tushanshu_logs | [open catch-all]

Entry tags:

[open catch-all]

Characters: Leonardo (

duelkatana) and OPEN
Date: throughout the month of May
Location: various
Situation: various
Warnings/Rating: none yet; subject to change

-

{ooc; If you'd like me to write up a header for you or otherwise plot, feel more than free to PM me or catch me at

throesofangels. Or you can tag in with your own starter! This month Leo will spend much of his time rooftop-hopping in the Fire Sector, lingering as near to Tu Vishan's head as he can get away with, and keeping a self-imposed vigil near damage control spots throughout the city. Brackets or prose both welcome!}

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Leo can't help but throw him an utterly confused look. Raph, just cleaning at the dojo? Somehow he doesn't buy that, little brother.

But something tells him it falls somewhere under that contract they've kept for a year, and it's already been broken once today - under any other circumstance, Leo might insist on going, but he'll let this time slide. Lord knows he owes Raph a favor after this morning.

"Okay..." he says a bit dubiously, eying his brother. He crosses his arms in the clear declaration that he's letting Raph off the hook for now. "Well, have fun."

Huffing a sigh, all Raph can do is roll his eyes. "Uh-huh."

It's a little too early to leave now (some of the students might still be lingering around), but he can't stand when Leo gets like this. So he heads for the door, giving him a sharp little wave over his shoulder. "See ya."

Leo's lucky they're brothers. Otherwise he'd never put up with his crud at all.

Leo watches him go, stance never faltering. Once Raph disappears out the door, Leo gives a slight, sharp sigh, cracking his neck to the side. Well, that was closer to the norm. He shouldn't feel as relieved about that as he does.

Either way, having an actual plan already makes him feel better. With Don still on the consoles and Mike out who-knows-where, there isn't much place for Leo to return to other than his room, but this time he brushes off the desire to mope - instead he slips his mask and weapons back on, runs through what few kata he can in the small space, and then drops into a much more peaceful meditation than the one he'd attempted earlier.

Get under Raph's skin, feel your troubles melt away. Who knew?

Sometime after dinner, Raph finally shows up from his "cleaning" with a split lip and a fresh set of soon-to-be bruises. But he's in a good mood, stomping around the house bellowing at Mike from another room the prospect of saved leftovers, then sniffing around the fridge before he goes looking for Leo.

Leonardo prides himself on his unshakeable focus, but there are few people that subvert every known Leo-ism better than Raphael. His expression pinches in slight irritation at all the stomping and bellowing. One guess as to who's back. Leo gets to his feet, rotating his shoulder as he moves to the door and slips out just in time to meet Raph.

"You're in a good mood," he notes with a raised eye ridge, pulling the door shut behind him. Cleaning. You get into a fight with the mop or what?

Don't ask, don't tell. They're going back to the old rules, right? Exceptions are only for Turtles hellbent on slowly driving themselves crazy. And this Turtle? Well, he's just pretty damn good at driving others crazy.

"Huh?" He says dumbly, still munching on the handful of leftovers he managed to snatch. He's not gonna eat a whole bunch now, so grabbing stuff on the go it is.

"Yeah, I guess," he says quickly with a shrug. "We still goin' or what? I wanted to check out the Metal Sector."

Don't ask, don't tell. It's precisely the reason Leo doesn't push further than that, but his mouth twitches upward. It's obvious Raph must have done something other than cleaning at the dojo that cheered him up, and a happy Raph is a rare sight - enough so that some of that cheer is transferred to Leo, whether he likes it or not.

"We're going," he says, already waving his hand and heading for the window. He'll ask about the interest in Metal along the way.

Without a second's hesitation, Raph shoves the rest of his food in his mouth and trots to the window after him. Then, they're out into the rapidly darkening night in the direction of Metal.

It's not a place Raph usually frequents, and that's the real reason they're going there tonight. The place is just too clean, to modern. It lacks the dirty, gritty feel of the others that reminds him a little of home. Metal... it only serves as a reminder of just how far away from home they really are. But considering the time Don's spent around there? Tonight he's willing to give it a shot.

The cool night air prickles his skin, fills his lungs and gives him an extra boost of speed. With the mood he's in, that quickly turns into a game of parkour, sliding down steeply pitched rooftops, seeing how many flips he can land off the ornamental architecture and still land in one piece on the other side.

Leo's been around the whole city plenty of times, but Metal... only a handful of occasions have brought him here specifically, and none of them just to run.

It's a gorgeous sector. What it lacks in grit it makes up for with brilliance and sheen, like a New York City with its grime stripped away, leaving sharp, clean angles, lights that scatter shadows like skittish night-creatures. Leonardo knows that like any other place of its kind, the beauty is only skin deep, but there's a starkness to Metal that he can truly admire even without understanding it.

Also, what Raph is doing looks like fun. Leo doesn't intend to get flashy at first, but seeing his brother sliding and flipping quickly makes regular rooftop hopping seem boring in comparison. A grin ticking up the corners of his mouth, he ups his speed, and is soon keeping pace with Raphael - and although he doesn't speak, there's an unmistakeably competitive edge to his parkour, the way he balances on razor-thin rails without breaking stride and uses antennae to swing the tight turns and angles of Metal's architecture.

Leonardo has a lot more of that well-practiced finesse than Raphael could ever dream of. But for being built like a tank, Raph doesn't do bad for himself. Rows of streetlights stretching between buildings become stages for daring tightrope acts. And as the smooth curves of Water become the angular, steel-plated playground of buildings, there's twice the opportunity for theatrics.

He runs at full-tilt, lungs burning and his heart thrumming in his chest, and it feels good. Better than any drug. With manic energy humming in his veins and the cool night wind blowing at his back, Raph feels like he could do anything.

