#woodyangelo

[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. 

[gorillapomegranate]

Pizza bros inspired by @angelmichelangelo's fanfiction. Really excited about them

I'm also trying to draw more backgrounds. It is somehow easier with urban landscapes than with natural ones tbh

[zeriphi]

~ROTTMNT Woody Dirkins design~ Because Mikey deserves to have his boyfriend exist in more versions than just the IDW comics

[angelmichelangelo]

woodyangelo anon back again !

i love so much that woody is a piece of this boring stable human life mikey has always craved. whenever things get too much i like to think he sneaks out of the lair and goes to woody's, to cry and vent or to just have a moment of escapism and feel normal. woody always leaves one window to his apartment slightly ajar so mikey knows there's always someone in his corner no matter how bad things get...

oh absolutely. woody is this safe space that he doesn’t even realise he craves until he meets him :’)

and the thing that ties in nicely in the tmnt franchise is queer stories. it’s about acceptance and found family and loving who you are and that’s just so mikey-coded. on the outside he seems somewhat content with the life he’s been handed. he doesn’t mind being a mutant. but on the inside he wants to be “normal” and have what everyone else around him has…… if that’s not a little queer coded then idk what is….

he learns to love woody and allows woody to love him back :) it’s all very lovely and good and i think that’s why woodyangelo gives me the warm squishies? like. it’s just nice. and happy. and they’re just comfortable together and they remind me of college boyfriends that are destined to be soulmates forever and i just think it’s really nice :3

please always come and cry about these two goobers with me. nobody else will lmao

[lavena]

Since I am so incredibly desperate for tmnt fic recs, here I am supplying mine. All of these i HAVE READ AT LEAST 3 TIMES

pretty much all Mikey centric and jsyk every one I recommended I reread b4 posting this. Sorry If I repeat any, this took me over a week, college is kicking my butt and midterms are next week, kill me. If you have any you red please lmk either in comments or with rb I need the ficss guys please I am desperate.

On AO3

Train-wreck of thought by halogalopagost

A beautiful 2003 tmnt where Mikey is having trouble meditating and gets some tips from his dad and brothers, he struggles with his ADHD, he over comes it and turns out there is a lot more to this meditating than he thought. he intends to use it to his advantage.

The Legend of the Heiwa no Buki by abz_the_turtle

2012 Mikey is pure of heart and turns out that causes some problems for him, his brothers and a certain bother in blue from the future

exhaust trails through space by SpectrumWriting

2012 B team realizes they really need a break, after a fight between Leo and Donnie, B team pull a few favors and go to visit a few planets, look at some extraterrestrial inventions and get to see a festival of food. Each brother learns new things about each other and finally get to take a few deep breaths.

Surface Pressure by TheKeyBladeMaster1994

Mikey watched Encanto and something abut their family feels familiar. Honest to go so good, it is unfinished and only at 3 chapters but it is 32k words and by god if it isnt one of the best books I have read over 5 times already, featuring mikey being a helpful little brother and managing to stress his big brothers out in the proccess.

Pretend That I Never Left by redstingraven (sirimiri)

2003 Mikey gets taken into the Horizon Zero Dawn universe rather than the superpowered turtle universe in the SAINW episode. Positively glorious, he gets bashed and bruised and comes out the other end with an arrow sticking out of him.

All The Small Things by taizi @taizi

2012 Donnie gets deaged and Mikey gets to be a big brother. Positively adorable, Mikey is an enabler and the poor toaster will never be the same, plus just the right amount of angst to make me squeal.

Underdark by Nekotsuki

2003 Mikey and Leo and stuck in the sewers after a collapse, both are hurt and oh looky here it seems Leo has fainted and Mikey is panicking, it would be great if he could take a full breath to hyperventilate with.

We've been here all along by Taizi

Beautiful 2007 tmnt, Mike gets shot, worries about making Donnie abandon him, Casey says fuck that.

walk with open hands by taizi

Mikey can't get over his fathers death and knows his brothers cant get over it either, and he is going to do something about it, been if it almost costs him everything. Was originally 1 chapter, but a second chapter from Splinters POV makes everything gorgeous.

traveling so far to get there by taizi

different age turtles, 2012 universe, Mikey and Raph gets transported to a post-apocalypses time-line aptly called the after party, no one lives, but Mikey does manage to find himself a monkey companion and Raph really wishes his little brother and him would be back home. Little moment of Mikey and Donnie being twins that is positively adorable and I need more of it ASAP. Its 10k words but reads like 30 in the best way possible, like literally a must read!

Closer by Taizi

adorable human woodyangelo

Problem child by taizi

human AU, Mikey is going to give his big brothers a heart attack, he makes questionable friends, and it seems he has a lot of growing up to be doing

Things You Never Outgrow by taizi

Mikey might just have picked up some less than stellar habits from his family as a baby, and now its coming out to bite him in the butt as his brothers notice.

Know the world in yourself by taizi

Donatello is an aspiring Egyptologist, and close friends with part-time thief and sometimes-scoundrel Casey Jones, who pickpockets an ancient map of the fabled City of the Dead off a young man he stumbles across in the Casbah—a young adventurer, it turns out, and none other than the little brother Donatello hasn't seen in almost eight years

Small spaces by Taizi

After 2012 Mikey gets captured and held by the Kraang, it seems he might just have a new fear, his brothers are not happy about it.

While you're here enjoy the view by taizi

Cute little woodyangelo 2012. They have my heart

Sleepwalking by TheKeybladeMaster1994

Splinter wakes up in a cold sweat and notices that Mikey is missing, and it seems like a dark entity is after his littlest sons light, good thing its just a nightmare, right? A few nights later it seems that is not so. Only 4 chapters but has 30k words and is a positive joy to read, I hope it continues to update.

The Ultimate Weapon by TheKeybladeMaster1994

Mikey is pure of heart and just about everything knows it, including but not limited to an eldritch entity that he swears is just try to make his life hard no matter what it tells you.

Interrogation or Malpractice by Professor_Anxietree

2012 Mikey when he got captured by the triceritons, their mind reading machine doesn't do quite what was intended and it spells out pain and sufferings for the smallest of the Hamato clan. Its pretty much being over stimulated to the max, like your skin feels too tight and you can hear your nerons firing in your brain type stuff, beware if you have overstimulation.

