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morrigan-cotk95 · 13 days ago

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hold the world to its best (7/?)

rottmnt word count: 2k pairing: raph & OC title borrowed from light by sleeping at last part of the archer au

with art by @soldrawss !

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Raph wakes up early the next morning to the feeling of something going missing. A tiny weight beside him that isn’t there anymore.

The only reason it isn’t immediately alarming is because he can hear Leo talking quietly, the only cue his subconscious needs not to panic. He still cracks one eye open in time to see a familiar silhouette disappearing out his bedroom door.

Since the storm, Gio has been a little clingier and a lot quieter. It seemed to have stirred up anxiety that hasn’t settled yet, like sediment in water that’s taking its time drifting back to where it usually rests. When he isn’t actively being distracted from it, it sits with him, casting him in shadow.

He has enough shadows as it is. At four years old, they’re so much bigger than him.

I wonder if he had a nightmare, Raph thinks, and with that thought the grogginess still clinging to him vanishes instantly. With the sigh of someone who knows he won’t get back to sleep until he checks in, Raph hauls himself up out of bed.

There’s a light spilling out of the living room doorway, a block of warm yellow stamped across the hall. More than that, it’s the sound of his brothers’ voices that Raph’s following, that he’d be able to follow clear across the world. It probably wouldn’t even be the hardest thing he’s ever done.

“—couldn’t get back to sleep either,” Leo is saying as Raph draws nearer. His tone is low and friendly, an automatic balm to frayed nerves. “I appreciate the company, Jorgito.”

It slaps Raph upside the head that he managed to forget about his little brother’s years-long losing battle with insomnia. In part, he thinks guiltily, because ever since Gio moved in, it’s been something they all worried less about.

Those first weeks after the invasion were rough for everyone, but it was especially hard to watch Leo wake up from a night terror and have absolutely no idea where he was. No idea if he was safe. Shuddering away when they reached out to him, eyes darting around the room with an expression of raw fear—as if he was an animal being hunted by some unimaginable monster, and not a teenage boy surrounded by the people who would kill for him with their teeth and bare hands if they had to.

All of them got a lot of practice at talking him down, at remembering to keep a light on for him. But Gio had a built-in fast-pass. Gio only had to put himself in Leo’s line of sight and take his hands, this brother of theirs who found Leo in the dark and carried him home in the first place, and all of the electrified, lock-jawed terror would seep from Leo like water down a leaky drain. If Gio was here, it meant he’d already been saved. It was a touchstone that never failed.

The odds are very good that no one has thought to check in with Leonardo since Giorgio was cursed. Raph tries to think of when he last saw Leo without his mask and can’t pin it down.

“Guess you’ve always been an early bird,” Leo goes on, “even back when you were just a little baby bird. Mikey’s the same way—up with the sun for every second of the day till it goes down again. The circadian rhythm of a bumblebee, and just as busy as one, too. Ninety-percent of papa’s gray fur is that maniac’s fault, don’t believe anything anyone else tells you.”

Whatever Gio says in reply is too quiet for Raph to hear from the hall. He moves forward, enough to look through the doorway, and his heart melts into putty at the sight of Leo curled up in dad’s armchair with Gio nestled cozily on his plastron, the two of them nearly nose to nose and tucked under the cover of the family-favorite quilt.

If Leo’s tired, it doesn’t show. It’s hard to tell with him even on a good day. But his smile is one of the crooked, sincere ones.

“It’s nice of you to give me the chance to turn the tables.” Leo pokes one of the spots on Gio’s face. “I get to be the one that helps you out for a change.”

Gio asks something with his hands. Raph can’t see clearly enough from this angle to make out more than just the little question mark wiggle at the end. It makes Leo laugh, warm and golden, spilling light as easily as the glow from the lamp pours into the hallway.

“Are you kidding? My big brother Georgie is a professional monster-slayer. I learned all my moves from the best.”

Gio doesn’t say or sign anything else—he just considers that statement with a gravity ten times his current age, visibly working it around in his head the way he’d work a jawbreaker around in his mouth. Then he carefully tucks himself under Leo’s chin, one small hand clinging to the long tails of Leo’s mask.

