Work Text:
It starts- as most things do- on a Monday.
It is 11:10 AM and Donnie is a third of a way through his half hour break at work. It’s a routine he has- that whenever he starts work at 7:45 AM (the opening shift) and he’s not working a double, then he has his break at 11 on the dot, no earlier and no later. Of course, saying something doesn’t mean it always works this way. His co-workers have a funny way of deciding they should go to the bathroom or just straight up vanish right before he’s due to clock off, meaning Donnie gets stuck waiting for them to come back. It’s never for more than a few minutes but it’s a delay Donnie doesn’t like. He relies on structure to get himself through his gruelling hospitality job, and deviations shake him to his core, even if he refuses to let anyone else see it.
Today is good, he thinks, because he has clocked off at 11 AM sharp and he will clock back on at exactly 11:30 AM sharp, getting up from the table he always sits at just a minute before, so he has time to put his bag and laptop away- even if his co-workers always tell him to sign back on and then pack up, rather than use his allotted break time for it. Admittedly, Donnie has tried to do it that way, but it never sits right with him- and when things don’t sit right with him they make everything feel out of place until it’s too much and he returns to his allotted norm.
He's enjoying work so far. This isn’t Donnie can admit to much considering it’s hospitality and hospitality straight up sucks. He’d rather not be here at all, but he’ll take the good days when he can. They make things slightly more bearable- alleviating soul crushing agony to a manageable intense pain.
“Donnie,” a manager Donnie has always liked slides in across from him at the table. This is immediate cause for concern, because the manager makes a point not to bother people on their breaks unless something is really, awfully wrong. That, or he wants to tell a bad joke or ask if Donnie’s seen a new TV show.
“Yes?” he says, pushing his left-over noodles (last night’s dinner) aside. Food never tastes good reheated, and it tastes even worse reheated in the crappy microwave they have, but this is a problem Donnie cannot afford to dwell on, lest it mean he never eat at all.
“You okay?” the manager asks.
“Yeah,” Donnie says, because as far he’s aware, he is.
“You sure?”
This gives Donnie reason to pause and take stock. People are always doing this- asking him if he’s okay when he’s pretty sure he is, making him feel like they know something about him that he himself does not. Sometimes they’re right, but this isn’t one of those times.
“Yeah,” he says again. He thinks for a second, wondering what exactly it is the manager wants to hear. “Maybe a bit tired.”
“Well, it’s just that I got a complaint about you,” the manager says, and the floor drops out from underneath Donnie.
This is…this is not good. This is in fact, quite bad. Donnie hates this job- hates it like people hate the plague and long waits in line and taxes. But Donnie also needs this job- needs it like people need oxygen and food and water. His family is not well off. In fact, they are actually quite poor. They rely on this income and Donnie can’t afford to lose this.
“Hey, it’s okay,” the manager says before Donnie can spiral any further. “He just said that he felt really unwelcome in the restaurant by you, but I told him you’re a great worker, and that I’d check to see if you’re okay because it’s totally not normal.”
These are meant to be reassuring words, but Donnie can feel tears of injustice prickling at his eyes.
“Did he…did he say what I did?”
“Just that you were really glaring at him when you came in and when he came up to order, that you said you’d be with him in a moment?”
In other words, Donnie had just been Donnie.
And that’s a problem.
“I, I’m sorry that happened but I promise that’s not what I was doing at all.”
“Just zoning out, huh?” the manager laughs. Like this is a time for laughing?
“Maybe,” Donnie says.
“Well, I told him sorry and that coffees on us next time. Enjoy the rest of your break.”
The manager leaves and Donnie hunches over his noodles and tries not to cry, because that’s not something he wants to do, right now or ever. His throat burns and he can already feel the anger and the frustration building. This man is getting free coffee because he happened to walk through Donnie’s line of sight while he was zoned out, thinking about what project he should work on next and if they’d have enough rent for the week. The man saw Donnie’s dull eyes and heard his flat voice and thought, ‘no, this is not good enough’.
But that’s who Donnie is as a person. He’s not inclined to talk to people with great enthusiasm and most of the time, his voice has a tendency to drop into something level and expressionless. His customer service persona is just that. A persona. It takes everything Donnie has to sound engaging and cheery just so people won’t be pissed off at him. And now, even when he’s off in his own world, people march into it and decided it’s not something they should have to put up with- as if it’s not their fault they let themselves in.
