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The thing about Donnie’s freak out moments is that they always end up being more trouble than they’re worth. Short term relief swaps itself out for long term awkwardness, and the cycle starts itself all over again.
Condensation- Donnie locks himself in his lab and doesn’t come out.
Precipitation- {INSERT BROTHER HERE} comes in and gets through to him.
Evaporation- Donnie comes out of his lab and everyone treats him weirdly.
Condensation (again, because that’s how a cycle works) - Donnie locks himself in his lab and doesn’t come out.
He doesn’t like the attention his moments of weakness gain him. It’s why sometimes he tries so hard just to be normal- finding strength deep inside of himself when there shouldn’t be any left and then using it all up until the crash comes even harder. If it was more socially acceptable he thinks he’d break down more. But then again, what does he know about being social and being acceptable? He’s a mutated turtle that lives in a sewer with three other mutated turtles, a mutated rat man, and occasionally a girl with a crane licence and a resume eighteen pages long and counting.
He misses April right now, even though he knows it’s of no fault but his own that she’s not here. A closed door to a soundproof lab can only ever really send one message to a person, and it’s not really a very nice one. Donnie mentally adds ‘send April an apology in the form of some kind of shiny tech’ to his list of things he’s going to do once his arms stop being, annoyingly, not arms.
Well, that’s not really scientifically correct. He still has arms. They’re still attached to the rest of his body the way they usually are. There’s no way anybody could look at them and think ‘hey now, those aren’t arms-albeit strange, green arms’. It’s just currently Donnie’s arms are a lot more broken than the rest of the population’s.
That’s what happens when you take a hit from a mech that is fully intent on killing you. You can put a shield between you and your brother but it will never be quite good enough. Something is always going to give- to break.
Honestly, he’s glad it’s just his arms, and not his shell, or his heart, or his entire body.
“So…” Leo- broken entire body- says as they hobble towards the living room together. “What movie you gonna pick?”
Raph- broken shell- calls out something about The Samurai Who Loved Me while Mikey -broken heart- cheers in agreement , but Donnie does have some standards when it comes to Romcoms. He’d rather watch Lou Jutsu’s The Ninja Who Loved Me because there should be some character consistency in this house (sewer).
“Have you eaten yet?” Donnie asks.
“I asked you a question first.”
“I answered it.”
“Not out loud, you didn’t. Doesn’t count if you do it in your head, Dee.”
“Right,” Donnie does that a lot. Ponders things over internally and eventually comes to a conclusion that he then forgets to actually share with the class. “We should watch The Ninja Who Loved Me. Eaten, Leo?”
Leo gives him a look that even Donnie can tell means ‘no, no I didn’t, I forgot again but I don’t want to say that because it’s embarrassing’.
“I’ll go help Raph and Mikey whip something up,” Leo says- offers. “If you set up the movie?”
Donnie nods, and then watches- still and silent- as Leo hobbles away. He hasn’t seen his brother manoeuvre around with his injuries yet because, well-
{Condensation- Donnie locks himself in his lab and doesn’t come out.}
-so he’s taking the time to observe now. Leo seems like each step causes him pain, and he hangs onto the walking frame for dear life like (because) it’s the only thing keeping him up. Donnie aches to invent something that would have Leo zipping around the lair with his usual speed and pizazz, but that’s out of his reach right now. He can barely move his fingers to type, let alone saw and weld and build. Donnie, right now, is failing to function as he should do. He needs a complete system overall, except he can’t do that because he’s tripped a core wire where the reboot should relay.
Leo disappears into the kitchen and Donnie sets off towards the living room. It’s irrational that Leo being out of his sight should suddenly be an upsetting thing, considering Donnie has spent the past week locked in his lab not seeing any of his brothers. He doesn’t get to be sad about things that are of his own choosing.
Just as Donnie’s searching through the DVD cabinet, there’s the loud sound of breaking glass from the kitchen that has his blood freezing in his veins. Suddenly he’s all too aware of just how light his back feels without the comforting- if not sometimes painful- weight of his battle shell. Every nerve in his body is screaming at him to go, get back to his lab, put it back on, hide away, be safe, save yourself. He wants that extra layer of protection against him and the world- except it’s not an extra layer, it’s the only layer.
But…he’d taken it off for Leo. That was the deal they’d made. If Donnie takes off the shell that is ‘ literally altering your centre of gravity’ then Leo will actually talk to him.
He’s not talking because you weren’t there to listen, idiot.
It’s only when Mikey comes storming into the living room that Donnie remembers the broken glass. It had set him off on a whirlwind of thoughts, too far into the race to remember the starting line.
“Everything okay?” he asks carefully, surreptitiously looking Mikey up and down for any new injuries.