He doesn’t look like he’s going to fall asleep again, even when Leo starts to hum a song by The Cranberries. He looks more like he’s prepared to soldier awake through the next hundred hours in a row if it means more time to absorb a hug and a song from someone happy to hold him and sing to him. Gio’s big dark eyes stay stubbornly open, even when Leo scritches along the scutes of his tiny spotted carapace, a tried and true tactic to put baby bothers to sleep.

A riot of tenderness in his chest that only smaller turtles can put there, Raph turns on his heel and takes himself into the kitchen. It’s hot chocolate o’clock. He wonders for a split-second if he should be concerned about Gio’s sugar intake, and then immediately decides that that sweet kid deserves all the spoiling they can manage to pack into however many days they get to have him.

When Raphael pushes past the noren-style curtains into the kitchen, he’s surprised to find Mikey there already, wide-awake—staunchly proving Leo right about being up with the sun like the bumblebees.

Only Raph’s little sunshine isn’t very bright this early morning. Mikey is staring hard at his hands, brushing softened butter over rolled-out dough and rubbing a mix of cinnamon and brown sugar on top of that. He must see Raphael in his periphery—or at the very least sense him with the not-unremarkable perception of someone who is all at once a living weapon, trained ninja, and student of mystic arts—but he doesn’t look up or offer a cheerful, cheeky greeting. There is a distinct downward tuck to the corners of his mouth, firmly unsmiling.

“Hey, kid,” Raph says, watching him as he collects mugs from the cabinet, “everything okay?”

“Uh, no,” Mikey replies sardonically, as if it’s an obvious answer. He battles with himself for all of two seconds before blurting, “I’m not stupid, Raph.”

Raph has no idea what he’s just walked into, but it doesn’t feel like he’s dealing with a grumpy turtle who woke up on the wrong side of the hammock. There’s a level of real hurt in Mikey’s voice that has all of Raph’s protective instincts rearing their collective head.

“Nobody said you were stupid,” he says immediately. “You’re everyone’s favorite person. Wars have been waged for less. What’s going on?”

Mikey’s frown deepens, pure upset in his bright red eyes. He moves onto rolling the dough into a tube and continues to pointedly not look at Raph.

“I keep thinking about the other day. The scars on Gio’s hands that upset you and Leo so much. I didn’t piece it together right away, but I’m not stupid. If Donnie’s tracker that he put on Gio when he was nineteen disappeared, Gio’s scars from then would have gone, too. But they’re still there, because they were there when he was a baby. Someone hurt him. Over and over, until it left a mark.”

He stops, brow furrowing, face screwing up the way it only does when he’s trying to act older than his age—usually when he’s trying not to cry.

“And he’s so thin. What the hell. We need more food than humans our age do, we burn through calories like crazy, and I bet—he was probably always hungry, he probably never got to feel full, and that’s not fair. And it’s just another thing that he carries around with him. And none of us ever noticed, because it was already a part of him when we first met.”

The tears finally burn their way out of Mikey’s eyes, dripping down his cheeks. He glares hard at the dough as he portions it into rolls, the set of his jaw daring Raph to comment.

Raph circles around the island to put a hand on Mikey’s carapace, unable to bear the space of the counter between them for a second longer. When it doesn’t cause the smaller turtle to snap, Raph rubs those sunny patterned scutes the way he can remember doing from as far back as five years old.

“It’s not fair,” Mikey says again in a voice that wobbles. “He doesn’t tell us stuff. And it wouldn’t matter even if he did ‘cause we couldn’t fix it anyway.”

“We are fixing it,” Raph says, knowing it’s true in his blood and his bones. “You’re fixing it, by doing exactly what you do every day. By doing this,” he adds, tapping the corner of the baking pan that the dough rolls are being nestled into, a just-because little kindness that comes to Michelangelo as easy as breathing. “It means the world to him, Mike. You know it does.”

Mikey rubs his face dry on the inside of the collar of his hoodie, takes a deep breath while he’s still hidden, then pops out and declares, “He deserves it!”

“Hell yeah he does,” Raph rumbles back.

The rolls are covered and left to rise and the counter is wiped down, utensils and dishes moved to the sink. Then Mikey squares his shoulders and summons a smile. It’s a good one, huge and toothy and dimpled. He’s dredging up that familiar force-of-nature optimism—less naivety and more plain willingness to wrestle the world into the shape he wants it to take one impossible hurdle at a time.

He spares a moment to shove himself forward into Raph’s arms for a squeeze, and then swings around the island to shoot for the living room at full speed, shouting, “Are we turtle piling?”

