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maybelinefox · 22 hours

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Doctor On Call

“Hey Donnie, is this infected?”

Donatello jerked away from his workstation as Mikey’s foot came down on it heel-first. A large nodule stuck out from the lateral interior of his foot—red, angry, and (oh, goody) leaking.

He wrinkled his nose and used his screwdriver to push the foot unceremoniously off his desk. “How’d you even manage to get a blister there? We don't wear shoes, Mikey.”

He laughed. “You’re tellin’ me, dude. But uh, it kinda hurts, so—”

Donnie heaved a long-suffering sigh. “Hang on, let me go sterilize a needle.”

“Y’know how you said to never remove a weapon if you’re impaled?”

Don swiveled around in his chair, only able to see a green and red blur through his magnifying visor. He pushed it up and away from his eyes with the back of his grungy hand, and found a little more red decorating the scene than he would have liked.

“Raphael,” he began evenly, “would you care to explain how this happened?”

Standing on the threshold of his brother’s lab, Raphael shifted from foot to foot. The sai embedded in his shoulder wobbled slightly, but he didn't so much as wince. “No,” he finally said.

Donnie put a hand to his face for a moment, drawing in a steadying breath. “At least have the decency to go get the suture kit, then.”

Raph grinned guiltily, then went for the kit.

“Heeey, Donnie,” Leo drawled.

Donatello froze, hunched over his workspace. “What did you do?”

Leo must have taken that as an invitation to enter, because his bare feet padded farther into the room, stopping just behind Don. He rested a hand heavily on his brother’s shoulder. “Why assume I did something? Do I need an ulterior motive to check in on my little bro?”

Donnie’s mouth thinned into a line as he stared bemusedly at his latest robotics project. “Well we could start with the slurred speech and the weave in your gait.”

He shrugged Leo’s hand off and turned around in the worn desk chair. It was lucky he did, it gave him just enough time to snatch Leo’s arm before he completely busted his shell. The fast-bruising welt on his head proved Don’s theory.

“Did you hit your own head, or did Raph finally snap?”

For a second, Leo looked like he was going to deny it, then his shoulders fell and he sighed. “I lost a fight with the cabinet above the stove. Think you could check for a concussion?”

“Only if I get lifetime mocking rights,” he shot back. “Fearless Leader Felled by Cast Iron Pan From Above, what a headline.”

Leo sat heavily on the spare stool. “Fine, fine.”

Don plucked his penlight from the pencil cup and swiveled toward his brother. “See, this is why Mikey doesn’t let you in the kitchen.”

“Excuse me, Donatello.”

Donnie startled in his chair. Master Splinter always surprised him like that; he could hear his brothers coming from a mile away, but never their father. He stood and turned to face him, bowing quickly. “Yes, Sensei—oh.”

Master Splinter stood on the threshold of the lab, holding out his shaking paws—the pads of which were an angry red, and growing blisters quickly. Donatello practically picked his father up in the process of getting him to a place to sit down.

“Leo!” He hollered in the general direction of the dojo, hoping that’s where his brother was. “Bring ice! Sensei, you should have put these under the faucet immediately,” he chided softly.

“Yes, my son, I realized that halfway here.” He chuckled, despite how painful it must have been to have Donnie poking and prodding at his hands. “What is it that you say? Six, half dozen?”

Donnie laughed too, he couldn't help it. Anything sounded like a wise old Japanese proverb when Master Splinter said it. And the fact that his first thought had been to go to his son…well, Donnie knew he was no doctor, but it was touching how much trust his family placed in him.

Leo, bless him, showed up less than sixty seconds later with ice wrapped in a thin dish towel. “Sensei!” He sucked a breath through his teeth, catching a glimpse of his burned paws before Donnie placed the ice on top of them. “What happened?”

He looked at his sons from beneath his thick brows, one ear twitching. “We shall tell your brothers a different story, but…I was trying to make tea,” he finally relented.

Donnie’s hand audibly smacked against his forehead. Leave it to the master ninja to give himself partial thickness burns with a pot of water.

Leo laid a hand on Sensei’s shoulder. “We’ll tell Raph and Mikey that you were training and save you the torment.”

Sensei laughed again, more heartily this time. “Thank you, my sons.”

Donnie took the ice away from his hands. “Hmm, that doesn't look good. Let's go back to the kitchen and run them under water, okay?”

“Of course, Donatello. Thank you.”

Holding onto Sensei’s elbow as they left for the kitchen, Donnie beamed at the praise.

Three things happened at once: first, a string of very colorful language drifted from Donnie’s lab over to where his three brothers sat in front of the television; the power flickered twice and then cut out; and in the very brief, very dark silence that followed, the fire alarm in Donnie’s lab began shrilling.

All three of them jumped up without a word to one another, expertly navigating their home in the dark.

“Donnie!” Leo called, skidding into the dark lab.

Raphael clambered on top of a workbench to silence the alarm, sending Donnie’s projects and gadgets tumbling all over. There was no fire, just the smell of smoke.

“Don?” Leo tried again. He stilled, briefly confused that he couldn't find his brother in the dark. Usually he would at least hear his breathing—

Oh shell, he wasn't breathing.

The three of them realized as one, and the scramble began anew. Leo fell to his hands and knees to find his brother, Mikey went for the emergency floodlight on the wall, and Raph left the lab altogether. By the time he came back with the AED, Leo was already halfway through a round of compressions.

CPR on a turtle was…complicated. Their hearts were dead center in their chest, to begin with, which meant ‘the medial joint of their plastron’s scutes prevented compressions too deep’, as Donatello had so technically said. Donnie assured them all that if a scute was cracked or bruised during compressions, it would be okay. But now that Leonardo actually had his brother's plastron beneath his palms, hearing and feeling the groan of it every time he pressed down, he didn't feel so certain.

Raph knelt on Donnie’s other side while Mikey stood over them with the flashlight, trying to illuminate as much of the scene as possible.

“Do you smell that?” Mikey asked, voice shaking.

Yeah, they smelled it. Burned flesh was hard to miss. But treating whatever other wounds Donnie had sustained had to come second to his heart.

Raph tore the paper off the AED pads and carefully placed them just like Don taught him, then pressed the on switch. They all nearly jumped out of their shells when Donnie’s voice, thin and tinny, came out of the AED. “Analyzing cardiac rhythm,” it said.

Raph wanted to cover his ears. If the last time he heard his brother’s voice was from the stupid AED—

“Administering shock. Stay clear of the patient.”

“Clear,” Raph said.

“Clear,” both of his brothers echoed, Leo holding his hands up near his head to prove it.

“Shock will be delivered in 3…2…1…” Donnie jolted once as electricity shot through him. “Shock administered, check pulse and breathing and resume compressions if necessary.”

Raph put his fingers on Don’s neck, then shook his head. Leo moved to resume compressions, but he signaled him to stop. No, there was something there…

Both brothers froze.

“I have a pulse, but he’s not breathing.” Without giving his brothers any time to respond to that information, Raph lifted one meaty fist and brought it down hard on the center of Don’s chest.

Donnie took a deep breath, eyes flying open in terror. He wobbled on his shell, off-balance in a panicked effort to flee. Three sets of hands came down on his chest to stop him.

“Donnie, don't move,” Leo said urgently. He took his brother’s pulse, actually timing it this time, and listened to his heavy, ragged breathing for a moment.

The power came back on.

“What the fuck, Don!” Raph yelled.

He looked between his brothers, clearly disoriented, but less panicked with a good view of his surroundings. “Sorry,” he gasped out. He accepted his their help as he struggled to sit up, hands over his plastron. “Ough, my chest. What happened?”

Leo grabbed his hands, flipping them palms up. He wrinkled his nose. Well, he figured out where the burned flesh smell came from—Donnie’s palms were both blistered and slightly charred, but it didn't seem to cover too much surface area.

“We were kinda hopin’ you could tell us,” Raph sighed out, adrenaline ebbing.

Donnie eyed the AED, then looked over Raph’s head up to his workstation. He blinked a few times, then smiled sheepishly. “I, uh. I think I forgot to unplug it.”

They followed Donnie’s eyes up to the unidentifiable appliance on the workbench. Whatever it was, Donnie had long stripped it of its housing and any other identifiable features. Other than that it was made of metal and plugged into the wall, they didn't have a clue what it was.

“You knucklehead,” Raph muttered. “I’d kill you if I hadn’t just finished savin’ your skin.” He ripped the pads off Don’s chest and tossed them in the AED bag, standing up to wash his hands of the whole affair.

Mikey scooted into Raph’s spot and threw his arms around Donnie’s neck. “Don’t ever do that again! I thought you were toast, bro!”

“Don’t do what again?” Splinter appeared in the doorway, body-blocking Raphael. He tapped his cane on the ground, whiskers twitching.

“Oh—Sensei, uh. I just had…an accident. Everything’s okay now. No need to worry.” He tried for a smile. It was too wobbly to be reassuring.

He gave all four of his sons an incredibly unamused stare. They all ducked their heads, still unwilling or unable to stick their ground in the face of that all-knowing look. “Leonardo, how badly is he wounded?”

“It’s not too bad, Sensei.” He held Donnie’s burned hand out, showing him the minor damage. “I’m more worried about the fact that your heart stopped, Donnie.”

Donatello had the decency to look ashamed. “It probably didn’t stop,” he muttered. “Most likely, it was ventricular fibrillation.”