There’s a biting sort of pain grabbing at his heart. Donnie is supposed to have stopped thinking of himself like he’s a machine- something to be shut down and scrapped the moment something goes wrong. He thinks of himself this way despite that. He wants to be turned off. He wants to cease to function, to exist.
His entire body has shifted too far to the left and it’s shaking now from the strangeness of it all. There are too many feelings inside him that he wants to get out right now. He’s at work and it’s 11:14 AM. He has sixteen minutes left on his break. He has half a bowl of noodles still to eat. He is expected to go back to work like everything is normal and the day is fine and he hasn’t just been pushed into taking a good long look at himself and realising he still doesn’t like what he sees, even after all this time.
Donnie spends the rest of the day in a bad mood. He can’t stop thinking about how who he is fundamentally as a person is enough to make a man feel unwelcome. Donnie has to reach deep inside himself to find even the barest scrapings of forced enthusiasm that he can use anytime he has to talk to a customer. Heaven forbid his voice dips an octave from below the crystal clear cheer he puts on for strangers who hold his job in the palm of their hands and don’t even care. His brothers think his customer service voice is funny. They laugh about how he can’t drop out of it at all during work even if it’s them he’s serving on the rare chances they come in. Donnie wants to laugh about it too except he has nothing left in him to do so. He’s used everything he has, and more. There’s nothing left of his energy and yet he still has to get more from somewhere.
“Must be that time of the month,” an especially brutal co-worker says- the boss’ nephew. He’s managed to clock and not clock Donnie at the same time. It’s a particular brand of bigoted that Donnie is forced to endure thanks to some good old-fashioned nepotism.
Donnie says nothing in reply, where usually he would snark right back. There is nothing left he can say to anybody. He’s using it all up for the customers and for the sake of his job.
The manager is quiet too, watching Donnie like he can tell the mood has shifted. Donnie thinks about self-fulfilling prophecies, and puts in even more effort he doesn’t have to appear normal. It’s strange to think he really did think today was going fine, and now suddenly it’s not, all because someone thought he wasn’t fine.
The average house fly lives for two weeks- the cap off a bottle of juice he’s fetching for a customer proclaims cheerily.
Lucky fly, Donnie thinks.
“Heyyyyyyyyyyy Dee,” Mikey slides his way into Donnie’s personal bubble slowly and carefully, like he’s waiting for Donnie to tell him no. It’s a dance they’ve danced since childhood, when it had become more and more obvious that Donnie was touch adverse ninety percent of the time and too stubborn to say when he wasn’t the other ten percent. Mikey was the first to get used to the idea and even now he never forgets to approach hesitantly and wait to see what Donnie is able to handle.
He's been hovering since Donnie got home from work two hours ago, even though Donnie had gone straight to his room and shut the door in a pretty clear ‘leave me alone’ way. Mikey had respected this but Donnie had practically felt him staring through the door and eventually pushed it open as a subtle invitation to come in. Mikey had bounded in immediately with a wide grin on his face, and how they’re here, slowing everything down in the same old waltz from childhood.
“You’ve been pretty quiet since you got back from work. Whatcha thinking about?”
Donnie shifts to let Mikey get a little closer. He’s not up for a hug but he thinks he’ll be okay with close proximity. “Self-fulfilling prophecies.”
“Cool, cool…what’re those?”
“Well,” Donnie says. “If you Google it, it gets defined as ‘the phenomenon whereby a person's or a group's expectation for the behaviour of another person or group serves actually to bring about the prophesied or expected behaviour.’ Yes, before you ask, that’s the direct quote. I memorised it.”
“In Mikey speak?”
“Someone thinks you’re going to make a mistake, and then you end up doing it because they thought you would. Only it wouldn’t have happened if they didn’t.”
Mikey swings his legs a little and sneaks a look at Donnie, no subtler than a flying brick. “So…you made a mistake today?”
“Nothing like that,” Donnie says. It’s not a mistake if it’s who you are as a person, right? Just an awful, awful flaw. “It was an example. Just…well, it doesn’t matter now.”
It’s in the past- should Donnie let it be. Only he’s still yet to stop thinking about it.
“It matters if it’s upsetting you,” Mikey says sincerely. He’s disgustingly kind like that. Donnie has always envied the easy way Mikey relates to people, even as Mikey assures him time and time again that there’s nothing wrong with the way Donnie goes through life. Mikey always says it’s about parallels and contrasts and other art terms that Donnie wishes he understood more. “Come on, tell me.”