“‘Morning, bumblebee,” Raph hears Leo say affectionately. “Hey, Gigi, you think there’s room for Mikey in here?”

“Always room for Mikey,” Gio’s little voice answers clearly. From the way he starts to giggle at the same time Leo lets out a theatrical oof, it must have been all the encouragement Mikey needed to dive right in.

Their overlapping chatter keeps Raphael company as he heats enough milk to fill four mugs. He isn’t going to go crazy and make the from-scratch stuff on the stove the way Mikey finds any reason to, but he’ll add a dash of cinnamon and vanilla extract to the instant mix the way dad always did when they were kids. And he puts an ice cube in Gio’s, knowing the little gremlin is going to go in for a scalding gulp at the first whiff of chocolate. It’s the work of less than ten minutes, and most of that time is spent waiting on the microwave.

Raph’s fingers are too big for the mug handles, but big enough to comfortably carry all four at once into the living room. He doesn’t so much distribute them as he does hold out his hands and wait for smaller ones to reach out and extract their color-coded drink.

“Ooh, thanks Raphie!” Mikey says.

“We’re gonna have to eat raw carrots for lunch at this rate,” Leo says, wrapping both hands around his mug to better absorb the warmth. “Don’t think I didn’t clock the butter and sugar on your sleeve, Michael.”

“Aw, what?” Mikey says, leaning out of the turtle pile enough to check the sleeve in question. He puffs out his cheeks when he finds the stain near his elbow. “Whatever! It’s all for the cause! I’m making cinnamon rolls for my favorite cinnamon roll,” he goes on, nudging his shoulder into Gio’s tiny one.

“Me?” says Gio.

“Of course you,” Leo scoffs playfully. “You see any other cinnamon rolls around here?”

Gio’s eyes are huge and deep and watchful. His mug looks laughably big in his hands. He says, “Your favorite?”

“My favorite ever of all time,” Mikey says, utterly serious. He even means it—all of his siblings are his absolute favorite sibling.

“Really?” Gio checks in a quiet voice. He ducks a little bit, shoulders curling, as if he’s waiting for them to lose their tempers over all the repeated questions, every inch a little turtle weighing the pros and cons of hiding inside his shell.

“Really really,” Raph answers right away.

“Even though I’m a brat?” Gio asks.

Leo goes so still in Raphael’s periphery that he might as well be carved from stone. Mikey is more obvious about his upset, sucking in a sharp breath that hisses through his teeth. Raph’s last drink of hot cocoa feels blistering as it makes his way down his throat, the rest of him abruptly and absurdly cold.

“You are not a brat,” Leo says with as much feeling as when he said I missed on purpose.

“Who said that to you?” Raph asks carefully.

“Everybody,” Gio says. It would sound matter-of-fact coming from anyone else. It still hurts like a knife to the chest. Especially because Gio’s mouth turns down, and his eyes fall to land in the lukewarm chocolate he isn’t drinking anymore, and he says, “I want to be your favorite Gio instead.”

“You are!” Mikey chokes out, practically a shout, and he doesn’t need the warning look Leo gives him over the top of Gio’s head to know better. He bites the inside of his lip until he’s certain he can control his volume and says, “Don’t you listen to anybody else! You’re our big brother and you’re brave and cool and kind and smart, and we love you so much!”

Gio doesn’t immediately break into a smile at that, which should have been the first red flag.

It should have been one of several clues that Raph has been too slow to put together into the obvious picture. Giorgio isn’t a secretive child—he isn’t even really a secretive person at twenty, as mysterious as a plain brick wall—but he speaks so sparingly that it’s hard to gauge when he doesn’t have anything to say, and when he’s doing his best to talk around something that will hurt him.

Later, Raph will kick himself for not catching it. Gio has been asking over and over what the other Gio is like—the big Gio. The better Gio. He’s been absorbing everything they’ve had to say with a serious little face and a downturned mouth, assimilating the information into his understanding of his place in their family.

Of course all of that would lead to the place that it does.

Donatello had felt a type of way about finding out he had incidentally been excluded from impromptu early-morning turtle piles and seized custody of their baby brother for the rest of the day in comeuppance. So Gio should have been tucked away in the genius’ bedroom for an afternoon nap, but instead he was wide awake and peeking through Raph’s door.