“Oh, that sure makes me feel better,” Raph drawled sarcastically. “I guess he’s fine, guys, let’s all hit the hay. Are you stupid, Donnie? No—don’t answer that.”

“I’m fine! You guys knew exactly what to do, so I'm fine. Just a little bruised up.”

Splinter, with his ears pressed flat against his head, closed his eyes momentarily and took a deep breath. “You four will be the end of me. Donatello, be honest—what side effects should we prepare for?”

He pulled his hands away from Leo, using the side of one to rub absently at his chest. “Uhh, nothing much. Just, uh, that my heart doesn’t…stop again. Or something like that.”

“Oh, sure, nothin’ too serious,” Raph scoffed.

Only the telltale twitch of their father’s whiskers alerted them to his vague irritation. “You will be sleeping in the infirmary bed tonight, my son. Come, help your brother up.”

Mikey and Leo got Donnie to his feet pretty quickly, and Raph put a hand on the back of his shell as if to say ‘there, I participated, are you happy?’ They helped him the few steps to the infirmary cot, which Donnie was surprised to actually need. Not only did his legs seem unwilling to comply—it seemed that the electricity had left an exit wound on the bottom of his left foot.

Master Splinter sat in the chair beside the cot, pulling the rolling cart of medical supplies closer to himself. “I will treat the burns while you set up the heart monitor.”

“Guys, really, I'm okay.” Even as Leo started sticking EKG nodes on him and Raph clipped the pulse oximeter on one green finger, he protested. “The likelihood of going into v-fib again is infinitesimal.”

“Ahh, darn, looks like we can't comply with your complaints if we can't understand the words yer usin’,” Raphael drawled.

Splinter gently drew Donnie’s burned hand into his own. “My son, it is you that so often cares for us when we are injured or unwell. Let us return the favor now and care for you.”

Donnie smiled in spite of himself, looking down at his lap as he felt heat rise in his cheeks. “Okay, I guess that makes sense. Thank you, Sensei.”

“Didja hit your head on the way down?” Raph asked, standing behind his head.

“Uh, I don't think so. No bumps, no headache.”

“Good.” A smack reverberated around the room. “Be smarter next time, genius.”

Don lurched forward, hands raised instinctively to protect the head that Raph smacked. “Ow! Talk about insult to injury!”

“That's actually injury to injury,” Raph corrected, leaning into his field of vision. “You die, an’ I'm gonna dig you up just to kill you again. You hear?”

Donnie winced as Master Splinter made his first pass with the antibacterial gel on his hand. “Loud and clear, boss,” he grumbled.

Maybe, just maybe, it would be okay to let himself be taken care of.

Just this once.

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maybelinefox · 22 hours

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maybelinefox · 1 day

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As It Never Will Be

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“What is this, some kinda game? Like hide’n seek or somethin’?”

Raph chuckles ruefully. “Yeah, somethin’ like that.”

Donatello sits down. In the middle of the lair, surrounded by his family, he sits down before he can fall.

They're all on top of him instantly, Leo kneeling beside him while Splinter puts a warm paw on his head, and they're all trying to talk to him. Donnie can’t hear them through the high-pitched whine buzzing through his skull, everything around him is all blurred and muffled. And he can't breathe—why can't he breathe?

“—Donnie, Donnie please—” Leo, beside him, shakes his shoulder. The world tilts to the left.

“—bruised, he needs to—”

“—son?”

“Can you hear me? Donatello—”

“Bro, take a breath!”

It's Mikey’s voice that cuts through the fog. The flash of orange in his peripheral vision—so bright and happy, not a single stain in sight—snaps him out of it. Suddenly he’s groping for Mikey, grabbing his arm—both arms, and just releasing control of his own body. He feels the lurch as his full weight falls against his baby brother, but there are so many other hands on the both of them, they don't fall.

“Donnie,” Mikey murmurs, stroking his brother’s head, “buddy, you're kinda freakin’ us out here dude.”

He closes his eyes, which are suddenly burning for some reason. Why are his eyes burning? “Eight days,” he murmurs. He can't even feel his mouth moving.

“What?”

He hooks his shaking fingers onto the edge of Mikey’s plastron, memorizing the feel of the waxy smoothness and trying to replace it with the memory of the jagged, dulled scutes he last touched. “ Eight days , not ten minutes.” He gasps for breath, but his chest still feels too tight. Did the air in the lair get thicker while they were gone? Terror grips him as he wonders—is this even the right reality? Is this his earth?

He can hear them talking now, their voices are clearer, but he’s panting too hard to try to respond. His head is spinning, and he hasn't had anything to eat but small dry rations for days, and he can still feel The Shredder’s blood on his skin. He can feel it .

“Mikey, we’re going to the lab, come on,” Leo says in the most Leo-like way possible. God, it’s good to hear his pitchy teenage voice again.

His brothers haul him to his feet and practically have to carry him into his own lab, depositing him on the cot against the far wall. His little doctor’s station is there, with his magnifying lamp and sterile gauze and needles and antibiotics—stuff he would have killed for two days ago, when he saw to rebel after rebel with infections or burns or skin torn from bone—

“Donnie, what's hurt?” Leo asks urgently, hands hovering over his brother.

He takes in a thin, gasping breath, but hot tears are still coming down his cheeks and he still can't speak past the lump in his throat or that dull ache in his chest. Oh, is he having a heart attack?

Raph shoulders his way into the space beside Leo. Donnie’s vision goes double, giving him four brothers instead of two. “He ain't hurt, he’s havin’ a panic attack. Donnie, try to breathe with me.” He kneels and takes one of his brother’s hands, placing it on his own chest while taking deep and exaggerated breaths.

That matches up, he thinks as he gasps for breath. Accelerated heart rate, chest pain, shortness of breath, all classic symptoms of a panic attack. But no amount of logic can stop his body now, auto-pilot has taken over and he can’t stop the short, wheezing breaths that are quickly making him more and more lightheaded.

“Just breathe, Don,” Raph urges.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, he remembers being years younger and teaching Raphael how to do this when their roles were reversed. He squeezes his eyes shut and tries, really tries to synchronize his breathing with Raphael’s, but he can barely take in any air at all.

“Can't—” he gasps, shaking his head. “Can't, Raph—”

He feels Splinter’s paw rest heavily on his forehead, thumb smoothing the creases in his temple, and senses, rather than hears, his Master’s soothing words. “ My son. Whatever you have seen, it is no more. You are home, you are safe. Let your mind and body be at rest .”

The world around him goes dark.

“His chest is bruised, he has four lacerations on his right leg that probably need stitches, he’s got other cuts and bruises everywhere , and I think he might have a concussion. I—I can't tell, Sensei. Usually I would ask him…”

“I know, my son. Look! He is waking up.”

Donnie’s head is pounding like a three year old with a drum kit and his eyes are crusted shut, like he’s been sick or crying, but he can’t quite remember when he fell asleep. He forces his eyes open anyway. He wants—no, he needs to see his family.

Only Leo and Splinter are there, sitting side by side at the cot. They both have their hands on him at once—Leo on his chest, gently applying pressure so he can’t get up, and Sensei holding his hand. He lifts the other hand to rub his eyes and nearly hits himself in the face with the IV tube they affixed there. He glares at it. “How long was I out?”

“About twenty minutes,” Leo says softly. “You're a bit dehydrated, so…”

Damn. At first, he felt like he slept for days.

“Are you alright? You really scared the shell out of us, Don.”

He stares at Leo for a long moment, then laughs. The giggle burbles out of his throat suddenly, hysterical even to his own ears. The last time he heard Leo swear, his voice was thirty years older and he didn't say shell .

“I'm—I'm okay,” he stammers out, trying to hold the hysterics in his chest. If he laughs again, he might just burst into tears afterward. “Where’s Mikey and Raph?” He swallows thickly. “I need—I need to see them, Leo. I need to see you all side by side.”

Leo moves to stand, but Splinter beats him to it. He pats each of his sons’ hands, then excuses himself.

Leo scoots into Sensei’s chair, closer to his brother. His hand still hasn't strayed from Donnie’s chest. “I understand if you don't want to talk about it, but—”

“I don't.” That giddy feeling from just a moment ago is gone, and the hollow that it leaves behind might collapse into itself like a dying star if he has to say another word about it. He lays his head back against the pillow and fixes his eyes on a blank patch of brick wall somewhere behind Leo, suddenly drained of any ability to pretend.

He nods. “Okay. That's…that's okay.”

It's gonna kill Leo until he knows, because he thinks he always has to know everything. But Donnie is unequivocally certain that Leo doesn't want to know what he saw over the last few days. Hell, Donnie wishes he could unsee it himself.

“Bro!” Mikey enters with two plates of pizza. They ordered it just before everything went down days ago—hours ago?—so it’s hot and fresh and the sight of it makes his mouth water instantly. “Thought you might be hungry, who knows what they were feeding you…wherever you went.”

Leo throws a look over his shoulder as Mikey sidles into the seat beside him. It shuts him up pretty quick.

“Thanks.” He takes the plate and lifts the slice to take a bite, but the smell of the grease and cheese suddenly sends a wave of nausea over him. Mikey has a point—he hasn’t eaten much in the last few days, so maybe he should start with something milder.

