Archive of Our Own ^beta

Carefully–but not too carefully, because then he’d definitely mess up–he placed half of his foot down onto the ground, the blanket that had been wrapped around him pulled back as he glanced behind himself. He smirked confidently in the dimly-lit room when all that greeted him was the sound of his oldest brother sawing away, the force of it enough to slightly rattle the bed with each inhale. Next to him was Mikey, who sleepily mumbled as he nuzzled himself closer to Raph’s plastron, drool starting to collect at the corner of his mouth.

Sweet! That meant he had lots of time to ex-ah-cute his super secret plans! Raphie was always hovering and had a sixth sense for his brothers misbehaving, but Mikey seemed to be calming whatever all that was just by being with him. Raph had joked that it was a superpower once, his sixth sense, and that it allowed him to know all of Leo’s naughty thoughts, but that was just to scare him.

Probably–he just had to ignore all the times Raph would appear with a big ol’ frown on his grumpy face as he put an end to Leo’s awesome and new way of keeping himself not-bored.

…Mutants were already impossible, and if superpowers were supposed to be impossible, what did that mean for him?

Suddenly feeling less sure of himself, he stared a bit longer at the steady rise and fall of both of his brothers. Donnie wasn’t with them because of his own boring and loud projects. It was one of those that had Leo grumbling and clapping a hand over both ears as he tried to read his comics. But you needed hands for that, so it often ended with what his purple brother liked to call his dramatic temper tantrums, whatever that meant. If you asked Leo, his reaction was reasonable! Anyone would get mad.

Right now he wasn’t mad, though. While the project Donnie had been working on for the past few days was a loud one, the only sounds drifting out from the lab was the occasional sound of metal softly clanging against each other.

Still studying Raph and Mikey, he bit his lip, snout wrinkling in annoyance. Nothing was going to happen! If Raph really could read his mind, he woulda stopped Leo as soon as he heard the idea enter his mind. Besides! It wasn’t like he was doing anything that bad. Just. A little rule-breaking was all.

His eyes flicked to the clock in their room, big numbers in rainbow colors greeting him. The thing had been Pops’ idea, not wanting to get them more than one and already knowing they would argue about the color. That was why this one had all of their colors and more. But the bestest thing about it was that it had a unicorn on the side! Riding a rainbow, too! With little stars and clouds around the rec-tan-gular boxy shape of the clock.

Right now it had a ten and a four-three on it. That was way past their bedtime, and he could already picture how mad Raph would be to know he hadn’t slept yet. Even just thinking about it made him yawn, rubbing an eye slowly. He shook himself hard immediately after, scowling. He couldn’t sleep yet!

Sucking in air and puffing out his cheeks, he placed his whole foot onto the cold ground, then the other. Still, his brothers did not stir, no matter how often he looked behind himself as he slowly inched towards the door. His eyes kept doing this game of back-and-forth, being mindful of the toys he had left scattered on the floor despite Raph's insistence that he clean up before bed. It wasn't Leo's fault that cleaning was so boring and tee-dee-us! It wasn't fun, but now he was wishing he had put some stuff away, just so he wasn't so worried about waking Raph up. Or Mikey. The little guy got cranky when woken up. So, he crept along quietly with bated breath.

Once safely outside, he couldn’t help but pump his fist in triumph, a small ‘yes!’ hissing past his teeth as he happily scampered towards the living room. Pops was nowhere to be seen right now, but Leo wasn’t too concerned about that right now. Sometimes the rat just up and disappeared without any of them being able to find him. That prolly meant he was up there, with the humans. Leo didn’t get why their dad chose to do that so often, even though Raph told him that was the only way for them to get anything. Stuff like that was never shown on TV, though! Why were their lives so different?

Oh well! Leo had something more fun to focus on, and that was his most prized possession! Hands wildly moving at his sides, he crawled up onto the sofa, a small hand squeezing in-between the couch cushions to pull out a comic. The young slider still didn’t know how to read very well, but that was okay! There were plenty of pictures to look at for him to make his own guesses as to what was going on.

The real problem was that Splinter didn’t want him reading this one for some reason, a decision that had been made after the rat quickly turned through the pages. So Leo had to pretend to toss it away when really he had sneakily hid it here in his super secret hiding spot. It made him feel like a hero on TV, hiding a weapon where the bad guys couldn’t see. Lou Jitsu would be so proud!

Smiling, Leo laid down on his plastron, placing the beat up comic close to where the kitchen was. There was always a thin beam of light coming out of there, which was especially good for moments like tonight. Content, he kicked his legs back and forth in the air, one hand keeping his face propped up and the other tracing underneath the words as he silently sounded them out. Every now and then he would mix something up, taking a word from a sentence below the one he was on and making the whole sentence not make sense. Then he would run into a biiiig word that meant nothing to him, no matter how much he put the letters’ sounds together.

