Take this story whichever way you will. I myself am not entirely sure at this point where it's going to end up. But there's something unignorably adorable about Leo and Donnie as a pair, and then something just as irresistible about Leo and Raph. And whatever those somethings are gave rise to this piece. So I hope you enjoy, and we'll see where this takes us.

And of course, disclaimer: As much as I wish the turtles were mine, they simply are not.

The slosh of eight-year-old, mutant turtle feet traipsing through ice cold sewer water echoed through New York City's underground network of mucky tunnels. The careless splashes were accompanied by the whispered exhales of two sets of lungs hiding behind the turtles' plastrons as they hurried down a narrow passageway, one following the other.

The brother in front bore an adventurous grin that swelled with the same air of overconfidence that always so often stained his cheeks. His emerald eyes, accented by a strip of red cloth, danced around the slime-coated tunnel as the young ones came closer and closer upon their destination. In his arms was a paper bag on its last leg of life, bulging with articles of clothing just as equally old and shabby. The young turtle hardly spared a glance behind his shoulder for his brother, who was lagging behind.

The second turtle was striped with blue and skimmed the tunnel with a nervous gaze markedly the same hue of his mask. He kept his arms wrapped around himself as a frail defense against the cold and only ran whenever he realized his brother was trotting too far ahead to make out in the shadows. His little heart beat a fast pace behind his ribcage and his head whirled at every noise, constantly gazing back at the sheet of black that seemed to follow them, crawling over every inch of the tunnel in a deadly, pending silence. It was not the darkness that he feared, nor the mysteries that lurked within it. What frightened him was the prospect of being found in a place they should not be.

"Raphie," he moaned as he caught up with his brother again. "We're not supposed to be down here. What if Master Splinter—"

"Quit being such a baby, Leo," Raphael said, sparing his brother half a glance over his shoulder. "I thought you said you wanted to see it."

"I do but …" Leonardo bounced on his toes. "Sensei told us never to come this far. He's gonna find out. We'll get into trouble … Maybe we should go back."

"No way! Not when we're this—" He stopped abruptly and looked toward the ceiling. "You hear that?"

Leo inched close to his brother's shell and listened as panic pulsed through his veins. He tried to hear it, the whisper of his father's tail dragging through the water, the wispy silence of the great master's sprint, that voice angrily shouting out his name. But instead, he heard the high-pitched wailing of a siren that began faint then grew louder as the seconds ticked by. He furrowed his brow at the noise.

"We're close," Raph nearly shouted, rattling Leo's nerves. He took off without another word and shortly disappeared around a corner.

"Raph, wait!"

Leonardo hastily followed and came to a sudden halt as he rounded the corner and nearly plowed into his brother's carapace. He wobbled on the balls of his feet then found his balance and gasped as he caught a glimpse of dappled, white-blue light beaming down into the middle of the tunnel a few yards away. He stood on his tiptoes to get a better peek over Raph's shoulder.

He was familiar with this kind of light, but it always seemed so far away in the dojo, and it was never content on staying. It continually came and went as though undecided whether or not it wanted to befriend the little family of turtles and their rat master. And even when it did shine, the leaves of the full-grown tree made the light and the world it came from hard to distinguish, and Splinter always covered it up in the winter. It was a wonder they could never get close to. But now, that wonder was only yards away, right above their heads.

Raphael finally turned to his blue-banded brother with a smile splitting his face. "This is it," he said, his voice brimming with eagerness. He shoved the bag into Leo's arms. "Hold this."

Leonardo, who was not quite as strong as his younger brother, clutched the bag awkwardly and waited as Raphael plunged his arms inside of it, adding to its weight. The turtle in red pulled out a dingy, striped scarf and wrapped it cozily around his brother's neck, then stuffed a knitted cap on his head that sunk down halfway over his eyes. Leonardo audibly struggled as he shifted the bag into one arm to adjust the hat on his head, while Raphael continued to scrounge around in the bag. Finally, Raph pulled out a large, stained hoodie and slipped it over his own head.

Leonardo narrowed his eyes. "Where did you get that?" He certainly never remembered Splinter bringing it home for one of them.

"I found it."

"Where?"

Raphael answered with an un-telling smirk and took the bag from Leo's arms. He pulled out a blanket and tossed it at him. "You ready?"

