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At first, Yuichi didn’t know why Leonardo was so annoyed about his family crashing their dates. The Hamato siblings were fun to be around and folded Yuichi into their shenanigans as though it cost them nothing to include him. And it was always worthwhile to see Leonardo in his natural habitat—those sweet and silly and childish sides of him that only came out of their shell at home—so he never minded when he drove down to the lair to visit Leonardo and their time together was never time alone together.
Then Leonardo came over to Yuichi’s house to watch a movie and Yuichi’s cousins invited themselves into the den and each made it their life’s mission to make Yuichi wish he was an only child. Leonardo thought they were hilarious and encouraged their antics like the troublemaker he was but Yuichi firmly resolved to never laugh at him for complaining about his brothers ever again.
“We should go out sometime,” Yuichi said pointedly, staring very hard at the unrepentant little fluffy faces peeking at him from the porch windows. “We could get dinner. Or go skating. Or vandalize public property. I’m not picky.”
“Or all of the above!” Leonardo chimed brightly, the blue light of a portal flickering playfully behind him. He squeezed Yuichi’s hands and added, “I like the way you think, Snowball. Let me know when you’re off work on Friday and I’ll come steal you from tío.”
He leaned in like he was thinking about going for a kiss, then seemed to remember they had an audience and backed off again with a nervous giggle.
Goddammit, Yuichi thought with feeling. The constant scrutiny was actually ruining his entire life.
So that’s how they end up here; Yuichi has his bike helmet tucked under one arm, watching with amusement as his boyfriend stands in front of his assembled family and lays down the law.
“One last time: what are you not going to do,” Leonardo says in a no-nonsense tone, arms folded across his plastron, borrowed purple bomber jacket glittering where the living room lights hit the sequins. He’s unfairly cute.
“Stalk, supervise or spy,” his siblings recite with varying levels of agreeableness.
“And what will happen if I catch any of you doing any of those things?”
“You’ll portal our favorite belongings into the ocean.”
“And I will catch you,” Leonardo adds dangerously. “My phone is on, I’m sharing my location, I’ll be with Yui the entire time, and we probably won’t do anything crazier than trying that new Greek restaurant on 9th Ave.”
“You’d try Gyros Stop without us?” Michelangelo demands with a look of absolute betrayal and wet, shiny eyes. Yuichi honestly can’t tell if he’s kidding or not, but Leonardo is completely unmoved.
“Pushing your luck, Miguel. I’ll bring back baklava.”
The crocodile tears dry right up. One camera shutter sound later, Leonardo is staring at Casey and Casey is staring at the floor, new phone clutched guiltily to his chest.
“I promised April I’d get a picture,” he whispers.
“If you go into the settings you can turn the sound effect off for next time,” Donatello says, leaning over his nephew’s shoulder.
“Next time?” Leonardo all but shrieks.
“Hey, so you two should get going, huh?” Raphael interjects quickly—probably because he can sense the situation rapidly deteriorating by the second. “Have a good time! Tell Raph all about it later!”
Yuichi and Leonardo finally make it past the turnstiles with only a few more dramatics for the road, hopping down into the tunnel where Yuichi’s bike is waiting while Splinter’s pointed reminder of the curfew for little turtles echoes boomingly around them.
Said little turtle looks seconds away from dying of mortification and busies himself with shoving his helmet on and pretending his father isn’t still talking about what he’ll do if ‘my Baby Blue comes home with even a single scratch!’
“Get me out of here before I do something drastic,” Leonardo grits out.
Yuichi pulls his own helmet on and slings a leg over his bike. He twists around and pats the seat behind him, smiling.
“I’ll go real fast, Stripes. Just hang on tight.”
He knows for a fact that the Hamato brothers have motorcycles that Donatello built from the ground up, and that even little Michelangelo can outdrive people three times his age. And Yuichi has floated the idea of Leonardo coming down to the Hidden City on one of the shell hogs so they could have a drag race with Kitsune and Chizu, which Leonardo agreed instantly was the best idea he’d ever had.