Someone to Protect by Koalagriton

2012. Mikey's big bothers get captured by Hun and Mikey doesn't take it well, that's going to become Huns problem.

Flowers by intomyfireyoushallfall

Mikey meets Tang Shen

The shinobi's garden by taizi

buncha one shots that you have to read, you have to istg 66k words of nothing but amazing.

family sticks together, bruh by hellomyoldheart

Mikey (Bayverse) discovers online shopping and sends it to Aprils place, April gets a package addressed for Mikey O'neil

too bad, but its the life you lead by angelmichelangelo @angelmichelangelo

2k7my beloved. Mikey is having trouble at home, good thing this new cat he found, affectionately named Klunk, can help a little. You will cry, I cried, still have read it four times, but crying non the less, read the tags or it will hit you like a freight train

the dad diaries by angelmichelangelo

pepaw Ronin and the new babies, adorable and angst ( in the form of flashbacks) nuff said

a minute from home by taizi

bteam for the win, I cant get enough, baby don and mikey wonder off and survive 3 months, it changes them

I've been afraid of changing by taizi

2007 Mikey really hates his job, Donnie didn't get that, but now he does

Give up the ghost series by taizi

Mikey can see ghosts, and that means he can see his one and only dead brother too, donnie, it causes problems for eveyone around him. human AU

The Gauntlet by T33la

Mikey and Don have to take a leap of faith, good thing Mikey has complete trust in his big bros tech

Flipbook by T33la

the 2003 SAINW donnie boy planned just in case and mikey finds the first bit of the plan, talks happen

Chronicles of the Cretaceous by T33la

Mikey boy manages to befriend a T-rex because of course he does

Words to be Spoken by Mona_E_Lisa @mona-e-lisa

Soulmate Au with woodyangelo, its got angst, just not for the boys, nd holy shyt I need more

The Silver Sentry by Mona_E_Lisa

2003 Mikey gets a son, and he deffo has some problems with Splinter, and I love him more than words

2088 by Mona_E_Lisa

If you haven't read this you haven't lived and that's all I can say. What are you doing? go read it??? like asap, will change you. Its 6k and this post will still be here when you get back, get going now sho sho

A Tale of Spirits by unorthodoxx @unorthodoxx-page

ATLA x tmnt 2018, everyone thinks they are spirits, donnie boy isn't going to correct them, and mikey ends up malnourished, but it updates this sunday so GO Go Go asap, it great

turning over stone by angelmichelangelo

2012 mikey gets angry, and kami does it suck, but good thing his big brother has experience in dealing with it.

caught in the rip tide by angelmichelangelo

Mikey gets hurt, and it might just be leos fault. 2012 based on the season 4 episode broken food.

yolk by angelmichelangelo

Mikey can't take the fighting anymore, too bad it took wrecking a midnight breakfast for his brothers to notice.

december 18th: raise a glass by angelmichelangelo

Mikey turns 21, and they really should be winding down by now, but Donnie doesn't have the heart. technically tagged with 2012 and IDW, but could totally see it with 2007 if u ignore that raph is in japan

december 15th: a size too big by angelmichelangelo

2007 Mikey was supposed to be bac an hour ago, he is gonna be the death of Donnie I swear.

the Kappas constellation by angelmichaelangelo

bunch a one shots

Honestly just anything by angelmichelangelo or taizi, but you can see that with how often they show up in this list

FF.net

Its a cycle by GhostiesandGhoulies

Adorable 2007 Mikey being hurt while doing cowabunga car and his brothers looking after him

Clogged drain by Goblin cat KC

Horror, the poor boys were not ready for this one but I adore it. Nothing more I can say than they will have nightmares and all of them will have night lights.

Hero among them by oliviasbizzaremind

2007 gang gets a call after a rough night, its for cowabunga carl, so how exactly does this lady know Mikey's name? Mikey always was a bleeding heart.

If Wishes were Fishes by Taisi (this is also on A03 I believe I just found it on ff.net fist so i figured id share that here too)

Human AU, adorable must read, like I cant stress this enough, you haven't lived without this. And as a former foster kid, damn.

Mikey's truly awful, incredibly sucky, super hella bummer of a day by Orange4Days

Exactly what the title says and you will enjoy this boys suffering and eventual comfort.

[taizi]

If you're okay with another fic prompt, maybe Mikey hiding his tears in the rain? And one or all of his brothers (or friends) figuring it out and comforting him.

Can I also request it be in the 2003 verse?

x

Usually it’s Raph who puts his foot in his mouth in a major way, but this time it’s Leo. 

It doesn’t happen often. Donnie thinks he could probably count on both hands the number of times Leo has said something intentionally hurtful to one of his brothers and still have some fingers leftover. Since returning from Japan, that frightening temper that turned their warm-hearted leader into a brooding stranger has been discarded for good, but it left a few scars. And Leo is as much a teenager as the rest of them are, even if he wasn’t always free to act like it. It’s not fair to expect him to regulate his emotions all the time. It wouldn’t be fair to expect that of a non-traumatized seventeen year old, let alone a kid with PTSD and anxiety and god only knows what else.

So really it shouldn’t be as surprising as it is when the words come bulleting out of Leo’s mouth, sharp and seething, “Some ninja you are.”

It shouldn’t be, but Raph whips around like someone struck him upside the head, and Donnie’s hands on Mikey’s shoulders clench tight involuntarily. He’s still kneeling in front of Mikey, still mopping up the blood on his head with a shirt Raph unapologetically ripped off a clothes line, still halfway through mentally cataloging the fatalistic difference another inch to the left would have made, so he has a front-row seat to the hurt that parades across the smallest turtle’s expression. 

That hurt hadn’t even existed when the Purple Dragon threw the knife at Mikey’s head in the first place. He’d been laughing a second ago, shaking off the jitters from the very close-call. Leo’s bitter condemnation stole that away in an instant. Their eldest brother is special and important to each of them, but he’s Mikey’s hero. 

Rain is drumming all around them, cascading off the boarded-up storefront overhang they’ve sheltered under. It’s early May and the recent days have gotten warmer, but abruptly Donnie feels very cold. 

“He don’t got eyes in the back of his head, Fearless,” Raph snaps back, like clockwork. His hackles are up, because as far as he’s concerned, only one person on this planet is allowed to give Mikey any semblance of a hard time, and that person is decidedly not Leonardo. 

“Then how about a little spacial awareness?” Leo bites out, squaring his shoulders when Raph faces him, as if they’ve never managed to mature past thirteen years old. “We’re running drills in the dojo starting tomorrow.”

It’s on the tip of Donnie’s tongue to say the hell we are, but he doesn’t bother. Raph and Leo are starting their unstoppable-force-meets-immovable-object routine and they’ll be at it for a good five minutes at least. Instead he reminds himself that his big brothers are keyed up and agitated out of worry and care, that the fighting only started after Donnie gave the all-clear, because it really won’t do anyone any good if all three of them lose their tempers. 

A second later Mikey is leaning out of Donnie’s hands and pushing himself to his feet. He’s looking right at Leo with all that hurt packed away into a neat little box, impossible to find. His orange mask is stained a stomach-turning rust color. The balled-up shirt is still in Donnie’s hand and Mikey is just letting himself bleed. 

“Mike,” Donnie says helplessly. 

