Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Veronica Wescott loved her life.

There wasn’t much that could beat it, really. With her best friend, Millie, married and expecting kids, Millie’s sister adopting a beautiful little girl, and Peter getting married himself, Veronica was going to have her hands full with all those kids.

Seriously, nothing could get better than that. 

Veronica hummed happily to herself as she walked along the rooftops of New York City. Her patrol routes were usually boring, as they were populated mostly by kid heroes. Most of the minor crime fighting was left to them. 

Being a hero was good work, she showed up for a couple hours a week at the base under Rosevelt’s restaurant to talk to the kids, went on patrol every other day to make sure the teenage heroes weren’t killing each other, and she got paid good cash. Hermes had been easy to win over during the discussions of her contract. 

As she hopped from one building to the next, she spotted a sweet shop across the street. “Oh! Maybe someone at the base would like something?” Veronica asked herself. “Maybe Ana May?” Veronica hopped off the roof, her winged shoes allowing her to gracefully fly her over to the entrance of the sweet shop. 

Ten minutes later, she exited the shop with way more candy than just for one person. 

“Let’s see…” Veronica muttered to herself, holding up her several bags of candy to make sure she had everything. “Ana May gets lemon drops, Vince has peanut butter cups, Gia’s allergic to peanut butter, so she has skittles, and-” 

Interrupted by screams, she glanced up to find their cause. 

Someone was falling from the sky. 

In a slight state of panic, she dropped the bags of candies and sprinted in the direction of the faller, her steps getting wider and wider to build up momentum for her shoes to take over. With a final jump, she burst into the sky at speeds faster than a private jet. 

She tried to see if she could collide with the person, to try and knock them off course, but the person was falling too fast.

She adjusted her course and set herself underneath them. Veronica grunted and wobbled a bit as they plopped into her arms. Her shoes adjusted for the extra person she was carrying. Or, well, the extra turtle she was carrying. 

Because that’s what he was.

Chapter Text

Leo blinked open his eyes, staring up at the blue sky. 

Oh… he thought, closing his eyes again and smiling softly to himself, we won.

But then why did he still feel the weightlessness of the prison dimension? Although, it felt less like floating in the messed up gravity of the otherworld and more like…

He was falling.He had just registered this and the fact that maybe he should be feeling some sort of panic, when something collided into him, the weightless feeling stopped as he began to be brought down slowly. 

“Donnie?” Leo asked softly, trying to figure out who was holding him. Though he was the only one who could fly, it couldn’t be Donnie, the arms weren’t right. And he couldn’t hear the motor’s of his battle shell. Maybe it was April? But when did she learn how to fly?

“Sorry, bud. Just your good old friend Snakewing.”

Leo struggled to open his eyes against the pain and slight delirium that he was feeling, and sure enough, it was not Donnie or April. This “Snakewing” person was not a snake. Nor did she have wings, but she had a nice smile and really cool hair that was slicked back into a high ponytail.

“Nice hair.” he mumbled.

She laughed. “Thanks.”

He felt so tired. Maybe if he just closed his eyes for a bit…

“Bud, Baby Blue, I need you to try not to pass out, okay? I need to check you for some brain damage. I don’t know what you were doing over a hundred feet in the air, away from a bunch of buildings, but I am going to assume it wasn’t by choice,” Snakewing interrupted his thoughts.

So Leo struggled. His legs were on fire, his shell was most definitely cracked. That had to be bad. He was also getting blood all over this nice lady’s clothing. 

He felt a soft jolt as Snakewing landed somewhere.

“Alright, Baby Blue, I called for some reinforcements, but I’m going to try to help you as much as I can,” Snakewing reassured, “Can you tell me your name?”

“Leo…Leonardo Hamato,” Leo mumbled, his words slurred together. “But my dad calls me B- AAAGH!”  His tired speech was interrupted as Snakewing began cleaning his wounds with a slightly damp cloth. Although gentle, the soft strokes sent jolts of unbearable pain up his legs. 

“That’s good, Leo. What does your dad call you?” 

“Bu-Blue.” he answered through gritted teeth. 

“That’s nice. Who’s Donnie?”

Leo let out another scream of pain as Snakewing’s cloth brushed what was sure to be a severe fracture. 

“D-Donnie…is my-my twin. He-AGH- he likes nerd stuff.”

“Cool, does he have a color too?”

“Pur-purple!” 

“I love a good purple. Anything else?”

“R-Raph…He’s my big,” another yelp, “ brother !” he whimpered, trying to pull away from Snakewing, but Snakewing just moved with his legs.

“I know, I know, bud, but we’ve got to try to clean this. When my friend gets here, he’ll be able to give you some medicine, but I don’t have any. You got to help me out here.”

“I know….” Leo growled, eyes squeezed shut in pain, “If we don’t clean them, they’ll get infected and then I may never,” his voice broke, “walk again…”

“And that would suck, so work with me!” 

