Chapter Text
It happens on an unremarkable Tuesday night, as they’re heading home from a relatively quiet patrol. Raph is grumbling under his breath because he still has energy to burn, and one tussle with the Dragons was about one-tenth of the outlet he was looking for.
Mikey’s natural state of being is still-has-energy-to-burn and he walks backwards to make a moue of false sympathy in Raph’s direction.
“Aww, poor Raphie,” the little menace coos. “We’ll find you another head to knock, I promise.”
“Won’t have to look very far, there’s one right here,” the red-banded turtle growls, and dives after him. Mikey shrieks in combination terror-excitement and darts around the other side of Leo. Leo allows himself to be circled, looking as though he’s ready to go straight to bed when he gets home, where at least he won’t have to deal with any annoying little siblings for the next six solid hours.
“Hey, um,” Donnie says from somewhere behind them. “Umm, Leo? Guys?”
His tone draws Raph up short. He turns with the long tails of Mikey’s mask still caught in his fist, while Mikey continues to squawk and flail. Leo is already moving out from in between the two of them, abandoning the youngest to his fate and approaching Donatello swiftly.
He doesn’t even need to ask what caught the genius’ eye. Donnie is staring at a bright point of light above the street. It hovers for a moment and then begins to open wider, warm and yellow and glowing.
As Raph watches, something falls through. Someone. He barely has a second to make out the vaguely human shape of the body before the mask tails in his hand are yanked away and his smallest brother is racing forward across the rooftop like a bullet.
Leo makes an aborted move to stop him, but there’s no point. Mikey has always been the fastest of the four and he has always, exclusively, only ever done what he wanted to do. Really, Raph shouldn’t even be surprised.
Mikey catapults off the parapet, collides with the body before it can fall more than a few feet toward the unforgiving asphalt eight stories below, and brings it safely to the roof of an adjacent building, taking the brunt of the fall in a neat sideways roll.
“Ugh, he’s gonna be bragging about that catch for weeks,” Raph mutters, keeping pace with Leo as they follow him over.
Donnie is way ahead of them both, easing the body out of Mikey’s arms by the time the eldest turtles catch up. It’s a green-skinned teenager, with the oh-so-familiar built-in armor of a turtle shell. The red stripes on his face, and yellow ones down his arms and legs, are obscured almost entirely by grisly bruises and a not-insignificant amount of blood. Most tellingly, the kid is wearing a bright blue ninja mask.
“Oh,” Don says, pausing in opening his medkit. He rubs one hand gently over the little mutant’s bruised forehead. “It’s another Leo.”
It says something about their lives that this isn’t the weirdest thing that’s ever happened on a Tuesday. Above them, the portal the kid came through is closing rapidly. The light goes with it, dwindling until it’s gone.
“He’s tiny,” Mikey says, all the joy and irreverence from a few moments ago blown clean out of his expression. Raph doesn’t like to see him look so worried, brow creased beneath his sunny orange mask. “And he’s hurt bad.”
“What the hell happened to him?” Raph rumbles, arms folded tight across his own plastron. It rankles to see any version of Leonardo injured like this. “And where the hell are his brothers?”
“They can’t be far,” Leo says, because it’s unspoken that where one of them goes, they all go, no matter what backwards dimension they might come from. He kneels next to his younger brothers and looks over his small counterpart with grave eyes. “But there’s no time to wait. He needs stitches at the very least. Donnie, can we move him?”
Donnie finishes packing the sluggishly bleeding gash above the kid’s knee with a temporary bandage and tapes it down, then sets about the rest of his medical examination, brown eyes troubled.
“There’s a crack in his shell that concerns me,” he says, probing around the kid’s neck with careful fingers. “And he almost definitely sustained some head trauma. I just can’t be certain about a spinal injury. I don’t want to risk permanent damage by manhandling him into the sewers. There’s also—oh.”