But for now it makes sense to share Yuichi’s bike. It's date night! And it feels like Yuichi is literally the king of the entire universe when Leonardo wraps his arms snug around Yuichi’s middle and props his chin on Yuichi’s shoulder, knocking their helmets together playfully.
There’s another camera shutter sound behind them, and Leonardo whips around like he’s going to surrender to the Cain Instinct once and for all. Biting back a bark of laughter, Yuichi revs the engine really loud and takes off.
It’s late and the sky is overcast, which means that when they turn onto the street from the underground it’s to a smear of headlights and bright neon signs and glowing storefront windows.
None of the Hamatos seem particularly interested in Cloaking Brooches, beyond the single time Yuichi heard them curiously pondering what their human forms would look like while they were waiting on the popcorn in the microwave. Brooches aren’t particularly hard to come by, and Yuichi knows for a fact that there are a bunch in a drawer at home somewhere, but when he offered to bring over a few, he got a round of “nahh”s.
“Embrace the turtle, baby,” cheerful Michelangelo piped up.
“Maybe pops would want one,” Raphael added thoughtfully. “We’ll have to ask.”
“It’s New York,” Donatello explained, since Yuichi probably looked as confused as he felt. “No one pays attention to anybody else. At best, the humans won’t even notice we look weird because they’ve got their own stuff going on. At worst, they will notice and automatically assume we’re in costume and not care why. What a town.”
So when they pull into a drive thru for smoothies, Leonardo just says, “Leave your helmet on, they won’t say anything,” proving it when he leans over to pay for their drinks with his phone and his sleeve rides up past his wrist. The teenage cashier clocks his green skin, visibly decides she’s not paid enough to care, and smiles at them brightly when Leonardo tips 25%.
The Hamatos have lived in—or beneath—Midtown their entire lives, so Yuichi is comfortable deferring to their experience. He doesn’t think he’ll tell Auntie, though.
They wind up at a little park with a wooded waterfront area, almost entirely empty due to the threat of rain. There’s one dim, buzzing streetlight that offers a warm orange glow against the tree coverage and overcast sky, so the two of them gravitate that way.
Yuichi can see a few other people on the walk path, all the way down at the other side of the park, looking as though they’re making their way out.
“There’s so many people in every corner of this town but you still manage to find little pockets like this where nobody’s around,” Yuichi says. “It seems impossible.”
“The Hidden City is like that, too,” Leonardo says, hopping up to sit on the railing that separates the greenery from the water. “Every time you take me to one of your secret hangout spots I’m like, ‘Wait, there’s a billion yokai half a street over, how is it just the two of us here?’”
Yuichi laughs and says, “That’s fair. Did you get pineapple-banana this time? Let me try.”
“You gotta branch away from strawberries and cream, there’s a whole world out there,” Leonardo complains, but gamely switches smoothies anyway.
Hanging out just the two of them takes much the same shape as it does when they hang out at the farm or the lair. They talk and watch videos on their phones and recreate TikTok dances they’ll never post but save anyway. The only big differences are the ambient noises of the city—traffic and sirens and music and humanity—and the lights on the water behind Leonardo that frame him like a movie scene.
And also that there’s no nosy siblings to get in the way when Yuichi leans in for a kiss. He does exactly that, mirroring Leonardo’s smile, when suddenly his boyfriend’s gaze cuts to something over his shoulder and he goes through the five stages of grief in rapid-fire.
“Pizza Supreme,” the slider mutters, letting his forehead bump against Yuichi’s in defeat. “Gram-gram’s laughing at me, I know she is. I mean it’s free entertainment at this point.”
“What?” Yuichi says, turning around. “What did you see?”
“My all-time least favorite B-list bad guys, probably up to their same old stupid tricks.” Leonardo puts his hands on Yuichi’s shoulders to guide him out of the way as he hops down from the railing. His attitude has cooled slightly, a gleam entering his eyes that wouldn’t look out of place in Donatello’s. Which definitely means trouble. “Hey, morons!” he calls. “Stop trying to out-ninja me, I’m so far out of your league it’s actually insane!”