“I’ll text you later,” he replies and ducks away quickly, out from under the overhang into the alley. Donnie sometimes wonders at the things his family has normalized over the years. His only little brother, the only person Donatello has always been directly responsible for, is all plastered with rain and walking off with a head wound, and it’s not even in the top ten worst things that’s happened so far this year. And it’s May. 

“Where do you think you’re going?” Leo says suddenly. He storms after Mikey, reaching out like he’s going to grab him by the arm, and Donnie has just a second to think yeah that’s not good before Mikey whirls around. 

“Back off!” 

It stops Leo in his tracks so completely that it probably would have been funny in another time and place. He blinks dumbly, like the computer in his brain is rebooting. Donnie knows that this sudden temper of his was triggered by fear—that the sight of a knife flying towards his littlest brother’s head woke up something ugly in his brain that sprang to the defense in the quickest, easiest manner it could, clouding rational thought—but that doesn’t mean his words hurt any less. 

Mikey wipes roughly at his face with the heel of his hand. It’s impossible to tell through the rain, but he might be crying. Then, with an economy of motion that all his brothers have envied since they were clumsy little toddlers, the orange-banded turtle scales the side of the adjacent building and disappears over the roof into the dark. 

“Well done, asshole,” Raph says, but it’s half-hearted at best. “At this rate, I’ll be out of a job.”

Leo’s brow is furrowed beneath his mask. His hand is still slightly raised, like Mikey is still right there within reach. He’s never been here before, Donnie knows. Even when Leo was at his most hateful, those painful weeks after the showdown with the Shredder, Raph and Donnie—and even April, Casey and Splinter—were careful to keep him the fuck away from Mikey on his darker days. There are some things that can’t be walked back. 

This isn’t that. To be frank, they’ve said much worse to each other over much smaller fish. But sometimes hurt can spring up where it’s least expected. And sometimes when you get a knife thrown at your head, you want sympathy from the person you’ve spent your whole life idolizing, not scorn. 

“Why did I say that,” Leo mutters. It doesn’t sound like a question. 

Donnie answers anyway. “Because you’ve refused every single one of my attempts to get you into therapy. Telehealth exists, Nardo. We’re on a very good insurance plan.”

“Since when do we have insurance?” Raph says. He’s peering out from under the overhang into the rain, like maybe Mikey’s going to make a surprise reappearance. “Are you frauding some sleezy millionaire again?”

“Just doing my part,” Donnie says mildly. He touches Leo’s shoulder and says, “You owe him an apology. But he’ll be okay.”

It’ll be a cold day in hell when just that would be enough to make Leo stop worrying, especially in this case, but Donnie still had to try. Sure enough, Leo nods once, mechanically, and then says, “Can you track his phone?”

“Slow down, Mamanardo,” Raph says. “Let the kid have a minute to himself.”

“He’s hurt,” Leo replies like it’s making him sick to think about. Donnie has a comment locked and loaded that sounds something along the lines of “how convenient of you to remember that now and not when you and Raph were ripping each other’s heads off” but he chooses to be the bigger turtle. 

“He’ll be okay,” Donnie reiterates. He tosses the ruined shirt into a nearby bin and then sticks his hands out into the rain, washing the sticky, tacky red away. “Besides, tracking his phone is unnecessary. There’s only one place he would have gone.”

Even Raph raises an eyeridge at that, and Leo is equally clueless, but that’s okay. Donnie has been Mikey’s co-conspirator and secret-keeper since before they could talk in full sentences, and it’s only fair, because Mikey has been all of those things for him, too. Being on the B Team doesn’t have a lot of perks, but this is one of them. 

A couple of hours later, Donnie successfully shakes his brothers off at the lair. Splinter caught Donnie’s eye and helpfully ushered the elder two turtles into the dojo for a convenient meditation session, so Donnie didn’t have to worry about a pair of red and blue mother hens trailing after him. 

He crawls up the side of an apartment building in East Village and sits on the railing of the fire escape to peer into a warmly-lit window on the seventh floor. Inside his little brother and his little brother’s best friend, a human with piles and piles of curly blond hair and dimples when he smiles, are probably minutes away from getting a noise complaint, dancing around a cramped shoebox living room and singing at the top of their lungs. 

“Girl, put your records on,” they bellow, sharing the TV remote as if it’s a microphone. “Tell me your favorite song! You go ahead, let your hair down!”

There’s a big pink bandaid plastered to the side of Mikey’s head, and evidence of Thai takeout on the coffee table that’s been shoved to the side of the room, and he’s in a sunflower yellow hoodie that’s at least two sizes too big. Any trace of the hurt from earlier is long-gone. 

They’ll need to get home eventually. It isn’t safe to stay out in the early morning hours, as the city that never sleeps begins to pick up speed. And Leo is almost certainly going to be waiting up for them, restless until he sees for himself that his baby brother hasn’t been driven away by him completely. They really do need to get that boy some therapy. Donnie makes a mental note to get April on his team for that. 

For now, there’s still some time. Until the end of this song, at least. It’s catchy. 

[taizi]

i’ve been afraid of changing

tmnt 2k7 pairing: mikey & donnie, mikey & april, mikey & woody word count: 4575 pre-movie

well, i’ve been afraid of changing ’cause i’ve built my life around you but time makes you bolder even children get older and i’m getting older too

read on ao3

x

Mikey hates his job.

He thinks it for the first time on a Saturday evening when he’s lugging his catering equipment back to his van, sore all over and with a headache pounding away at the base of his skull, miserable and hungry and with another party to look forward to tomorrow morning.

He shuts the back doors, leans his forehead against one of the dusty rear windows, and thinks I hate my job.

He doesn’t know where the thought comes from. Maybe he’s just tired. Maybe he’d feel better after he got some dinner and played a few rounds of Mario Kart and clocked an hour of kitty therapy with Dr Klunk, PhD. Maybe it’s not a big deal. If he’s learned any one thing from daytime TV, it’s that everyone hates their job.

But it’s the first time Mikey’s ever hated anything about his life. He’s always had his brothers. He’s always been taken care of. He’s always had a home he loved running to at the end of the day. Sure, he didn’t get to play in the sun when he was little, or go to those cool fusion restaurants downtown that April liked, or hit up the movies or the skatepark without enough planning and subterfuge beforehand that the whole thing felt more like the Invasion of Normandy than a fun night out. But his childhood was a happy one. And for awhile he’d had this crazy idea that happiness wasn’t something you were supposed to outgrow.

But now Raph is mean and reclusive. And Donnie is short-tempered and too busy for anything besides his computer. And Leo is still gone. And Mikey hates his job.

He climbs into his van and just sits in the driver’s seat for a minute. He didn’t wear his headset today, because Donnie hasn’t used their private channel in weeks anyway, so what’s the point. There isn’t a familiar little voice in his ear telling him to get a move on, Mike. Don’t stay up there too long. It isn’t safe. Come home. Which is good. He doesn’t want to go home.