Donnie’s hands pause where he’d been feeling down the kid’s right arm. He pulls it out carefully from where it’s sandwiched between the kid’s side and Mikey’s plastron. Raph stoops to get a closer look at whatever got Donnie’s attention and then feels his chest go tight with rage.
They’re chains. Tiny, glowing links of burnished gold, almost translucent, wrapped firmly around the strange mutant’s forearm. And his fist is clenched around what looks like a piece of paper, but the chains are more concerning.
“Hey, uh, what the fuck,” Mikey says loudly. His hands on the kid’s shoulders tighten there protectively. “Can we get those off?”
“Let’s try,” Leo says, his own eyes whited-out and narrowed. He tests the chains with a touch, the way of someone testing the elements on a stove to see if they’re hot. When nothing happens, he grips one of the chain links firmly and begins to pull.
Raph, Donnie and Mikey all jump at the same time when Leo suddenly yanks his hand away with a hiss.
“What?” Donnie blurts. “What happened? Did it burn you?”
“No, it—it bit me,” Leo replies, shaking out his hand.
The golden chains glow a little brighter as the brothers watch, and now there are bright purple sparks trailing warningly up and down the length of them like an electric current. Raph eyes the purple warily. It looks like it bites.
“Try a knife?” Mikey says, tone upturned at the end because he’s as much out of his depth as the rest of them are.
Donnie hums, brow wrinkled thoughtfully, and works a kunai out of his belt. He slides the edge under one of the chains without issue, but the moment he starts to apply pressure, the orange glow and purple sparks become limned with red, like some kind of armor. The chains constrict slightly, biting tighter into the kid’s arm.
Back off, they say, as clearly as anything without a voice ever could.
“Leave it for now,” Raph says. He won’t say it out loud, aware of how stupid it would sound, but that color combination alone soothes some of the jagged uncertainty he has about this whole situation. “It ain’t like Little Blue’s a prisoner. We can deal with the chains once we’ve dealt with the obviously broken bones.”
Leo nods, on the same page for once. “Can you wake him up, Donnie?”
“Actually, I have just the thing,” Donnie says, like that’s some big surprise, hauling his satchel around and digging through it for a moment. That thing might as well belong to Mary Poppins, and he proves it nearly every day. Sure enough, Don emerges victorious with a container of tiny capsules. Shaking one out into his palm, he says, “Smelling salts. Sort of. My own spin, anyway. Mike, brace him as best you can, okay?”
“You got it, Doc,” Mikey says, picking the parts of the kid’s chest and shoulder that look the least beat-to-hell and planting his hands there.
Donnie snaps the capsule and waves it under Little Blue’s beak. It takes all of three seconds for the kid to give a violent full-body jerk, flailing wildly and going nowhere beneath Mikey’s steady grip. His eyes fly open, a burst of bright gold, and dart around frantically. The left eye is bloodied. Raph can feel his metaphorical hackles going up, because someone obviously beat the shit out of this kid, and he can’t be much older than fifteen.
“Hey, easy,” Mikey says, in a light, breezy tone, “you’re okay, you’re safe.”
“Okay, we can knock spinal injuries off the list,” Donnie says. He looks like about a hundred pounds of stress was just lifted off his shoulders.
Little Blue squints at them, all woozy. When he finally finds Mikey’s face, probably little more than a green and orange blur from his perspective, he relaxes visibly.
“Dee’s tryin’ to experiment on me again,” he whines. “Make ‘im stop or I’m telling Raph.”
Message delivered, he slumps back into sleep after that—apparently reassured by his present company, looming threat of unwilling experimentation notwithstanding. Donatello looks bewildered, and glances sidelong at Raph. Raph shrugs. Leo huffs out a laugh, sitting back on his heels.
“I’d know that tone anywhere. If he’s not the youngest, he’s close.”
“He’s just like me for real,” Mikey pipes up, grinning widely. “Home?”
