#anon im sorry this took forever ! ive been planning this little coda since u sent me that ask

[goodlucktai]

first of all your fic has me sobbing (i'm not exaggerating like i really am sobbing), second of all what was it that mikey said in his sleep though 👀

walk with open hands

x

Splinter goes from the rooftop battle to the lair in seconds and he’s staggered by the sudden shift. The calm and safety of his hidden underground home is disorienting. His heart is still racing with adrenaline. He curls forward and clutches his youngest child close to his chest and prepares himself for the next wave of danger. In that moment, Splinter would be willing to tear through Saki with his teeth. 

A footfall in the doorway snatches Splinter’s attention. His gaze snaps that way and lands on Leonardo, who looks at him like he’s seen a ghost. It’s a look that makes Splinter’s fur stand on end. He’s never seen his eldest look so brittle and diminished, as if he’s buckling under the weight of the world. 

And then Leonardo’s eyes dip lower, to the weight in Splinter’s arms, and fear chases everything else out of his expression like hounds running down a fox. Iron shoots through his spine and he crosses the room in two running leaps, already shouting behind him for his brothers. 

Because Michelangelo is writhing like a creature possessed. His arms are a horror, green skin flaking away as gold eats its way up in jagged, crooked lines. 

The boys come together like a well-oiled machine, scrambling desperately to help, every other thing they must be feeling shoved aside in favor of fear for their youngest. 

Leonardo leans over the smallest of his siblings and soothes him in a shaking tone, wiping away his tears in such a clear echo of Shen that it seems impossible she didn’t raise him herself. 

“Leonardo,” Splinter says, “qigong, now.”

His eldest hurries to obey. He’s clearly overwhelmed, clearly terrified, but the given task allows him a sense of purpose that clears the storm in his mind. His hands don’t shake or fumble, because he can’t afford them to. 

It takes several long moments. Longer than it should. That golden light wants to keep living in Michelangelo, has found a place in his soul it doesn’t want to leave. Splinter pours as much of his qi into the healing hands as he possibly can, determined to chase it and all the pain out. 

Finally, Michelangelo’s anguished thrashing tapers off. He heaves a great, shuddering breath, and all the tension in his body blows away with the exhale. Splinter sits back on his heels and feels about a hundred years old.  

“Infirmary,” Donatello says at length, his voice low and blunt. It’s unclear who the order is for, but everyone moves at the same time. Splinter leans forward to lift Michelangelo back into his arms, and tries not to notice the way Raphael yanks his hand away before it comes into contact with his father’s. 

The weight of one of his sons is a familiar thing to carry. Splinter has done this a thousand times before—the early mornings after movie nights, those accidental sleepovers when pre-teen plotting ran late—and he finds himself grateful that they’re still small enough that he can manage it. 

They’re still so small. What has he been doing, leading them headlong into this war? The second he became aware of the Shredder in New York City, he should have bundled them all up and fled with them as far as he could. 

Michelangelo is dwarfed by the infirmary bed and his eyes are half-lidded but he resists sleep with ferocious stubbornness. The same stubbornness that always managed to outlast his brothers’ difficult moods, that made him a force of nature in the dojo only when he wanted to be, that saved Splinter’s life on that rooftop moments ago. It takes all four of them to convince him to pry open his hands and release wakefulness and slide away through the darkness into healing sleep. 

Then Donatello is all business, blinking past the wet sheen in his eyes and drawing the blanket away from his younger twin. He reaches for a pair of shears on a nearby work table and begins cutting through the pink jacket.

“Hey,” Raphael says without heat. 

“It’s ruined anyway,” Donatello fires back. “And I want to look at his shoulder.”

Donatello has always put more stock in medicine than qigong, and it’s fair of him to be concerned about the source of all the blood staining the bright material a stomach-turning rust color. Leonardo leans in to help, eyes boring into Michelangelo’s pale, tear-stricken face as though committing the latest in a long line of personal failures to memory.

Splinter stands out of the way, hands folded in the sleeves of his ripped robe, watching the process from over their heads.

He has seen Michelangelo in this particular jacket three times now. 