Donnie doesn’t have the energy to talk, but he also doesn’t have the energy to not talk. He exists as a conundrum of conflicting ideas that mean he can never be truly settled.
“Please, Don?”
“Do you ever think you’re okay until someone asks if you are and you realise you’re not?”
“Are you okay?” Mikey asks instantly.
“No,” Donnie says truthfully. Then he gets up and walks away before Mikey can say anything else.
“How can you stand it?” Donnie asks Raph that night as they do the dishes together- Raph washing and Donnie supposedly drying. Donnie never washes the dishes, can’t stand the feeling of wet food sliding between his fingers, but he doesn’t mind the drying part. He’s better at it then Mikey who always drops stuff, and Leo who gets distracted and leaves wet cups in weird places.
“Stand what?” Raph asks.
“The constant anger,” Donnie says.
“Hey now,” Raph stabs at a plate with a scrubbing brush. “I’m not angry all the time.”
“Just most of the time.”
“Whatever, smart guy.”
Donnie wants to preen at the nick name, but he stays quiet, aimlessly wiping a long-dry bowel with the bedraggled tea towel. It makes him think of wiping cutlery at work and then the anger hits again and he has to put the bowel down before he gives in to the urge to throw it against the wall.
“I’m serious, Raph,” he says. “What do you do about it?”
Raph sighs and lets the plate slip into the water. “I dunno, Donnie, I just do. It’s not like I wanna go around punching things and hitting people. I’m just…” he trails off and picks the plate back up.
“You’re what?” Donnie presses.
“I’m not angry,” Raph says. “Not really. It’s other things. Then those other things make me angry.”
“That’s literally how anger works.”
“You’re not getting it.”
“Then tell me,” Donnie all but begs. “So then I can. Because-”
“Because?”
Donnie thinks about the anger that overtook him at work. He thinks about how it boiled his blood and made him want to take every cup from the top of the coffee machine and smash them on the ground one by one. He thinks about wanting to leap the counter and drive his fist into the next customer who so much as implied he didn’t sound nice and kind and welcoming.
“So then I can stop it,” he says.
“Dee? You good?”
He never gets answers from his brothers when he talks about this stuff. Just questions about his well-being. If they actually told him what he wanted to hear then maybe he could give them the same in return.
“I wanted to do that today,” he says, because Raph is now full on ignoring the dishes and looking at Donnie with the kind of big brotherly concern that makes Donnie want to dissolve in acid from the awkwardness of it all. Donnie keeps his eyes on his hands, briefly transfixed by the tiny scars on the backs of his fingers that he keeps getting from work. “I wanted to punch things and hit people.”
“It’s okay if you felt like that,” Raph says instantly. “Just as long as you didn’t actually do it,” he pauses. “Did you do it?”
“No, of course not,” Donnie bristles. “I just let it…whatever.”
Let it sit inside me and eat me alive.
“Okay,” Raph says. He’s got his thinking face on. Donnie’s really considering that acid bath right about now. He never should have brought this up but he’s still angry and sad and thinking about it all, and Raph has always been happy to talk about these things in his own Raph way. “Do you know where the anger came from?”
From being an unwelcoming dick, apparently.
“Forget it,” Donnie says. “It doesn’t matter. Forget I said anything.”
He leaves the room and the dishes and Raph.
Donnie works to the loud blaring of music he doesn’t like to keep himself awake. He has a day off tomorrow which means he can stay up as late as he wants and there’s a whole list of things he wants to get done before he has to give himself back to his job. He’d be a lot further through the list if not for-
“So,” Leo’s voice is one of the few things that somehow always manages to sneak through whatever headphones Donnie is wearing and permeate through whatever he’s listening to. “Heard you’ve been acting weirder than usual.”
“Go away ‘Nardo,” Donnie says immediately. Or at least he thinks he says it. He can’t actually hear himself over the music.
“No can do,” Leo saunters further into the room. He’s never been good at not getting into Donnie’s space. It used to annoy Donnie but now he knows it’s because Leo can’t stand to be alone. It makes him too antsy and then that energy builds into stupid decisions that nearly always end in cuts and bruises and on one memorable occasion- a broken wrist. Donnie is more than willing to let Leo come bother him if it means he doesn’t have to hear Leo actually cry in real, true pain.
Maybe not just now though. Not when Donnie still isn’t settled and he still can’t stop thinking about a customer actually complained about him because Donnie has dull eyes and a flat voice and isn’t doing cartwheels at the mere thought of serving a customer.