He sets it aside and swings his legs over the side of the cot, aware of Leo’s watchful eye. He reaches out and puts his hands on Mikey’s biceps, gripping them firmly. He knows it's weird, he can plainly see how they're both looking at him, but he just has to convince himself that it's real , and he's home, and maybe it was all just a nightmare after all.

“You sure you're feeling alright?” Mikey asks, mouth full of pizza.

He pulls his little brother into a bone-crushing hug, smiling at the surprised squeak. He doesn't bother answering the question.

“Hey, don't go crushin’ Mikey without letting me in on the fun,” Raph says as he shuffles in.

Don parts from Mikey just in time to see Leo reach up and wipe a smudge of pizza sauce off Raph’s chin, only for Raph to glare down at him with an energy of do it again, I dare you .

As soon as Raph is sitting (and thus within arm’s reach), Donnie reaches out and snatches the bandanas from his and Leo’s heads. He just looks at them for a long moment—eyes intact and seeing, faces free of scars and age spots and sunken frowns. Sixteen years old, voices still a little pitchy, not yet grown to their full height.

“The hell are you lookin’ at, brainiac?” Raph snatches his mask back. “Exactly how hard did they hit ya on the head?”

Yeah. He's home alright.

Leo breaks the uncomfortable silence by standing up and dragging the med cart closer. He starts ripping open sterile packages and setting out things for sutures to tend to his and his brothers’ wounds. Luckily, it looks like Mikey and Raph were more or less unharmed. The other two weren’t quite as lucky, though Don is sure he looks the worst by far.

“Okay so I know it was bad and everything, but the place I went was kinda awesome,” Mikey gushes. “We were superheroes! But like, it wasn’t really us or something, none of them went by the same names as us. It was spooky, dude.”

“Mikey, we’re giant turtles that practice ninjutsu, how much closer to ‘superhero’ do we really need to be?”

“Uhhh, I dunno, Raph, can you change size and shape at will? Can you fly? Huh ?”

Donnie sits back against the pillows while Leo gently positions his leg to do the stitches. Just a pinch of local anesthetic, exactly like he taught them, and he’s ready to go.

“Pfft, doesn't matter, I got to race across multiple hostile planets on a bike the size of the battle shell.”

“No way! Did you win?”

“‘Course I won!”

“That must be awesome for you dude, since you lost the Battle Nexus so hard .”

Donnie smiles idly at his brothers as the youngest receives a vicious noogie.

“I went to Usagi’s world,” Leo says quietly, not looking up from his task. Donnie barely hears him over the other two bickering.

“Oh, that’s…nice, I’m glad you were among friends.”

He chuckles. “It was weird, being in a world where anthropomorphic animals are the norm. I walked through cities in broad daylight.”

Donnie only hums in response.

Leo doesn’t look up until he’s finishing off the stitches on the first of three cuts that would receive them. Don doesn’t meet his eyes, just pretends he can’t see him at all. The look Leo gives him is a knowing and expectant one—usually this is how they have hard conversations, one exchange of information at a time. But Donnie isn’t interested in that bargain. Not this time.

“You think we’ll ever see Draco again?” Mikey asks.

“Nah, that lizard’s done for. Though I woulda liked to get in a few hits first,” Raph grumbles. “Make the world’s ugliest snakeskin boots.”

“And Lord Simultaneous just recreated the Daimyo's son! Talk about a bad idea.”

“Maybe not,” Leo says with a shrug. “He’ll have a chance to do things over, and he’ll know what to watch for this time. People aren't inherently evil.”

Mikey shrugs it off. “What about you Donnie? What crazy shenanigans did you get up to?”

“Oh. It was…” he tries to formulate a lie that isn’t too far from the truth, but boring enough that they won’t ask for more details. “It was basically the same as here,” he shrugs. “I manifested in the lair, met you guys…”

“Boo, lame,” Mikey pouts. But Donnie catches the look that he gives him—he’s reminded that Mikey has always been more perceptive than they gave him credit for.

Donnie barely manages to beg off sleeping in the lab—Leo wants them to take shifts through the night, sitting at his bedside and observing him, but Donnie insists that they all need rest in their own beds after whatever-the-shell-it-is that happened to them in the last few days. (Minutes? Hours? He’s still not sure, and at this point he doesn’t care either.) He desperately wants to sleep in his own familiar room and listen to the groaning water pipes in the wall behind his bed, with Raph snoring just next door. He craves that normalcy like oxygen.

Leo seems especially loath to leave him alone as he lingers in the doorway of his bedroom later on. He watched Don like a hawk all evening as he forced down some Gatorate and a few stray pizza crusts, and now he apparently wants to watch him sleep too.

“Leo, I’m fine,” he insists. And he really is, tucked into his warm bed and truly comfortable for the first time in days.

His eldest brother still hesitated, gripping the door and staring uncertainly into the dark room. “Are you sure you don’t want someone to stay with you?”

“ Leo .”

“Okay, okay,” he sighs. “Let me know if you need anything. I’ll see you in the morning.” He pulls the door to behind him, leaving a thin sliver of light across the floor and up onto the wall. Someone flicks off the hall light, and then that disappears too.

Honestly, Don is one hundred percent down for any and all of his brothers piling into his bed for the night, but admitting that to Leo would just raise more red flags on his already-sensitive radar, and he simply did not have the energy to deal with that tonight. So he lay in bed alone, pillows and blankets all tucked in around him the way he likes, glow in the dark constellations wishing him goodnight from the low ceiling, and tries to sleep. And tries.

And tries.

As time goes on, it becomes increasingly obvious that he just isn’t going to be sleeping tonight. Every time he begins to drift off, he sees flashes of his brothers from the future; blood, scars, the horrible things they said to each other, Master Splinter’s grave in the park, the way Mikey would occasionally grip the stub of his arm and faintly grimace like he was in pain—

Enough of that, he needs to get up.

Don rolls out of bed decisively, coming up a little wobbly on his feet. He doesn't have a concussion, that much he’s sure of, so he shouldn’t feel this unsteady. Maybe it’s just the too-quick pumping of his heart inside his shell, screaming like a steam engine about to fly off the rails, or the fact that he still can’t draw a full breath without feeling the tug of panic in the pit of his stomach. No matter what it is, he can’t just lay in bed like this. He needs to do something.

He pads out into the hallway and takes the stairs down one at a time, mindful of the stitches all up and down his right leg straining against the movement of his muscle and skin. In the dark, it’s easy to imagine his home as he’d briefly seen it in that other reality: broken, scorched, empty. Utterly devoid of life. He has to remind himself that Mikey’s ripsaw snores are real, and the flickering light of Master Splinter’s one ever-lit candle from behind the screen of his door are real, and he isn’t alone, and his brothers are safe, and he is safe.

But The Shredder isn’t dead.

He has a feeling that the fact is going to haunt him for a while—even more than usual, anyway—maybe until Saki really is dead. Next time he faces The Shredder (and there will be a next time), he won’t be making any assumptions about whether he’s dead or alive. He wants whatever the Utrom equivalent of asystole is, to see him bleed out then burnt up until there isn’t a single atom of him left to identify. Because even if those turtles weren’t really his brothers, that Shredder was the very same that he’s faced again and again—the same one that has tormented and abused his family again and again. And he’ll have his preemptive revenge, that is no question.

As he reaches the threshold of his lab, the comforting whir of computer fans and the blinking lights on various equipment greeting him like a warm blanket, and he’s absently surprised to hear Mikey’s voice in his head instead of their father’s. “ Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering,” says Mikey’s uncanny Master Yoda impression in his head. It used to drive all three brothers crazy that the Jedi code sometimes matched up so perfectly with principles of bushido; Mikey could spout Star Wars nonsense and Sensei, none the wiser, would simply nod along with him and tell the three that they should be more mindful like their brother. Of course, that had long since passed when Leo practically forced their father to marathon the entire Star Wars hexalogy for the sake of everyone’s sanity.

The memory brings a smile to Don’s face. He won’t let anger consume him like it had with Darth Vader—or indeed with The Shredder himself. He’s going to be intentional about involving his brothers every step of the way and make sure they’re all united and equally prepared when the time comes. If he’s learned anything in the last week-and-some-change, it’s that no one of them could take on Shredder without all three of the others.

He leans into the doorway of the lab for a moment, just breathing in the familiar smell of motor oil and hot CPUs and trying to relax his tense body. Honestly, now that he’s gotten up, he feels more tired than he had when he was in bed. Maybe he just needed the change of scenery; a cognitive shakeup. Whatever caused the change, his body suddenly feels like it weighs a hundred tons, and he’s overcome with an all-consuming need to lie down. He easily crosses the lab in the dark and finds the soft edge of the cot against the wall. He lays down on his plastron and pillows his head on his arms. The moment his eyes close, the sleep which had so evaded him swallows him whole.

Mikey kept staring at him, eyes narrowed and suspicious, the whole way to the rebel base. Donnie thought about addressing it a few times, but quite frankly, he didn’t know how to address this older, cynical version of his brother. He hadn’t seen him smile once, or even crack a joke, or make an obscene gesture. This Mikey was covered in scars, missing an arm, and utterly suspicious of Don.

And looking at the world around them, Don couldn’t blame him.

Mike stopped short at a street corner. Donnie rushed to melt into the shadows of an alley anxiously, assuming his brother had spotted something or someone coming around the way. Instead, Mikey just stood there and kept staring at him with those shrewd, narrowed eyes. He’d be lying if he said it didn't feel a little threatening.

“Mikey?”

“How old are you?”