The first memory comes rushing back—the meadow in the shadow of the mountain, the little river spirit in an inexplicable pink hoodie—the way it trembled where it stood, as if it couldn’t feel the warmth of the sun, and how clearly Splinter could recognize pain when he saw it. And despite all of that, the spirit smiled at him. It offered apology, and thanks, and even love. It spoke with the simple integrity and powerful empathy characteristic in children. It was definitely, Splinter had realized with a sinking heart, someone’s baby. 

He revisited the memory in a dream, not even a full decade later, and recognized that little river spirit instantly as his baby. Splinter sprang out of bed with all the strength and speed he possessed, sweeping down the tunnel into the room that functioned as a nursery. The turtles were too small for their own rooms and still preferred to slumber together in a pile, and Michelangelo was comfortably squished beneath Donatello, their little faces peaceful and untroubled. 

Splinter sat beside their nest for the rest of the night, his heart pounding. Michelangelo was so tiny and fragile in his sleep, when his limitless energy and manic good cheer didn’t make him appear two times larger than life. Splinter couldn’t begin to imagine how he could have ended up in that meadow. He couldn’t summon any reasonable explanation why the precious child would cry and apologize so earnestly. 

When Michelangelo got a little older, and he and his brothers were progressing effortlessly through their training, Raphael made the executive decision that the four of them should wear masks, like the heroes in their Saturday morning cartoons. Splinter obliged him, and took the boys into the side tunnel he used for storage, allowing them to pick from the fabrics he had available. Michelangelo went straight for a sunny orange color as if it had always been his. And in a way, Splinter thought, feeling both unrelentingly fond and quietly apprehensive, it always had been. 

The second memory of the turtle in the pink jacket did not stand out the way the first and the last did. On an unremarkable afternoon, Splinter had happened upon a frenzied Michelangelo in the den, pacing in restless circles. It only struck Splinter as odd because his sons had left for April’s apartment not even twenty minutes ago. But when he made his presence known, Michelangelo had whipped around with a lethal speed that spoke more of hard-earned experience than it did of training, and his eyes were as wide as the moon. 

It had been a long time since Splinter had worried about the troubling vision of his youngest in Japan. As a parent of four high-energy children, his mind was often occupied by a thousand things at once, each more pressing than the last, and distant memories of dreamlike encounters could not always be in his top ten priorities.

It was not the pink jacket that tugged at recollection that time. It was the way his sweet boy’s face had crumpled, the way he plucked at his sleeves and choked out, “I’m sorry, papa.”

“I should have been good. I’m really sorry.”

And suddenly, Splinter was terrified. Suddenly it felt as though they were on a one-way road and picking up speed, barreling towards an inevitable end. He held Michelangelo as tight as he dared and wanted more than anything to protect him from whatever was coming. All he could do was impress upon the child that he was good, that he was loved, that he never needed to apologize to Splinter—the simple act of existing was a gift Michelangelo had given his family that was impossible to repay, and they would be lost without him. 

Then he let Michelangelo go chasing after his brothers, and wondered if it would be enough. 

The third memory—the rooftop. Coming up on the end of fate’s one-way road. 

Splinter had raised his sons to trust their instincts. To put stock in the things their hearts told them. To listen to the voice in their minds when it urged them to move. It was an order of a magnitude more difficult for some of them than it was for others. Donatello and Leonardo had an inclination towards practicality and the arts they could study and practice. Raphael was too stubborn and righteous to do anything but the right thing, whatever the cost. But Michelangelo was a whirlwind of intuition. Michelangelo could breeze through life on a hunch if he wanted to. 

And on the rooftop, he was a coiled spring, waiting, waiting, waiting for some cue from the universe. He was so hot to the touch he nearly burned, and his arms were glowing through the sleeves of that pink jacket, and his eyes were fixed without blinking on some point above and behind Splinter’s shoulder. 

When the Shredder arrived, Michelangelo was ready. And now they’re here. They’ve crashed through the roadblock at the end of fate’s path and this is what comes after. This unmapped territory, unfamiliar ground. 

“What the hell is that?” Raphael says sharply. There’s a small clock resting against Michelangelo’s plastron, glowing gold and putting out heat like a furnace. 