“Dropped a glass, it’s not biggie,” Mikey says, except his tone is so far from normal Mikey cadence that it seems like it’s definitely a biggie. His hands are shaking ever so slightly even with the sports tape wrapped around them from wrist to elbow.
“Are your…your arms okay?”
“I dunno,” Mikey flops down into a beanbag and sinks down into it until he’s one with the fabric, more bean than boy. “You tell me.”
“I can’t-” Donnie begins, but then he cuts himself off because that’s exactly the point Mikey’s making, and he doesn’t need Donnie to say it back to him like he’s too dumb to know what he’s saying.
“Sorry,” Mikey says instantly, though Donnie can’t tell if he means it or not. “That’s not fair of me. I know your rituals are important.”
{Condensation- Donnie locks himself in his lab and doesn’t come out}
“You could tell me now,” Donnie says. “If you like.”
Mikey flexes his fingers a little in a motion that he usually does seconds before he starts spray painting the sewer walls or slapping stickers everywhere. “I talked about it with Raph, it’s fine.”
Donnie doesn’t know what to say to that, so he turns back to the DVDs and shuffles through them as best as he can with his own aching fingers. He can feel Mikey’s eyes burning a hole in his shell, and his nerves scream at him again to go get protection, are you stupid, you don’t want to be stupid, stupid people die.
“I can feel you staring,” he says.
“Woah, do you think that’s one of my mystic powers?” Mikey doesn’t actually sound all too happy at the thought.
“I think it’s a common expression,” Donnie says dryly. “Not meant to be taken literally.”
“You can’t say shit ‘bout taking things literally, Dee,” Mikey shoots back. “Remember the time that guy on TV made a joke about how standing on fertiliser would make you grow ten feet tall and you believed it.”
“I was five, Mikey. Five year olds are meant to be gullible.”
“It says gullible on the ceiling.”
“I’d say you’re lying but I wouldn’t put it past you to have painted it up there.”
Somehow, this causes the mood to crash back down. Mikey flexes his fingers once more and then sinks even further into the beanbag. “Don’t know how that’ll go right now,” he says, trying for lightness but Donnie can hear the sadness in his voice the same way he could feel his eyes on his shell.
“Are your-um-arms still bothering you?” Donnie tries again. If at first you don’t succeed, adjust your hypothesis and start over.
“Yup,” Mikey pops the p obnoxiously. “Haven’t stopped, if I’m being honest.”
He’s speaking so casually and yet his voice is still so not-Mikey, that Donnie finally takes his attention off the DVDS to fully dedicate it to his brother. He’s trying to pull off a ‘don’t bull-shit me’ look but he’s been assured in the past that it’s too similar to his ‘normal’ look and so he’s not sure if Mikey is actually going to catch on.
Mikey, to his credit, stares right back at Donnie. He stares for long enough that Donnie eventually has to give in and look away.
Something is always going to give…
“Why are you looking at me?” Donnie asks. Direct and straight to the point because he really doesn’t have it in him to beat around the bush and dress everything up in vague metaphors.
“Gotta look somewhere, don’t I?” Mikey says. This has a bit more of his usual warmth in it, and it makes Donnie feel a little warmer as well. He’s long thought of his emotions like the effect different temperatures have on an ecosystem- it’s outside forces that see it changing, rather than an internal affair. Mikey is the sun to his terrarium.
Donnie is the environment, but he is also the rain, the water, the cycle.
{Precipitation- (INSERT BROTHER HERE) comes in and gets through to him.}
“Is it because you haven’t seen me for a week?” Donnie presses. It seems like the most obvious reason, albeit perhaps one too common for Mikey’s trains of thought. If Donnie has a timetable and a system that sees his carriages leaving on time as best they can, Mikey has a full system of chaos that leaves early and arrives late and shows up all at once, or not even at all.
So Donnie’s not in the mood for speaking in metaphors, but his brain is fully eager to think in them.
Mikey opens his mouth to talk, seems to consider it for a moment, and then shuts it again. There’s a familiar look of frustration mixed with despair on his face- the same one he’d worn when he’d tired time and time again to get his mystic powers to work, only to fail time and time again.
Except, of course, for the last time.
Donnie carefully looks at Mikey’s arms again.
“Now who’s staring,” Mikey says. Donnie blinks and accepts the charge- guilty, sentenced to awkward conversations.
“I just wanna know why,” he says. A reason is good, a reason is a basis for a fix.
“Oh I dunno, Dee, maybe it’s because the last time I saw you properly you kept jumping in front of me to take hits that should have freaking killed you, because apparently you thought your life meant less then mine?”
“What?”
Donnie’s brain scrambles to take stock of every part of the sentence, and then work out what to address first.
