were surrounded. The looks on the ghosts’ faces were unsettling, to say the least. As he looked at them he could see anger; grief; fear. He felt cold, then, like ice was running through his veins.

Master Builders, each and every one of them… And their deaths are our faults… He breathed in and out slowly to try to calm his nerves. He couldn’t blame them for wanting revenge- he would, too. Bad Cop glanced over at him as the tip of the crowbar dipped slightly, watching him warily. Would it really be so bad to just… let them? It’s no less than I deserve…

Almost as one the crowd of dead Master Builders swarmed them, separating Sirius from Bad Cop with a speed the officer couldn’t keep up with. He growled, throwing himself into the fight, but the ghosts were remarkably organized, making a concerted effort to keep him from getting to his friend. It made him wonder- was the Ringmaster controlling them, the way he was controlling Keelan? But at least it was keeping their attention off of Good Cop, allowing him to finish making his adjustments.

Good Cop glanced up as the crowbar slipped from Sirius’ grasp and hit the floor with a solid thunk, followed shortly by the President himself. “Sirius!” he shouted, but the President didn’t answer, hunching over and disappearing in the swarm. He gasped as he went unexpectedly cold, as though icy fingers had reached into his chest; it was like the whispers all over again, but inside him where he couldn’t block them out. Bad Cop faltered, apparently feeling the same thing, and Good Cop could only guess that was what had affected Sirius so badly.

He steeled himself against the despair so persistently trying to drown him, and snapped the cover of the blaster back into place. In his peripheral he could see Bad Cop go down; he’d given it his best, but his fighting style was useless against the intangible, when only the strikes enhanced with the iron would land. Good Cop took aim.

“I am not weak.”

He squeezed the trigger, smirking in satisfaction as a wave of energy tore through the spirits harassing Sirius. They vanished like smoke, and he hurried to his friend’s side. He fired again, dispelling Bad Cop’s assailants next. It would provide only a brief reprieve, but it was enough to allow Bad Cop to pull himself to his brother’s side. “Is anything broken?” Good Cop asked, checking him over.

“Not yet,” Bad Cop grunted. “Sirius?”

“Come on buddy, come back…”

“Just let ‘em finish me,” he murmured brokenly. “Can never make up for it…”

“That’s not like you to just give up,” Bad Cop growled back.

“He’s in deep,” Good Cop murmured.

“Where’s Brickowski when you need a heartfelt speech?” Good Cop huffed and swatted at his brother, and Sirius snorted, finally peeking up at them.

“There you are,” Good Cop greeted warmly, giving him a soft smile. “I told you these ghosts have a way of getting under your skin.”

“Look out!” Bad Cop snatched up the crowbar, sweeping it in a wide arc as the ghosts made a comeback, shrieking in fury as they descended upon the trio. Good Cop lifted the blaster again, but it was quickly knocked from his hands before he could use it. He didn’t waste a moment in calling forth his magic, hovering protectively over Sirius as he joined his brother in the fight.

They were too distracted to notice Keelan starting to stir.

With a screech the youngest of the triplets pounced on Sirius, shoving him to the ground. He let out a scream as claws began to slash mercilessly into him, and no amount of thrashing would dislodge Keelan.

“Sirius!” Good Cop cried out, but in his distraction was dragged further away. The ghosts returned as quickly as they were dispersed, overwhelming the two brothers. Soon, Sirius lost sight of the cops altogether under the mass of furious ghosts.

Keelan paused with his hand wrapped around Sirius’ throat, and glanced up at something approaching them. Or someone, Sirius realized as he tilted his head back just enough to see. Judging from the green haze, it wasn’t any of their friends.

“Well done,” said a familiar voice. Sirius stared. The Ringmaster wasn’t quite what he remembered. Mostly in that he wasn’t quite human anymore. His skin had been dark in life, but now it was outright black, like the cops’ uniforms. But mostly, it was his eyes. They weren’t like a human’s eyes anymore, with recognizable pupils and irises and whites. They were a solid, glowing green. And there were four of them. He grinned, revealing sharp teeth, and turned to the cops, showing off two rows of spines that reminded Sirius of lionfish fins, the bulbous ends glowing the same green. “I don’t think our guests have much fight left in them, now. All we have left to do is wait for the audience to arrive.” He glanced over to where the ghosts dropped his friends, the cops looking the worst he’d seen them in a long time. Bad Cop’s back was to him, but Good Cop sported several bruises and scratches on his face, and a split lip, the lenses of his glasses shattered, the frames mangled. Their uniforms were in much the same state as his suit, and he could only guess at the extent of the hidden damage. “Let’s start with your boss, shall we?”

“No, no you can’t do this to Keelan, please! He’s innocent!” Good Cop begged. Bad Cop struggled to get back to his feet, silent, but his expression promised there would be hell to pay.

Sirius took a deep breath and looked back up into Keelan’s empty eyes. “Come on, kiddo, I know you’re still in there,” he started, and choked when Keelan pressed harder against his throat. He struggled to get his next words out. “Listen to your brothers…” Shakily, he reached up until his hands were on the youngest triplet’s shoulders, yanking him down into a tight embrace. The hand around his throat went slack in surprise. “Fight him!” Keelan screeched, thrashing to get free, and he held on for dear life.

The Ringmaster crouched down near his head, grinning a Cheshire cat grin. “That’s sweet, that you think he can hear you. I have his mind, and he will do my bidding until I get bored and kill him.” He caught something flying toward him out of the corner of his eye, and jerked out of the way just in time for the crowbar to go crashing into the wall. He turned a furious look to where Bad Cop still held one arm out from throwing it. “So you do still have some fight in you!”

“You have no idea,” Bad Cop snarled in response. “I’ve already been through Hell, you’ve got nothing to keep me down.”

“So you figured you’d try to take me on all alone?”

“That’s just it. You’ve been so focused on keeping your hold on Keelan, you haven’t even realized…”

“…He’s not alone,” Emmet finished.