#sequel to this where leo gives woody the shovel talk

[taizi]

So lil request if ya feel up for it :-}

★ A story about Mikey's brothers finding out about his and Woody's secret relationship(?). Like, maybe it can be that one of them are going through Mikey's phone and they see his camera roll full of photos of him and Woody !! Or like they walk in on the two cuddling asleep or something idk :-0

Do whatever U want 💖

i went with rise on this one. i missed those guys :')

read on ao3

x

Don slams into the infirmary with a shout of, “LEO! Leoleoleoleoleoleo!”

“Congratulations, my name just sounds like noise to me now,” Leo replies drolly, as if he’s not ecstatic to have company. Sure, Raph had been camped beside his bed up until like ten minutes ago, but a lot can happen in ten minutes. 

As if to prove it, Don shoves a phone into Leo’s face. “Michael—our Michael—has a boyfriend.”

Leo sits up so fast he feels it in his entire body, an ache radiating down his spine like it’s a gong that just got rung.

“You’re lying!” 

“I would never lie to you,” Donnie says, his tone a weird mix of agitated and absolutely giddy.  

Such a gossip, Leo thinks fondly. 

Don piles onto the bed, still careful of Leo’s broken bones but a far cry from the cautious, mincing way he climbs in lately for their Youtube video essay marathons or vent sessions. Leo might have to orchestrate more tantalizing secrets for his nosy twin to uncover if it stops him treating Leo like something glass that’s about to break. 

Shoulder to shoulder, Donnie holds the phone where they both can see it. Now that Leo’s looking at it properly, he clocks the glittery sticker-covered military-grade phone case and says, “Oh, no. Tello, you didn’t. Look me in the eyes and tell me you didn’t steal his phone.”

“It’s called the Freedom of Information Act.”

“That does not apply here!” Leo is torn between horror—because Mikey is objectively terrifying—and glee—because Donnie is an absolute menace and he loves to see it. 

“Agree to disagree. I could have just cloned his phone onto a new device but where’s the pizzazz? Anyway—”

He brings up Mikey’s camera roll, scrolling through dozens of post-invasion celebratory selfies and candids, past a few scattered pics of Mikey’s own cooking and digital art (and Leo makes a mental note to revisit that, because there aren’t as many of those as there ought to be) and finally making an “ah-HAH” sound under his breath, tapping on a particular picture to blow it up. 

It’s a selfie taken at arm’s length of two faces squished together to fit the frame. One face belongs to Leo’s little brother, caught mid-laugh. The other one is distinctly human, almost lost in a haphazard cloud of yellow curls and turned sideways to plant a kiss on Mikey’s spotted cheek. 

Leo finds himself smiling involuntarily. Mikey looks happy. It’s cute. 

Of course, if Mikey thinks he can have a whole-ass secret boyfriend and get away with it, he’s got another thing coming. Not when he has three older brothers and an older sister who have been waiting their entire lives for this moment. 

“This doesn’t prove they’re dating,” he points out, mostly just to play devil's advocate. “Maybe they’re super affectionate friends. The five of us do cheek- and forehead-kisses on occasion, too.”

“Mm-hmm, yes, I thought you might say that, and I am, of course, prepared to offer more evidence.” 

Donnie taps out of the photo gallery and brings up Mikey’s messaging app. He scrolls for a bit, past the sibling group chat, April, their own names, Raph, their dads—even Rupert, what the hell?—and then, right beneath Piebald and before Casey Sr., is a text thread with a contact simply, and tellingly, labeled babe💛.

On pure reflex, Leo smacks the phone out of Don’s hand before he can open the thread. 

“So what we’re not about to do is read his texts to and from his boyfriend,” he says, very deliberately, so a single world won’t be misconstrued.

“I wasn’t gonna,” Donnie mumbles, in a tone that suggests that he was, in fact, gonna. 

Leo picks up the phone and goes back to the picture. He checks the timestamp, humming thoughtfully to see that it was from a little over two months ago. They've certainly been busy since the whole Krang situation, but Mikey has always had time for the things he loves. He makes time. He’s just a kid, albeit one who had to grow up too fast, but he was born with a good sense of what’s really important.

And this guy, Leo thinks, seems like he could be important. So why is this the first they’re hearing about him?

“How exactly did you make this discovery?” Leo asks, handing the stolen phone back. 

“S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N. regularly scans all of our devices for anything icky—you’re welcome—and he asked me who the blond guy was,” Donnie explains offhandedly. “He thought we had a new friend he hadn’t met. You know how he gets when he thinks we’re leaving him out of literally anything.”

“Like father, like son,” Leo says sagely.

Donnie lowers the phone and makes direct eye contact. “No.”

Leo laughs so hard he thinks he might actually be in danger of puncturing a lung with one of his broken ribs. Donnie goes back to snooping, but there’s a pleased quirk at the corner of his mouth. 

“DONALD!” a voice thunders suddenly from down the hall. “IF WHAT I THINK IS HAPPENING IS HAPPENING, IT BETTER NOT BE!”

“Eughh boy,” Leo says. 