Leo gets up in Donnie’s space while he’s being angry again and tugs the headphones down. The silence that greets him sets Donnie’s teeth on edge and he fights against Leo to pull them back up.
“Stop it-”
“You stop it-”
“Get your stupid-”
“You wanna go deaf-”
“Maybe, if it meant I didn’t have to hear you-”
“Sticks and stones may break my bones but words-”
“Literally shut up and die-”
“Literally?”
Their words overlap and sentences don’t end in the right places and yet it’s a conversation of sorts, the kind Leo claims comes from being twins and the kind Donnie knows is just from prolonged exposure to each other.
He gives in eventually, because Leo always wins when Donnie is like this- empty and scraped out. He still hasn’t got anything back in his tank from what he gave today. He took too much. He’s overdrawn his credit card. Bill pending, it’s only going to get worse from here.
“Hey, ‘Nardo?” he says, once Leo’s quietened down as well and his rocking back and forth on the spare wheely chair Donnie only keeps because he knows it’s his twin’s favourite. “Am I unwelcoming?”
“Oh, literally all the time,” Leo says instantly. “You never let me come into your room and it’s always ‘go away Leo’ and ‘I’m busy Leo’ and ‘shut the door behind you Leo or I’ll stab you with a chopstick and make it look like an accident Leo’ aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand that’s not the answer you’re looking for, is it?”
“It’s the truth, isn’t it?” Donnie sniffs. “That’s the answer I’m looking for.”
“Not if it’s gonna make you cry,” Leo says.
Donnie shoots him the finger. “Fuck off, I’m not crying.”
“I can see tears.”
“I stopped blinking and now they’re dry.”
“Why’d you stop blinking?”
“Oh my god, fuck off Leo.”
“No, I’m not going to,” Leo says seriously, switching the tone of the conversation in a split second. “You’re obviously upset and I’m not going to leave you when you’re like this.”
Donnie digs his finger nails into his palms hard enough that it should draw blood, only his parms are rough and calloused and he’s not strong enough to apply the pressure needed to bleed. His body is on fire with anger and uncomfortableness and if it doesn’t get out of him right now he might explode with it all.
There’s a huge poster on his wall of the periodic table that April got him for his birthday last year. It’s glossy and colourful and it is now the subject of Donnie’s rage. He’s lunging at it before he knows he’s even doing it and tears it free.
“Hey, Donnie!” Leo’s cry is lost in the sound of the poster ripping as Donnie tears it apart. Once down the middle, and then each half again, and he wants to go for a third time but then there are arms around him and he’s pulled away from the mess. “Donnie, Donnie, stop it!”
“I need to break it!” he yells and fights even as the arms hold him tighter.
“You don’t, I promise!”
“Let me go!”
“NO!”
The hands clutch at him and Donnie’s vision wavers and he’s seeing the customer at work walk in, only he’s not seeing it because Donnie’s mind is miles away and he’s not even thinking about the prospective interaction he’s going to have, he’s thinking about projects and assignments and rent and
UNWELCOMING
FLAT
DULL
NEVER BEEN MORE UNWELCOME
COMPLAINT
ARE YOU OKAY?
NO!
NO.
No.
“I can’t do it anymore,” Donnie whispers. He slumps in Leo’s arms and stares blankly (flatly, dully) down at the remains of the poster April had painstakingly picked out for him.
“Then don’t,” Leo says. His breath rasps in his chest. He’s exhausted because Donnie lost control and would have destroyed it all, if only Leo hadn’t held him.
“Stupid,” Donnie rasps. “You don’t even know what it is I can’t do.”
“It’s obviously hurting you, so I don’t want whatever it is in your life.”
“And if it’s me?”
“Huh?”
“If I’m the thing? It’s all me, Leo. Everything that’s wrong. It always ends up being me.”
“I thought we were past this whole, thinking you're defective technology thing,” Leo says. He still sounds tired, and Donnie hates, hates, hates himself because it’s his fault.
“We’re trying to be,” he says instead. “Trying’s different then actually being.”
“I know that.”
“Do you?”
They stand in silence for a moment. Slowly, exhaustion takes Donnie and he has to sit back down in his chair. Leo mimics his movements and then end up sitting across from each other, like the manager had sat across from Donnie just this morning.
“What happened, Dee?” Leo asks. “Why are you suddenly obsessed with self-fulfilling prophecies and anger issues and breaking things?”
