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Donatello never believed in hell, until he woke up there.
This has to be hell. He’s spent the past few millennia in a self-made purgatory, a prison constructed from his own hubris, and during that time he has only managed to damn himself further. If he’s finally been allowed to die and yet remains aware, then he must be in hell. There’s no other option.
The circumstances of his awareness support his conclusion. A perfect black expanse unfurls infinitely on every side, quiet and still, like a universe-sized sensory deprivation chamber. There’s nothing else in existence to distract from his mistakes. But worse than that: he has a body.
He hasn’t had a body in… well, in quite some time. Proportionally, in human terms, he spent the first few months of infancy in a conventional physical form, then abandoned it for the next 80-odd years. He can’t say it’s worse than he remembers, because he doesn’t remember it. But yeah, it’s pretty terrible.
There’s saliva in his mouth that he has to swallow periodically, and every time he does, an odd click sounds in his ear canals. The skin on his fingers is dry where they rub against each other. He keeps forgetting to blink.
He doesn’t know the rules of this place. Will it get worse? Will he grow hungry? Tired? Can he hurt? This is hell, so probably.
Nothing is happening, yet. Is it going to? Or is this it? He doesn’t remember all the steps to move a body like this one, but if nothing else is going to happen, then he probably doesn’t need to. For now, he lies still and waits.
Some time passes. It’s impossible to say how much.
Then, there’s sound.
Soft footsteps pad across the indefinable surface of the landscape. They’re quiet at first, then somewhat less so as they grow closer. The darkness doesn’t change; he can’t see what’s coming. But they must see him.
The footsteps stop and there’s a shuffling and a light thump as something sits down invisibly beside him. He considers trying to move away, but really, what’s the point? He only stiffens at the touch of something — a hand? — against his shoulder.
“Hey Dondon, c’mon. Time to get up.”
His breath freezes at the sound. What is that, who is that? It’s so desperately familiar. He wants them to speak again. He keeps his breath held as he waits for it, unwilling to spoil the voice with any other sound.
“Na, Donnie, keep breathing. You gotta — well, you don’t gotta, I guess, but it’s still better if you do.”
The voice wants him to breathe. He breathes.
“There you go, see? Calming, right? That’s why you should always listen to Leo.”
Leo.
Of course, of course; he hasn’t heard his brother’s voice in thousands of years but he could never truly forget it. Leo, here.
Why can’t he see him? The question distracts him for a moment before he realizes his eyes are closed. The black of this space and the black of his eyelids look exactly the same. He opens his eyes and sees his twin brother.
Leo has the same bright eyes, the same red markings, the same blue shell that he remembers. But there’s so much more that he forgot: the bony jut of his knee, the crooked line of his smile, the scar on the underside of his chin. Leo is missing an arm. Did he know that? He thinks he did, yes. He thinks maybe he made Leo a new one. Where is it now?
Leo is grinning down at him, unconcerned by the missing piece. “Hey, there he is! Good to see ya, bud.”
He gazes up at his brother and tries to remember how to speak. He has so many questions, a hundred, a thousand of them. He wants to ask where they are, and how, and why, because if Leo is here, it can’t be hell after all. And he needs to say he’s sorry, god, he’s so, so sorry.
His mouth opens — yes, that was step one, he remembers — but nothing else happens.
Before frustration can overwhelm him, Leo shakes his head, still smiling warmly. “It’s cool, Donnie, just give it a minute. It’ll come back.” Leo’s remaining hand takes hold of a limp wrist and brings it up, stretching and bending the arm at the joints. It helps, jumpstarting long forgotten pathways in his brain, patterns that align with movements. “That’s why you’re out here right now, in between. Makes the transition easier. Everyone else is waiting further on; we’re just the welcoming party.”
He — Donnie — still can’t speak, but Leo seems to read the question on his face: ‘We?’
Leo winks, then turns his head to call over his shoulder. “Alright, you guys can come on over, now. I think he’s ready for you.”
More footsteps, more shuffling, and two more miracles fall into view.
“Hey, little brother. Long time no see.”
“Missed you, Dee!”
Sound comes out this time, when he tries, but it’s a garbled mess. Mikey takes the hint anyway, and grabs his other hand. He tries to hold on in return and is thrilled when his fingers compress in a weak squeeze. Raph settles by his legs, just close enough that Donnie can feel the pressure against his knee and remember, oh yes, he has knees again.