He thinks maybe he hates it there.

x

The thing is, Mikey is halfway to Rupert’s to pick up a pie for his birthday, when it occurs to him that he should be upset that his brothers forgot. He actually stops short, halfway down a fire escape, letting that percolate in his brain for a minute.

He should be disappointed or annoyed or hurt, right? But he’s not any of those things. He’s not even sad.

He hasn’t seen Raph in like three days. Donnie had breakfast with Mikey this morning, but the older turtle had shadows under his eyes, and this pale, brittle way about him that Mikey clocked as a migraine and a chronic lack of sleep, so he immediately curbed his own energy and made a mental note to leave his brother alone.

Their birthdays are stupid, made-up things anyway. Dates they picked for each other when they were little, and marked on a big calendar that Splinter hung outside the dojo. Leo’s was a couple months ago, and that night Donnie and Raph got into a screaming fight about—Mikey doesn’t even know what.

Maybe they’ve outgrown birthdays. Maybe Mikey’s going to outgrow every single good thing about his entire life until there’s nothing left but a job he hates doing and a home he never wants to go back to.

Woody is waiting for him out behind the pizzeria. There’s a private drive back there for delivery trucks but the gate is locked at all other times. The building behind Rupert’s is vacant, its windows boarded up. It’s a safe spot for Mikey to venture out of the shadow into the warm, flickering light of the kitchen where it pours from the door Woody has propped open.

His human friend is sitting on an upturned plastic vegetable crate, and smiles automatically when he sees Mikey.

“Hey, amigo,” Woody says, offering his fist for a bump. “Bingo—”

It’s such instant relief to be around somebody who wants Mikey around. He didn’t even realize how much tension he was carrying until he exhales and a bunch of muscles in his back and shoulders go loose and suddenly it’s a little easier to hold his head up.

He grins back and completes the fist bump. “—bongo!”

Woody is still on the clock, but it’s a slow night, and his sister Darcy is running things up front. Mikey met her by accident last year when he was hanging out with Woody in the prep kitchen after close and neither of them were paying attention to the footsteps thumping down the stairs from the second-floor apartment. He’s never told his brothers about that because they’ll probably kill him. Besides, Darcy’s cool.

They head inside, kicking the door shut behind them. The packed heat of the pizza ovens and the heady smell of garlic and oregano and basil is so familiar it brings a rush of comfort.

Mikey stays for hours. They cook pizzas and break-and-bake cookies and a very wonky attempt at a birthday cake in one of the ovens. He goes home with a bag full of leftovers and a meticulously-wrapped present from Darcy that she refused to let him open in front of her. Before he left, Woody hugged him so thoroughly that the warmth of it stayed with Mikey for the entire journey underground.

It doesn’t last long after that.

“Where the hell’ve you been?” Raph barks at him by way of hello when Mikey is barely two steps through the door. There’s a big duffel on the floor next to him, so either he just got in or he’s on his way out.

Mikey should rise to this, he thinks. He should be full of festering hurt, disappointment, resentment. You forgot about my birthday and now you’re giving me shit over a non-existent curfew?

It wasn’t so long ago that he was willing to get right in Raph’s face when Raph was being especially antagonistic. Mikey doesn’t wear anger like his brothers do, but everyone has put on a jacket that didn’t really fit once or twice.

He used to goad and wheedle and harass his big brother into venting his feelings the only way he knew how. Tussles and shouting matches were a vehicle for Raph to express the parts of himself he wasn’t comfortable with talking about. Mikey knows that. And he knows that Raph is always angling for a fight these days because he has so much he needs to say to somebody.

But Mikey isn’t the person he needs. The person all three of them need. He couldn’t be even if he tried. He doesn’t want to try.

He hates his job and he hates being home and he’s beginning to hate how Raphael talks to him like they’re total strangers who made a bad first impression on each other and never managed to forget it.

“I was at Rupert’s,” Mikey says, walking past him. “If you needed something while I was out, you could have texted me. You still have my number, right?”

It takes the shape of a joke, the way he used to tease a good mood out of moments like this. He sets his bag on the table and roots through it, coming up with a tinfoil-covered pizza round. There’s a birthday cake underneath the foil, the sides uncertain and lopsided because it wasn’t big enough to bake to the edges of the round, the buttercream icing a little lumpy and way too rich.

It’s Mikey’s favorite thing in the whole world, because he and Woody laughed the entire time they made it, about a hundred different things, and somehow it tastes like laughter, like they managed to bake that in there with the butter and vanilla. It almost feels like it doesn’t belong in this kitchen. He puts it on the counter anyway.

“There’s dessert if you want it,” Mikey says, meeting Raph’s eyes from right across the room and about a thousand miles away. Raph is frowning at him, but the anger from a moment ago isn’t there anymore. Mikey doesn’t want to know what fresh new thing Raphael has to frown about, so he says goodnight and goes looking for his cat.

x

He cancels a gig. He doesn’t tell Donnie. He doesn’t get out of bed. No one comes looking for him. Everyone else is busy, everyone else is on track. Mikey can’t keep up.

x

Donnie corners him on some random Thursday. It’s been a few weeks since Mikey’s worked and a part of him has been dreading this confrontation. It was only a matter of time.

“We don’t need the money,” Mikey says. Because they don’t. Donnie has been seeding funds from untraceable backdoors into Fortune 500 companies for years. The jobs were Donnie’s idea to keep them busy, back when sensei first forbade them from doing ninja stuff while Leo was gone. “What does it matter if I quit?”

“It’s not about money, it’s about responsibility. If you make a commitment, you stick to it,” Donnie grinds out. His voice is carefully measured, straining on the brink of losing his patience. For some reason, it’s rubbing Mikey wrong. It’s making him feel itchy and restless.

Responsibility. Commitment. What do his brothers know about keeping promises? About sticking to it? They’ve abandoned Mikey one after the other and now Donnie is lecturing him about responsibility and commitment.

“You can’t make me go,” Mikey blurts, too loud. “I won’t. I don’t want to.”

“Jesus,” Donnie mutters, rubbing his forehead. He’s already so fed-up with Mikey after like three seconds of conversation that Mikey can feel his eyes start to sting. “The last thing I want to do is fight with you, Mike. I thought you liked Cowabunga Carl.”

It’s not fair. Donnie’s so smart. He’s tired and overworked and unhappy, but he’s smart. How can he get this one thing so wrong? How can he not know Mikey as well as he used to, like all of those years of being each other’s best friends and co-conspirators and secret-keepers from where they were relegated to the “B Team” aren’t as intrinsic and important and fundamental to him as they are to Mikey? How can he look at Mikey, right in the face, and not understand him at all?

Something breaks.

