Family is What You Make of It
“--wait a sec, Foggy just came home.” Matt turned his head toward him where he was sitting at his desk as Foggy shut the door behind him. “Hey, Fog.”
Before Foggy could return the greeting, a four-part chorus rang from the green-cased phone lying on Matt’s desk: “HI, FOGGY!”
Foggy grinned at the familiar commotion. “Hey, guys, what’s up?”
“Don’s providing IT support and the rest of us are hanging around,” Mikey said cheerfully. Foggy winced, glancing at Matt.
“Laptop still giving you issues?”
Matt huffed a frustrated noise. “Yeah. I might to bring it home this weekend so Donnie can take a better look at it. And I’m still going to have to beg for an extension from McClintock.”
“Ah, he loves you,” Foggy said, breezily waving off this unfounded concern and dumping his backpack on his bed. “He’d probably give you until next year to turn in whatever you wanted.”
“Yeah, but I’d like to not have to draw on professorial goodwill if I don’t have to. That’s coin to spend only in an emergency.”
“Your laptop only booting up half the time counts as an emergency, Matty,” Donatello’s voice pointed out, dry. “Especially since you can’t simply download your paper off the cloud and work in the library like anyone else.”
Matt furrowed his brow, obviously disgruntled at this reminder. “Yeah, I know.” Ah, the joys of specialized accessibility programs and equipment. Foggy knew it was the entire reason he hadn’t taken his laptop to the campus IT department already, not trusting them to not screw up his settings, even inadvertently. But then Matt brightened. “But hey, I haven’t had a chance to have dinner with you all and Sensei for a while. Silver linings, I guess.”
Foggy had yet to meet any of Matt’s family besides April and Casey back on move-in day, and he still wasn’t sure how exactly they arranged themselves in relation to each other (April was his adopted mom, but her adopted brothers were also Matt’s adopted brothers and not his uncles, but Matt’s adopted brothers’ dad was Matt’s grandfather and also sensei to all of them -- flowchart, he needed a flowchart), but there was no mistaking the affection Matt held for them all, and they obviously adored him back.
“It’ll be great to see you,” Leonardo put in now. “We’ll make a weekend of it. Get out, have some fun.”
An overly-shocked gasp sounded from the phone. “No way. Leonardo proposing to have fun instead of train?” Foggy still had no earthly idea how the others had escaped picking up Raphael’s thick Brooklyn accent. Then again, Mikey sounded like a transplant straight from Southern California, which, again, how. “Guys, the world’s endin’ again, check for aliens and flyin’ pigs.”
“Joke’s on you,” Leonardo said smugly, ignoring Mikey in the background suggesting that they look for alien flying pigs, “Matt’s idea of fun is training, remember?” Matt laughed as Raph audibly grumbled.
Another thing that Foggy knew about Matt’s family was that most of them were martial artists of some stripe, and they included Matt in their training. Matt had cheerfully explained this in Fall Semester when he came back from his first weekend at home sporting a bruised jaw and split lips and Foggy had a conniption. He was too genuinely and consistently chill about it to be covering up something more underhanded, but Foggy sometimes wondered if he was going to be called in for a welfare interview after the wrong person spotted Matt and came to an understandable if incorrect conclusion about his family life, or god forbid, Foggy himself.
Right now, though, he got to listen to the occasionally turbulent mess of personalities that was Matt and his elder brothers. “C’mon,” Raph was protesting, “kid’s working his ass off all the time studying, let him take it easy for a few days--”
“I’d rather blow off some steam in the ring,” Matt interjected. “Unless you want me going soft, is that it?” A sudden shark smile sharpened his features and tone. “You think you can beat me just because I’m spending more time learning torts instead of taijutsu these days? Is that the kind of advantage you need?”
Raphael changed his tune so fast Foggy got whiplash. “Oh, that’s it, you punk, you get your ass down here, I’m gonna kick you up one side and down the other--”
“Note to self: stock up on popcorn.”
“--gonna get yours, swear to god you cocky little shit--”
“Ooh, Donnie, can we get that caramel cheddar stuff? Casey says it’s really good!”
“Oh my god, Raphael, take it down a notch--”
“What, you wanna go too, Leo?”
“Hey, careful, that’s my soldering iron--!”
Crash.
As the purported troubleshooting call devolved into chaos, Matt leaned back in his chair with a sly, satisfied air. Foggy shook his head at his beatific grin. “You are such a youngest sibling,” he said.
Matt beamed. “Guilty as charged.”