Gio hugs a teddy bear as big as he is to his stomach, looking up at the much larger turtle with careful, worried eyes, and asks, “When I’m the brother you like again, will Raphie still hug me?”

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morrigan-cotk95 · 2 months ago

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hold the world to its best (6/?)

rottmnt word count: 2k pairing: raph & OC title borrowed from light by sleeping at last part of the archer au

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The storm rolls in later than the forecast called for, starting in earnest the next afternoon.

The first crack of thunder is so loud, even underground, that it makes everyone jump and Mikey almost fumbles the huge mixing bowl of eggs he’s whisking. It even startles S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N. awake from the nap he was taking in the charging dock in the corner. The string of beeps he lets out must be something pretty foul in binary, because Donnie whips around as quick as a snake.

“Watch your language in front of the impressionable youth!” he yells after his kid, who makes a quick escape down the hall.

Raph’s about to step into the line of fire for his robot nephew’s sake and point out the obvious—that none of them have half an idea what S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N. said, let alone the four-year-old among them—but Leo beats him to the punch.

“Uhhhhh speaking of the impressionable youth,” the slider says, “where’s George?”

“He’s right—oh,” Mikey stops short. His tiny spotted helper has vanished from where he had been parked on the stool pushed up to the counter.

Mikey puts his bowl down and joins Leo in looking around, a frown tugging at his mouth. While he’s distracted, Leo swipes a chunk of bell pepper from his cutting board, which may or may not have been his endgame all along.

“That’s so weird, he was here two seconds ago,” Mikey says.

Raph pushes back from the table and gets up to check the living room. A Jupiter Jim movie is playing on the projector, and Gio has revealed himself to be as much of a fan as the rest of his siblings are, but there are no little turtles sitting transfixed in front of the screen.

“Not in here,” he reports back.

“Stay calm, people, we have protocols in place for this,” Donnie says, tapping his bracer until it projects a holographic screen of color-coded GPS location pins.

“Donald, you did not microchip that baby,” Mikey intones ominously.

“Of course I didn’t. That would be unethical,” Donnie replies. He even rolls his eyes, because he has no sense of danger. “I implanted the chip in his nineteen-year-old self two days after he first moved in, like a reasonable person.”

Raph pinches the bridge of his beak and reminds himself to revisit this conversation later. For the hundredth time in their lives.

“Can you find the kid or not, Dee?”

“Please, name literally one time my Genius Built methods have ever failed us in any capacity. Of course I can find him,” Donnie scoffs, only to frown at the big error symbol that pops up on the holoscreen a second later. “Ah. Update, due to certain magical interference, the tracker currently does not exist. I can’t find him.”

“Great contribution, Tello,” Leo says, sounding like he’s fighting for his life to keep a straight face. “Maybe now we can just look for him with our eyes.”

Another rumble of thunder bullies into the conversation. The new lair is a repurposed subway station, closer to the surface than the old one had been, and this is the first time it’s stormed this hard since they moved in, so none of them were prepared for the magnitude of the sound. It reverberates through the tunnels and pipes, amplified by the metal and cement and hollow spaces.

“He probably went after S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N.,” Raph reasons. “I’ll go find him. You two bozos stay put and help Mike finish making lunch.”

“Are you punishing them or me?” Mikey demands. Behind him Leo steals a cherry tomato off the cutting board, because he also has no sense of danger. Raph gets while the getting is good.

Gio isn’t in the lab, where S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N. is buzzing around singing Speed Drive by Charli xcx to himself, or the bathroom.

Anxiety begins to stir in the back of his heart, where it’s lived for as long as he can remember. It sleeps some of the time, but not as much as it used to.

The steps leading up to the front door have been baby-gated to lengths of absurdity, part of Donnie’s manic lair-wide Georgie-proofing—so the odds of Gio making it past the stairs and into the dark maze-like tunnels in the handful of seconds someone wasn’t actively watching him are slim to none.

It doesn’t stop Raph from worrying. He doesn’t want to shout Gio’s name, because he doesn’t want to do anything on purpose that would make that little boy’s eyes get big and fearful, but he can feel his steps getting more frantic with every room that he checks that comes up empty.

The door to Gio’s room is ajar—it’s rarely ever closed—and Raph pokes his head in without expecting much. Gio—grown-up Gio—doesn’t spend a lot of time in his bedroom, and baby Gio got an eyeful of it on the whirlwind tour Mikey took him on but didn’t seem particularly interested in exploring the space.

