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He’s tired, he’s sore, and his jaw aches from how hard he’s been grinding his teeth, but when he blinks his eyes open from the brief respite of a deep, calming breath, Leo finds himself exactly where he always does — directly across from his twin brother.
Today’s battlefield is literal, though plain. He stands on one side of a long, large room with hardwood floors and no color on the walls. Some dozen yards away, Donnie has settled into a ready stance, feet shoulder width apart, bō held firm but loose. Another breath and Leo mirrors him, sword angled expertly before him.
Their father calls out the command, and they move before the last syllable has formed in his mouth.
Leo runs straight forward. In any other fight, he would be less direct, would dart or distract to one side, but Donnie knows him too well to fall for such a feint. They meet in the middle with a clash of metal that echoes in the empty room. Leo doesn’t let it stun him, pulls the sword back for another blow, and another.
Donnie blocks each one. He wastes no time with showy spins or twirls of his staff, just brings it up for each successive parry with calm efficiency. The blows push him back and he lets himself be moved, lets Leo take step after step forward and eat up the length of the room until there’s only a few feet between the wall and Donnie’s back. On the next swing, Leo’s shoulder rolls up a little too high and the sword pulls back a little too slow, and Donnie’s bō slips and twists along its edge. Leo is twisted with it, turned sharply to the side so his back meets the wall.
He pushes off again instantly, too slow to bring up his weapon to block but quick enough to turn to one side so Donnie’s next strike lands on his shell instead of his arm. It hurts — more than usual because Donnie has managed to talk his way into wielding his handmade titanium staff instead of the traditional wooden one — but it’s not a broken bone. Leo lets the weight of it force him down and kicks out at Donnie’s knee from the floor, making him dance backward and giving Leo space to regain his footing.
He lets his left foot lead, stays low to come up on Donnie’s front. It catches Donnie off guard because he’s still used to protecting his back, a decade-old habit he has yet to overcome, though he desperately needs to. Leo slams the hilt of his sword into his brother’s stomach to drive the point home.
Donnie stumbles then leaps backward, glaring at Leo as he recovers his stance. It’s an admonishment for using the blunt end of his weapon, mirrored by a light scoff from the sidelines. Leo accepts it graciously, turning his blade so the next strike is posed to draw blood.
This time, Donnie makes the first move, a rapid one-two from either end of his bō that forces Leo into a defensive stance. He blocks the swings aimed for his head, but the third comes down with enough force to push his sword arm off to the side, too far to make it back in time to hold off a fourth. Leo braces himself for the crack against his skull, but the bō swings low instead, sweeping his legs out from under him, and Leo is on the floor once again.
He rolls to the side and watches the staff slam into the ground with enough force to crack the wood where he lay just a moment ago. It’s enough to make him forget form and technique, to have him scrambling toward his brother and crashing into his side while he’s crouched forward. They tumble to the ground in a mess of limbs, weapons briefly forgotten in the chaos. Donnie’s knee juts into Leo’s side and makes him gasp for a breath, Leo’s elbow catches Donnie in the chin and snaps his head back against the floor, and both their arms sprout red from desperate scratching.
It’s untenable, both futile and profoundly unacceptable. It lasts only a few seconds, and they shove apart before they can be forcibly separated, but it’s enough to have them both panting and fierce when they meet again standing.
They strike with more abandon. The bō slams against Leo’s left foot. The sword catches deep along Donnie’s bicep. Leo does not pause to wait for a call to cease that won’t come. He’s frustrated, but unsurprised that the gush of blood and the crack of bone aren’t enough. He needs to end this. The next moment he has the space to breathe, Leo swings his sword through thin air instead of toward his brother, and leaps through the glowing portal.
Donnie remembers himself this time, and when Leo emerges from the other end of the wormhole, he curls to let the blow land against his back instead of turning to protect it. The sword glances harmlessly against the metal plating, and Leo vanishes through another portal before Donnie can retaliate.
Donnie’s eyes find him instantly where he reappears, narrowed and burning. His brother hates him, Leo knows, for his ability to access the mystic energy that Donnie still can’t quite grasp, now matter how hard he tries. He hates it nearly as much as Leo hates Donnie’s giant brain, for making their father sneer and call him a stupid, slow child, when Leo knows, compared with anyone else, he wouldn’t be.