Should he write them down so Donnie could tell him what they meant later? As soon as he thought that, he hummed and smashed his face deeper into his palm. Nah, that was a bad idea. Donnie would make fun of him and use even bigger words to confuse him and make him mad. Sometimes it was funny, but when he thought of how much he wanted to learn all he could about this Jupiter Jim guy, he felt sad.

He knew that Donnie wouldn’t ever be mean to make him feel bad, but something about these little night readings were special! They were special even though he had felt confused at seeing turtle-like characters appear in the comic. Leo wanted to be like Jupiter Jim, yet here these guys were, looking more like him and his brothers than anyone else in the world, but bad. Still, Leo liked Jupiter Jim! His adventures seemed so fun, with him going to all sorts of places!

Places that were way more exciting than some dumb ol’ sewer. Whatever. Right now was his special comic time.

With that, he continued his attempts at reading, swaying a bit as he entertained himself.

—--------------------

Donnie admired his work with a critical eye, tilting the mechanism he had been soldering all around so he could analyze it from different angles. Satisfied, he nodded to himself, wiping his hands on a towel as he hopped down from his chair. A glance at his lab’s clock revealed it to be later than he had intended to stay up, but since there were no mothering older brothers around, he assumed that he would easily be able to sneak back into their shared bedroom without a hitch.

Such were his thoughts until he stumbled into the living room, halting in his steps as his eyes met that of Leo’s. Who was looking like a child caught misbehaving, eyes wide and guilty looking as he smiled the weirdest smile Donnie had ever seen on the slider. It wasn’t that usual ambitious and cocky grin that he was used to seeing, nor was it one of his ‘please-don’t-tell-Raph’ smiles. It wasn’t the faux apologetic smile complete with puppy eyes he would give Splinter, either. No, this was something Donnie couldn’t recall seeing before.

It was…oddly sheepish.

But quickly it was gone as his blue brother sat up, attempting to whisper at him as he hid whatever he had been looking at behind his back. The keyword here was ‘attempt’, as the slider wasn’t good at all in regulating his volume no matter what it was he was doing.

“Helloo Tello! I was just, uh, watching TV…?”

Donnie gave him a deadpan look, eyes pointedly looking towards the very much not on TV with a skeptical eyeridge raised. Leo only grinned wider, practically oozing arrogance as if he hadn’t just told the most flimsy lie ever.

“I thought I was the bad liar here,” Donnie said, voice much quieter than the dum-dum brother before him. He stepped closer to the couch, hoping to get a look at whatever it was that Leo was choosing to (quite obviously) keep away from him. This made Leo shift his body, angling his back out of sight as he made a ‘pshh’ sound, waving off Donnie’s words.

“Nobody’s beating you there, egghead. You just happened to–wha–hey!”

Whatever idiocy that was about to leave his brother’s mouth was cut off by Donnie tackling him, wrestling his hands away. He expected a bigger surprise, to be honest. But what he held in his hands was none other than a dirty, battered comic that had clearly been thrown away.

Huh.

“Is this the one Papá had made you get rid of…?”

There was more Donnie had wanted to ask, but found his question trailing off into nothing as he took in his brother’s expression. Leo was making an effort of not meeting his eyes, absently scratching at his cheek as his other hand clenched and unclenched, buried in his nightshirt.

“Maybe…? Leo drawled, still not looking at him.

Now, Leo was no stranger to breaking the rules, especially ones that Splinter set in place. But opening up a page and looking at the comic, Donnie only grew more confused. He could sorta understand why their father had kept the young (and impressionable) slider from reading this particular issue. As annoying as his brother was, he was oddly receptive and sensitive to certain things. He picked up and latched onto all kinds of trivia from their father’s shows, and he was the type to compare and contrast their lives with that of the humans on TV on numerous occasions. Usually it was to whine and complain when he wasn’t getting his way.

But sometimes he wouldn’t be loud in his tantrums. Sometimes he wouldn’t say much of anything, just staring at the TV as the humans did something they would probably never experience.

If stuff like that would upset him, surely seeing alien creatures that resembled them being treated like monsters by humans would set him off. Yet here he was, up at one in the morning, happily reading away to the point he lost track of time. Obviously, something about this comic and its story was appealing to him. Enough to make him - Leo! - sheepish about breaking bedtime rules.

Which was even weirder because Leo was always the type to scoff and avoid doing any kind of lesson. Despite being five, the slider had atrocious handwriting and could barely read the words on a cereal box, so there was no way he should have been so concentrated on making sense of a story with quite a few words in it.