“Uh—sixteen.”

Mikey’s expression went completely blank, shrewd gaze gone into a faraway stare.

He moved to take a step forward, then falters and stops. “I told you Mikey, I didn’t abandon you guys. Something happened . I haven’t—I mean, I didn’t live through the last thirty years.”

Mikey leaned heavily into the crumbling brick facade of the building Don had his shell pressed against, staring wide-eyed at the ground.

Donnie had a hundred questions he could’ve filled the silence with. First and foremost, he wanted to ask how the heck old he thought he was, half a head shorter than his younger-but-older brother as he was, but he thinks better of it. There was no good way to frame a question like that, and Mikey was clearly reeling.

“So you, what…time traveled here? Is Renet involved in this?”

Donnie almost laughed. “I wish, Mikey. It was Draco and the Daimyo’s son.”

Mikey uttered a string of colorful profanity. Well that, at least, was more like the Mikey he knew. “We spent all that time looking for you, we were all so angry with you…”

That stung. That his family could ever think him capable of outright abandoning them like that... He had to remind himself what this Mikey had been through, and the extremes that it must have taken for them to arrive at that conclusion.

“I’m not sure that I’m really…from this timeline,” he added hesitantly, voice small and uncertain.

Mikey straightened out. “Doesn’t matter. I just needed to know you weren’t…some kind of trick of The Shredder’s. I couldn’t live with myself if I led them right to the base, after everything. Come on, we have to get in before sunrise.”

Fuck, fuck , there’s blood running down the side of his face, and his hands are pinned, what happened? He vaguely hears the cries of a brother in the distance, but which one? Which brother, and where, and does he have enough strength to save them?

He groans and tries to gather himself, tries to force himself to think through the fog in his head. He feels paralyzed and stiff—something must have hit him in the head. But he can’t hear his brothers anymore, he’s alone now, and his entire body is slick with blood.

No, something seems wrong about that.

He peels his eyes open, almost forcing them, and slowly, slowly comes down from the false adrenaline high. He’s in his lab still, on the infirmary cot instead of the unidentified rocky terrain he’d seen behind closed lids, but he is definitely damp, that much is real. His hands, pinned beneath his plastron, are vaguely prickly and numb. He moans again, more conscious of it this time, and rolls himself onto his side. The prickling floods full force into his fingers as blood rushes to fill the oxygen-deprived tissues and his nerves respond in kind. His entire body buzzes in the dark.

He lurches to his feet and sways dangerously, righting himself at the last moment on his rolling medical cart. Something crashes to the floor and takes a few other items down with it, but the sound barely registers to him. He’s still wet, and in the dark he really can’t tell if it’s blood or not. As he stumbles out of the lab, he has one hazy goal in mind: shower.

Don feels drunk on his own exhaustion and the leftover panic from the dreams he can barely grasp. He gropes for walls to support himself as he makes his way around the lair the long way, slowly skirting the edge until he comes to the stairs. He ascends them just as carefully as he’d descended them earlier. (How much earlier? His foggy mind hopes it was enough that he won’t have to go back to sleep, that maybe he’ll shower and feel rested enough to face the day, but the silent darkness of the lair betrays that hope.)

He doesn’t even turn the light on in the bathroom, just goes by the nightlight and touch as he opens the hot water tap and steps underneath before it’s even warm. The pipes in the wall shudder alongside him until they finally open blessedly hot water over his skin, scalding away what he now recognizes only as sweat from a restless, nightmare-filled sleep. His heart pounds in his ears over the rush of the water.

In the darkness, he rests his hands on his knees and rests his shell against the tiled shower wall. Vaguely, the logical part of his brain is aware of what’s happening: he’s tripoding—the medical shorthand for the posture a patient commonly assumes when experiencing mild to severe respiratory distress. He’s seen his father, his brothers, and his friends do it after a battle or a particularly brisk run, and he’s seen his brothers do it the few times when panic overtook them. He can feel his neck straining as he breathes, notes the peripheral muscle involvement to his list of symptoms. His heart rate…was still less than ideal, but it never really slowed down since he got home from that nightmare earlier in the day.

Simply put, he’s having another panic attack. Alone, in the shower, in the dead of the night. He drags in steamy breath and forces it back out too quickly, shaking under the scalding water. He doesn't understand—he held it together so well with those alternate versions of his brothers, kept cool and level headed and led them to victory, no matter how pyrrhic it may have been. And now, even though he intellectually knows what’s happening and has experienced this sort of post-trauma breakdown before, he doesn’t understand why it’s happening to him . Can’t he just catch a break for once? Can’t he just sleep through the night, suffer through whatever nightmares his traitorous subconscious deals him, and move on like the rest of his brothers? Does he really have to be such a crybaby about it?

He pounds his fist into the tile, grits his teeth together as it gives and cracks beneath his fist, then sinks to his knees in the shower stall. Even if he has to tape his eyelids open, he won’t be risking sleep again tonight.

Mikey, usually the earliest to rise out of all of them, looks positively shocked when he catches sight of Donnie sitting at the kitchen table at zero-dark-thirty, coffee mug and book laid out in front of him. If Leo and Raph are equally surprised to see him up and about when they file in, they don’t show it.

Sensei suggested the night before that they skip the day’s training, giving everyone a chance to rest and reorient themselves in their home. Donnie had a sneaking suspicion that it was solely for his benefit though, as his brothers appeared more or less unaffected by their adventures, and he just isn't going to take any of the misplaced sympathy. Just before the clock strikes seven, their normal gathering time, Don stands up and pointedly enters the dojo. He supposes Sensei really meant it about taking the day off—no one has lit the candles nor dragged out the sparring mats, so he sets to the task himself.

He hears the telltale dull thunk of a shell hitting the wooden frame of the dojo door and pointedly ignores it.

Raphael clears his throat loudly. “Don,” he starts evenly, “whatcha doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?” he mumbles in reply.

Raph doesn’t say anything right away. Instead, he waits until Donnie has dragged the first mat into the center of the room and stands panting over top of it, shell still toward his brother.

“Looks like yer being more stubborn than Leo. Which I’d usually commend, but you look like shit.”

Don wipes a thin sweat from his brow with the back of his hand, pretending that it wasn’t shaking, then turns to face his brother. “Gee, thanks. Are you gonna help me or not?”

Raph, arms crossed over his chest, shrugs. “Nah, I’ll letcha wear yourself out.”

Donnie rolls his eyes and goes for the next mat, pulling it from its place leaning against the brick sewer wall to rest on the ground, then dragging it into place. It doesn’t usually take any effort at all for him to do this, but today it feels like he’s trying to drag an entire continent across the dojo. Fcine, so he hadn’t gotten the best rest or nutrition while he was in that godforsaken future, but he can’t begin to recondition his body until the dojo is set up and his Sensei has stopped babying him.

When he finally pulls it into place, arms trembling, he centers himself on the mat and sinks into a lotus pose with less grace than he’d have liked. He holds no delusions that he’ll be able to meditate like this, but he wishes his brothers would at least sit down with him so that he could pretend to join them and have that deep-meditation connection.

Eyes closed, Donnie listens to Raph close the dojo door, heave a great sigh, and assume a matching pose beside him, knees just barely touching.

“You look like shit,” he repeats. “What happened, Don?”

He flinches. “I spent a week in an alternate reality. It was just—tiring, is all. I’m fine.”

“Bull-fuckin’-shit you’re fine, you look like ya lost fifteen pounds and ten years off your life. I don’t need all the gritty details, but I like t’think you trust me enough with the gist of it.”

“It’s not about trusting you,” Donnie snaps, opening his eyes and jerking his knee away from Raph’s. “I just don’t want to talk about it. Is that a crime?”

He wants Raph to rise to the challenge, meet his anger in kind and start a fight. He wants someone to yell at and blame and be angry at instead of the hollowed-out, bone-deep exhaustion in his chest. But his brother’s gaze doesn’t harden, and his hands don’t ball into fists. Damn him for having compassion, damn Leo for helping him get his anger under control, damn him for losing an eye, damn him for his recklessness that will eventually get him killed.

Raph’s face softens instead. “I heard ya bumpin’ around last night. Did you sleep at all?”

Donnie searches his brother’s eyes for a hint of mockery, a thread of wayward anger he can pull at and unravel, but all he sees is a reserve of compassion that Raphael keeps on tap just for him. He wants to scream, wants to hit something, wants to rip his metaphorical hair out and go apeshit, but he’s the smart one. The level-headed one, the one holding everything together, the one that they look to for strength when things are uncertain. He can’t waver, he can’t let them know their potential future, he can’t let them know how horrible it could be if he fucks up even a little bit.

Raph reaches toward him, and when Don flinches away, he drops his hand into his lap instead. “When you decide you wanna talk, I’ll be around.” He waits a moment, watches as Donnie shifts his gaze to the mat and tries to keep his breathing level. Eventually, he leaves and closes the dojo doors behind him.

Don lays down on the mat and buries his face in his hands.

“Wait, so you aren’t our Donnie?”

In the basement of the rebel hideout, after two days of waiting, Donatello finally had this battered version of his brothers together in one place. They sat around a battery-powered lantern and talked in hushed tones so as not to wake the infirmary of rebels sleeping on the far side of the room, and the harsh shadows cast at harsher angles made his brothers’ weathered faces look truly foreign.