It’s a comfortable room. Cozy, even, which is a style that a total stranger might be surprised to find out that Gio subscribes to, but absolutely no one who knows him needed longer than one second to conceptualize before they realized it made perfect sense.

There are string lights draped across the ceiling, and a huge felt board that takes up half the length and height of the back wall, where photos and drawings and little mementos are pinned. A downy polka-dotted duvet swallows up the bed, and the curtains strung across the front-facing window, to block some of the light that beams in from the living areas, are polka-dotted for good measure—because if there’s one thing this family loves, it’s leaning into a bit.

The room would be tidy if not for Gio’s little siblings leaving evidence behind of their constant comings and goings. Donnie’s Switch and wireless headphones are tossed on the bed, and Leo’s guitar is balanced crookedly on the chair by the desk, and the desk itself is covered in the half-inked pages of a graphic novel Mikey is brainstorming. Even one of April’s college textbooks has ended up in here.

Growing up, Raph never understood why all three little gremlins wanted to be in his room all the time—sprawled on his floor bickering over snacks, or cramming into his bed to make him watch two hour long video essays about any obscure topic under the sun—and then Raph got a big brother, and it all clicked. The huge pink beanbag that used to live in Raph’s room had graduated to the corner of Gio’s, where it ended up staying as a permanent fixture. Half the time Raph just lets himself in and flops into his designated seat, in the exact same way that Donnie and Mikey and Leo consistently get on his last nerve for doing.

Gio, who thinks everything his siblings do is silly or charming or both, complains about it a lot less than Raph does.

“Georgie?” he says, just in case there are any turtle toddlers lurking. Of course no one answers, and he’s turning to leave and find another place to look, when he hears two separate sounds. A vicious growling bark of thunder that echoes down the tunnel, and a muffled whimper from much closer.

Raph stops dead in his tracks. Now he’s listening for that second sound again specifically, straining to hear it, all his ninja senses and supersoldier senses and—most of all—biggest brother senses on high alert.

He hears it, and follows it down onto his hands and knees to peer under the bed at where a tiny spotted turtle is hiding.

Gio’s face is streaked with tears and he’s shuddering from head to toe, hands clamped over his ears, limbs all curled up like every frightened instinct in his body is urging him to go inside his shell.

Feeling his heart break clean down the middle, Raph trips over himself to soothe, “Hey, hey, kiddo, it’s okay! Gio, what—”

Thunder rolls, and Gio flinches and makes another quiet sound of fear, and Raph realizes immediately what the situation is. He is also about two seconds from bodily lifting the bedframe and flinging it out of the way to better scoop Giorgio up. He has always, historically, hated any potential barrier between himself and his siblings with a single-minded fervor. He can’t even function when someone he loves is crying and he can’t reach them.

He reigns in the impulse to charge forward. It takes both hands and considerable willpower.

Running in recklessly always worked out when he was a child, because stakes were low and his brothers would follow him anywhere even if they fully believed his plan would fall apart as early as step one.

But as he got older, and had to force the leadership reins into Leo’s unwilling hands, and that charming and reliable guy who was forever on Raph’s right hand side with a clever idea or an exit strategy suddenly became someone willing to let them all fail just to prove a point, Raphael learned the value of thinking things through.

And he can’t just throw the bed out of the way, he reminds himself with gritted teeth, because that would scare the baby.

So instead he settles on his plastron right there on the floor, cheek pressed to the rug, and starts to rumble deep and low in his chest. April calls it his car engine sound, and Donnie has compared it to the healing frequency of a cat’s purr more than once. Guaranteed to comfort frightened little turtles or your money back guaranteed.

Sure enough, after a moment, Gio’s eyes peek open. He’s crying so hard he’s hiccuping, but other than that he’s barely made a peep. Until he manages to focus on Raph’s face, and then his sobs have a little voice behind them.

“Hey, big man,” Raph soothes. “Raphie’s right here. Nothing bad is gonna happen while Raphie’s right here.”

Gio doesn’t budge from where he’s wedged against the wall but he’s listening. He’s such a good kid, always listening. His limbs are curled so tight they must hurt, it would probably feel better for him to just pull inside his shell at this point, but for whatever reason he stays in a miserable little ball.

