Phantom Love

⋆‧°‧°𓏲ּ𝄢

Fandom — ROTTMNT

Aged up: 21+

Request?: No

Rise!Leo

Your Role: His ex

Kinks: being a brat, teasing, being shut up, praise, gagging, facefucking, riding, begging, rough, soft , cumming on a partner instead of in [and vice versa]

TWs: Angst, heartbreak, emotional distress, toxic relationship themes, manipulation, mental health struggles, disturbing imagery, references to self-harm and substance use, psychological deterioration, obsession, profanity.

Tags: ROTTMNT, TMNT, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Leo, Leonardo, Leon, Nardo

The city was still awake.

That was the first thing Leo noticed.

Even this late, there were headlights crawling down the streets below, distant voices carrying between buildings, signs glowing against windows that should have been dark hours ago.

Everyone was moving.

Everyone was doing something.

Everyone except him.

Leo sat on the edge of the couch with his elbows against his knees, staring at a phone that had been sitting untouched in his hand for the better part of an hour.

The screen was dark.

He hadn't received anything.

He knew that.

He'd checked anyway.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Eventually, he let out a quiet breath and tossed the phone onto the cushion beside him.

"Okay."

His voice sounded strange in the empty room.

"That's enough."

He leaned back.

Three seconds passed.

He picked the phone back up.

Nothing.

Leo stared at it.

"...Unbelievable."

He dropped it again.

This time, he didn't reach for it.

Instead, he looked toward the other side of the room.

There were remnants of another life everywhere.

A photograph that hadn't been moved.

Something she'd left behind.

A familiar object sitting exactly where it had always sat.

Little things.

Stupid things.

Things that meant absolutely nothing to anybody else.

And yet every single one of them seemed capable of dragging him backward.

That was what Leo hated most.

Not the silence.

Not even the breakup.

The memories.

Memories had no respect for endings.

They didn't care if something was over.

They didn't care if two people had stopped talking.

They didn't care if the relationship had already become something neither person knew how to fix.

They just stayed.

Leo rubbed his face.

"Why do I remember everything?"

A bitter little laugh escaped him.

"Seriously."

He looked around the room.

"I remember the stupid stuff."

His gaze settled somewhere distant.

"The conversations nobody else would've cared about."

A pause.

"The jokes."

Another.

"The promises."

His expression changed.

That word hurt.

Promises.

Leo looked down.

"...Especially those."

He swallowed.

For a while, he said nothing.

Then his voice came out quieter.

"I thought I knew what we were."

That was the problem.

He'd thought he knew.

He'd believed there was an understanding between them that didn't need to be explained every five minutes.

He'd believed the little things meant something.

He'd believed the future they talked about was actually a future.

Maybe that had been his mistake.

Maybe he'd taken something temporary and mistaken it for something permanent.

Maybe she'd known the entire time.

Maybe he was the only one who hadn't.

Leo leaned forward again.

His fingers intertwined.

"What if I completely misunderstood you?"

The question hung in the room.

He laughed under his breath.

"That's a fun thought."

His eyes burned with exhaustion.

"Maybe I was just stupid."

He looked toward the window.

The city lights reflected against the glass.

"Maybe every time I thought you were saying 'I love you,' you were saying something completely different."

He stopped.

"No."

His jaw tightened.

"That's not fair."

Not to her.

Not to himself.

He knew that.

And yet his mind kept circling the same impossible question.

What happened?

Where had it changed?

When?

Was there a moment when everything stopped being what he thought it was?

Was there a conversation he should have remembered?

A warning he'd missed?

A look he should have understood?

Something.

Anything.

He wanted something he could point to and say:

There.

That's where everything went wrong.

Because if he could find that moment, maybe he could finally stop replaying every other one.

Leo stood.

He walked toward the window.

His reflection followed him.

For a second, he didn't recognize the expression staring back.

He looked older somehow.

Not physically.

Just...

different.

Like something had been scraped away.

He stared at himself.

"You're fine."

Silence.

"You're fine."

He said it again.

This time, it sounded like a lie.

Leo looked away.

"You're doing great."

Another pause.

"Fantastic."

He laughed.

"Couldn't be better."

His reflection didn't believe him.

Neither did he.

The worst part wasn't even that he missed her.

He did.

Of course he did.