“Well, not exactly,” he said slowly. “I think your Donatello and I are one and the same, but this timeline seems to be a result of my disappearance at Draco’s and the Daimyo’s son’s hands,” he mused. “If you—that is, the younger version of you—are able to put me back in my own time and place, this all may not come to pass at all.”

The three turtles around him, simultaneously his brothers and not his brothers at all, let out a collective sigh that sounded like relief.

“But that’s a lot of maybes, and since you all have no clue what happened to me in this timeline...it’s far from the only possibility, or even the most likely one.”

Leo reached under his dark glasses and scratched at a scar. “If there’s a chance that you could go back to your own timeline, then you need to stay here. Whatever you’ve cooked up in that brain of yours, we can do it ourselves, the three of us, and leave you out of it. You’re of more use to your brothers than...us,” he said awkwardly.

What he meant was if you die here, now, that cements this future, and we don’t want that. Donnie didn’t want that either, but there was nothing to say that this wasn’t already cemented. If his brothers, or Lord Simultaneous, or Draco or whoever was going to pull him back into his own timeline, it would make the most sense to do it at the moment when he showed up. Honestly, there were a thousand different possibilities and Don didn’t have the time or brainspace to do the necessary calculations to rule some of them out. What mattered was that he was prepared to face this reality as the only true future and do whatever it took to save his brothers, these brothers, even if that meant death.

“I’ll be careful,” he said, trying to brush it off. But the Leo of the past wasn’t that gullible, and this elder Leo for sure was not.

“Yeah, sorry Don, that’s not gonna fly,” Raph grumbled out, beating Leo to the punch. Leo’s words died on his lips. “Losin’ you once was bad enough,” he adds, voice cracking at the end.

The foursome grew silent, each willing the other to speak first. Finally, it was Mikey who broke the silence with a harsh laugh.

“Seriously, he’s here after thirty years, offering us a solution on a silver platter, and you’re gonna turn him down on the off chance he can prevent this altogether? This is our chance , guys.”

“Our last chance almost cost you your life, Mike,” Raphael snaps. “And it did cost ya an arm. We’re not draggin’ him into this.”

“Hey, don’t I get a say here? You’re not dragging me into anything, it’s literally my plan .”

Leo held up a hand to silence the argument, and to Donnie’s surprise, the other two actually listened. Even after all this time. “Donatello, I won’t let you put yourself in harm’s way. I failed to protect you once, and I will not make that mistake again. You can go, but you’re going to stay inside the tunneller.”

Donnie bristled, crossing his arms over his chest. He’d spent the last two days, while he and Mikey waited around for him and Raphael to show up, treating the wounded and ill. He’d sewn more stitches than he could count—so many that his fingers were sore and stiff—and held more than one hand while its owner passed into the next world. He helped April dig graves while Mikey stood by watching, physically unable to wield a shovel to help. He watched his brother sleep, whimpering in pain and pleading with invisible enemies in his dreams. He might be thirty years younger than them, but he’d done enough damn growing up in the last forty eight hours to at least make his own decision.

“Let me get this straight. Leo, you’re assuming that I’m not your Donatello?”

Leo hesitated, clearly trying to follow his brother’s train of thought. “Yes,” he said hesitantly.

“Good. Then you’re not my Leo, and I don’t have to follow your orders. I’m going, and that’s the end of it. You guys need me.”

Mikey, sitting between Leo and Raph on Raph’s blind side, grinned and gave Donnie a wink. It was the first bit of the Mikey he knew that he’d seen in two days.

Leo opened his mouth to speak, a finger raised, and Raph once again beat him to it with a harsh, grating laugh that sounded more like silverware in a garbage disposal than his own brother.

“I always knew ya had more balls than brains, just like the rest of us.” Raph sighed and cuffed him on the shoulder affectionately. “Let’s hear the rest of the plan, you little maniac.”

Donnie couldn’t help it—despite the gloom and terror and hopelessness around him, he smiled. And for the first time in who knows how long, so did all three of his brothers.

He wakes in a sticky sweat for the third time in one night, on the living room couch this time. He tried replicating the success of last night’s nap by trying the cot in his lab first, then the couch, but he keeps having the same results no matter where he falls asleep: visions of blood, of swords, of the Shredder’s angry pink face, of the angry pink gore that spilled out of it as the crystal drill bore into him—

Enough to keep him awake again.

He sits up, panting, and freezes completely when he sees a shadow of a figure across the dark lair. He has the nearest thing in his hands in an instant, which just so happens to be the oversized, unlosable TV remote that Master Splinter scavenged after the third time Mikey misplaced the old one. It makes a poor replacement for his staff, but a stick is a stick, and he’s got killer aim.

“Whoa, I come in peace,” Mikey stage-whispers.

Don’s entire body sags back into the pillows, tossing the remote aside. He lets out a dizzying sigh and resumes his labored breathing, hand over his eyes. “You scared the shell outta me, Mikey.”

“Duh, Captain Obvious.” Mikey comes closer, the soft plap-plap of his feet on the stone floor a comforting metronome. “You okay bro? You were having some killer nightmares.”

Don scoots over and makes room for his brother on the couch, gesturing to join him. He obliges, lazily throwing an arm around his brother’s shoulders. Ah, so he isn’t hiding the distress very well. He never could hide much from Mikey, anyway.

“I’m fine,” he insists. “The usual stuff.”

“Shredder?”

A ghost of an ironic smile flits across Don’s face. “Yeah.”

Mikey’s quiet for a while while Don gets his breathing and heart rate under control. It’s easier than it was yesterday night, but still harder than he’d like it to be. He’d never been the praying kind, seeing as he and his brothers were somewhat of an affront to any god that might exist, but he would do damn near anything to forget those images of his brothers’ battered bodies, covered in blood and the scars of too many years on their own, lungs stilled by his failure. He knows he has many more sleepless nights to come, but the reminder that he doesn't have to face them alone is more than a little comforting.

These brothers aren’t dead, they aren't maimed, they aren’t at odds with each other. At least no more than usual. He shouldn’t push them away—he needs to drag them in closer and make sure they all know how much he loves them.

Stupid Raph, forcing perspective on him and making him see reason. Of all his brothers.

“Donnie?”

“Hm?”

His little brother hesitates, hand idly tracing patterns over Don’s scaly shoulder. “I know you saw something bad, wherever you went. You don’t have to tell me about it, but you’ve been acting funny—like, not ha-ha funny, and what you said about…my arms? It's just been wiggin’ me out, man.”

Wow, he barely remembers saying that. The confusion and sheer emotional gut punch of going from Shredder’s throne room to standing beside his brothers, young and whole again, it was…something else.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Don opens his mouth to dispense an automatic reply as he’s overwhelmed by horrible images of his brothers’ mangled bodies and the sharp smell of their blood in the air, but finds himself stopping short. He didn’t want to talk about it with Leo at first, or with Raph earlier, but Mikey…

Even if it wasn’t this Mikey, a Mikey had been his anchor throughout the whole ordeal. Maybe Donnie going missing was what kickstarted the apocalypse or whatever, but he realizes now with a start that Mikey was the glue that held them all together long enough to get anything done in that dismal future. Maybe their older brothers don't need to know about it just yet, but Don is seized by the sudden realization that Mikey deserves to know.

“It was a future where Shredder won,” he begins quietly. “Not our future, I'm going to make sure of that. But he ruled the entire world and you—you were in hiding. Near the lair, but the lair had been destroyed.” He smiles a little, in spite of it all. “You were a badass . I mean, not that you aren't already, but in the future you were seriously wrecking the Foot’s shit. But you were…well, you only had one arm. The other was gone.”

Mikey mumbles out a dulled “huh” that sounds vaguely horrified, but it’s hard to tell without seeing his expression. “That—uh, that's messed up dude. But everyone else was fine, right?”

Donnie worries his hands together in his lap. “No,” he says hoarsely. “Sensei was…gone. Raph and Leo didn't talk anymore, and Raph was missing an eye, and Leo was blind —” He shudders and takes in a thin, trembling breath. “It was horrible , Mikey, like a horrible nightmare I couldn’t wake up from. I helped you take down the Shredder, but it cost you all your lives . I couldn’t save you —”

Mikey pulls him into a hug so suddenly that he lets out a startled cry. With his little brother holding his head to his chest, Donnie finally just can't hold it in anymore. He cries bitterly for the broken future he saw and those brothers that he couldn't save.

“It was my fault,” he cries. “I disappeared and everything fell apart—”

“Hey, hey, bro, it's okay.” Mikey squeezes him gently. “That wasn’t me, or Leo or Raph, those were just some other guys that looked like us. See, I’ve got two good huggin’ arms here! Leo is definitely not blind since he’s been glaring at everything all day, and Raphie is perfectly capable of rolling both his eyes at us. You’re here now, and—I know you’d never leave us. It's okay.”

He hiccups another sob. “It could still happen. If I go missing, or die—”

Mikey pulls him out to arms’ length to look at him. He can barely make out the unusually stern features of his brother’s face in the dark. “Hey, you are not going to die. Don’t even think about it.”

His mouth hangs open for a moment, stunned by his baby brother’s serious tone. Then another wet sob strangles his throat, and he's falling apart all over again. “I'm so scared Mikey, there's nothing to say that isn't exactly what’s going to happen to us.”

Mikey must not know what to say to that, because he just pulls him back in to hold him while he cries. Donnie isn't even sure why he’s crying—it’s all over now, it maybe never even happened, there's no point in dwelling on it now. The tears fall all the same.