There's a competition, sure. There always will be when it comes to Leo and Raph, but this time it's just a simple, good-natured game of cat and mouse. Like two dogs chasing each other across a yard. They run and dive and flip the startling gaps between buildings just for the sake that it makes them feel more alive.

In time, Raph hopes they'll circle past Don's suite. And then the wreckage of the latest terrorist bombings around that part of the city. Because even on a good night with the wind at their back, this is still a city at war, and they're its reluctant soldiers.

In time, Leo stops being flashy; instead of trying to outdo his brother with flips and long leaps and rolls, he matches Raph's speed, sticking to a much simpler (and admittedly more efficient) routine. The simple rush from satisfying the need to run fills his veins with static, a weightless drug - he feels better than he has in days. But he's running on an apple alone, and he knows he has to slow down a bit if he wants to keep it that way.

Soon enough, Leo decides he doesn't need to ask about the interest in Metal Sector at all. He thinks he's feeling the reason, right now.

But it is true: they live in a city at war, hardly the first of its kind, and certainly not the last they'll ever see. When Leo pulls a little ahead of Raph, he abruptly stops on a rooftop, head swerving somewhere to the west. A few hundred yards away he can see a whole block of darkness, a black pit sitting in the brilliance of a thousand lights, and immediately he knows - they both must know - why it's there.

He doesn't bother looking back at his brother, or even motioning a command; he simply changes course, veering towards that dark pit on the horizon.

The gap in the gleaming architecture is like a missing tooth in a wide, jagged smile. When they reach the edge, the blackness is so palpable it almost swallows them whole, leaves Raph stopping dead on a razor's edge, his mask tails whipping in the wind behind him.

It's not the first burned-out hull of a building he's seen, but the feeling of it still leaves the same impression. How many were trapped? Injured? How many were killed when the walls came falling down? How many lives were ruined? How many bones still lay beneath the rubble?

The game is over for now. Now it's a time to stop, stand panting, peering over into the abyss and remember the enormity of it all.

Wordless seconds tick by, and that's all the communing with ghosts Raph can take. Soon he's off again, trekking a course for Don's suite with much less vigor than before.

Standing on the edge of the pit, his feet balanced on a gnarled support beam that twists at the end like it had been wrenched off, Leonardo stares down. The damage here isn't like it was in the Water Sector. The attacks filled their home with poison, but here it carved whole chasms, ripped buildings down as though they were built from hardened sand. He sees no bodies in the trench, but it's probably because they've already been removed by relief workers.

When the reconstruction starts, there will be many more bags lined up along the concrete.

Leo's fists clench.

Damn war. Damn every war there's ever been, for every body he'll never see.

Raph leaves, but Leonardo lingers a moment longer, bandana tails whipping across his shell. Then, silently, he turns and follows, letting his brother lead the way this time.

Raph's feet pound the gravel rooftops, launching himself off concrete ledges and into the dead air until he lands on the other side again, whole and alive. That's how running rooftops always feels. Like lengths of time fighting gravity, fighting himself for speed and exertion interrupted by those miniscule, weightless moments of perfect freedom.

When he runs, Raph is always escaping something. And as he goes, it feels too good to put the rubble behind him.

He's not sure exactly where Donnie's suite is, but he has a rough idea. So slowly they circle the sector under his lead, passing more burned-out shells of half-demolished buildings. He doesn't stop again until he's found the Foreigner housing, his mouth drawn into a hard line as he takes in his surroundings.

It becomes clear soon enough that Raph is looking for something. The way his gaze passes over buildings, skipping jaggedly across skeletons and crumbled architecture - Leo isn't sure, at first, but he hazards a guess soon enough.

Don's suite is in this Sector.

He doesn't know if he's right, and if he is, why Raph wants to see it so badly. But the truth is, Leo does, too. There's something he's been thinking about for a while. He'll need plenty more time to think about it, but the option has been on the table ever since the attacks.

The only thing stopping him from bringing it up to his brothers lies all around them. Poison, or annihilation? How can one possibly choose between those two dangers?

Either way, when they stop near the Foreigner housing, Leo stands side-by-side with his brother, eyes sliding across the landscape. Eventually he tilts his head in Raph's direction.

"Do you know which one it is?"

There's no real reason why Raph wanted to come scope out his brother's suite. Just curiosity. Don's been spending a lot of time down here and he wants to see what it looks like.

Perched on the edge of one of the housing buildings, he watches quietly as two people pass under the streetlights, not turning to answer.

"Don't remember," he says with a shrug.

Huh. Leo returns his gaze to the horizon. He'll ask Don to show it to him later... once he's thought about the idea of moving a bit more.

They stay like that for a while; Raph crouched on the edge, Leo standing with his arms crossed, both shadows lingering in a far-bright place. Somehow, it feels like they belong anyway. Leonardo doesn't see a need to break the silence.

A block down, there's a scaffolding set up around the charred remains of a building, worker kedan with lamps fastened to their heads laboring through the night to tear down charred walls of metal and set up new support beams. Leo's eyes settle on a pair feeding wire into a searchlight; they point it up into the sky and switch it on, bathing the framework of the building in neon blue light.

War never changes, but neither do peoples' will to live and rebuild.

Seeing what's slowly become of the city, it's hard not to ask Leo where they're going to go from there. What happened before their little run is the only thing that stops him.

All he can do is sigh heavily and let his mind wander. Think about this place and what they're expecting them to do. Just sitting there makes his skin itch, but even he knows there's nothing they can do about it now, and that's the worst part of it all.

After a while, Raph stands up from his crouch and silently hops the next roof, heading back in the direction of home. There's no fancy footwork this time. Only the quiet flit of shadows into the night.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[open catch-all]

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject