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darth-sonny · 1 year

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here's what I call a "practice test" for the Prime Leo AU fic. theoretically, this is supposed to be the first chapter...I believe

anyway, content warning!! there's nothing pretty past the read more, so be warned!!

The beatings didn't help much. Leo couldn't remember a time when he wasn't being hunted down and thrown around like a rag doll. He couldn't remember not feeling everything in his body screaming out in pain every time the Kraang slammed him into walls or the ground. His leg was useless now – his knee was shattered – but it's not like Leo could run away, anyways. All he did now was float. His right arm was practically dead at this point. He knew that he was going to have to get it amputated at one point. Maybe, if he's lucky, Kraang would rip it off. He doubted it. If it caused him pain and made it harder for him to get away, Kraang left it alone.

(**)

The prison dimension was cold, unnaturally so. It was the kind of cold you couldn't shake off, no matter how close you were to the fire, or how many layers you wrapped yourself up in. The cold wasn't merciful, it was brutal. It threatened to tear one's lungs apart either with its freezing air or the rather toxic taste it left in your mouth.

The alien was like that. He caused Leo pain – excruciating and unimaginable pain, but he never killed him. Leo lost a concerning amount of blood, but Kraang hadn't spilled enough to get Leo to either pass out or die from blood loss. Every punch, every stab, every twist and snap that the mutant suffered through was deliberate. Methodical. Surgical. In the back of his (somehow still working) mind, Leo wondered why Kraang had decided to not kill him despite all the beatings. He did say that his wrath was now reserved for him alone, and Leo had naturally assumed that meant he was going to get beaten to death. Once, he thought that the alien wasn't strong enough to properly kill him. Unfortunately, he said that out loud. That had earned him getting grabbed by the head and slammed into the ground repeatedly enough to leave both a crater and a large pool of blood.

The Kraang was strong enough to kill him, he just wanted Leo alive to keep a punching bag. Something to take his frustrations, anger, and vengeance out on. The slider doesn't blame him. Leo did ruin his plans. He ruined everything. He can't remember what he ruined exactly but he knows he did it.

He wasn't afraid to die, he just wished that it didn't take so long. He's stopped thinking that one of these days – weeks? Months? Fuck, how long has it been now? – the alien would get it over with and just kill him. Leo didn't care how at this point; his neck snapped, stabbed through the heart or the head, ripped in half, stopped on, the list could go on and on. Kraang should just pick one and go through with it. Dying by slow, methodical beatings was getting boring now. His entire body was basically one broken and bloody bruise by now, but Leo just couldn't find it in himself to care. Dying would be better than being stuck here. Death was much more welcoming than his current home – and it was a home. He's been here for a while now. He's not sure of the exact time, but he knows that it has been longer than a few days.

Somewhere, he could hear a voice that sounded suspiciously familiar (was it his?), telling him that he had family waiting for him if he died.

Family.

Family…

Right. Gram-gram. He had a Gram-gram. Karai was her name, he thinks. It's been a while since he saw her. How long has it been? Years? Closing his (somehow already closed) eyes, Leo tries to remember what his gram-gram looked like. He could vaguely recall her having… long black hair, tied back in a ponytail. And… she was wearing… green, or some other color. Her face was the hardest. She was pale, he could remember that, but her eyes and other features he couldn't remember. She was… nice, and she was…

Leo scrunched up his face, trying to remember more.

Long hair, green clothes, pale complexion, brown… eyes…? Yeah. Brown. They were brown. And they were kind. Was Gram-gram a hugger? Leo swore that she must have been. You couldn't be part of the Hamato Clan if you weren't a hugger.

Hamato… was that his name? It couldn't be. His name was Leo. It was short for… something – he didn't know what – but he knew Hamato couldn't be his name. He only had one. And it was Leo.

Leo.

Leo, Leo.

Leo.

Sometimes he was called Pest. Or Nuisance. But neither of those counted as names. He was Leo, plain and simple.

