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When they were all really small it was just Leo Being Leo, like all of the other annoying and irritating things Leo did. Leo talked a lot, Leo got too rowdy, Leo didn’t always play by the rules, Leo started fights during mealtimes—Leo was Leo, and it was normal.
Maybe a lot of it was smoothed out by the general abnormality that came with meals as a whole with their family. When they’d been really small it had been a real battle to get through the eating aspect of the day between Donnie’s sensory aversions and Raph’s allergies and Mikey’s blood sugar, so Leo Being Leo was the least of their worries.
But they’d gotten older, and Donnie sorted through a vast majority of what foods were hell and what foods were acceptable, and foods with allergens commonly known and banned and avoided, and Mikey was no longer too small to help take care of himself; and so mealtimes smoothed. Except Leo kept Being Leo.
There was a memory somewhere in the back of Leo’s mind that had engraved itself in the walls of being nine and staring down at a plate of food while his stomach churned. He remembered being hungry enough that his head hurt, but nauseous enough that the idea of being an inch closer to the food was horrible. He remembered the pulse of a headache that pushed behind his eyes and the exhaustion in their dad’s face.
“I don’t know why you do this,” Dad had said, tired and a little irritated even though Leo could tell he was trying not to show it. “What does it get you? Why do we always have to fight about this?”
It was the first time it had occurred to Leo that he’d been interpreting the scenario wrong.
In his mind, Leo always pictured sitting alone at the table with a plate of food in a standoff, wanting to eat and not wanting to eat and wanting to go and do something else so he could stop wasting time sitting and doing nothing at this stupid table.
Leo had shrugged in response, stabbing at his cold dinner while he broadened the arena in his mind to include a tired dad and a stubborn son and a ticking clock and creeping guilt in his gut.
—---
The worst days were when Leo was too Leo and everyone was a little too exhausted with him before dinner had even begun. Those days the guilt won out against the nausea.
There were some days when Leo would enter the kitchen and see the weary lines on his dad’s face as the prospect of another dinnertime trying to convince a stubborn son to eat a full meal and he’d swell up with guilt remembering the trouble he’d already gotten into that day and the need to be good would win.
It felt worse after, knowing how little effort it took to sit and eat normally. It felt worse to remember how much relief the room seemed to swell with when Leo stopped being Leo for a few minutes and just ate.
Sometimes it was that line of thought that left Leo retching over the toilet not long after they finished clearing their plates. But sometimes it was just a heavy, nauseous feeling that sent him there.
—--
The easiest days were the ones that became more frequent the older they got, when Dad started spending days slunk back into his room alone and when he came out he was a little more Splinter than he was Dad.
It was a little easier to count those days as a break and quit after four or five bites. Leo thought sometimes, just to himself, that’s where the face man was born; between fake-out bites over dinner while he found enough things to talk, talk, talk about that by the time everyone was done, nobody was focused on how much he had or hadn’t eaten.
Everything is good, the persona said, talking on and on about comics and shows and nothing at all. Everyone is happy and life is good, the persona promised.
It started, maybe, to get around the mind-numbing chore of eating. But the persona was really, really good for so many other things.
You know Dad always gets like this in the winter, the persona could promise Mikey, and they could draw until his little brother perked up. The persona could be calm and reassuring and optimistic and everything a big brother needed to be, sure and steady when things got a little rocky.
Leo might have been better at sitting alone in his room and thinking you’re just watching your future now and at least it was you and not your brothers, isn’t it a good thing none of them had to feel like this? So he passed that job along to the persona.
—--
Somewhere along the way, it became more intentional than it used to be.
The thing— Leo never gave a name to it, because it didn’t really matter—had always been an unintentional byproduct of the improper way he’d been designed. It wasn’t that Leo didn’t want to eat, he just never felt hungry, he always felt nauseous, he always felt a little anxious and unsure.
Somewhere along the way, he did feel hungry.
Hungry and guilty and tired and anxious and devoured whole, but not hungry enough to want to eat. And then it became intentional.
It felt a little vindictive, a little bit like winning, every day the headache and hunger won out; it felt a little bit like a nasty little voice in his head that existed to say see? That’s why you do it every time Leo slipped up and did something stupid.
—-
“You’re out of the gummy shark phase?” Raph asked, picking up an unopened little box on Leo’s desk.
Leo cracked an eye open, peering out and frowning with an unnecessary dose of drama. “Um, hi? Welcome to my room, please, go through my things.”
Raph’s eyes rolled hard enough Leo worried they’d pop out of his face. “I’m hardly going through— they’re sitting right on your desk—I thought you liked the little sharks?”
“I do,” Leo said, sitting up from his bed to pluck the candy box from his brother’s fingers. “I haven’t gotten around to them yet.”
Leo worked the cardboard of the box open, cleanly splitting the fold in two and pulling the plastic bag free. He wiggled it in Raph’s direction, showing off his prize, and settled back against his headboard. “Did you come in here to harass me about my candy eating? Because I think it’s vegetables you’re supposed to be on my case about.”
“...No,” Raph stole the bag back, tearing the plastic open and grabbing a gummy shark before returning it to Leo. “You’ve just been awfully quiet today. Had to come and make sure you hadn’t died.”
“Not dead,” Leo declared, waving a ta-da motion with his hands. “Just sleeping. Having a lazy Sunday, you know how it goes.”
Something about the statement made Raph’s face crinkle for a moment before he forced it to smooth back out. His eyes lingered for a moment too long on the candy in Leo’s fingers. Leo blinked, realizing he was meant to eat the candy and not just hold it, and so he bit the head off the shark. It didn’t have a flavor, even though Leo remembered them tasting like something.
Leo tried to scrounge up the persona to say something witty and annoying and little-brother-ish. He racked his brain for something a person would say and came up empty. His stomach panged and Leo wondered if maybe he’d finally gotten hungry enough that his body had eaten the persona to survive and that was why he was so tired suddenly.
Raph’s face quirked up in an awkward smile. “Alright, then. Have fun on your lazy Sunday.”
And then it was Leo and his room and his headache and the way his hands shook a little bit if he paid them any attention.
—--
Leo was sure he’d devoured the faceman, because if any semblance of the persona were leftover it would never have allowed this.
He could somewhat recall the tired shuffle into Donnie’s room and curling up under all of his blankets. And at some point, Donnie must have also realized where Leo was, because he was also curled up under the blankets now, tangled up close enough that they could have meshed together.
But Leo could tell which limbs were Donnie’s because they were the only things Leo could feel that didn’t ache. His eyes hurt like they were about to fall out, his head ached like it may implode any moment, his chest throbbed with every heartbeat and breath and his hands shook like an earthquake, and something deep in Leo’s gut just hurt.
He was so tired it hurt and the ache kept him awake; he was so hungry the nausea made him gag at the thought of eating. Leo knew he’d devoured the faceman and he was dying now.
There was a forehead pressed to his own that soothed the ache a little bit, and someone familiar was murmuring.
“I don’t understand why you do this,” Leo’s twin mumbled, lips to Leo’s forehead, and Leo wished he could drown in the guilt.
— - -
If you asked anyone what Leo’s role on the team was, they would tell you that he was the Faceman.
Leo was the Faceman.
Leo was the host of the persona that could help make brothers feel better and could talk down villains and make friends and find ways to keep entertained; the persona that helped keep things running smoothly.
Leo’s job was to stay just afloat enough to keep the persona alive so that it could do its job, and he did okay enough at that. The world hadn’t ended yet.