Looking as though he just saw his life flash before his eyes, Donnie shoves the phone at him and blurts, “You take it! You’re a convalescent, he can’t kill you! It would be against the Geneva Conventions!”

“Oh, I see, you want me to use my horribly mangled body as a meat shield between you and the consequences of your own actions.” Leo holds his hands up and open to avoid having any incriminating evidence forced into them. “Also, I think you skipped like six years of Social Studies.”

The infirmary doors slam open hard enough that one of Leo’s shelves of meticulously organized medical supplies rattles ominously. Mikey looms in the threshold, silhouetted against the light from the den. It’s appropriately intimidating.

There’s a beat of silence. Then Mikey’s eyes lower to the bright yellow phone in Donnie’s hands. It’s indie-film levels of drama. Leo is eating this up. 

Donnie whispers, “Oh, Hawking, I did not think this through.”

“When you die, who gets your laptop?” Leo whispers back. 

“I knew it!” Mikey shrieks. “You think S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N. can keep a secret?? S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N.?? You programmed him with all your own tells! I’m going to destroy everything you love!” 

The resulting cat-and-mouse chase around the infirmary is rowdy enough that it summons Raph, warm and fresh from the shower, dressed in his favorite huge pink hoodie. He catches Donnie on his way by and lifts him bodily out of the melee. Mikey is bloodthirsty enough that he scales Raph like a tree and their biggest brother is forced to hold Donnie out at arm’s length to keep the two of them apart.

“Woah, woah, hey—Jesus, what is happening?” Raphie says. His eyes dart to Leo, one dark and the other a pale milky pink, but it’s still the same look he’s given Leo a billion times before. The one that says loop me in. 

Leo searches under his pillow for the palm-sized knife he keeps there and focuses hard. Two little cyan portals open, maybe the size of dessert plates, one next to him and the other by Donnie, a neat little wrinkle in the dimension. He reaches through it and retrieves the phone. 

Pretending he doesn’t feel woozy after the brief use of ninpo well before he was technically allowed to use it again—because then he would have to admit that Draxum was right about something, and frankly he’d rather die—Leo waves the recovered goods at his brothers.

Mikey stops trying to kill Donnie and stares across the room with a very vulnerable, unhappy expression. Leo hates that, so he takes charge. 

“Just the Cain Instinct at work, Raphala,” Leo says, smiling. “How about you deliver Donnie to April for a lecture on respecting other people’s privacy, and I’ll talk to Mikey about the pros and cons of fratricide.”

“Pros and cons? What pros? You know what, nevermind,” Raph adds before Leo can answer, holding Donnie more comfortably in the crook of his arm as Mikey hops down from his shell. 

Donnie is dead-weight at this point, gone totally limp and accepting his fate. Since a lecture from April has a fifty-fifty chance of turning into a gossip session, Leo doesn’t feel bad for his twin at all. 

“And don’t think you're not in deep shit for that portal just now,” Raph says severely, pointing at him. “Yeah, Raph clocked that. No ninpo while you’re healing, Leon, or I’m telling pops.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Leo says dismissively.

But Raph still comes over to rub his head, and Leo still leans into him when he does, because a little part of Leo is always going to be six years old with stars in his eyes, gazing up at his biggest brother like Raph could hold the whole sun in his hands if he wanted to.

When Raph has carted Donnie away, the infirmary is much quieter. Mikey slinks over to the bed ungraciously and invites himself right up, pressing into Leo’s side and hiding his face in a yellow-striped shoulder.

Leo passes him back his phone. Mikey tucks it against his plastron and doesn’t say anything.

“So the pros of fratricide would be that your stuff would get stolen way less,” Leo begins airily. 

With a huff, Mikey nudges him. 

“He showed me a picture, but we didn’t read any texts,” Leo adds, less playful. “As far as we know, you have a really good friend we just haven’t met yet.”

“Yeah,” his little brother says quietly. He presses his face harder into Leo’s shoulder. Leo works his arm out from in between them and wraps it around Mikey’s carapace instead. 

Tracing a familiar pattern between the scutes, he says, “You know you can tell me anything, right?”

When Leo came out, a few years ago now, he was terrified. 

It was just another thing that made him difficult, that made him harder to love, that might cost him what little of his father’s good opinion he thought he had. He kept it a secret, tucked behind the armor of his plastron where no one but himself would ever see it.

But then one day, when he was fourteen, Leo found Raph in the living room, watching Youtube videos of the NYC Pride Parade with something young and hopeful on his face, only to slam the laptop shut when Splinter came in. Raph’s expression had twisted into something ashamed. Afraid. 

And Leo thought, Absolutely not.

So he came out to his family over dinner that same night. He said it like his hands weren’t sweaty and shaking beneath the table, like he hadn’t practiced the words and tone in the mirror for an hour beforehand. 

He couldn’t force himself to look at Splinter, twisting some spaghetti onto his fork and following his big announcement with something stupid, like, So I guess you could say the only straight I am’s a straight-up bitch. That way everyone would know it wasn’t serious, wasn’t a big deal, they could stop looking at him now please. 