Things would be a lot simpler if he just stopped thinking. But ever since he got here, all he's been able to do is think. All he could think about was the blood that was spilling out of his wounds, the pain that shot through his whole body whenever he twitches involuntarily, making him cry and pass out for an unknown amount of time. He thinks about how, some time ago, he started counting how long the time passed between the beatings Kraang gave him (the longest being two hundred and forty-four Mississippis, and the shortest not even ten). Leo thinks about how he began reading the Kraang, taking a mental note of how he acted, the similarity all of his rantings had, and how he ticked. It was easy to do. All he had to do was just… watch him. Watch him through blackened eyes, through the blood that leaked from the open gash on his head.

Kraang, for all his terrifying bravado, was a simple being. He wanted to dominate, to be in control. He thrived off of it. From the images the alien was so kind to bestow upon him, Leo could see that on every planet he visited, the life forms that existed there fell to their knees after a day or two of ravaging. Even after they pleaded and begged for mercy, Kraang just slaughtered them all. He kept a few survivors to torment, to lord his superiority over. Be it physical or whatever else. Kraang was a control freak, a sadist in every sense of the word. A textbook definition of a narcissistic personality disorder. Leo wondered how Kraang's siblings (and he knew the alien had siblings, he told him. Well, more like beat it to him) dealt with him for as long as they did. They probably had the same mentality as Kraang. It must've been like looking into a mirror for him.

Mirror.

Mirror, mirror.

If there were a mirror here Leo knew he would not have been a pretty sight.

Mirrors. He liked mirrors. He liked the coolness they gave off. How one could do small little tricks with them. He liked how they came in different shapes and sizes. Did mirrors come in different colors? Leo hoped they did. The colors are pretty. If he had to pick a colorful mirror, he'd pick one that's blue. Blue was his favorite color. It was the color of the mask that covered his eyes. It did little to protect him – it didn't do anything at all, actually – but Leo still liked it. It was battered and torn now, one mask tail was shorter than the other by a lot, but he still wore it. He liked how it looked, how it felt. Kraang didn't like it, but the slider wasn't one to care what the alien said when it came to appearances. Kraang considered himself a higher and superior being. Leo thought he looked like a pink blob.

If there was a process to his thoughts, he didn't know what it was. His mind had a habit of jumping between topics. Except whenever Kraang was torturing him. Then his mind went blank. Leo supposes it does that as a way to spare him from the pain. A small form of mercy.

There was no mercy in the prison dimension.

There was only him, Kraang, the abuse, and the hundreds and thousands of corpses of dead family members that floated through the empty space.

His hands were getting cold. Everything about him was cold, but his hands especially. Ignoring the sharp sting of pain that came from moving, Leo brought his hands up to his face. A daunting task, really. His right arm had no feeling, and he could hardly move it. And his left arm had a pretty serious gash running across the inside of his forearm. It had stopped bleeding who even knows how long ago, but the wound itself was an admittedly ugly sight. It should say something about how desensitized he was to all of this that a wound open enough that he could see some muscles peaking out wasn't even worthy of mention. Right now, his hands were cold, and that was all he could think about.

A picture was in his right hand. A picture. Picture picture picture. He almost forgot about it. How? It was important to him. He didn’t know the exact reason as to why, but at this point in his life, trying to understand his shot memories was something he gave up on a long time ago. All that mattered was that he still had the picture. He recognized himself – the blue mask was a dead giveaway, even though Leo was 87% sure he didn’t look like that anymore – but the others were… hazy. Three of them looked like him, but only as turtles. They varied in height, size, and none of them had markings like he did. They wore bright colors too, so Leo supposed that they were a team at some point. The other two occupants were even hazier than the three other turtles. One of them was a rat, the other was a human. Human. Human? That was the word, right? Human? Yeah. Yeah, it was. Human. She was a human.

But what was a human doing in this picture? She must’ve been part of the team. Everyone looks happy, all smiles with teeth and fangs. Even he had a smile on his face.

Smile.

Smile, smile.

Grin.

A grin.

Leo didn’t smile. Didn’t grin. Kraang didn’t like it when he did that. The first time he smiled in front of Kraang, he got punched through a small asteroid. The second time, Kraang grabbed him by the throat and squeezed until Leo could practically feel the alien’s metal claw almost touching through the muscles of his neck. He let go after that, and Leo remembered vomiting. There was blood mixed in there too. But to Leo, the blood was thrown to the back burner. He was just glad he could breathe again. Even if the air he was inhaling was toxic and so, so cold.

He doesn’t know if he smiled a third time. Or a fourth. He must’ve. Kraang liked to find excuses to beat him bloody. Sometimes he didn’t even need an excuse. Sometimes it was just whenever he felt like it, or if they were playing their little game and Leo got caught. Leo was a lousy player. His broken and twisted limbs didn’t give any help at all when he needed to run. He had to rely on momentum, on dragging himself as far as he could and hiding in whatever corpse looked big enough for him. Not like it mattered. Kraang found him, he always found him. That made him a lousy player. He never won, which was weird. Leo could vaguely (and he cannot emphasize the word vaguely enough) recall that he used to win. He won something, the feeling of victory was there, but he didn’t know what it was. He knew it wasn’t his game with Kraang, Leo always lost those, but he was the winner of… something. It didn’t bother him that he couldn’t remember. It stopped bothering him a while ago. He stopped hyperventilating whenever he couldn’t recall anything beyond the prison dimension.

Why should he? He lived here.

Lived.

Lived, lived.

Lived.

He lived but he wasn’t living

“There you are.”

Ah.

Right.

For all his musings, it somehow managed to fly over Leo’s head that he wasn’t alone here. The sound of Kraang’s claws digging themselves into the rock of the small meteorite they were on was deafening to Leo’s ears. The bright red light of Kraang’s eye nearly blinded him. There wasn’t any light in the prison dimension. There used to be, if Leo thought back on it, but it disappeared just as quickly as it came. A bright flash, then it was gone. Almost like an explosion.

Something grabbed him without any care, and the familiar pain that came from it was almost comforting. At least he didn’t feel too cold anymore. Without ceremony, Kraang dragged him up to meet him eye to eye. Eyes to eye. Eyes, eye. One of Leo’s eyes was swollen shut, and the other was tainted red. Still, it was enough for him to see Kraang’s face. The alien had a smile. That was the deal. He could smile but Leo couldn’t. He wasn’t allowed to smile. It took a few beatings and blood loss for that to become clear to the slider, and it did. Eventually. After some splitting headaches and a broken skull.

“And here I thought you were almost going to win our little game.”

Shit, were they playing? Leo didn’t remember Kraang saying anything about that. He opened his beak to ask when suddenly he was thrown back onto the ground and stomped on once again.

It was honestly a miracle that his shell stayed intact as much as it did. Obviously, there were going to be some serious cracks and breaks on it, but aside from that, it was still on him, which was nice.

“Did I say you could talk?” Kraang spat out. "I gave you no permission to do so. Is that clear?”

After a moment of coughing up some blood, Leo nodded. He couldn’t talk. There were lots of things he couldn’t do here; talk, smile, grin, laugh, taunt, quip, snark. Kraang only allowed him to talk on rare occasions. And the only noises he was allowed to make without permission were grunts and screams of pain. And the occasional cough. And vomit.

“Good pest.”

Kraang picked him up again, his hold on the mutant crushing, adding more pain to his already hurting body. Leo let out a whimper.

“Now normally, whenever you lose, I’d deal out your punishment for your failure,” Kraang said, voice low and venomous. His grip tightened ever so slightly, but Leo felt his whole body flaring up with white-hot pain. He coughed again. He made sure that none of the blood that spilled out of his mouth splattered on Kraang. That previous little mistake led to the alien twisting his right arm in a way that Leo was certain would’ve ended with it getting torn off. “But I’m feeling generous today. How about a little treat?”

Leo watched as Kraang detached some of his tentacles from his suit. He watched as they slithered their way toward his face. He wondered what he was going to be shown today. More images of Kraang’s past exploits? Scenarios in which Kraang killed Leo in the most fucked up way possible, just to mess with him? Or was he just going to probe his brain, touching it in ways that made Leo feel even colder than before and leaving him to vomit until he passed out? That was the worst of the treats. If Leo actually had the choice, he’d pick the past exploits. As horrifically graphic and violent as they were, they were better than watching himself die and the probing.

Luck was not on Leo’s side today (when was it ever?). As Kraang’s tentacles reached his face, one of them immediately went into his swollen eye, forcing it open. He felt it pushing his eyeball further back, making space for the appendage to enter. Leo began to hyperventilate. The other tentacle wrapped itself around his neck, the tip expanding and settling at the base of his nape. Leo suddenly couldn’t move. It wasn’t like those other times, it never was, where the pain was so great that it made him stop himself from moving, only to give out the occasional twitch. No. He was paralyzed. That’s how it always was, how Kraang gave him this treat to make it more enjoyable for the alien. No matter how much the slider willed himself to move just an inch, his body did nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing nothing nothing.

The tentacle going through his eye touched something, and Leo wanted to throw up. He could feel it opening up, spreading itself all over his brain. It felt like a fleshy web, wrapping itself around his brain and touching it. Touching, touching touching touching. He was getting touched. He wanted to scream. He couldn’t scream, couldn’t move. Everything and nothing could be felt. The air was too cold, the air was too hot. Toxic, toxic. He couldn’t breathe, he was breathing too fast. His lungs were burning, his body was burning, and his eyes were burning. His eyes were open. Were they open? He was sure he closed them. Why would he close them?

He wanted this to be over, he wanted the beatings. He wanted the images of his mangled body getting torn to shreds. He wanted the memories of genocide and burned bodies and decapitated heads… anything. Anything other than what was happening now. The web began moving. It was moving. Tears. Tears, tears. Tears. He was crying. Please stop. Just beat him again. He wanted the pain, the blood, the screaming. He wanted to get stabbed, mangled, stomped on. He wanted Kraang to rip his arm off, his useless arm. Destroy his leg. Either one, both of them, he didn’t care. He wanted the pain, the past planets. Anything but this treat.

There was more. More. More more more more more. More webs. More webs. Why were there more? One was enough. Why? Why why why why why why why why why? The webs overlapped, dug inside. Deeper. Deeper. The webs weren’t inside anymore. They were outside. Inside. Outside. Everywhere. Inside his shell. On his plastron, carapace. They were over the cracks. The gash on his arm, head, legs. They were everywhere. They were inside. He couldn’t breathe. Stop, please. His eyes were bleeding. Which one? Both? Yes. No. Yes? He was bleeding, bleeding. Too much. It was everywhere. Kraang was everywhere. He always was. Leo couldn’t run from him. This was proof. The webs were getting bigger. Bigger bigger. Something was inside his shell. The gashes too. His legs were moving. Kicking. It wasn’t him. He couldn’t move. Please. Let him move. No more webs, NO MORE WEBS. PLEASE. PLEASE, LET HIM DIE. HE WANTED TO DIE. HE WANTED TO DIE. DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE.

KILL HIM. KILL HIM, GET IT OVER WITH. HE WAS DEAD. DEAD DEAD DEAD. HE WAS JUST A CORPSE. A BODY. NOTHING ELSE. WHY WAS HE STILL ALIVE? PLEASE, KILL HIM. STOP STOP. HE WANTED TO DIE, HE DIDN’T WANT TO DIE. HE WANTED TO LIVE. BEAT HIM, LEAVE HIM ALONE DON’T LEAVE HIM ALONE HE DIDN’T WANT TO BE ALONE HE DIDN’T WANT TO LIVE WHY WAS HE LIVING PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE HE COULDN’T KILL HIMSELFHECOULDN’THEWASACOWARDUSELESSHENEEDEDTODIEHEHADTODIEPLEASE-

Leo was unceremoniously dropped onto the ground.

“That was fun,” Kraang cooed. His suit made a grating noise as he crouched down to look more closely at the prone form of his plaything.

“Stay there, pest. I’m done with your little treat,” said the alien, his voice low with sadistic glee.

With that, the alien left.

Leo surprised himself by curling up into a ball. The picture was still in his hand. He was cold. Colder than before. He didn’t know if he threw up. He probably did. He couldn’t move. He could, but he didn’t. The gash on his arm was bleeding again. There were tears in his eyes. Eye. The ground hurt. His body was numb. He was crying. When was he not crying? He let out one broken, quiet sob.

Leo could still feel the webs.

#😬😬😬😬😬😬😬#if yall couldnt tell this is basically the torture subprime was ordered to give leo #it's.......................not pretty #also i read in a medical website that head trauma can make people repeat stuff: words being the most common #reason why leo's just repeating random words #tmnt #teenage mutant ninja turtles #rottmmt #rise of the tmnt #rise of the teenage mutant ninja turtles #leo hamato #kraang subprime #sonny writes #prime leo au

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