“Hey, what's with the ruckus in here? A turtle needs his— Donnie ?” Raph is up and over the second-floor railing and kneeling by the couch in seconds, his hand on Don’s arm as he continues to cry. He just can't stop , no matter how hard he tries.

Leo’s in a second later, a sheathed sword in one hand, the other on the hilt. At the sight of his brothers, he sets it down by the stairs and silently joins them, perched on the edge of the coffee table.

With Raph clinging to his arm and Leo gently stroking the back of his shell, he calms faster than he thought he could. The silent comfort of his brothers—his strong , stubborn, loving brothers—is like a balm on his aching soul. His cheek pressed to Mikey’s plastron, he takes in deep, shuddering breaths and tries to focus on the moment. He’s here now—they all are.

“I'm scared,” he says again, words slightly slurred by his position against Mike.

“It's okay to be scared,” Leo says softly. His hand’s gentle movements on Don’s shell don't cease.

“Yeah, Mikey’s scared all the time,” Raph suggests with a hint of a smile.

“I didn't think I'd ever see you guys again. I didn't—I didn't even know if I was in another reality, or if it was just too late to change things. I still don’t.”

Mikey makes a sad, strangled sound in his throat, and his arms tighten around Donnie. “We’re here, dude, we’re not going anywhere.”

Donnie can tell that Leo and Raph are both barely holding back on a million questions, but he can’t find it in himself to repeat any part of the story now. Now that it’s out of him, he feels like a weight has been lifted from his chest and he can breathe for the first time since the Ultimate Draco vanished him away. He has all three brothers, every part of them, and the next thirty years stretch out in front of him like eons. He knows they’ll get hurt, he knows they’ll have to face Shredder again, but for now just being whole and together is enough. Knowing that his brothers could live with him and this failure, the horrible reality that even though he has the smarts and the skills to match he can’t always save them , soothes something broken inside him that he didn’t even know was there.

“I love you guys,” he mumbles, the words mashed and mangled between the thickness in his throat and his mouth so close to Mikey’s shell.

They’re each quick to respond in kind, hands and arms tangling around him in a warm and confusing embrace of scales and shells and tears from more than one of them.

They sleep in a tangle across the couch and living room carpet that night, all as close to Donatello as they can be. Every time he wakes to a nightmare, at least one of them is there to assure him that he is not alone, the nightmare is over, and he hasn’t failed.

By the time morning rolls around again, warmth has curled up and made a home in Donnie’s chest, replacing the hollow and horrible feeling that had taken respite there ever since he had to look at his brothers’ broken and bloodied corpses. He watches them all sleep—Mikey sitting up at the end of the couch, Raph in Master Splinter’s armchair, Leo sprawled across the carpet with a blanket haphazardly thrown across his legs—with a smile, knowing they’re alive, and they love him, and he loves them. For now, that’s all he needs in the world. The rest of it? They’ll do what they do best, and take it one punch at a time.

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maybelinefox · 2 days

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Trail cam catching a deer fawn with the zoomies

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maybelinefox · 2 days

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Shroud

read on AO3

After all the screaming, the silence that settled over the triage tent was deeply unsettling.

April remembered Casey sitting on the couch at her old place and watching TV a million years ago, before the world ended. He grimaced at a hockey game and announced that no matter how badass a guy was, if his knee was bent the wrong direction, he was gonna scream like a little girl. That Caseyism had been proven to her time and again over the last eight years they’d spent trying to save the human race, by the biggest and baddest of asses and even Casey himself. Still, some little part of her, the same part that saw him as her little brother and maybe a little bit invincible, must have thought Raphael was the exception.

He was not.

They had a hard time at first figuring out why he was screaming. There was so much going on around them, so much chaos and blood, there was no saying how much of his crying was caused by the physical versus emotional. Either way, the syringe of fentanyl had taken care of it.

The resistance usually hoarded those drugs like precious gold. They were only being manufactured in very small amounts these days, and even then they were nigh upon impossible for the resistance to get their hands on. The turtles were no exception to this rule—they had endured countless wounds and even surgical procedures that they really should have been sedated for, all without anesthetics or narcotic pain medication. And even though April was the one they all called commander, everyone knew Leonardo was a close second; so when he told the medic to knock his brother’s ass out, that medic did as he was told.

Leonardo stood at April’s shoulder as she sat beside the surgeon, watching him stitch Raph’s newly-empty eye socket closed. Her own eyes were swollen and raw from crying, and she had yet to even get through the worst of it. She knew she was in for a second, more volatile breakdown later when the reality of it really hit her. When she laid down to go to sleep and Casey wasn’t there, when the other half of the bed was empty—

“I’m sorry,” Leo whispered. “I wouldn’t let him go back in. I—” he cut himself off and took a breath.

April usually would have pressed him to go on and not hold back for her sake—she was leading the goddamn resistance, she needed to know everything and not be protected even by these turtles who spent most of their time by her side, these days. But today, just this once, she was going to let him shield her from the gory details. Maybe someday she’d want to hear the story about how her brave, stupid husband went out in a blaze of glory, but not the very same day as that death.

“I didn’t want to lose either of them, but I didn’t want to lose both of them,” Leo finally finished. "I'm so sorry." He rested his hand on April’s shoulder, and she leaned into the touch.

“You did all you could, Leo. This is just what war is.”

He was quiet for a moment. The surgeon tied off the last stitch. “Still sucks.”

“Yeah. Still sucks.”

Raph's awareness came to him in bits and pieces. Hearing came first, as it always did, and was accompanied by an unpleasant ringing. High pitched screaming from all around him that he couldn't shut off, because he had a habit of standing a little too close to explosions. H It wasn't new to him, just somehow worse than usual. Beyond the ever-present screech he could hear the soft sounds of life—someone shifting in a chair, feet scuffing concrete floors, the groan of the wounded somewhere nearby.

The pain filtered in after that, and he sucked a breath in through his teeth. Son of a bitch, his face was on fire. His head felt like it was in a vice, and his leg didn't feel real good either, but he was pleased to find that he could wiggle all ten fingers and toes. Still doing better than Mike.

He tried to open his eyes and a whimper of pain escaped him. Fuck, his face hurt! Why'd his face hurt so bad? It hadn't even hurt this much that time he fractured his cheekbone.

"Raph?"

April's voice. He stiffened. He couldn't remember exactly why, but he knew he didn't want to see her at the moment.

He couldn't think through the thick fog of pain on his mind, the searing pain on his face was far more pressing than whatever reason he was avoiding April this time. He thought fondly of ibuprofen. Remember that? He asked his body. Remember ibuprofen? He could go for about eight hundred of those bad boys.

A hand slotted into his, small and cold, even to him. He squeezed her fingers. I hear you.

An almost-unnoticeable sigh of relief. More chair squeaking as she adjusted. "You haven't been out too long, only about a day. If you wanna go right back to sleep, I won't tell."

He forced himself to breathe through the pain. You gotta breathe deeply, Donnie always said, even if it hurts. I'm not treating your sorry shell for pneumonia.

He missed his brother. He would trade any and every painkiller in the world for his know-it-all brother. Hell, he'd trade the world itself.

He lifted his other hand to his face, searching blindly for the reason it hurt so badly. April lurched forward to stop him, but it was too late. His rough, calloused fingers caught on the cotton gauze, and he stopped cold.

It all came back to him at once. The fire, the searing heat, that last glimpse of Casey he caught right before the boiler blew—

His head was splitting open like an egg, brain running down his face. It had to be. Nothing else could hurt this badly. He felt tears rush to his eyes and bit back a cry of pain. Why did his goddamn face hurt so much? He dug at the hurt with the heel of his hand—and the world around him shook.

April grabbed his hand and wrenched it away from his face. "Raph, stop! You're gonna hurt yourself!"

It was too fucking late for that, it already hurt. It hurt it hurt it hurt, the tears, the loss, the burns, the everything. It stung and burned and fucking hurt all over.

"You need painkillers," she said. It wasn't a question.

"No," he hissed. "I'm fine. Save 'em, I'm fine."

He heaved a few unsteady breaths. He could control this, he could do it. He just...needed a minute.

"What's the damage?" His voice was too thin. He needed a drink.

April's long silence was telling. Raph touched the gauze again, gentle and cautious this time.

"Whole thing's gone, huh?"

"Shrapnel ruptured the sclera and pierced the musculature behind it. You're lucky it didn't end up in your brain." She didn't say I'm sorry, they all stopped saying it a long time ago. It was an unspoken constant; they were all sorry.

"'S what I get," he mumbled. He dropped his hands to his chest and let out a breath. The pain still raged on, but he could tune it out. "And—is he...did Casey make it out?"

All the air in the room turned to ice. Raph knew his hearing wasn't really that sensitive anymore, but he woulda swore he heard April's heart beat faster. Every second passed like an eon in the horrible moment between dread and knowledge.

"No," she whispered.

Raph’s fists clenched. He could learn to live without the eye. Fight without it, do life without it, keep hope alive without it. But without Casey—? He clutched at the gauze as white-hot, urgent pain ricocheted around in the empty socket. The rush of tears burned.