It’s so weird. Were bodies always this weird? Who designed them like this?
“Yeah, it’s been way too long. You left me alone with these bozos for ages,” Leo complains, still working Donnie’s arm back and forth. It’s getting easier to follow the movements.
Mikey sticks out his tongue at Leo. “Shut up, I’m a delight.”
His little brother looks older than he remembers, older than he was when he, when he… Oh, he had a name, didn’t he? He knew it just a second ago.
Raph taps his leg, distracting him from scouring his brain for the missing word. “Donnie, you wanna sit up?”
Donnie, that’s right. He repeats it in his head a few times, commits it to memory. Then he nods.
Mikey and Leo help out with an arm on either side as he levers himself upright, still a little shaky, limbs still jerking a bit in unexpected directions when the signals don’t quite send correctly. It feels weird to support his own weight like this, but as soon as he’s within range, Raph holds out his arms and Donnie falls forward into them. It’s so warm.
“Raph.”
“Aww, baby’s first word. That’s adorable.”
Donnie sends out one arm to smack Leo in response. They’re close enough that he doesn’t need to be very precise with his aim.
“Ow!”
Mikey laughs. “Ha! Should’ve done your teasing before he could move, bro.”
“Raph,” Donnie repeats, clinging to him with both hands now. He hasn’t seen his brother since Raphael died, long before he lost the others, and then he’d gone and messed it all up and he thought he’d never die, never see them again, never be able to rest. Immortality is overrated.
His cheeks feel wet. His body has remembered how to cry.
“Aw, kid.”
He’s not a kid. He’s thousands of years old, and he’s responsible for his own actions.
“Sorry,” he mumbles, distorted by his fumbling lips and his face buried in Raph’s chest. “Sorry, m’sorry, m’sorry…”
Raph shushes him, rocks him like a child. “It’s not your fault.”
It is. It is. He can’t speak well enough to explain it, wouldn’t have the words even if he could. He couldn’t possibly explain the things he’s done. Everyone, the whole Earth, and hundreds, thousands of worlds more, destroyed while he watched, while he helped. All because he thought he could dive into the abyss and climb back out after, unchanged.
His brothers close in around him, surrounding him on all sides. He wants them to press closer, to squeeze until his body can’t hold this form anymore and he melts away. Maybe the guilt will melt away with him. Oblivion is a promising concept.
…But, no. Then he would lose them, and he can’t. Never again. He clings all the tighter at the thought.
Some time later — longer than it takes him to stop crying, shorter than eternity — they pull back. Donnie’s not ready to let go, but he doesn’t think he’ll ever be, so he allows it. Luckily, they don’t go far.
“Feel better?” Raph asks him.
“No.” It doesn’t even occur to him to lie.
Leo winces sympathetically. “You will,” he promises. He waves his hand through the space around them. “This place is great for that, you know: perspective.”
Perspective.
He’s not sure his brothers understand the scope of the violence that became his existence. He hopes they can’t. They’re still stuck on Earth, speaking in terms and measures they can comprehend. What happened after… it was more than genocide, more than annihilation. Humanity has never had a word for that scale of devastation; they’ve never needed one.
Donnie shakes his head. The words are coming now, but in short, stunted phrases. Any higher order gets lost on its way to his lips. “It was bad.”
“I know.”
Do they know? Did the connection to his ancestors carry over into whatever he became? Could they see? He never saw them, not once, and he preferred it that way, when he could comprehend the possibility.
“But it’ll get better now,” Raph’s quick to reassure him. “I promise.”
No, no, not— They think he means his feelings, he doesn’t care about that. “No, I did things.” Awful, terrible, horrific things.
“It wasn’t you, it was the Kraang.”
“If I hadn’t gone into the ship…”
“And if it weren’t for me, they wouldn’t have opened the portal in the first place,” Leo interrupts him. “The war never would have happened; we would all have been fine. Every single person who died, that’s on me, isn’t it?”
Donnie gapes at the look on his brother’s face. The words come out so easily, the ones that had followed him and haunted him every moment since the day of the invasion. He says them calmly, and although his expression is regretful, his shoulders are not crushed under their weight. Donnie has never seen Leo stand so tall against his own worst mistake.
“No,” he responds as he has a hundred times before, when they were alive together. “Of course not.” And for the first time he can recall, Leo looks like he believes it, like he already knew.