“Home,” Leo confirms. “Can you carry him?”
“Uhh, are you kidding? He’s probably about as heavy as a handful of grapes.”
“We need to be careful with his arm. The, uh, unchained one. It’s broken in a couple of places. And try not to jostle his leg, either. And his shell—”
“Don, we get it,” Raph says, not unkindly. “Fragile, handle with care. Hear that, chucklehead? No razzmatazz.”
Mikey makes an offended noise and Leo cuts them off at the pass with the grace and finesse of someone who’s been single-handedly dealing with their shit for the better part of twenty years. “Let’s go Mikey. We’ve been out here too long already, and that light-show might have attracted some attention. I’ll call sensei once we start moving and ask him to prepare the infirmary bed for us.”
It’s a group effort to get the kid folded into Mikey’s arms in a manner that doesn’t upset Donnie’s doctoral sensibilities. But he’s such a scrawny stringbean that Mikey carries him with the same level of effort Casey might use to haul around a couple twelve packs of Cherry Coke.
Little Blue, for his part, only squirms to get comfortable and smushes his cheek against Mikey’s shoulder without waking. He’s clearly used to being hauled around. Raph won’t give him the satisfaction of admitting it, but he thinks Leo was probably right. That’s little sibling behavior if Raph’s ever seen it.
Splinter takes the arrival of a fifth turtle in the lair like a champ. It’ll be a cold day in hell when they manage to surprise their dad for real. His aged brown eyes are gentle as Mikey sets the kid on the cot, and he lingers nearby as Donnie prepares the fiberglass for the arm cast. He’s probably remembering when Fearless was that small.
Splinter manages to work Blue’s fist free of the paper he was clutching and smooths out the creases. It looks like it might be a photo. Whatever it is, it causes the rat’s eyes to get very old and very sad. He puts it back in the little mutant’s hand and closes his fingers around it again.
Somehow Little Blue manages to sleep through the stitches and the setting of his broken arm. He doesn’t even stir as he’s tipped onto his side so ointment can be applied to the crack in his shell before the edges are smeared with epoxy and forced back together.
He could probably use the rest—he looks like he just tumbled out of the end of the world. Donnie isn’t concerned about the prolonged stint of unconsciousness only because the kid was awake for a few minutes and coherent enough to form sentences, as confused as they were.
The chains have dulled to the barest glow. Every now and then they light up like Christmas, but only for a minute or two. Mikey dubs it “energy-saving mode.” It’s remarkably un-reassuring.
The whole clan eats dinner in the infirmary in a bunch of mismatched chairs, all of them reluctant to leave the battered child’s side. The second time one of his brothers starts to nod off, Raph makes the executive decision that he’ll take first watch.
Because none of his siblings know how to do anything the easy way, he has to all but run them out at blade-point.
“I know for a fact that you haven’t slept in three days, Don,” Raph says mercilessly. Donnie withers like a little overwatered plant when sensei’s sharp eyes descend upon him. “And Mikey, you’re barely any better than him. I will gladly throw you under the bus next, try me.”
“And we call Leo the mother hen,” the youngest grumbles, only to squeak and dive behind Leo when Raph advances a single threatening step in his direction.
“C’mon, you two,” Leo says, herding them out. “We can have a sleepover in the den. That way we’ll hear it if Raph calls us.”
It’s an unspoken request for Raph to wake them if anything happens. Raphael salutes him only semi-sarcastically and takes up camp next to the cot. Splinter draws a chair up beside Raph’s, whiskers twitching with amusement as Mikey whines from the living room, “But I won’t even be able to sleep!”
“He’ll be out like a light in twenty,” Raph says dryly.
“Ten, if Donatello puts on “How It’s Made,”” Splinter replies with equal parts exasperation and affection. He puts one clawed hand on Little Blue’s forehead, and goes on, “It was good of you to bring him here.”