Leonardo fumbled with the blanket and wrapped it around himself, clutching the ends tightly at his chest. However much it stung his nose with the stench of filth, it was much warmer than nothing. He nodded and followed as Raph led the way toward the light.

The air sharpened with an intense chill the closer they got, and with the new lighting, Leo could now see his breath leaving his lips in little white clouds. A smile escaped him without his notice. It wasn't often that he got to see himself breathing, witness the proof of his life floating before his own beak. But just as quickly as it had come, the little grin slipped away again and was replaced by astonishment as he hesitated at the edge of the light. He could see now, little specks of white drifting down from the grate above, crafting a dusting of frost on the sewer floor wherever the light touched the cold cement. Slowly, Leonardo stepped directly under it, sliding one foot forward at a time, and looked straight up.

What he saw made his breath escape once and filled him with awe from the bottom up. A tingling ensued in his chest with a new level of happiness he had never known until this moment.

It was the sky, and it was full of wispy clouds that released a constant trickle of the white flakes he only vaguely knew to be snow. And behind these clouds were slivers of midnight blue, all illuminated by a shiny, silver moon as round as a coin, just hanging there, far above the world. And yet he still felt like he could reach it somehow, if he just lifted his hand and wished hard enough. There were no stars—years later, Donatello would explain this to be the cause of light pollution—but little dots of man-made light, embedded in sky-scraping buildings, did join the moon in igniting the city with a gleam of luminescent silver as they set up a perimeter around the grate.

After years of wondering, of frustrating himself with curiosity, of hoping as hard as he could just to catch a glimpse of the world that his sensei constantly forbade him and his brothers from visiting, he was finally seeing it for the very first time—if through the bars of a metal screen, it was still his first view of the sky, of the tops of buildings, of the real actual moon, and of snow. He reached up and could swear he felt the light curling graciously around his fingers, welcoming him, pulling at him as if calling him to draw nearer, to join life on the surface … And the snow, it was so soft, so cold, tickling his skin as the tiny snowflakes met his fingertips and melted straight away.

The smile came back, creeping across his cheeks. "Raph," he whispered. "The sky …"

Raphael nodded. "I know … Still wanna go back?" he teased, another smirk in his voice.

Leo shook his head. "It's beautiful," he said instead, the soft-spoken words leaving his lips in a wispy puff of white. Without realizing he was doing so, he stood on his toes, reaching as far up as he could, desperate to get his fingers between the grate to touch the atmosphere on the other side.

He swayed as something grabbed his shell, and then his feet left the floor. Raphael stooped to get his brother on his shoulders and then stood without effort. Using the top of Raph's head for support, Leo expertly propped his feet on his younger brother's shoulders and pushed himself up to his full height. Together, their stature put Leonardo's head just inches below the grate.

Breathing rather shallow now, he slowly lifted his arm out of the blanket and poked his child-sized, three-fingered hand through the widest slot in the grid. The atmosphere was neither colder nor warmer, nor was it any more or any less humid. The pattern of the snowfall was no different and the lighting was the same, but having his hand enveloped by the air up above, the same air that the humans breathed, gave him other-worldly chills that rushed up his spine.

"How does it feel?" Raph asked, his voice echoing off the tunnel walls.

"Amazing."

"Leo … We could go up there."

It took a few blinks for this to sink in and yank him rudely out of his reverie.

"What?"

"There's a manhole just in the next tunnel. It's got a ladder leading up to it and everything."

"Are you insane?" the older turtle said, jerking his hand back and staring down with wide eyes. "Splinter would kill us! He'd never forgive us. He'd—He would … Wait. How do you know that?"

Raphael's bright and mischievous green eyes blinked up at him silently, and then he shrugged, hands secure around Leo's ankles. "I've been over here a few times; I told you. But come on, Leo. We could actually go up there to the surface—for the first time ever. There's probably snow everywhere!"

"There's probably people everywhere."

No sooner had these words taken their respective dive off his tongue then his eyes snapped back up at the sound of voices and he caught a glimpse of two large, oddly-shaped figures moving toward the grate. Panic seized him, and in his hurry to hide, he forgot he was standing on Raphael's shoulders. He tipped backward, and in Raph's instinctive attempt to catch him, they both fell with an oomph!, Leo's shell connecting with Raph's plastron as he landed on top of him. They stilled in an awkward heap and held their breath as they stared anxiously up at the grate, eight-year-old hearts shivering behind their ribcages as they waited to be discovered.