“And it’s not on you, either. No, listen.” Leo grabs his shoulder tight with the hand he didn’t lose to the Kraang. “You can be sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I lost the key, and I’m sorry I said yes to your crazy plan, and I’m sorry I stopped looking for you when I knew you weren’t dead. I — Maybe we could have done better, but it happened. It just is. We can’t change it now.”
“We did the best we could,” Mikey amends. “All of us.”
Donnie nearly laughs. If that was his best… god, he’d hate to see his worst.
“We lost,” he says. The magnitude of it echoes through empty space and comes to nothing.
“Not entirely,” Mikey replies. He’s smiling now, eyes twinkling. “We got Casey out.”
‘Out?’ He tries to picture it and fails. “Out? As in…?”
“As in out, as in back, just like we talked about, Dee.”
He has to stretch his memory back, far back, to translate the words into some kind of sense. When he does, it slams into his chest like a train. “A time gate.”
Mikey’s grin widens, bright and beautiful. “It worked. We were right.”
“Are you sure…?”
“Shoved him through the damn thing myself,” Leo says proudly. “Somewhere out there is a timeline lucky enough to have one Casey Jones save all their asses.”
Donnie tries to picture it. He’s out of practice with imagination, but math is steady and familiar. He ran the calculations himself, so long ago, and he can extrapolate.
One speck of light in an endless field of darkness is such a small fraction, so easily overlooked, but compared with what it was before, infinitely better, infinitely brighter.
“Oh,” he breathes.
“Yeah,” Mikey agrees. “So no matter what else, we made that happen.”
“You did that.”
“No, I’m pretty sure it was ‘we’, actually. Just because I did the last step doesn’t mean we didn’t all spend years keeping that kid alive. All that fighting, it wasn’t for nothing. We got him out,” Mikey repeats.
Casey’s just one kid. Donnie has watched so many kids die. But Casey is theirs, and Donnie is biased. Mikey’s right: it’s not nothing, it’s everything. If he focuses on that, and not on everything that came after, it’s a little easier.
Casey, alive. And Raph’s hand on his shell, that’s good too. Mikey smiling, Leo kneeling beside him. He pulls these pieces together, makes them his fulcrum, and holds on tight. His world starts to recenter.
Leo clears his throat. “So, uh, not to rush you or anything, but there are people waiting on us, y’know.”
“Leo,” Raph admonishes.
“I mean,” Mikey says, “he’s right. Dad’s gonna be real glad to see you; he kinda flipped out.”
Leo groans a little and leans back to stare upward into the black. “Oh yeah, when me ’n Mikey showed up and realized you weren’t here it was like, a whole thing.”
He’s sure it was. Actually, as more and more comes back to him (Dad, his dad), Donnie is very certain it was more than just a ‘thing’. He doesn’t voice the thought. He doesn’t say that he’s ready to go, either, because he knows the blatant lie would ring hollow, but he reaches out a hand toward his nearest brother. “Help me up.”
They pull him to his feet and he stumbles instantly, legs shaky and uneven under his weight. It’s been centuries upon centuries since he had to do this, and he probably looks like a newborn fawn.
“Ugh, legs,” he laments, glaring down at the offending appendages and leaning more heavily onto Raph’s steadying arms.
“I know, right?” Leo agrees easily, as though the sentiment is universally relatable. “C’mon little bro, you got this.”
Donnie frowns. He stops trying to coordinate his limbs and focuses instead on compiling his thoughts into a longer and more coherent sentence than he’s managed thus far, because this is important.
“Leo.”
“Hmm?”
“I am literally thousands of years older than you were when you died. I’m definitely the elder twin.”
Mikey immediately bursts out laughing, losing his grip on Donnie’s arm. Donnie tilts a little, but catches himself.
Leo is sputtering beside him. “Wh— what? No, that’s not…”
“He’s got a point,” Raph says, and Donnie turns to him, ready to push his luck.
“I’m older than you, too.”
But Raph only frowns a little and shakes his head. “Na, that’s not how that works.”
Mikey’s still giggling, doubled over at the waist with one hand clutched around his middle and the other covering his face. Donnie spots a tear leaking out from between his fingers, and the laughter sounds a little hysterical, but that’s okay. Leo is arguing vehemently that this new rule makes Raph the baby of the family, and Raph is very calmly denying it as he helps Donnie limp on toward… something, he’s not really sure, but that’s okay too. He thinks it’s probably okay.
He’s been lost for a long time, but they can take the lead now.
He’s been gone for a long time, but he can still make his brothers laugh.