“I hate it!” Mikey screams. His chest is full of heat and air and nothing he can dig his hands into and ground himself in, just emptiness and panic. “I hate my job, I hate going up there by myself, I hate driving in rush hour traffic, I hate being around strangers who wouldn’t want anything to do with me if they found out I was a freak of nature, I hate the kids when they scream and run around because it makes me feel like I’m in danger even though I know that’s stupid! I hate all of it, I hate going out there and I hate coming back here, and I hate that none of you love me anymore! I hate you!”

There would be a ringing silence in the lair, if not for the way Mikey’s chest is heaving as he gulps for air. He’s crying, but he can still see the way Donnie’s face has gone slack and sickly white with horror, the way he’s looking at Mikey like he’s a fucking alien creature in the living room that Donnie has no idea how to communicate with. They don’t know each other anymore.

“Mikey,” Donnie whispers.

Mikey takes a shaky step back, then another. That burst of too much feeling has left him, deserted him, and now he’s reeling from the lack of it.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” he says hoarsely. “I didn’t mean it. I love you.”

Donnie’s hands catch him before he can move another inch.

“Please don’t go, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Hey, look at me.” Those same hands let go of Mikey’s arms and cup his face, framing it carefully and keeping him still. Donnie moves into his line of sight, his eyes round and full, mouth pressed into a wobbling line. “I love you, too. Of course I love you. I’m here. I never should have—I never should have let you think I was anywhere else. I’m right here, okay? Don’t go.”

His hands move again, pulling Mikey into an embrace so tight it almost hurts.

“I don’t hate you,” Mikey sobs. He can’t believe he said that. He can’t believe he knew how to say those words in that order.

“Mikey, I know,” Donnie replies. His voice is all thick and watery, and he presses one hand to the back of Mikey’s head, and holds onto him like he’s terrified Mikey is going to vanish into thin air. “You don’t have a hateful bone in your body. You’re the last good thing I have.”

x

When April and Casey show up a few hours later, Mikey isn’t surprised when they make a beeline for the sofa. He freaked Donnie out pretty majorly, it’s only natural he’d call his best friends for support or advice.

What does surprise Mikey is that Casey only trades a speaking look with Donatello before tugging on Mikey’s mask tails playfully and then heading in the direction of Raph’s bedroom like a man on a mission. April, meanwhile, plants herself on the arm of the sofa on Mikey’s side and wraps her arm around his shoulders.

“I don’t know about Casey, but I’m here for one reason and one reason only,” she confides in him. “To make Donnie watch this bootleg of RENT that I just downloaded from a potentially malicious website. You in?”

Donnie makes a disgruntled support technician sound.

Mikey beams up at her. She’s so cool. She’s one of the best people he knows. She isn’t his friend like she’s Donnie’s and Leo’s, but she’s his big sister in a way they can’t claim. The way she cares about him hasn’t changed a smidge from day one.

“Donnie needs more culture in his life,” Mikey says. “And he’s totally gonna cry during the I’ll Cover You reprise. I’m in, times like, a billion.”

April smiles back at him and takes his face in her hand. She thumbs at his cheek like she can still see the tear tracks there from earlier but she doesn’t say anything about any of that.

She just says, “Good, ‘cause we brought enough Thai food to feed a ninja army.”

Splinter emerges from his rooms, drawn into the open atrium by the sound of their voices. Or maybe he’s in on this, too, because he doesn’t seem at all surprised by April and her formidable arsenal of takeout bags. His dark eyes are gentle as he greets her. He pats Donnie on the arm as he passes by, and tugs on the ends of Mikey’s mask tails in that affectionate way all of Mikey’s relatives do, the way Casey just did a minute ago, and then settles into his recliner.

His presence nearby is like a balm. It always is. Even though he sent Leo away, and saddled Donnie with the mantle of leadership that was never his to carry in the interim, and Mikey is sort of unhappy with him somewhere in the back of his mind, he’s still their dad. He still makes the world make a little more sense, just by being there.

They’re twenty minutes into RENT before Casey reappears, and he’s got Raph with him. Casey accepts a heaping container of green curry and rice from April, gives his red-banded best friend a truly evil look, and pointedly takes a seat in an armchair.

There’s a spot left on the sofa on Donnie’s other side, or in the other chair. Raphael, to his credit, only waffles about it for a moment before he sinks onto the couch. Mikey feels Donnie’s whole body go stiff with tension, but neither of them break into their usual song-and-dance routine—maybe in part because April is absolutely willing to take them down with extreme prejudice if they start a fight right now. Maybe because they don’t actually want to.

“What is this shit, anyway?” Raph mutters.

“Theater,” Mikey, April and Casey say at the same time—only Casey sounds significantly less enthusiastic than his little brother and his fiance both do.

“Don’t knock it till you try it,” Mikey adds. “Twenty bucks says you’ll have one of the songs stuck in your head tomorrow.”

“You’re on, brat,” Raphael says.

For a minute, they might as well be fifteen years old again, before they started getting tugged in different directions, before Leo’s absence drove a wedge between them that honestly feels like nursing a knife between the ribs.  

Raph turns his head, golden eyes darting past Donnie to look at Mikey sidelong. Mikey finds himself thinking that it’s absolutely crazy he could have ever found anything about Raphael unfamiliar. That’s his brother. No matter what else changes, that’s always going to be true.

So Mikey sticks his tongue out at him. Surprise, relief, and good humor run through Raph’s expression one after the other, and they all settle into a comfortable scowl.

“Pass me that chicken satay before I come over there and take it from you,” he demands.

Donnie snatches one of the skewers off the plate as it changes hands in front of him and smugly says, “Taxes.”

“I’ll show you taxes—”

“Okay, boys, I love the bonding going on here, but talk through Light My Candle and see what happens,” April interjects pleasantly.

Raph and Donnie shut right up. Casey snorts and mutters “cowards” under his breath. Mikey leans against his sister and bites into an eggroll so he doesn’t say something really embarrassing about how much he’s missed family movie night.

Splinter watches them more than he watches the musical. Like something about the rowdy, reactive audience they make is more precious and compelling than anything Broadway could ever have to offer.

x

Donnie works about half as much as he used to, and drags Mikey into his lab with him the rest of the time. Sometimes they tinker and talk, other times Donnie starts, like, solving world hunger or the energy crisis, and Mikey parks himself on the loveseat and watches a movie.

He started out with headphones and a laptop, but then Donnie scolded him for trying to loop him out of Legally Blonde. Now they project movies onto the wall so Donnie can watch while he works, and Mikey can make silly commentary, and it feels like they’re friends again.

Mikey doesn’t hate being at home so much anymore.

