#wow imagine me NOT usign the LSoW tag for once guys

[spectralsleuth]

FLIPSIDE WON! Let's goooo. Alrighty, disclaimer that all WIP's are subject to change since I rewrite things a million times before posting and have no beta or editor.

Michelangelo: Make a Portal

“It shouldn’t be possible.”

Michelangelo has heard some variation of this over and over again for far too long. It wasn’t new. He wished he could harden his heart against the expectations of hearing something different, but if there was one thing Michelangelo Hamato had an abundance of it was hope.

(If he hardened his heart even once for this, it would never soften again.) 

So every time a mystic expert arrived at the base, they took a look at Michelangelo; and every time, he got his hopes up that maybe this time someone would know what was wrong. Maybe this time someone would look at his knobbled knuckles, his sore feet, the creases around his face that were outstripping his brothers- and know how to fix it.

Leonardo said he didn’t get his hopes up, but Michelangelo knew different. He was quieter the days after these exams, and although Michelangelo could never catch him at it he knew Leo was looking at his little brother with something like sorrow.

Michelangelo hurt, was the thing. Getting old sucked, but getting old when you were only thirty-nine mega sucked.

Michelangelo didn’t walk much any more, because his knees were riddled with arthritis and if he stepped wrong the impact would bring tears to his eyes. His tendons jumped and popped like old cables, and although Michelangelo kept trim and fit and stretched the same as all his brothers, he couldn’t stop himself from losing elasticity. He couldn’t bend, couldn’t jump, and although he gloated while he hovered over Leonardo during strategy meetings, it didn’t change the fact that he wasn’t sure he could run any more.

His skin was thinner, the scales duller, his head hurt all the time- and he hadn’t told Leonardo, but. Sometimes, he felt a flutter and a burning in his chest, that would bring a wave of nausea so strong that he had to sit down wherever he was until it passed. Pins and needles would move through his whole left arm, and he’d tuck it inside his cloak to rub the pain away.

His soft heart finally having had enough, it seemed.

Michelangelo was getting old, and no one knew why.

Until he finally did.

“It’ll take everything I have.” He told Leonardo, and he meant it.

There was never a world where Leonardo said jump, and Michelangelo didn’t ask how high. Michelangelo would spend every last bit he had left for one last hail mary, one last attempt to stem the tide of the Apocalypse, one last try to save his brother's son if nothing else. Leonardo knew that. They both knew that, even if Casey Jones Jr. with his Hamato eyes and his mom’s crookedly healed nose didn’t.

Michelangelo centered himself.

Not just himself, but he centered the world. He felt for the edges of space where he was standing, the ground under his feet and the exact space he was occupying. He felt for where they were hurtling through space clinging to the skin of a bone bleached Earth, and he felt for how the faint flex of his plastron as he breathed moved that space all the way down. From the planets solar orbit, to the grains of pulverized concrete under his toes.

Every single little thing was connected, and if you had a big enough lever you could affect it-

And Michelangelo had a very big fucking lever.

He felt along this connection like finding his way in the dark, and once he knew the space it was simple to take a step to the side, and know the time.

‘Anyone got the time?’ He couldn’t help but think hysterically. He’d only ever practiced this; brushed the edges of time with the crackling tips of his fingers during meditation, until he’d jerked his hand back like he’d been burned.

Michelangelo had known then the toll it would take. It was like standing on a railroad track and seeing the light getting bigger in the distance. At the time he had stepped off the tracks and let it go by, and told Leonardo what he’d felt later, only under the cover of night in the quiet where they told each other everything they had left to tell.

(The two of them always pressed shell to shell in a bunk too small for the both of them, Michelangelo aching in such a fierce way that not even the cold press of Leonardo’s mechanical arm against his elbows, knees, neck could keep tears from seeping beneath his closed eyelids while they tried to sleep.)

Here and now, in what was left of him standing in the wreckage of Central Park, he heard the krang dogs in the distance. He heard the crunch of feet on gravel and rebar, he heard CJ’s desperate yelling and he heard his older brother giving the marching orders. He could see the sky stained red, and couldn’t help but wish he could look at something different when he died.

That was a selfish thought. But the apocalypse had made them selfish.

Asking a kid to stop the apocalypse wasn’t right. But it was what they had.

Michelangelo didn’t need to turn and see the blood to know Leonardo wasn’t making it out of this either. He would be the last one standing though, Michelangelo couldn’t help but think wryly, as bits of himself started to burn away.

It was sad.

A sad end, to a sad story.

That was his last thought. He had one last time for a wink, and then he felt himself fall apart.

It didn’t hurt. It happened so quickly that whatever made him capable of feeling pain was gone before he could even comprehend it should hurt, his essence spiraling away into nothing but some apocalyptic dust.

It didn't hurt, and he didn’t die.

Michelangelo found himself in the same spot he often meditated in; that liminal space behind his closed eyes, that often sparked with gold, and seafoam green. He was waiting for something to happen- Karai to show, and guide him to the afterlife. Raphael, or Donatello to appear with wide open arms.

Dad.

The only things that made dying worth it, when he was leaving CJ behind.

(Selfish.)

But he didn’t see them. Instead, he saw that glimmering edge of time still standing open in the dark, and with a growing sense of wonder- he found something.

He felt like a kid again; turning over a rock to find a tiny rolled up pillbug, or beautiful patch of moss. Wonder, delight, understanding. Michelangelo hadn’t ever been scared of death, or he might have been panicking more at the prospect of his soul being sucked into an endless looping time vortex.

Instead, he only felt curiosity, and the deep burning joy in understanding the universe, and knowing how it worked. Michelangelo reached unafraid and put himself into what he had found, and he found-

Himself.

‘Oh.’ Michelangelo thought; seeing himself reflected over and over into infinity, a million iterations, a billion, every one of them as orange and bright and burning and full of love for his family as the last. CJ was sailing towards the future, and he felt the last remaining Hamato from their time like an anchor point, dragging his consciousness and awareness with it, and Michelangelo thought-

‘Oh. I can work with this.’