The bō comes up and two tiny missiles detach at the press of a button, shooting across the distance between them. Those are new. Leo grits his teeth and darts through another portal to avoid them.
One finds him anyway. They must be something special, guided or heat-seeking instead of just flying blindly forward, because he feels the impact against his side, sending him crashing into the wall. Damn Donnie’s stupid, cheating tricks. This must be why the bags under his eyes were deeper this morning, sagging with the weight of an all-night work session he’d refused to discuss. Their father doesn’t call out, doesn’t agree that this advantage is unfair. He’s probably proud.
Donnie presses his ill-gotten advantage, forcing Leo further into a corner with strategic blows, one hitting hard against his injured side, one threatening to trip up his throbbing foot. The end of his bō comes up to press against Leo’s chest, crackling with the electric potential of the coming shock, and it’s over.
It should be over.
Shell against the wall, sword pointed downward, and if Leo were anyone else, that would be that. He needs the portal to drag him down, out of the path of Donnie’s final blow and victory. He’s sure that won’t be any consolation, that his savior being mystic in nature will only mean Donnie takes it harder.
Leo doesn’t travel far at all, only a few feet upwards, and he descends from that height to land hard and bring his brother to the ground, knee on his chest and sword at his throat.
Donnie glares up at him, fingers twitching around his staff as Leo keeps it pinned down with his left hand. His right holds the sword steady, just barely breaking the skin of his brother’s neck. He watches a few beads of blood spring up and trail down toward the floor. He waits for the call to cease, hears only silence.
They’re both breathless with exertion. Leo takes in deep, quick breaths, watching his brother try and fail not to do the same. The motion of it brings his throat further into the edge of the sword, and the little drops of blood become a steady stream. Leo’s right hand is motionless as the rest of his body heaves for air. He wonders how much longer they’re delaying the inevitable, how much further until it’s finally—
“Enough.”
He lifts his sword and rolls to his feet, ribs screaming as he forces his back straight. He does not offer a hand to help Donnie up. Donnie holds one hand to his throat as he rises, but drops it to stand at attention beside Leo. It clenches at his side instead, stained red.
Their father watches them, eyes sharp behind his gold-rimmed helmet. No matter how many times they endure his scrutiny, Leo will never quite overcome the feeling of being a bug pressed under glass.
“Very well then,” he says finally, as though they’ve offered him something to accept. “You may return to your room and rest; we will resume lessons tomorrow. You.” His gaze shoots to Donnie now, a reminder that that previous statement does not apply to him. “Come with me.”
Leo is dismissed. He walks out of the room and doesn’t look back.
His steps grow less steady as he walks through the halls, out of his father’s view. His left foot throbs every time he puts pressure on it, and he knows something must be broken. It’s a relief to close a door behind him and sink down to sit on the edge of his bed, and he lets himself revel in the calm for a few minutes before he reaches for the box of supplies under the bed frame.
A systematic prodding of fingers along the length of his foot reveals no obvious compound fractures, nothing profoundly out of place, just a hot spike of pain centered on the outside arch. He wraps a sturdy bandage around the limb, just far enough up the ankle to stabilize.
His side is harder to examine, given the placement of the blow. He can’t bend far enough to get a good view of things. The shell is intact, no blood when he swipes his fingers to search, though the sting of it tells him the missile burned along with the blunt force. He wipes the whole area down with a wet cloth and antiseptic and calls it a day. He lies down after cracking an ice pack and propping his foot up on a pillow to rest.
Leo stares up at the ceiling and waits. He replaces the ice pack twice when it melts. It’s hours before the door opens again.
Donnie doesn’t stumble as he enters the room; he closes the door behind him and flicks on a light to compensate for the dim hour, and stands quiet for a moment with his hand curled tight around his bō. The wound on his arm bleeds sluggishly. There’s a bruise on his cheekbone that Leo knows he didn’t put there.
“That needs stitches,” Leo says finally. Donnie nods. He sits down in the empty space made when Leo swings his body upright.
The motion of the needle and thread is rhythmic and soothing, a steady pattern across the wound which closes comfortingly behind it. Leo has always found this sort of thing very satisfying, the visual confirmation of repair. Internal injuries are harder, tucked away where he can’t see them heal.
The cut on Donnie’s neck doesn’t need stitching, but it does leak a thin trickle of fresh blood when he swipes a wet cloth across it to clean away the dried patches, so he presses a bandage in place. It’ll have to come off in the morning. It’s too clear a sign of weakness, a bullseye on a fragile target.