“But Donnie can’t babysit me forever,” Mikey confides in Woody sometime later. They’re in the kitchen at Rupert’s, after closing time, and Mikey is helping him shut the place down. Right now he’s doing the books in the broom closet of a back office while Mikey hangs over the back of his computer chair and idly swings himself back and forth, the ever-important moral support. “He hates his job, but he has to have something productive to do or he’ll go crazy. That’s why we started working in the first place. I need to figure something out, too. Not Cowabunga Carl. Something I won’t—hate.”

“Donnie’s a genius, right?” Woody asks abruptly. “He has like two actual PhDs that he got just for fun?” 

“Oh, yeah,” Mikey says. 

“Call me crazy, Mikester, but maybe he’d be happier if he found a job that played to his strengths.” 

Woody shuffles receipts around on the desk until he finds the computer mouse and then Googles “new york remote jobs phd graduate” and gets hundreds of results with buzz words like “researcher” and “scientist” and “engineer” that make more sense in relation to Mikey’s polymath brother than entry level tech support. Mikey reads over his shoulder with wide eyes. 

“Look, NYU is hiring. He won’t even need a teaching degree to work at the university.”

“E-mail that to me,” Mikey demands.

He feels full of purpose. He imagines Donnie as a professor, explaining any number of impossibly complicated subjects to his students the way he’s been happy to explain things to Mikey since they were toddlers discovering the world together. He imagines Donnie brainstorming with colleagues whose minds are as bright as his.

Mikey wants it for him so badly he’s annoyed with himself for not coming up with this idea a year and a half ago.

Woody is watching Mikey in that careful sideways manner that makes Mikey think there’s something else he wants to say.

“You know,” the human settles on, “I’m kind of hurt.”

Mikey is a ninja, and more than that, he’s the youngest of four dynamic, explosive personalities, so he’s good at sussing out tones. Woody is clearly joking, so Mikey tips his head, more curious than anything.

“What’d I do to you?”

“You left me hangin’, amigo. You quit that catering gig—which was the right call—but now you’re sending your resume everywhere but here.” He shakes his head, mock-solemn. Mikey is staring at him.

“I don’t have a resume.”

“It’s a figure of speech.”

“Rupert’s is hiring?”

“You see anybody else back here, bud?” Woody’s smiling at him. “Uncle Rupert cooks days, I cook nights. But nights are significantly busier, and sometimes my uncle comes back in to help me out. He’s gonna work himself into an early grave at this rate. We’ve been looking to add onto the night crew for months.”

Mikey feels like the world just tilted off its axis. He glances around at the kitchen he knows so well, the place he spends all his free time, because it’s where his best friend works. He thinks of how often he helps Woody knead dough, prep gallons and gallons of sauce, box up orders. The countless evening hours they spend drinking cream soda and eating cheesy breadsticks or Chinese from across the street and watching cable TV on the crappy plasma mounted on the wall.

He thinks of doing all of that as a job. He would love it. He didn’t know he could have a job that he loved.

“Really?” he says quietly.

Woody laughs at whatever his face looks like. He gets up and shoves open the order window and bellows, “Darce, take that Help Wanted sign out of the window! And text Uncle Rupert! Mike’s on board.”

“Thank GOD,” Darcy shouts back, and audibly stomps all the way across the tiny lobby to rip their handmade paper sign down.

“Uncle Rupert’ll love you,” Woody confides in Mikey, dropping back into his seat. “I mean, he loves you already. We talk about you enough at home. He doesn’t know you’re a turtle, but I don’t think it’ll be a big deal. You’re way more normal than that one delivery guy who drops off the produce order every Tuesday in a glittery tux, and Rupert keeps him around.”

“That guy’s so weird,” Mikey says, and he’s sort of crying, but he’s laughing at the same time.

x

A little over two years after Leo left New York, April followed a ghost story through a South American jungle and managed to track down the familiar boy behind it. She did her best to convince him to come home, because missing him was like missing a limb.

She told him about Donnie lecturing on half a dozen different topics at NYU, and Raph getting hooked on musical theater, and Casey sneaking Mikey into Comic Con in a DIY Bowser costume just to get an exclusive variant cover edition of the new Silver Sentry comic and how extremely grounded they both were for that.

She didn’t say they’re lost without you, because she didn’t think that was true anymore. But if she knew her friend as well as she thought she did—as well as she used to—then it should be enough just to tell him that his brothers needed him. They missed him. They loved him, and he wasn’t there.

Mikey hears all of this firsthand, about eleven and a half hours later, when April’s plane touches down at LaGuardia and she calls the lair the second she’s allowed to turn her cellphone back on.

He and Donnie are just getting in at around three in the morning, because Mikey is a tiny bit drunk. Rupert hauled down a case of craft beer after closing time and Darcy goaded everyone into a drinking contest and Mikey discovered that a mutagen-reinforced metabolism has nothing on a family of Irish-Americans. Woody called Donnie, and Donnie agreed to come pick Mikey up, and Darcy sat on Mikey’s carapace until his brother got there, because none of them wanted him wandering the sewers and getting lost.

Everyone worries about him a little more than they used to. But the Dirkins clan sent him off with waves and laughter, and Donnie was smiling crookedly as he guided Mikey’s clumsy limbs down a manhole ladder, and all of it made Mikey feel cared-for. It reminded him of being younger, being taken care of.

By the time they get home, Mikey’s burned through the fun parts of too much alcohol and now he has a pounding headache. Donnie points him toward a chair at the kitchen table and starts rummaging around in the fridge for the coconut water he keeps on hand for Casey and Raph when they’re in a similar state.

And then April calls the repurposed payphone that serves as their landline and says she found Leo, and Mikey’s heart jumps right into his throat.

“He said he wasn’t coming back, but you should have seen the look on his face,” April says. She sounds croaky and exhausted from her exploits and the red-eye flight, but her voice is still full of care and hope and optimism. “He’s homesick. He misses you guys so much. He doesn’t want to be out there anymore.”

Mikey wants to ask her how she knows for sure. He wants to beg for some kind of impossible guarantee. But he can hear Casey in the background of her call, probably waiting at the arrivals gate to take her home, so instead he says, “Thanks, Apricot. Thank you. Get home safe, okay? Tell Case I said ‘or else’.”

“You bet, honey. I’ll see you later.”

Donnie couldn’t hear the other half of the conversation, even with his freaky ninja hearing, but he knows how to read Mikey’s expression like a book. He’s holding a glass of that fancy water like he’s forgotten it’s in his hand, and his clever eyes are narrow and darting across his little brother’s face.

“What is it?” he asks as soon as Mikey hangs the phone up. “Is everything okay?”

Mikey doesn’t answer right away. He’s still processing.

The truth is, Leo has always had the same number one priority. Before his father’s expectations, before his duty as the eldest son, before his own wants and goals and secret childhood wishes, he had one thing he always put first.

If his brothers need him, he’ll drop everything. He’ll run to them, wherever they are.