Wondering if he’ll ever outgrow the uncomfortable feeling he gets from any sort of praise, Raph spins a sai for something to do with his hands and mutters, “Well, yeah. Us turtles gotta look out for each other. It’s not like the humans are gonna do it.”
Splinter kindly moves on. “The boy’s qi is very bright, for all that something has recently attempted to snuff it out. I can tell he was raised in a home full of love.”
“Someone’s gotta be missin’ him,” Raph agrees. It makes his stomach sink to think of some version of his family missing their Leo.
Reading Raph’s mind as easily as he always has, the rat transfers his hand to his son’s arm and pats gently. “We will make sure that he finds his way home. Now,” he adds in a brighter tone, “tell me about my two youngest refusing to take proper care of themselves. I need to know how many flips to assign.”
Grinning, Raphael settles in to spend these quiet early morning hours gossiping with his father.
He must doze off himself at some point, because his senses kick him awake the second before a heavy thud would have. He jumps to his feet, but Splinter raises a hand to calm him.
“Our guest is up,” the rat says mildly. “Collect your brothers.”
Normally, Raph would have something to say about leaving his father alone with a potentially dangerous unknown variable. In this case, he catches sight of two very bright, very frightened gold eyes staring at him from behind the cot, and decides Splinter is probably on the right track. Surprise, surprise.
So Raphael backs up toward the door, scrutinized every inch of the way. As he’s leaving, he hears the kid say, in a tone that aims for demanding and lands somewhere around plaintive instead, “Who are you? Where’s my dad?” It makes Raph want to hit something.
His little brothers are fast asleep in a pile on the sofa. Leo is also actually resting for once in his goddamn life in the armchair, curled up with his limbs all folded like a pretzel. The TV is still on, but the volume is turned almost all the way down. Raph makes it a single step into the room before Leo’s eyes slide open, meeting Raph’s unerringly in the low light.
“He’s up,” Raph says plainly. “And he’s a little freaked out. Kinda got the idea that sensei wants us to make ourselves scarce for a bit.”
Leo nods. With his mask slung around his neck like a bandanna, the worry lines between his eyes are more obvious.
“Let’s make breakfast,” he decides. “You and I can handle a few omelets.”
Mikey usually takes charge of meals, because the goofball has never really shaken off the idea that he doesn’t contribute as much to the general workings of their family as everyone else does. Which is a fucking joke. They’d probably last all of two days without Michelangelo, and they’d be the most miserable two days known to man.
So his big brothers make it a point to wrestle control of the kitchen from him every now and then. Meals aren’t as good when anyone else is doing the cooking, but it’s the principle of the thing.
As Raph is beating a big mixing bowl of eggs together, he blurts, “If you got flung into another dimension, I’d drag your ass back home first thing. You’re not getting out of this shit that easy.”
“Language,” Leo says without looking up from the bell peppers on his cutting board. There’s a smile hiding in the corner of his mouth. “And I know you would.”
There’s a thump from the general area of the den—presumably a turtle falling off the sofa—followed by the low tones of Donnie and Mikey arguing sleepily. Raph’s heart does this big warm stretch in his chest as they amble into the kitchen, something he would never in his life admit to out loud.
Mikey’s mouth is open to protest this shameless coup of his kitchen. Raphael points the whisk at him warningly.
“One word and I’m tossing onions in here,” he says. “A whole bunch of ‘em.”
It’s as much of a threat as it needs to be. Mikey’s beak wrinkles but he only circles around the table to start the coffee for Don.
They return to the infirmary armed with plates and drinks. Little Blue is sitting on the edge of the cot, watching them with obvious wariness on his face. When this version of Mikey who isn’t his Mikey approaches him, Blue’s expression does something it hurts to look at. But he musters up a smile anyway and takes the plate and mug he’s offered.
The plate goes to the side right away. The mug is turned around and around in his hands. It’s a start.