There’s a beat of silence, less than a handful of seconds, and then a dozen humans in dark clothing reveal themselves. Yuichi spends a lot of time with a ninja clan these days and still finds it a little unnerving the way they can spill out of the shadows soundlessly. Even Leonardo and his siblings, with all their bright colors and larger-than-life personalities, can disappear into thin air like it’s nothing.
These ninja wear hooded cowls with a burnt orange emblem that give away exactly who they are.
Yuichi’s hand goes to Edgewing, belted at his hip. He knows who to blame for the Krang invading New York City—and ultimately for the battle scars Leonardo and his brothers all bear as a result. He only has to take one look at the healed gashes that stand out stark white against the pretty blue of Leonardo’s carapace and it’s enough to make him want to start breaking faces with an eagerness Karasu-Tengu-sensei would disapprove of.
“Can we please just cut to the chase here?” Leonardo says, hands on his hips. “I’m a busy guy, and frankly, you picked the wrong night.”
At the beginning of the evening, the only solid plans on Yuichi’s itinerary had been dinner and driving around really fast to hear Leonardo whoop in his ear and maybe going to that drive-in movie theater in Brooklyn the turtles love, because it was screening the original Jurassic Park trilogy this weekend and Yuichi had only seen the first one.
Maybe he should have been surprised to end up engaged in a sword fight with his boyfriend’s hereditary enemy in a cute postal-stamp sized park in Manhattan, but he’s not, really. Part of running with the Hamato clan is learning really early on how to roll with the punches.
And—he’s taking some mean glee in this. Sue him. When he slams the hilt of Edgewing into a cowled face and hears the crunch of cartilage he goes, “Ha,” under his breath, and only feels guilty for a second about what sensei would have to say about it.
“Aren’t you guys embarrassed?” Leonardo calls out to the gaggle of Foot ninja he’s fighting, sounding more annoyed than anything else. “All of your overlords either leave you for dead or sick a squishy pink brain parasite on you.” He glances at Yuichi and adds, as if he had somehow missed the entire alien invasion earlier in the year and this was his first time hearing about it, “It was a whole thing.”
“You know, I do have the Internet at home.”
“You have dial-up at home. I didn’t even know what that was until Donnie Googled it.”
If Yuichi wasn’t already in love with this guy for an embarrassing number of reasons, watching him fight five to one without breaking a sweat definitely would have helped him get there. He doesn’t even need the edge his ninpo gives him; fighting an enemy like the Krang kind of makes everything else seem like small fish in comparison.
By the time the last ninja has crumpled bonelessly to the ground, Yuichi’s muscles are burning in that pleasant post-workout way. And his mind is completely free of everything except a giddy runner’s high. So when Leonardo tilts a smile at him, already reaching for his abandoned smoothie, Yuichi doesn’t think.
He just closes those four steps between them, takes Leonardo’s face in both hands, and kisses him.
It’s perfect, obviously. Even with the sound of a nearby eavesdropper squeaking and then being soundly muffled.
“Okay,” Leonardo says very calmly, and disappears in a flash of cyan.
Somewhere in the wooded part of the park, there’s multiple shrieks and the sound of Raphael pleading, “No listen, we weren’t spying I swear we were, uh, we were—”
“Geocaching,” Donatello fumbles, “what an insane coincidence that it took us here, he lied convincingly. Nardo, you know how susceptible I am to both peer pressure and FOMO—”
“You guys are so cute!” Michelangelo chirps enthusiastically. “Ow! And totally a power couple, you should see the pictures we—Lee, ow, ow, okay, I’m sorry I’m sorry—”
Yuichi sighs, and looks down at the Foot ninja beginning to stir weakly on the ground nearby.
“I’m so lucky,” he confides in them, the truth of it a warm little star in his heart, and then slides out his phone.
Donatello added him to the Hamato family plan ages ago, which means he gets service everywhere and data speeds he didn’t even know were possible. Yuichi finds Gyro Stop on GrubHub and places a pick-up order for enough spanakopita and baklava to feed however many of Leonardo’s siblings he decides to leave alive.