Donnie takes over then, turning Leo to the side so he can inspect the spot where his missile impacted. He clicks his tongue at the sight; clearly, Leo hasn’t done a good enough job taking care of it himself. He rummages around in the box of supplies for a moment before emerging with a pair of tweezers.
“Father has a gift for me,” he says as he turns his attention back to Leo’s side. It’s the first time he’s spoken in three days and it sends ice shooting along Leo’s veins.
“Oh?” Leo prompts, trying to calm the rapid fluttering of his heart before Donnie can feel it pounding beneath his skin.
Donnie nods. His tweezers pinch and pull away a piece of debris lodged under the lip of Leo’s shell. “A new eye.” Leo closes his own. “It’s very advanced, I should be able to program it with all the current capabilities of my goggles, and more beyond that. Thermal vision would be useful on missions, don’t you think?”
Leo does think. It probably was a heat-seeking program on the missile, then. Donnie tends to get stuck on a theme.
“And.” Donnie pauses, setting the tweezers down in favor of a tube of lotion that makes Leo shiver with relief when it is spread across the wound. “It can track mystic energies, too.”
There it is, then. The real reason for this ‘gift’. Leo is surprised it took this long. He wishes it had taken longer.
“That’s good,” he makes himself say out loud. “Maybe that will help.”
Donnie’s eyes flicker and narrow in response. Those eyes — warm, rich brown, the same as Leo’s, one of only a few spare features they have in common despite being twins — stay pinned to his task, controlled. He presses on a bandage with a little more force than necessary, but Leo doesn’t gasp at the sting.
With that done, Donnie moves his attention to Leo’s wrapped foot. His goggles come down over his eyes and he flicks through settings on the side, presumably to pull up the x-ray for a better look at the bones. He won’t need those goggles much longer.
“When?” Leo asks him.
“Next week. We’re just refining the neural link.” A week. Alright. One week, and half of his brother’s familiar gaze will be replaced with something cool and mechanical, functional. Will it be the left or the right eye? He doesn’t ask. “You have a simple greenstick fracture on the second metatarsal,” Donnie informs him. “Should heal well.”
Leo watches the metal plates of his brother’s back ripple slightly as he shifts and stands up. That was last year’s gift. The titanium is implanted in layers of thin, interlocking sheets, allowing Donnie all the flexibility of his natural shell as well as the protection of a tougher surface. And the permanence means he’s never left vulnerable.
His old battle shell sits in a corner of their room, a relic waiting to be stripped for parts. Leo imagines the goggles will soon join it. He breathes deep.
“I’m having some trouble with the portals,” he offers slowly, and Donnie freezes between one step and the next. “Think there might be a limit on the distance, I’m not sure I can get them much farther than—”
“Do not,” Donnie snaps, each syllable a sharp crack through the still air. “Don’t you dare.”
Of course not. Leo nods. “I’ll figure it out, then.”
“Yes, you will.”
Leo stares at his brother, his twin, the face he’s seen every morning and evening of his life, and still doesn’t know well enough to tell whether it’s concern or resentment behind his words.
Donnie turns his back before Leo can figure it out. After setting his staff carefully near the door, he turns off the light and lies down on his own bed. He curls up with his face toward the wall, so all Leo can see of him are the layered plates of his shell. The glint of metal along the segments makes him look more like a pillbug than a turtle. Leo flips over and stares at the wall instead.
When they were younger, they would push their beds together and whisper as long into the night as they dared. Leo would rest a hand over the bandages on Donnie’s arm and Donnie would watch Leo’s eyes carefully for any sign of a concussion. They would share foolish, dangerous thoughts in the darkness of their room: I’m tired of fighting — one day we should leave — you’re not stupid, he’s wrong.
They would press their shells together and fall asleep back to back, secure in the knowledge that, at least, they would always have each other.
The sentiment has twisted over the years since then. Yes, they’ll always have each other. Always have their brother to push and pull against, to be measured up to and found wanting, to watch as pieces of him are ripped away and to think ‘at least it’s not me.’ Even if they pushed their beds together now, it wouldn’t be the same. The weight of Donnie’s shell would be cold and hard, not the reassuring warmth of his memory.
They will always have each other. Leo can’t remember the last time that thought was a comfort.