Raph didn’t even get after Leo for saying the bitch word. He flew to his feet and rounded the table and scooped Leo up into a big bear hug. Well, Leo and Mikey, because Mikey was already attached to him at that point. Donnie said, “Gasp! This is my surprised face. Whoever could have anticipated this astonishing turn of events?” because he was an asshole. But he also reached over the table to put his garlic bread on Leo’s plate, because he was the absolute best. 

Leo’s heart didn’t stop racing for what felt like hours, even after his brothers squeezed him to death and made a bunch of noises about loving him no matter what, even after Splinter informed the table at large that his Baby Blue could start thinking about dating boys in another thirty years and not a minute sooner! 

But he did that for a reason. So his brothers had a lead to follow if they ever needed one. So they wouldn’t be scared like Leo constantly was.

And now the tension slowly leaks out of Mikey’s frame. 

“I know. I know,” he says, stronger the second time. “I guess I got all in my head about it. At first I wanted it to just be my thing, for me. I liked him but I wasn’t sure if he—you know. And then when he did, everything was perfect, and I didn’t want to mess it up.” He sits up enough that he can look at Leo, red-brown eyes earnest and wide. “Then the longer I didn’t say anything, the more impossible it felt to ever say anything. It’s not ‘cause I didn’t—”

“You don’t owe me or anybody else an explanation, Angie,” Leo says, tugging on the tails of his mask. “If you want to talk about him, I’m all-ears. If you want me to blackmail Donnie into forgetting he exists, I can do that, too. I’ve got the goods.”

Mikey smiles. It’s a relief to see. “I have no idea how you did it,” he says. “How you just told us like it was nothing. Told dad. I guess being his favorite probably helped.”

His WHAT?

Leo chokes on an incredulous laugh. He thumps his own chest, wheezing. Mikey rolls his eyes and slumps down again, gets comfy, a familiar weight under Leo’s arm. 

“Puh-lease, Lee. You two are like the same person, all the way down to the inherent self-worth issues and validation-seeking. Of course he’s going to feel complicated about loving a carbon-copy of himself when he hates himself so much.” After a moment, Mikey adds, “I think you help him feel better about who he is.”

Huh. Welp. Time to pack all of that up to think about later because otherwise Leo’s brain is going to explode.

“Nice attempt at distracting me, but I’m the master of misdirection.” Leo jostles Mikey, enough to make him whine stoooop. “If you think for one second you’re not everyone in the entire family’s favorite person, then there’s something deeply wrong with you,” he adds severely. “Junior has only been here for like five minutes and even he likes you best.”

Mikey’s grinning by the time he’s done. Leo can feel the shape of it against his arm. 

“It’s a gift,” the youngest Hamato says humbly. 

Identical chimes from the phone in Mikey’s hand and the one on the bedside table alert them to a new text in the Mad Dogz group chat. 

Bootyyyshaker9000 After an illuminating conversation, during which absolutely no robot sons were taken hostage to force my compliance, I have seen the error of my ways and will endeavor to change my behavior. I wanted to offer my sincerest apologies to Angelo for my invasion of his privacy. I am not making this statement under duress. YellowSubmarine Good enough for you, baby?

Mikey’s grin graduates with honors into a laugh, that charming, full-bodied thing that fills whatever room he happens to be in. He types a quick reply and the group chat goes crazy. Leo sort of just lays there and takes the moment in. 

In about an hour, it’ll be time for another round of medication, but Leo thinks—even though it’s sappy and saccharine and he would never, ever say it out loud—that this is medicine enough. 

“Sooo,” Leo says, “you gonna tell me about him?”

“Leo,” Mikey groans, but he’s still smiling. 

“Oh, come on, you have to give me something.”

“How ‘bout a trade?”

Aww, his baby brother knows how to barter. Leo is so proud.

“I’m listening,” he says.

“I’ll tell you about Woody,” Mikey offers, waving his phone around, “if you tell me about that bunny waiter from Run of the Mill who asked for your number.”

Leo would shoot upright if he had, like, a completely unbroken back. As it is he has to move a little slower. 

“What?? Why—how did you—I mean, who?” Nailed it.

“Raph overheard the entire thing,” Mikey says sweetly. “He thought it was cute so he told me since I was right there. You know he can’t handle cute without gushing about it to somebody.”

It’s Raph’s knee-jerk reaction, like cute-aggression; only instead of squeezing or biting, he has to overshare to the nearest available party, usually while choking back tears. 

Kneading his temples, Leo forces out, “Mm-hmm.” 

He can’t even be mad, though. It’s Raph. If Donnie had been the one to overhear, it’d be plastered on a billboard above Times Square by now. 

“Lemme have this one on Donnie,” Mikey says, and brings out the big guns, brown eyes all wide and liquid. “He always gets your secrets first.”

“Disaster twins privilege,” Leo replies, so he doesn’t have to think about the novel concept that his family could believe his secrets are worth anything. “Alright, Miguel. Since it’s to spite Dontron specifically, you have yourself a deal.”

Mikey whoop-whoops, with the arm and everything. It’s so stupid. And it makes Leo think, This Woody guy doesn’t know how lucky he is.