Chapter Text
It felt nothing like how he imagined dying would feel.
Donatello was a man of science, so it would have been foolish of him to have not, over the years, devised theories around what results certain situations would generate, what or who they might take out of commission, and what he would need to do personally in order to gain the best possible outcome. He would sometimes note down how he believed these situations might affect him or his brothers, both physically or mentally - he wasn’t an expert on emotions, far from it, but he could at least logically assume that getting, say, struck by lightning (one of his planned-for possibilities) would leave its own traumatic scar on any man or turtle that happened to experience it, so he’d dragged in April for those certain emotional areas and promptly abandoned her as a research partner when she’d told him he was being obsessive. He was Not obsessive, just thorough.
(Plus, you know. He cared about his brothers, and how they felt and reacted to things, although he’d beg you not to tell any of them that directly. He hoped they knew anyway.)
Having done all this research, Donatello had, of course, devised a good portfolio for how he understood dying to feel. What signs to look out for, and how to plan for any last minute escape plan or, at the very least, a kick-ass final monologue before he danced his last soirée. He had poured through countless articles and research papers into the psychology of resuscitation, about the experiences of coma patients, all of it. Leo may have been the medic of the group, but Donnie was certain he knew the most about the post-mortem. April had called it morbid. He had called it “being prepared”.
He couldn’t help but feel as though some of that research time may have been wasted, though, as he lay on his side, his newest project slash rework shattered into almost unsalvageable pieces on the floor across from him. (And really, that felt almost like the harshest blow - how was anyone except him supposed to salvage that hunk of junk? Was that all that he was leaving behind?)
He felt it had been time wasted, maybe, because dying didn’t feel at all like the soft, slowing breaths of passing peacefully into sleep, or the fast tight gasping of someone going out from a bullet wound. If anything, it felt like he was breathing too deeply, every breath filling his whole body and stretching out every wound and puncture and fracture, oxygen making his head light (or maybe that was the blood loss). He didn’t feel at peace, and he certainly didn’t feel as scared as he thought he should’ve been, as he had read he should have been.
Mostly, it just felt like an inconvenience.
As his fast brain slowed and there was something warm and wet pooling down his abdomen (it’s blood, Donnie, now’s not the time for denial), all he could think of was the fact that the shards in his chest should have been a part of a shiny new contraption by now. That this machine, powerful enough to kill him, of all brilliant people, should have made his brothers starry-eyed enough for him to slip in a quick explanation of how it worked - just a short half hour presentation, really.
He had really hoped that this time, this new thing would be big enough, strong enough, sparkly enough to finally squash down every threat to his family that seemed to crawl out of the woodwork, mushing up their good days and their fun adventures. To remove every danger to the ones he loved.
(And, as he lay there, shattered amongst his finest work and empaled by a beautiful, wonderful contraption that he could have shown to his family, that could have exploded and hurt them instead, that could have malfunctioned at a critical time and cost them something, someone important, he couldn’t help but feel like it might have done just that.)
He felt really warm and really cold, like he had been sleeping on all of his limbs at once and now none of them responded to him, flopped in front of him uselessly. Logistically speaking, now, if dying didn’t feel like any of his theories had posited it would, the evidence would suggest he was not, in fact, dying. In any other situation, if someone had made a claim against one of his impeccably researched, practically watertight theories, he would have demanded they provide physical evidence to the contrary. April had said in the past that that might make him a bad scientist, being so reluctant to consider possible contrary opinions, but he always said that if everyone did as much research as he did, they’d be fairly confident in their opinions too.
He couldn’t say he much liked this physical evidence though. Because the odds were, as his vision watered and flickered like the first moments of waking up and the last moments of falling asleep, that this was what dying felt like to him. That he was dying with the most fascinating experience he’d ever had only stored in his brain, and if only he could get to a recording device right now, if only he could note this down, if only he could-
He thinks he sees his big brother, as he sinks. Maybe that’s a kinder last sight than the growing pool of crimson that would be sure to leave a terrible mark on his lab’s floor if left to accumulate.
He hoped someone would clean it up for him.
-
Loud noises were, surprisingly, a rare occurrence from Donnie’s lab nowadays; he’d soundproofed it after a long and rather heated discussion between him and a certain elderly rat who’s TV volume could only go so high. It was one of very few times Donnie had agreed to compromise, although those occasions were becoming less occasional nowadays. Raph was proud of him for that, of all his brothers; they were all learning as a group to be more understanding and communicative and be a better team altogether - it made the “big brother” part of his heart warm and ache at the same time. They were all so… adult now.