“Hang on, no seriously, what? I do not think my life is worth less than yours?”
“So you think it’s worth more?”
“Not what I said at all, Mikey.”
“Then why keep doing it?” Mikey is frustrated now, waving his arms around like he’s about to open another portal (stupid, do not do that) and send Donnie to like, Antarctica or something so he can cool off. “Didn’t you even stop to think that it might kill you? Or were you not even thinking at all?”
“I was thinking,” Donnie bites out, “that since I have all this fancy tech built specifically for protection, that it would be a good fucking idea to go ahead and use it to stop my brother from getting killed right in front of me, because otherwise that would haunt me for the rest of my life and I would never get over it, because I can be normal in some regards, Michael, especially when it comes to the people I love. ”
The words seem to echo through the lair, when in reality they’ve probably barely reached outside the walls of the living room. Mikey stares at Donnie, and Donnie stares at Mikey. Between the two of them they’re sporting a pharmacy worth of bandages and tape to help heal their hospital worth of injuries. The two youngest of the four, separated only by a pile of old Lou Jutsu and Jupiter Jim DVDs. The gap could be broken in an instant, except neither moves.
They just…stare.
{Condensation?}
The silence becomes too long- too drawn out. Donnie isn’t sure if Mikey is doing it on purpose, because all his brothers know that if you stay quiet around Donnie for too long then he’ll eventually start talking just to fill it all up.
“It’s like this,” Donnie says. It’s not a trap if he enters it willingly, right? “Bad guys aim a laser at us. One hit from it will kill any of us. Except me, because I have the battle shell. I can take the first hit. So what’s better? One of you gets hit and instantly dies. Or I get hit and lose the shell. Okay, now I’m exposed, but we’ve all survived the first hit, and now there’s a chance we can stop the second one from happening. It makes sense. I can be the wall that keeps the elements out.”
“That’s not right though,” Mikey says. He’s slowly emerged from the bean bag over the course of the conversation and now he’s sitting up enough to be on Donnie’s level. “Because we can take those hits. I could’ve taken them, Donnie, and then maybe-maybe things would have been different. One of us could have been there with Leo, instead of letting him get stuck there a-a-alone. If you’d just let-”
“Let that kraang hit you? Right, because that would have been the proper thing to do.”
“Maybe!”
“I’m not letting that happen, Mikey.”
“So what,” Mikey pushes himself forward and right up into Donnie’s space. The DVDs in their precarious pile don’t stand a chance. One of them tips and clatters to the floor. Donnie looks down and sees that it’s The Ninja Who Loved Me. The one he’d been looking for the whole time, right in front of his eyes. “I never get to do anything for you guys except get in your way?”
“That’s not true-”
“Maybe you don’t think it is, but thinking something doesn’t make it real, Dee. You can say ‘oh I don’t think I baby Mikey’ but you still put yourself in danger just so I won’t get hurt.”
“I would have done it for any of you !”
“Donnie-”
“You’re not special like that, Mikey, I’m not-argh-I’m not picking and choosing out of you guys, I’m not. I have to be there to protect you, I want to be there. It’s not-you don’t-I couldn’t get there in time for anyone else. Because I’m weak. But I got there for you. I was able to help you. And I, god, I really thought that meant something. Can’t I-did you not want…did you want to get hit so hard you died?”
“No!” Mikey yells it. Then, quieter, “no…but I didn’t want it to happen to you either. I don’t think I’m being selfish thinking that, right?”
“Or maybe we’re both selfish,” Donnie says.
“Maybe.”
“Don’t know if there’s a fix for that.”
“Nah, probs not.”
Donnie sighs, and reaches out for the DVD. Mikey gets there first though- pulling a face at the cover.
“I thought we agreed on The Samurai Who Loved Me,” he says in mock disgust.
“I made no such agreements,” Donnie tries to snatch the DVD back but his arms seize up at the abrupt movement, that admittedly, is a movement Donnie knew wouldn’t work before he’d even made it.
“How are your arms?” Mikey asks with mock innocence. Little shit loves turning the tables on his older brothers. Thinks it’s poetic.
“Getting there,” Donnie says. He could go into details (and he wants to, because details are important) but then he runs the risk of making Mikey look sad and angry ( smad, Donnie, call it smad ) again, so he’ll have to settle for vague descriptions just this once. “Back to normal soon, I expect. Just like yours will be.”
“Sure,” Mikey says.
Donnie waits a moment, watching as Mikey turns the DVD case over and over between his fingers. It’s a simple, repetitive movement that Mikey manages with ease. It’s clear that he’s not even aware he’s doing it.
“I don’t regret it,” Donnie says.
Mikey blinks at him. “Regret what? Picking this movie? Cause dude, you should.”