Donnie looks at his hands and the tiny scars, and then he looks up and he tells Leo. He says it all with a flat voice and dull eyes because that’s how it is when he talks sometimes- it’s just who he is.
When he finishes, it’s Leo’s turn to stand in a rage. “That’s bullshit! Like you-you-urgh, I can’t believe this jerk! You give your entire being to this job and he thinks he can just make a stupid complaint like that because he misinterpreted your behaviour. That’s such a dick move. I bet he’s not even thinking about being ‘unwelcomed’ now but you’re still thinking about it. That’s so, ARGH!”
“Leo, it’s…” Donnie stops himself before he can say it’s fine, because it very clearly isn’t. He’s not going to say it for Leo’s benefit. Donnie’s not fine and he’s not sure he can remember what fine feels like because that’s what it’s like to be Donatello. He can’t remember good times when he’s in the bad times, and he can’t picture being happy again because he isn’t right now. It’s that stupidly simple.
“Donnie, you can’t think this is true,” Leo says, getting right up into Donnie’s face. “You seriously can’t. I know you’re probably stuck on this, but it isn’t. Nobody thinks this has anything to do with you. Not the manager and not me and not Mikey or Raph. It’s just this guy being self-absorbed and he’s going to make nobody but himself miserable. You can’t let him get to you like that.”
“Really?” Donnie says. “Am I meant to be stronger than that?”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“Then what are you saying?”
“That he’s a dick and he’s not worth your time!”
“And yet here he is, living rent free in my head,” Donnie says dryly. “Really, it feels like I’m actually the one having to pay for shit.”
Pay with his energy and his core and his essence. An entire week of customer service persona used up in a day.
“Next time he comes in I’ll be there,” Leo says. He slaps his fist into his palm in what is meant to be a threatening move copied from their father’s old martial arts days, except Leo is kinda twiggy and it just looks like it hurts him to do it in the first place.
“That’ll really get me fired for sure,” Donnie says. “It’s a miracle I have this job. Don’t ruin it for me.”
“Donnie,” Leo says, back to serious on the flip of a dime. “You give so much to that job. Too much, if you’re asking me, which I know you’re not. You hate it and you still work so hard, because that’s who you are. So what if this dude thought something, that by the way, isn’t even true. He’s just one guy and everyone who matters knows it’s bullshit. He doesn’t matter.”
“He is right though,” Donnie says. “I am flat and I do look blank and I don’t sound approachable.”
“People shouldn’t base their own feelings off how you sound sometimes. That’s dumb.”
“I-”
“Anything you say, I’m gonna have an argument for,” Leo says. “So might as well give up now.”
Donnie reaches inside himself for something else to say, before remembering he’s empty now. Well and truly empty. Nothing left…but that’s okay. It just means he’s got space to fill it all up again.
He looks down at the poster. April will be angry if she sees it. He needs to fix it. Not right now though. Right now is for…
Well, he doesn’t know what it’s for.
“We got you,” Leo says. “We can fix this, yeah?”
Donnie nods.
It ends- like things rarely do- on a Monday. The same Monday it started on, in fact.
Donnie watches from his bed as Mikey tapes up the poster with careful, precise hands. He’s got his weighted blanket draped over his shoulder and Leo has made him a tea just the way he likes it- strong with just a dash of milk and no sugar. Raph is leaning against a wall with his knitting, and everything is quiet in a good way.
There is something under Donnie’s skin that shouldn’t be there. If he starts to think about what happened for too long then it grows and shifts and starts to consume him. When he starts to think about what happened, his brothers are there to distract him.
Donnie is different, and he knows this. He is comfortable in this most of the time. On bad days, he isn’t. Today is a bad day, but it’s the kind of bad day that never lasts. He just has to ride it out.
It feels silly to have gotten so worked up about this, only he also knows it isn’t, because this customer looked at things that are just part of Donnie on a basic level and thought they were so horrible that he had to make a complaint. It makes Donnie angry. So angry that he destroyed something he loved.
The anger isn’t worth the result. The anger comes from other emotions. From sadness and from fear. That’s what Raph had been trying to say.
He gets it now.
He can’t solve this right now. It’s not something to be solved. It’s just a problem and it’s upsetting him, and he has to live with it for however long it lingers.
“You okay?” asks his manager.
Absolutely not, Donnie thinks. Self-fulfilling prophecy.
But I will be, Donnie thinks. Self-fulfilling prophecy.