“That storm is pretty loud, huh? Raph doesn’t like it either.” He reaches an arm under the bed, offering a hand. “But you know something? The best thing about being part of such a big family is that we keep each other safe. Even when it gets loud and scary and makes you wanna hide, you’ve got all of us here on your team.” Then, with a playful frown, he adds, “I’ll go wrestle that storm right out of the sky and make it say sorry for being such a bully and making my Georgie cry. How ‘bout that?”

Thunder rumbles again, and Gio jumps and shivers at the sound, but when he starts to squirm it’s forward, towards Raph’s open hand. He holds it with both of his much smaller ones, tears dripping from his chin, grip white-knuckled.

Lips wobbling, he bravely shakes his head.

“No?” Raph says, playful and gentle in equal parts. “Okay, I’ll stay in here with you instead. Do you think I could fit under there? Scooch over a bit.”

Something that might one day grow up into a smile touches just the corners of Gio’s mouth. He shakes his head again.

“Raphie’s too big,” he whispers. Raph scoffs in fake-offense and the almost smile on Gio’s face inches closer to the real thing. “We can go under the table,” he adds very earnestly.

“That’s the best idea I’ve ever heard,” Raph says, down for literally anything that will make his babyfied older brother stop crying. “Come on over here, spots. We’ll go together.”

Some jangling, dislocated thing in Raph’s heart only settles when he’s got Gio in his arms, tiny, insubstantial thing that he is. He sits on the floor for an extra minute, rumbling extra loud, until Gio’s pulse slows its frantic leaping into something closer to its normal resting rate. The next time the storm tries to speak up where it isn’t wanted, Gio’s tucked safely under Raph’s chin absorbing his car engine sound and only shivers.

Red catches Raph’s eye, a familiar hoodie hanging from the handle of the closet door. He’d given it to Gio months ago, when a cooking incident led to Gio’s jacket getting tossed into the wash, and Raph had said, “Here, you can borrow one of mine.”

He’d fished the old hoodie out of a basket of clean laundry and passed it over. It wasn’t anything to write home about, weathered and faded over the years, the hem stretched out and a corner of the hoodie pocket peeling away thanks to a loose string.

But Gio looked stunned when he saw it. He took it from Raph’s hands robotically and pulled it over his head with a mumbled thank you. It was laughably big on Raph’s big brother, who would probably only have a few inches on the twins for a few more years. Raph grinned and helped Gio roll up the sleeves, saying, “All my siblings steal this one from me constantly. Right of passage.”

“Yeah,” Gio said hoarsely. “Perfect fit.”

Since he seemed to like it so much, Raph let it keep mysteriously ending up in his room. And Raph reaches over for it now, tucking it in with his armful of Georgie as a makeshift toddler blanket before he finally pushes to his feet.

“Sorry,” Gio says very quietly as they make their way back toward the light and laughter pouring out of the kitchen. “For hiding.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Raph says, startled. “Georgie, you got scared, that’s not your fault. Of course you hid, that’s what any smart little turtle would do. Mikey hides when the toaster pops too loud. And I get scared all the time.”

Gio clearly doesn’t believe him, frowning deeply. That stubborn face is one-hundred-percent their Gio. “Raph’s too big and strong to be scared,” the spotted turtle retorts, as close as he’s likely to ever come to a more age-appropriate “nuh-uh!”

“Hah,” Raph says, “I wish that was true.” He looks down at Gio and says, “The thing that always makes me feel brave is remembering that I have all of you guys with me. I have a thing I say that helps. Maybe you can try it next time you get scared. Just say I’m not alone.”

“I’m not alone,” Gio repeats obediently. One day, Raph thinks, it’ll stick.

Until then, they’ll keep reminding him. They’ll drag him out of the dark a hundred thousand times and carry him to a warmer, well-lit place, where his siblings will trip over themselves to put a smile on his face, even if that means eating frittatas on the floor under the kitchen table.

Leo keeps stealing food from Mikey’s plate until finally Mikey leaps on him for the kill, and Donnie shrieks when they kick over the pitcher of lemonade, and Splinter comes in to investigate the noise and takes in the scene and says, “Why are you like this? Who raised you?”

The rest of the storm passes the way storms always do. The next time thunder rumbles through the lair, Gio is too busy giggling to hear it.

#I love them way too much #rottmnt #rise of the tmnt #the archer au

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