It tore a hole in his fucking heart. He couldn't do this without Casey, without his best friend that stood by him through thick and thin and unwaveringly supported him. His big brother, his confidant, the only person outside of his immediate family that ever really understood him and saw all of his inner struggle. His chest heaved with empty breath. And April—fuck, April was a widow. He couldn't save her husband, the one constant that she had. She didn't even have anything to bury. Raph failed her, he failed to bring Casey home even if it was in a body bag.

"Leo told me what happened."

No wonder she was here, she was waiting for him to wake up so she could tell him how many ways he could go fuck himself. He didn't say I'm sorry, it wouldn’t change a thing. She was probably real sorry too.

April's hand closed around his forearm, and it burned like condemnation and hellfire. "You can't blame yourself. Don't."

He sucked a sharp breath in. “What?”

Tears shimmered in her eyes. “He wouldn’t want you to blame yourself, Raph. You know that.”

“It—it was my fault. He wanted to fall back, he said we needed to cut our losses—”

“And he was wrong. You gave the extraction team the extra few minutes they needed, he—” the tears finally spilled over and she paused to sniffle. “Casey was the only one who didn’t make it.”

That…was really good. That was the lowest fatality rate of a rescue mission in a long time. And with the prisoners they freed…they’d actually come out with positive numbers, rather than total losses. Casey would be damn proud of that. Of them.

Raph got real quiet.

There was a time that he would have let April gather him up into her arms and hold him until the sorrow had eased. There was a time, too, when he would have gotten out of bed and screamed and punched the walls, broken whatever he could get his hands on. But he used up his sorrow when Donnie went away, and after Splinter left, his anger was exhausted too. He just laid there with tears silently running down his face, eyes covered and body trembling silently. He had nothing left.

“I’m sorry,” he said through clenched teeth. Even though he didn’t have to. Even though it didn’t mean anything. “I’m so fucking sorry.” A sob caught in his throat and he strangled it into an anguished swear. He didn’t deserve to cry when his best friend’s widow, his fucking sister, was sitting there mourning beside him.

“Raph, it’s not your fault. It’s Shredder.”

That’s what she said every time they lost something else to this fucking godforsaken war—it’s not your fault Splinter died, it’s Shredder, it’s not your fault Mikey’s radius and ulna were reduced to fucking atoms, it’s Shredder. Well who failed to stop him in the first place, huh? Of course it was his fault, of course it was.

Silence, long and uncomfortable and condemning, stretched on in the sickbay. There wasn’t any privacy in the apocalypse—on the other side of the dirty shower curtain barely three feet from Raph’s cot, there was another guy mourning some other loss. Another wounded, another mourner, another dead, another I’m sorry that didn’t mean a damn thing. It never ended.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” April eventually said. “Considering.”

Considering the one-less-eyeball. Raph finally peeled open the one functioning eye he still had and took a long look at April. She was blurry—if his vision hadn’t been so good before the total loss of depth perception, it was shit now. Still, he didn’t need to see in HD to know her eyes were bloodshot and rimmed with red.

“Are you sure you don’t need meds?”

He nodded. The deep, stabbing headache would keep him in bed, but honestly, he didn’t care. He wanted to curl up and drown in the misery just for a little while. “You should sleep, Commander.”

She smiled bitterly. “Do I look that bad?”

“Dunno,” he answered honestly. “From here ya just look fuzzy. Am I wrong?”

She sighed and scrubbed tears off her already-raw face. “You’re right.” A beat. Then, barely audible, “Bed’s awful empty.”

Without a second thought, Raph scooted to the side of the narrow cot until his shell met open air. He patted the mattress, and April curled up in the vacated space beside him. She wasn’t even fully settled in before the first heartbroken sob tore out of her throat.

Raph held her close and closed his eye. Fuck this. Fuck Shredder. Fuck everything.

Making the choice to leave came easier than he expected it to.

The same day that the medic cleared him to leave the sickbay, Raph went to his bunk and started packing. He just couldn’t take it anymore—the constant battle, the loss, the grief, but most of all, the constant fear. As long as there were loved ones nearby, there was fear. Mikey, April, Angel, shit, even Leo—there wasn’t a second of the day that he wasn’t pants-shittingly terrified that they would be next, and he couldn’t take any more! He just couldn’t take any more. Donnie, Splinter, now Casey too? He couldn’t do it, he couldn’t take any more empty graves.

He couldn’t even bring Casey’s body home to his wife.

His eye, the one that still had an eyeball in it, burned with unshed tears as he shoved his shit in a bag. He didn’t know yet where he was gonna go; the sewers weren’t safe anymore, central park was razed ages ago. He was gonna have to leave the city. Maybe the farm up in Northampton was still safe, none of them had been up there since the summer Donnie went missing.

He reached into the drawer of the beat-up bedside table and his new lack of depth perception finally got him, he slammed his hand right into the back of the drawer and cursed.

Mike blearily peeked out from the top bunk, then grinned. It was the middle of the day, but he looked half asleep. He must have been on night watch. “Arr, matey, it be good to see ye up and about. Hah, eyepatch humor.” His smile flickered at the sight of the bag. “Where—where are you going?”

Raph looked down. “Leaving. I can’t fuckin’ do this anymore, Mike.”

He scoffed. “You’re kidding. You can’t just run off and do your lone-wolf thing anymore Raph, it’s not safe.” A long silence passed. “Come on, be real, dude. Where are you gonna go?”

“I dunno. But I am leaving.”

There was a brief silence. “Fuck you.”

Raph one-eyed blinked.

“What, are you going on some one-man suicide mission against the Shredder or something? We aren’t kids anymore Raph.”

“No, I’m just—I’m leaving, okay? It’s none of your fucking business.”

“Fuck you,” he repeated. He rolled over in his bunk and disappeared into his scratchy wool blanket. “You’ll be back in a week.”

Raph didn’t bother with the contents of the drawer. On his way out of the barracks, something thwacked him on the shoulder, then fell to the concrete. He caught a rustle from Mike’s bunk as he knelt to pick it up.

It was a red mask with one eye stitched closed.

He moved on to the kitchen and stole some rations—nothing crazy, just a few days’ worth. It wasn’t difficult. Everyone knew who he was, everyone knew the turtles were April’s second-third-fourth in command, so no one questioned him as he gathered shit up.

He didn’t go out of his way to say goodbye to Leo. He wouldn’t have said anything to Mikey either if they hadn’t shared a bunk. Leo had tried to stop him from leaving a hundred times before—both back when they were kids and since they had helped form this ramshackle ‘resistance’—and this time he wasn’t going to give him the chance. He tossed the bag over his shoulder and headed out on foot.

He expected Leo, was braced to argue with him and even fight past him if he had to. He wasn’t expecting April. In fact, April might have been the last person he wanted to see. It was her that he was running from, after all.

She stood propped against the wall by the gate with Casey’s giant bomber jacket draped over her shoulders. It was just starting to get chilly out in the evenings, barely cold enough for her to need it. Just the sight of the thing made him want to curl up in a ball and cry his guts out.

She looked up as he approached and of course—of course she didn’t look angry. She looked hurt.

“Don’t try to talk me outta it.”

She shook her head. “Why? I don’t get it.”

He sighed and looked away. Even blurry, he couldn’t stand the sight of her so heartbroken. “Why can’t you just be mad at me already? Yell at me, hit me, get it over with.”

“Raph, I’m not going to be—”

“You should be!” he yelled. “I couldn’t even bring him home in a body bag! He wanted to get out and I stopped him!” His empty eye socket burned again, it truly was insult to injury that crying hurt so much. “He should have come back—he shoulda been the one that came back, and not me.”

April pushed away from the wall and came to stand in front of him. He had caught up to her a little bit height-wise, but she would always be a little bit taller. She cupped his cheek in her hand and chewed on her lip for a moment. “You’re my brother, Raphie.”

He stood there in her grasp, choking back the tears that ran down his face anyways.

She tilted his head forward and planted a soft kiss on his head, then shrugged out of the jacket. She slung it around his shoulders instead. “You’re really going?”

“I have to. I—I gotta get outta here, April.”

She sniffled, then sobbed quietly, but she nodded. She wasn’t going to try to stop him. “Don’t forget about us, okay?”

He wiped tears off his own face and nodded. “Okay.”

There was a moment of hesitation, and before he could second-guess himself, Raph pulled her into a tight hug. She felt so small and breakable in his arms. Mike would watch over her—he was probably the one who sent her out here to begin with.

Dusk turned to night as he held on to her. She didn’t move or complain, content to hold on as long as he would let her. Eventually he had to let go. They both sniffled, but nothing else was said.

She watched him go, Casey’s jacket around his shoulders, until he faded away into the night.

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maybelinefox · 2 days

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maybelinefox · 2 days

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#brbchasingdreams

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maybelinefox · 2 days

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@daboyau

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Mikey screams again, falling backwards in an attempt to get away.

Leo’s mask tilts and stares him down with the black, soulless part that covers his eyes.

Mikey scrambles back until his shell hits a wall.

“What did you do!?”

Leo’s head turns towards the blood on the floor before he looks back at Mikey.

“It’s pretty clear what I did. Do you need to see it again?”

Mikey shakes his head almost immediately.

“I-Is he-“

“Dead? That’s up to him. If he’s not stubborn and gets himself treatment from an actual doctor instead of trying to fix himself up with his fake degree.” Leo says, voice dripping with disdain.

Mikey did not see any of this coming.

Not by a long shot.

“I-I thought you were working for him-“

“That’s what I wanted you to think! That’s what I wanted everyone to think! Including him. I was biding my time until he finally showed me what I needed.” Leo picks up Mikey’s mask from the floor.