Maybe that's still true. Maybe Mikey still knows how to believe in that.

So he looks up at Donnie and says, “I think so.” He even really means it.

[taizi]

If you’re still taking fic prompts, how about some good ol’ fashioned woodyangelo cos you write them so so well and I can never get enough of them both 💛

set in 2012 'verse, but the turtles are all different ages, like they are in rise <3

x

They weren’t sure about Woody at first. None of Mikey’s brothers were, it wasn’t just Leo. 

The guy was just so… normal. He wasn’t thrown into their lives the way April and Casey both were. He didn’t prowl around dark alleys in the middle of the night, picking fights with crime lords and brain-shaped aliens in power mechs. His hobbies had absolutely nothing to do with sharp weapons or parkour. 

So it just didn’t make sense. There was no common denominator. He had no stakes in the game. He could walk away from them at any time and upend their entire existence and it wouldn’t cost him anything. Just because he hasn’t yet doesn’t mean he won’t. 

But it was a mistake to say as much to Mikey. ‘Mistake’ is putting it lightly. 

Leo has absolutely never seen his littlest brother’s eyes turn so sharp. Mikey drew himself up like he was bracing himself for a knock-down, drag-out fight. It was like looking at a younger Raphael, except he burned hot, and apparently Mikey burned cold. 

“You don’t like any of my friends,” Mikey said plainly. His arms were crossed and he wasn’t budging. “You call Mondo annoying right to his face, and you’re scared of Leatherhead because he’s stronger than you so you’re always weird and rude around him, and every time Renet comes to visit you look at her like you think she’s stupid. And I can tell, ‘cause it’s the same way you guys look at me.”

“Woah,” Donnie said, putting up his hands. His eyes were round and stunned. None of them had come into this conversation expecting it to spiral into an outright confrontation so fast. “We don’t think you’re stupid.”

“Sure,” Mikey said in a tone that made it sound like he was actually saying ‘yeah, right.’ His mouth was set in a firm line, brows drawn together under his mask. “So are you gonna tell me to stop hanging out with Woody? Is that what the point of this was?”

Originally? Yes. But Donnie was stricken, and Raph kept shooting sidelong stares at Leo that said Abort, Fearless, abort! as clearly as if he was shouting it. But more than that, it was the way Mikey was looking at him. 

He looked like he was ready to get his feelings hurt, and it was the first time he’d ever looked at Leo like that in his entire life. 

Leo was doing his best to lead the family without Splinter’s patient guiding hand, but there were days that he really struggled. Days that he’d give anything to see his father again, so he could ask for one more answer, one more moment of wisdom. 

But he didn’t need anyone to tell him what the right answer was here. 

“No, Angie,” Leo said quickly, the old nickname slipping out on its own. “I’m sorry I came at this so wrong. I just want you to be careful, okay? You know I—I worry.”

Mikey’s expression softened. Underneath the unfamiliar angry, defensive shell, he was still the sweet kid that brightened all of their days. He surged forward and Leo readily enveloped him in a snug hug, swaying him side-to-side in a playful way. 

“It’s okay, Leo. I’m not very smart, but there are some things I know for sure. And I know Woody’s good.”

“Okay,” Donnie said, breaking up the hug with a brisk clap. Now he was the one who looked ready to go on a warpath. “We’re talking about that next. You are not stupid.”

“And I’m not scared of Leatherhead, that's dumb,” Raphael blurted, like he couldn’t go another second without saying it. So the Woody conversation quickly winged away in another direction, but they all ended up talking about things that needed talking about, and Leo soaked up their company the way other turtles basked in sunlight. 

It would be easier if he could protect his brothers from every uncertainty and every stranger and every heartache, but doing that would sabotage all of the potentially good things, too. And Leo’s brothers deserved every good thing the world had to offer. What the world didn’t offer, Leo would take for them. 

He still wasn’t sure about Woody—that hadn’t been cleared up at all—but he wasn’t going to deny Mikey anything that made him happy. Leo’s job as big brother and stand-in parent was to step in when things went wrong and make them right again. Until then, he would just pray they didn’t go wrong. 

When Christmas Eve rolls around, the lair is packed. There’s music and cheesy Christmas movies and a rich spread of food. All of their friends make an appearance, even if they can’t stay. It’s so different from the Christmas celebrations of his childhood that it might as well be a scene from some alien planet. Splinter raised his sons with warmth and love, but he had been so alone in the world. Leo and his brothers are really lucky to have as many people to count among their family as they do.

He almost misses it entirely when Woody shows up. Maybe he would have, if Mikey hadn’t shouted out loud in pure glee. He watches his littlest brother jump down from Leatherhead’s shoulders and sprint across the lair at full ninja speed. Woody is laughing when they collide.  

Leo isn’t close enough to hear their conversation over the noise of the party. Casey and Shinigami are doing karaoke now, for some godforsaken reason, and they could easily drown out everything else within a ten mile radius. 

But he can see the brightness on both of their faces, the dimpled grin Woody’s wearing as he absorbs Mikey’s special brand of light, the easy, familiar way they lean into each other’s orbit. 

They start to venture toward the kitchen, and like an act of gravity, Mikey’s closest friends peel away from the party to fall into step with them. 

“—thought the movie tickets were my present!” Mikey is protesting, a big theatrical pout on his face. “The Force Awakens was amazing, and the theater was so cool!”

“The movie tickets were a red herring,” Woody replies. “My sister works there and it was really easy for her to get us in, especially because she’s been trying to get fired for weeks now. Your real present is actually in your house already. I had no idea how to get it down here by myself, so April and Karai helped me smuggle it in yesterday. I think they hid it in the pantry.”

Now it made sense why April has been guarding that particular corner of the kitchen so fiercely. Rockwell almost lost a hand when he went looking for some chips earlier. She tips her snowman-shaped mug at Woody in solidarity and he nods gravely back. 

Leo is curious. He drifts over to join April when she moves over to stand just inside the doorway, propping up a wall. There’s a crooked smile on her face. 

“You’ll want to see this,” she says, so certainly that Leo believes her. 

The present, when they wrestle it out of the pantry and onto the kitchen island, is fairly big, and it’s easy to see how one skinny teenage boy would have struggled to get this into the tunnels by himself. Mondo immediately plucks the bow off the box and smacks it onto the top of his own head, because he’s—

Leo catches himself. 

Because he’s a kid, Mikey’s age, mutated at fourteen years old and abandoned by his family and left to make his own way in the world. And maybe he’s annoying sometimes, but that’s not all he is. 

“I’m a gift,” the gecko says proudly. 

“To the world,” Renet and Woody say at the same time, utterly serious, and Mikey laughs. 

He enlists Leatherhead’s help in unwrapping his present, because the metric ton of tape Woody used is no match for the alligator’s knife-point claws. Then all the paper comes off, and Mikey takes one look at what's underneath, and the smile falls right off his face. 