There was only so much he could focus on, though, so he chose to save those questions for later, instead asking, “How long have you been up for?”

Leo just shrugged. “Dunno. It said ten, four-three on the clock when I left.”

“Leo,” Donnie started, going still as he mentally processed and calculated what that information meant. “That was a while ago. It’s already past midnight now.”

The slider’s eyes widened to comical proportions that Donnie would have laughed at if the slider didn’t look so distressed by this news. “You’re lying! I would’ve noticed if it had been that long…”

“Were you just out here reading the whole time?” Donnie asked, brows furrowed. The whole thing was confusing, frankly. Did Leo lose track of time because of his difficulties with reading…?

Or…

Donnie rocked gently on his feet, contemplating. He couldn’t help but think of all the times Mikey, or any of his brothers really, would suddenly appear in his lab with a glass of water, often accompanied by food. They would insist that he had been in there too long, even though it felt like mere minutes to himself. But no matter how much he tried to refute it, they would always be right. It was just another one of those things that seemed to set him apart from his brothers, getting so absorbed in his work that he often didn’t even hear others calling out to him.

Yet now here was Leo, acting much like Donnie in those situations. It was weird to be on the other end.

Speaking of Leo…

“Um, sorta,” he answered after a minute or two, looking down at his hands as he fiddled with them. “I was trying, but a lot of the words didn’t make sense. Then I’d be thinking of what they could mean since some sounded familiar from Dad’s shows, but I’d get distracted real quick. Then I’d have to start over again, so I didn’t get very far…”

Something about the way he said it was so sad. It was weird, Donnie decided. He didn’t like hearing that lilt of embarrassment and shame in his same-aged-in-years brother’s voice. This was Leo, after all! The annoying numbskull that you couldn’t ever get to shut up. Especially when it was about anything he liked. It was almost like–

For what felt like the umpteenth time that night, Donnie paused, mind growing quiet in a way he wasn’t used to it being. Donnie could count a million times his family had brushed off something he had excitedly been talking about, or the way in which their eyes would glaze over when they didn’t understand. He wasn’t like Leo, where he could just plow right ahead, uncaring and unable to understand that no one cared. Donnie cared too much, and it was always hard to get started again when he noticed the subtle shift in attention. Yet, he couldn't help himself from talking, talking, talking away about the things he loved so much. They occupied his mind so much, his creations, that it was hard to turn his attention away from anything else. It made even simple things like sleeping hard; even moreso if he was tinkering away to rid himself of the bad feeling he got whenever he felt like his favorite thing to do was being dismissed.

This past week, however, Leo had been asking more questions than usual. Almost like…

Almost like he got it, which was strange, because they couldn’t be any more different most of the time. They fought over and about everything. Where Leo was rowdy and loud, Donnie was typically more quiet and preferred to be on his own in a quiet space. Leo didn't think through things well, whereas Donnie thought about and worried over things too much. There were similarities, however, if he thought about that observation he had just made. Whenever Leo got excited, he would animatedly flap his hands in a way Donnie was familiar with. They both had the habit of biting their fingers when thinking as well, although Leo also had the habit of chomping on everything he could. Almost like Raph was they were younger, but different. Different in a way that...well, it was in a way that Donnie found himself thinking about himself whenever he spotted another behavior of his that no one else around him did.

Testing the waters, Donnie looked back down at the comic in his hand. The vibrant colors that vied for attention even in the poor light conditions stared back at him, as if daring him to make the first move. “So what happens in this story, anyway?”

Leo’s head snapped towards him, eyes narrowing suspiciously. The way his face scrunched up made Donnie want to roll his eyes. It was always the dramatics with this one. Still, something told him that would be the wrong move, so instead he listened patiently as Leo tilted his head and questioned him with a critical eye. “You mean it?”

“Mean what?”

“That you really want to know. That you're interested in it.”

“I wouldn’t have asked if I wasn't,” Donnie answered truthfully, already hoisting himself up to sit beside his brother.

Said brother was still looking at him a bit hesitantly, but ultimately his excitement won out as he began to tell Donnie in rapid detail everything he had managed to learn. Lots of it sounded painfully Leo-like to the point that Donnie was positive the other had been supplying his own take on words to fit his imagining of what was going on, but that was fine.

It was fine because Donnie quickly found himself also being pulled in, supplying Leo with definitions as they both poured their attention to the pages of the comic, reading it together.

And that was how a panic-stricken Raph found them, huddled up together and snoring light, a comic loosely grasped in Leo’s hand. Splinter would definitely be having words with them later, but for now, Raph smiled as he covered them with a blanket, letting them sleep.