“Um, hi,” he says. His voice is a shock to the system. He sounds like a childhood memory. “I guess introductions would be kind of redundant, huh?”
Donatello smiles. “That’s right. Do you already have experience with other dimensions?”
The kid’s hands go white-knuckled around his drink. “Not till recently,” he says woodenly. “And not like this. Donnie loves to talk about the multiverse theory, though. I’m an expert by proxy.”
Raph recognizes it when someone is on the brink of a panic attack and keeping it at bay by the skin of their fucking teeth, and his family sees it, too. He can practically see Leo reshuffling the course of this gentle interrogation, bypassing the obvious next question of “what the hell happened” for something a little safer instead.
“You were pretty banged up when we found you,” is what he lands on. “Do you feel alright?”
Leo’s tiny counterpart doesn’t seem to know what to make of him, equal parts awed and troubled. He glances over at Raph quickly, something of a knee-jerk reaction, and his face creases a little when he doesn’t find what he’s looking for. His eyes fly to Donnie next, where they only linger for a second before falling to his lap.
Raph can’t imagine how alone he must feel.
“Think so,” the kid says by way of answer. “I mean, my entire body feels like one big bruise, but I didn’t die. So I’ll take it as a win.” He blinks. “Unless I did die and this is a really weird afterlife. Or my brain is in that pre-death electrical storm and all my cells are depolarizing en masse and this is what it cooked up for me to go out with.”
Okay, the kid is beginning to sound more like a Donatello than a Leonardo now, but the way his voice is getting tighter and faster is all Mikey when he freaks himself out.
“Hey, hey,” Raph says as he stands, shoving his plate towards Leo blindly and lifting his empty hands. It doubles as a ‘slow down’ gesture, and also as a means to grab Blue if he passes out. “Cool it, kiddo. We’re not a—a brain tsunami or whatever the hell you just said.”
“That’s probably what a brain tsunami would say,” Blue says faintly.
Raph takes those few steps to the kid’s side, coming to stand between him and Splinter. He reaches out to tap the bottom of the mug Blue’s strangling.
“Drink,” he orders. “You’re safe here. If you need someplace to panic, or scream, or throw things, I’ll show you my wreck room. But you’re not allowed to see it at all if you pass out again.”
The kid obediently lifts the mug to his mouth, mumbling a petulant, “Okay, mom.”
It’s the exact same tone of voice that Raph, Mikey, Donnie and even Casey have used to say those exact same words to Leo. Raph’s shock must show on his face, because Splinter lets out a quiet huff of laughter. Leo’s laugh, somewhere behind them, is louder.
The miserable expression on Blue’s face clears after the first sip. Leo’s favorite drink when they were little, before he started to abandon childish things and mold himself into the shape of a leader, was strawberry milk. From the way Blue lifts wide gold eyes towards Mikey and holds the mug closer to his center, it’s his favorite, too. And it’s a piece of home he wasn’t expecting to find in this weird place.
Mikey winks at him and a line of tension in Blue’s shoulders fades away. For the second time since waking up, Blue smiles back. It comes a little easier to him this time.
Raph isn’t surprised. A Mikey makes everything better.
“While I can understand why a wave of short-circuiting neurons in your brain might seem like the most logical explanation for this,” Donatello says, which makes goddamn one of them, “I can promise you that this is real. You fell through a portal in Brooklyn.”
“A portal?” Blue asks. “A yellow one?”
“Yeah! You remember?” Mikey says brightly.
“I remember the light,” he replies slowly. He sets his cup down, and his hand drifts over to the crumpled-up photo sitting on the cot beside him. He doesn’t lift it or look at it, he just sets his hand on it, like he’s taking strength from its existence. “It was so dark and cold, and then the sun came out. I think I reached for it. I don’t know how I ended up here.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Leo says firmly. “And those chains, too.”
“Chains?” the kid asks.
“The ones on your arm,” Donnie says. “You don’t feel them?”