The lack of loud noises recently had, as a consequence, made every brother in the near vicinity freak the flip out when a rattling explosion rung through their underground base in the early evening hours of 6:15. Leo, who had been attempting to balance various objects on his body as he stood one-legged, was thusly beefed by the giant heavy hardbacks that had been precariously positioned on his head, and Mikey, who had been the one putting them there, tasted shell as the resulting beefed slider keeled sideways on top of him.
Raph, for one, was glad he had been filming it.
“What the heck was that? Thought D was being quieter with his ‘creative genius’ these days.” The slider rubbed his rapidly bruising head, shifting off his little brother’s dazed body with a small thunk.
“Yeah, I mean, he did put in those extra layers of sound-foam-stuff a couple weeks ago. Don’t you remember? He got Raph to shift twenty boxes full of it before he admitted he had a robot that he’d built ‘specially to carry stuff.” Mikey grinned and flashed a peace sign at Raph’s phone camera before Raph could lower it with a huff.
Raph remembered that incident. He had given Donnie the silent treatment for two days, before he had realised that for Donnie, the silent treatment was basically already their daily routine. (If he’d asked Leo to double down on the irritating small talk after that, it was no one’s business but his.) He should probably still say something about the noise now, though.
“You think Donnie’s ok down there? That was a pretty impressive boom.”
“It has been a little while since he’s worked with big explosives,” Leo scratched his neck thoughtfully, “but I wouldn’t worry about the guy too much. He’s got those crazy defence systems in place all over nowadays. It’d be hard to find somewhere around here you could get hurt.”
“Says the guy who just got his face owned by dad’s old sci-fi novels,” Mikey snicked, his grin wide and cheeky.
“That was due to my sick heightened reflexes. If we were in a real crisis situation, I would have totally been the first one to get a hit on the bad guy.”
“You would have been the first one to be hit. By a phonebook.”
“I feel like you’re missing the point.”
“I feel like you’re not making one.”
Raph tuned out his brothers’ lighthearted bickering for a moment, fingers tapping gently on the floor next to him where he had situated himself. If Donnie was working on stuff with explosives that strong, was he making sure he was safe? Raph was, for all the credit he would give his own skills, not the best with ‘tech stuff’, but he knew his brothers as well as anyone could dare to know them. He knew that while Donnie had piled up the security measures in recent months, a certain kind of drive or perhaps paranoia that had led to him seeing his usually reclusive brother around the base more often (usually drilling or sawing holes in walls or asking Raph to stand very still while he measured his exact weight and height for “security data”), Donnie was never really as careful with himself.
Not to say Donnie was famously reckless when it came to his safety in battle - anyone who had seen the kinds of things that battle shell had faced would tell you otherwise. It’s just that, particularly recently, Raph had noticed his brother’s less-than-stellar self care routine getting even more questionable. Meals would be left outside his lab for him and forgotten about, gathering ants and other creepy crawlies to the general area, which Donatello himself would certainly say wasn’t sanitary. He sometimes saw flashing lights from his brother’s lab late into the night, when Raph would get up for a walk around after particularly nasty nightmares, sometimes involving goopy space tentacles, sometimes just involving terrified faces and screeching metal.
He knew his brothers were suffering too, after the Krang, but also after everything before it. Just because the time-travel-horror-space shenanigans came more recently, it didn’t mean any of the other stuff didn’t still linger in their minds. Raph knew it did.
So he was worried about Donnie locking himself away from everyone. But even then, maybe even because of that, he was overwhelmingly, incredibly annoyed at it.
“I wanna go see what he’s doing.”
Mikey and Leo looked up from the ridiculous fighting poses they had devolved into, Mikey’s foot kicking lightly at Leo’s cheek, with the older brother pushing him down by his shell, half sitting on top of him.
“Not sure that’s a great idea, man. You know how… extra he gets about being left alone with this sort of stuff. Especially if that boom meant something’s gone wrong. He’s super intense about no one staring at his dunk projects.” Leo rolled his eyes, hoisting himself off the floor and dusting himself off, particularly fussing over any creases in his sash.
“I dunno man, I could always start on dinner; maybe it would be a good time to go get him anyway. It’ll be a family dinner! Ooo, I could make pizzas with everyone’s favourite toppings! Ok, I’m set on this idea now,” Mikey cracked his knuckles for emphasis, a toothy grin forming, “Leo, you go with Raph to go get him.”
The slider swivelled back around to face his brother.
“What?! Why do I get put on ‘retrieving hermit’ duty?!”
“Because I’ve already created a menu in my mind, and now I can’t risk Donnie not being there. Besides, how could he resist coming out with both of his favourite siblings asking?” Mikey slid close to both of them, eyes sparkling wide. Goddamn. He was bringing out the big guns.