Mikey’s eyes follow the movement.

“The mask…?”

“How to make it. That’s all he was good for. Now we can really complete the set!”

Footsteps signal the arrival of two more people.

Mikey looks up in horror.

Raph and Donnie.

Leo’s body language seems giddy as he twists around to look at them. He sets the mask down on a table.

“Took you longer than I thought to show up!”

Raph snarls at him.

“You come after us for not followin orders and then merc the boss? We ain’t just sitting by and takin it! You’re gonna bring him back and then you’re gonna take punishment.”

Donnie holds out his hands, they’re gloved and letting out sparks.

“Oh please, let me do it.”

Leo’s body shakes like he’s laughing hysterically, but no sound comes out.

“I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and say it’s Draxum making you so stupid! You’re outnumbered!”

“Check your math, inferior. There’s four people in this room.” Donnie corrects.

“And only one person fighting a winning battle.” He shakes more.

“Quit playin games.” Raph hisses.

Leo finally let’s out the manic cackling that’s been building up.

“But I love games! I want to play the one where you guess how many bones I’ll break!”

“No! Leo! Don’t!” Mikey screams.

“Aww, of course Leo won’t.” He promises.

Raph comes at him first, fist cocked to connect with Leo’s jaw. Leo doesn’t move an inch, opening a portal right in front of him. Another portal opens next to Donnie, causing him to get hit hard enough to make a dent in the floor when he falls.

“Artemis will.”

Mikey screams again. His throat is starting to hurt from how much he’s doing it. He stands up and tries to get to Donnie, but Leo shoves his arm hard across his plastron.

“You know that feeling of wanting to help that you keep making everyone else’s problem? Take it and shove it down deep inside or I’ll make you, got it? SUCK IT UP ALREADY!” Leo hisses, moving his hand grabbing Mikey’s head before tossing him to the ground again.

Mikey lands on his shell, yelping in pain.

Raph goes into a frenzy.

He starts attacking without any real strategy or direction. Raph just wants to hit him. Leo ducks and weaves, not moving quickly, but just enough to keep Raph’s attention trained on him and only him.

“What’s wrong, Atlas? Afraid for them? Ah ah ah, what did you just say about not behaving correctly?” Leo hops back.

Mikey doesn’t have a single clue about what to do right now. Is Leo on his side? Should be help Raph and Donnie? He can’t exactly escape, Leo is way too fast and ready to hurt him if he tries.

Can he really just watch and do nothing?

Does he have a choice?

Leo hides his hands behind his back and makes another portal. Mikey can see how he slows down slightly, hands appearing in a portal again. He doesn’t know what he’s doing until he sees the movement of Donnie’s gloves being pulled off his hands.

Raph slashes at Leo with sharp claws only for his body to start jolting at the electricity running through it. Leo has a glove pressed to Raph’s neck and holds it there until the snapping turtle falls to a knee.

“This is the way you’ve always been, huh, Atlas? Stubborn to a fault, and for what? Nobody appreciates what you do. A defender, a protector, former leader, wasted in a rage filled beast who can’t bare to be alone. Go to sleep. I’ll be taking over the show.” He presses the other glove to him.

Raph falls over completely, twitching.

Leo tosses the gloves into yet another portal.

Donnie pathetically drags himself over to Raph once he has an ounce of consciousness and lays over his arm.

Leo giggles, the sound echoing in Mikey’s ears.

This isn’t Leo. It’s not by a long shot. It isn’t Draxum either, it’s a completely different evil that’s more heinous than anything they’ve encountered before.

Whatever it is has his brother under its grip.

He can’t get anyone back if Leo is like this. He won’t let him.

An idea pops into his head.

There’s one thing Leo has tried to stop this entire time, even when it hasn’t made sense, especially when he said he wanted it to happen.

While Leo is distracted by having Foot ninja come in and remove their injured brothers, Mikey shakily grabs the mask.

Leo quickly spins around as he hears metal move off the table. His head tilts once more.

“Icarus, what do you think you’re doing?”

Mikey swallows hard, hands still shaking as he holds it in his hands. He can feel the evil radiating off such a deceptively cute mask.

“Y-You don’t want me wearing this yet. T-Tell me what you’re planning. Wh-Why you’ve gone against Draxum. Wh-Who’s actually in control!”

He wishes that he could be as tough as nails as he needs to be when demanding such a thing, but it’s so hard to muster that after what he’s seen and who he’s talking to.

Leo stares at him.

Mikey feels his nerves on absolute edge.

Leo starts circling around him.

Mikey gets the odd sensation of being a fish in a fish bowl while a cat tries to figure out a way inside.

Or a way to get the fish out.

“Finally….” Leo mutters.

“What…?”

“FINALLY! I’ve been trying to rip your heart out from your brain this whole time! You still went way too soft but I can work with that!”

Leo grabs Mikey’s arm and starts pressing the mask closer to his face.

“Leo!”

“What!? I thought you wanted to threaten me! Take a good look at what’s going to happen to you!”

Mikey barely manages to keep the mask from being put on. He’s always been strong, but Leo is on another level right now. He shouldn’t be able to do this.

Mikey can see the tendrils reaching out towards him. It makes him sick to his stomach. This is the last thing his brothers saw before they lost themselves.

Think Mikey, think!

He said he wanted everyone to assume he was working for Draxum, but why? He said he needed to know how the mask is made to complete the set, but his mask finishes it!

Doesn’t it?

Why didn’t he want the mask on him before?

Why didn’t he hurt April or dad?

Why isn’t he trying harder?

Is he….stalling…?

His eyes widen as he pauses his struggle.

“You….you want to mask them too!?”

Leo rips the mask away.

“Ding ding ding! You finally get something right! That’s all I’m going to give you. Want some bonding time? No? Too bad.”

Mikey feels the ground under him vanish as he falls through a portal. He lands on a cement floor and groans in pain. His eyes are drawn to the bars in front of him. Leo really put him in a cell. He’s gone full supervillain, if that wasn’t obvious enough already.

Directly across from him, he sees that Donnie and Raph have their own, separate cells. It makes sense he’s keeping them apart. The way they are, they’d probably attack on sight.

Can those bars hold Raph back?

He hates how he has to hope they can. It’s not right to be this scared of his oldest brother. That’s only reserved for when he’s truly angry, lecturing about missed training or reckless behavior.

Raph is supposed to be the one who makes a scary world so much more bearable. The moment Mikey goes into his shell he knows who will be one of the first to grab and hold it tight, not letting go and silently promising to take care of him when he’s too overwhelmed.

He’s taken it so much for granted. He knows that. Mikey always assumed that he’d just have Raph doing things for him for….ever. He thought he’d always have Raph period.

His eyes move to Donnie next.

He’s still out cold.

When will he wake up?

He will wake up, right?

Raph hit him pretty hard.

Donnie would probably hate Mikey thinking like that. He doesn’t want to be seen as weak. He already covers up the shell he was born with to ease the anxiety of having it at all.

Donnie wishes he was as gruff and tough as he tries to make himself out to be. Behind every evil laugh and joke about hurting his brothers, there’s a longing to be more connected to them. To understand each other.

Mikey starts whining and whimpering. Two of his brothers are right there in front of him and he feels more alone than ever. He can’t be brave. It’s impossible.

“…Icarus…..” A soft hiss draws his attention back.

Mikey rushes to the bars, grabbing them and pressing himself close enough to squish his face.

“Donnie! Donnie, are you okay!?”

He’s sat up, gripping the bars tightly himself.

“What do you think!? That pathetic, sniveling rat avoided punishment now but I will make him understand what it means to suffer!”

Mikey sighs.

Really, what was he expecting?

“You sat there and did nothing! You coward! Weakling!”

“Leave him alone….” Raph grumbles from his place on the floor.

Of course he’s-

Wait, what?

“R-Raph?”

“Ica-….Mikey….”

Mikey gasps, desperately reaching his arm through the gaps. Raph is way too far away for him to actually ever reach him but he wants to try anyways.

“Raph! Raph! Are you actually you!?”

Raph grips the mask on his face. It’s slightly loose, he attempts to pull on it but it only earns him a loud grunt in pain.

“I-I’m tryin to be. I-It’s hard.”

“It’s okay! It’s okay, I know you can do it! I just need to know how! You have to tell me why your mask is loose!”

Raph grumbles, still in pain and unable to think as clearly from the damage done to him.

“Shock, the shock, made….made everything hurt….it started….making it let go….but it’s coming back. It’s healing. It wants me back.”

“No! You have to fight it! Don’t let it take you again, please! I need you! I can’t do this by myself!” Mikey pleads, near tears.

Raph smiles at him. It’s genuine, but pain is written all over it.

“You….you can, Mikey. I know you think I d-don’t trust you, y-you think I won’t let you go on your own because I-I look down at you, but i-it’s not why. It’s m-me. I’m scared. F-For you. I….want to protect you….I need to….I have to….I believe in you!”

Mikey’s tears flow freely now.

He’s losing him.

Again.

He blinks the tears away hard as he watches the mask slip itself more into place, taking his brother away and leaving something awful instead.

Raph hisses and clicks, Donnie responding to it in turn.

Mikey knows now what he has to do.

It will hurt them, it’s going to be incredibly difficult at best, and it might kill him at worst to try.

He still has to to try.

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