Little Blue looks down at both his casted and his whole arm, frowning. He lifts the whole one closer, turning it, and Raph catches the faint glimmer of those stubborn chains before they explode into burning gold. Blue yelps in surprise, and Raph’s brothers fly to their feet.
“Did that hurt?” Mikey says all frantic, flapping his hands.
It’s a fair question. Little Blue’s eyes are still wide and stunned, but now they’re filling rapidly with tears. He touches the chain the same way Leo had, like he’s testing something. It’s on the tip of Raph’s tongue to warn him not to, but it turns out not to be necessary.
That aggressive show the lights put on for Raph and his siblings is nonexistent. Those purple sparks circle Blue’s fingers harmlessly. The red glow is a steady, unfaltering warmth. The chains themselves cinch tighter, resolute and unbreakable.
Donnie’s mind is racing behind his brown eyes. He’s putting together what Raph’s heart had already figured out back on that rooftop.
Wherever one of them goes, they all go. It didn’t make sense to find any version of Leonardo by himself, because his brothers would never have let him go without a fight. The place he belongs to would fight tooth and nail to keep him.
Sure enough, Little Blue hugs his arm against his plastron and whispers, “Thanks for holding onto me.”
Then he’s in motion. He knocks back the rest of his strawberry milk like he’s a character in a Western film throwing back a shot of rye, crams the photo into the pouch at his waist, and hops off the cot. He staggers immediately, catching himself on the arm of Splinter’s chair. The whole thing is not giving Raph a whole lot of confidence in whatever this kid is planning, but he gets the feeling that trying to stop him now would be like trying to stop a trainwreck with his bare hands.
Blue points at the butter knife on Leo’s plate, there because he eats his omelets like an old man.
“Can I borrow that?”
“Uh, sure,” Leo says, standing up and passing it over.
“Thanks,” his young counterpart says with a winning smile, just seconds before it lights up in his hands and changes shape. When the bright blue glare fades, there’s a katana in the kid’s hand where a butter knife used to be.
“What the fuck?” Raph and Mikey shout at the same time, though Mikey’s is more of a delighted shriek.
Blue is blinking rapidly, like he’s trying to clear his gaze. He’s swaying where he stands, and Splinter’s brow is folded in concern, but before anyone can stop him, he lifts his shiny new sword in front of him and slashes down through empty air.
Right away, a small cyan portal opens in front of him. It’s charged and electrified, a playful spinning thing. Raph’s heart is racing, and he puts out a hand to keep Mikey firmly behind him. Similarly, Leo has a solid grip on the leather strap across Don’s plastron, because their little brothers are both the same type of idiot in opposite directions when it comes to sparkly unexplainable things.
Little Blue, for his part, looks disappointed in his portal and in himself, and it bleeds quickly into frustration. “Come on,” he says, shaking the sword in his hand. He forces the portal open a little wider, gaining a few inches in diameter. It’s still not big enough to be anything like a door, or even a window.
“Your qi is exhausted,” Splinter says gently. “It will take days yet to build it up into even half of what it should be.”
“I don’t want to wait days,” Blue grits out, hand white-knuckled around the hilt. “I want to go home.”
The chains on his arm begin to unravel, elongating impossibly, becoming bigger and denser. Now they more closely resemble the heavy-duty chains Don uses in the garage to lift engines above his head. Two loops remain around his wrist, and the rest of it goes flying into that portal.
For a moment, nothing happens.
And then, to put it in scientific terms, the portal fucking explodes.
What started as the size of a dinner plate is now easily big enough for the Battle Shell to barrel through with plenty of clearance on all sides. It stands almost as tall as the ceiling and just as wide. And it barely has a chance to exist in this state for more than a second before multiple bodies come hurtling through from the other side at break-neck speed.
“LEO!” three young voices scream, and Little Blue drops his sword to meet the chaos with open arms.
“Took you long enough,” he says warmly.