Leo gripped his temple with a flair of his wrist, groaning low and frustrated.
“Firstly, Donnie’s favourite sibling is April - this is well established. Secondly, his favourite brother is you. Thirdly… fine.”
He bit out the final word like a swear, and Raph found himself being pulled by the arm towards the lab, a wide grinning Michelangelo waving them off as he disappeared into the kitchen. Raph felt his hand tight on his bicep as he allowed himself to be dragged all the way across their home, Leo pulling his famous ‘dramatic upset face’.
(And if Raph was grateful for the backup Mikey had provided him when facing a brother somehow more dramatic than Leo, well, once again. That was his business.)
Eventually, they came face to face with Donnie’s thick lab door, recently fortified, with a red blinking light obnoxiously flickering away over the top. Raph remembered what that meant, after Donnie’s extensive presentation and subsequent rant about his new ‘lab lights’ system. Green was enter, orange was ‘working on some stuff’, but Donnie had been very explicit as to what red meant.
Go away.
“I told you he wasn’t exactly gonna be looking for visitors Raph.”
“You give up too easy.”
Raph stepped forward, took a deep, calming breath… and pounded on the door rapidly.
“DONNIE! YOU’D BETTER GET OUT HERE OR- or… oR I’LL MOVE EVERYTHING IN YOUR BEDROOM AROUND!”
No response. Then, after a moment, a robotic voice clearly sampled from Donnie’s own voice recordings rang out.
“Visitor detected. State your business.”
Raph pinched the area where the top of his nose would be.
“For God’s sake Donnie, it’s us. Dinner’s getting ready.”
Another pause.
“Biggest Brother detected. Operation ‘Closed Fortress’ still engaged.”
A large bang ran out as Raph slammed his head into the wall in frustration. Leo paused thoughtfully, before turning to the thick door.
“What if it’s an emergency?”
The light on the door flickered a couple of times.
“Dumbest Brother detected.”
“Hey!”
“What is the nature of the emergency?”
Leo’s eyes widened and Raph suddenly perked up. It had worked?
“Uhhh, uh, um,” Leo waved his hands a couple of times, “the base is on fire!”
“Denied.”
Raph’s eyes bugged out of his head.
“Uhhh… all your stuff has exploded!”
“Denied.”
They both groaned, wilting. They were pretty much already ready to give up and report their mission a failure, when the voice of their youngest brother rang out from across the base.
“Tell him I picked up flavourless juice from the store!”
“Smallest Brother detected. Emergency acknowledged.”
The door vibrated slightly, and then a loud click could be heard.
“Operation ‘Closed Fortress’ aborted.”
…
A short silence once again passed between the two brothers, before-
“How is that an emergency?”
“Why am I the only one with a mean nickname?!”
“What if the base actually had been on fire?”
The two brother took a second to regain their composure, having to calm themselves down. Damn Donnie.
…
The two of them, still muttering between themselves, almost didn’t immediately catch the smell when they pushed open the door dramatically.
Sulphur. Charcoal. Blood.
… blood?
Their brother’s lab was almost completely ruined. Dark streaks of ash and dark smoke dust streaked the wall in a dramatic star-like pattern, encircling and framing the multitude of smouldering papers, broken tools and, right in the centre, what looked to have been some sort of tubular machine with once-smooth metal wheels on the base, left almost completely unidentifiable by the fact that its top half seemed to have completely blown up, shards of its metal casing and interior sliced into both the walls and the floors of the once-pristine laboratory.
It was enough all on its own. But it was not all.
“Oh my god- Donnie?! Don?!”
The dim purple-and-blue lighting of the lab, of the parts that remained intact, were barely enough to silhouette the pool of dark liquid seeping from a particularly large and familiar shape on the floor. Raph was grateful for them in that moment. Before, it could have been another pile of scraps. Now, he knew what it was.
“Oh my god, Jesus, D- Raph! Raph! H-help me pick him up! We have to examine him in, in clearer light!”
Maybe it was better that the lights were dark. He wondered if the true colour would remind him too much of his own headband. He wondered why he wondered that.
“Raph! Raph, come on, now’s not the time to blank out on me, man! I need you to lift him, he’s, he’s too heavy on his own!”
He could barely see the silhouette of his younger brother trying to drag a pile of dead weight behind him, his vision now spotty and uneven. He was still wondering how it got like that as his body moved without him tell it to, gently but firmly picking up the shape. The shape was dripping wet in his arms. His brother was bleeding-
He felt, one again, a hand on his arm, leading him along and out into the only slightly lighter hallway to the rest of the base.
It was all they needed to see him.