Instead, however, the figures passed right over the grid and their voices soon faded away. Both boys exhaled with relief.

"You see?" Leo said, rolling off of his brother. "We can't go up there. Someone would see us."

Raph's huff of an exhale left his mouth as a cloud. He crossed his arms over his chest and slanted his lips. "You do everything Splinter tells you to. You're such a wannabe."

Leo pursed his lips, ready to argue, but decided against it. They'd probably be heard if they started shouting at each other, being so close to the world above. He plopped down next to his brother and sighed.

"Let's just stay here for a little while and then go back home before Master Splinter knows we're gone. Wasn't that what we were supposed to do anyway?"

Raphael turned his green eyes on his brother and stared him down as though it took every ounce of humility he had in him—if any—to agree with his brother's recommendation. Then something soft seemed to come across his gaze and he gave in.

"Fine, you win." He threw his hands down in his lap and then gave his fingers the smallest of smirks. "Splinter Jr.," he mumbled.

Leo squinted at his younger brother and accepted the challenge with his own grin. "Hot-head."

"Teacher's pet."

"Gremlin."

"Kill joy."

"Godzilla."

"Suck-up."

Leo paused with a self-confident smirk. "Little brother."

Raphael narrowed his eyes. The boys held evenly-matched glares for such a long amount of time that Leo started to stretch his senses and count the number of snowflakes kissing the sewer floor as he waited for Raph to break. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen … And then finally the stubborn turtle stuffed his arms over his chest and scoffed under his breath.

"Yeah, well I'm stronger than you."

Leonardo smiled. "I know. But I still win."

A tiny smirk lifted Raph's cheek. "Oh yeah?"

The fire of a physical challenge lit in Raph's eyes, and Leo knew what was coming but was too slow to move first. Raphael pounced on him before he could spare another blink, tackling him to the sewer floor, and they wrestled with each other—ninjas-in-training style—until Raphael pinned Leonardo to the floor and they were both giggling so hard that exultant tears sparkled in their eyes.

"Okay, okay." Leo laughed. "I give. Get off."

He shoved his brother to the side and Raph rolled over on his shell, chuckling still as he stared up at the grate above. His laughter soon tapered off and Leo watched him close his eyes and let the snow fall on his face. Leo leaned back and rested his head on his brother's plastron and did the same. The snow was nice and cold on his skin, keeping him awake and alert and aware that anytime he opened his eyes he'd be struck with the presence of the sky and the radiant moon smiling down on him. He sighed comfortably and hugged the blanket around him.

There was a moment of silence as he listened to the low rumble of human life moving around on the surface and the steady breathing of his brother as his stomach rose and fell under Leo's head. Then Raph took in a large breath and sighed.

"Hey, Leo?"

"Hm?"

"Don't tell anyone about this okay?"

Leonardo opened his eyes. The sight of the speckled sky was still just as brilliant as before. "But … Mikey and Donnie—"

"I know," Raph said quietly. "But they can see it some other time, right? I mean, Splinter can't keep us down here forever."

Leo pursed his lips doubtfully. Their father was very protective, and very frighteningly grave about the matter of them never going up to the surface. "I dunno, Raphie … He kind of can."

Raph shifted, stuffing his hands behind his head. "Well he can't keep me."

Leo glanced at the defiance stuck on his brother's set expression and frowned. He looked back up at the sky. The beauty of it seemed unfair to hold so selfishly to themselves. He'd feel guilty for not letting the younger two in on an experience like this.

"Why can't we tell Mikey and Donnie?"

"Because we need a thing, Leo, just for us, without Mike and Don for once."

Leo tilted his head. Admittedly, there was a small part of him that liked that idea—a secret kept just between him and Raph. It was almost annoyingly frequent how often they butted heads, but when they did get along, they could be the best of friends, inseparable even. It seemed like a good idea to have something they could share that would bring them closer together, maybe help them clash a little less. And it was good to be with Raph alone because Leo could handle his aggressiveness and he didn't have to worry about constantly protecting the younger two from his volatile brother's bullying streak. Maybe Raph was right.

"Don't tell the others, Leo," the younger turtle said in a tone that hinted at his reluctance to beg.

Leo flashed a small smile. "I won't."

Raph held up a fist. "Promise?"

Leo touched his knuckles to his brother's. "I promise."