#leo is shocked about this revelation and maybe a tad bit jealous but its okay he's a good and polite boy about it

[shyalia]

This scene is so dear to me! It's fun, it's silly, it's throwing the boys for a loop meeting one of their dimensional counterparts for the first time! I tried to make the photos a mixture of candid and posed, and Mikey's little writings on the Polaroid images are a little hard to read because it's a challenge getting details in that are that tiny, but they are:

Donnie in a chair at his computer: Donnie, the IT guy

Donnie and Mikey selfie: Best bros (with a smiley face and a fancy S)

Leo smiling at his phone: Leo, just ask her out already!

April and Casey posing, Casey holding rabbit ears over her head: April + Casey (with a heart)

Raph pulling his eyelid down and sticking his tongue out: What a loser! (With a tongue-out smiley)

Mondo skateboarding: Epic trick Mondo!! WOW (double underlined, with a star)

Raph mid-noodle slurp with their dad at the table: Raph + Dad (with a heart)

Leo folding laundry: Mr. Responsible (underlined, with a star and a shocked smiley)

Their dad drinking tea: Tea time (with a heart)

@shyalia sent me another amazing piece and I had to share it. Look at the lad! The attention to detail is so sweet, and 2012 Leo looks so good look at this turtle, suddenly realizing he's got to guide four versions of him and his brothers that got to live a normal life and therefore have no ninja training through a whole dang apocalypse. She captured everything SO perfectly, I love it!

This is a scene from Chapter Four of The Day the World Broke, and you can check out an excerpt below the cut!

“My room, welcome,” Mikey jumped in, and then he jumped up, giving a classic butler bow and spreading his arm wide to gesture to the glory that was their simple but definitely awesome room. “Pleasure to host you. If I knew you were coming I would have straightened up.” 

He wouldn’t have. But it was a nice thing to say, right?

“You live in a house?” Leonardo asked, and for the first time he seemed to look around a little more closely. Mikey saw his eyes linger on their photo board, which was mostly Mikey’s because their dad had gotten him a polaroid camera for his birthday last year and he definitely went a little overboard with it. But it was so cool, you know, and the retro vibes were awesome. He liked having actual photos that lived somewhere other than his phone because one time he’d lost his phone and all his photos and had to listen to what was basically an hour-long lecture from Donnie about proper cloud storage. 

“Where else would we live?” Donnie asked, sounding dismissive. Mikey didn’t take offense, sometimes Donnie just sounded that way, especially when he was overwhelmed. Did Leonardo know that? He definitely had his own Donnie by the sounds of it. How similar were they? Did he have a Mikey? Did he want to meet himself?

What was he saying, of course he did. 

“We live underground but I suppose…there’s a first for everything,” Leonardo said, and Mikey watched him take a few steps forward to take a closer look at the pictures. He saw him linger over one he’d taken of Raph and their dad at the dinner table. Nothing special, it had been Mikey’s candid phase where he was trying to capture the essence of life but Raph messed it up and looked at him mid-noodle slurp. 

“Underground? Like a cave?” Mikey asked. He didn’t know anyone who lived underground, aside from the wild fancy rich people houses he sometimes saw on HGTV. Man, he bet those guys were sitting pretty now, in their underground furnished bunkers with backup generators and an indoor vegetable farm. They didn’t have to worry about anything. Oh, to be a billionaire with a crazy house. 

Leonardo stepped back from the photo wall and tilted his head, a half-yes. “Sewers, technically.” 

Oh no. That was the exact opposite of a billionaire bunker. The sewers? Mikey was about to ask some extremely important follow-ups but Leo cut him off. 

“You live in the sewers?” Leo asked, voice still high and stringy. He let out a strangled sounding whine and Mikey saw his fingers grip harder around his head. “Oh my god why?”

Can you just ask people why they live in the sewers? You probably can’t just ask people why they live in the sewers. Technically Mikey didn’t know the answer to that question but it felt like a real Mean Girls moment. Oh my god, Leo, you can’t just ask people why they live in the sewers. He almost said it, but the joke fell flat on his tongue, like the weight of the situation burdened his humor too much. 

Read more here! Pay attention to the tags and warnings!

https://archiveofourown.org/works/50818507/chapters/128379037