“Putting myself between you and the hits,” Donnie says. Mikey opens his mouth to probably (definitely) protest so Donnie rushes on. “And I never will. Could have killed me and I wouldn’t have regretted it. And you don’t have to like that. I think there’s even a part of me that doesn’t like it. But that’s it. It’s out there, and I can’t change it. So…I think we have to live with it.”
“At least you said live,” Mikey huffs. His blinking has picked up the pace now which means he’s trying not to cry. Great. Donnie made Mikey cry. If hell existed, he’d be destined for it ten times over now.
“Don’t you get it, Mikey?” Donnie asks, because he wants Mikey to get this.
“Apparently not, since I’m too dumb and stupid.”
“You’re not stupid. Well, maybe compared to me, but everyone’s stupid compared to me and-”
“-kinda making it hard to take the first part of that sentence seriously, Dee-”
“-and that’s not the point!”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s this,” Donnie says. “It’s…Mikey, if you don’t want us to take the hits, then who does? You? Isn’t that just you doing the same thing? Taking hits instead of us.”
“Donnie…”
“We’re brothers,” Donnie says, and he means those two words more than he’s ever meant any other word before. He knows that when they were young, he was the one who insisted on DNA testing and identifying what species they were, leading to a tense period of time where he went around waving his results and declaring them unable to be siblings. He also knows that was one of the stupidest things he’d ever done. They’re brothers, end of story.
End of that story, at least, because this one is still going. It twists and turns and sometimes gets a bit boring in the middle, but it’s one Donnie doesn’t want to reach the end of ever.
“Brothers do stuff like this for each other,” he says. “It’s like, textbook brother behaviour.”
“You and your textbooks,” Mikey sniffs. “You know that-”
“And obviously it’s better if we don’t get the shit kicked out of us at all, but we’re the ones who chose to be vigilante ninjas, so that’s kind of on us.” Donnie finishes in a tumble of words. He’s quickly grown uncomfortable with how sentimental the conversation has gotten, and it’s his second one of the day which is making it way worse. It settles under his skin- the uncomfortableness. It makes him wish he could take every word he said and stuff it back inside him.
{Evaporation- Donnie comes out of his lab and everyone treats him weirdly- including himself }
“Just, pretend I didn’t say any of that,” he says, squeezing his eyes shut so he doesn’t have to try to interpret any of Mikey’s facial expressions. “It’s stupid. Whatever, I’ll leave the talking to Leo.”
“Yeah, and pigs will fly,” Mikey says with a snort.
“Flying pigs are the example you’re going with for unattainable? In case you haven’t noticed, we’re mutated turtles. We know a pig who could probably fly, if he absorbed the right energy.”
“Yeah, yeah, I said a big dumb thing, whatever,” this time, Mikey definitely sounds like he’s joking. How spoiled Donnie is to have spent his entire life around his brothers to the point that even he can tell how they’re feeling just by the cadence of their voice. “You said a whole buncha dumb things just then.”
“Hey, I-”
“But I liked ‘em,” Mikey says, and with four simple words he takes the uncomfortableness out from under Donnie’s skin and helps it to cease to exist. “Even if I am still a bit angry. I’m allowed ta be, I think. I bet you’re still angry at Leo.”
“Oh, I’m fuming,” Donnie agrees mildly. He’s working on it though. They both are. Leo will come talk to him, when he’s ready, and Donnie is content enough to wait.
“Yup,” Mikey says. “Guess that’s what love’s like, huh?”
Donnie can’t do anything but nod, because Mikey has indeed hit the proverbial nail on its proverbial head. They’re angry at each other for putting themselves in danger, because they love each other and that means they don’t want to see each other in danger.
(It’s another one of those cycles)
“And,” Mikey says. “Love is also like, about doing nice things. Good brother things. Like maybe picking a different-”
“We’re watching The Ninja Who Loved Me and that’s final.”
“Aw, Donnie!”
Mikey starts listing off a bunch of reasons that, in his belief, make The Samurai Who Loved Me the superior Lou Jutsu romcom, and Donnie sits back on his legs to listen with a tiny grin. In due time, Raph and Leo will join them with food, and then hopefully April and Casey will come over too, and together they’ll all be able to eat and throw popcorn at the TV, and get yelled at by Pops for being too loud. Then things will really start to feel like they’re back to normal- or perhaps just the closest they can get it to be. That’s fine. Normal is overrated. Change is a permanent force, and how you choose to adapt defines how you get to live your life.
The cycle goes like this.
Condensation- Donnie locks himself in his lab and doesn’t come out.
Precipitation- Raph, Leo and Mikey come in and get through to him.
Evaporation- Donnie comes out of his lab and everyone loves him.
He loves them back.