“Don’t,” Leonardo says, throwing out an arm when Donatello’s hand drifts towards it. “Don’t touch it. Do you have something you can cut the chain with?”

A moment later, the chain around Michelangelo’s neck is broken, and Donatello is lifting the clock away at arm's length with the sort of exacting precision Splinter would attribute to a bomb disposal technician. The second it’s gone, Michelangelo stirs and starts to cry. 

“Wait—don’t go,” he says, and his siblings all jump in surprise.

“It’s okay,” Leonardo starts, but Michelangelo won’t be comforted. 

“I’ll get it right this time,” the child babbles, word salad. He still seems to be half-dreaming. “I’ll try again. Again. Again. Let me try again.”

“Hey hey,” Donnie says, touching his twin’s sweaty forehead with the calloused tips of his fingers, a gentle tap-tap-tap that is a secret code between just the two of them. “Angie, it’s all over, you don’t have to do anything.”

“I can fix it,” Michelangelo sobs, so much pain in every word that it wrenches at Splinter’s heart. “No one’ll know I’m gone. No one’ll miss me.”

Raphael’s eyes are bright and furious and wet. His fists would be curled into dangerous weapons, if both his hands weren’t already curled carefully around one of Michelangelo’s.  

“We’d miss you,” Leonardo says, only barely above a whisper. The grief in his voice is old, but the fear is brand-new. He’d come dangerously close to losing something important, something he might not have survived losing. “We’d miss you every single second you weren’t here, Mikey. What would we do without you?”

Michelangelo sinks back into sleep, never fully awake to begin with. Raphael lowers his head onto the bed, on the pillow of one folded arm, and doesn’t let go of Michelangelo’s hand. The room is tense and silent, all of them waiting for something. Waiting for the thick, clouded atmosphere to break open and finally give into rain. 

Splinter lays a hand on his eldest son’s shell, unsure if the touch will be welcome. Leonardo flinches and goes terribly still. Then his shoulders start shaking. 

“We had a funeral,” Leonardo chokes out.

“You died,” Donatello bites out. He’s unwilling to leave his little brother’s side, but all of his menacing focus is pointed at Splinter like a knife.  

Splinter had made that connection, somewhere in the quiet back of his brain—between the clock and the knowledge that Michelangelo’s best friend is a Timestress and those memories of Michelangelo that stand out in Splinter’s mind, that don’t quite fit in the chronological places they should, and the way his turtles look at him now. It still hurts to hear it. 

“I’m sorry,” Splinter replies, his heart well on its way to breaking. He says it again, “Moushiwake arimasen deshita. The last thing I wanted was to leave you.”

They will certainly need to talk about it in depth at another time. Splinter, of all people, knows trauma when he sees it. But it isn’t a conversation they’re ready to have right now. They’re barely clinging to their composure as it is. Splinter will let them go at their own pace.

“Mikey thinks—” Leonardo starts, and can’t bring himself to finish. 

“We let him think it,” Raphael says. “We all fell apart.”

“I’m not letting him go anywhere without me ever again,” Donatello says bitterly, sinking into a chair beside the bed. “I’m invoking grounding rights. The next time he goes on a time-traveling odyssey, he’ll have a chaperone.”

Leonardo is surprised into a smile. All isn’t lost. “Three chaperones,” he says. 

“Five, once April and Casey hear about this,” Raphael adds, muffled because he refuses to lift his head. 

“That is incorrect,” Splinter interjects. His sons look at him, conflicting expressions on their faces, and so he adds, “There will be six of us. We are a family, and wherever we must go next, we will go together.”

It’s too late now to sweep his children away to some safe, far-away place. They have friends and loyalties and memories tying them to this city. It is their home in a way it never quite managed to be Splinter’s. He missed the opportunity to be the best father to them that he could be. His life is a series of missed opportunities. 

But he has been given, of all wonderful, impossible, undeserved gifts, a second chance. 

“I won’t waste it,” Splinter says, gazing down at Michelangelo’s sleeping face. He still sees his baby sleeping there, untroubled and unburdened and full of light. “I won’t waste another second.”