It’s a KitchenAid Artisan stand mixer, in bright buttercup yellow, with a bunch of attachments included in the box. Leo stands a little taller, eyes narrow as he takes in the scene, trying to suss out what caused that expression on Mikey’s face. 

He looks absolutely dumbfounded. He thumbs at a corner of the box like he’s making sure it’s real. 

“It’s exactly the one I wanted,” Mikey says really quietly. He’s clearly overwhelmed. “I never said anything. How’d you know that?” 

“C’mon, amigo, of course I knew,” Woody replies. He’s a little self-conscious now.  “I had to do a lot of extra deliveries to save up for it. But I figured I had lots of Christmases to make up for. And I wanna be around for all the rest of them, too.”

Mikey sniffs, and then starts rubbing his eyes, his shoulders trembling. 

“Aww, Mikey, nooo,” Renet says, sounding choked up, “if you cry I’m gonna, like, start bawling my eyes out! Please think of my eyeliner!”

“They don’t have waterproof makeup in the 79th Dimension?” Mondo asks judgmentally. 

Leatherhead chuckles warmly, a low rumble that sounds more like a growl than laughter. He’s so laughably big he barely fits in their kitchen, but he fits. It has a lot to do with the way he smiles at Leo’s baby brother, like he knows exactly how special Mikey is. 

All of Mikey’s friends look at him like that. Even Mondo, skating in circles around the kitchen island, is sort of grinning to himself. 

“Can you stay the night?” Mikey asks wetly. “I’m gonna make homemade cinnamon rolls for breakfast with my new mixer.”

“Mikester,” Woody says, resting his weight on his elbows and leaning across the island to give Mikey his undivided attention, “I would literally rather die than miss your homemade cinnamon rolls.” 

“Hard same,” Mondo adds. 

Renet sighs, puts one arm around Mikey’s shoulders and the other around Leatherhead’s snout, tugs them both in really tight, and says, “This Christmas is one of my favorites. I come back to it all the time.”

“Stop trying to give me an existential crisis!” Woody demands, tossing a napkin at her. “I have enough of those on my own!”

Leo glances at April, and finds her already smiling back at him. The last stubborn guard around Leo’s heart folds, just like that. He gazes across the room at the ragtag little group his brother picked out for himself and realizes for the first time that he has a lot less to worry about than he thought he did. 

Woody wasn’t forced into this subterranean life of secrecy and subterfuge and war. He could bail anytime he wanted and leave these abandoned subway tunnels behind for good, the way any normal person probably would, and there would be nothing that Leo could do to stop him. 

He doesn’t have to stick around. Which makes it even more special that he’s still here. 

And he looks at Mikey the way everyone who loves Mikey looks at him. Leo would know that look anywhere. 

[angelmichelangelo]

can i pick your brains about how you think woody and mikey officially get together? (this could be in idw canon or an au or something i'm just desperate for woodyangelo content...!!)

oh my gosh yes anon you can :D

so the thing i adore the most about woodyangelo is that they’re in their own little bubble? no superhero’ing or being part of ancient clans or anything like that, it’s the kind of normality i imagine mikey craves. and woody is drawn to mike because he’s got a love for the weird and the crazy and mikey is just that.

and i like to imagine that they’re just such big hopeless romantics whilst both actively not really looking for romance?? they kinda just. happen?and mike moves in with him, and it’s not a big deal, and then he migrates from the couch to his bed and his brothers are like “oh cool when did this become a thing:)” and mike and woods are SO oblivious because duh but they slowly realise their feelings in a real backward way but it still works because they’re bound together forever hehe

anon im literally ALWAYS up for talking about woodyangelo. it’s a very small club but i am here waving my flag. please join me lol

[angelmichelangelo]

mmhhmmm.., thinking about woodyangelo ..... :)

[angelmichelangelo]

full price to pay

g, 5.5k words

But now Mikey’s hovering halfway out of the hole in the ground, the manhole cover growing increasingly more dense against his shoulder where it’d been precariously perched, frozen like a deer in the headlights (or a turtle in the sewer he supposes would be the more appropriate way around it) as the human standing above him with the pizza box clutched in his hands just… stares at him in awe with wide, round eyes.

Mikey wonders if he could get away with just nabbing the pie and making a run for it. There’s not much of a chance anyone would follow someone down into a city sewer even if they thought they could snap a couple of pics of whatever weird and freaky creature they’d just seen, send it into some tacky social media news site and earn a couple of bucks for it all.

But the kid doesn’t make a grab for his phone. He doesn’t scream or run away or rub his eyes in some comedic fashion like he was out of an old time-y cartoon.

He just huffs a gentle sounding laugh, the corners of his mouth lifting into the smallest of smiles and he says, his words fitting around a thick Brooklyn accent,

“Hey,” he says like it’s nothing. He makes it feel like it’s nothing. “Least you left a decent tip.”

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[zeriphi]

Woodyangelo propaganda 

[zeriphi]

~Midnight Ride~

[angelmichelangelo]

woodyangelo anon back again... (hope u are well!!)

do you have a personal hc about these two saying 'i love you' for the first time?

i like to think it's a casual moment, they're out for a drive or eating pizza while watching a cheesy movie.. and it just kinda slips out. and they both turn to each other, say "that's gay" at the same time and then burst out laughing. and then kiss...

i'm also a sucker for 'i love you' coming out in life-or-death situations too, but for these two it's the domestic bliss that gets me, you know?

omg absolutely ;__;

woody makes mikey laugh so hard and he just says it like it’s the most normal thing in the world and they stop for like a second because wow but then they just go back to laughing because they’re just so happy together :(((

they really are the sweetest boys

[angelmichelangelo]

Just wanted to say I really enjoy your woodyangelo fanfics! They're insanely sparse throughout fandom so I'm so happy your writing for them :) Can't wait to read your latest fic!

oh thank you anon! i am a BIG big fan of our pizza bros - i love them in IDW but i am constantly craving more of them in other versions. maybe one day we’ll see another version of woody (he deserves to be part of their gang and join in on their adventures outside of just the comics!)

but there is so much fic opportunities between these two, whether you ship them romantically or just as bros, i think im able to keep a line between both for anyone that prefers either or.

but thank you for reading! im so glad you’ve enjoyed what ive written so far! there is definitely more woodyangelo to come from me - i might even make a mini lil series of woody in the 2012 following the fic i just posted, just cos it sounds like fun and i really loved writing them in that verse :)

thanks for such a kind ask, amigo <3 take care!

[angelmichelangelo]

december 10th: i know a trick

rated g, 1.7k words

prompt: snowball fights

mikey is feeling pretty bummed out over family disputes and dramas, but lucky for him, woody knows how to cheer him up best

part ten of the december fic advent 2022 series

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