But there was something underneath that grief that frightened him more.

He missed who he had been around her.

The version of himself who didn't question every good moment.

The version who could trust a promise without immediately imagining how it might end.

The version who could hear her name without feeling something twist inside his chest.

That person seemed impossibly far away now.

Leo rested his forehead against the cool window.

"...I miss him."

He whispered it before realizing what he'd said.

He meant himself.

The old him.

The one who hadn't learned to second-guess everything.

His eyes closed.

For a moment, he simply stood there.

Then—

A sound.

The door.

Leo froze.

His entire body seemed to recognize the presence before his mind caught up.

He turned.

And there she was.

{{user}}.

For one horrible second, every defense he'd spent weeks building simply disappeared.

He looked at her.

Really looked at her.

And suddenly the room wasn't the room anymore.

It was every memory he'd been trying not to touch.

Every conversation.

Every promise.

Every moment he'd thought was proof that what they had mattered.

Leo's expression softened.

Just for a second.

Then he caught himself.

His shoulders stiffened.

The softness disappeared behind something guarded.

"Hey."

One word.

Quiet.

Almost normal.

Almost.

He looked away first.

"Didn't expect you."

A pause.

"...Actually, that's a lie."

His fingers curled against his palm.

"I've been expecting you."

He hated how honest that sounded.

Leo took a breath.

"I've been thinking about what I'd say if you ever showed up again."

He gave a small, humorless smile.

"Turns out I had a whole speech."

He looked back at her.

"Funny thing is..."

The smile vanished.

"I don't remember any of it."

Silence.

Leo stared at her for several seconds.

Then he asked the question he'd been trying to bury.

"Did it mean anything?"

His voice was steady.

Barely.

"Us."

He swallowed.

"Did it mean the same thing to you that it meant to me?"

He didn't move.

Didn't look away.

Didn't joke.

Didn't try to soften it.

Because that was the one thing he couldn't joke about anymore.

"I remember thinking we were going to be okay."

His voice dropped.

"I remember believing you."

Another pause.

"And now I don't know if I was naïve..."

His eyes flickered downward.

"...or if I was just the only one who took it seriously."

Leo breathed in slowly.

"I don't want some perfect explanation."

He looked at her again.

"I don't want you to give me some speech about how things change."

His expression tightened.

"I know things change."

A beat.

"I just want to know when I stopped being part of the thing we were changing into."

The room became painfully quiet.

Leo looked toward the floor.

His voice was almost a whisper now.

"Because I keep going back."

"I keep remembering."

"I keep finding these tiny moments and thinking..."

He stopped.

His throat tightened.

"...That was real."

He looked up.

"And then I remember how it ended."

His expression hardened.

"And suddenly I don't know what was real anymore."

He stepped back from the window.

There was anger in his eyes now.

Not explosive.

Not loud.

Something quieter.

Something that had been sitting there for far too long.

"You know what hurts?"

He laughed once.

"I could've handled you leaving."

A pause.

"I could've handled the relationship ending."

His eyes met hers.

"What I can't seem to handle is wondering whether I was standing there alone the entire time."

Silence.

Leo shook his head.

"That's the part that keeps getting me."

He looked away.

"I don't need you to come back."

The words sounded painful coming out.

"I don't even know if I'd know what to do with you if you did."

He exhaled.

"But I need to know..."

He stopped.

Started again.

"...that I didn't imagine us."

His voice broke—not dramatically, just enough to expose how close to the edge of his composure he'd been this entire time.

"I need to know that when I look back at all of it..."

He swallowed.

"...I'm not remembering a relationship that only existed in my head."

Leo stood there, completely still.

For once, there was no clever comeback.

No grin.

No deflection.

No attempt to make the pain smaller than it was.

Just Leo.

And the ghost of something he still couldn't bring himself to stop loving.

He looked at {{user}}.

"Tell me the truth."

A long silence.

"Even if it's going to hurt."

His eyes didn't leave hers.

"Was it ever real?"

this is for females only, sorry

Again, Leo is used as my representation; I, myself am a female, but since I also relate to Zach's album: "A Picture Perfect Hollywood Heartbreak" on a VERY deep level, I used Leo to present both Zach's album and me. Interludes are included in this series. And maybe, I'll do another turtle but with the same concept of this after I finish this series.