Leo nodded and continued. “Mikey.”

Snakewing continued her work, and Leo, through hisses of pain and gritted teeth, told her about his family.

Eventually, a softer, more masculine voice joined the conversation, though Leo was too pained to register it completely. 

“Styg, do you think he might-?”

“Oh, he most definitely has a concussion.”

A concussion? That’s not good. He’ll have to add it to the injuries he has acquired that were slowly piling up like his laundry at the lair. 

A hooded figure entered his line of vision. His face was shrouded by the dark colored hood. 

“Hey, kid. I’m here to help you, and I need to teleport you somewhere, are you okay with me touching you?” the hood questioned. 

“I like teleporting.” 

“Okay.” The man reached out and layed a gentle hand on Leo’s shoulder. Leo closed his eyes and waited for the familiar tingling sensation of every portal he had gone through. 

It never came, though. Instead, a harsh chill traveled up and down his beaten body and darkness crawled into him like tentacles. The chill was enough to have him open his eyes, and he saw…nothing. Just a black, empty endlessness. An ever expanding void that kept reaching out into nothing. 

A soft voice whispered gently in his ear, “You’re okay, it can’t hurt you.”

Leo took a deep shaking breath as the black faded and was replaced by harsh, white, artificial light. 

“Alright, Lee.” Snakewing popped into his line of sight. “We’re at a hospital-” 

“NO!” Leo gasped, sitting up, but more pain flared through his legs. “No, I can’t-”

The unnamed man placed an arm across Leo’s plastron and pushed him back down. Snakewing patted his arm kindly. “Don’t worry, this hospital knows all about nonhumans! Or um…what type of nonhuman are you?”

Leo stared. Type? There were more than two? “I’m a mutant.” 

Snakewing glanced at the stranger who shrugged. “Never heard of that one before, but I’ll tell the lady. I’ll be right back, alright?” 

Leo nodded and shut his eyes.

The stranger sat back in a chair with a sigh that held exhaustion from multiple nights awake. “What’s your name, kid?” he asked.

“Leo.”

“I’m Stygian.”

Leo nodded silently.

They sat in silence listening to the bustle of the emergency room. 

Several sets of footsteps came rushing towards him. 

“He’s going to need surgery!” 

“Get a room ready!”

Leo was whisked away.

Veronica stared after Leo as the doctors pulled him away on a stretcher, shouting medical crap that she didn’t understand.

Consumed by nerves, Veronica raised a hand to her mouth and chewed on her thumbnail. Brian, face still shrouded by his cloak, reached over and pulled her hand away.

“Don’t.”

Veronica sighed and shook out her hand instead. “Yeah, I know. But, jeez, what did that to him? He’s just a kid. Maybe. I actually don’t know how old he is.” 

Brian nodded. “He’s interesting. A powerful sort.”

“You felt it, too, huh?”

Brian nodded again, sticking his hands into the wide sleeves of this cloak like a dark Minecraft villager. 

Veronica turned back to the hallway that Leo disappeared down. “We should probably tell Rosevelt.”

“Most likely.”

With a sigh, Veronica plopped down onto one of the very uncomfortable plastic chairs lining the waiting room. “It’s just, if we tell Rosevelt, she’ll wanna take him into the Junior’s program and try to help us fight, you know? And I don’t think Baby Blue wants that. Like, he’s obviously already got his own problems. I don’t want him to feel pressured to fight a fight that’s not his own, you know?”

“You’re pretty attached to a kid that you met three minutes ago.” 

“I’m always attached to kids and you know this. But we can’t just not tell Rosevelt about him! I mean, we’re sworn to honesty and all that.”

“Not a thing.”

“Whatever, Styg.” Veronica ran a hand through her ponytail. “He just seemed so young…”

A nurse stepped over to them. “Excuse me, Ms. Snakewing?”

Veronica smiled at him. “Yeah?”

“Could you fill out some of this paperwork for the turtle you brought in?” He held out a clipboard with several stacks of paper on it and a pen. 

“Uh…yeah. I can do that.” Veronica took the clipboard from the nurse and flipped through a couple of pages.

“Please fill it out to the best of your ability. Skip stuff you don’t know. If all goes well, we can fill out the rest when the turtle wakes up.” The nurse walked back to his post.

Brian patted Veronica’s shoulder. “I have to get back to patrol. I’ll get a Junior to fill in your spots. Someone will check in on you later.”

Veronica nodded. She was not phased by Brian’s outward coldness. Brian was just like that. Cold on the outside, a prickly cactus that couldn’t be approached by anyone. But just like a cactus, if you approach it slowly enough and with caution, it won’t hurt you. Kind of like a pitbull. Sweetest, loyalist, scariest guy out there.

“Oh, wait!” Veronica caught Brian’s arm right before he stepped into the shadows. “Keep an eye out for more turtles. Leo mentioned brothers.”

Brian nodded and disappeared.